Van Fraassen explains rejections and asymmetries in science in terms of his contextual theory of explanation in the same way that scientists explain observable phenomena in the world in terms of scientific theories. I object that van Fraassen’s skeptical view regarding inference to the best explanation together with the English view of rationality jointly imply that the contextual theory is not rationally compelling, so van Fraassen and his epistemic colleagues can rationally disbelieve it. Prasetya replies that (...) the truth of the contextual theory coincides with its empirical adequacy, so the contextual theory is compelling. He also replies that the contextual theory is compelling, provided that van Fraassen’s argument for it instantiates a compelling subset of IBE. I argue that Prasetya’s replies either fail or help scientific realism. (shrink)

One recently proposed solution to the Liar paradox is the contextual theory of truth. Tyler Burge (1979) argues that truth is an indexical notion and that the extension of the truth predicate shifts during Liar reasoning. A Liar sentence might be true in one context and false in another. To many, contextualism seems to capture our pre-theoretic intuitions about the semantic paradoxes; this is especially due to its reliance on the so-called Revenge phenomenon. I, however, show that Super-Liar (...) sentences (where a Super-Liar sentence is a sentence which says of itself that it is not true in any context) generate a significant problem for Burge’s contextual theory of truth. (shrink)

Seungbae Park argues that Bas van Fraassen’s rejection of inference to the best explanation (IBE) is problematic for his contextual theory of explanation because van Fraassen uses IBE to support the contextual theory. This paper provides a defense of van Fraassen’s views from Park’s objections. I point out three weaknesses of Park’s objection against van Fraassen. First, van Fraassen may be perfectly content to accept the implications that Park claims to follow from his views. Second, even (...) if van Fraassen rejects IBE he may still endorse particular arguments that instantiate IBE. Third, van Fraassen does not, in fact, use IBE to support his contextual theory. (shrink)

Integrated Information Theory (IIT) is one of the most influential theories of consciousness, mainly due to its claim of mathematically formalizing consciousness in a measurable way. However, the theory, as it is formulated, does not account for contextual observations that are crucial for understanding consciousness. Here we put forth three possible difficulties for its current version, which could be interpreted as a trilemma. Either consciousness is contextual or not. If contextual, either IIT needs revisions to (...) its axioms to include contextuality, or it is inconsistent. If consciousness is not contextual, then IIT faces an empirical challenge. Therefore, we argue that IIT in its current version is inadequate. (shrink)

We discuss a research project that develops and applies algorithms for computational contextual vocabulary acquisition (CVA): learning the meaning of unknown words from context. We try to unify a disparate literature on the topic of CVA from psychology, first- and secondlanguage acquisition, and reading science, in order to help develop these algorithms: We use the knowledge gained from the computational CVA system to build an educational curriculum for enhancing students’ abilities to use CVA strategies in their reading of science (...) texts at the middle-school and college undergraduate levels. The knowledge gained from case studies of students using our CVA techniques feeds back into further development of our computational theory. Keywords: artificial intelligence, knowledge representation, reading, reasoning, science education, vocabulary acquisition. (shrink)

This article explores the implicit theories of morality, or the conceptions regarding the patterns of stability, continuity and change in moral dispositions, both in lay and academic discourses. The controversies surrounding these conceptions and the fragmentation of the models and perspectives in metaethics and moral psychology endangers the pursuit of adequate operationalizations of morally relevant constructs. The current debate between situationists, who deny that character is an useful concept for understanding human behavior, which is better explained by contextual factors (...) (Doris 1998; Harman 1998) and dispositionists, who advocate the cross-situational stability of traits, is also present in the lay discourse, through the existence of competing commonsense ontological assumptions regarding the mutability or alterability of moral features, namely the implicit theories perspective (Chiu, Dweck, Tong, & Fu 1997). These personal theories are primary suspects in the affective and cognitive reactions to transgressions: the type of attended information in formulating evaluative judgments, the calibration of moral responsibility and blameworthiness, the assignment of retribution or reparatory recommendations to transgressors. In the second part of the study we attempt to advance toward a more fine-grained inspection of these lay beliefs, arguing that the construct of implicit theories of morality, as it is currently treated and measured, tends to be restrictive and oversimplifying. (shrink)

Using speech act theory from the Philosophy of Language, this paper attempts to develop an ethical framework for the phenomenon of speech processing. We use the concepts of the illocutionary force and the illocutionary content of a speech act to explain the ethics of speech processing. By emphasizing the different stages involved in speech processing, we explore the distinct ethical issues that arise in relation to each stage. Input, processing, and output are the different ethically relevant stages under which (...) a spoken item or a speech navigates within the range of speech-processing modules. Employing the illocutionary force-content distinction, we specify and characterize the input-related ethical issues, the output-related ethical issues, and the processing-related ethical issues involved in speech processing. Together with illocutionary force-content distinction, we employ the data-information distinction to characterize the stage-wise ethical issues in the phenomenon of speech processing as the ethics of collecting (speech) data, the ethics of contextualizing (speech) data/information, and the ethics of releasing the con-textualized information (processed speech). Immediate ethical issues that arise from the range of speech processing modules are distinguished from distant ethical issues. We also indicate the nature of ethical issues that arise from Speaker Independent speech technologies. (shrink)

Deliberate contextual vocabulary acquisition (CVA) is a reader’s ability to figure out a (not the) meaning for an unknown word from its “context”, without external sources of help such as dictionaries or people. The appropriate context for such CVA is the “belief-revised integration” of the reader’s prior knowledge with the reader’s “internalization” of the text. We discuss unwarranted assumptions behind some classic objections to CVA, and present and defend a computational theory of CVA that we have adapted to (...) a new classroom curriculum designed to help students use CVA to improve their reading comprehension. (shrink)

It is well known that in quantum mechanics we cannot always define consistently properties that are context independent. Many approaches exist to describe contextual properties, such as Contextuality by Default, sheaf theory, topos theory, and non-standard or signed probabilities. In this paper we propose a treatment of contextual properties that is specific to quantum mechanics, as it relies on the relationship between contextuality and indistinguishability. In particular, we propose that if we assume the ontological thesis that (...) quantum particles or properties can be indistinguishable yet different, no contradiction arising from a Kochen-Specker-type argument appears: when we repeat an experiment, we are in reality performing an experiment measuring a property that is indistinguishable from the first, but not the same. We will discuss how the consequences of this move may help us understand quantum contextuality. (shrink)

In Pantsar (2014), an outline for an empirically feasible epistemological theory of arithmetic is presented. According to that theory, arithmetical knowledge is based on biological primitives but in the resulting empirical context develops an essentially a priori character. Such contextual a priori theory of arithmetical knowledge can explain two of the three characteristics that are usually associated with mathematical knowledge: that it appears to be a priori and objective. In this paper it is argued that it (...) can also explain the ... (shrink)

In Pantsar, an outline for an empirically feasible epistemological theory of arithmetic is presented. According to that theory, arithmetical knowledge is based on biological primitives but in the resulting empirical context develops an essentially a priori character. Such contextual a priori theory of arithmetical knowledge can explain two of the three characteristics that are usually associated with mathematical knowledge: that it appears to be a priori and objective. In this paper it is argued that it can (...) also explain the third one: why arithmetical knowledge appears to be necessary. A Kripkean analysis of necessity is used as an example to show that a proper analysis of the relevant possible worlds can explain arithmetical necessity in a sufficiently strong form. (shrink)

Contextual vocabulary acquisition (CVA) is the deliberate acquisition of a meaning for a word in a text by reasoning from context, where “context” includes: (1) the reader’s “internalization” of the surrounding text, i.e., the reader’s “mental model” of the word’s “textual context” (hereafter, “co-text” [3]) integrated with (2) the reader’s prior knowledge (PK), but it excludes (3) external sources such as dictionaries or people. CVA is what you do when you come across an unfamiliar word in your reading, realize (...) that you don’t know what it means, decide that you need to know what it means in order to understand the passage, but there is no one around to ask, and it is not in the dictionary (or you are too lazy to look it up). In such a case, you can try to figure out its meaning “from context”, i.e., from clues in the co-text together with your prior knowledge. Our computational theory of CVA—implemented in a the SNePS knowledge representation and reasoning system [28]—begins with a stored knowledge base containing SNePS representations of relevant PK, inputs SNePS representations of a passage containing an unfamiliar word, and draws inferences from these two (integrated) information sources. When asked to define the word, definition algorithms deductively search the resulting network for information of the sort that might be found in a dictionary definition, outputting a definition frame whose slots are the kinds of features that a definition might contain (e.g., class membership, properties, actions, spatio-temporal information, etc.) and whose slot-fillers contain information gleaned from the network [6–8,20,23,24]. We are investigating ways to make our system more robust, to embed it in a naturallanguage-processing system, and to incorporate morphological information. Our research group, including reading educators, is also applying our methods to the develop-. (shrink)

What are philosophers doing when they prescribe a particular epistemology for science? According to science and technology studies, the answer to this question implicates both knowledge and politics, even when the latter is hidden. Exploring this dynamic via a specific case, I argue that Longino’s “critical contextual empiricism” ultimately relies on a form of political liberalism. Her choice to nevertheless foreground epistemological concerns can be clarified by considering historical relationships between science and society, as well as the culture of (...) academic philosophy. This example, I conclude, challenges philosophers of science to consider the political ideals and accountability entailed by their prescribed knowledge practices. (shrink)

Jacob Klapwijk’s book Purpose in the Living World? (Cambridge 2998) is examined with special attention given to the scholarly background from out of which it emerges as a significant contribution to reformational philosophical reflection. As an initial step to clarify some important issues raised by Klapwijk’s critical comments about Dooyeweerd’s “essentialist” concept of species, the article probes facets of the way Jan Lever incorporated reformational philosophical concepts into his biological theory and considers the 1959 review written by Herman Dooyeweerd (...) of Lever’s Creation and Evolution. The analysis focuses specifically upon the social responsibilities of these two scholars and the confrontation of their respective views. With the work of Lever and Dooyeweerd we sense something of the ambiguities when reformational philosophy confronts an evangelical scholasticism. This confrontation is an important facet of the context in which Klapwijk has set forth his discussion of creation and emergent evolution. Purpose is also the fruit of scholarly collaboration across disciplines, providing a welcome stimulus for a deepened understanding of the corporate character of the student vocation. (shrink)

There is a common assumption in the semantics of modal auxiliaries in natural language; in utterances of MOD φ , where MOD is a modal and φ is the prejacent, context determines the particular flavor of modality expressed by the modal. Such is the standard contextualist semantics of Kratzer and related proposals. This winds up being a problem, because there is a significant class of modals which have constraints on the admissible modal flavor that are not traceable to context. For (...) example, in MUST φ , subsentential properties of φ, like the aspectual class of the predicate in the prejacent, can affect the flavor of MUST. By encoding the above assumption into the semantics, such contextualist accounts fail to be able to explain, much less to predict, this pattern. Worse yet, attempts to exploit the resources of the theory in service of an explanation run afoul of important commitments of the view, like the hypothesis that modals have a uniform semantics. Given these circumstances, these data might seem like a justification for dispensing with the uniformity hypothesis. The present paper lays out the above problem in detail. Against the pessimistic view, I argue that the the contextualist account can in fact explain and predict these patterns while preserving the uniformity hypothesis. This requires adopting an amendment to the semantics of modals based on the work of Valentine Hacquard. Aside from maintaining the contextualist paradigm and preserving uniformity, the proposal also clarifies the role of context in the interpretation of modals. As it will turn out, the role of context ought to be circumscribed in its flavor-determining role for modals. (shrink)

In his recent paper, C. Fuchs formulates QBism in the form of eight postulates. We criticise QBism as an anti-realist position and propose an alternative – contextual quantum realism (QCR). 1. A quantum state is not “an agent’s personal judgement” (QBism), nor is it subjective (QBism), but objective (QCR). It describes not the current experience (QBism), but a state of a physical system in context (QCR). 2. A quantum measurement is a (literally) measurement of quantum reality (QCR), rather than (...) an agent’s action upon its external world (QBism). It can only be regarded as an action in the sense in which a cognitive Wittgensteinian language game is an action (QCR). 3. The result of a quantum meas- urement is objective, though context-sensitive (QCR), rather than subjective (QBism), personal to the agent performing the action (QBism). 4. The quantum formalism is normative (QCR and QBism) and at the same time descriptive (QCR). The wave function tells us what to expect and how a quantum experiment should be conducted (i.e. plays the role of a norm), and also describes the state of a quantum system in context (QCR). 5. Unitary evolution is objective (QCR), not subjective (QBism). It does not express an agent’s degrees of belief (QBism). 6. Probability 1 is ontic (QCR), not an agent’s maximum degree of subjective certainty without ontic content (QBism). 7. In general, measurement outcomes are not predetermined (QCR and QBism), i.e. “unperformed measurements have no outcomes” (for QCR, this is an analytical judgement; for QBism this is a thesis), but they are predeter- mined in the case of probabilities 1 and 0 (QCR). In the case of probabilities 0 and 1, one can speak of performed measurements (QCR). 8. Quantum theory is a universal Wittgen- steinian rule (norm), i.e. a rule (norm) rooted in experience, reality (QCR). It can be used by any competent subject (QCR and QBism). We illustrate the difference between QCR and QBism on the example of how they treat “Wigner’s friend” thought experiment and consider their attitude to phenomenology. (shrink)

one hand, it raises fundamental doubts about the Davidsonian project, which seems to involve isolating specifically semantic knowledge from any other knowledge or skill in a way reflected by the ideal of homophony. Indexicality forces a departure from this ideal, and so from the aspiration of deriving the truth conditions of an arbitrary utterance on the basis simply of axioms which could hope to represent purely semantic knowledge. In defence of Davidson, I argue that once his original idea for dealing (...) with the familiar indexical expressions is suitably implemented, in terms of theorems expressing conditional truth-conditions, the contrast between semantic and nonsemantic knowledge occurs in an appropriate place: between knowledge of the conditional truth conditions themselves (semantic), and knowledge of their antecedents (non-semantic). For example, a simplified version of a conditional truth condition for an utterance u of “That is a cat” will say that for all x, if the utterer in uttering “that” in u thereby referred to x, u is true iff x is a cat. The conditional fact belongs to semantic knowledge; non-semantic knowledge is required to work out what the utterer referred to; the two kinds of knowledge conspire to enable a truth condition to be detached. The other kind of worry relates to difficult technical questions, relating to specific idioms, raised by context-dependence. I consider whether an argument by Travis (2006), designed to establish that there can be no correct truth conditional semantics, can be turned on its head, and used to establish a general method for bringing all forms of context-dependence within Davidsonʼs framework (using quantification into the qualifier “on understanding U”). I argue that this will not work, and that we are committed to a piecemeal examination of various cases, of which I give some examples. One of these relates directly to Travisʼs argument concerning the context-dependence of “grunt”. In addition, Davidsonians need to have a sharp eye for the distinction between pragmatic and semantic content, to be specified by a test akin to Griceʼs notion of cancelability; they should treat sentences like “Itʼs raining” by the conditional truth-condition method; and they should treat possessives as semantically very unspecific. It is part of the thesis of the paper that this list of examples by no means exhausts the cases a Davidsonian needs to address. (shrink)

Many philosophers affiliated with the analytic school contend that the history of philosophy is not relevant to their work. The present study challenges this claim by introducing a strong variant of the philosophical history of philosophy termed the “logical–contextual history of philosophy.” Its objective is to map the “logical geography” of the concepts and theories of past philosophical masters, concepts and theories that are not only genealogically, but also logically related. Such history of philosophy cannot be set in opposition (...) to the traditional “systematic philosophy.” Rather, the logical–contextual history of philosophy is, like the traditional school philosophies, systematic, although it develops along different lines. (shrink)

Background theories in science are used both to prove and to disprove that theory choice is underdetermined by data. The alleged proof appeals to the fact that experiments to decide between theories typically require auxiliary assumptions from other theories. If this generates a kind of underdetermination, it shows that standards of scientific inference are fallible and must be appropriately contextualized. The alleged disproof appeals to the possibility of suitable background theories to show that no theory choice can be (...) timelessly or noncontextually underdetermined: Foreground theories might be distinguished against different backgrounds. Philosophers have often replied to such a disproof by focussing their attention not on theories but on Total Sciences. If empirically equivalent Total Sciences were at stake, then there would be no background against which they could be differentiated. I offer several reasons to think that Total Science is a philosophers' fiction. No respectable underdetermination can be based on it. (shrink)

In this work, we discuss a formal way of dealing with the properties of contextual systems. Our approach is to assume that properties describing the same physical quantity, but belonging to different measurement contexts, are indistinguishable in a strong sense. To construct the formal theoretical structure, we develop a description using quasi-set theory, which is a set-theoretical framework built to describe collections of elements that violate Leibnitz's principle of identity of indiscernibles. This framework allows us to consider a (...) new ontology in order to study the properties of quantum systems. (shrink)

Harmonizing materials and practices of senior high school teachers in the contextualization of various learning areas are crucial in the current curriculum. The study determined how teachers in the senior high school harmonize materials and practices in teaching the various subjects and analyzed the contextualization across the K12 curriculum. Qualitative research was employed in the study specifically grounded theory. Eleven participants were included in the study where five were grade 12 students and six were senior high school teachers. Purposive (...) sampling was employed in the conduct of the study and has employed key informant interviews and the focus group discussion. In analyzing the data, Grounded theory Analysis as modeled by Charmaz (2006), as well as Glasser and Strauss (2017), was employed. Relevance, coherence, and appropriateness as contextualization connectivity are considered in harmonizing materials and practices in the contextualization of lessons in senior high school. The themes culled were sources of contextualized materials, conceptualizing contextualized materials, teachers contextualized materials and practices, coherence, relevance, and appropriateness in contextualization. Formulation of the conceptual paradigm vis-à-vis contextualization across curricula emerged in the study. (shrink)

Measures and theories of information abound, but there are few formalised methods for treating the contextuality that can manifest in different information systems. Quantum theory provides one possible formalism for treating information in context. This paper introduces a quantum inspired model of the human mental lexicon. This model is currently being experimentally investigated and we present a preliminary set of pilot data suggesting that concept combinations can indeed behave non-separably.

The famous EPR article of 1935 challenged the completeness of quantum mechanics and spurred decades of theoretical and experimental research into the foundations of quantum theory. A crowning achievement of this research is the demonstration that nature cannot in general consist in noncontextual pre-measurement properties that uniquely determine possible measurement outcomes, through experimental violations of Bell inequalities and Kochen-Specker theorems. In this article, I reconstruct an argument from Niels Bohr’s writings that the reality of the Einstein-Planck-de Broglie relations alone (...) implies that no such properties can exist for momentum and position measurements, show how this argument responds to the challenge of EPR on general physical grounds, and advance that this reconstruction shows that and how Bohr’s “complementarity” is a view of the objective content and logic of quantum theory. (shrink)

The original concept of epistemic dependence suggests uncritical deference to expert opinions for non-experts. In the light of recent work in science studies, however, the actual situation of epistemic dependence is seen to involve the necessary and ubiquitous need for lay evaluations of scientific experts. As expert knowledge means restricted cognitive access to some epistemic domain, lay evaluations of expert knowledge are rational and informed only when the criteria used by non-experts when judging experts are different from the criteria used (...) by experts when making their claims. The distinction between ‘substantial knowledge’ and ‘contextual knowledge’ allows for the laypeople to know with experts without having to know precisely what experts know. Such meta-expert evaluations are not specific to the public sphere outside science, nor are they limited internally to science, but they are present in a wide range of contexts in and around science. The paper legitimizes the concept of contextual knowledge by relating it to the relevant literature, and expounds the idea by identifying some elements of such a knowledge. (shrink)

Most recent philosophical theories of consciousness account for it in terms of representation, the bulk of the debate revolving around whether (suitably) representing something is sufficient for consciousness (as per first-order representationalism) or some further (meta-)representation is needed (as per higher-order representationalism and self-representationalism). In this paper, I explore an alternative theory of consciousness, one that aims to explain consciousness not in terms of representation but in terms of the epistemically and metaphysically direct relation of acquaintance. I call this (...) the Inner Acquaintance Theory of consciousness (IAT). Roughly, on IAT, what makes a mental state conscious is its subject being acquainted with it. Though not wholly unprecedented, IAT is still at the fringe of consciousness debates and remains largely underexplored. The main goal of this paper is to take some steps toward developing the details of IAT, illustrate its potential explanatory power, and put it forward as a plausible alternative to representational theories, with the hope that this will contribute to shifting IAT closer to the center of the debate. Here is how I proceed. In §2 I introduce a notion—inner awareness—that is crucial both to contextualize and to understand IAT. In §3 I provide some preliminary motivation for exploring IAT. In §4 I explain the notion of acquaintance and illustrate some of the features that are typically attributed to it in the literature. The details of IAT are then shaped through four main decision points. I address them in §§5-8, where I suggest a particular choice at each decision point, thereby progressively building up a view that I consider particularly promising. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to extend the explanatory power of Martin Thrupp’s legacy within the framework of critical realism. Specifically, it argues that critical realism’s methodological complement, the morphogenetic approach, provides a metatheoretical toolkit that can deepen and expand Thrupp’s realist analysis of school contexts. The article elaborates on how the morphogenetic approach offers a stratified, temporally phased view of causality that integrates structure, agency, and culture (SAC). By foregrounding SAC, it argues for a layered and nuanced understanding (...) of context in education policy analysis, refining Thrupp’s conceptualisation of the constraints and opportunities available to school leaders. The article also delineates how the morphogenetic approach offers greater analytical precision in examining how emergent socio-cultural configurations condition agency and change within global educational systems, particularly through its positing of ‘situational logics’ that predispose agents towards specific courses of action. The final section outlines the potential of the morphogenetic approach for theorising the impact of globalised neoliberalism and managerialism on education, ultimately complementing and sharpening Thrupp’s realist contextualism. The article concludes that Thrupp’s contextual approach can be ‘rebranded’ through the morphogenetic framework, enhancing his realist analysis with a stratified understanding of how global neoliberal forces shape local educational contexts while offering strategies to resist managerialism and promote social justice. (shrink)

ABSTRACTRecent debate over the semantics and pragmatics of epistemic modals has focused on intuitions about cross-contextual truth-value assessments. In this paper, we advocate a different approach to evaluating theories of epistemic modals. Our strategy focuses on judgments of the incompatibility of two different epistemic possibility claims, or two different truth value assessments of a single epistemic possibility claim. We subject the predictions of existing theories to empirical scrutiny, and argue that existing contextualist and relativist theories are unable to account (...) for the full pattern of observed judgments. As a way of illustrating the theoretical upshot of these results, we conclude by developing a novel theory of epistemic modals that is able to predict the results. (shrink)

Constructive empiricism implies that if van Fraassen does not believe that scientific theories and his positive philosophical theories, including his contextual theory of explanation, are empirically adequate, he cannot accept them, and hence he cannot use them for scientific and philosophical purposes. Moreover, his epistemic colleagues, who embrace epistemic reciprocalism, would not believe that his positive philosophical theories are empirically adequate. This epistemic disadvantage comes with practical disadvantages in a social world.

According to virtue epistemology, the main aim of education is the development of the cognitive character of students (Pritchard, 2014, 2016). Given the proliferation of technological tools such as ChatGPT and other LLMs for solving cognitive tasks, how should educational practices incorporate the use of such tools without undermining the cognitive character of students? Pritchard (2014, 2016) argues that it is possible to properly solve this ‘technology-education tension’ (TET) by combining the virtue epistemology framework with the theory of extended (...) cognition (EXT) (Clark and Chalmers, 1998). He argues that EXT enables us to consider tools as constitutive parts of the students’ cognitive system, thus preserving their cognitive character from technologically induced cognitive diminishment. The first aim of this paper is to show that this solution is not sufficient to solve the TET. Second, I aim to offer a complementary and more encompassing framework of tool-use to address the TET. Then, I apply it to the educational uses of ChatGPT as the most notable example of LLM, although my arguments can be extended to other generative AI systems. To do so, in Sect. 1.1, I present Pritchard’s framework of cognitive character and virtue epistemology applied in education, to which I am committed in this treatment. In Sects. 2 and 3, I respectively illustrate Pritchard’s (2014) solution to the TET, and I highlight the general limitations of his proposal. Thus, in Sect. 4.1 I characterize ChatGPT as a computational cognitive artifact using Fasoli’s (2017, 2018) taxonomy of cognitive artifacts. In Sect. 4.2, I introduce my proposal, which combines Pritchard’s account of virtue epistemology with Fasoli’s (2017, 2018) taxonomy of cognitive artifacts to address the TET. Finally, in Sect. 5.1, I present some epistemically virtuous uses of ChatGPT in educational contexts. To conclude, I argue in favor of a multidisciplinary approach for analyzing educational activities involving AI technologies such as ChatGPT. (shrink)

The essays collected in this special issue explore what legitimacy means for actors and institutions that do not function like traditional states but nevertheless wield significant power in the global realm. They are connected by the idea that the specific purposes of non-state actors and the contexts in which they operate shape what it means for them to be legitimate and so shape the standards of justification that they have to meet. In this introduction, we develop this guiding methodology further (...) and show how the special issue’s individual contributions apply it to their cases. In the first section, we provide a sketch of our purpose-dependent theory of legitimacy beyond the state. We then highlight two features of the institutional context beyond the state that set it apart from the domestic case: problems of feasibility and the structure of international law. (shrink)

In this paper, we intend to offer an interpretation about the explanation of the (relative) idea of pure substance in general on John Locke’s philosophy, from Thomas Reid’s notion of ‘natural suggestion’. To achieve this aim, after contextualizing Locke’s notion of pure substance in general and distinguishing it from the idea of particular substance (section 1), we explicit that Locke’s words about the source of the idea of the former in the mind (either empirical or rational) are ambiguous and inconclusive (...) (section 2). Then, we argue that the parallels between this idea and that of ‘relation’, as well as of ‘power’ do not assist in that answer, due to some problems we identify on them (section 3). Finally, we argue that the Reidian explanation for the source of the idea of ‘mind’, from the notion of ‘natural suggestion’ allows us to i) avoid those problems and ii) inasmuch as, according to this interpretation, the idea of pure substance in general would have an empirical source, Lockian empiricism would remain intact (section 4). (shrink)

Van Fraassen infers the truth of the contextual theory from his observation that it has passed a crucial test. Mizrahi infers the comparative truth of our best theories from his observation that they are more successful than their competitors. Their inferences require, according to the argument from double spaces, the prior belief that it is more likely that their target theories were pulled out from the T-space than from the O-space. The T-space is the logical space of unconceived (...) theories whose appearances agree with their realities; the O-space is the logical space of unconceived theories whose appearances may agree or disagree with their realities. (shrink)

I defend a Deferred Ostension view of quotation, on which quotation-marks are the linguistic bearers of reference, functioning like a demonstrative; the quoted material merely plays the role of a demonstratum. On this view, the quoted material works like Nunberg’s indexes in his account of deferred ostensión in general. The referent is obtained through some contextually suggested relation; in the default case the relation will be … instantiates the linguistic type __, but there are other possibilities. In this way, the (...) deferred ostension view deals with a problem I pointed out for the identity proposal in my earlier work, that we do not merely refer with quotations to expression-types, but also to other entities related in some way to the relevant token we use: features exhibited by the token distinct from those constituting its linguistic type, features exhibited by other tokens of the same type but not by the one actually used (as when, by using a graphic token, we refer to its phonetic type), or even other related tokens (see the examples on p. 261 of García-Carpintero 1994). (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that one approach to normative political theory, namely contextualism, can benefit from a specific kind of historical inquiry, namely genealogy, because the latter provides a solution to a deep-seated problem for the former. This problem consists in a lack of critical distance and originates from the justificatory role that contextualist approaches attribute to contextual facts. I compare two approaches to genealogical reconstruction, namely the historiographical method pioneered by Foucault and the hybrid method of (...) pragmatic genealogy as practiced by Bernard Williams, arguing that they both ensure an increase in critical distance while preserving contextualism’s distinctiveness. I also show, however, that only the latter provides normative action-guidance and can thus assist the contextualist theorist in the crucial task of discerning how far certain contextual facts deserve their justificatory role. I prove this point by showing how a pragmatic genealogy of the practice of punishment can inform the contextualist’s reflection about the role this practice should play in a transitional scenario, i.e. in the set of circumstances societies go through in the aftermath of large-scale violence and human rights violations. (shrink)

This paper defends a version of Davidson’s demonstrative theory of quotation and against against the Fregean identity theory (IT henceforth) as articulated and defended by Corey Washington (1992). On the Fregean view, when an expression is referred to by means of quotation the quoted material itself is a linguistic referring expression. Quotation-marks are not needed; when they are used, they serve to make clearer the shift in syntactic and semantic properties effected on the quoted material by its occupying (...) that linguistic context: whatever its usual syntactic function, the quoted material functions as a singular term; whatever its usual semantic function, in that linguistic environment the quoted material refers to itself. On DT, in contrast, quotation-marks themselves are the linguistic bearers of reference, functioning like a demonstrative; the quoted material merely plays the role of a demonstratum. In the version I argue for the referent is obtained through some contextually suggested relation; in the default case the relation will be: … instantiates the linguistic type __, but there are other possibilities. In this way, the view can deal with the fact that we do not merely refer with quotations to expression-types, but also to other entities related in some way to the relevant token we use: features exhibited by the token distinct from those constituting its linguistic type, features exhibited by other tokens of the same type but not by the one actually used (as when, by using a graphic token, we refer to its phonetic type), or even other related tokens. (shrink)

This project is a blend of Africana intellectual history and philosophical anti-humanism. The opening chapter seeks to contextualize the thought of Huey P. Newton in the Black nationalist tradition outline his conceptualization of US empire – ‘Reactionary Intercommunalism’. I use the second chapter to explore counterinsurgency as a historical phenomenon that laid the basis for European colonization and the civilizing mission during the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries and the modern phenomena understand as racial violence. The third chapter analyzes how (...) gender ideological have been deployed toward this end historically and through contemporaneous Black scholarship before using the final chapter to introduce the theory of killology or MAN3. This theory advances the claim that counterinsurgency as a modality of warfare be understood as the contemporary fountainhead of western humanism and thus as the primary force of social regulation which proleptically organizes modern civilization on a spatially and temporally indeterminate basis to defeat/subvert insurgent populations before they are ever mobilized towards resistance through the application of technology, deadly force to those constructed as threats and control of the information environment towards this end. (shrink)

This paper explores the role of 1980s to early 1990s feminist theory of art within the analytic philosophical tradition of aesthetics starting with a critique of the noncontextual criticism of aesthetics of Jerome Stolnitz and Monroe Beardsley contrasted with contextual feminist theory, informed by contextual theories of Arthur Danto, George Dickie and Marcia Eaton, and concluding that knowledge of external, contextual data is necessarily required to assess a work of art that has been deemed a (...) work of art by means of external, contextual data. Feminist theory is one type of contextual theory available. (shrink)

Hypothetical trolley problems are widely used to elicit moral intuitions, which are employed in the development of moral theory and the psychological study of moral judgments. The scenarios used are outlandish, and some philosophers and psychologists have questioned whether the judgments made in such unrealistic and unfamiliar scenarios are a reliable basis for theory-building. We present two experiments that investigate whether differences in moral judgment due to the role of the agent, previously found in a standard trolley scenario, (...) persist when the structure of the problem is transplanted to a more familiar context. Our first experiment compares judgments in hypothetical scenarios; our second experiment operationalizes some of those scenarios in the laboratory, allowing us to observe judgments about decisions that are really being made. In the hypothetical experiment, we found that the role effect reversed in our more familiar context, both in judgments about what the actor ought to do and in judgments about the moral rightness of the action. However, in our laboratory experiment, the effects reversed back or disappeared. Among judgments of what the actor ought to do, we found the same role effect as in the standard hypothetical trolley scenario, but the effect of role on moral judgments disappeared. (shrink)

My topic is Kant’s theory of historical progress. My approach is primarily textual and contextual. I analyse in some detail Kant’s three most important essays on the topic: ‘Idea for a Universal History’, the third part of ‘Theory and Practice’ and the second part of The Conflict of the Faculties. I devote particular attention to the Kant-Herder debate about progress, but also discuss Rousseau, Mendelssohn, Hegel and others. In presenting, on Kant’s behalf, a strong case for his (...) theory of progress, I address the main objections which have been put to it. These are: (i) historical teleology is incoherent (history can’t have a goal because there is no intentional actor functioning at the historical level); (ii) historical teleology undermines morality (if things are getting better anyway, why do I have to try to make them better?); (iii) progress involves ‘chronological unfairness’ (if things are getting better, doesn’t this mean that earlier generations get a raw deal?); (iv) progress consigns the species to ‘spurious infinity’ (isn’t endless improvement endlessly unsatisfactory?); (v) progress amounts to pernicious homogenization (doesn’t the elimination of traditional practices and values impoverish our world?); (vi) the idea of progress is just ‘secularized’ religion (and should be rejected accordingly). In relation to (vi), I consider the Löwith-Blumenberg debate, and draw some general conclusions about the issue of ‘secularization’. In relating these to Kant, I argue for the following position: (a) his theory of progress is more than merely secularized religion; (b) to the extent that it can be described in terms of the secularization thesis, this reflects his ‘critical’ endeavour to rationalize Christianity; (c) in any case, the idea of progress by no means exhausts the rational potential of religion, and so should not be seen as intended to replace the latter. (shrink)

David Lewis may be regarded as an antiessentialist. The reason is that he is said to believe that individuals do not have essential properties independent of the ways they are represented. According to him, indeed, the properties that are determined to be essential to individuals are a matter of which similarity relations among individuals are salient, and salience, in turn, is a contextual matter also determined to some extent by the ways individuals are represented. Todd Buras argues that the (...) acknowledgment of natural properties in counterpart theoretic ontology affects Lewis’s theory with regard to essentialism. Buras’s reasoning is appealing. He claims that, since natural properties determine the existence of similarity relations among individuals that are salient independent of context, Lewis can no longer be claimed to be an antiessentialist. The aim of this paper is to argue, against Buras, that if counterpart theory was antiessentialist before natural properties were taken into account, then it remains so afterwards. (shrink)

Stephen Finlay analyses ‘ought’ in terms of probability. According to him, normative ‘ought's are statements about the likelihood that an act will realize some (contextually supplied) end. I raise a problem for this theory. It concerns the relation between ‘ought’ and the balance of reasons. ‘A ought to Φ’ seems to entail that the balance of reasons favours that A Φ-es, and vice versa. Given Finlay's semantics for ‘ought’, it also makes sense to think of reasons and their weight (...) in terms of probability. In this paper, I develop such a theory of weight. It turns out, however, that it cannot explain the entailments. This leaves Finlay with a challenge: to explain these entailments in some other way consistent with his theory, or to show why the appearances deceive and there are no such entailments. (shrink)

It is generally agreed that constructions of the form “if P, Q” are capable of conveying a number of different relations between antecedent and consequent, with pragmatics playing a central role in determining these relations. Controversy concerns what the conventional contribution of the if-clause is, how it constrains the pragmatic processes, and what those processes are. In this essay, I begin to argue that the conventional contribution of if-clauses to semantics is exhausted by the fact that these clauses introduce a (...) proposition without presenting it as true so that the consequent can be understood in relation to it. Given our cognitive interests in such non-truth-presentational introductions, conditionals will make salient the wide but nevertheless disciplined variety of contents that we naturally attribute to them; no further substantial constraints of the sorts proposed by standard theories of conditionals are needed to explain the phenomena. If this is correct, it provides prima facie evidence for a radically contextualist account of conditionals according to which conditionals have no truth-evaluable or intuitively complete content absent some contextually provided, sufficiently salient relation between antecedent and consequent. (shrink)

Considering the short history of the feminist philosophy of language, Rae Langton’s article “Speech Acts and Unspeakable Acts” was highly influential as one of the first positive research programs in the movement. In that paper, Langton – using John L. Austin’s speech act theory – tries to interpret Catharine MacKinnon’s thesis: pornography is a speech that subordinates and silences women. Despite the importance of the subject, those unfamiliar with certain historical and contextual features of the topic would hardly (...) understand it. My paper aims to introduce some of the major accounts in this special area in the intersection of speech act theory and feminist philosophy. Rather than just reconstructing Langton’s arguments and the most common objections against it, I will take a more holistic approach, examining its surrounding literature as well. This article has six sections. In Section 1, I contrast the conservative and liberal arguments against pornography and sketch MacKinnon’s liberal critique. In Section 2, I give alternative interpretations of MacKinnon’s thesis, “pornography is harm.” In Section 3, I try to make sense of the prima facie implausible assumption that pornography is speech. In Section 4 and 5, I will analyze the Langtonian theories about subordination and silencing. Finally, in Section 6, I will mention the most challenging problems for Langton’s approach, considering the verbal nature or pornography, the limits of the protection of free speech, and the different positions on sexual consent. (shrink)

Dual-process theories divide cognition into two kinds of processes: Type 1 processes that are autonomous and do not use working memory, and Type 2 processes that are decoupled from the immediate situation and use working memory. Often, Type 1 processes are also fast, high capacity, parallel, nonconscious, biased, contextualized, and associative, while Type 2 processes are typically slow, low capacity, serial, conscious, normative, abstract, and rule-based. This article argues for an embodied dual-process theory based on the phenomenology of Martin (...) Heidegger. According to Heidegger, the basis of human agents’ encounters with the world is in a prereflective, pragmatically engaged disposition marked by readiness-to-hand (Zuhandenheit), sometimes equated with “smooth coping.” Examples of smooth coping include walking, throwing a ball, and other embodied actions that do not require reflective thought. I argue that smooth coping primarily consists of Type 1 processes. The Heideggerian dual-process model yields distinctly different hypotheses from Hubert Dreyfus’ model of smooth coping, and I will critically engage with Dreyfus’ work. (shrink)

We propose a logic to reason about data collected by a num- ber of measurement systems. The semantic of this logic is grounded on the epistemic theory of measurement that gives a central role to measure- ment devices and calibration. In this perspective, the lack of evidences (in the available data) for the truth or falsehood of a proposition requires the introduction of a third truth-value (the undetermined). Moreover, the data collected by a given source are here represented by (...) means of a possible world, which provide a contextual view on the objects in the domain. We approach (possibly) conflicting data coming from different sources in a social choice theoretic fashion: we investigate viable opera- tors to aggregate data and we represent them in our logic by means of suitable (minimal) modal operators. (shrink)

This three-part article reinforces crosscurrents between cybernetician Gordon Pask’s work towards creating responsive machines applied to theater and education, and Vygotsky’s theory, to advance sociohistorical approaches into the internet age. We first outline Pask’s discovery of possibilities of a neoclassical cybernetic framework for human–human, human–machine, and machine–machine conversations. Second, we outline conversation theory as an elaboration of the reconstruction of mental models/concepts by observers through reliance on sociocultural psychological approaches, and apply concepts like the zone of proximal development (...) and perezhivanie to Paskian aesthetic technologies. Third, we interpret Pask’s teaching/learning devices as zones of proximal development, and outline how Paskian algorithms in digital devices like THOUGHTSTICKER have been generalized on today’s internet, supplemented by corporate interests. We conclude that Paskian theory may offer understandings of the roles of internet technologies in transforming human thinking, and suggest (re)designing tools incorporating algorithms that contextually advance conceptual understanding that deviates from current indexing approaches. (shrink)

While most of healthcare research and practice fully endorses evidence-based healthcare, a minority view borrows popular themes from philosophy of science like underdetermination and value-ladenness to question the legitimacy of the evidence-based movement’s philosophical underpinnings. While the feminist origins go unacknowledged, those critics adopt a feminist reading of the “gap argument” to challenge the perceived objectivism of evidence-based practice. From there, the critics seem to despair over the “subjective elements” that values introduce to clinical reasoning, demonstrating that they do not (...) subscribe to feminist science studies’ normative program——where contextual values can enable good science and justified decisions. In this paper, I investigate why it is that the critics of evidence-based medicine adopt feminist science’s characterization of the problem but resist the productive solutions offered by those same theorists. I suggest that the common feminist empiricist appeal to idealized epistemic communities is impractical for those working within the current biomedical context and instead offer an alternate stream of feminist research into the empirical content of values (found in the work of Elizabeth Anderson and Sharyn Clough) as a more helpful recourse for facilitating the important task of legitimate and justified clinical decision-making. I use a case study on clinical decision-making to illustrate the fruitfulness of the latter feminist empiricist framework. -/- See response by Sharyn Clough: http://wp.me/p1Bfg0-1aN See reply by Maya Goldenberg: http://wp.me/p1Bfg0-1oY. (shrink)

The ramifications of existence provide the setup for a theory on civilization as a whole. This story is composed under the premise of looking at Rabbinic Judaism and the Old/New Testaments as contextual clues for an overview of civilization and existence in general. This includes a mathematical model for prior to the existence of time i.e. QSOPR Theorem: Quantum Similarity Origin Point References, MDQBT: Multi-Dimensional Quantum Breakpoint Theorem, and QSICT: Quantum Simulated Informational Consciousness Theory. As well as (...) tracing back ancient lineages such as Coptic DNA and the e1b1b haplogroup, FGC8712, or tribal lineages such as Berbers, the Quarashi, and ancient Mesopotamian groups. Next, we will look at history and philosophy through religious texts which include mythology, Quranic text and hadiths, and any related archaeological evidence in relationship to the Shashu, Temple 0, or contextual geological clues. This will provide a premise for human nature, civilization, world religions, societal falls, and history through correlative patterns, universal truth, linguistics, ethics and morality. (shrink)

This paper shows that Russell’s theory of descriptions gives the wrong se-mantics for definite descriptions occurring in questions and imperatives. Depending on how that theory is applied, it either assigns nonsense to per-fectly meaningful questions and assertions or it assigns meanings that di-verge from the actual semantics of such sentences, even after all pragmatic and contextual variables are allowed for. Given that Russell’s theory is wrong for questions and assertions, it must be wrong for assertoric state-ments; (...) for the semantics of ‘the phi’ obviously doesn’t vary depending on whether it occurs in a question or an assertion or a command. (shrink)

Pierre Duhem’s influential argument for holism relies on a view of the role that background theory plays in testing: according to this still common account of “auxiliary hypotheses,” elements of background theory serve as truth-apt premises in arguments for or against a hypothesis. I argue that this view is mistaken. Rather than serving as truth-apt premises in arguments, auxiliary hypotheses are employed as “epistemic tools”: instruments that perform specific tasks in connecting our theoretical questions with the world but (...) that are not premises in arguments. On the resulting picture, the acceptability of an auxiliary hypothesis depends not on its truth but on contextual factors such as the task or purpose it is put to and the other tools employed alongside it. (shrink)