L. Gazziero, « “Οἰκείως τῇ λογικῇ πραγματείᾳ” (Simplicii in Aristotelis categorias commentarium, 12.11). Contraintes disciplinaires – anciennes et modernes – de l’interprétation logique des Catégories d’Aristote », dans V. Brière et J. Lemaire (éd.), Qu’est-ce qu’une catégorie ? Interprétations d’Aristote, Leuven, Peeters, 2019, p. 9-59 [ISBN 9789042936621] -/- In addition to understanding the very notion of « category » according to its different Aristotelian contexts, the first order of business of an archaeology of Aristotle’s categories is to inquire into its (...) influential evolution at the hands of Late Ancient commentators. The essay retraces the origin and development of the « logical » interpretation which held sway both in ancient and modern times. It shows first that the key to understand the debate between Benveniste and Derrida over Aristotle’s categories is to be found in the Neoplatonic exegesis of the work of the same name. It shows next the powerful dynamic that led the commentators to dismiss more than a few hints in the text itself in order to build a remarkably consistent interpretation that understood the notion of category as the simplest and most fundamental element in a building block theory of linguistic expression and argumentation. -/- Face au foisonnement qui caractérise l’instruction contemporaine du dossier des « catégories » d’Aristote, il est encore et toujours utile de suivre le fil historique inauguré par Adolf Trendelenburg, réinventé par Emile Benveniste et élevé par Jacques Derrida au rang d’impératif méthodologique. Le geste inaugural d’une archéologie de la notion de « catégorie » consiste donc à se prémunir contre le risque d’évacuer le problème historique des catégories à la faveur d’une catégorialité anachronique ou passe-partout : ce qui n’est possible qu’à condition de replacer les « catégories » dans les différents contextes aristotéliciens où elles sont utilisées et d’interroger les contraintes disciplinaires qui ont structuré le débat autour de leur nature chez les commentateurs de l’Antiquité tardive. (shrink)

Discussion of partial grounds that aren't parts of full grounds; definition of full grounding in terms of partial grounding.

Ian Rumfitt has argued that rational adjudication against classical logic in quantum mechanics is not only unnecessary, but impossible as well. This paper explains why his argument fails.

Practical wisdom is the intellectual virtue that enables a person to make reliably good decisions about how, all-things-considered, to live. As such, it is a lofty and important ideal to strive for. It is precisely this loftiness and importance that gives rise to important questions about wisdom: Can real people develop it? If so, how? What is the nature of wisdom as it manifests itself in real people? I argue that we can make headway answering these questions by modeling wisdom (...) on expert skill. Presenting the main argument for this expert skill model of wisdom is the focus of this paper. More specifically, I’ll argue that wisdom is primarily the same kind of epistemic achievement as expert decision-making skill in areas such as firefighting. Acknowledging this helps us see that, and how, real people can develop wisdom. It also helps to resolve philosophical debates about the nature of wisdom. For example, philosophers, including those who think virtue should be modeled on skills, disagree about the extent to which wise people make decisions using intuitions or principled deliberation and reflection. The expert skill model resolves this debate by showing that wisdom includes substantial intuitive and deliberative and reflective abilities. (shrink)

Given the fact that many people use Wikipedia, we should ask: Can we trust it? The empirical evidence suggests that Wikipedia articles are sometimes quite good but that they vary a great deal. As such, it is wrong to ask for a monolithic verdict on Wikipedia. Interacting with Wikipedia involves assessing where it is likely to be reliable and where not. I identify five strategies that we use to assess claims from other sources and argue that, to a greater of (...) lesser degree, Wikipedia frustrates all of them. Interacting responsibly with something like Wikipedia requires new epistemic methods and strategies. (shrink)

This essay joins Wilhelm Dilthey’s conception of the metaphysical impulse as a flight from the tragedy of human finitude with Ludwig Wittgenstein’s understanding of how language bewitches intelligence. We contend that there are features of the phenomenology of language that play a constitutive and pervasive role in the formation of metaphysical illusion.

The article proceeds upon the assumption that the beliefs and degrees of belief of rational agents satisfy a number of constraints, including: consistency and deductive closure for belief sets, conformity to the axioms of probability for degrees of belief, and the Lockean Thesis concerning the relationship between belief and degree of belief. Assuming that the beliefs and degrees of belief of both individuals and collectives satisfy the preceding three constraints, I discuss what further constraints may be imposed on the aggregation (...) of beliefs and degrees of belief. Some possibility and impossibility results are presented. The possibility results suggest that the three proposed rationality constraints are compatible with reasonable aggregation procedures for belief and degree of belief. (shrink)

A new form of skepticism is described, which holds that objectivity and understanding are incompossible ideals of modern science. This is attributed to Weyl, hence its name: Weylean skepticism. Two general defeat strategies are then proposed, one of which is rejected.

Spinoza's use of the phrase “sui iuris” in the Tractatus Politicus gives rise to the following paradox. On the one hand, one is said to be sui iuris to the extent that one is rational; and to the extent that one is rational, one will steadfastly obey the laws of the state. However, Spinoza also states that to the extent that one adheres to the laws of the state, one is not sui iuris, but rather stands under the power [sub (...) potestate] of the state (TP 3/5). It seems, then, that to the extent that one is sui iuris, one will not, in fact, be sui iuris. In this paper, I offer an interpretation of Spinoza's notion of being sui iuris that enables us to overcome this paradox and sheds light on Spinoza's relationship to the republican tradition. I work towards this goal by distinguishing between two ways in which Spinoza uses the locution, which correspond to two different conceptions of power: potentia and potestas. This distinction not only allows us to save Spinoza from internal inconsistency, it also enables us to see one important way in which Spinoza stands outside of the republican tradition, since he conceives of liberty not as constituted by independence, or citizenship in a res publica, but as being sui iuris in the first sense described above: being powerful. (shrink)

This unpublished paper, written in 2005 in the PhD philosophy program at Notre Dame, argues that algebraic structural realism faces a potentially fatal difficulty raised by the existence of inequivalent representations in quantum field theory.

The psychiatric diagnostic system, as exemplified by the DSM, is a pseudo-scientific framework for diagnosing sick Cartesian isolated minds. As such, it completely overlooks the exquisite context sensitivity and radical context dependence of human emotional life and of all forms of emotional disturbance. In Descartes’s vision, the mind is a “thinking thing,” ontologically decontextualized, fundamentally separated from its world. Heidegger’s existential phenomenology mended this Cartesian subject-object split, unveiling our Being as always already contextualized, a Being-in-the-world. Here I offer a critique (...) of studies in “phenomenological psychopathology” that presuppose the validity of the psychiatric diagnostic system and leave it unchallenged. In this vein, I contend that all emotional disturbances are constituted in an indissoluble context of human interrelatedness. Specifically, I claim that all emotional disturbances, including those objectified by the DSM, take form in relational contexts of severe emotional trauma. There are no psychiatric entities, only devastating contexts. Additionally, I show that Heidegger’s analyses of Angst, world-collapse, uncanniness, and thrownness into Being-toward-death provide extraordinary philosophical tools for grasping the existential significance of such contexts of emotional trauma. Applying Heidegger’s concept of authenticity, I suggest that emotional health entails an ease of passage—i.e., an absence of dissociation—between the world of trauma and the world of everydayness. (shrink)

This essay develops the thesis that the essence of psychoanalysis lies in emotional phenomenology.

This book demonstrates how the authors have experienced the power of phenomenology in their therapeutic work with patients, especially those struggling with horrific trauma; in their encounters with psychological and philosophical theories; and in their efforts to comprehend destructive ideologies and the collective traumas that give rise to them. The Power of Phenomenology presents the trajectory of this work. Each chapter begins with a contribution written by one or both authors, extending the power of phenomenological inquiry to one or more (...) of these diverse contexts. The contributions are followed, one or two at a time, by a dialogue between the authors, illustrating the dialectical process of their long collaboration. The unusual format seeks to bring the phenomenology of their collaborative efforts to life for the reader. (shrink)

For more than four decades, George Atwood and I have been absorbed in rethinking psychoanalysis as a form of phenomenological inquiry. In the course of this work, I repeatedly made the claim that phenomenology led us inexorably to relationality, but until now I did not offer an explanation of this inexorability. In this article, I show that emotional phenomenology and relationality always already form an indissoluble unity, because relationality is constitutive of emotional experience.

FDE is a logic that captures relevant entailment between implication-free formulae and admits of an intuitive informational interpretation as a 4-valued logic in which “a computer should think”. However, the logic is co-NP complete, and so an idealized model of how an agent can think. We address this issue by shifting to signed formulae where the signs express imprecise values associated with two distinct bipartitions of the set of standard 4 values. Thus, we present a proof system which consists of (...) linear operational rules and only two branching structural rules, the latter expressing a generalized rule of bivalence. This system naturally leads to defining an infinite hierarchy of tractable depth-bounded approximations to FDE. Namely, approximations in which the number of nested applications of the two branching rules is bounded. (shrink)

When faced with the complexity of an intersubjective system, in which one is oneself implicated, an epistemic humility that recognizes and respects the finitude of knowing is essential.

In the present essay we explore a form of linguistic witchery (Wittgenstein) aimed at forging a sense of unity from incompatible visions of reality—namely, the formation of oxymoronic hybrids.

The author develops the claim that humans characteristically maintain a sense of protectedness by creating various forms of metaphysical illusion, replacing the tragic finitude and transience of human existence with a permanent and eternally changeless reality. One such illusion forms around planet earth itself, transformed into an indestructible metaphysical entity. It has become increasingly difficult, in the face of the ravages of climate change, to maintain the illusion of earth’s indestructibility, and with it, a sense of safety. The author refers (...) to the feelings evoked by the crumbling of metaphysical illusion as Apocalyptic anxiety¬—the dread of the end of human civilization. This Apocalyptic dread needs to be confronted (not evaded) in a comportment of dwelling—with our vulnerable planet and with our vulnerable fellow human beings. (shrink)

After noting how academic philosophers have shunned psychobiography, the author brings to focus the psychobiographical sources of Martin Heidegger's "turn" from a hermeneutic phenomenology to a form of metaphysical mysticism.

The paper sketches an argument against modal monism, more specifically against the reduction of physical possibility to metaphysical possibility. The argument is based on semantic aspects of non-distributive quantum logic.

This article examines the relationship between totalitarianism and the metaphysical illusions on which it rests. Phenomenological investigation is claimed to loosen the grip of totalitarian ideology by exposing its origins in the “resurrective” illusions that seek to overcome the impact of collective trauma. Phenomenology is thus shown to have emancipatory power.

Scharff’s study of Heidegger’s earlier lectures and their debt to Dilthey’s phenomenology allow one to recognize the Diltheyan influences that pervade Being and Time, undistracted by Husserl’s super-Cartesianism.

This paper, written in Romanian, explains why the eutaxiological argument, endorsed by scientists like Newton, Einstein, and Weyl, and recently defended by Richard Swinburne, is not defensible.

The as-structure provided by language, even in the sciences, is always constitutive of experience and never merely designative. “From Saying…it comes to pass that the World is made to appear” (Heidegger 1971 [1957]: 101).

De Mul’s central thesis is that Dilthey’s Critique of Historical Reason can be understood as a radicalization of Kant’s recognition of the contingency and finitude of human reason.

This paper, written in Romanian, compares fictionalism, nominalism, and neo-Meinongianism as responses to the problem of objectivity in mathematics, and then motivates a fictionalist view of objectivity as invariance.

This paper argues that whereas Mach understood thought economy as a principle of practical rationality, Husserl rejected it as a principle of theoretical rationality. The distinction is further supported by their correspondingly different readings of the principle of permanence.

This essay is devoted to the study of useful ways of thinking about the nature of interpretation, with particular attention being given to the so called normative character of mental explanation. My aim of illuminating the nature of interpretation will be accomplished by examining several views, some of which are common to both Donald Davidson and Daniel Dennett, concerning its unique characteristics as a method of prediction and explanation. Moreover, some of the views held by Davidson and Dennett will be (...) adopted, elaborated, and defended. The conclusions of these philosophers do not, however, form an acceptable whole. Thus I will attempt to moderate some of their views. In particular, I will attempt to show up the deficits of Davidson's view of the mental by defending the possibility some sort of psycho-physical reduction. Despite such philosophical pretensions, major parts of this essay will be devoted to sketching the foundations of a method for the interpretation of intentional behaviour which I take to embody the key features of our ordinary practice of interpretation. In particular, I will attempt to sketch the bases for a method of interpretation which is sensitive to the methodological considerations associated with the seemingly unique normative character of mental explanation. To this end, I will also investigate the question of how certain formal measures of coherence can be made to yield models for understanding the actual and possible bases of interpretation. (shrink)

Ang kakayahan ng mga mag-aaral sa paggamit ng wikang Filipino ay nararapat lamang na malinang nang lubusan ng mga tagapagturong may sapat na kasanayan. Ang pag-aaral na ito ay gumamit ng pagsusuring palarawan, upang malinaw na makita ang saloobin ng mga mag-aaral sa paggamit ng Filipino sa paraan na pagpapahayag ng kanilang saloobin. Nilayon ng pag-aaral na ito na malaman ang saloobin ng mga mag-aaral hinggil sa paggamit ng Filipino sa mga piling asignatura ng GEC (General Education Subject) kabilang dito (...) ang GEC 5 (Purposive Communication), GEC 2 (Readings in Philippine History), GEC 1 (Understanding The Self) at GEM 14 (The Life and Works of Rizal). Sinusuri rin dito ang mga uri ng pag-uulat, mga sulatin at proyekto sa naging negatibong saloobin ng mga mag-aaral sa paggamit ng wikang Filipino. At bilang midyum sa mga piling asignatura, 33 o 27.50% ng mga mag-aaral ay may negatibong tugon samantalang (87 o 72.50%) karamihan ay nagsabi na kailangan, mahalaga, nakatutulong, madaling gamitin, at gamitin pa sa ibang asignatura. Ang mga respondent ay napatunayan na batid nila na ang paggamit ng Filipino ay isa sa mga wikang panturo sa mga piling asignatura sa antas tersarya at ang walang pagkakaibang saloobin ng mga mag-aaral sa paggamit ng Filipino ay nagpapakita ng kanilang positibong pagtanggap sa Filipino ay kinakailangan sa kanilang pagkatuto. Batay sa kinalabasan ng pag-aaral, ang mga mag-aaral ay kailangang mabigyan ng mga kaukulang gawain kaugnay sa wika upang mapahalagahan ang kanilang saloobin at lalong magamit ang wikang Filipino bilang unang wika sa paraang pasulat at pasalita. (shrink)

The paper replies to an earlier paper by Yannis Stephanou, who presented an argument purportedly showing the falsity of certain instances of the characteristic axiom of the modal logic B. The paper argues that the B axiom was not to blame for the unsoundness of Stephanou's argument.

I argue that there is a flaw in the way that response-dependence has been formulated in the literature, and this flawed formulation has been correctly attacked by Mark Johnston’s Missing Explanation Argument (1993, 1998). Moving to a better formulation, which is analogous to the move from behaviourism to functionalism, avoids the Missing Explanation Argument.

Heidegger, Art, and Postmodernity offers a radical new interpretation of Heidegger's later philosophy, developing his argument that art can help lead humanity beyond the nihilistic ontotheology of the modern age. Providing pathbreaking readings of Heidegger's 'The Origin of the Work of Art' and his notoriously difficult Contributions to Philosophy, this book explains precisely what postmodernity meant for Heidegger, the greatest philosophical critic of modernity, and what it could still mean for us today. Exploring these issues, Iain D. Thomson examines several (...) postmodern works of art, including music, literature, painting and even comic books, from a post-Heideggerian perspective. Clearly written and accessible, this book will help readers gain a deeper understanding of Heidegger and his relation to postmodern theory, popular culture and art. (shrink)

Psychopaths routinely disregard social norms by engaging in selfish, antisocial, often violent behavior. Commonly characterized as mentally disordered, recent evidence suggests that psychopaths are executing a well-functioning, if unscrupulous strategy that historically increased reproductive success at the expense of others. Natural selection ought to have favored strategies that spared close kin from harm, however, because actions affecting the fitness of genetic relatives contribute to an individual’s inclusive fitness. Conversely, there is evidence that mental disorders can disrupt psychological mechanisms designed to (...) protect relatives. Thus, mental disorder and adaptation accounts of psychopathy generate opposing hypotheses: psychopathy should be associated with an increase in the victimization of kin in the former account but not in the latter. Contrary to the mental disorder hypothesis, we show here in a sample of 289 violent offenders that variation in psychopathy predicts a decrease in the genetic relatedness of victims to offenders; that is, psychopathy predicts an increased likelihood of harming non-relatives. Because nepotistic inhibition in violence may be caused by dispersal or kin discrimination, we examined the effects of psychopathy on (1) the dispersal of offenders and their kin and (2) sexual assault frequency (as a window on kin discrimination). Although psychopathy was negatively associated with coresidence with kin and positively associated with the commission of sexual assault, it remained negatively associated with the genetic relatedness of victims to offenders after removing cases of offenders who had coresided with kin and cases of sexual assault from the analyses. These results stand in contrast to models positing psychopathy as a pathology, and provide support for the hypothesis that psychopathy reflects an evolutionary strategy largely favoring the exploitation of non-relatives. (shrink)

The idea that there could be spatially extended mereological simples has recently been defended by a number of metaphysicians (Markosian 1998, 2004; Simons 2004; Parsons (2000) also takes the idea seriously). Peter Simons (2004) goes further, arguing not only that spatially extended mereological simples (henceforth just extended simples) are possible, but that it is more plausible that our world is composed of such simples, than that it is composed of either point-sized simples, or of atomless gunk. The difficulty for these (...) views lies in explaining why it is that the various sub-volumes of space occupied by such simples, are not occupied by proper parts of those simples. Intuitively at least, many of us find compelling the idea that spatially extended objects have proper parts at every sub-volume of the region they occupy. It seems that the defender of extended simples must reject a seemingly plausible claim, what Simons calls the geometric correspondence principle (GCP): that any (spatially) extended object has parts that correspond to the parts of the region that it occupies (Simons 2004: 371). We disagree. We think that GCP is a plausible principle. We also think it is plausible that our world is composed of extended simples. We reconcile these two notions by two means. On the one hand we pay closer attention to the physics of our world. On the other hand, we consider what happens when our concept of something—in this case space—contains elements not all of which are realized in anything, but instead key components are realized in different features of the world. (shrink)

Der moralische Kontraktualismus scheint als Konzeption einer nicht-konsequentialistischen intergenerationellen Ethik sehr vielversprechend. Eine zentrale theoretische Herausforderung stellt jedoch das Nichtidentitätsproblem dar. Spezifisch ist zu klären, ob zukünftige Personen einen Einwand gegen die Prinzipien unseres Handelns haben, wenn unser Handeln negative Folgen für die Lebensqualität zukünftiger Personen hat, die Existenz der konkreten Personen aber von diesem Handeln abhängt und ihr Leben für sie insgesamt lebenswert ist. Eine prominente Antwort besteht darin, die Einwände zukünftiger Personen “nicht-komparativ” zu verstehen. Ihr Einwand bestehe also (...) nicht darin, dass sie durch unser Handeln schlechter gestellt werden, als sie es andernfalls wären, sondern darin, dass sie dadurch in relevanter Form schlecht dastehen. Es ist bislang unklar, wie genau eine solche Position im Rahmen des moralischen Kontraktualismus aussehen könnte, ob sie eine Lösung des Nichtidentitätsproblems darstellt und ob ihre substanziellen Implikationen überzeugen. Dieser Beitrag prüft daher kritisch die Möglichkeiten und Grenzen eines nicht-komparativen kontraktualistischen Ansatzes. Es wird dafür argumentiert, dass nicht-komparative Einwände mit Bezug auf das Wohlergehen der zukünftigen Personen nicht plausibel sind, solange ihr Leben nicht überwiegend schlecht für sie ist. Der hier diskutierte Ansatz kann für den moralischen Kontraktualismus also höchstens eine Teilantwort auf das Nichtidentitätsproblem darstellen. (shrink)

Open peer commentary on the article “Sensorimotor Direct Realism: How We Enact Our World” by Michael Beaton. Upshot: In light of the construal of sensorimotor theory offered by the target article, this commentary examines the role the theory should admit for internal representation.

Upshot: In our target article we claimed that, at least since Weber and Varela, enactivism has incorporated a theoretical commitment to one important aspect of Jonas’s philosophical biology, namely its anthropomorphism, which is at odds with the methodological commitments of modern science. In this general reply we want to clarify what we mean by anthropomorphism, and explain why we think it is incompatible with science. We do this by spelling out what we call the “Jonasian inference,” i.e., the idea that (...) we are entitled, based on our first-person experience of teleology, to take the appearance of teleology in other living beings at face value. (shrink)

Recent iterations of Alvin Plantinga’s “evolutionary argument against naturalism” bear a surprising resemblance to a famous argument in Descartes’s Third Meditation. Both arguments conclude that theists have an epistemic advantage over atheists/naturalists vis-à-vis the question whether or not our cognitive faculties are reliable. In this paper, I show how these arguments bear an even deeper resemblance to each other. After bringing the problem of evil to bear negatively on Descartes’s argument, I argue that, given these similarities, atheists can wield a (...) recent solution to the problem of evil against theism in much the way Plantinga wields the detailsof evolutionary theory against naturalism. I conclude that Plantinga and Descartes give us insufficient reason for thinking theists are in a better epistemic position than atheists and naturalists vis-à-vis the question whether or not our cognitive faculties are reliable. (shrink)

In earlier work, I predicted that we would probably not be able to determine the colors of the dinosaurs. I lost this epistemic bet against science in dramatic fashion when scientists discovered that it is possible to draw inferences about dinosaur coloration based on the microstructure of fossil feathers (Vinther et al., 2008). This paper is an exercise in philosophical error analysis. I examine this episode with two questions in mind. First, does this case lend any support to epistemic optimism (...) about historical science? Second, under what conditions is it rational to make predictions about what questions scientists will or will not be able answer? In reply to the first question, I argue that the recent work on the colors of the dinosaurs matters less to the debate about the epistemology of historical science than it might seem. In reply to the second question, I argue that it is difficult to specify a policy that would rule out the failed bet without also being too conservative. (shrink)

Online education will be paired by developing intelligent systems that can provide personalization to the learner. To that extent ,this paper is proposing the design for an Online Personalized Learning Remediation/Tutoring Tool to help learners find the most suitable teachers for certain topics. The tool relies on a dataset of teacher profiles, comprising the subjects taught, video links, ratings, and experience, so that using machine learning techniques, it could recommend top educators. Applying feature extraction using CountVectorizer and recommendation based on (...) cosine similarity, it will ensure the robust and personalized search experience to the learners. The tool will augment the process of learning by not wasting time of the learner searching for an appropriate teacher and provides an uninterrupted user experience through an easy-to-understand web interface. This system increases the satisfaction of learners along with optimizing their ability to engage with the relevant teachers effectively. (shrink)

Non-communicable diseases now account for the majority of the global burden of disease and an international campaign has emerged to raise their priority on the post-2015 development agenda. We argue, to the contrary, that there remain strong reasons to prioritize maternal and child health. Policy-makers ought to assign highest priority to the health conditions that afflict the worst off. In virtue of how little healthy life they have had, children who die young are among the globally worst off. Moreover, many (...) interventions to deal with the conditions that cause mortality in the young are low-cost and provide great benefits to their recipients. Consistent with the original Millennium Development Goals, the international community should continue to prioritize reductions in communicable diseases, neonatal conditions, and maternal health despite the shifts in the global burden of disease. (shrink)

The Axis II Work Group of the Task Force on Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV) has expressed concern that antisocial personality disorder (APD) criteria are too long and cumbersome and that they focus on antisocial behaviors rather than personality traits central to traditional conceptions of psychopathy and to international criteria. R. D. Hare et al describe an alternative to the approach taken in the DSM-III—Revised (DSM-III—R; American Psychiatric Association, 1987), namely, the revised Psychopathy Checklist. The authors also (...) discuss the multisite APD field trials designed to evaluate and compare 4 criteria sets: the DSM-III—R criteria, a shortened list of these criteria, the criteria for dyssocial personality disorder from the 10th edition of the International Classification of Diseases (World Health Organization, 1990), and a 10-item criteria set for psychopathic personality disorder derived from the revised Psychopathy Checklist. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2015 APA, all rights reserved). (shrink)

In attempting to form rational personal probabilities by direct inference, it is usually assumed that one should prefer frequency information concerning more specific reference classes. While the preceding assumption is intuitively plausible, little energy has been expended in explaining why it should be accepted. In the present article, I address this omission by showing that, among the principled policies that may be used in setting one’s personal probabilities, the policy of making direct inferences with a preference for frequency information for (...) more specific reference classes yields personal probabilities whose accuracy is optimal, according to all proper scoring rules, in situations where all of the relevant frequency information is point-valued. Assuming that frequency information for narrower reference classes is preferred, when the relevant frequency statements are point-valued, a dilemma arises when choosing whether to make a direct inference based upon relatively precise-valued frequency information for a broad reference class, R, or upon relatively imprecise-valued frequency information for a more specific reference class, R*. I address such cases, by showing that it is often possible to make a precise-valued frequency judgment regarding R* based on precise-valued frequency information for R, using standard principles of direct inference. Having made such a frequency judgment, the dilemma of choosing between and is removed, and one may proceed by using the precise-valued frequency estimate for the more specific reference class as a premise for direct inference. (shrink)

This is the first chapter to our edited collection of essays on the nature and ethics of blame. In this chapter we introduce the reader to contemporary discussions about blame and its relationship to other issues (e.g. free will and moral responsibility), and we situate the essays in this volume with respect to those discussions.

Deductive inference is usually regarded as being “tautological” or “analytical”: the information conveyed by the conclusion is contained in the information conveyed by the premises. This idea, however, clashes with the undecidability of first-order logic and with the (likely) intractability of Boolean logic. In this article, we address the problem both from the semantic and the proof-theoretical point of view. We propose a hierarchy of propositional logics that are all tractable (i.e. decidable in polynomial time), although by means of growing (...) computational resources, and converge towards classical propositional logic. The underlying claim is that this hierarchy can be used to represent increasing levels of “depth” or “informativeness” of Boolean reasoning. Special attention is paid to the most basic logic in this hierarchy, the pure “intelim logic”, which satisfies all the requirements of a natural deduction system (allowing both introduction and elimination rules for each logical operator) while admitting of a feasible (quadratic) decision procedure. We argue that this logic is “analytic” in a particularly strict sense, in that it rules out any use of “virtual information”, which is chiefly responsible for the combinatorial explosion of standard classical systems. As a result, analyticity and tractability are reconciled and growing degrees of computational complexity are associated with the depth at which the use of virtual information is allowed. (shrink)

This chapter deals with the ways in which entrepreneurships driven by industrial design and the strategies for interconnecting design for innovation are articulated. In the first instance, current practices are recognized in order to analyze the different processes that entrepreneurial dynamics go through. This analysis is carried out from a systemic perspective, at three levels of abstraction: designer, entrepreneurship and ecosystem. The theoretical and conceptual framework will be structured based on the innovations driven by design, which occur around the designer, (...) his personal projects, and the possible interactions and singularities offered by living spaces. The objective of this work is to unravel the eventual relationships of the entrepreneurial designer in the ecosystem and to highlight the potential added by emerging connections, which allow for the projection of synergistic actions with other actors to create value(s). In this way, other possible views of the entrepreneurial process are provided, where the cultural and philosophical dimension that characterizes industrial designers allows them to achieve a higher quality of life, designing and producing collectively (in) their environment. (shrink)

What makes some acts morally right and others morally wrong? Traditionally, philosophers have thought that in order to answer this question we must find and formulate exceptionless moral principles—principles that capture all and only morally right actions. Utilitarianism and Kantianism are paradigmatic examples of such attempts. In recent years, however, there has been a growing interest in a novel approach—Particularism—although its precise content is still a matter of controversy. In this paper I develop and motivate a new formulation of particularism (...) as a research program and I show that my formulation is not vulnerable to the most common objections to particularism. Moreover, I argue that the particularist research program shows enough promise to warrant further exploration. (shrink)

What would be the consequence of embracing skepticism about free will and/or desert-based moral responsibility? What if we came to disbelieve in moral responsibility? What would this mean for our interpersonal relationships, society, morality, meaning, and the law? What would it do to our standing as human beings? Would it cause nihilism and despair as some maintain? Or perhaps increase anti-social behavior as some recent studies have suggested (Vohs and Schooler 2008; Baumeister, Masicampo, and DeWall 2009)? Or would it rather (...) have a humanizing effect on our practices and policies, freeing us from the negative effects of what Bruce Waller calls the “moral responsibility system” (2014, p. 4)? These questions are of profound pragmatic importance and should be of interest independent of the metaphysical debate over free will. As public proclamations of skepticism continue to rise, and as the mass media continues to run headlines announcing free will and moral responsibility are illusions, we need to ask what effects this will have on the general public and what the responsibility is of professionals. (shrink)