This project is an investigation into the prospects for an antirealist theory of essence. Essentialism is the claim that at least some things have some of their properties essentially. Essentialist discourse includes claims such as “Socrates is essentially human”, and “Socrates is accidentally bearded”. Historically, there are two ways of interpreting essentialist discourse. I call these positions ‘modal essentialism’ and ‘neo-Aristotelian essentialism’. According to modal essentialism, for Socrates to be essentially human is for it to be necessary that he be (...) a human if he exists, and for Socrates to accidentally have a beard is for it to be contingent that Socrates has a beard if he exists. According to neo-Aristotelian essentialism, objects have definitions in something like the way words do. For Socrates to be essentially human but accidentally bearded is for it to be part of the definition of Socrates that he is human, but not part of that definition that he is bearded. I argue that both are susceptible to antirealist interpretation. This thesis sets about showing that this is the case. In Chapters One and Two I investigate neo-conventionalist theories of modality, in the hope of using such a position to develop an antirealist modal essentialism. In Chapter Three I discuss the debate between modal and neo-Aristotelian essentialism and conclude that it is by no means settled. In Chapter Four I develop an antirealist neo-Aristotelian essentialism based on the mechanism of one of the neo-conventionalist accounts of modality. In Chapter Five I argue that this account is in a better position to give an essentialist theory of necessity than its realist counterparts. I conclude that, regardless of whether one is a modal or neo-Aristotelian essentialist, antirealist essentialism is a viable theory of essence that is worthy of consideration in contemporary debate. (shrink)

This paper, for two upcoming volumes, makes what I consider to be the definitive textual case for finally rejecting the phenomenalist interpretation of Ernst Mach's works, and his customary association with the Vienna Circle, in favor of a stronger realistic neutral monist reading connecting him to James, Russell and the American realist movement and today's neutral monism (for example my 2014). I hope that this reading will eventually supplant the previously mistaken view of Mach's work and that his views of (...) science and philosophy of space and time can be revised as well. (shrink)

Since their formulation by Keith DeRose (1992), the so-called bank cases have played a major role in the discussion about whether knowledge depends on practical factors. According to the proponents of pragmatic encroachment, the proper conclusion to be drawn from the bank cases and similar examples is that knowledge of a proposition _p_ does not supervene on one’s evidence for or against _p_. In my view, this conclusion is ill-founded. The reason is that the bank (...) cases and similar examples suffer from an ambiguity concerning the known proposition — an ambiguity that has so far been overlooked. When this ambiguity is made explicit, it becomes clear that the conclusion does not follow. (shrink)

Contextualism (the view that ‘knowledge’ and its variants are context-sensitive) has been supported in large part through appeal to intuitions about Keith DeRose’s Bank Cases. Recently, however, the contextualist construal of these cases has come under fire from Kent Bach and Jennifer Nagel who question whether the Bank Case subject’s confidence can remain constant in both low- and high-stakes cases. Having explained the Bank Cases and this challenge to them, I argue that DeRose (...) has given a reasonable reply to this initial challenge. However, I proceed to argue that the current stalemate can be broken. Seeking to extend the Bach-Nagel critique, I offer a novel interpretation of the Bank Cases according to which the subject’s evidence changes between low- and high-stakes cases. If I am correct, then, given the amount of support the Bank Cases have been thought to lend contextualism, the case for contextualism is seriously weakened. (shrink)

Contextualists and Subject Sensitive Invariantists often cite the knowledge norm of assertion as part of their argument. They claim that the knowledge norms in conjunction with our intuitions about when a subject is properly asserting in low or high stakes contexts provides strong evidence that what counts as knowledge depends on practical factors. In this paper, I present new data to suggest they are mistaken in the way they think about cases involving high and low stakes and I show (...) how insensitive invariantists can explain the data. I exploit recent work done on the distinction between flouting a norm and being blamed for that violation to formulate a rigorous theory of rational expected blameworthiness that allows insensitive invariantists to explain the data cited. (shrink)

The objective of this paper is to examine the role of the banking system in the growth of the Vietnamese economy in the process of the transition that started in the early 1990s. An ARDL approach-based multivariate regression technique is applied to shed light on the impact on the growth of banking development, which is measured by broad money and bank credit. The empirical findings confirm a positive long-term effect of banking development on growth, reflecting the important role of (...) the banking system in a typical bank-based financial system in mobilizing and supplying capital to the economy, thus contributing to growth throughout the process of economic transition. The empirical findings also indicate a nonlinear effect and a diminishing marginal effect of banking development in the sub-period 2007–2020. The thresholds for the two measures of banking development are estimated to be around 107% and 101% of the GDP, respectively. This finding suggests that bank credit expansion needs to be closely controlled to be adaptive to the capital-absorptive capacity of the economy. To a certain extent, this finding is also an indicator of the ongoing extensive growth model adopted in Vietnam, which relies heavily on the quantity of invested capital. (shrink)

Business Process Reengineering and Organizational Structure – A Case Study of Indian Commercial Banks -/- Author / Authors : Dr. Naveeda Seher Page no. 126 -138 Discipline : Applied Economics/ Management/ Commerce Script/language : Roman/English Category : Research paper Keywords: Business Process Reengineering, organizational Structure, Effectiveness, competitive.

Local Currencies, Local Exchange Trading Systems, and Time Banks are all part of a new social movement that aims to restrict money's purchasing power within a certain geographic area, or within a certain community. According to their proponents, these restrictions may contribute to building sustainable local economies, supporting local businesses and creating “warmer” social relations. This article inquires whether the overall enthusiasm that surrounds alternative currencies is justified. It argues that the potential benefits of these currencies are not sufficient to (...) justify the restrictions they impose on money's purchasing power. Turning these currencies into effective channels of change, by increasing their scope and their strength, could severely hinder the pursuit of social justice, in a way that is probably not even necessary for achieving their objectives. The paper concludes that large-scale limitations of money's purchasing power are, therefore, undesirable. (shrink)

The objective of this paper was to identify the level of demand in the Vietnamese fisheries sector for e-Nav – weather and sea condition forecast application developed by NASCA Geosystems. NASCA Geosystems is a small company of five people operating in the field of information technology consulting. Management at NASCA Geosystems wanted to study the Vietnamese market in order to expand their operation in Vietnam. In this thesis, both qualitative and quantitative methods were applied. The quantitative data was gathered from (...) the official statistic sources namely the General Statistics Office of Vietnam, Indexmundi, the United Nations and the World Bank. The qualitative research includes an email interview with the director of NASCA Geosystems and a personal interview with Mr. Tran Dinh Lan from the Institute of Marine Environment and Resources. (shrink)

Neutral monism is a position in metaphysics defended by Mach, James, and Russell in the early twentieth century. It holds that minds and physical objects are essentially two different orderings of the same underlying neutral elements of nature. This paper sets out some of the central concepts, theses and the historical background of ideas that inform this doctrine of elements. The discussion begins with the classic neutral monism of Mach, James, and Russell in the first part of the paper, then (...) considers recent neo-Russellian versions in the second half. The chances for a revival of neutral monism are probably slight; its key ideas and starting points lie far from those in contemporary philosophy of mind. A better route might be through the philosophy of science and a deeper understanding of causation. (shrink)

We address the most fundamental yet routinely ignored issue in economics today: that of distributive impact of the monetary system on the real economy. By re-examining the logical implications of token re-presentation of value and Irving Fisher’s theory of exchange, we argue that producers of value incur incidental expropriation of wealth associated with the deflationary effect that new value supply has on the purchasing power of money. In order to remedy the alleged inequity we propose a value-added negative tax (VANT) (...) based on net individual contribution to the economic output, which is structured as a negative tax function geared to profits derived from eligible productive activities in consideration of their estimated deflationary impact. We show that an adequately optimised VANT can be non-inflationary and have zero net cost to the public. Furthermore, economic output stands to improve due to direct incentivisation of value creation, making the proposed scheme not only politically feasible but economically desirable. The proposal advances the principle of ‘fair money’, where all forms of economic value are attributed to their rightful owners prior to any positive taxation. (shrink)

A look at the dynamical concept of space and space-generating processes to be found in Kant, J.F. Herbart and the mathematician Bernhard Riemann's philosophical writings.

Grete Hermann’s essay “Die naturphilosophischen Grundlagen der Quantenmechanik” has received much deserved scholarly attention in recent years. In this paper, I follow the lead of Elise Crull who sees in Hermann’s work the general outlines of a neo-Kantian interpretation of quantum theory. In full support of this view, I focus on Hermann’s central claim that limited spatio-temporal, and even analogically causal, representations of events exist within an overall relational structure of entangled quantum mechanical states that defy any unified spatio-temporal description. (...) In my view, Hermann also advances an important transcendental argument that perspectival spatio-temporal representations of nature have their foundations in general relational networks that are not spatio-temporal. The key point is that the adoption of a perspectival system within the general network induces the representation but only for that context. These ideas are consistent with a perspectival subject–object principle in Kant and also with Weyl’s work on Lie groups and their representations. (shrink)

Extension is probably the most general natural property. Is it a fundamental property? Leibniz claimed the answer was no, and that the structureless intuition of extension concealed more fundamental properties and relations. This paper follows Leibniz's program through Herbart and Riemann to Grassmann and uses Grassmann's algebra of points to build up levels of extensions algebraically. Finally, the connection between extension and measurement is considered.

Recent studies have shown that the indigenous population has been subject to social exclusion (Medel, 2016; Tetreault,2012; Rionda,2010; Del Popolo et al.,2009; World Bank,2004; Uquillas et al.,2003; Appasamy,1996). However, in the case of Mexico, there is no indicator to measure the degree of social exclusion. This article presents a methodology for estimating social exclusion index (IES) by estimating main components. Our proposal is to incorporate the index of social exclusion as a factor that can explain the current status of (...) poverty in the localities that have a high concentration of indigenous population and high economic marginalization in the state of Veracruz, and thus analyze the scope social policy to combat poverty, as the case Development Program Priority Areas (PDZP). (shrink)

Artificial intelligence systems have been widely applied to various contexts, including high-stake decision processes in healthcare, banking, and judicial systems. Some developed AI models fail to offer a fair output for specific minority groups, sparking comprehensive discussions about AI fairness. We argue that the development of AI systems is marked by a central paradox: the less participation one stakeholder has within the AI system’s life cycle, the more influence they have over the way the system will function. This means that (...) the impact on the fairness of the system is in the hands of those who are less impacted by it. However, most of the existing works ignore how different aspects of AI fairness are dynamically and adaptively affected by different stages of AI system development. To this end, we present a use case to discuss fairness in the development of corporate wellness programs using smart wearables and AI algorithms to analyze data. The four key stakeholders throughout this type of AI system development process are presented. These stakeholders are called service designer, algorithm designer, system deployer, and end-user. We identify three core aspects of AI fairness, namely, contextual fairness, model fairness, and device fairness. We propose a relative contribution of the four stakeholders to the three aspects of fairness. Furthermore, we propose the boundaries and interactions between the four roles, from which we make our conclusion about the possible unfairness in such an AI developing process. (shrink)

This article distinguishes between Machian empiricism and the logical positivism of the Vienna Circle and associated philosophers. Mach's natural philosophy was a first order attempt to reform and reorganize physics, not a second order reconstruction of the "language" of physics. Mach's elements were not sense data but realistic events in the natural world and in minds, and Mach admitted unobserved elements as part of his world view. Mach's critique of metaphysics was far more subtle and concerned the elimination of sensory (...) visual imagery from natural science, leaving only concrete elements and functions, very much an inspiration to the young Einstein and Heisenberg and a useful engine of theory construction in physics. (shrink)

William James' Radical Empiricist essays offer a unique and powerful argument for direct realism about our perceptions of objects. This theory can be completed with some observations by Kant on the intellectual preconditions for a perceptual judgment. Finally James and Kant deliver a powerful blow to the representational theory of perception and knowledge, which applies quite broadly to theories of representation generally.

A look at Mach's work on monocular stereoscopy with relation to Mach Bands and the sensation of space.

An overview of the problem of constructing extension combinatorially from qualities cum dispositional powers. In the model recommended here, Grassmann's algebra provides the combinatorial structure while Machian elements give the content.

This paper for an upcoming journal volume examines Grete Hermann's Naturphilosophischen Grundlagen der Quantenmechanik (1935) and the relative context, or perspectival, interpretation of standard quantum mechanics found therein. I find an argument for the emergence of limited spatio-temporal and retrocausal stories, from a chosen experimental perspective, within a larger set of entangled systems not subject to a spatio-temporal interpretation. This argument can be read in reverse as giving some of the necessary preconditions of spatio-temporal representations as based upon perspectival relations, (...) carrying on a Kantian transcendental argument on one hand, and on the other hand, looking forward to Weyl's use of symmetry groups, Lie algebras and their representations in quantum mechanics. (shrink)

I examine Mach's influence on American philosophy from 1890-1910, on Carus, James, Peirce, the American Realists and J.B. Stallo. I also consider the question of whether Mach was a pragmatist in the sense of Peirce and James. I conclude that early pragmatism was a method-centric theory whereas Mach's empiricism prized agreement with experience and downplayed the significance of inductive-scientific methods in general as a guide to discovery.

This paper offers a "tu quoque" defense of strong AI, based on the argument that phenomena of self-consciousness and intentionality are nothing but the "negative space" drawn around the concrete phenomena of brain states and causally connected utterances and objects. Any machine that was capable of concretely implementing the positive phenomena would automatically inherit the negative space around these that we call self-consciousness and intention. Because this paper was written for a literary audience, some examples from Greek tragedy, noir fiction, (...) science fiction and Dada are deployed to illustrate the view. (shrink)

Bertrand Russell in "My Philosophical Development" claimed he converted to neutral monism in 1919, in the essay "On Propositions." I question whether Russell was really a complete neutral monist in the style of Mach and James and conclude that he was not. Russell's lingering commitment to image propositions and a linguistic theory of meaning and truth and falsity separate him from the more naturalistic causal theory of knowledge and error one finds in James and Mach.

In recent work on the semantics of ‘knowledge’-attributions, a variety of accounts have been proposed that aim to explain the data about speaker intuitions in familiar cases such as DeRose’s Bank Case or Cohen’s Airport Case by means of pragmatic mechanisms, notably Gricean implicatures. This paper argues that pragmatic explanations of the data regarding ‘knowledge’-attributions are unsuccessful and concludes that in explaining those data we have to resort to accounts that (a) take those data at their semantic face (...) value (Epistemic Contextualism, Subject-Sensitive Invariantism or Epistemic Relativism), or (b) reject them on psychological grounds (Moderate Insensitive Invariantism). To establish this conclusion, the paper relies solely upon widely accepted assumptions about pragmatic theory, broadly construed, and on the Stalnakerian insight that linguistic communication takes place against the backdrop of a set of mutually accepted propositions: a conversation’s common ground. (shrink)

In defending his interest-relative account of knowledge in Knowledge and Practical Interests (2005), Jason Stanley relies heavily on intuitions about several bank cases. We experimentally test the empirical claims that Stanley seems to make concerning our common-sense intuitions about these bank cases. Additionally, we test the empirical claims that Jonathan Schaffer seems to make in his critique of Stanley. We argue that our data impugn what both Stanley and Schaffer claim our intuitions about such cases (...) are. To account for these results, one must develop a better conception of the connection between a subject's interests and her body of knowledge than those offered by Stanley and Schaffer. (shrink)

Abstract: Microfinance Institutions (MFIs) are the financial services established for the specific target to enabling community, particularly poor people to access loans having lack of access to conventional banking and related services. Worldwide the sector started since 1770’s. In Tanzania, it kicked off in 1991 after the enactment of BFIA and SACCOS Act in 1991. This research was conducted in Singida District in 2018 comprising a sample size of 88 respondents from ten SACCOS. Both qualitative and quantitative data were collected. (...) The study employed case study method intended to assess the factors that affect the growth of Micro-finance Institutions in Tanzania. The study found that the growth of MFIs is affected by the following factors; Capacity in managing finances and loans and adhering to financial policies and guidelines. Others include competent personnel, appropriate training to key staff, loan follow up, corruption, and access of members to business training. Similarly, the availability of Technical support to SACCOS, Availability of sources of Business Capital, Level of knowledge on sustainability, Risk management, Training related to the members, challenges of business competition, Macroeconomic factors including inflation, Financial Sector Reforms and Development of Microfinance Policy, affect MFIs. Further the study found that the challenges affecting the performance of the growth of MFIs are within the capacity of the MFIs stakeholders. Henceforth, the study urges all stakeholders to play a pertinent role to enhance effective performance of MFIs. (shrink)

Some philosophers have recently argued that whether a true belief amounts to knowledge in a specific circumstance depends on features of the subject’s practical situation that are unrelated to the truth of the subject’s belief, such as the costs for the subject of being wrong about whether the believed proposition is true. One of the best-known arguments used to support this view is that it best explains a number of paradigmatic cases, such as the well-known Bank Case, in (...) which a difference in knowledge occurs in subjects differing exclusively with respect to their practical situation. I suggest an alternative explanation of such cases. My explanation has a disjunctive character: on the one hand, it accounts for cases in which the subject is aware of the costs of being wrong in a given situation in terms of the influence of psychological factors on her mechanisms of belief-formation and revision. On the other hand, it accounts for cases in which the subject is ignorant of the costs of being wrong in her situation by imposing a new condition on knowledge. This condition is that one knows that p only if one does not underestimate the importance of being right about whether p. I argue that my explanation has a number of advantages over other invariantist explanations: it accounts for all the relevant cases preserving the semantic significance of our ordinary intuitions, it is compatible with an intellectualist account of knowledge and it escapes several problems affecting competing views. (shrink)

This article argues that we can construct a complex interpretation of the nature of time by linking Aciman’s gnostic thread to aspects of twentieth century theory, from philosophy and psychoanalysis. In brief, it attempts to demonstrate the roles of dislocation, deferral, and Otherness in constituting human temporality. The essay begins by surmising the conceptual history of time, touching on key ideas put forward by Augustine and Bergson. The second section takes a psychoanalytic turn after exploring Homo Irrealis to describe the (...) significance of desire and fantasy. Thirdly, we develop a unique and temporal application of difference and deferral, building off of Deleuze and Derrida. The fourth section will consider how the psychoanalytic concept of the Other is inhered within time. We conclude that an Acimanic analysis of time is the means by which we can understand existence not as a series of moments, but a rich progression of dissimilitude and Otherness defined moreso by its lack of cohesion and directness of being than by a unified and self-identifying subject. (shrink)

Moderate Pragmatic Invariantism has been criticized in the literature for postulating implicatures that are not straightforwardly cancellable. Defenders of MPI have responded that the data are not as clear-cut as one might wish. This paper grants the defenders of MPI, for the sake of argument, that the implicatures in question are cancellable and then turns this admission against them. In particular, the paper offers Bank Case variants in which the conversational implicatures postulated by MPI are contextually suspended – and (...) thus cancelled. Since our intuitions do not vary between the original Bank Case and these novel types of cases, the explanation offered by MPI must be mistaken. Our varying truth-value intuitions in the Bank Cases cannot be accounted for by means of conversational implicatures. (shrink)

A 2012 review article for Metascience which explains Mach's realistic brand of empiricism, contrasting it with the common phenomenalist reading of Mach by John Blackmore in two recent books.

Epistemic invariantism, or invariantism for short, is the position that the proposition expressed by knowledge sentences does not vary with the epistemic standard of the context in which these sentences can be used. At least one of the major challenges for invariantism is to explain our intuitions about scenarios such as the so-called bank cases. These cases elicit intuitions to the effect that the truth-value of knowledge sentences varies with the epistemic standard of the context in which (...) these sentences can be used. In this paper, I will defend invariantism against this challenge by advocating the following, somewhat deflationary account of the bank case intuitions: Readers of the bank cases assign different truth-values to the knowledge claims in the bank cases because they interpret these scenarios such that the epistemic position of the subject in question differs between the high and the low standards case. To substantiate this account, I will argue, first, that the bank cases are underspecified even with respect to features that should uncontroversially be relevant for the epistemic position of the subject in question. Second, I will argue that readers of the bank cases will fill in these features differently in the low and the high standards case. In particular, I will argue that there is a variety of reasons to think that the fact that an error-possibility is mentioned in the high standards case will lead readers to assume that this error-possibility is supposed to be likely in the high standards case. (shrink)

Abstract: The study sought to establish Tanzanian`s financial inclusion level, its determinant and whether the country`s financial inclusion levels have influence on the access to basic income, food, heath, employment and education service. Among the major determinants of financial inclusion are income, financial literacy and the geographical presence of financial institutions. With regard to the link between financial inclusion and livelihood indicators, it is found that greater financial inclusion promotes access to basic income, food, health and education for households for (...) the country, with differential effect of inclusion becoming wider when banking instead of total inclusion considered. The purpose of this paper is to assess the contribution of financial inclusion to the rural livelihood households. This has been analyzed with the theoretical background on financial access and livelihood, and by analyzing the primary data collected from five wards, Named; Pawaga, Kalenga, Ismani, Nduli and Kibebe in Iringa district. The results show that, there is a significant positive relationship between Financial Inclusion and the Rural Livelihood households in Tanzania. Access to, availing of formal banking services pave the way to positive changes in the rural livelihood status of households. With regard to rural households in Tanzania the country needs aggressive financial inclusion strategies to reduce access vulnerabilities and poverty. (shrink)

The sometimes, selective exclusion by the legislation and the financial houses of the host country, force immigrants of African origin to setup stokvels to sustain their businesses and livelihood in South Africa. Aim: To provide the basis for inclusive policy initiatives, this paper investigated the drivers for the formation of business support stokvels by Cameroonians in South Africa. Method: The paper adopted a mix research paradigm with the survey questionnaire and personal interviews as the tools of choice. The purposive sampling (...) technique was implored to reach the 132 respondents. Results: It was apparent that the participants form stokvels to compensate for the lack of access to finance from formal financial intermediaries. The dire need for startup and later expansion capital drove them to form stokvels and even to belong to multiple stokvels as they strive to improve their chances. Beyond this, stokvels provide the platform for the mobilization of savings and the opportunity to run their own bank on their own terms. Implications: while aligned to the Cameroonian community, other minority groups can draw vital lessons. Beyond this, the paper informs the inclusive finance debate and may therefore be relevant to policy makers and academics. (shrink)

Many philosophers have thought that aggregates of small, broadly dispersed evils don’t pose the same sort of challenge to theism that horrendous evils like the Nazi Holocaust do. But there are interesting arguments that purport to show that large enough aggregates of small evils are morally and axiologically equivalent to horrendous evils. Herein lies an intriguing and overlooked strategy for defending theism. In short: small evils, or aggregates of such evils, don’t provide decisive evidence against theism; there’s no relevant difference (...) between horrendous evils and aggregates of small evils; hence horrendous evils must not provide decisive evidence against theism, either. (shrink)

The word ‘extremist’ is often used pejoratively, but it’s not clear what, if anything, is wrong with extremism. My project is to give an account of moral extremism as a vice. It consists roughly in having moral convictions so intense that they cause a sort of moral tunnel vision, pushing salient competing considerations out of mind. We should be interested in moral extremism for several reasons: it’s consequential, it’s insidious – we don’t expect immorality to arise from excessive devotion to (...) morality – and it’s yet to attract much philosophical attention. I give several examples of moral extremism from history and explore their social-political implications. I also consider how we should evaluate people who miss the mark, being either too extreme in the service of a good cause or inconsistent with their righteous convictions. I compare John Brown and John Quincy Adams, who fell on either side of this spectrum, as examples. (shrink)

Any good theory of knowledge ascriptions should explain and predict our judgments about their felicity. I argue that any such explanation must take into account a distinction between three ways of using knowledge ascriptions: to suggest acceptance of the embedded proposition, to explain or predict a subject's behavior or attitudes, or to understand the relation of knowledge as such. The contextual effects on our judgments about felicity systematically differ between these three types of uses. Using such a distinction is, in (...) principle, open to both contextualist and pragmatic invariantist accounts of knowledge ascriptions. However, there are some implications pertaining to the use of the “method of cases” in the debate about knowledge ascriptions. (shrink)

In this paper, I will discuss what I will call “skeptical pragmatic invariantism” as a potential response to the intuitions we have about scenarios such as the so-called bank cases. SPI, very roughly, is a form of epistemic invariantism that says the following: The subject in the bank cases doesn’t know that the bank will be open. The knowledge ascription in the low standards case seems appropriate nevertheless because it has a true implicature. The goal (...) of this paper is to show that SPI is mistaken. In particular, I will show that SPI is incompatible with reasonable assumptions about how we are aware of the presence of implicatures. Such objections are not new, but extant formulations are wanting for reasons I will point out below. One may worry that refuting SPI is not a worthwhile project given that this view is an implausible minority position anyway. To respond, I will argue that, contrary to common opinion, other familiar objections to SPI fail and, thus, that SPI is a promising position to begin with. (shrink)

Keith DeRose has argued that context shifting experiments should be designed in a specific way in order to accommodate what he calls a ‘truth/falsity asymmetry’. I explain and critique DeRose's reasons for proposing this modification to contextualist methodology, drawing on recent experimental studies of DeRose's bank cases as well as experimental findings about the verification of affirmative and negative statements. While DeRose's arguments for his particular modification to contextualist methodology fail, the lesson of his proposal is that there (...) is good reason to pay close attention to several subtle aspects of the design of context shifting experiments. (shrink)

Contextualists and pragmatists agree that knowledge-denying sentences are contextually variable, in the sense that a knowledge-denying sentence might semantically express a false proposition in one context and a true proposition in another context, without any change in the properties traditionally viewed as necessary for knowledge. Minimalists deny both pragmatism and contextualism, and maintain that knowledge-denying sentences are not contextually variable. To defend their view from cases like DeRose and Stanley's high stakes bank case, minimalists like Patrick Rysiew, Jessica (...) Brown, and Wayne Davis forward ‘warranted assertability maneuvers.’ The basic idea is that some knowledge-denying sentence seems contextually variable because we mistake what a speaker pragmatically conveys by uttering that sentence for what she literally says by uttering that sentence. In this paper, I raise problems for the warranted assertability maneuvers of Rysiew, Brown, and Davis, and then present a warranted assertability maneuver that should succeed if any warranted assertability maneuver will succeed. I then show how my warranted assertability maneuver fails, and how the problem with my warranted assertability maneuver generalizes to pragmatic responses in general. The upshot of my argument is that, in order to defend their view from cases like DeRose and Stanley's high stakes bank case, minimalists must prioritize the epistemological question whether the subjects in those cases know over linguistic questions about the pragmatics of various knowledge-denying sentences. (shrink)

In this paper, I present a counter-example to the two most prominent theories of pragmatic encroachment (regarding knowledge ascriptions): Contextualism (specifically, DeRose's version), and Stanley's Subject-Sensitive Invariantism (SSI). The example is a variation on DeRose's bank case. -/- Key words: Knowledge, knowledge ascriptions, pragmatic encroachment, Stanley, DeRose, bank case, standards, stakes.

We provide an overview of Searle's contributions to speech act theory and the ontology of social reality, focusing on his theory of constitutive rules. In early versions of this theory, Searle proposed that all such rules have the form 'X counts as Y in context C' formula – as for example when Barack Obama (X) counts as President of the United States (Y) in the context of US political affairs. Crucially, the X and the Y terms are here identical. A (...) problem arises for this theory for cases involving 'free-standing Y terms', as for example in the case of money in a computerized bank account. Here there is no physical X to which a status function might be attached. We conclude by arguing that Searle's response to this problem creates difficulties for his naturalistic framework. (shrink)

Every year, the Vietnamese people reportedly burned about 50,000 tons of joss papers, which took the form of not only bank notes, but iPhones, cars, clothes, even housekeepers, in hope of pleasing the dead. The practice was mistakenly attributed to traditional Buddhist teachings but originated in fact from China, which most Vietnamese were not aware of. In other aspects of life, there were many similar examples of Vietnamese so ready and comfortable with adding new norms, values, and beliefs, even (...) contradictory ones, to their culture. This phenomenon, dubbed “cultural additivity”, prompted us to study the co-existence, interaction, and influences among core values and norms of the Three Teachings –Confucianism, Buddhism, and Taoism–as shown through Vietnamese folktales. By applying Bayesian logistic regression, we evaluated the possibility of whether the key message of a story was dominated by a religion (dependent variables), as affected by the appearance of values and anti-values pertaining to the Three Teachings in the story (independent variables). Our main findings included the existence of the cultural additivity of Confucian and Taoist values. More specifically, empirical results showed that the interaction or addition of the values of Taoism and Confucianism in folktales together helped predict whether the key message of a story was about Confucianism, β{VT ⋅ VC} = 0.86. Meanwhile, there was no such statistical tendency for Buddhism. The results lead to a number of important implications. First, this showed the dominance of Confucianism because the fact that Confucian and Taoist values appeared together in a story led to the story’s key message dominated by Confucianism. Thus, it presented the evidence of Confucian dominance and against liberal interpretations of the concept of the Common Roots of Three Religions (“tam giáo đồng nguyên”) as religious unification or unicity. Second, the concept of “cultural additivity” could help explain many interesting socio-cultural phenomena, namely the absence of religious intolerance and extremism in the Vietnamese society, outrageous cases of sophistry in education, the low productivity in creative endeavors like science and technology, the misleading branding strategy in business. We are aware that our results are only preliminary and more studies, both theoretical and empirical, must be carried out to give a full account of the explanatory reach of “cultural additivity”. (shrink)

Duress is a defense in both law and morality. The bank teller who provides an armed robber with the bank vault combination, the innocent suspect who fabricates a story after hours of interrogation, the Good Samaritan who breaks into a private cabin in the woods to save a stranded hiker, and the father who drives at high speed to rush his injured child to the hospital—in deciding how to respond to agents like these, we should take into account (...) that they have acted under duress. In this paper, I offer a new duress defense, which I call “distinctive duress.” The distinctive-duress defense is neither ordinary justification nor ordinary excuse. Rather, it is a defense available to agents who act wrongly because they are appropriately insensitive to certain reasons. In the distinctive-duress cases, an agent’s normative sensitivities are rightly directed elsewhere, leading them awry. (shrink)

Part 1 of this exchange consists in a critique by Smith of Searle’s The Construction of Social Reality focusing on Searle’s use of the formula ‘X counts as Y in context C’. Smith argues that this formula works well for social objects such as dollar bills and presidents where the corresponding X terms (pieces of paper, human beings) are easy to identify. In cases such as debts and prices and money in a bank's computers, however, the formula fails, (...) because these are cases of what he calls ‘free-standing Y terms’, since there is here no X which can count as the corresponding Y. In his response in Part 2, Searle argues that Smith’s critique rests on three misunderstandings: 1. in wrongly presupposing that Searle is trying to analyze the nature of what he calls “social objects”, rather than of social facts; 2. in thinking that the counts as formula is intended as a definition, rather than as a mere mnemonic; and 3. in neglecting the naturalism of Searle’s account. (shrink)