The paper deals with polymodal languages combined with standard semantics defined by means of some conditions on the frames. So, a notion of "polymodal base" arises which provides various enrichments of the classical modal language. One of these enrichments, viz. the base £(R,-R), with modalities over a relation and over its complement, is the paper's main paradigm. The modal definability (in the spirit of van Benthem's correspondence theory) of arbitrary and ~-elementary classes of frames in this base and in some (...) of its extensions, e.g., £(R,-R,R-1 ,_R-1), £(R,-R,=I=) etc., is described, and numerous examples of conditions definable there, as well as undefinable ones, are adduced. (shrink)

The concept of agency is of crucial importance in cognitive science and artificial intelligence, and it is often used as an intuitive and rather uncontroversial term, in contrast to more abstract and theoretically heavy-weighted terms like “intentionality”, “rationality” or “mind”. However, most of the available definitions of agency are either too loose or unspecific to allow for a progressive scientific program. They implicitly and unproblematically assume the features that characterize agents, thus obscuring the full potential and challenge of modeling agency. (...) We identify three conditions that a system must meet in order to be considered as a genuine agent: a) a system must define its own individuality, b) it must be the active source of activity in its environment (interactionalasymmetry) and c) it must regulate this activity in relation to certain norms (normativity). We find that even minimal forms of proto-celular systems can already provide a paradigmatic example of genuine agency. By abstracting away some specific details of minimal models of living agency we define the kind of organization that is capable to meet the required conditions for agency (which is not restricted to living organisms). On this basis, we define agency as an autonomous organization that adaptively regulates its coupling with its environment and contributes to sustaining itself as a consequence. We find that spatiality and temporality are the two fundamental domains in which agency spans at different scales. We conclude by giving an outlook to the road that lies ahead in the pursuit to understand, model and synthesis agents. (shrink)

Despite numerous and increasing attempts to define what life is, there is no consensus on necessary and sufficient conditions for life. Accordingly, some scholars have questioned the value of definitions of life and encouraged scientists and philosophers alike to discard the project. As an alternative to this pessimistic conclusion, we argue that critically rethinking the nature and uses of definitions can provide new insights into the epistemic roles of definitions of life for different research practices. This paper examines the possible (...) contributions of definitions of life in scientific domains where such definitions are used most (e.g., Synthetic Biology, Origins of Life, Alife, and Astrobiology). Rather than as classificatory tools for demarcation of natural kinds, we highlight the pragmatic utility of what we call operational definitions that serve as theoretical and epistemic tools in scientific practice. In particular, we examine contexts where definitions integrate criteria for life into theoretical models that involve or enable observable operations. We show how these definitions of life play important roles in influencing research agendas and evaluating results, and we argue that to discard the project of defining life is neither sufficiently motivated, nor possible without dismissing important theoretical and practical research. (shrink)

In times of crisis, when current theories are revealed as inadequate to task, and new physics is thought to be required—physics turns to re-evaluate its principles, and to seek new ones. This paper explores the various types, and roles of principles that feature in the problem of quantum gravity as a current crisis in physics. I illustrate the diversity of the principles being appealed to, and show that principles serve in a variety of roles in all stages of the crisis, (...) including in motivating the need for a new theory, and defining what this theory should be like. In particular, I consider: the generalised correspondence principle, UV-completion, background independence, and the holographic principle. I also explore how the current crisis fits with Friedman’s view on the roles of principles in revolutionary theory-change, finding that while many key aspects of this view are not represented in quantum gravity, the view could potentially offer a useful diagnostic, and prescriptive strategy. This paper is intended to be relatively non-technical, and to bring some of the philosophical issues from the search for quantum gravity to a more general philosophical audience interested in the roles of principles in scientific theory-change. (shrink)

Without doubt, terrorism is one of the most vehemently debated subjects in current political affairs as well as in academic discourse. Yet, although it constitutes an issue of general socio-political interest, neither in everyday language nor in professional (political, legal, or academic) contexts does there exist a generally accepted definition of terrorism. The question of how it should be defined has been answered countless times, with as much variety as quantity in the answers. In academic discourse, it is difficult to (...) find two scholars who use the term ‘terrorism’ in the same way. -/- While it is impossible to formulate a definition which satisfies everyone, discussing the definition question is indispensable. The necessity to review existing definitions with a view to improving them is especially obvious in legal and political contexts. How terrorism is defined in these contexts has serious consequences, and if we lack clear definitions we run into problems. How can we have laws or take political measures against something we have not clearly defined? Without doubt, there exists a practical necessity for a definition in these fields. It is important to have clear standards for defining terrorism. -/- In my view, the definition should meet three basic criteria: first, it should cover those cases that we concurrently consider to be instances of terrorism (such as the attacks on the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in September 2001 or those on commuting trains in Madrid Atocha in March 2004). That is, ideally, our definition of terrorism remains close to uncontroversial usages of the term. Second, the definition should abstain from morally judging the act in question. Later I will say more about so called “moral” definitions of terrorism. For now, it suffices to say that defining an action and evaluating it are distinct tasks and should remain so. Third, the definition must identify characteristics that are specific to terrorism alone, characteristics which clearly distinguish it from other phenomena. (shrink)

Enactivism and ecological psychology converge on the relevance of the environment in understanding perception and action. On both views, perceiving organisms are not merely passive receivers of environmental stimuli, but rather form a dynamic relationship with their environments in such a way that shapes how they interact with the world. In this paper, I suggest that while enactivism and ecological psychology enjoy a shared specification of the environment as the cognitive domain, on both accounts, the structure of the environment, itself, (...) is unspecified beyond that of contingent relations with the species-typical sensorimotor capacities of perceiving organisms. This lack of specification creates a considerable gap in theory regarding the organization of organisms as coupled with their environments. I argue that this gap can be filled by drawing from resources in developmental systems theory, namely, specifying the environmental state-space as a developmental niche that shapes and is shaped by individual organisms over developmental and, on a population scale, evolutionary time. Defining the environment as an organism’s developmental niche makes it clearer how and why certain contingencies have arisen, in turn, strengthening a joint appeal to both enactivism and ecological psychology as theories asserting complementarity between organisms and their environments. (shrink)

In international law and just war theory, war is treated as normatively and legally unique. In the context of international law, war’s special status gives rise to a specific set of belligerent rights and duties, as well as a complex set of laws related to, among other things, the status of civilians, prisoners of war, trade and economic relationships, and humanitarian aid. In particular, belligerents are permitted to derogate from certain human rights obligations and to use lethal force in a (...) far more permissive manner than is the case in other kinds of conflicts and in domestic law enforcement operations. Given war’s unique status, the task of defining war requires not just identifying the empirical features that are characteristic of war but explaining and justifying war’s special legal and moral status. In this chapter, I propose a definition of war that captures war’s unique features and can offer insights into when and how some forms of unarmed conflict could count as wars. (shrink)

The Defining Issues Test (DIT) has been widely used in psychological experiments to assess one’s developmental level of moral reasoning in terms of postconventional reasoning. However, there have been concerns regarding whether the tool is biased across people with different genders and political and religious views. To address the limitations, in the present study, I tested the validity of the brief version of the test, that is, the behavioral DIT, in terms of the measurement invariance and differential item functioning (DIF). (...) I could not find any significant non-invariance at the test level or any item demonstrating practically significant DIF at the item level. The findings indicate that neither the test nor any of its items showed a significant bias toward any particular group. As a result, the collected validity evidence supports the use of test scores across different groups, enabling researchers who intend to examine participants’ moral reasoning development across heterogeneous groups to draw conclusions based on the scores. (shrink)

New definitions are proposed for communication and language. Communication is defined as the evolution of physical, biochemical, cellular, community, and technological information exchange. Language is defined as community communication whereby the information exchanged comprises evolving individual and group-constructed knowledge and beliefs, that are enacted, narrated, or otherwise conveyed by evolving rule-governed and meaningful symbol systems, that are grounded, interpreted, and used from within evolving embodied, cognitive, ecological, sociocultural, and technological niches. These definitions place emphasis on the evolutionary aspects of communication (...) and language, and they are here differentiated from four older paradigms that instead focus either on the referential or social aspects of language, or the informational or semantic aspects of communication. In contrast with these paradigms, the definitions proposed here for communication and language are in line with a pluralistic evolutionary worldview, one that necessitates the recognition that a multitude of units, levels, mechanisms and processes are involved in bringing forth communication and language. (shrink)

I argue that Topics VI does not contain any serious theory about definitions, but only a collection of advices for formulating definitions in a dialectical context, namely, definitions aiming to catch what the opponent means. Topics VI is full of inconsistencies that can be explained away by this approach: the inconsistencies reflect "acceptable opinions about definitions" that distinct groups of interlocutors accept. I also argue that the "topoi" need not be pieces of serious theory Aristotle is commited to. The "topoi" (...) must also be considered as "endoxa", namely, as accepted opinions about how it is legitimate to draw an inference. (shrink)

Wherever philosophers disagree, one of the things at issue is likely to be what they disagree about, itself. In addition to asking whether moral realism is true, and which forms of moral realism are more likely to be true than others, we can also ask what it would mean for some form of moral realism to be true. The usual aspiration of such inquiry is to find definitions that all can agree on, so that we can use terms in a (...) uniform way. But we doubt that this aspiration is always possible, or even desirable. It will be our goal in this chapter to sketch out some of our reasons for such skepticism, and to lay out a picture of what philosophical inquiry can look like in metaethics and beyond, even when it is impossible to reach uniform agreement on the terms of the debate. (shrink)

Language defines human existence. Yet defining language is a fraught project. I use the term "language" to refer to a specific mode of information transfer. First, it is a communicative mode. By communication I mean the information transfer serves a function, that is, an activity that occurs because it has increased the evolutionary fitness of ancestors. Secondly, while all communication is governed by norms, human communication, as opposed to biological communication, is governed by norms that have evolved within the learned (...) traditions of individual cultures. The meaning of an assertion in a culture’s language is the set of commitments to which that culture holds its speakers when they utter that assertion. Syntax has appeared in recent evolution to facilitate and enrich the communicative function, but it is a secondary aspect of language. The defining characteristic of human communication, of "language," -- is its capacity to constitute meaning. (shrink)

This paper analyses the relations between philosophy of information (PI), library and information science (LIS) and social epistemology (SE). In the first section, it is argued that there is a natural relation between philosophy and LIS but that SE cannot provide a satisfactory foundation for LIS. SE should rather be seen as sharing with LIS a common ground, represented by the study of information, to be investigated by a new discipline, PI. In the second section, the nature of PI is (...) outlined as the philosophical area that studies the conceptual nature of information, its dynamics and problems. In the third section, LIS is defined as a form of applied PI. The hypothesis supported is that PI should replace SE as the philosophical discipline that can best provide the conceptual foundation for LIS. In the conclusion, it is suggested that the 'identity' crisis undergone by LIS has been the natural outcome of a justified but precocious search for a philosophical counterpart that has emerged only recently: namely, PI. The development of LIS should not rely on some borrowed, pre-packaged theory. As applied PI, LIS can fruitfully contribute to the growth of basic theoretical research in PI itself and thus provide its own foundation. (shrink)

It is surprisingly hard to define presentism. Traditional definitions of the view, in terms of tensed existence statements, have turned out not to to be capable of convincingly distinguishing presentism from eternalism. Picking up on a recent proposal by Tallant, I suggest that we need to locate the break between eternalism and presentism on a much more fundamental level. The problem is that presentists have tried to express their view within a framework that is inherently eternalist. I call that framework (...) the Fregean nexus, as it is defined by Frege’s atemporal understanding of predication. In particular, I show that the tense-logical understanding of tense which is treated as common ground in the debate rests on this very same Fregean nexus, and is thus inadequate for a proper definition of presentism. I contrast the Fregean nexus with what I call the original temporal nexus, which is based on an alternative, inherently temporal form of predication. Finally, I propose to define presentism in terms of the original temporal nexus, yielding original presentism. According to original presentism, temporal propositions are distinguished from atemporal ones not by aspects of their content, as they are on views based on the Fregean nexus, but by their form—in particular, by their form of predication. (shrink)

This paper investigates whether different philosophers’ claims about “normativity” are about the same subject or (as recently argued by Derek Parfit) theorists who appear to disagree are really using the term with different meanings, in order to cast disambiguating light on the debates over at least the nature, existence, extension, and analyzability of normativity. While I suggest the term may be multiply ambiguous, I also find reasons for optimism about a common subject-matter for metanormative theory. This is supported partly by (...) sketching a special kind of hybrid view of normative judgment, perspectivism, that occupies a position between cognitivism and noncognitivism, naturalism and nonnaturalism, objectivism and subjectivism, making it more plausible that radically different metanormative theories could be about the same thing. I explore three main fissures: between (i) the “normativity” of language/thought versus that of facts and properties, (ii) abstract versus substantive senses, and (iii) formal versus robust senses. (shrink)

The concept of Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) is ubiquitous in the public and semi-technical domain, yet rarely defined precisely. We clarify main concepts that are usually discussed in connection to GenAI and argue that one ought to distinguish between the technical and the public discourse. In order to show its complex development and associated conceptual ambiguities, we offer a historical-systematic reconstruction of GenAI and explicitly discuss two exemplary cases: the generative status of the Large Language Model BERT and the differences (...) between protein structure predictions from AlphaFold 2 and 3. Our analysis shows that there is no unique and unambiguous definition of GenAI based on a purely technical account of the term. Following this conclusion, we argue that the public discourse is not simply a less complex way of speaking, but instead transcends its technical basis. As a means to structure this newly emerging discussion landscape we introduce a non-exhaustive list of four central aspects of GenAI: (multi-)modality, interaction, flexibility, and productivity. These dimensions constitute a first step towards defining GenAI beyond its technical basis. (shrink)

The classification of a state of affairs under a legal category can be considered as a kind of con- densed decision that can be made explicit, analyzed, and assessed us- ing argumentation schemes. In this paper, the controversial conflict of opinions concerning the nature of “marriage” in Obergefell v. Hodges is analyzed pointing out the dialecti- cal strategies used for addressing the interpretive doubts. The dispute about the same-sex couples’ right to marry hides a much deeper disa- greement not only (...) about what mar- riage is, but more importantly about the dialectical rules for defining it. (shrink)

The classification of preserved hypothalamic activity in brain death and brainstem death as functional or non-functional has become a subject of debate. While proponents of the neurological criterion claim that these activities lack functional significance (Shemie et al. 2014), Nair-Collins and Joffe (2023) argue for their functional physiological role. However, the interpretation of the term "function" within the medico-legal framework, where death is characterized by the irreversible cessation of all brain functions, remains unclear. -/- My intention here is not to (...) engage in a debate over the validity of different viewpoints regarding the functional significance of preserved activities in the hypothalamus or the heart. Rather, I aim to highlight the critical importance of exploring and defining the concept of function in medicine, which currently lacks clarity. My point is that, whatever our position in the brain death debate, reaching a consensus on this conceptual matter would minimize misunderstandings and establish a robust foundation for further insightful analysis. (shrink)

These two remarkable books, both published in 2010, share many themes but differ in significant ways, and each is very much worth reading and pondering. Oord’s The Nature of Love concentrates primarily on conceptual and theological themes relating to the very nature of love itself and what influential theologians have had to say about love. His Defining Love focuses on how the social and physical sciences impact our understanding of human and divine love. Both books presuppose and express many themes (...) that are prominent in process theology such as: freedom is universally present (by degrees) in all creatures, especially us; predestination is abhorrent and untenable; God exists necessarily and everlastingly but not .. (shrink)

As the quality movement in health care now enters its fourth decade, the language of quality is ubiquitous. Practitioners, organizations, and government agencies alike vociferously testify their commitments to quality and accept numerous forms of governance aimed at improving quality of care. Remarkably, the powerful phrase ‘‘quality of care’’ is rarely defined in the health care literature. Instead it operates as an accepted and assumed goal worth pursuing. The status of evidence-based medicine, for instance, hinges on its ability to improve (...) quality of care, and efforts are made by both proponents and detractors to unpack the contents and outcomes of evidence-based practice while the contents of ‘‘quality of care’’ are presumed to be understood. Because the goals of medicine are far from obvious, this paper investigates the neglected term, ‘‘quality of care,’’ in an effort to understand what it is that health care practices are so uncritically assumed to be striving for. Finding lack of consensus on the terminology in the quality literature, I propose that the term operates rhetorically by way of persuasive appeal (and lack of descriptive meaning). Unsatisfied that ‘‘quality of care’’ operates as a mere buzzword in morally contentious debates over resource allocation and duties of care, I implore health care communities to go beyond mere commitments to quality and, instead, to focus attention on the difficult task of specifying what counts as quality care within an economically constrained health care system. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Rima Basu and I have offered separate accounts of wokeness as an anti-racist ethical concept. Our accounts endorse controversial doctrines in epistemology: doxastic wronging, doxastic voluntarism, and moral encroachment. Many philosophers deny these three views, favoring instead some ordinary standards for epistemic justification. I call this denial the standard view. In this paper, I offer an account of wokeness that is consistent with the standard view. I argue that wokeness is best understood as ‘group epistemic partiality’. The woke person (...) does extra epistemic work before forming a negative belief about a member of an oppressed social group. Just as we do extra epistemic work when forming belief about our friends, so the woke person does for members of oppressed social groups. I first outline the account. I then raise questions about the scope of wokeness and belief formation. After this, I demonstrate that the group partiality view is consistent with the standard view in epistemology. The partiality view, therefore, should appeal to epistemologists who have adopted the standard view because it is consistent with ordinary standards of justification. I conclude that wokeness as a concept in epistemology should not be controversial for those who endorse the standard view. (shrink)

Accounts of the concepts of function and dysfunction have not adequately explained what factors determine the line between low‐normal function and dysfunction. I call the challenge of doing so the line‐drawing problem. Previous approaches emphasize facts involving the action of natural selection (Wakefield 1992a, 1999a, 1999b) or the statistical distribution of levels of functioning in the current population (Boorse 1977, 1997). I point out limitations of these two approaches and present a solution to the line‐drawing problem that builds on the (...) second one. (shrink)

It is becoming increasingly common for authoritarian regimes to leverage digital technologies to surveil, repress and manipulate their citizens. Experts typically refer to this practice as digital authoritarianism (DA). Existing definitions of DA consistently presuppose a politically repressive agent intentionally exploiting digital technologies to pursue authoritarian ends. I refer to this as the intention-based definition. This paper argues that this definition is untenable as a general description of DA. I begin by illustrating the current predominance of the intention-based definition (Section (...) 2). Section 3 then presents four counterexamples to this definition: benign surveillance; digital sovereignty; attention-harvesting algorithms; and tech-induced loneliness. In each case, we witness authoritarianism being promoted by digital technologies without any evidence of this being intentionally caused by politically repressive agents. Based on these observations, I contend that the intention-based definition is underinclusive and is therefore unsustainable. Section 4 outlines an improved definition of DA – what I call the promotion-based definition. Since this more expansive definition does not posit intentional, politically repressive agency as a precondition of DA, it can accommodate the counterexamples discussed in Section 3. Moreover, it enables us to catch a broader spectrum of cases of DA, such as tech-induced loneliness, which those adhering to the intention-based definition are prone to overlook. After outlining further practical benefits of the promotion-based definition, I argue that we still need to distinguish between intentional and unintentional forms of DA since they call for distinct types of remedial action. -/- . (shrink)

To be optimistic, it is standardly assumed, is to have positive expectations. I here argue that this definition is correct but captures only one variety of optimism – here called factual optimism. It leaves out two other important varieties of optimism. The first – focal optimism – corresponds to the idea of seeing the glass half full. The second – axiological optimism – consists in the view that good is stronger than bad. Those three varieties of optimism are irreducible to (...) each other and do not belong to a common kind. I define each of these, characterize their respective correctness conditions, and contrast hope with optimism. (shrink)

In free speech theory ‘speech’ has to be defined as a special term of art. I argue that much free speech discourse comes with a tacit commitment to a ‘Subtractive Approach’ to defining speech. As an initial default, all communicative acts are assumed to qualify as speech, before exceptions are made to ‘subtract’ those acts that don’t warrant the special legal protections owed to ‘speech’. I examine how different versions of the Subtractive Approach operate, and criticise them in terms of (...) their ability to yield a substantive definition of speech which covers all and only those forms of communicative action that – so our arguments for free speech indicate – really do merit special legal protection. In exploring alternative definitional approaches, I argue that what ultimately compromises definitional adequacy in this arena is a theoretical commitment to the significance of a single unified class of privileged communicative acts. I then propose an approach to free speech theory that eschews this theoretical commitment. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to explore the peculiar case of infectious logics, a group of systems obtained generalizing the semantic behavior characteristic of the -fragment of the logics of nonsense, such as the ones due to Bochvar and Halldén, among others. Here, we extend these logics with classical negations, and we furthermore show that some of these extended systems can be properly regarded as logics of formal inconsistency and logics of formal undeterminedness.

Some of the central questions that have been explored by Latin American and Latinx philosophers are questions of metaphilosophy. "Metaphilosophy" refers to philosophical reflections on the nature of philosophy itself. For example, we might ask: What is the purpose of doing philosophy? How does philosophy compare and contrast with other disciplines, such as science, theology, or literature? And what is the best way of categorizing the different kinds and traditions of philosophy? These are philosophical questions about philosophy as an activity (...) and as a discipline. In this chapter, we discuss some ways that Latin American and Latinx philosophers have addressed these and other metaphilosophical issues. Our focus will be on the following questions: What are the defining characteristics of Latin American philosophy and Latinx philosophy? Do they constitute distinctive traditions of philosophy, and if so, what is especially valuable about these traditions? (shrink)

In this article I seek to say what it is for something to count as a neglected disease. I argue that neglect should be defined in terms of efforts at prevention, mitigation and cure, and not solely in terms of research dollars per disability-adjusted life-year. I further argue that the trend towards multifactorialism and risk factor thinking in modern epidemiology has lent credibility to the erroneous view that the primary problem with neglected diseases is a lack of research. A more (...) restrictive contrastive model of disease is endorsed as better suited to the definition of neglected disease. (shrink)

In a series of recent publications, orofacial researchers have debated the question of how ‘bruxism’ should be defined for the purposes of accurate diagnosis and reliable clinical research. Following the principles of realism-based ontology, we performed an analysis of the arguments involved. This revealed that the disagreements rested primarily on inconsistent use of terms, so that issues of ontology were thus obfuscated by shortfalls in terminology. In this paper, we demonstrate how bruxism terminology can be improved by paying attention to (...) the relationships between (1) particulars and types, and (2) continuants and occurrents. (shrink)

Martha Kuhlman criticizes Milan Kundera for repeatedly depicting crowds in a negative light, contrasting his impressions with that of another novelist and observer of crowds. But how do we define the concept of a crowd? In this slightly light-hearted paper, I propose a definition and then note a problem with it and then propose another definition.

The method of reflective equilibrium (MRE) is a method of justification popularized by John Rawls and further developed by Norman Daniels, Michael DePaul, Folke Tersman, and Catherine Z. Elgin, among others. The basic idea is that epistemic agents have justified beliefs if they have succeeded in forming their beliefs into a harmonious system of beliefs which they reflectively judge to be the most plausible. Despite the common reference to MRE as a method, its mechanisms or rules are typically expressed in (...) a metaphorical or simplified manner and are therefore criticized as too vague. Recent efforts to counter this criticism have been directed towards the attempt to provide formal explications of MRE. This paper aims to supplement these efforts by providing an informal working definition of MRE. This approach challenges the view that MRE can adequately be characterized only in the negative as a set of anti-essentialisms. I argue that epistemic agents follow MRE iff they follow four interconnected rules, which are concerned with a minimalistic form of foundationalism, a minimalistic form of fallibilism, a moderate form of holism, and a minimalistic form of rationality. In the critical spirit of MRE, the corresponding working definition is, of course, provisional and revisable. In general, the aim is to contribute to a reflective equilibrium (RE) concerning MRE. If it is successful, this working definition provides a better grasp of the most basic elements of the method and thereby enhances our understanding of it. (shrink)

Scholars have disagreed on whether Cicero’s De Amicitia is a philosophically serious or even coherent work. Such criticisms, I believe, can be met by an examination of the successive accounts of friendship that the character of Gaius Laelius provides in the dialogue. I argue that the dialogue offers three such accounts of friendship which taken together provide a comprehensive and coherent account of friendship. Further, I defend Cicero’s account against criticisms that Aulus Gellius had raised in the 2nd century CE (...) (criticisms that have been repeated to the modern day). The problem of defining friendship is a thread that brings unity to the entire dialogue and shows Cicero philosophizing about both the origins of friendship and its dissolution, especially when the bonds of friendship are in tension with obligations to the political community. (shrink)

Definitions of animal welfare often invoke consciousness or sentience. Marian Stamp Dawkins has argued that to define animal welfare this way is a mistake. In Dawkins’s alternative view, an animal with good welfare is one that is healthy and “has what it wants.” The dispute highlights a source of strain on the concept of animal welfare: consciousness-involving definitions are better able to capture the normative significance of welfare, whereas consciousness-free definitions facilitate the validation of welfare indicators. I reflect on how (...) the field should respond to this strain, ultimately recommending against splitting the concept and in favor of consciousness-involving definitions. (shrink)

In this paper we present a new proposal for defining actual causation, i.e., the problem of deciding if one event caused another. We do so within the popular counterfactual tradition initiated by Lewis, which is characterised by attributing a fundamental role to counterfactual dependence. Unlike the currently prominent definitions, our approach proceeds from the ground up: we start from basic principles, and construct a definition of causation that satisfies them. We define the concepts of counterfactual dependence and production, and put (...) forward principles such that dependence is an unnecessary but sufficient condition for causation, whereas production is an insufficient but necessary condition. The resulting definition of causation is a suitable compromise between dependence and production. Every principle is introduced by means of a paradigmatic example of causation. We illustrate some of the benefits of our approach with two examples that have spelled trouble for other accounts. We make all of this formally precise using structural equations, which we extend with a timing over all events. (shrink)

This paper is an extended critical discussion of Jerrold Levinson's historical definition of art. I try out various different avenues of attack; it is not clear whether any of them is ultimately successful.

defining art conjunctively, that is, by defining the individual arts and joining these definitions in an exhaustive list. I suggest that the individual art forms are no easier to define than is the general category of art. As well, not everything falling within a given art form counts as art, not every instance of art in the given medium falls within the art form, and some artworks do not belong to an art form at all, so conjoining definitions of the (...) individual art forms (supposing they could be defined) would not map the extension of ’art’. Taken together, these problems indicate that the approach advocated here to art’s definition cannot be successful or convincing. (shrink)

McTaggart has an insight that changes of property rely on changes of tense (McTaggart 1908). As I show in this paper, he fails to define A-series as a series for changes of tense, and therefore his proof for the unreality of time is unsuccessful. A-series found in the proof is reduced to a number of mere indexicals of time, and this reduction is pushed forward in Dummett's defense. My aim in this paper is not only to check the validity of (...) their arguments but to investigate invincible difficulties faced in defining changes of tense. The latter is my main aim, and the former is a preliminary argument for it. (shrink)

It is a platitude that whereas language is mediated by convention, depiction is mediated by resemblance. But this platitude may be attacked on the grounds that resemblance is either insufficient for or incidental to depictive representation. I defend common sense from this attack by using Grice's analysis of meaning to specify the non-incidental role of resemblance in depictive representation.

We can simply define Gödel 1931 Incompleteness away by redefining the meaning of the standard definition of Incompleteness: A theory T is incomplete if and only if there is some sentence φ such that (T ⊬ φ) and (T ⊬ ¬φ). This definition construes the existence of self-contradictory expressions in a formal system as proof that this formal system is incomplete because self-contradictory expressions are neither provable nor disprovable in this formal system. Since self-contradictory expressions are neither provable nor disprovable (...) only because they are self-contradictory we could define them as unsound instead of defining the formal system as incomplete. (shrink)

Defining the distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic properties has turned out to be one of the most difficult and controversial tasks in contemporary metaphysics. It is generally assumed that a definition of intrinsicness should aim to avoid as many counterexamples as possible and reduce the notion to less controversial philosophical notions. In this paper, the author argues for a new methodological approach to defining intrinsicness. Rather than trying to cover as many intuitive examples as possible, a definition of intrinsicness should (...) reflect the crucial features of our intuitive understanding of the notion, and one of these features is that the intrinsic/extrinsic distinction has to be characterized in a non-reductive way. (shrink)

The notion of the human embryo is not immutable. Various scientific and technological breakthroughs in reproductive biology have compelled us to revisit the definition of the human embryo during the past 2 decades. Somatic cell nuclear transfer, oocyte haploidisation and, more recently, human stem cell-derived embryo models have challenged this scientific term, which has both ethical and legal repercussions. Here, we offer a legal perspective to identify a universally accepted definition of ‘embryo’ which could help to ease and unify the (...) regulation of such entities in different countries. (shrink)

Overview of the definition of art and its relationship to definitions of the individual art forms, with an eye to clarifying the issues separating dominant institutionalist and skeptical positions from non-skeptical, non-institutional ones. Section 2 indicates some of the key philosophical issues which intersect in discussions of the definition of art, and singles out some important areas of broad agreement and disagreement. Section 3 critically reviews some influential standard versions of institutionalism, and some more recent variations on them. Section 4 (...) discusses some recent reductionist approaches to definitional questions, which advocate a shift of philosophical focus from the macro- to the micro-level —from art to the individual art forms. Section 5 outlines an alternative, non-institutionalist and non-reductionist approach to definitional questions. (shrink)

Textual entailment is a relationship that obtains between fragments of text when one fragment in some sense implies the other fragment. The automation of textual entailment recognition supports a wide variety of text-based tasks, including information retrieval, information extraction, question answering, text summarization, and machine translation. Much ingenuity has been devoted to developing algorithms for identifying textual entailments, but relatively little to saying what textual entailment actually is. This article is a review of the logical and philosophical issues involved in (...) providing an adequate definition of textual entailment. We show that many natural definitions of textual entailment are refuted by counterexamples, including the most widely cited definition of Dagan et al. We then articulate and defend the following revised definition: T textually entails H = df typically, a human reading T would be justified in inferring the proposition expressed by H from the proposition expressed by T. We also show that textual entailment is context-sensitive, nontransitive, and nonmonotonic. (shrink)

The knowledge of the evident qualities of time, such as its all-encompassing unidirectional relentless change, does not provide answers as to what time is or why it occurs. Those qualities do not identify what it is in the universe that intrinsically has those qualities. Thus, previously it has not been possible to achieve an adequate definition of time that includes the answers to those questions. Now, with the discovery that the continuing-existence of space plays the role of time in the (...) universe, a complete definition of time is possible. (shrink)

The conflation of two fundamentally distinct issues has generated serious confusion in the philosophical and biological literature concerning the units of selection. The question of how a unit of selection of defined, theoretically, is rarely distinguished from the question of how to determine the empirical accuracy of claims--either specific or general--concerning which unit(s) is undergoing selection processes. In this paper, I begin by refining a definition of the unit of selection, first presented in the philosophical literature by William Wimsatt, which (...) is grounded in the structure of natural selection models. I then explore the implications of this structural definition for empirical evaluation of claims about units of selection. I consider criticisms of this view presented by Elliott Sober--criticisms taken by some (for example, Mayo and Gilinsky 1987) to provide definitive damage to the structuralist account. I shall show that Sober has misinterpreted the structuralist views; he knocks down a straw man in order to motivate his own causal account. Furthermore, I shall argue, Sober's causal account is dependent on the structuralist account that he rejects. I conclude by indicating how the refined structural definition can clarify which sorts of empirical evidence could be brought to bear on a controversial case involving units of selection. (shrink)

This essay examines the concept of leadership as it is commonly understood within the field of leadership studies today. The inquiry is framed by an analysis of three generally accepted definitions of leadership. I look at the selected definitions from four angles, which I call the four dimensions of leadership: the behavioral (what the leader does, or ought to do, that makes it leadership), the asymmetrical (in what sense a leader is different from the others in the group), the social (...) (what it is that the leader is leading), and the teleological (what the direction is). By doing this, I find that these definitions can be problematic, if instructively so. I identify two underlying concerns. The first problem is the tendency to fuse informal and formal leadership into a single concept. I argue that informal and formal leadership can be more helpfully understood, rather, as two separate, if sometimes overlapping, concepts, each needing its own definition and analysis. This is because formal leadership is a functional concept, while informal leadership is not; this entails not only that each type of leader is leading a different type of entity, but also that each is judged by different standards. The second problem is, paradoxically, a bias against leadership. To put this less polemically: scholars who recognize that organizational success can be hindered by excessive emphasis upon hierarchy, and who thus study the dynamics of egalitarian collaboration, can inadvertently generate confusion by allowing the honorific of “leadership” to be applied also to that work. So, I propose definitions of the two key concepts, formal and informal leadership, with the suggestion that this provides a helpful method of sorting leadership scholarship into three categories: formal leadership; informal leadership; and egalitarianism. (shrink)

Although a considerable degree of precision has been introduced both into the formulation and the discussion of ontological theories by the use of formal methods there is still a remarkable indefiniteness about foundational issues. In particular it is not clear what an ontological category is and why we regard something as an ontological category. This is amazing given that the notion of ontological category is in fact the most basic of the whole of ontology: it is what this discipline is (...) about. (shrink)

Art is a creative phenomenon which changes constantly, not just insofar as it is being created continually, but also in the very meaning of ‘art.’ Finding a suitable definition of art is no easy task and it has been the subject of much inquiry throughout artistic expression. This paper suggests a crucial distinction between ‘art forms’ and ‘forms of art’ is necessary in order to better understand art. The latter of these corresponds to that which we would typically call art (...) such as painting, singing, etc. The former corresponds to the form out of which these take shape, movement, speech, etc. With this distinction set out, it becomes clearer that art and the aesthetic is rooted in the properties of the ‘thing’ such as the color, shape, and the texture, rather than the product of creation itself. Thus, the future of art will bring a new aesthetic in which these properties become recognized as art and as such there will be an aesthetic of everyday life. (shrink)