We investigate the firms’ specific attributes that determine the difference in speed of adjustment (SOA) towards the cash holdings target in the Scandinavian countries: Denmark, Norway and Sweden. We examine whether Scandinavian firms maintain an optimal level of cash holdings and determine if the active cash holdings management is associated with the firms’ higher SOA and lower adjustment costs. Our findings substantiate that a higher level of off-target cost induces professional managers to rebalance their cash level (...) towards the optimal balance of cash holdings. Our results reveal that Scandinavian firms accelerate SOA towards cash targets primarily for the precautionary motive. Moreover, our results show that SOA is heterogeneous across Scandinavian firms based on adjustment cost and deviate cash holdings towards the target mainly with the support of internal financing. Furthermore, our empirical findings show that the SOA of Norwegian firms is significantly higher than the Danish and Swedish firms. (shrink)

Monetary incentives to increase COVID-19 vaccinations are widely used. Even if they work, whether such payments are ethical is contested. This paper reviews ethical arguments for and against using monetary incentives that appeal to utility, liberty, civic responsibility, equity, exploitation, and autonomy. It concludes that in low-income nations and nations with meagre safety nets and income inequality, policy-makers should proceed with caution.

Exchange rate movement is a mostly debatable issue amongst economists and strategic financial planners in the economies as a vital phenomenon, of every economy in the developing the world. This study sets out to examine the impact of cash conversion cycle, Size, Age, and exchange rate movement on firms’ financial decisions. The estimation used techniques of static panel data analysis in this study; pooled OLS, random effects, and fixed effects. Interaction techniques are applied to check the impact of the (...) exchange rate by multiplying this variable with the main variables of cash conversion cycle, that is receivable in days and payables in days. The results depict there is a significant negative relationship between return on assets and exchanger rate during the period of review while the beta of cash conversion cycle has negative value; age and size are positive and significant at 1% level with return on assets. Therefore, it is recommended that organizations that have some measure to agreement in foreign currencies can adopt some advanced hedging technique to occupy the exchange rate movements risk to improve firm’s performance. (shrink)

Journal of Political Philosophy, EarlyView.

Most business in the Philippines is mostly in the microenterprise. Hence, this research was accomplished in order to assess the effectiveness of financial management practices of microenterprises in Quezon City. The city was selected as the locale of the research since there were various microenterprises built in this location. The respondents were classified according to the number of years in operation of their business, the number of employees, capitalization, and their source of funds. Additionally, the individual profile was also classified (...) into their age, highest educational attainment, and the number of seminars or trainings related to their business that they had attended. The assessment was specified into aspects of financial planning, financial control, and cash management. The result shows that most businesses were newly established and only operating for zero (0) to two (2) years. The result also showed that most of the respondents only had a capitalization of PHP 100,000.00 and they were utilizing their personal savings as a source of funds. Most of them are aged from twenty-one (21) to thirty (30) years with no bachelor’s degrees. They only attended seminars and training less than three (3) times. The result of this study was beneficial to business owners, local government units, government, government agencies, banks, and other financial institutions, academe, and future researchers. (shrink)

I analyse the meaning of a popular idiom among consciousness researchers, in which an individual's consciousness is described as a 'field'. I consider some of the contexts where this idea appears, in particular discussions of attention and the unity of consciousness. In neither case, I argue, do authors provide the resources to cash out all the implications of field-talk: in particular, they do not give sense to the idea of conscious elements being arrayed along multiple dimensions. I suggest ways (...) to extend and generalize the attentional construal of 'field-talk' to provide a genuine multiplicity of dimensions, through the notions of attentional proximity and causal proximity: the degree to which two experiential elements are disposed to bring one another into attention when attended, or to interact in other distinctively mental ways. I conclude that if consciousness is a field, it is one organized by attentional and/or causal proximity. (shrink)

Anorexia Nervosa (AN) is a complex disorder characterised by self-starvation, an act of self-destruction. It is often described as a disorder marked by paradoxes and, despite extensive research attention, is still not well understood. Much AN research focuses upon the distorted body image that individuals with AN supposedly experience. However, based upon reports from individuals describing their own experience of AN, I argue that their bodily experience is much more complex than this focus might lead us to believe. Such research (...) often presents an overly cognitive understanding of bodily experience in AN, underplaying the affective, felt experience of individuals with AN, as well as descriptions of empowerment, strength and control reported in the early stages of AN. This paper seeks to enrich our understanding of bodily experience in AN as it progresses throughout the various stages of the disorder. I show how the classical phenomenological distinction between the body-as-subject and the body-as-object, as well as Leder’s conception of the visceral body, can inform our understanding of bodily experience in AN. I suggest that the project of self-starvation is an attempt to overcome the noisy demands of the visceral body, which are experienced as threatening the body-as-subject, through a process of objectifying the body-as-object. By cashing out AN as a project of radical bodily control that, tragically, comes to control the individual, we can capture important aspects of the bodily experience of AN and the temporal progression of the disorder. -/- . (shrink)

Abstract : Background: Vegetable agriculture is very important to human continued existence and remains a key driver of many economies worldwide, especially in underdeveloped and developing economies. Objectives: There is an increasing demand for food and cash crops, due to the increasing in world population and the challenges enforced by climate modifications, there is an urgent need to increase plant production while reducing costs. Methods: In this paper, Lemon classification approach is presented with a dataset that contains approximately 2,000 (...) images belong to 3 species at a few developing phases. Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) algorithms, a deep learning technique extensively applied to image recognition was used, for this task. The results: found that CNN-driven lemon classification applications when used in farming automation have the latent to enhance crop harvest and improve output and productivity when designed properly. The trained model achieved an accuracy of 99.48% on a held-out test set, demonstrating the feasibility of this approach. (shrink)

Should Marxists support universal basic income (UBI), i.e., a regular cash income paid to all without a means test or work requirement? This paper considers one important argument that they should, namely that UBI would be instrumentally effective in helping to bring about communism. It argues that previous answers to this question have paid insufficient attention to a logically prior question: what is Marx’s account of communism? In reply, it distinguishes two different accounts: a left-libertarian version that associates communism (...) with the freedom to live and work how one wants, and a perfectionist version that associates communism with the overcoming of alienated labour and self-realisation in work. It argues that UBI would make steps towards the left-libertarian account but not the perfectionist account. Ultimately, then, the question “should Marxists support basic income?” is shown to partly depend on which account of communism Marxists want to bring about. (shrink)

I give an account of what makes an event a coincidence. -/- I start by critically discussing a couple of other approaches to the notion of coincidence -- particularly that of Lando (2017) -- before developing my own view. The central idea of my view is that the correct understanding of coincidences is closely related to our understanding of the correct 'level' or 'grain' of explanation. Coincidences have a kind of explanatory deficiency — if they did not have this deficiency (...) they would not be coincidences. This deficiency, I claim, is the same explanatory deficiency as when we give low-level explanations of special science phenomena. Such explanations are typically too specific and not robust enough. I claim that there is this same badness in purported explanations of coincidences. -/- I cash out this idea sketching an account of explanatory goodness — an account of what makes explanations better or worse -- and using that to give a more precise account of coincidences. (shrink)

A number of philosophers have been impressed with the thought that moral saints and moral monsters—or, evil people, to put it less sensationally—“mirror” one another, in a sense to be explained. Call this the mirror thesis. The project of this paper is to cash out the metaphorical suggestion that moral saints and evil persons mirror one other and to articulate the most plausible literal version of the mirror thesis. To anticipate, the most plausible version of the mirror thesis implies (...) that evil persons mirror moral saints insofar as the characters of each are marked by similar aretaic properties: suffering from extremely vicious character traits—in a sense to be explained—suffices for being evil whereas possessing extremely virtuous character traits similarly suffices for moral sainthood. (shrink)

On Jaeggi’s reading, the immanent and progressive features of ideology critique are rooted in the connection between its explanatory and its normative tasks. I argue that this claim can be cashed out in terms of the mechanisms involved in a functional explanation of ideology and that stability plays a crucial role in this connection. On this reading, beliefs can be said to be ideological if (a) they have the function of supporting existing social practices, (b) they are the output of (...) systematically distorted processes of belief formation, (c) the conditions in which distorting mechanisms trigger can be traced back to structural causal factors shaped by the social practice their outputs are designed to support. Functional problems thus turn out to be interlocked with normative problems because ideology fails to provide principles to regulate cooperation that would be accepted under conditions of non-domination, hence failing to anchor a stable cooperative scheme. By explaining ideology as parasitic on domination, ideology critique points to the conditions under which cooperation stabilizes as those of a practice whose principles are accepted without coercion. Thus, it seems to entail a conception of justice whose principles are articulated as part of a theory of social cooperation. (shrink)

Moral particularists argue that because reasons for action are irreducibly context-dependent, the traditional quest in ethics for true and exceptionless moral principles is hopelessly misguided. In making this claim, particularists assume a general framework according to which reasons are the ground floor normative units undergirding all other normative properties and relations. They then argue that there is no cashing out in finite terms either (i) when a given non-normative feature gives rise to a reason for or against action, or (ii) (...) how the reasons that are present in a given context play off each other to determine one’s overall duties. However, the conjunction of these two theses leaves particularists without a coherent notion of a reason for action: posit too much irreducible context-dependence in the behavior of reasons, and the reasons-based framework breaks down. One upshot is that the particularists’ challenge to principle-based approaches to ethics has not, at present, been successfully made out; another upshot is that perhaps the best way to formulate that challenge involves renouncing the reasons-based framework all together. (shrink)

Hobbs (2010) introduced ‘clause-internal coherence’ (CIC) to describe inferences in, e.g., ‘A jogger was hit by a car,’ where the jogging is understood to have led to the car-hitting. Cohen & Kehler (2021) argue that well-known pragmatic tools cannot account for CIC, motivating an enrichment account familiar from discourse coherence research. An outstanding question is how to compositionally derive CIC from coherence relations. This paper takes strides in answering this question. It first provides experimental support for the existence of CIC (...) via offline evidence that attributive (non-)deverbal adjectives can trigger the same causal inferences within clauses that their predicative counterparts can trigger across clauses, albeit more weakly. To explain the experimental results, we use tools in Segmented Discourse Representation Theory (SDRT), which allows us to show that causal inferences can be derived in various ways, depending on whether deverbal adjectives are used attributively or predicatively. If the former, they are presupposition triggers and the coherence relations Elaboration/Continuation compete with Background; if the latter, Explanation/Result compete with Background. These different competitions -- cashed out in terms of interaction between default axioms -- correlate with the difference in the relative salience of the causal inferences. (shrink)

In discussions about responsibility for climate change, it is often suggested that the historical use of natural resources is in some way relevant to our current attempts to address this problem fairly. In particular, both theorists and actors in the public realm have argued that historical high-emitters of greenhouse gases (GHGs) – or the beneficiaries of those emissions – are in possession of some form of debt, deriving from their overuse of a natural resource that should have been shared more (...) equitably. These accounts of what might be termed ‘natural debt’ generally focus on one particular natural resource (global GHG sink capacity); invoke a principle of justice by which rights to consume this resource should have been allocated (most commonly, equal per capita shares); and then argue that historical violations of this principle give rise to certain rectificatory duties in the present (generally, duties on the part of those who have historically consumed an excessive amount of the world’s GHG sink capacity, or who have benefitted from such excess consumption, to offer some form of compensation to those who have not – such compensation usually taking the form of emission credits or cash). Though many seem to find it intuitively plausible that historical high-emissions have incurred some form of debt, significant challenges arise in rendering the concept of natural debt both coherent and defensible. Such problems are not, however, my focus in this piece. Instead, I here suggest that discussions about historical responsibility for climate change commonly fail to recognise certain other past injustices concerning natural resources that appear to hold contemporary relevance. In particular, I argue that it is not just the unequal consumption of global GHG sink capacity that may be of moral significance here; but also the way in which the world’s resources have more generally been governed. (shrink)

In carrying out cost-benefit or cost-effective analysis, a discount rate should be applied to some kinds of future benefits and costs. It is controversial, though, whether future health is in this class. I argue that one of the standard arguments for discounting (from diminishing marginal returns) is inapplicable to the case of health, while another (favouring a pure rate of time preference) is unsound in any case. However, there are two other reasons that might support a positive discount rate for (...) future health: one relating to uncertainty, and the other relating to the instrumental benefits of improved health. While the latter considerations could be modelled via a discount rate, they could alternatively be modelled more explicitly, in other ways; I briefly discuss which modelling method is preferable. Finally, I argue against the common claims that failing to discount future health would lead to paradox, and/or to inconsistency with the way future cash flows are treated. (shrink)

In the bitcoin whitepaper, Satoshi Nakamoto (2008: 2) defines an electronic coin as a chain of digital signatures. Many have since defined a bitcoin as a chain of digital signatures. This latter definition continues to appear in reports from central banks, advocacy centers, and governments, as well as in academic papers across the disciplines of law, economics, computer science, cryptography, management, and philosophy. Some have even used it to argue that what we now call bitcoin is not the real bitcoin. (...) The definition fails, however. This is important because the Chain Definition obscures Satoshi’s solution to a dilemma in the design of electronic cash, as well as the truth about bitcoin’s privacy and fungibility. In this article, I explain why the Chain Definition fails and what Satoshi likely endorsed instead. Along the way, I untangle some issues around bitcoin fungibility and clarify some others around the ontology of digital assets. (shrink)

The concept of burden of proof is used in a wide range of discourses, from philosophy to law, science, skepticism, and even in everyday reasoning. This paper provides an analysis of the proper deployment of burden of proof, focusing in particular on skeptical discussions of pseudoscience and the paranormal, where burden of proof assignments are most poignant and relatively clear-cut. We argue that burden of proof is often misapplied or used as a mere rhetorical gambit, with little appreciation of the (...) underlying principles. The paper elaborates on an important distinction between evidential and prudential varieties of burdens of proof, which is cashed out in terms of Bayesian probabilities and error management theory. Finally, we explore the relationship between burden of proof and several (alleged) informal logical fallacies. This allows us to get a firmer grip on the concept and its applications in different domains, and also to clear up some confusions with regard to when exactly some fallacies (ad hominem, ad ignorantiam, and petitio principii) may or may not occur. (shrink)

When probability discounting (or probability weighting), one multiplies the value of an outcome by one's subjective probability that the outcome will obtain in decision-making. The broader import of defending probability discounting is to help justify cost-benefit analyses in contexts such as climate change. This chapter defends probability discounting under risk both negatively, from arguments by Simon Caney (2008, 2009), and with a new positive argument. First, in responding to Caney, I argue that small costs and benefits need to be evaluated, (...) and that viewing practices at the social level is too coarse-grained. Second, I argue for probability discounting using a distinction between causal responsibility and moral responsibility. Moral responsibility can be cashed out in terms of blameworthiness and praiseworthiness, while causal responsibility obtains in full for any effect which is part of a causal chain linked to one's act. With this distinction in hand, unlike causal responsibility, moral responsibility can be seen as coming in degrees. My argument is, given that we can limit our deliberation and consideration to that which we are morally responsible for and that our moral responsibility for outcomes is limited by our subjective probabilities, our subjective probabilities can ground probability discounting. (shrink)

The view that an agent’s cognitive processes sometimes include proper parts found outside the skin and skull of the agent is gaining increasing acceptance in philosophy of mind. One main empirical touchstone for this so-called active externalism is Edwin Hutchins’ theory of distributed cognition (DCog). However, the connection between DCog and active externalism is far from clear. While active externalism is one component of DCog, the theory also incorporates other related claims, which active externalists may not want to take on (...) board. DCog implies a shift away from an organism-centred cognitive science to a focus on larger socio-technical-cum-cognitive systems. In arguing for this shift, proponents of DCog seem to accept that socio-cultural systems have some form of agency apart from the agencies of the individuals inside them. I will tentatively suggest a way in which such a notion of agency can be cashed out. (shrink)

To what extent does the black hole information paradox lead to violations of quantum mechanics? I explain how black hole complementarity provides a framework to articulate how quantum characterizations of black holes can remain consistent despite the information paradox. I point out that there are two ways to cash out the notion of consistency in play here: an operational notion and a descriptive notion. These two ways of thinking about consistency lead to (at least) two principles of black hole (...) complementarity: an operational principle and a descriptive principle. Our background philosophy of science regarding realism/instrumentalism might initially lead us to prefer one principle over the other. However, the recent physics literature, which applies tools from quantum information theory and quantum computational complexity theory to various thought experiments involving quantum systems in or around black holes, implies that the operational principle is successful where the descriptive principle is not. This then lets us see that for operationalists the black hole information paradox might no longer be pressing. (shrink)

On the face of it, suffering from the loss of a loved one and suffering from intense pain are very different things. What makes them both experiences of suffering? I argue it’s neither their unpleasantness nor the fact that we desire not to have such experiences. Rather, what we suffer from negatively transforms the way our situation as a whole appears to us. To cash this out, I introduce the notion of negative affective construal, which involves practically perceiving our (...) situation as calling for change, registering this perception with a felt desire for change, and believing that the change is not within our power. We (attitudinally) suffer when negative affective construal is pervasive, either because it colours a large swath of possibilities, as in the case of anxiety, or because it narrows our attention to what hurts, as in the case of grief. On this view, sensory or bodily suffering is a special case of attitudinal suffering: the unpleasantness of pain causes pervasive negative affective construal. Pain that doesn’t negatively transform our world doesn’t make for suffering. (shrink)

Many philosophers accept a response constraint on normative reasons: that p is a reason for you to φ only if you are able to φ for the reason that p. This constraint offers a natural way to cash out the familiar and intuitive thought that reasons must be able to guide us, and has been put to work as a premise in a range of influential arguments in ethics and epistemology. However, the constraint requires interpretation and faces putative counter-examples (...) due to Julia Markovits, Mark Schroeder, and others. This paper develops and motivates an interpretation of the response constraint that avoids the putative counter-examples. (shrink)

According to an influential idea in the philosophy of set theory, certain mathematical concepts, such as the notion of a well-order and set, are indefinitely extensible. Following Parsons (1983), this has often been cashed out in modal terms. This paper explores instead an extensional articulation of the idea, formulated in higher-order logic, that flat-footedly formalizes some remarks of Zermelo. The resulting picture is incompatible with the idea that the entire universe can be well-ordered, but entirely consistent with the idea that (...) the sets of any set-theoretic universe can be. (shrink)

It has been argued that picture perception is sometimes, but not always, ‘inflected’. Sometimes the picture’s design ‘inflects’, or is ‘recruited’ into the depicted scene. The aim of this paper is to cash out what is meant by these metaphors. Our perceptual state is different when we see an object fact to face or when we see it in a picture. But there is also a further distinction: our perceptual state is very different if we perceive objects in pictures (...) in an inflected or uninflected manner. The question is what this difference amounts to. My answer is that it is a difference of attention. In the case of inflected, but not uninflected, picture perception, we are consciously attending to certain properties: to relational property that cannot be fully characterized without reference to both the picture’s design and to the depicted object. I defend this way of interpreting inflected picture perception from some important objections and emphasize the importance of this, inflected, way of perceiving pictures. (shrink)

This paper examines the evolution of Edmund Husserl’s theory of perceptual occlusion. This task is accomplished in two stages. First, I elucidate Husserl’s conclusion, from his 1901 Logical Investigations, that the occluded parts of perceptual objects are intended by partial signitive acts. I focus on two doctrines of that account. I examine Husserl’s insight that signitive intentions are composed of Gehalt and I discuss his conclusion that signitive intentions sit on the continuum of fullness. Second, the paper discloses how Husserl (...) transforms his 1901 philosophy in his 1913 revisions to the Sixth Logical Investigation, affirming that the occluded parts of perceptual objects are intended by empty contiguity acts. I demonstrate how he overturns the two core doctrines of his theory from the Investigations in these revisions, claiming that empty intentions are not composed of Gehalt and asserting that those acts break with the continuum of fullness. Husserl implements these changes to solve problems that arise from his recognition of two new kinds of intentions; darker and completely dark acts. Finally, in the conclusion, I cash out this analysis, by indicating that, in 1913, Husserl transforms his theory of fulfillment on the basis of his new insights about empty acts. (shrink)

The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change principle of ‘common but differentiated responsibility’ admits many interpretations. In the philosophical literature on climate justice, it has typically been cashed out in terms of the following three principles: the ability to pay principle (APP), the beneficiary pays principle (BPP), and the contribution to problem principle (CPP). Many of these accounts have given prominence to the CPP and APP, but there are some who argue that the BPP deserves greater consideration. In this (...) paper, I want to ask whether the BPP must feature in any plausible account of remedial responsibility for climate change. I examine this question by looking at three different ways in which the BPP has been incorporated into accounts of climate burden-sharing. In each case, there are questions about the particular role that the BPP is assigned and it looks like either the BPP must be given equal prominence to the CPP, or the BPP might be redundant when it comes to specific task of remedying the injustices of climate change. I suggest in the conclusion one possible reason to maintain the BPP. (shrink)

We describe an experimental approach toward implementing a commonsense "microtheory" for buying and selling. Our prototype system characterizes how intelligent agents hold items and money, how they buy and sell items, and the way money and items are transferred. The ontology of the system includes money (cash, check, credit card), agents (people, organizations), items (movable, real estate, service), barter, and the notions of transfer, loan, buying by installments, profit, and loss.

This paper purports to provide a fresh cashing out of Debasing Scepticism: the type of Scepticism put on the map in a recent article by Jonathan Schaffer, with a view to demonstrating that the Debasing Sceptic’s argument is not so easily dismissed as many of Schaffer’s commentators have thought. After defending the very possibility of the Debasing Sceptic’s favoured sceptical scenario, I lay out a framework for thinking of the agent’s power to hold their beliefs in the light of reasons (...) which I argue has initial plausibility. I then attempt to show that with this framework in tow, the Debasing Sceptic has an argument for their sceptical conclusion available to them which Schaffer’s commentators have failed to undermine, and which is independently interesting. (shrink)

Margaret Gilbert’s work on sociality covers a wide range of topics, and as she puts it “addresses matters of great significance to several philosophical specialties – including ethics, epistemology, political philosophy, philosophy of science, and philosophy of law – and outside philosophy as well” (Gilbert 2013, p. 1). Herein I argue that Mark Greenberg’s recent call to eliminate the problem of legal normativity is well motivated. Further, I argue that Gilbert’s work on joint commitment, and more specifically obligations of joint (...) commitment, allows us to move beyond the problem of legal normativity while cashing out H.L.A. Hart’s thesis that moral and legal obligations are distinct. (shrink)

There is a clear intuitive difference between lying and attempting to mislead. Recent efforts to analyse this difference, and to define lying in ways that respect it, are motivated by the conviction that the difference is important or significant in some way. Traditionally, the importance of the lying-misleading distinction has been cashed out in moral terms, but this approach faces a number of challenges. The purpose of this paper is to suggest and develop a different way in which the lying-misleading (...) distinction might be important: it might matter aesthetically. I propose that the aesthetic significance of the distinction inheres in a more prominent experienced disharmony in lying as compared with attempting to mislead. (shrink)

According to the person-affecting view, the ethics of welfare should be cashed out in terms of how the individuals are affected. While the narrow version fails to solve the non-identity problem, the wide version is subject to the repugnant conclusion. A middle view promises to do better – the Interpersonal Comparative View of Welfare (ICV). It modifies the narrow view by abstracting away from individuals’ identities to account for interpersonal gains and losses. The paper assesses ICV’s merits and flaws. ICV (...) solves the non-identity problem, avoids the repugnant conclusion, and seems to accommodate the person-affecting intuition. But it cuts too many things along the way: ICV obstructs the advantage of the wide view to account for all future individuals’ welfare, abandons the intuitions that underlie the narrow view, and even violates its own presuppositions by turning out to be merely pseudo person-affecting. (shrink)

Online therapy sessions and other forms of digital mental health services (DMH) have seen a sharp spike in new users since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. Having little access to their social networks and support systems, people have had to turn to digital tools and spaces to cope with their experiences of anxiety and loss. With no clear end to the pandemic in sight, many of us are likely to remain reliant upon DMH for the foreseeable future. As such, (...) it is important to articulate some of the specific ways in which the pandemic is affecting our self and world-relation, such that we can identify how DMH services are best able to accommodate some of the newly emerging needs of their users. In this paper I will identify a specific type of loss brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic and present it as an important concept for DMH. I refer to this loss as loss of perceptual world-familiarity. Loss of perceptual world-familiarity entails a breakdown in the ongoing effortless responsiveness to our perceptual environment that characterizes much of our everyday lives. To cash this out I will turn to insights from the phenomenological tradition. Initially, my project is descriptive. I aim to bring out how loss of perceptual world-familiarity is a distinctive form of loss that is deeply pervasive yet easily overlooked-hence the relevance of explicating it for DMH purposes. But I will also venture into the space of the normative, offering some reasons for seeing perceptual world-familiarity as a component of well-being. I conclude the paper with a discussion of how loss of perceptual world-familiarity affects the therapeutic setting now that most if not all therapeutic interactions have transitioned to online spaces and I explore the potential to augment these spaces with social interaction technologies. Throughout, my discussion aims to do justice to the reality that perceptual world-familiarity is not an evenly distributed phenomenon, that factors like disability, gender and race affect its robustness, and that this ought to be reckoned with when seeking to incorporate the phenomenon into or mitigate it through DMH services. (shrink)

In his 1975 paper “The Meaning of ‘Meaning’”, Hilary Putnam famously argued for semantic externalism. Little attention has been paid, however, to the fact that already in 1973, Putnam had presented the idea of the linguistic division of labor and the Twin Earth thought experiment in his comment on Wilfrid Sellars’s “Meaning as Functional Classification” at a conference, and Sellars had replied to Putnam from a broadly inferentialist perspective. The first half of this paper aims to trace the development of (...) Putnam’s semantic externalism, situate his debate with Sellars in it, and reconstruct the two arguments he presented against Sellars. The second half of this paper aims to reconstruct how Sellars replied to Putnam. I argue that Sellars not only accepts the social character of language but also suggests how inferentialists can accommodate the contribution of the world. Sellars’s key idea is that substance terms have a “promissory note aspect” which is to be cashed out in a successor conceptual framework. I reconstruct Sellars’s position as ideal successor externalism, and compare it with temporal externalism. (shrink)

I argue that the theory of chance proposed by David Lewis has three problems: (i) it is time asymmetric in a manner incompatible with some of the chance theories of physics, (ii) it is incompatible with statistical mechanical chances, and (iii) the content of Lewis's Principal Principle depends on how admissibility is cashed out, but there is no agreement as to what admissible evidence should be. I proposes two modifications of Lewis's theory which resolve these difficulties. I conclude by tentatively (...) proposing a third modification of Lewis's theory, one which explains many of the common features shared by the chance theories of physics. (shrink)

This paper accomplishes two goals. First, the essay elucidates Husserl’s descriptions of meaning consciousness from the 1901 Logical Investigations. I examine Husserl’s observations about the three ways we can experience meaning and I discuss his conclusions about the structure of meaning intentions. Second, the paper explores how Husserl reworked that 1901 theory in his 1913/14 Revisions to the Sixth Investigation. I explore how Husserl transformed his descriptions of the three intentions involved in meaningful experience. By doing so, Husserl not only (...) recognized intersubjective communication as the condition of possibility of linguistic meaning acts, but also transformed his account of the structure of both signitive and intuitive acts. In the conclusion, I cash out this analysis, by showing how, on the basis of these new insights, Husserl reconstructs his theory of fulfillment. (shrink)

The idea that development is the expression of information accumulated during evolution and that heredity is the transmission of this information is surprisingly hard to cash out in strict, scientific terms. This paper seeks to do so using the sense of information introduced by Francis Crick in his sequence hypothesis and central dogma of molecular biology. It focuses on Crick's idea of precise determination. This is analysed using an information-theoretic measure of causal specificity. This allows us to reconstruct some (...) of Crick's claims about information in transcription and translation. Crick's approach to information has natural extensions to non-coding regions of DNA, to epigenetic marks, and to the genetic or environmental upstream causes of those epigenetic marks. Epigenetic information cannot be reduced to genetic information. The existence of biological information in epigenetic and exogenetic factors is relevant to evolution as well as to development. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to argue that there is no unproblematic way of delineating perceptual beliefs from non-perceptual beliefs. The concept of perceptual belief is one of the central concepts not only of philosophy of perception but also of epistemology in a broad foundationalist tradition. Philosophers of perception talk about perceptual belief as the interface between perception and cognition and foundationalist epistemologists understand perceptual justification as a relation between perceptual states and perceptual beliefs. We consider three ways of (...) cashing out the difference between perceptual and non-perceptual beliefs (semantic, justificatory, and etiological) and argue that none of them works. Finally, we explore the possibility of understanding perceptual justification without relying on the concept of perceptual beliefs. (shrink)

An otherwise lawlike generalisation hedged by a ceteris paribus (CP) clause qualifies as a law of nature, if the CP clause can be substituted with a set of conditions derived from the multivariate regression model used to interpret the empirical data in support of the gen- eralisation. Three studies in human biology that use regression analysis are surveyed, showing that standard objections to cashing out CP clauses in this way—based on alleged vagueness, vacuity, or lack of testability—do not apply. CP (...) laws also cannot be said to be simply false due to the indefinitely many conditions not explicitly stated in their associated model: scientific CP clauses imply that these are, given the evidence, not nomically relevant. (shrink)

The college hopes that every semester students are able to pay tuition properly and smoothly. The hope is that the institution will be able to maintain monthly cash flow so that its operational and maintenance costs can be met. Therefore, this study was conducted to predict and fulfill the institution's cash-in from the method of paying tuition fees either by cash, installments, or sometimes late payments every semester. In predicting the method of paying tuition fees, using student (...) profile data (name, name, study program) and achievement index every semester for 5 semesters passed and the method of payment (cash, installments, and late--cash or installments). Using the Naive Bayes (NB) method, Support Vector Machine (SVM), and Deep Learning, this study aims to forecast tuition costs. The Classification Prediction Model with Naive Bayes, SVM, and Deep Learning produces Confusion Matrix Performance NB with an Accuracy of 91.49%, Confusion Matrix Performance SVM with an Accuracy of 85.11%, and Confusion Matrix Performance Deep Learning with an Accuracy of 89.36%, according to the research findings. (shrink)

Citizens in wealthy liberal democracies are typically expected to see to basic needs like food, clothing, and shelter out of their own income, and those without the means to do so usually receive assistance in the form of cash transfers. Things are different with health care. Most liberal societies provide their citizens with health care or health care insurance in kind, either directly from the state or through private insurance companies that are regulated like public utilities. Except perhaps for (...) small co-pays or deductibles, citizens are not expected to see to their health needs out-of-pocket, at least for some basic level of care. Instead, when a citizen gets sick, the state or her insurance company foots the... (shrink)

There have recently been novel applications of medical systematic review guidelines to economic policy interventions which contain controversial methodological assumptions that require further scrutiny. A landmark 2017 Cochrane review of unconditional cash transfer (UCT) studies, based on the Grading of Recommendations Assessment, Development and Evaluation (GRADE), exemplifies both the possibilities and limitations of applying medical systematic review guidelines to UCT and universal basic income (UBI) studies. Recognizing the need to upgrade GRADE to incorporate the differences between medical and policy (...) interventions, the GRADE Public Health Project Group (PHPG) was convened to enumerate and address these methodological challenges. However, in light of our analysis of additional methodological challenges that arise for UCT and UBI studies, we argue that the adaptation of medical systematic review guidelines to economic methodology is far from straightforward and is in fact more challenging than claimed by the PHPG. (shrink)

It is regrettably common for theorists to attempt to characterize the Humean dictum that one can’t get an ‘ought’ from an ‘is’ just in broadly logical terms. We here address an important new class of such approaches which appeal to model-theoretic machinery. Our complaint about these recent attempts is that they interfere with substantive debates about the nature of the ethical. This problem, developed in detail for Daniel Singer’s and Gillian Russell and Greg Restall’s accounts of Hume’s dictum, is of (...) a general type arising for the use of model-theoretic structures in cashing out substantive philosophical claims: the question of whether an abstract model-theoretic structure successfully interprets something often involves taking a stand on non-trivial issues surrounding the thing. In the particular case of Hume’s dictum, given reasonable conceptual or metaphysical claims about the ethical, Singer’s and Russell and Restall’s accounts treat obviously ethical claims as descriptive and vice versa. Consequently, their model-theoretic characterizations of Hume’s dictum are not metaethically neutral. This encourages skepticism about whether model-theoretic machinery suffices to provide an illuminating distinction between the ethical and the descriptive. (shrink)

Should involuntarily childless people have the sameopportunities to access parenthood as those who are not involuntarily childless? In the context of assisted reproductive technologies, affirmative answers to this question are often cashed out in terms of positive rights, including rights to third-party reproduction. In this paper, wecritically explore the scope and extent to which any such right would hold up morally. Ultimately, we argue for a departure away from positive parental rights. Instead, we argue that the state has an imperfect (...) duty to benefit involuntarily childless people in relation to their parental aspirations. (shrink)

People tend to be repulsed by the idea of cash markets in kidneys, but support the trading of kidneys through paired exchanges or chains. We reject anti-commodification accounts of this reaction and offer an egalitarian one. We argue that the morally significant difference between cash markets and kidney chains is that the former allow the wealthy greater access to kidneys, while the latter do not. The only problem with kidney chains is that they do not go far enough (...) in addressing equality concerns, and we show how the introduction of cash payments by the state could remedy this. (shrink)

Two experiments with undergraduates as subjects were carried out with the aim of replicating and extending previous results showing that the implication of the behavioral life-cycle hypothesis (H. M. Shefrin & R. H. Thaler, 1988) that people classify assets in different mental accounts (current income, current assets, and future income) may explain how consumption choices are influenced by temporary income changes. In both experiments subjects made fictitious choices between paying for a good in cash or according to a more (...) expensive installment plan after they had received an income which was either less, the same, or larger than usual. In Experiment 1 subjects were supposed to have savings so that the total assets were equal, whereas in Experiment 2 the total assets varied. The results of both experiments supported the role of mental accounts in demonstrating that subjects were unwilling to pay in cash after an income decrease even though they had access to saved money. Thus, in effect they chose to pay more for the good than they had to. Indicating a need for further refinement of the concept of mental account, choices to pay in cash after an income decrease tended to be more frequent when the consumption and savings motives were compatible than when they were incompatible. Furthermore, increasing the total assets made subjects more willing to pay in cash after an income decrease. (shrink)

There has been a troublesome anomaly in the UK between cash payment to men for sperm donation and the effective assumption that women will pay to donate eggs. Some commentators, including Donald Evans in this journal, have argued that the anomaly should be resolved by treating women on the same terms as men. But this argument ignores important difficulties about property in the body, particularly in relation to gametes. There are good reasons for thinking that the contract model and (...) payment for gametes are both inappropriate, and that a model based on altruism should be applied to both sexes. (shrink)