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Results for 'Gunnar O. Klein'
970 found
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- Concept systems and ontologies: Recommendations for basic terminology.Gunnar O. Klein & Barry Smith - 2010 - Transactions of the Japanese Society for Artificial Intelligence 25 (3):433-441.This is the third draft of a paper that aims to clarify the apparent contradictions in the views presented in certain standards and other specifications of health informatics systems, contradictions which come to light when the latter are evaluated from the perspective of realist philosophy. One of the origins of this document was Klein’s discussion paper of 2005-07-02 entitled “Conceptology vs Reality” and the responses from Smith, as well as the several hours of discussions during the 2005 MIE meeting (...)
- In Defense of Wishful Thinking: James, Quine, Emotions, and the Web of Belief.Alexander Klein - 2017 - In Sarin Marchetti & Maria Baghramian (eds.), Pragmatism and the European Traditions: Encounters with Analytic Philosophy and Phenomenology Before the Great Divide. London and New York: Routledge. pp. 228-250.What is W. V. O. Quine’s relationship to classical pragmatism? Although he resists the comparison to William James in particular, commentators have seen an affinity between his “web of belief” model of theory confirmation and James’s claim that our beliefs form a “stock” that faces new experience as a corporate body. I argue that the similarity is only superficial. James thinks our web of beliefs should be responsive not just to perceptual but also to emotional experiences in some cases; Quine (...)
- Cunoașterea științifică, funcție a psihicului uman.Adrian Klein - 2022 - Cunoașterea Științifică 1 (1):27-30.Cunoașterea științifică e o funcție a psihicului uman, a conștiinței de sine. Pentru a defini acest termen în mod inechivoc, va trebui în primul rând să abordăm analitic conștiința umană ca atare, un subiect mult controversat, și pe drept.
- Fenomenologia e Estética Comparativa:antropometrias e (in)visibilidades nos Corpus. Para um diálogo entre Yves Klein e Merleau-Ponty.Paulo Alexandre E. Castro - 2020 - Revista Philia Filosofia, Literatura e Arte 2 (1):485-509.Este ensaio estabelece uma comparação estética e fenomenológica entre os pensamentos de Yves-Klein e Merleau-Ponty. Se o pintor materializou as suas reflexões e concepções em obra pictórica, o fenomenólogo francês dissertou na escrita filosófica o resultado da sua reflexão. Da análise conjunta entre um e outro resulta esta fenomenologia e estética comparativa que apresenta alguns conceitos fundamentais que alimentaram essas reflexões, tais como a visibilidade, o corpo, o mundo. Assim, para além dessa comparação, este ensaio viabiliza o diálogo entre (...)
- (1 other version)Cunoașterea Științifică, Volumul 1, 2022.Nicolae Sfetcu - 2022 - Cunoașterea Științifică 1.Revista Cunoașterea Științifică este o publicație trimestrială din domeniile științei și filosofiei, și domenii conexe de studiu și practică. -/- Cuprins: -/- EDITORIALE Cunoașterea, de Nicolae Sfetcu Cuvânt introductiv pentru (și despre) „Cunoașterea Științifică”, de Adrian Klein Viitorul științei – Știința științelor, de Nicolae Sfetcu -/- ȘTIINȚE NATURALE Teste gravitaționale, de Nicolae Sfetcu Inside, and Beyond „Nothingness”, de Adrian Klein și Robert Neil Boyd Anomalii ale relativității generale, de Nicolae Sfetcu -/- ȘTIINȚE SOCIALE Fondarea Uniunii Europene și evoluția (...)
- Hacia una nueva topología de la juridicidad: contribuciones críticas al pensar iusfilosófico.Marina Gorali - 2015 - Revista Instituto de Investigaciones Ambrosio Gioja 14.La Botella de Klein es una figura topológica no orientable que no posee exterior ni interior. Es una superficie que implica un autoatravesamiento: la torsión que conlleva hace que los giros que la rodean se in-viertan después de dar la primera vuelta. Su construcción se gesta a partir de dos bandas de Moebius de torsión diferente pegadas en su borde. Como el sin-fin de las mil y una noches o la escena dentro de la escena, el trazado topológico de (...)
- (1 other version)Cunoașterea Științifică, Volumul 1, Numărul 1, Septembrie 2022.Sfetcu Nicolae (ed.) - 2022 - Bucharest: MultiMedia Publishing.Revista Cunoașterea Științifică este o publicație trimestrială din domeniile științei și filosofiei, și domenii conexe de studiu și practică. -/- Cuprins: -/- EDITORIAL Cunoașterea, de Nicolae Sfetcu Cuvânt introductiv pentru (și despre) „Cunoașterea Științifică”, de Adrian Klein -/- ȘTIINȚE NATURALE Teste gravitaționale, de Nicolae Sfetcu Inside, and Beyond „Nothingness”, de Adrian Klein și Robert Neil Boyd -/- ȘTIINȚE SOCIALE Fondarea Uniunii Europene și evoluția tratatelor comunității europene, de Alexandru Cristian Istoria eugeniei, de Nicolae Sfetcu Contextul intrării României în (...)
- Online Deliberation: Design, Research, and Practice.Todd Davies & Seeta Peña Gangadharan (eds.) - 2009 - CSLI Publications/University of Chicago Press.Can new technology enhance purpose-driven, democratic dialogue in groups, governments, and societies? Online Deliberation: Design, Research, and Practice is the first book that attempts to sample the full range of work on online deliberation, forging new connections between academic research, technology designers, and practitioners. Since some of the most exciting innovations have occurred outside of traditional institutions, and those involved have often worked in relative isolation from each other, work in this growing field has often failed to reflect the full (...)
- Estabelecimento da Gestação nos Animais.Emanuel Isaque Cordeiro da Silva - manuscriptOBJETIVO A gestação nos mamíferos domésticos é um processo fisiológico que implica mudanças físicas, metabólicas e hormonais na fêmea, que culminam com o nascimento de um novo indivíduo. Desta forma, a compreensão de tais mudanças e como estas favorecem um ambiente ideal de desenvolvimento embrionário inicial, até a placentação e a fisiologia envolvidas durante esses processos é fundamental na tomada de decisões quanto à saúde reprodutiva da fêmea, na seleção de futuras matrizes e até mesmo para a saúde fetal e (...)
- Corporate Crocodile Tears? On the Reactive Attitudes of Corporate Agents.Gunnar Björnsson & Kendy Hess - 2017 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 94 (2):273–298.Recently, a number of people have argued that certain entities embodied by groups of agents themselves qualify as agents, with their own beliefs, desires, and intentions; even, some claim, as moral agents. However, others have independently argued that fully-fledged moral agency involves a capacity for reactive attitudes such as guilt and indignation, and these capacities might seem beyond the ken of “collective” or “ corporate ” agents. Individuals embodying such agents can of course be ashamed, proud, or indignant about what (...)
- Teleology and function in non-living nature.Gunnar Babcock - 2023 - Synthese 201 (4):1-20.There’s a general assumption that teleology and function do not exist in inanimate nature. Throughout biology, it is generally taken as granted that teleology (or teleonomy) and functions are not only unique to life, but perhaps even a defining quality of life. For many, it’s obvious that rocks, water, and the like, are not teleological, nor could they possibly have stand-alone functions. This idea - that teleology and function are unique to life - is the target of this paper. I (...)
- Explaining (away) the epistemic condition on moral responsibility.Gunnar Björnsson - 2017 - In Philip Robichaud & Jan Wieland (eds.), Responsibility - The Epistemic Condition. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 146–162.It is clear that lack of awareness of the consequences of an action can undermine moral responsibility and blame for these consequences. But when and how it does so is controversial. Sometimes an agent believing that the outcome might occur is excused because it seemed unlikely to her, and sometimes an agent having no idea that it would occur is nevertheless to blame. A low or zero degree of belief might seem to excuse unless the agent “should have known better”, (...)
- Resolving teleology's false dilemma.Gunnar Babcock & Dan McShea - 2023 - Biological Journal of the Linnean Society 139 (4):415-432.This paper argues that the account of teleology previously proposed by the authors is consistent with the physical determinism that is implicit across many of the sciences. We suggest that much of the current aversion to teleological thinking found in the sciences is rooted in debates that can be traced back to ancient natural science, which pitted mechanistic and deterministic theories against teleological ones. These debates saw a deterministic world as one where freedom and agency is impossible. And, because teleological (...)
- Klein and Loftus's model of trait self-knowledge: The importance of familiarizing oneself with the foundational research prior to reading about its neuropsychological applications.Stan Klein - 2013 - Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 7:1-3.In this article I want to alert investigators who are familiar only with our neuropsychological investigations of self-knowledge to our earlier work on model construction. A familiarity with this foundational research can help avert concerns and issues likely to arise if one is aware only of neuropsychological extensions of our work.
- Explaining away epistemic skepticism about culpability.Gunnar Björnsson - 2013 - In David Shoemaker (ed.), Oxford studies in agency and responsibility. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 141–164.Recently, a number of authors have suggested that the epistemic condition on moral responsibility makes blameworthiness much less common than we ordinarily suppose, and much harder to identify. This paper argues that such epistemically based responsibility skepticism is mistaken. Section 2 sketches a general account of moral responsibility, building on the Strawsonian idea that blame and credit relates to the agent’s quality of will. Section 3 explains how this account deals with central cases that motivate epistemic skepticism and how it (...)
- Collective responsibility and collective obligations without collective moral agents.Gunnar Björnsson - 2020 - In Saba Bazargan-Forward & Deborah Tollefsen (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Collective Responsibility. Routledge.It is commonplace to attribute obligations to φ or blameworthiness for φ-ing to groups even when no member has an obligation to φ or is individually blameworthy for not φ-ing. Such non-distributive attributions can seem problematic in cases where the group is not a moral agent in its own right. In response, it has been argued both that non-agential groups can have the capabilities requisite to have obligations of their own, and that group obligations can be understood in terms of (...)
- On individual and shared obligations: in defense of the activist’s perspective.Gunnar Björnsson - 2021 - In Budolfson Mark, McPherson Tristram & Plunkett David (eds.), Philosophy and Climate Change. Oxford University Press.We naturally attribute obligations to groups, and take such obligations to have consequences for the obligations of group members. The threat posed by anthropogenic climate change provides an urgent case. It seems that we, together, have an obligation to prevent climate catastrophe, and that we, as individuals, have an obligation to contribute. However, understood strictly, attributions of obligations to groups might seem illegitimate. On the one hand, the groups in question—the people alive today, say—are rarely fully-fledged moral agents, making it (...)
- Essentially Shared Obligations.Gunnar Björnsson - 2014 - Midwest Studies in Philosophy 38 (1):103-120.This paper lists a number of puzzles for shared obligations – puzzles about the role of individual influence, individual reasons to contribute towards fulfilling the obligation, about what makes someone a member of a group sharing an obligation, and the relation between agency and obligation – and proposes to solve them based on a general analysis of obligations. On the resulting view, shared obligations do not presuppose joint agency.
- The Curious Case of the Self-Refuting Straw Man: Trafimow and Earp’s Response to Klein (2014).Stan Klein - 2016 - Theory and Psychology 26:549– 556.In their critique of Klein (2014a), Trafimow and Earp present two theses. First, they argue that, contra Klein, a well-specified theory is not a necessary condition for successful replication. Second, they contend that even when there is a well-specified theory, replication depends more on auxiliary assumptions than on theory proper. I take issue with both claims, arguing that (a) their first thesis confuses a material conditional (what I said) with a modal claim (T&E’s misreading of what I said), (...)
- Outsourcing the deep self: Deep self discordance does not explain away intuitions in manipulation arguments.Gunnar Björnsson - 2016 - Philosophical Psychology 29 (5):637-653.According to manipulation arguments for incompatibilism, manipulation might undermine an agent’s responsibility even when the agent satisfies plausible compatibilist conditions on responsibility. According to Sripada, however, empirical data suggest that people take manipulation to undermine responsibility largely because they think that the manipulated act is in discord with the agent’s “deep self,” thus violating the plausible compatibilist condition of deep self concordance. This paper defends Sripada’s general methodological approach but presents data that strongly suggest that, contrary to Sripada’s contention, most (...)
- Responsibility: Expected, Taken, Recognized.Gunnar Björnsson - forthcoming - In Cheshire Calhoun, Jules Holroyd, Heidi Maibom & Gunnar Björnsson (eds.), A Social Practice Account of Responsible Persons.In her Descartes Lectures, Cheshire Calhoun argues that “responsible person” is a valuable cross-temporal status assigned by default to fellow social participants. Responsible persons, on Calhoun’s proposal, are (i) accountable, (ii) compliant with at least basic normative expectations, and (iii) disposed to take responsibility—to promote good ends in ways that are not normatively expected. The third component in particular goes beyond what is standardly discussed in debates about moral responsibility, where the relation to what is normatively expected is central. In (...)
- Metaethical Contextualism Defended.Gunnar Björnsson & Stephen Finlay - 2010 - Ethics 121 (1):7-36.We defend a contextualist account of deontic judgments as relativized both to (i) information and to (ii) standards or ends, against recent objections that turn on practices of moral disagreement. Kolodny & MacFarlane argue that information-relative contextualism cannot accommodate the connection between deliberation and advice; we suggest in response that they misidentify the basic concerns of deliberating agents. For pragmatic reasons, semantic assessments of normative claims sometimes are evaluations of propositions other than those asserted. Weatherson, Schroeder and others have raised (...)
- An externalist teleology.Gunnar Babcock & Daniel W. McShea - 2021 - Synthese 199 (3-4):8755-8780.Teleology has a complicated history in the biological sciences. Some have argued that Darwin’s theory has allowed biology to purge itself of teleological explanations. Others have been content to retain teleology and to treat it as metaphorical, or have sought to replace it with less problematic notions like teleonomy. And still others have tried to naturalize it in a way that distances it from the vitalism of the nineteenth century, focusing on the role that function plays in teleological explanation. No (...)
- Moral Attitudes for Non-Cognitivists: Solving the Specification Problem.Gunnar Björnsson & Tristram McPherson - 2014 - Mind 123 (489):1-38.Moral non-cognitivists hope to explain the nature of moral agreement and disagreement as agreement and disagreement in non-cognitive attitudes. In doing so, they take on the task of identifying the relevant attitudes, distinguishing the non-cognitive attitudes corresponding to judgements of moral wrongness, for example, from attitudes involved in aesthetic disapproval or the sports fan’s disapproval of her team’s performance. We begin this paper by showing that there is a simple recipe for generating apparent counterexamples to any informative specification of the (...)
- The Explanatory Component of Moral Responsibility.Gunnar Björnsson & Karl Persson - 2012 - Noûs 46 (2):326-354.In this paper, we do three things. First, we put forth a novel hypothesis about judgments of moral responsibility according to which such judgments are a species of explanatory judgments. Second, we argue that this hypothesis explains both some general features of everyday thinking about responsibility and the appeal of skeptical arguments against moral responsibility. Finally, we argue that, if correct, the hypothesis provides a defense against these skeptical arguments.
- Do ‘Objectivist’ Features of Moral Discourse and Thinking Support Moral Objectivism?Gunnar Björnsson - 2012 - The Journal of Ethics 16 (4):367-393.Many philosophers think that moral objectivism is supported by stable features of moral discourse and thinking. When engaged in moral reasoning and discourse, people behave ‘as if’ objectivism were correct, and the seemingly most straightforward way of making sense of this is to assume that objectivism is correct; this is how we think that such behavior is explained in paradigmatically objectivist domains. By comparison, relativist, error-theoretic or non-cognitivist accounts of this behavior seem contrived and ad hoc. After explaining why this (...)
- Group Duties Without Decision-Making Procedures.Gunnar Björnsson - 2020 - Journal of Social Ontology 6 (1):127-139.Stephanie Collins’ Group Duties offers interesting new arguments and brings together numerous interconnected issues that have hitherto been treated separately. My critical commentary focuses on two particularly original and central claims of the book: (1) Only groups that are united under a group-level decision-making procedure can bear duties. (2) Attributions of duties to other groups should be understood as attributions of “coordination duties” to each member of the group, duties to take steps responsive to the others with a view to (...)
- Joint responsibility without individual control: Applying the Explanation Hypothesis.Gunnar Björnsson - 2011 - In Nicole A. Vincent, Ibo van de Poel & Jeroen van den Hoven (eds.), Moral Responsibility: Beyond Free Will and Determinism. Springer.This paper introduces a new family of cases where agents are jointly morally responsible for outcomes over which they have no individual control, a family that resists standard ways of understanding outcome responsibility. First, the agents in these cases do not individually facilitate the outcomes and would not seem individually responsible for them if the other agents were replaced by non-agential causes. This undermines attempts to understand joint responsibility as overlapping individual responsibility; the responsibility in question is essentially joint. Second, (...)
- The Significance of Ethical Disagreement for Theories of Ethical Thought and Talk.Gunnar Björnsson - 2018 - In Tristram Colin McPherson & David Plunkett (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Metaethics. New York: Routledge. pp. 275-291.This chapter has two sections, each focusing on a distinct way in which ethical disagreement and variations in ethical judgment matter for theories of ethical thought and talk. In the first section, we look at how the variation poses problems for both cognitivist and non-cognitivist ways of specifying the nature of ethical judgments. In the second, we look at how disagreement phenomena have been taken to undermine cognitivist accounts, but also at how the seeming variation in cognitive and non-cognitive contents (...)
- Are Synthetic Genomes Parts of a Genetic Lineage?Gunnar Babcock - 2021 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 72 (4):995-1011.Biologists are nearing the creation of the first fully synthetic eukaryotic genome. Does this mean that we still soon be able to create genomes that are parts of an existing genetic lineage? If so, it might be possible to bring back extinct species. But do genomes that are synthetically assembled, no matter how similar they are to native genomes, really belong to the genetic lineage on which they were modelled? This article will argue that they are situated within the same (...)
- A Unified Empirical Account of Responsibility Judgments.Gunnar Björnsson & Karl Persson - 2012 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 87 (3):611-639.Skeptical worries about moral responsibility seem to be widely appreciated and deeply felt. To address these worries—if nothing else to show that they are mistaken—theories of moral responsibility need to relate to whatever concept of responsibility underlies the worries. Unfortunately, the nature of that concept has proved hard to pin down. Not only do philosophers have conflicting intuitions; numerous recent empirical studies have suggested that both prosaic responsibility judgments and incompatibilist intuitions among the folk are influenced by a number of (...)
- The Pragmatics of Insensitive Assessments: Understanding The Relativity of Assessments of Judgments of Personal Taste, Epistemic Modals, and More.Gunnar Björnsson & Alexander Almér - 2010 - In Gunnar Björnsson & Alexander Almér (eds.), The Baltic International Yearbook of Cognition, Logic and Communication. pp. 1-45.In assessing the veridicality of utterances, we normally seem to assess the satisfaction of conditions that the speaker had been concerned to get right in making the utterance. However, the debate about assessor-relativism about epistemic modals, predicates of taste, gradable adjectives and conditionals has been largely driven by cases in which seemingly felicitous assessments of utterances are insensitive to aspects of the context of utterance that were highly relevant to the speaker’s choice of words. In this paper, we offer an (...)
- Strategic Content: Representations of Epistemic Modality in Biosemantics.Gunnar Björnsson - 2018 - Theoria 84 (3):259-277.A central idea in Ruth Millikan’s biosemantics is that a representation’s content is restricted to conditions required for the normal success of actions that it has as its function to guide. This paper raises and responds to a problem for this idea. The problem is that the success requirement seems to block us from saying that epistemic modal judgments represent our epistemic circumstances. For the normal success of actions guided by these judgments seems to depend on what is actually the (...)
- Free Will Skepticism and Bypassing.Gunnar Björnsson & Derk Pereboom - 2014 - In Walter Sinnott-Armstrong (ed.), Moral Psychology, Vol. 4. MIT Press. pp. 27–35.Discusses Eddy Nahmias' “Is Free Will an Illusion?”.
- Determinism and attributions of consciousness.Gunnar Björnsson & Joshua Shepherd - 2020 - Philosophical Psychology 33 (4):549-568.The studies we report indicate that it is possible to manipulate explicit ascriptions of consciousness by manipulating whether an agent’s behavior is deterministically caused. In addition, we explore whether this impact of determinism on consciousness is direct, or mediated by notions linked to agency – notions like moral responsibility, free will, deliberate choice, and sensitivity to moral reasons. We provide evidence of mediation. This result extends work on attributions of consciousness and their connection to attributions of agency by Adam Arico, (...)
- (1 other version)Traditional and Experimental Approaches to Free Will and Moral Responsibility.Gunnar Björnsson & Derk Pereboom - 2016 - In Wesley Buckwalter & Justin Sytsma (eds.), Blackwell Companion to Experimental Philosophy. Malden, MA: Blackwell. pp. 142-57.Examines the relevance of empirical studies of responsibility judgments for traditional philosophical concerns about free will and moral responsibility. We argue that experimental philosophy is relevant to the traditional debates, but that setting up experiments and interpreting data in just the right way is no less difficult than negotiating traditional philosophical arguments. Both routes are valuable, but so far neither promises a way to secure significant agreement among the competing parties. To illustrate, we focus on three sorts of issues. For (...)
- Goal directedness and the field concept.Gunnar Babcock & McShea Dan - forthcoming - Philosophy of Science.A long-standing problem in understanding goal-directed systems has been the insufficiency of mechanistic explanations to make sense of them. This paper offers a solution to this problem. It begins by observing the limitations of mechanistic decompositions when it comes to understanding physical fields. We argue that introducing the field concept, as it has been developed in field theory, alongside mechanisms is able to provide an account of goal directedness in the sciences.
- Blame, deserved guilt, and harms to standing.Gunnar Björnsson - 2022 - In Andreas Carlsson (ed.), Self-Blame and Moral Responsibility. New York, USA: Cambridge University Press. pp. 198–216.Central cases of moral blame suggest that blame presupposes that its target deserves to feel guilty, and that if one is blameworthy to some degree, one deserves to feel guilt to a corresponding degree. This, some think, is what explains why being blameworthy for something presupposes having had a strong kind of control over it: only given such control is the suffering involved in feeling guilt deserved. This chapter argues that all this is wrong. As evidenced by a wider range (...)
- Internalists Beware—we Might all be Amoralists!Gunnar Björnsson & Ragnar Francén Olinder - 2013 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 91 (1):1-14.Standard motivational internalism is the claim that by a priori or conceptual necessity, a psychological state is a moral opinion only if it is suitably related to moral motivation. Many philosophers, the authors of this paper included, have assumed that this claim is supported by intuitions to the effect that amoralists—people not suitably related to such motivation—lack moral opinions proper. In this paper we argue that this assumption is mistaken, seeming plausible only because defenders of standard internalism have failed to (...)
- Creating a World in the Head: The Conscious Apprehension of Neural Content Originating from Internal Sources.Stan Klein & Judith Loftus - forthcoming - Psychology of Consciousness: Theory, Research, and Practice.Klein, Nguyen, & Zhang (in press) argued that the evolutionary transition from respondent to agent during the Cambrian Explosion would be a promising vantage point from which to gain insight into the evolution of organic sentience. They focused on how increased competition for resources -- in consequence of the proliferation of new, neurally sophisticated life-forms -- made awareness of the external world (in the service of agentic acts) an adaptive priority. The explanatory scope of Klein et al (in (...)
- Being implicated: on the fittingness of guilt and indignation over outcomes.Gunnar Björnsson - 2021 - Philosophical Studies 178 (11):1–18.When is it fitting for an agent to feel guilt over an outcome, and for others to be morally indignant with her over it? A popular answer requires that the outcome happened because of the agent, or that the agent was a cause of the outcome. This paper reviews some of what makes this causal-explanatory view attractive before turning to two kinds of problem cases: cases of collective harms and cases of fungible switching. These, it is argued, motivate a related (...)
- How effects depend on their causes, why causal transitivity fails, and why we care about causation.Gunnar Björnsson - 2007 - Philosophical Studies 133 (3):349-390.Despite recent efforts to improve on counterfactual theories of causation, failures to explain how effects depend on their causes are still manifest in a variety of cases. In particular, theories that do a decent job explaining cases of causal preemption have problems accounting for cases of causal intransitivity. Moreover, the increasing complexity of the counterfactual accounts makes it difficult to see why the concept of causation would be such a central part of our cognition. In this paper, I propose an (...)
- Incompatibilism and "Bypassed" Agency.Gunnar Björnsson - 2014 - In Alfred R. Mele (ed.), Surrounding Free Will: Philosophy, Psychology, Neuroscience. New York: Oup Usa. pp. 95–112.Eddy Nahmias and Dylan Murray have recently argued that when people take agents to lack responsibility in deterministic scenarios, they do so because they take agents’ beliefs, desires and decisions to be bypassed, having no effect on their actions. This might seem like an improbable mistake, but the Bypass Hypothesis is bolstered by intriguing experimental data. Moreover, if the hypothesis is correct, it provides a straightforward error theory for incompatibilist intuitions. This chapter argues that the Bypass Hypothesis, although promising and (...)
- Asexual organisms, identity and vertical gene transfer.Gunnar Babcock - 2020 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 81:101265.This paper poses a problem for traditional phylogenetics: The identity of organisms that reproduce through fission can be understood in several different ways. This prompts questions about how to differentiate parent organisms from their offspring, making vertical gene transfer unclear. Differentiating between parents and offspring stems from what I call the identity problem. How the problem is resolved has implications for phylogenetic groupings. If the identity of a particular asexual organism persists through fission, the vertical lineage on a phylogenetic tree (...)
- 'Must', 'Ought' and the Structure of Standards.Gunnar Björnsson & Robert Shanklin - 2016 - In Olivier Roy, Allard Tamminga & Malte Willer (eds.), Deontic Logic and Normative Systems. London, UK: College Publications. pp. 33–48.This paper concerns the semantic difference between strong and weak neces-sity modals. First we identify a number of explananda: their well-known in-tuitive difference in strength between ‘must’ and ‘ought’ as well as differ-ences in connections to probabilistic considerations and acts of requiring and recommending. Here we argue that important extant analyses of the se-mantic differences, though tailored to account for some of these aspects, fail to account for all. We proceed to suggest that the difference between ’ought’ and ’must’ lies (...)
- If you believe in positive facts, you should believe in negative facts.Gunnar Björnsson - 2007 - Hommage À Wlodek. Philosophical Papers Dedicated to Wlodek Rabinowicz.Substantial metaphysical theory has long struggled with the question of negative facts, facts capable of making it true that Valerie isn’t vigorous. This paper argues that there is an elegant solution to these problems available to anyone who thinks that there are positive facts. Bradley’s regress and considerations of ontological parsimony show that an object’s having a property is an affair internal to the object and the property, just as numerical identity and distinctness are internal to the entities that are (...)
- Normative Responsibilities: Structure and Sources.Gunnar Björnsson & Bengt Brülde - 2016 - In Kristien Hens, Daniela Cutas & Dorothee Horstkötter (eds.), Parental Responsibility in the Context of Neuroscience and Genetics. Cham: Springer International Publishing. pp. 13–33.Attributions of what we shall call normative responsibilities play a central role in everyday moral thinking. It is commonly thought, for example, that parents are responsible for the wellbeing of their children, and that this has important normative consequences. Depending on context, it might mean that parents are morally required to bring their children to the doctor, feed them well, attend to their emotional needs, or to see to it that someone else does. Similarly, it is sometimes argued that countries (...)
- Motivational internalism and folk intuitions.Gunnar Björnsson, John Eriksson, Caj Strandberg, Ragnar Francén Olinder & Fredrik Björklund - 2015 - Philosophical Psychology 28 (5):715-734.Motivational internalism postulates a necessary connection between moral judgments and motivation. In arguing for and against internalism, metaethicists traditionally appeal to intuitions about cases, but crucial cases often yield conflicting intuitions. One way to try to make progress, possibly uncovering theoretical bias and revealing whether people have conceptions of moral judgments required for noncognitivist accounts of moral disagreement, is to investigate non-philosophers' willingness to attribute moral judgments. A pioneering study by Shaun Nichols seemed to undermine internalism, as a large majority (...)
- Memory and the Sense of Personal Identity.Stan Klein & Shaun Nichols - 2012 - Mind 121 (483):677-702.Memory of past episodes provides a sense of personal identity — the sense that I am the same person as someone in the past. We present a neurological case study of a patient who has accurate memories of scenes from his past, but for whom the memories lack the sense of mineness. On the basis of this case study, we propose that the sense of identity derives from two components, one delivering the content of the memory and the other generating (...)
- Disagreement, correctness, and the evidence for metaethical absolutism.Gunnar Björnsson - 2013 - In Russ Shafer-Landau (ed.), Oxford Studies in Metaethics, Volume 8. Oxford, GB: Oxford University Press.Metaethical absolutism is the view that moral concepts have non-relative satisfaction conditions that are constant across judges and their particular beliefs, attitudes, and cultural embedding. If it is correct, there is an important sense in which parties of moral disputes are concerned to get the same things right, such that their disputes can be settled by the facts. If it is not correct, as various forms of relativism and non-cognitivism imply, such coordination of concerns will be limited. The most influential (...)
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