An action-oriented perspective changes the role of an individual from a passive observer to an actively engaged agent interacting in a closed loop with the world as well as with others. Cognition exists to serve action within a landscape that contains both. This chapter surveys this landscape and addresses the status of the pragmatic turn. Its potential influence on science and the study of cognition are considered (including perception, social cognition, social interaction, sensorimotor entrainment, and language acquisition) and its impact (...) on how neuroscience is studied is also investigated (with the notion that brains do not passively build models, but instead support the guidance of action). A review of its implications in robotics and engineering includes a discussion of the application of enactive control principles to couple action and perception in robotics as well as the conceptualization of system design in a more holistic, less modular manner. Practical applications that can impact the human condition are reviewed (e.g., educational applications, treatment possibilities for developmental and psychopathological disorders, the development of neural prostheses). All of this foreshadows the potential societal implications of the pragmatic turn. The chapter concludes that an action-oriented approach emphasizes a continuum of interaction between technical aspects of cognitive systems and robotics, biology, psychology, the social sciences, and the humanities, where the individual is part of a grounded cultural system. (shrink)

The Gathas, a corpus of seventeen poems in Old Avestan composed by the ancient Iranian poet-priest Zarathushtra (Zoroaster) ca. 1200 B.C.E., is the foundation document of Zoroastrian religion. Even though the dualistic axiology of the Gathas has been widely noted, it has proved very difficult to understand the meaning and genre of the corpus or the position of Zarathushtra’s ideas with regard to other religious philosophies. Relying on recent advances in translation and decryptions of Gathic poetry, I shall here develop (...) a philosophical interpretation of the Gathas, including, as shall be discussed here in detail, explication of the revelation he reports in the poem known as Yasna 30. I argue that, similarly to Marx, Henry, and Schutz, Zarathushtra connects social criticism with an original philosophy of (inter)subjectivity and existential reflection, placing his account in the context of a fully developed metaphysics which includes the human-divine sharing of mental properties. I show that in order to accommodate this complicated problematic, Zarathushtra uses the vehicle of multiple realities. Reflecting the spontaneity of life, the dynamics of various ontological modes in the text create a reference to subjectivity. A description of the dream in Yasna 30 is sufficiently within the limits of possibility for a dream experience, and thereby delivers three original phenomenological reductions. The reductions initiate a genetic account of the phenomenalization of invisible impulses which give rise to moral choices, and define the human-divine relationship. The opposing moral choices open into a reverse axiological intentionality in the sphere of intersubjectivity, and are said to plot life for the rightful and lifelessness for the wrongful. It can be concluded that Zarathushtra’s theism and views of the social world are “the first philosophy”, with a unique and original phenomenological ontology of intersubjectivity at its core. (shrink)

This paper empirically investigates one aspect of the folk concept of time by testing how the presence or absence of directedness impacts judgements about whether there is time in a world. Experiment 1 found that dynamists, showed significantly higher levels of agreement that there is time in dynamically directed worlds than in non-dynamical non-directed worlds. Comparing our results to those we describe in Latham et al., we report that while ~ 70% of dynamists say there is time in B-theory worlds, (...) only ~ 45% say there is time in C-theory worlds. Thus, while the presence of directedness makes dynamists more inclined to say there is time in a world, a substantial subpopulation of dynamists judge that there is time in non-directed worlds. By contrast, a majority of non-dynamists judged that there was time in both growing block worlds and C-theory worlds, with no significant differences between the means. Experiment 2 found that when participants are only presented with non-dynamical worlds—namely, a directed world and a non-directed world—they report significantly higher levels of agreement that there is time in B-theory worlds. However, the majority of participants still judge that there is time in C-theory worlds. We conclude that while the presence of directedness bolsters judgements that there is time, most people do not judge it to be necessary for time. (shrink)

I argue that assertoric content functions as a means for us to track the responsibilities undertaken by communicators, and that distinctively assertoric commitments are distinguished by being generated directly in virtue of the words the speaker uses. This raises two questions: (a) Why are speakers responsible for the content thus generated? (b) Why is it important for us to distinguish between commitments in terms of their manner of generation? I answer the first question by developing a novel responsibility based metasemantics. (...) I answer the second by reference to the conflicting pressures governing the resources we have available for appraising speech. (shrink)

Recent research (Latham, Miller and Norton, forthcoming) reveals that a majority of people represent actual time as dynamical. But do they, as suggested by McTaggart and Gödel, represent time as essentially dynamical? This paper distinguishes three interrelated questions. We ask (a) whether the folk representation of time is sensitive or insensitive: i.e., does what satisfies the folk representation of time in counterfactual worlds depend on what satisfies it actually—sensitive—or does is not depend on what satisfies it actually—insensitive, and (b) do (...) those who represent actual time as dynamical, represent time in all possible worlds as dynamical—what we call insensitive dynamism—or do they represent time in all possible worlds as dynamical only conditional on the actual world in fact being dynamical—what we call sensitive dynamism and (c) do dynamists and non-dynamists deploy two different representations of time, or deploy the same representation, but disagree about what actually satisfies that representation? We found no evidence that the folk representation of time is sensitive, or that the folk representation of time is essentially dynamical in either sense, though we did find evidence of a shared representation, on which dynamical features are sufficient, but not necessary, for time. (shrink)

Many philosophers accept both of the following claims: (1) consciousness matters morally, and (2) species membership doesn’t matter morally. In other words, many reject speciesism but accept what we might call 'sentientism'. But do the reasons against speciesism yield analogous reasons against sentientism, just as the reasons against racism and sexism are thought to yield analogous reasons against speciesism? This paper argues that speciesism is disanalogous to sentientism (as well as racism and sexism). I make a case for the following (...) asymmetry: (a) some non-humans clearly have interests, but (b) no non-conscious entities clearly have interests. This asymmetry, I argue, renders sentientism resistant to the standard argument against speciesism. (shrink)

Many philosophers hold that ‘one-instant worlds’—worlds that contain a single instant—fail to contain time. We experimentally investigate whether these worlds satisfy the folk concept of time. We found that ~50% of participants hold that there is time in such worlds. We argue that this suggests one of two possibilities. First, the population disagree about whether at least one of the A-, B-, or C-series is necessary for time, with there being a substantial sub-population for whom the presence of neither an (...) A-, B-, nor C-series, is necessary for time, and hence those folk have a radically more minimal concept of time than has been attributed to them by philosophers. Or, second, the population do not disagree about whether at least one of the A-, B-, or C-series is necessary for time, but disagree about what it takes for a world to fail to contain even a C-series. (shrink)

In this paper I present a precise version of Stalnaker's thesis and show that it is both consistent and predicts our intuitive judgments about the probabilities of conditionals. The thesis states that someone whose total evidence is E should have the same credence in the proposition expressed by 'if A then B' in a context where E is salient as they have conditional credence in the proposition B expresses given the proposition A expresses in that context. The thesis is formalised (...) rigorously and two models are provided that demonstrate that the new thesis is indeed tenable within a standard possible world semantics based on selection functions. Unlike the Stalnaker-Lewis semantics the selection functions cannot be understood in terms of similarity. A probabilistic account of selection is defended in its place. -/- I end the paper by suggesting that this approach overcomes some of the objections often leveled at accounts of indicatives based on the notion of similarity. (shrink)

While many aspects of cognition have been shown to be shared between humans and non-human animals, there remains controversy regarding whether the capacity to mentally time travel is a uniquely human one. In this paper, we argue that there are four ways of representing when some event happened: four kinds of temporal representation. Distinguishing these four kinds of temporal representation has five benefits. First, it puts us in a position to determine the particular benefits these distinct temporal representations afford an (...) organism. Second, it provides the conceptual resources to foster a discussion about which of these representations is necessary for an organism to count as having the capacity to mentally time travel. Third, it enables us to distinguish stricter from more liberal views of mental time travel that differ regarding which kind(s) of temporal representation is taken to be necessary for mental time travel. Fourth, it allows us to determine the benefits of taking a stricter or more liberal view of mental time travel. Finally, it ensures that disagreement about whether some species can mentally time travel is not merely the product of unrecognised disagreement about which temporal representation is necessary for mental time travel. We argue for a more liberal view, on the grounds that it allows us to view mental time travel as an evolutionarily continuous phenomenon, and to recognise that differences in the ways that organisms mentally time travel might reflect different temporal representations, or combinations thereof, that they employ. Our ultimate aim, however, is to create the conceptual framework for further discussion regarding what sorts of temporal representations are required for mental time travel. (shrink)

In this paper, I first argue that waste is best understood as (a) any process wherein something useful becomes less useful and that produces less benefit than is lost—where benefit and usefulness are understood with reference to the same metric—or (b) the result of such a process. I next argue for the immorality of waste. My concluding suggestions are that (W1) if one person needs something for her preservation and a second person has it, is avoidably wasting it, and refuses (...) to allow the first to make some greater use of it, the second may be morally wrong and that (W2) if one person needs something for her preservation understood according to her metric and a second person has it, is avoidably wasting it according to his own metric, and refuses to allow the first to make some greater use of it, the second is morally wrong. (shrink)

Those inclined to positions in the philosophy of time that take tense seriously have typically assumed that not all regions of space-time are equal: one special region of space-time corresponds to what is presently happening. When combined with assumptions from modern physics this has the unsettling consequence that the shape of this favored region distinguishes people in certain places or people traveling at certain velocities. In this paper I shall attempt to avoid this result by developing a tensed picture of (...) reality that is nonetheless consistent with ‘hypersurface egalitarianism’—the view that all hypersurfaces are equal. (shrink)

In a recent paper, Zukowski and Markiewicz showed that Wigner’s Friend (and, by extension, Schrodinger’s Cat) can be eliminated as physical possibilities on purely logical grounds. I validate this result and demonstrate the source of the contradiction in a simple experiment in which a scientist S attempts to measure the position of object |O⟩ = |A⟩S +|B⟩S by using measuring device M chosen so that |A⟩M ≈ |A⟩S and |B⟩M ≈ |B⟩S. I assume that the measurement occurs by quantum amplification (...) without collapse, in which M can entangle with O in a way that remains reversible by S for some nonzero time period. This assumption implies that during this “reversible” time period, |A⟩M ̸= |A⟩S and |B⟩M ̸= |B⟩S – i.e., the macroscopic pointer state to which M evolves is uncorrelated to the position of O relative to S. When the scientist finally observes the measuring device, its macroscopic pointer state is uncorrelated to the object in position |A⟩S or |B⟩S, rendering the notion of “reversible measurement” a logical contradiction. (shrink)

Empirical evidence suggests that people naïvely represent time as dynamical (i.e. as containing robust temporal passage). Yet many contemporary B-theorists deny that it seems to us, in perceptual experience, as though time robustly passes. The question then arises as to why we represent time as dynamical if we do not have perceptual experiences which represent time as dynamical. We consider two hypotheses about why this might be: the temporally aperspectival replacement hypothesis and the moving open future hypothesis. We then empirically (...) test the moving open future hypothesis. According to that hypothesis, we represent the past as objectively fixed and the future open. And we represent that this objective openness moves as events that were open become fixed, such that in doing so, we represent a privileged moving present. We found no evidence for the moving open future hypothesis, which suggests that further investigation of the temporally aperspectival replacement hypothesis is called for. Our results also shed further light on our understanding of the respects in which we represent the future to be open, which, in turn, has implications for our theorising about the open future. (shrink)

The standard model of cosmology is acclaimed in physics as accurate, robust, well-tested, our best scientific theory of the cosmos, but it has had serious anomalies for a while, including the Hubble tension, anomalous galaxies, and the completely unexplained nature of dark energy and dark matter. And lurking behind it all is the lack of a unified theory: General Relativity (GR) and quantum mechanics (QM) are inconsistent. Now startling new observations by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) in 2022 of (...) the early universe present the strongest challenge yet to the standard model, and whispers have started that this shows there is something wrong with the fundamental theory, General Relativity itself. This would be a crisis for cosmology. But haven’t they tested this theory already, and shown it is correct? How could it turn out wrong at this late stage? Here we compare the standard cosmology with an alternative fundamental theory, that has a strikingly different overall cosmological behavior: a simple cyclic expansion function. It is simple and deterministic. There are only two or three general parameters. The interesting result is that this alternative cosmology: (A) closely matches the expansion observed and modelled through the CDM standard model, now going back to red-shifts of 5-15; and (B) it also predicts unexpected early galaxy formation now being reported by the JWST. The point here is not to try to prove this alternative theory however, but rather show how it compares to the conventional cosmology. This show us clearly how weak the empirical evidence for the standard model really is against a counterfactual fundamental theory. Some results established in science are robust against theory change, but we find the standard cosmological model and the implications drawn from it are not robust at all. (shrink)

The goal of this paper is to sketch an account of Kant’s signature metaphysical doctrine (transcendental idealism) that (a) has no supporters – as far as I am aware – in the contemporary literature, and (b) draws its primary motivation (as interpretation) from considerations regarding our practical situation and needs as agents. -/- The consideration I focus on here is that people not only have mental and moral features, but they also appear to us – in our daily experience – (...) to have such features: “[w]e can perceive virtue in our experience (Wir können in der Erfahrung wohl Tugend wahrnehmen)” (24: 906). The same presumably goes for vice: When I see you casually torturing a cat, you appear to me to be brown-haired, wearing jeans, moving your arms, laughing, and so on, but you also appear to me to be vicious and cruel. Your character shines through in your actions. I can then make a defeasible inference from those appearances to the moral reality. -/- Such appearances and inferences play a central role in our practices of praise, blame, forgiveness, and punishment. An interpretation of transcendental idealism that gives primacy to the practical will thus seek to analyze the concepts of experience, acquaintance, and appearance/phenomenon in a capacious-enough way that they can apply to mental and moral features too. If successful, such an interpretation would have a clear practical advantage over those that leave us merely conjecturing from experiences of bodies, gestures, and secondary qualities to moral features that do not appear, or even to the non-appearing features of a distinct set of things. (shrink)

Although Wittgenstein maintains that there are no theses in philosophy, he is regularly interpreted as advancing or committed to such theses. In this paper I consider a striking case in point, Merrill Ring’s discussion of §19(b), §20(a) and §20(b) of the Philosophical Investigations. I compare Ring's account of the text with Wittgenstein's actual words and stress the importance of refraining from taking Wittgenstein to be engaged in an explanatory or theoretical enterprise.

A review of Personhood, Ethics, and Animal Cognition: Situating Animals in Hare’s Two-Level Utilitarianism, by Gary E. Varner. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2012. Pp. xv + 336. H/b £40.23. and The Philosophy of Animal Minds, edited by Robert W. Lurz. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Pp. 320. P/b £20.21.

We investigate the causal manipulability hypothesis, according to which what partly explains (a) why people tend to prefer negative events to be in their further future rather than their nearer future and positive events to be in their nearer future rather than their further future and (b) why people tend to prefer that negative events be located in their past not their future and that positive events be located in their future not their past, is that people tend to discount (...) the value of events they are less able causally to manipulate. If people discount the value of events they are less able to causally manipulate, then since often temporally nearer future events are more causally manipulable than further ones, and since future events are manipulable whereas past ones aren’t, this could explain both (a) and (b). In turn, if the causal manipulability hypothesis is correct, this might suggest that insofar as people’s preferences are explained in this manner, those preferences are rationally permissible, since relative causal manipulability is normatively relevant. Thus, ascertaining whether the causal manipulability hypothesis is true may shed light on the normative status of such preferences. We investigate the cognitively mediated version of the causal manipulability hypothesis, according to which people’s consciously held beliefs about the relative causal manipulability of events explains (a) and (b). Contrary to expectations, we found no evidence in favour of this view. We suggest that either relative causal manipulability plays an explanatory role, but one that is not cognitively mediated, or that it does not play any role, even if it is sometimes associated with other factors, such as probability, that may play a role in explaining some time biased preferences. (shrink)

This paper investigates the connection between temporal attitudes (attitudes characterised by a concern (or lack thereof) about future and past events), beliefs about temporal ontology (beliefs about the existence of future and past events) and temporal preferences (preferences regarding where in time events are located). Our aim is to probe the connection between these preferences, attitudes, and beliefs, in order to better evaluate the normative status of these preferences. We investigate the hypothesis that there is a three-way association between (a) (...) being present-biased (that is, preferring that positive events are located in the present, and negative events are located in the non-present), (b) believing that past and future events do not exist and (c) tending to have present-focused rather than non-present-focused temporal attitudes. We find no such association. This suggests that insofar as temporal preferences and temporal attitudes are connected to the ways we represent time, they are not connected to the ways we represent temporal ontology; rather, they are more likely connected to the ways we represent relative movement in, or of, time. This has important consequences for, first, explaining why we exhibit these preferences and, second, for their normative evaluation. (shrink)

Several philosophers have suggested that certain aspects of people’s experience of agency partly explains why people tend to report that it seems to them, in perceptual experience, as though time robustly passes. In turn, it has been suggested that people come to believe that time robustly passes on the basis of its seeming to them in experience that it does. We argue that what require explaining is not just that people report that it seems to them as though time robustly (...) passes, and that they believe that it does, but rather, the substantial variation (a) in people’s reports regarding whether it seems as though time robustly passes, and (b) their beliefs about whether time robustly passes. We empirically investigate the agentive explanation of (a), according to which variation in people’s agentive experiences explains variation in people’s reports regarding whether it seems to them as though time robustly passes. We also empirically investigate the experiential seeming explanation of belief, according to which variation in people’s beliefs about whether time robustly passes is explained by variation in their reports regarding whether it seems in experience as though time robustly passes. We found empirical support for the agentive explanation, but not for the experiential seeming explanation of passage beliefs. We consider the implications of our results for three views about temporal experience and temporal beliefs: dynamism, passage illusionism and deflationism. (shrink)

Debates about the genuine disease status of controversial diseases rely on intuitions about a range of factors. Adopting tools from experimental philosophy, this paper explores some of the factors that influence judgments about whether low sexual desire should be considered a disease and whether it should be medically treated. Drawing in part on some assumptions underpinning a divide in the literature between viewing low sexual desire as a genuine disease and seeing it as improperly medicalized, we investigate whether health and (...) disease judgments are affected by factors such as an individual’s gender, the cause of the low desire, whether the desire is high or low, and both personal and societal valuations of the condition. Our main findings indicate that (a) the cause of a condition influences whether it is judged a disorder, (b) how the individual values the condition influences whether the condition is seen as a proper target of medical intervention, and (c) perceived dysfunction influences judgments regarding health, disorder classification, medicalization, and medical intervention. Our findings help further illuminate the intricate interplay of factors that influence judgments about health and disease in controversial conditions. (shrink)

The ways in which Wittgenstein was directly influenced by William James (by his early psychological work as well his later philosophy) have been thoroughly explored and charted by Russell B. Goodman. In particular, Goodman has drawn attention to the pragmatist resonances of the Wittgensteinian notion of hinge propositions as developedand articulated in the posthumously edited and published work, On Certainty. This paper attempts to extend Goodman’s observation, moving beyond his focus on James (specifically, James’s Pragmatism) as his pragmatist reference point. (...) It aims to articulate the affinity between Wittgenstein’s thought on the topic of certainty and that of the neglected pragmatist thinker, George Santayana. -/- The paper draws on Duncan Pritchard’s recent reading of Wittgenstein’s On Certainty in order to articulate the concept of certainty involved in the notion of hinge propositions. It identifies two important and related points of affinity between this Wittgensteinian line of thought on certainty and the line of thought on the same topic articulated in Santayana’s Scepticism and Animal Faith. The paper argues, firstly, that, both lines of thought reflect a pragmatist concept of certainty, according to which our most fundamental certainties are not conceived as purely theoretical objects of belief or knowledge but rather as thearational presuppositions of beliefs and practical action. Secondly, it examines the way inwhich the pragmatist concept of certainty functions, for the two thinkers as a response to scepticism. It argues that although the two thinkers’ responses are very different, they are mutually compatible and, together, point towards the possibility of a distinctively pragmatist response to scepticism, which involves an anti-epistemological model of the intimate relation of the human self to the world. (shrink)

Social scientists use many different methods, and there are often substantial disagreements about which method is appropriate for a given research question. In response to this uncertainty about the relative merits of different methods, W. E. B. Du Bois advocated for and applied “methodological triangulation”. This is to use multiple methods simultaneously in the belief that, where one is uncertain about the reliability of any given method, if multiple methods yield the same answer that answer is confirmed more strongly than (...) it could have been by any single method. Against this, methodological purists believe that one should choose a single appropriate method and stick with it. Using tools from voting theory, we show Du Boisian methodological triangulation to be more likely to yield the correct answer than purism, assuming the scientist is subject to some degree of diffidence about the relative merits of the various methods. This holds even when in fact only one of the methods is appropriate for the given research question. (shrink)

We have a striking ability to alter our psychological access to past experiences. Consider the following case. Andrew “Nicky” Barr, OBE, MC, DFC, (1915 – 2006) was one of Australia’s most decorated World War II fighter pilots. He was the top ace of the Western Desert’s 3 Squadron, the pre-eminent fighter squadron in the Middle East, flying P-40 Kittyhawks over Africa. From October 1941, when Nicky Barr’s war began, he flew 22 missions and shot down eight enemy planes in (...) his first 35 operational hours. He was shot down three times, once 25 miles behind enemy lines while trying to rescue a downed pilot. He escaped from prisoner of war camps four times, once jumping out of a train as it travelled from Italy into Austria. His wife Dot, who he married only weeks before the war, waited for him at home. She was told on at least three occasions that he was missing in action or dead. For 50 years, Nicky Barr never spoke publicly, and rarely privately, of his war-time experiences. He was very much a forgotten and forgetting hero (for further details, see Dornan, 2002). In his first public interview in 2002 on the Australian documentary program “Australian Story”, Nicky explained his 50 year silence by saying. (shrink)

Exploratory factor analysis (EFA) of the Psychopathic Personality Inventory (PPI; S. O. Lilienfeld, 1990; S. O. Lilienfeld & B. P. Andrews, 1996) with a community sample has suggested that the PPI subscales may comprise 2 higher order factors (S. D. Benning, C. J. Patrick, B. M. Hicks, D. M. Blonigen, & R. F. Krueger, 2003). However, substantive and structural evidence raises concerns about the viability of this 2-factor model, particularly in offender populations. The authors attempted to replicate the S. D. (...) Benning et al. 2-factor solution using a large (N= 1,224) incarcerated male sample. Confirmatory factor analysis of this model resulted in poor model fit. Similarly, using the same EFA procedures as did S. D. Benning et al., the authors found little evidence for a 2-factor model. When they followed the recommendations of J.-W. van Prooijen and W. A. van der Kloot (2001) for recovering EFA solutions, model fit results provided some evidence that a 3-factor EFA solution could be recovered via confirmatory factor analysis. (shrink)

In recent work, Andrew T. Forcehimes and Robert B. Talisse correctly note that G.A. Cohen’s fact-insensitivity thesis, properly understood, is explanatory. This observation raises an important concern. If fact-insensitive principles are explanatory, then what role can they play in normative deliberations? The purpose of my paper is, in part, to address this question. Following David Miller, I indicate that on a charitable understanding of Cohen’s thesis, an explanatory principle explains a justificatory fact by completing an otherwise logically incomplete inference. (...) As a result, the explanatory role such a principle plays is inseparable from its status as a (not necessarily successful) justificatory reason. With this interpretation in hand, I then proceed to argue that Lea Ypi’s and Robert Jubb’s recent criticisms fail to undermine Cohen’s thesis, and that fact-insensitive principles, once discovered, are especially helpful for purposes of deliberation in circumstances characterized by changing and changeable feasibility constraints. (shrink)

Andrew Bourke’s Principles of Social Evolution identifies three stages that characterize an evolutionary transition in individuality and deploys inclusive fitness theory to explain each stage. The third stage, social group transformation, has hitherto received relatively little attention from inclusive fitness theorists. In this review, I first discuss Bourke’s “virtual dominance” hypothesis for the evolution of the germ line. I then contrast Bourke’s inclusive fitness approach to the major transitions with the multi-level approach developed by Richard Michod, Samir Okasha and (...) others. I suggest that, rather than choosing between these approaches, we should exploit the strengths of both. Finally, I stress the need for a firmer conceptual grasp of the nature of social group transformation. (shrink)

Philosophy has long either dismissed or paid only minimal attention to creativity, and even with the rise of research on imagination, the creative imagination has largely been ignored as well. The aim of this volume is to correct this neglect. By bringing together existing research in various sub-disciplines, we also aim to open up new avenues of research. The chapters in Part I provide some framing and history on the philosophical study of imagination and creativity, along with an overview of (...) the empirical literature. Part II explores imagination and creativity as they manifest in, and in turn shape, the individual. Part III surveys the role of imagination and creativity across a wide variety of artistic domains, and the chapters of Part IV turn to societal domains. Part V focuses on the interplay of imagination and creativity with regard to particular features of creative subjects and different kinds of creative subjects. *** -/- Part I: Theories and Approaches 1. Theories of Imagination (Peter Kung) 2. Theories of Creativity (Julia Langkau) 3. Historical Treatments of Imagination in the Western Tradition (Lucia Oliveri) 4. Historical Treatments of Creativity in the Western Tradition (Elliot Paul) 5. Non-Western Treatments of Imagination (Reza Hadisi and Jing Iris Hu) 6. Non-Western Treatments of Creativity (Nicolas B. Verger and Vlad Glăveanu) 7. Empirical Treatments of Imagination and Creativity (Dustin Stokes) 8. Experimental Philosophy of Imagination and Creativity (Michael T. Stuart) 9. The Relationship between Imagination and Creativity (Margherita Arcangeli) -/- Part II: Imagination and Creativity in Mind and Action 10. Imagination, Creativity, and Skill (Amy Kind) 11. Imagination, Creativity, and Attention (Bence Nanay) 12. Imagination, Creativity, and Agency (Caterina Moruzzi) 13. Imagination, Creativity, and Emotion (Julien Deonna and Fabrice Teroni) 14. Imagination, Creativity, and Embodiment (Adriana Clavel-Vázquez and María Jimena Clavel Vázquez) 15. Imagination, Creativity, and Gender (Luke Roelofs) 16. Imagination, Creativity, and Race (Nicholas Whittaker) 17. Imagination, Creativity, and Child Development (Thalia Goldstein, Anna Sofia Caruso, Darian Stapleton, and Lamin Fatty) -/- Part III: Imagination and Creativity in the Arts 18. Imagination, Creativity, and the Visual Arts (Claire Anscomb) 19. Imagination, Creativity, and Music (Matteo Ravasio) 20. Imagination, Creativity, and Fiction (Hannah H. Kim) 21. Imagination, Creativity, and Dance (David Davies and Anna Pakes) 22. Imagination, Creativity, and the Culinary Arts (Patrik Engisch) 23. Imagination, Creativity, and Film (Murray Smith) 24. Imagination, Creativity, and Acting (Tzachi Zamir) 25. Imagination, creativity, and fashion (Laura T. Di Summa) -/- Part IV: Imagination and Creativity in Society 26. Imagination and Creativity in the Scientific Realm (Alice Murphy) 27. Imagination and Creativity in the Moral Realm (Tim Mulgan) 28. Imagination and Creativity in the Political Realm (Avshalom Schwartz) 29. Imagination and Creativity in the Law (Maksymilian Del Mar) 30. Imagination and Creativity in the Religious Realm (Neil Van Leeuwen) 31. Imagination and Creativity in Business (Eric Peterson) 32. Imagination and Creativity in Times of Crisis (Jennifer Fraser and Noah Stemeroff) Part V: Emerging Issues in Imagination and Creativity Research 33. Imagination, Creativity, and Aphantasia (Andrea Blomkvist) 34. Imagination, Creativity, and Neurodivergence (Sofia Ortiz-Hinojosa) 35. Imagination, Creativity, and Non-Human Animals (Henry Shevlin) 36. Imagination, Creativity, and Artificial Intelligence (Peter Langland-Hassan) 37. Collective Imagination and Collective Creativity (Nick Wiltsher) . (shrink)

This paper introduces a new, expanded range of relevant cognitive psychological research on collaborative recall and social memory to the philosophical debate on extended and distributed cognition. We start by examining the case for extended cognition based on the complementarity of inner and outer resources, by which neural, bodily, social, and environmental resources with disparate but complementary properties are integrated into hybrid cognitive systems, transforming or augmenting the nature of remembering or decision-making. Adams and Aizawa, noting this distinctive complementarity argument, (...) say that they agree with it completely: but they describe it as “a non-revolutionary approach” which leaves “the cognitive psychology of memory as the study of processes that take place, essentially without exception, within nervous systems.” In response, we carve out, on distinct conceptual and empirical grounds, a rich middle ground between internalist forms of cognitivism and radical anti-cognitivism. Drawing both on extended cognition literature and on Sterelny’s account of the “scaffolded mind” (this issue), we develop a multidimensional framework for understanding varying relations between agents and external resources, both technological and social. On this basis we argue that, independent of any more “revolutionary” metaphysical claims about the partial constitution of cognitive processes by external resources, a thesis of scaffolded or distributed cognition can substantially influence or transform explanatory practice in cognitive science. Critics also cite various empirical results as evidence against the idea that remembering can extend beyond skull and skin. We respond with a more principled, representative survey of the scientific psychology of memory, focussing in particular on robust recent empirical traditions for the study of collaborative recall and transactive social memory. We describe our own empirical research on socially distributed remembering, aimed at identifying conditions for mnemonic emergence in collaborative groups. Philosophical debates about extended, embedded, and distributed cognition can thus make richer, mutually beneficial contact with independently motivated research programs in the cognitive psychology of memory. (shrink)

According to telling based views of testimony (TBVs), B has reason to believe that p when A tells B that p because A thereby takes public responsibility for B's subsequent belief that p. Andrew Peet presents a new argument against TBVs. He argues that insofar as A uses context-sensitive expressions to express p, A doesn't take public responsibility for B's belief that p. Since context-sensitivity is widespread, the kind of reason TBVs say we have to believe what we're told, (...) is not widespread. Peet doesn't identify any problem with his own argument though he does attempt to limit its sceptical potential by identifying special contexts in which TBVs stand a chance of success. A more general defence of TBVs can be provided by showing Peet's argument to be unsound. I argue that Peet's argument is unsound because it requires us to wrongly suppose that speakers do far less labour than their audiences in context-sensitive linguistic communication. I aim to show why—in the context of the epistemology of testimony and the philosophy of language—it's important to recognize the labour that speakers can do, and so can can be held responsible for not doing, in episodes of context-sensitive linguistic communication. (shrink)

H´ector-Neri Casta˜neda-Calder´on (December 13, 1924–September 7, 1991) was born in San Vicente Zacapa, Guatemala. He attended the Normal School for Boys in Guatemala City, later called the Military Normal School for Boys, from which he was expelled for refusing to fight a bully; the dramatic story, worthy of being filmed, is told in the “De Re” section of his autobiography, “Self-Profile” (1986). He then attended a normal school in Costa Rica, followed by studies in philosophy at the University of San (...) Carlos, Guatemala. He won a scholarship to the University of Minnesota, where he received his B.A. (1950), M.A. (1952), and Ph.D. (1954), all in philosophy. His dissertation, “The Logical Structure of Moral Reasoning”, was written under the direction of Wilfrid Sellars. He returned to teach in Guatemala, and then received a scholarship to study at Oxford University (1955–1956), after which he took a sabbatical-replacement position in philosophy at Duke University (1956). His first full-time academic appointment was at Wayne State University (1957– 1969), where he founded the philosophy journal Noˆus (1967, a counter-offer made to him by Wayne State to encourage him to stay there rather than to take the chairmanship of philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania). In 1969, he moved (along with several of his Wayne colleagues) to Indiana University, where he eventually became the Mahlon Powell Professor of Philosophy and, later, its first Dean of Latino Affairs (1978–1981). He remained at Indiana until his death. He was also a visiting professor of philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin (1962–1963) and a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (1981–1982). He received grants and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation (1967–1968), the T. Andrew Mellon Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the National Science Foundation. He was elected President of the American Philosophical Association Central Division (1979– 1980), named to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1990), and received the Presidential Medal of Honor from the Government of Guatemala (1991). Casta˜neda’s philosophical interests spanned virtually the entire spectrum of philosophy, and his theories form a highly interconnected whole.. (shrink)

Because obituaries are succinct and explicitly intended to summarize their subjects’ lives, they may be expected to include only the features that the author finds most salient but also to signal to others in the community the socially-recognized aspects of the deceased’s character. We begin by reviewing studies 1 and 2, in which obituaries were carefully read and labeled. We then report study 3, which further develops these results with a semi-automated, large-scale semantic analysis of several thousand obituaries. Geography, gender, (...) and elite status all turn out to be associated with the virtues and values associated with the deceased. (shrink)

Several scholars, including Martin Hengel, R. Alan Culpepper, and Richard Bauckham, have argued that Papias had knowledge of the Gospel of John on the grounds that Papias’s prologue lists six of Jesus’s disciples in the same order that they are named in the Gospel of John: Andrew, Peter, Philip, Thomas, James, and John. In “A Note on Papias’s Knowledge of the Fourth Gospel” (JBL 129 [2010]: 793–794), Jake H. O’Connell presents a statistical analysis of this argument, according to which (...) the probability of this correspondence occurring by chance is lower than 1%. O’Connell concludes that it is more than 99% probable that this correspondence is the result of Papias copying John, rather than chance. I show that O’Connell’s analysis contains multiple mistakes, both substantive and mathematical: it ignores relevant evidence, overstates the correspondence between John and Papias, wrongly assumes that if Papias did not know John he ordered the disciples randomly, and conflates the probability of A given B with the probability of B given A. In discussing these errors, I aim to inform both Johannine scholarship and the use of probabilistic methods in historical reasoning. (shrink)

‘There is no place in the phenomenology of fully absorbed coping’, writes Hubert Dreyfus, ‘for mindfulness. In flow, as Sartre sees, there are only attractive and repulsive forces drawing appropriate activity out of an active body’1. Among the many ways in which history animates dynamical systems at a range of distinctive timescales, the phenomena of embodied human habit, skilful movement, and absorbed coping are among the most pervasive and mundane, and the most philosophically puzzling. In this essay we examine both (...) habitual and skilled movement, sketching the outlines of a multidimensional framework within which the many differences across distinctive cases and domains might be fruitfully understood. Both the range of movement phenomena which can plausibly be seen as instances of habit or skill, and the space of possible theories of such phenomena are richer and more disparate than philosophy easily encompasses. We seek to bring phenomenology into contact with relevant movements in psychological theories of skilful action, in the belief that phenomenological philosophy and cognitive science can be allies rather than antagonists. (shrink)

The following four assumptions plausibly describe the ideal rational agent. (1) She knows what her beliefs are. (2) She desires to believe only truths. (3) Whenever she desires that P → Q and knows that P, she desires that Q. (4) She does not both desire that P and desire that ~P, for any P. Although the assumptions are plausible, they have an implausible consequence. They imply that the ideal rational agent does not believe and desire contradictory propositions. She neither (...) desires the world to be any different than she thinks it is, nor thinks it is any different than she desires it to be. The problem of preserving our intuitions about desire, without embracing the implausible conclusion, is what I call “the Wishful Thinking Puzzle.” In this paper, I examine how this puzzle arises, and I argue that it is surprisingly difficult to solve. Even the decision theoretic conception of desire is not immune to the puzzle. One approach, the contrastive conception of desire, does avoid the puzzle without being ad hoc, but it remains too inchoate to win our full confidence. (shrink)

In Big Gods, Norenzayan (2013) presents the most comprehensive treatment yet of the Big Gods question. The book is a commendable attempt to synthesize the rapidly growing body of survey and experimental research on prosocial effects of religious primes together with cross-cultural data on the distribution of Big Gods. There are, however, a number of problems with the current cross-cultural evidence that weaken support for a causal link between big societies and certain types of Big Gods. Here we attempt to (...) clarify these problems and, in so doing, correct any potential misinterpretation of the cross-cultural findings, provide new insight into the processes generating the patterns observed, and flag directions for future research. (shrink)

What I plan to do in this paper is to provide a survey of the ways in which Spinoza’s philosophy has been deployed in relation to early modern thought, in the history of ideas and in a number of different domains of contemporary philosophy, and to offer an account of how some of this research has developed. The past decade of research in Spinoza studies has been characterized by a number of tendencies; however, it is possible to identify four main (...) domains that characterize these different lines of research: studies of Spinoza’s individual works, of its problematic concepts, from the point of view of the history of ideas, and comparative studies of Spinoza’s ideas. (shrink)

In order to improve our understanding of the components that reflect functionally important processes during reward anticipation and consumption, we used principle components analyses (PCA) to separate and quantify averaged ERP data obtained from each stage of a modified monetary incentive delay (MID) task. Although a small number of recent ERP studies have reported that reward and loss cues potentiate ERPs during anticipation, action preparation, and consummatory stages of reward processing, these findings are inconsistent due to temporal and spatial overlap (...) between the relevant electrophysiological components. Our results show three components following cue presentation are sensitive to incentive cues (N1, P3a, P3b). In contrast to previous research, reward‐related enhancement occurred only in the P3b, with earlier components more sensitive to break‐even and loss cues. During feedback anticipation, we observed a lateralized centroparietal negativity that was sensitive to response hand but not cue type. We also show that use of PCA on ERPs reflecting reward consumption successfully separates the reward positivity from the independently modulated feedback‐P3. Last, we observe for the first time a new reward consumption component: a late negativity distributed over the left frontal pole. This component appears to be sensitive to response hand, especially in the context of monetary gain. These results illustrate that the time course and sensitivities of electrophysiological activity that follows incentive cues do not follow a simple heuristic in which reward incentive cues produce enhanced activity at all stages and substages. (shrink)

_La Peste_, originally published in 1947 by the Nobel Prize-winning writer Albert Camus, chronicles the progression of deadly bubonic plague as it spreads through the quarantined Algerian city of Oran. While most discussions of fictional examples within aesthetics are either historical or hypothetical, Camus offers an example of "pestilence fiction." Camus chose fiction to convey facts--about plagues in the past, his own bout with tuberculosis at age seventeen, living under quarantine away from home for several years, and forced separation from (...) his wife who remained in Algiers while he was abroad in Nazi-occupied France. His own lived experiences undergird an imaginative account of shared human realities with which we can identify: vulnerability to the disease, isolation, fear, and finally humanitarianism. _The Plague_ teaches us to neither covet nor expect what we so casually took for granted. This collection of original essays on philosophical themes in _The Plague_ is of special relevance during and in the aftermath of Covid-19 but also provides reflections that will be of lasting value to those interested in this classic work of literature. The novel explores questions of enduring importance. Do we collectively meet the threshold of ethical behavior posed by Camus who wrote, "What's true of all the evils in the world is true of plague as well. It helps men to rise above themselves"? Or does the absurd undermine the compassionate? Do "heroes" dutifully fight a plague with "common decency," or does human nature resign itself to the normalization of uncontrollable suffering and death? There are myriad ways to approach the novel and this volume encourages readers to ponder human dilemmas in fictional Oran informed by our current pandemic. Series editor forward by Richard Eldridge. List of Contributors includes Steven G. Kellman, Jane E. Schultz, Andrew Edgar, Kathleen Higgins, Edward B. Weiser, Cynthia A. Freeland, and Margaret E. Gray; see "Introduction" by Peg Brand Weiser below. (shrink)

Progress in philosophy is difficult to achieve because our methods are evidentially and rhetorically weak. In the last two decades, experimental philosophers have begun to employ the methods of the social sciences to address philosophical questions. However, the adequacy of these methods has been called into question by repeated failures of replication. Experimental philosophers need to incorporate more robust methods to achieve a multi-modal perspective. In this chapter, we describe and showcase cutting-edge methods for data-mining and visualization. Big data is (...) a useful investigatory tool for moral psychology, and it fits well with the Ramsification method the first author advances in a series of recent papers. The guiding insight of these papers is that we can infer the meaning and structure of concepts from patterns of assertions and inferential associations in natural language. (shrink)

This is an anthology of ?fteen papers concerning various philosophical problems related to the topic of self-knowledge. All but one of the papers were previously unpublished, and all but two are descendants of presentations at a conference on self-knowledge held at the University of St Andrews in 1995. The collection.

“Doğal din” terimi, bazen doğanın kendisinin ilahi olduğu bir panteistik doktrine atıfta bulunur. “Doğal teoloji” terimi ise aksine, başlangıçta gözlemlenen doğal gerçekler temelinde (ve bazen) Tanrı’nın varlığını savunmaya yönelik projeye atıfta bulunur. Bununla birlikte çağdaş felsefede, hem “doğal din” hem de “doğal teoloji” genel olarak, dinî veya teolojik konuları araştırmak için insana, “doğal” olan bilişsel yetilerini – akıl, algı, içgözlem- kullanma projesini ifade eder. Doğal din veya teoloji, mevcut anlayış üzerine, doğayla ilgili ampirik araştırmalarla sınırlı olmamakla birlikte ayrıca panteistik bir (...) sonuçla da bağlantılı değildir. Bununla birlikte o, özel doğal olmayan yetilere (ESP, telepati, mistik deneyim) veya doğaüstü bilgi kaynaklarına (kutsal metinler, vahiy teolojisi, inanç otoriteleri, doğrudan doğaüstü iletişim) hitap etmekten kaçınır. Genel olarak, doğal din veya teoloji (bundan böyle “doğal teoloji” olarak anılacaktır), diğer felsefi ve bilimsel girişimlerle aynı rasyonel inceleme standartlarına uymayı amaçlamaktadır ve aynı değerlendirme ve eleştiri yöntemlerine tabidir. (shrink)

Der berühmte Ameisenmann E.O. Wilson war schon immer einer meiner Helden - nicht nur ein hervorragender Biologe, sondern eine der winzigen und verschwindenden Minderheit von Intellektuellen, die es zumindest wagt, die Wahrheit über unsere Natur anzudeuten, die andere nicht verstehen oder, soweit sie es verstehen, aus politischen Gründen unermüdlich vermeiden. Leider beendet er seine lange Karriere auf äußerst schäbige Weise als Partei eines ignoranten und arroganten Angriffs auf die Wissenschaft, der zumindest teilweise durch die religiöse Inbrunst seiner Harvard-Kollegenmotiviertist. Es zeigt (...) die abscheulichen Folgen, wenn Universitäten Geld von religiösen Gruppen annehmen, Wissenschaftszeitschriften von großen Namen so bewundert sind, dass sie eine ordnungsgemäße Peer Review vermeiden und wenn Egos außer Kontrolle geraten dürfen. Es führt uns in die Natur der Evolution, die Grundlagen der wissenschaftlichen Methodik, wie Mathematik mit Wissenschaft zusammenhängt, was eine Theorie ausmacht, und sogar, welche Einstellungen zu Religion und Großzügigkeit angemessen sind, wenn wir uns unaufhaltsam dem Zusammenbruch der industriellen Zivilisation nähern. Ich fand Abschnitte in 'Conquest' mit dem üblichen prägnanten Kommentar (obwohl nichts wirklich Neues oder Interessantes, wenn man seine anderen Werke gelesen hat und auf biologie im Allgemeinen ist) in der oftgestylten Prosa, die sein Markenzeichen ist, aber war ziemlich überrascht, dass der Kern des Buches seine Ablehnung inklusiver Fitness (die seit über 50 Jahren ein Standbein der Evolutionsbiologie ist) zugunsten der Gruppenauswahl ist. Man nimmt an, dass von ihm kommen und mit den articles er bezieht sich auf veröffentlicht von sich selbst und Harvard Mathematik Kollege Nowak in großen Peer-Review-Zeitschriften wie Nature, muss es ein wesentlicher Fortschritt sein,, trotz der Tatsache, dass ich wusste, Gruppenauswahl wurde fast überall abgelehnt, da mit jeder großen Rolle in der Evolution. Ich habe zahlreiche Rezensionen im Netz gelesen und viele haben gute Kommentare, aber die, die ich am meisten sehen wollte, war, dass von renommierten Wissenschaftsautor und Evolutionsbiologe Richard Dawkins. Im Gegensatz zu den meisten von Fachleuten, die in Zeitschriften nur für diejenigen mit Zugang zu einer Universität zur Verfügung stehen, ist es leicht im Netz verfügbar, obwohlanscheinend, entschied er sich, es nicht in einer Zeitschrift zu veröffentlichen, da es angemessen abscheulich ist. Leider findet man eine vernichtende Ablehnung des Buches und den acerbic Kommentar über einen wissenschaftlichen Kollegen, den ich je von Dawkins gesehen habe -- über alles in seinem vielen Austausch mit dem verstorbenen und unbeklagten Demagogen und Pseudowissenschaftler Stephan Jay Gould. Obwohl Gould für seine persönlichen Angriffe auf seinen Harvard-Kollegen Wilson berüchtigt war, stellt Dawkins fest, dass ein Großteil von "Conquest" einen unbequem an Goulds häufige Verfehlungen in "bland, unfocussed ecumenicalis" erinnert. Dasselbe gilt mehr oder weniger für Wilsons populäres Schreiben, einschließlich seines jüngsten Buches "The Meaning of Human Existence" – eine weitere schamlose Eigenwerbung seiner diskreditierten Ideen zu Inklusiver Fitness (IF). Dawkins weist darauf hin, dass das berüchtigte 2010-Papier von Nowak, Tarnita und Wilson in Nature von über 140 Biologen, die einen Brief unterzeichnet haben, fast überall abgelehnt wurde und dass es in Wilsons Buch kein Wort darüber gibt. Auch in den folgenden 4 Jahren mit Artikeln, Vorträgen und mehreren Büchern haben sie dies nicht korrigiert. Es gibt keine andere Wahl, als Dawkins trenchant Kommentar zuzustimmen: "Für Wilson nicht zu zugeben, dass er für sich selbst gegen die große Mehrheit seiner professionellen Kollegen spricht - es schmerzt mich, dies von einem lebenslangen Helden zu sagen -- ein Akt mutwilligen Arroganz." Angesichts von Nowaks späterem Verhalten muss man ihn auch einbeziehen. Ich habe das Gefühl, dass einer der fassungslosen Menschen, die man im Fernsehen sieht, interviewt wird, nachdem der nette Mann von nebenan, der seit 30 Jahren alle Kinder babysitten, als Serienmörder entlarvt wird. Dawkins weist auch darauf hin (wie er und andere seit vielen Jahren), dass inklusive Fitness mit dem Neo-Darwinismus (d.h. logischerweise folgt) entsteht und nicht abgelehnt werden kann, ohne die Evolution selbst abzulehnen. Wilson erinnert uns erneut an Gould, der Kreationisten von der einen Seite seines Mundes anprangerte, während er ihnen Trost spendete, indem er endlosen ultraliberalen marxistisch gefärbten Kauderwelsch über Spandrels, unterbrochenes Gleichgewicht und Evolutionspsychologie von der anderen ausspeist. Die Unbestimmtheit und mathematische Opazität (für die meisten von uns) der Mathematik der Gruppen- oder Mehrebenenauswahl ist genau das, was die Sanftmütigen ihnen ermöglichen wollen, dem rationalen Denken in ihren endlosen antiwissenschaftlichen Gerüchten und (in der Wissenschaft) postmodernen Wortsalate zu entkommen. Schlimmer noch, Wilsons "Eroberung" ist ein schlecht durchdachtes und schlampig geschriebenes Durcheinander voller Nonsequiturs, vager Streifzüge, Verwirrungen und Inkohärenz. Eine gute Bewertung, die einige davon im Detail ist, dass von Absolvent Gerry Carter, die Sie im Netz finden können. Wilson hat auch nichts mit unserem gegenwärtigen Verständnis der Evolutionspsychologie (EP) zu tun (siehe z.B. die letzten 300 Seiten von Pinkers 'The Better Angels of our Nature'). Wenn Sie eine seriöse Buchlänge Bericht über die soziale Evolution und einige relevante EP von einem Experten wollen, siehe 'Principles of Social Evolution' von Andrew F.G. Bourke, oder ein nicht ganz so ernster und zugegebenermaßen fehlerhafter und irrender Bericht, aber ein Muss,das Robert Trivers dennoch lesen muss—'The Folly of Fools: The Logic of Deceit and Self-Deception in Human Life' und ältere, aber immer noch aktuelle und durchdringende Werke wie 'The Evolutionof Cooperation':Revised Edition by Robert Axelrod and 'The Biology ofMoral Systems' von Richard Alexander. (shrink)

I propose a construal of aesthetic value that gives us reason to emphasize some aesthetic practices over others. This construal rests on the existence of a central aesthetic value, namely apprehension-testing intricacy within an appropriate domain. I address three objections: the objection that asks how an aesthetic value based on intricacy can account for the value of minimalism; the objection that asks about the difference between intricacy within a medium and intricacy between media; and the objection that asks about the (...) danger of a regress. I then say that, although this central aesthetic value can in principle allow us to adjudicate between aesthetic practices, we have epistemic limits (about the potential of certain artistic domains to allow for apprehension-testing intricacy) that prevent adjudication in some cases. Even if there is a difference between the vastness of the potential-intricacy-fields somewhere down the line, it is too far for us to see. (shrink)

Assertion plays a crucial dual role in Frege's conception of logic, a formal and a transcendental one. A recurrent complaint is that Frege's inclusion of the judgement-stroke in the Begriffsschrift is either in tension with his anti-psychologism or wholly superfluous. Assertion, the objection goes, is at best of merely psychological significance. In this paper, I defend Frege against the objection by giving reasons for recognising the central logical significance of assertion in both its formal and its transcendental role.

Rescher's 1983 study of risk analysis marks an important departure from game theory in that philosophical foundations for risk are neither formal nor implicit, But explicitly defined objective properties. Rescher's claim that these foundations are ontological fails, However. His ontology is internally inconsistent. Furthermore, Risk is always interest relative, Making it impossible to remove epistemological considerations entirely from any account of its foundations.

The theses of this paper are that: 1. the attempt to found absolute norms on rationality presupposes the availability of a single universal absolute conception of rationality, but no such conception is available; and 2. any conception of rationality which might be available for justifying one's ultimate normative commitments is itself evaluative. “Rationality” itself is a value-laden concept, as are all its philosophical sub-divisions—logic, ethics, aesthetics, axiology, etc. Choosing ultimate value principles under conditions of freedom, enlightenment, and impartiality presupposes that (...) one positively values such things. Rationality is an inescapably evaluative concept, not a value neutral concept. (shrink)