Aproximaciones teóricas a la danza es producto de un trabajo investigativo conjunto que permite la circulación del conocimiento producido por distintos actores involucrados en el campo de la danza en Colombia. Para la Red de Investigación Cuerpo Danza Movimiento, esta publicación es un logro investigativo colectivo que ofrece una visión del conjunto de esfuerzos y perspectivas actuales sobre la danza en Colombia y en otras latitudes en donde este arte se ha ido convirtiendo en un objeto de estudio específico. En (...) este volumen se encuentran textos sobre la relación danza y filosofía, de Carlos Eduardo Sanabria (Universidad Jorge Tadeo Lozano); la relación danza y antropología, de Andrea Ceballos Flórez y la danza contemporánea como campo de investigación de la antropología (Pontificia Universidad Javeriana); un estudio etnográfico de la salsa en Bogotá, de el de Ángela R. Leguizamón (Universidad Nacional, Universidad Distrital FJC); la política cultural y la participación del sector en la políticas distritales, de el de Laura de la Rosa, Diana C. Varón y Aidaluz Sánchez A. (Universidad Santo Tomás). Sobre estudios historiográficos, Juliana Congote se centra en los procesos editoriales y la consolidación de las comunidades de interpretación de la danza contemporánea en el país (Universidad de Antioquia ); y en estudios sociales Liliana Echeverri, sobre la relación del baile social con los espacios sociales que aparecen en Manrique, Medellín (Universidad Andina Simón Bolívar, Ecuador) y el texto de Patricio Juárez F., sobre la práctica artística de la danza y su relevancia como fenómeno sociocultural (Universidad Autónoma de Nuevo León, México); igualmente encontramos sobre filosofía el texto propuesto por Paola V. Pita Gaona, quien analiza la teoría de la acción poética y la danza en Paul Valéry (Pontificia Universidad Javeriana ); y sobre medios interactivos de Gloria S. Sáenz, en la exploración investigativa realizada en la Escuela tecnológica del Instituto Técnico Central, sobre la utilización del Smartphone (como videocámara) para la producción discursiva, creando nuevas aproximaciones al mundo (Escuela Tecnológica ITC), y finalmente, el texto de Rebeca Sánchez A., sobre la transformación en la creación, la contemplación y la participación, de la experiencia dancística cuando son utilizados recursos tecnológicos (UNAM, México). (shrink)

Desarrollar el recuento de la producción filosófica contemporánea no es una tarea sencilla. Más en nuestro país, donde se hacen pocos esfuerzos para comprender la dimensión real del pensamiento mexicano. Ello se debe a varios factores, entre los que pueden señalarse la apatía por conocer las reflexiones alrededor de temas nacionales, el poco interés que despiertan pensadores locales, la casi nula difusión que tienen algunas propuestas filosóficas y los esfuerzos aislados por componer una historia de la “filosofía de provincia”. En (...) la mayoría de los estados de la república, no existe una tradición sólida para publicar y debatir sistemáticamente la filosofía; tan lamentable carencia deviene con regularidad en la alimentación de una filosofía ficticia o en aislamiento de meditaciones originales y novedosas que no tienen la difusión que merecen. Para comprender parte de las causas de este problema, se propone, como experimento historiográfico, hacer una revisión de cuatro tesis vinculadas con la filosofía presentadas en el estado de Chihuahua entre 1968 y 1993; se incluye también la de José Fuentes Mares, defendida en la unam en 1944. Se parte del supuesto que en trabajos de esta naturaleza puede verse con cierta claridad la vocación, talento y disposición filosófica de los autores. Dado que no participa un comité editorial o un corrector de estilo, más allá de la guía del director de tesis, es poco el mejoramiento metodológico y estilístico que reciben las tesis, con lo que se evidencian carencias y fortalezas de los sustentantes. Se revisará tan sólo una muestra; sin embargo, estos trabajos son clave porque dos de ellos son de filósofos con reconocimiento nacional (Fuentes Mares y Rico Bovio), una es la primera tesis de la extinta maestría en Filosofía de la Universidad Autónoma de Ciudad Juárez (David Mariscal). Dos más fueron escritas por profesores que no se han dedicado a la investigación filosófica (Gilberto Vargas y Rubén Lau), y otras dos fueron escritas por exrectores de universidades chihuahuenses (Rubén Lau y Fuentes Mares). Los temas tocados (filosofía del derecho, antropología filosófica, filosofía griega e historia de la filosofía mexicana) brindan una panorámica de intereses y líneas de investigación –si así pudiera llamárseles– a los que se asoman los tesistas chihuahuenses. De esta manera, se está en condiciones de esbozar un “mapa intelectual” superficial en el que también podrán visualizarse ciertas tendencias en la docencia dentro del estado. Palabras clave: historiografía de la filosofía, filosofía mexicana, filosofía contemporánea del norte de México. (shrink)

Desarrollar el recuento de la producción filosófica contemporánea no es una tarea sencilla. Más en nuestro país, donde se hacen pocos esfuerzos para comprender la dimensión real del pensamiento mexicano. Ello se debe a varios factores, entre los que pueden señalarse la apatía por conocer las reflexiones alrededor de temas nacionales, el poco interés que despiertan pensadores locales, la casi nula difusión que tienen algunas propuestas filosóficas y los esfuerzos aislados por componer una historia de la “filosofía de provincia”. En (...) la mayoría de los estados de la república, no existe una tradición sólida para publicar y debatir sistemáticamente la filosofía; tan lamentable carencia deviene con regularidad en la alimentación de una filosofía ficticia o en aislamiento de meditaciones originales y novedosas que no tienen la difusión que merecen. Para comprender parte de las causas de este problema, se propone, como experimento historiográfico, hacer una revisión de cuatro tesis vinculadas con la filosofía presentadas en el estado de Chihuahua entre 1968 y 1993; se incluye también la de José Fuentes Mares, defendida en la unam en 1944. Se parte del supuesto que en trabajos de esta naturaleza puede verse con cierta claridad la vocación, talento y disposición filosófica de los autores. Dado que no participa un comité editorial o un corrector de estilo, más allá de la guía del director de tesis, es poco el mejoramiento metodológico y estilístico que reciben las tesis, con lo que se evidencian carencias y fortalezas de los sustentantes. Se revisará tan sólo una muestra; sin embargo, estos trabajos son clave porque dos de ellos son de filósofos con reconocimiento nacional (Fuentes Mares y Rico Bovio), una es la primera tesis de la extinta maestría en Filosofía de la Universidad Autónoma de Ciudad Juárez (David Mariscal). Dos más fueron escritas por profesores que no se han dedicado a la investigación filosófica (Gilberto Vargas y Rubén Lau), y otras dos fueron escritas por exrectores de universidades chihuahuenses (Rubén Lau y Fuentes Mares). Los temas tocados (filosofía del derecho, antropología filosófica, filosofía griega e historia de la filosofía mexicana) brindan una panorámica de intereses y líneas de investigación –si así pudiera llamárseles– a los que se asoman los tesistas chihuahuenses. De esta manera, se está en condiciones de esbozar un “mapa intelectual” superficial en el que también podrán visualizarse ciertas tendencias en la docencia dentro del estado. -/- Palabras clave: historiografía de la filosofía, filosofía mexicana, filosofía contemporánea del norte de México. (shrink)

In the remainder of this article, we will disarm an important motivation for epistemic contextualism and interest-relative invariantism. We will accomplish this by presenting a stringent test of whether there is a stakes effect on ordinary knowledge ascription. Having shown that, even on a stringent way of testing, stakes fail to impact ordinary knowledge ascription, we will conclude that we should take another look at classical invariantism. Here is how we will proceed. Section 1 lays out some limitations of previous (...) research on stakes. Section 2 presents our study and concludes that there is little evidence for a substantial stakes effect. Section 3 responds to objections. The conclusion clears the way for classical invariantism. (shrink)

I insist that I was able to raise my hand, and I acknowledge that a law would have been broken had I done so, but I deny that I am therefore able to break a law. To uphold my instance of soft determinism, I need not claim any incredible powers. To uphold the compatibilism that I actually believe, I need not claim that such powers are even possible. My incompatibilist opponent is a creature of fiction, but he has his prototypes (...) in real life. He is modeled partly after Peter van Inwagen and partly on myself when I first worried about van Inwagen's argument against compatibilism. (shrink)

This paper shows how to conservatively extend classical logic with a transparent truth predicate, in the face of the paradoxes that arise as a consequence. All classical inferences are preserved, and indeed extended to the full (truth—involving) vocabulary. However, not all classical metainferences are preserved; in particular, the resulting logical system is nontransitive. Some limits on this nontransitivity are adumbrated, and two proof systems are presented and shown to be sound and complete. (One proof system allows for Cut—elimination, but the (...) other does not.). (shrink)

This paper develops and motivates a unification theory of metaphysical explanation, or as I will call it, Metaphysical Unificationism. The theory’s main inspiration is the unification account of scientific explanation, according to which explanatoriness is a holistic feature of theories that derive a large number of explananda from a meager set of explanantia, using a small number of argument patterns. In developing Metaphysical Unificationism, I will point out that it has a number of interesting consequences. The view offers a novel (...) conception of metaphysical explanation that doesn’t rely on the notion of a “determinative” or “explanatory” relation; it allows us to draw a principled distinction between metaphysical and scientific explanations; it implies that naturalness and fundamentality are distinct but intimately related notions; and perhaps most importantly, it re-establishes the unduly neglected link between explanation and understanding in the metaphysical realm. A number of objections can be raised against the view, but I will argue that none of these is conclusive. The upshot is that Metaphysical Unificationism provides a powerful and hitherto overlooked alternative to extant theories of metaphysical explanation. (shrink)

The purpose of this essay is to shed some light on a certain type of sentence, which I call a borderline contradiction. A borderline contradiction is a sentence of the form F a ∧ ¬F a, for some vague predicate F and some borderline case a of F , or a sentence equivalent to such a sentence. For example, if Jackie is a borderline case of ‘rich’, then ‘Jackie is rich and Jackie isn’t rich’ is a borderline contradiction. Many theories (...) of vague language have entailments about borderline contradictions; correctly describing the behavior of borderline contradictions is one of the many tasks facing anyone offering a theory of vague language. Here, I first briefly review claims made by various theorists about these borderline contradictions, attempting to draw out some predictions about the behavior of ordinary speakers. Second, I present an experiment intended to gather relevant data about the behavior of ordinary speakers. Finally, I discuss the experimental results in light of several different theories of vagueness, to see what explanations are available. My conclusions are necessarily tentative; I do not attempt to use the present experiment to demonstrate that any single theory is incontrovertibly true. Rather, I try to sketch the auxiliary hypotheses that would need to be conjoined to several extant theories of vague language to predict the present result, and offer some considerations regarding the plausibility of these various hypotheses. In the end, I conclude that two of the theories I consider are better-positioned to account for the observed data than are the others. But the field of logically-informed research on people’s actual responses to vague predicates is young; surely as more data come in we will learn a great deal more about which (if any) of these theories best accounts for the behavior of ordinary speakers. (shrink)

Placeholder essentialism is the view that there is a causal essence that holds category members together, though we may not know what the essence is. Sometimes the placeholder can be filled in by scientific essences, such as when we acquire scientific knowledge that the atomic weight of gold is 79. We challenge the view that placeholders are elaborated by scientific essences. On our view, if placeholders are elaborated, they are elaborated Aristotelian essences, a telos. Utilizing the same kinds of experiments (...) used by traditional essentialists—involving superficial change (study 1), transformation of insides (study 2), acquired traits (study 3) and inferences about offspring (study 4)—we find support for the view that essences are elaborated by a telos. And we find evidence (study 5) that teleological essences may generate category judgments. (shrink)

The principle of alternate possibilities (PAP), making the ability to do otherwise a necessary condition for moral responsibility, is supposed by Harry Frankfurt, John Fischer, and others to succumb to a peculiar kind of counterexample. The paper reviews the main problems with the counterexample that have surfaced over the years, and shows how most can be addressed within the terms of the current debate. But one problem seems ineliminable: because Frankfurt''s example relies on a counterfactual intervener to preclude alternatives to (...) the person''s action, it is not possible for it to preclude all alternatives (intervention that is contingent upon a trigger cannot bring it about that the trigger never occurred). This makes it possible for the determined PAPist to maintain that some pre-intervention deviation is always available to ground moral responsibility. In reply, the critic of PAP can examine all the candidate deviations and argue their irrelevance to moral responsibility (a daunting prospect); or the critic can dispense with counterfactual intervention altogether. The paper pursues the second of these strategies, developing three examples of noncounterfactual intervention in which (i) the agent has no alternatives (and a fortiori no morally relevant alternatives), yet (ii) there is just as much reason to think that the agent is morally responsible as there was in Frankfurt''s original example. The new counterexamples do suffer from one liability, but this is insufficient in the end to repair PAP''s conceptual connection between moral responsibility and alternate possibilities. (shrink)

In the first half of this paper, I argue that essential properties are intrinsic and that this permits a modal analysis of essence that is immune the sort of objections raised by Fine. In the second half, I argue that intrinsic properties collectively have a certain structure and that this accounts for some observations about essences: that things are essentially determinate; that things often have properties within a certain range essentially; and that the essential properties of things are their core (...) properties. (shrink)

Revisionary ontologies seem to go against our common sense convictions about which material objects exist. These views face the so-called Problem of Reasonableness: they have to explain why reasonable people don’t seem to accept the true ontology. Most approaches to this problem treat the mismatch between the ontological truth and ordinary belief as superficial or not even real. By contrast, I propose what I call the “uncompromising solution”. First, I argue that our beliefs about material objects were influenced by evolutionary (...) forces that were independent of the ontological truth. Second, I draw an analogy between the Problem of Reasonableness and the New Evil Demon Problem and argue that the revisionary ontologist can always find a positive epistemic status to characterize ordinary people’s beliefs about material objects. Finally, I address the worry that the evolutionary component of my story also threatens to undermine the best arguments for revisionary ontologies. (shrink)

I argue that according to Socrates in the Phaedo we should not merely evaluate bodily pleasures and desires as worthless or bad, but actively avoid them. We need to avoid them because they change our values and make us believe falsehoods. This change in values and acceptance of falsehoods undermines the soul’s proper activity, making virtue and happiness impossible for us. I situate this account of why we should avoid bodily pleasures within Plato’s project in the Phaedo of providing Pythagorean (...) and Orphic ideas with clearer meanings and better justifications. (shrink)

We demonstrate that many philosophers accept the following claim: When an aesthetic object is apprehended correctly, taking pleasure in said object is a reliable sign that the object is aesthetically successful. We undermine this position by showing that what grounds our pleasurable experience is opaque: In many cases, the experienced pleasure is attributable to factors that have little to do with the aesthetic object. The evidence appealed to is a form of Higher-Order Evidence (HOE) and we consider attempts to overcome (...) said evidence. We argue they are unsuccessful. We conclude by considering what this means for our practice of making aesthetic judgements. (shrink)

Many hold that theoretical reasoning aims at truth. In this paper, I ask what it is for reasoning to be thus aim-directed. Standard answers to this question explain reasoning’s aim-directedness in terms of intentions, dispositions, or rule-following. I argue that, while these views contain important insights, they are not satisfactory. As an alternative, I introduce and defend a novel account: reasoning aims at truth in virtue of being the exercise of a distinctive kind of cognitive power, one that, unlike ordinary (...) dispositions, is capable of fully explaining its own exercises. I argue that this account is able to avoid the difficulties plaguing standard accounts of the relevant sort of mental teleology. (shrink)

Many philosophers maintain that causation is to be explicated in terms of a kind of dependence between cause and effect. These “dependence” theories are opposed by “production” accounts which hold that there is some more fundamental causal “oomph”. A wide range of experimental research on everyday causal judgments seems to indicate that ordinary people operate primarily with a dependence-based notion of causation. For example, people tend to say that absences and double preventers are causes. We argue that the impression that (...) commonsense causal discourse is largely dependence-based is the result of focusing on a very narrow class of causal verbs. Almost all of the vignette-based experimental work on causal judgment has been prosecuted using the word “cause”. But much ordinary causal discourse involves special causal verbs, such as “burn” and “crack”. We find that these verbs display a quite different pattern from the verb “cause”. For instance, for absences and double preventers (Studies 1-3), we find that while people are inclined to say that X caused Y to burn, turn, crack or start, they are less inclined to think that X burned, turned, cracked or started Y. In Study 4, we find that for chains involving a distal and proximal event, people are inclined to say that the distal event is not a special cause of the outcome, though it is a “cause” of the outcome. Together, we find a surprising double dissociation between “cause” and a stock of special causal verbs. We conclude by suggesting that much commonsense causal judgment, which heavily trades in special causal verbs, might be better captured by production-based accounts of causation. (shrink)

A discussion of three central ideas in action theory; trying to act, doing or acting, one's action causing further consequences.

Empirical research has recently emerged as a key method for understanding the nature of causation, and our concept of causation. One thread of research aims to test intuitions about the nature of causation in a variety of classic cases. These experiments have principally been used to try to resolve certain debates within analytic philosophy, most notably that between proponents of transference and dependence views of causation. The other major thread of empirical research on our concept of causation has investigated the (...) role that normative considerations play in causal judgments. These experimental results suggest that philosophical accounts of our concept of causation should take a broader view of what might be relevant. For both lines of research, we describe some of the significant experiments and outline key philosophical morals that have been drawn, all while pointing out various limitations. We conclude by considering other kinds of empirical research that should be philosophically interesting for those studying the nature of causation and our concept of causation. In particular, we point towards the need for philosophical research about causal perception, causal reasoning, and causal learning, as well as ways in which this research could play a role in prescriptive metaphysics. (shrink)

The term ‘intelligence’ as used in this paper refers to items of knowledge collected for the sake of assessing and maintaining national security. The intelligence community (IC) of the United States (US) is a community of organizations that collaborate in collecting and processing intelligence for the US. The IC relies on human-machine-based analytic strategies that 1) access and integrate vast amounts of information from disparate sources, 2) continuously process this information, so that, 3) a maximally comprehensive understanding of world actors (...) and their behaviors can be developed and updated. Herein we describe an approach to utilizing outcomes-based learning (OBL) to support these efforts that is based on an ontology of the cognitive processes performed by intelligence analysts. Of particular importance to the Cognitive Process Ontology is the class Representation that is Warranted. Such a representation is descriptive in nature and deserving of trust in its veridicality. The latter is because a Representation that is Warranted is always produced by a process that was vetted (or successfully designed) to reliably produce veridical representations. As such, Representations that are Warranted are what in other contexts we might refer to as ‘items of knowledge’. (shrink)

In introducing the reactive attitudes “of people directly involved in transactions with each other,” P. F. Strawson lists “gratitude, resentment, forgiveness, love, and hurt feelings.” To show how our interpersonal emotional practices of responsibility could not be undermined by determinism’s truth, Strawson focused exclusively on resentment, specifically on its nature and actual excusing and exempting conditions. So have many other philosophers theorizing about responsibility in Strawson’s wake. This method and focus has generated a host of quality of will theories of (...) responsibility. What I show in this paper is that if Strawson—and his followers—had focused on hurt feelings instead of resentment, not only would quality of will theories of responsibility be disfavored, but none of our other theories of responsibility could adequately account for them. I conclude by exploring what a conundrum this poses for our methods and starting points in theorizing about responsibility. (shrink)

Suppose Alice asserts p, and the Caterpillar wants to disagree. If the Caterpillar accepts classical logic, he has an easy way to indicate this disagreement: he can simply assert ¬p. Sometimes, though, things are not so easy. For example, suppose the Cheshire Cat is a paracompletist who thinks that p ∨ ¬p fails (in familiar (if possibly misleading) language, the Cheshire Cat thinks p is a gap). Then he surely disagrees with Alice's assertion of p, but should himself be unwilling (...) to assert ¬p. So he cannot simply use the classical solution. Dually, suppose the Mad Hatter is a dialetheist who thinks that p ∧ ¬p holds (that is, he thinks p is a glut). Then he may assert ¬p, but it should not be taken to indicate that he disagrees with Alice; he doesn't. So he too can't use the classical solution. The Cheshire Cat and the Mad Hatter, then, have a common problem, and philosophers with opinions like theirs have adopted a common solution to this problem: appeal to denial. Denial, these philosophers suppose, is a speech act like assertion, but it is not to be understood as in any way reducing to assertion. Importantly, denial is something different from the assertion of a negation; this is what allows it to work even in cases where assertion of negation does not. Just as importantly, denial must express disagreement, since this is the job it's being enlisted to do. (shrink)

Classical logic is usually interpreted as the logic of propositions. But from Boole's original development up to modern categorical logic, there has always been the alternative interpretation of classical logic as the logic of subsets of any given (nonempty) universe set. Partitions on a universe set are dual to subsets of a universe set in the sense of the reverse-the-arrows category-theoretic duality--which is reflected in the duality between quotient objects and subobjects throughout algebra. Hence the idea arises of a dual (...) logic of partitions. That dual logic is described here. Partition logic is at the same mathematical level as subset logic since models for both are constructed from (partitions on or subsets of) arbitrary unstructured sets with no ordering relations, compatibility or accessibility relations, or topologies on the sets. Just as Boole developed logical finite probability theory as a quantitative treatment of subset logic, applying the analogous mathematical steps to partition logic yields a logical notion of entropy so that information theory can be refounded on partition logic. But the biggest application is that when partition logic and the accompanying logical information theory are "lifted" to complex vector spaces, then the mathematical framework of quantum mechanics is obtained. Partition logic models indefiniteness (i.e., numerical attributes on a set become more definite as the inverse-image partition becomes more refined) while subset logic models the definiteness of classical physics (an entity either definitely has a property or definitely does not). Hence partition logic provides the backstory so the old idea of "objective indefiniteness" in QM can be fleshed out to a full interpretation of quantum mechanics. (shrink)

El artículo ofrece un panorama del precedente en el Civil Law con el objetivo de distinguir los problemas que pueden presentarse en los sistemas jurídicos que tienen una práctica formal o institucionalizada de precedente, de aquellos en los que no la hay. Se identificó que se introdujo el precedente como una forma de responder a las crecientes demandas de administración de justicia en la materia y delimitar la discrecionalidad del operador jurídico. Por tanto, la tesis de fondo de este trabajo (...) es que, en la operación regular de los sistemas jurídicos del Civil Law, tanto los tribunales constitucionales y la jurisdicción en general identificaron la necesidad práctica de dotar de contornos a los derechos humanos —en tanto disposiciones jurídicas a concretar jurisdiccionalmente—. (shrink)

This chapter explores the relationship between ethical judgement writ large (as opposed to merely moral judgement) and motivation. We discuss arguments for and against views on which ethical judgement entails motivation, either alone or under conditions of rationality or normalcy, either at the individual or community level.

Frankfurt cases are purported counterexamples to the Principle of Alternative Possibilities, which implies that we are not morally responsible for unavoidable actions. A major permutation of the counterexample strategy features buffered alternatives; this permutation is designed to overcome an influential defense of the Principle of Alternative Possibilities. Here we defend the buffering strategy against two recent objections, both of which stress the timing of an agent’s decision. We argue that attributions of moral responsibility aren’t time-sensitive in the way the objectors (...) suppose. We then turn to the crucial question of when an action is relevantly avoidable—when, in the parlance of the literature, an alternative possibility is robust. We call attention to two plausible tests for robustness that merit further consideration, showing that the agents in buffered Frankfurt cases don’t pass these tests, despite being morally responsible for their actions. (shrink)

I argue that, unlike your brain, you are not composed of other things: you are simple. My argument centers on what I take to be an uncontroversial datum: for any pair of conscious beings, it is impossible for the pair itself to be conscious. Consider, for instance, the pair comprising you and me. You might pinch your arm and feel a pain. I might simultaneously pinch my arm and feel a qualitatively identical pain. But the pair we form would not (...) feel a thing.1 Pairs of people themselves are incapable of experience. Call this The Datum. What explains The Datum? I think the following exhaust the reasonable options. (1) Pairs of people lack a sufficient number of immediate parts. (2) Pairs of people lack immediate parts capable of standing in the right sorts of relations to each other and their environment. (3) Pairs of people lack immediate parts of the right nature. (4) Pairs of people are not structures (they are unstructured collections of their two immediate parts). (5) Some combination of (1) – (4). Finally, (6) pairs of people are not simple. (shrink)

Philosophical accounts of the nature of belief, at least in the western tradition, are framed in large part by two ideas. One is that believing is a form of representing. The other is that a belief plays a causal role when a person acts on it. The standard picture of belief as a mental entity with representational properties and causal powers merges these two ideas. We are to think of beliefs as things that are true or false and that interact (...) with desires, intentions, and emotions to bring about rational action. Both ideas, I think, are ill-founded. One effect of abandoning them is a further blurring of the distinction between what is inside and what is outside our minds. Another is a shift towards a less mentalistic picture of the roots of rational action. (shrink)

Categorical logic has shown that modern logic is essentially the logic of subsets (or "subobjects"). Partitions are dual to subsets so there is a dual logic of partitions where a "distinction" [an ordered pair of distinct elements (u,u′) from the universe U ] is dual to an "element". An element being in a subset is analogous to a partition π on U making a distinction, i.e., if u and u′ were in different blocks of π. Subset logic leads to finite (...) probability theory by taking the (Laplacian) probability as the normalized size of each subset-event of a finite universe. The analogous step in the logic of partitions is to assign to a partition the number of distinctions made by a partition normalized by the total number of ordered pairs |U|² from the finite universe. That yields a notion of "logical entropy" for partitions and a "logical information theory." The logical theory directly counts the (normalized) number of distinctions in a partition while Shannon's theory gives the average number of binary partitions needed to make those same distinctions. Thus the logical theory is seen as providing a conceptual underpinning for Shannon's theory based on the logical notion of "distinctions.". (shrink)

The proposal I offer attempts to remedy the inadequacies of exclusive focus on well-being for moral purposes. The proposal is this: We should allow the agent to decide for herself where she wants to throw the weight that is her due in moral reflection, with the proviso that she understands the way that her weight will be aggregated with others in reaching a moral outcome. I will call this the "autonomy principle." The autonomy principle, I claim, provides the consequentialist's best (...) prospect for taking people into account morally in a way that they endorse. (shrink)

When people make sense of situations, illustrations, instructions and problems they do more than just think with their heads. They gesture, talk, point, annotate, make notes and so on. What extra do they get from interacting with their environment in this way? To study this fundamental problem, I looked at how people project structure onto geometric drawings, visual proofs, and games like tic tac toe. Two experiments were run to learn more about projection. Projection is a special capacity, similar to (...) perception, but less tied to what is in the environment. Projection, unlike pure imagery, requires external structure to anchor it, but it adds ‘mental’ structure to the external scene much like an augmented reality system adds structure to an outside scene. A person projects when they look at a chessboard and can see where a knight may be moved. Because of the cognitive costs of sustaining and extending projection, humans make some of their projections real. They create structure externally. They move the piece, they talk, point, notate, represent. Much of our interactivity during sense making and problem solving involves a cycle of projecting then creating structure. (shrink)

Conscious mental states are states we are in some way aware of. I compare higher-order theories of consciousness, which explain consciousness by appeal to such higher-order awareness (HOA), and first-order theories, which do not, and I argue that higher-order theories have substantial explanatory advantages. The higher-order nature of our awareness of our conscious states suggests an analogy with the metacognition that figures in the regulation of psychological processes and behaviour. I argue that, although both consciousness and metacognition involve higher-order psychological (...) states, they have little more in common. One thing they do share is the possibility of misrepresentation; just as metacognitive processing can misrepresent one’s cognitive states and abilities, so the HOA in virtue of which one’s mental states are conscious can, and sometimes does, misdescribe those states. A striking difference between the two, however, has to do with utility for psychological processing. Metacognition has considerable benefit for psychological processing; in contrast, it is unlikely that there is much, if any, utility to mental states’ being conscious over and above the utility those states have when they are not conscious. (shrink)

We describe a strategy for integration of data that is based on the idea of semantic enhancement. The strategy promises a number of benefits: it can be applied incrementally; it creates minimal barriers to the incorporation of new data into the semantically enhanced system; it preserves the existing data (including any existing data-semantics) in their original form (thus all provenance information is retained, and no heavy preprocessing is required); and it embraces the full spectrum of data sources, types, models, and (...) modalities (including text, images, audio, and signals). The result of applying this strategy to a given body of data is an evolving Dataspace that allows the application of a variety of integration and analytic processes to diverse data contents. We conceive semantic enhancement (SE) as a lightweight and flexible process that leverages the richness of the structured contents of the Dataspace without adding storage and processing burdens to what, in the intelligence domain, will be an already storage- and processing-heavy starting point. SE works not by changing the data to which it is applied, but rather by adding an extra semantic layer to this data. We sketch how the semantic enhancement approach can be applied consistently and in cumulative fashion to new data and data-models that enter the Dataspace. (shrink)

A careful elaboration and defence of holism in the philosophy of the social sciences, with regard both to particulars and properties. The last chapter addresses the issue of the irreducibility of holistic explanation in the social sciences.

In this paper, I suggest that the wrongness of many—though not at all—cases of microaggressions can be captured as cases of negligence. A case of negligence holds when, regardless of an actor’s intentions, he or she wrongs another in a manner that is both reasonably foreseeable and reasonably avoidable. Thinking of microaggressions as negligence answers some objections of skeptics who focus on the possibility that the alleged microaggressor “meant no offense”. It does so while retaining language explaining why a wrong (...) was committed and suggesting what sort of corrective behavior can reasonably be demanded to avoid these wrongs in the future. I also argue that a negligence framework does a better job of phenomenologically explaining most microaggressions—both why they occur and why they are perceived as the sort of conduct that subjects the microaggressor to agent-level moral criticism. Indeed, I believe that negligence-style logic permeates many accounts that already exist regarding microaggressions, albeit without fully being recognized. Finally, in cases where it applies, the negligence framework has an advantage over alternate accounts in that it provides for consideration of both the moral culpability of the perpetrator as well as the tangible impact of microaggressions on the victim. (shrink)

According to the Good True Self (GTS) theory, if an action is deemed good, its psychological source is typically viewed as more reflective of its agent’s true self, of who the agent really is ‘deep down inside’; if the action is deemed bad, its psychological source is typically viewed as more external to its agent’s true self. In previous work, we discovered a related asymmetry in judgments of blame- and praiseworthiness with respect to the mitigating effect of moral ignorance via (...) childhood deprivation. Inspired by work motivating the GTS theory, we ran a new study to discover whether our asymmetry likewise reflected judgments about the true self. It did. However, it is unclear whether our results fit with the ‘good’ part of the GTS theory: some of our and others’ results suggest that, in certain contexts, wrong actions are taken to be more expressive of agents’ true selves than right ones. In this paper, we propose that our and others’ data can be explained by the hypothesis that we are inclined to judge as the GTS theory predicts when there is a readily available external explanation for an agent’s action. In short, we give people the benefit of the doubt. (shrink)

I argue for a transformative revival or actualization of the very core of an integrative, methodologically secured form of intellect‑mystical asceticism. This approach draws on traditional sources that are re‑examined from a systematic—synthetic and transcultural—philosophical perspective and in light of the multi‑civilizational global environment of the 21st century. The main traditional points of reference in this paper are provided by Nicolaus de Cusa and Ibn Sīnā, and I refer toa few others, such as Attar of Nishapur, in passing. I begin (...) by developing a basic concept of intellect‑mystical asceticism. It is distinguished from mystification, science, scientism, and modes of everyday communication and cognition. Then, I make the case for an updated, transcultural approach to intellect‑mysticism that can foster the internal (social) and external (environmental) reintegration of the human noosphere and technosphere in future planetary development. In this context, a modern intellect‑mystical philosophical notion of “knowing non‑knowing” (wissendes Nichtwissen, docta ignorantia) is developed. It is inspired by Nicolaus de Cusa and contextualized from a systematic transcultural angle at the same time. Finally, I discuss the problem of the practical, or rather ascetic, realization of the related possibilities of intellect‑mystical self‑enfolding. Here, the preceding steps of the reflection are mapped onto an outline regarding distinct developmental stages of such a transformative intellect‑mystical practice in Ibn Sīnā’s Remarks and Admonitions (al‑Ishārāt wat‑Tanbīhāt). (shrink)

Implicit in our everyday attitudes and practices is the assumption that death ordinarily harms a person who dies. A far more contested matter is whether death harms sentient individuals who are not persons, a category that includes many animals and some human beings. On the basis of the deprivation account of the harm of death, I argue that death harms sentient nonpersons. I next consider possible bases for the commonsense judgment that death ordinarily harms persons more than it harms sentient (...) nonpersons. Contrary to what some philosophers believe, it is doubtful that the familiar resources of prudential value theory can vindicate this judgment. I show that the approach that at first glance seems most promising for supporting this judgment – namely, invoking an objective account of well-being – faces substantial challenges, before arguing that McMahan's time-relative interest account supplies the needed theoretical basis. I then go on to extract a significant practical implication of the first thesis, that death ordinarily harms sentient nonpersons: We should find a way to discontinue the routine killing of animal subjects following their use in experiments. (shrink)

It is common for theorists, drawing on P. F. Strawson, to account for morally responsible agency in terms of the nature of the emotions and feelings that characterize our responsibility practices, in terms of the nature of the so-called “reactive attitudes.” Here, I argue against this attitude-based Strawsonian strategy, and I argue in favor of an alternative, which I call the “concern-based Strawsonian strategy.” On this alternative, rather than account for morally responsible agency in terms of the nature of the (...) reactive attitudes, one accounts for such agency in terms of the concern that leaves us susceptible to those attitudes in the first place. This, I believe, is a more promising way to develop the Strawsonian approach than the attitude-based strategy. The concern-based strategy allows us to better countenance the number and variety of the reactive attitudes that characterize our responsibility practices; it shares the attitude-based strategy’s virtues; and it seems to position us to better understand the distinctive social and moral significance associated with being and being regarded as a morally responsible agent. (shrink)

This interdisciplinary exploration discusses the intricate conceptual linkages among Buddhism’s Eighth State of Consciousness, Quantum Holography, and the Jungian Collective Unconscious. Central to this study is examining the Eighth Consciousness in Buddhist thought—a realm that transcends the conventional sensory and mental states to connect with a more universal and profound awareness. Drawing parallels, Quantum Holography posits that every part of the universe retains information about the whole, much like a hologram. This notion seemingly mirrors the Jungian concept of the Collective (...) Unconscious, which postulates a shared reservoir of memories and ideas across humanity. The paper contends that the intricate dance of photons, oscillating between particle and wave states, mediates perception through resonance and hints at a multi-layered consciousness stratum that mirrors the vast, enigmatic quantum reality expanse. The study illuminates the intersections and divergences among these frameworks through meticulous comparative analysis, positing that an integrative understanding of quantum theories and Buddhist wisdom can unravel the human psyche’s profound depths. By weaving Eastern philosophies with Western psychological and quantum theoretical tapestry, the discourse unveils a multifaceted consciousness comprehension, championing integrative approaches as invaluable tools for decoding the mind and universe's enigmatic interplay from a quantum viewpoint. (shrink)

For Kant, any authentic moral demands are wholly distinct from the demands of prudence. This has led critics to complain that Kantian moral demands are incompatible with our human nature as happiness-seekers. Kant’s defenders have pointed out, correctly, that Kant can and does assert that it is permissible, at least in principle, to pursue our own happiness. But this response does not eliminate the worry that a life organized around the pursuit of virtue might turn out to be one from (...) which we cannot expect any of this (permissible) happiness. To address this worry, Kant would need to establish that there is a kind of harmony between virtue and our own happiness that can give us confidence that aiming at morality does not require us to abandon our hope for happiness in this life. This paper aims to show that Kant—building on insights from Rousseau that Kant identifies with Cynicism—does offer an account of such a harmony between virtue and worldly happiness. (shrink)

What constitutes numerically one and the same tradition diachronically, at different times? This question is the focus of often violent dispute in societies. Is it capable of a rational resolution? Many accounts attempt that resolution with a diagnosis of ambiguity of the disputed concept-Islam, Marxism, or democracy for example. The diagnosis offered is in terms of vagueness, namely the vague criteria for sameness or similarity of central beliefs and practices.