It is common for philosophers to argue that psychopaths are not morally responsible because they lack some of the essential capacities for morality. In legal terms, they are criminally insane. Typically, however, the insanity defense is not available to psychopaths. The primary reason is that they appear to have the knowledge and understanding required under the M’Naghten Rules. However, it has been argued that what is required for moral and legal responsibility is ‘deep’ moral understanding, something that psychopaths do not (...) have either due to their lacking empathy or practical reason. In the first part of the paper, I argue that psychopaths do not lack the abilities required for deep moral understanding, although they have deficits in those areas. According the M’Naghten Rules, therefore, psychopaths are not insane. Under a less strict formulation of the insanity plea, like the Model Penal Code, however, there is a good case to be made for their lacking substantial capacity. I argue that because psychopathy is an essentially moral disorder, and because of the nature of psychopathic violence, psychopaths should not be excused under the insanity plea. It would be tantamount to excusing someone for committing a crime because they are bad. Arguably, this contravenes the entire system of law. (shrink)

This paper describes an Intelligent Tutoring System for helping users with ADO.NET called ADO-Tutor. The Intelligent Tutoring System was designed and developed using (ITSB) authoring tool for building intelligent educational systems. The user learns through the intelligent tutoring system ADO.NET, the technology used by Microsoft.NET to connect to databases. The material includes lessons, examples, and questions. Through the feedback provided by the intelligent tutoring system, the user's understanding of the material is assessed, and accordingly can be guided to different difficulty (...) level of exercises and/or the lessons. The Intelligent Tutoring System was evaluated by a group of users and the results were more than satisfactory in terms of the quality of the material and the design of the system. (shrink)

Abstract: Many, if not most philosophers, deny that a sentence like ‘Sherlock Holmes smokes’ could be true. However, this attitude conflicts with the assignment of true to that sentence by natural language speakers. Furthermore, this process of assigning truth values to sentences like ‘Sherlock Holes smokes’ seems indistinguishable from the process that leads speakers to assign true to other sentences, those like ‘Bertrand Russell smokes’. I will explore the idea that when speakers assign the value true to the first sentence, (...) they are not mistaken or confused — that we ought to take these assignments at face value. I show how the most popular alternative to this idea is inadequate for explaining various sentences involving fictional names. In addition, I offer evidence that these truth value assignments to sentences are tracking semantic content rather than pragmatic effects. (shrink)

The concept of downward causation is frequently used in an explanatory capacity in biology to account for certain regularities and processes. Some philosophers, however, argue that downward causation is metaphysically incoherent, providing three main objections. Underlying these objections is the assumption that entities are connected by compositional hierarchies of levels of organization. In this paper, I introduce the notions of weak and strong compositional relations using examples from evolutionary developmental biology. I argue that downward causation becomes unproblematic if we use (...) features of interventionist theories of causation to explain the causal relations between levels. I show that an interventionist account of downward causation successfully responds to the three central objections to downward causation in the philosophical literature and I clarify the explanatory usefulness of the concept in biology. As such, this paper provides an epistemic solution to demystify downward causation in the context of scientific practice. The solution proposed is compatible with how biologists seem to use a concept of downward causation fruitfully in their work. (shrink)

The role of reciprocal causation in Extended Evolutionary Synthesis (EES) is controversial. Proponents of EES argue that reciprocal causation is a key innovation, underpinning the necessity of EES. Conversely, critics of the EES maintain that Standard Evolutionary Theory (SET) adequately encompasses the concept of reciprocal causation, challenging the need for EES. This skepticism is rooted in two primary critiques. First, the mischaracterization of causal dynamics within SET by EES advocates leads to a misrepresentation of SET. Second, the oversight of how (...) SET incorporates and acknowledges instances of reciprocal causation leads to claims about the empirical inaptness of SET. As a result, the debate has reached an impasse, with limited progress towards a constructive examination of reciprocal causation’s significance to evolutionary explanations. This paper introduces the scope argument, which examines reciprocal causation through timescales and grain of explanations. This approach revitalizes the debate in two ways. First, reframing the debate in terms of scope clarifies the role of reciprocal causation by allowing research programs to specify targets of explanation. Second, the elements of scope (timescales and grain) elucidate the epistemic advantage of reciprocal causation in the respective research programs in question. (shrink)

Many spectacular claims about psychopaths are circulated. This contribution aims at providing the reader with the more complex reality of the phenomenon (or phenomena), and to point to issues of particular interest to philosophers working in moral psychology and moral theory. I first discuss the current evidence regarding psychopaths’ deficient empathy and decision-making skills. I then explore what difference it makes to our thinking whether we regard their deficit dimensionally (as involving abilities that are on or off) and whether we (...) focus on primary or secondary psychopathy. My conclusion is that most grand claims about psychopathy settling long-standing debates in moral philosophy and psychology are overblown, but there is much to be learnt from this disorder when it comes to formulating modern theories of moral psychology. (shrink)

Fictional names present unique challenges for semantic theories of proper names, challenges strong enough to warrant an account of names different from the standard treatment. The theory developed in this paper is motivated by a puzzle that depends on four assumptions: our intuitive assessment of the truth values of certain sentences, the most straightforward treatment of their syntactic structure, semantic compositionality, and metaphysical scruples strong enough to rule out fictional entities, at least. It is shown that these four assumptions, taken (...) together, are inconsistent with referentialism, the common view that names are uniformly associated with ordinary individuals as their semantic value. Instead, the view presented here interprets names as context-sensitive expressions, associated in a context of utterance with a particular act of introduction, or dubbing, which is then used to determine their semantic value. Some dubbings are referential, which associate names with ordinary individuals as their semantic values; others are fictional, which associate names, instead, with sets of properties. Since the semantic values of names can be of different sorts, the semantic rule interpreting predication must be complex as well. In the body of the paper, I show how this new treatment of names allows us to solve our original puzzle. I defend the complexity of the semantic predication rule, and address additional worries about ontological commitment. (shrink)

It is often argued that the ability to imagine what others think and feel is central to moral functioning. In this paper, I consider to what extent this is true. I argue that neither the ability to think of others as having representational mental states, nor the ability to imagine being in their position, is necessary for moral understanding or moral motivation. I go on to argue that the area in which thinking about others’ thoughts and feelings appears to play (...) the largest role is that of supererogatory actions. Being able to get on well with others seems to be importantly predicated on our ability to think about their thoughts and feelings and being able to take up their perspective. However, when it comes to grosser moral norms and restrictions, such as harm norms, there is little reason to think that thinking about others’ thoughts and feelings plays a central role in understanding such norms or being motivated by them. (shrink)

In “Semantics of Fictional Terms,” Garcia-Carpintero critically surveys the most recent literature on the topic of fictional names. One of his targets is realism about fictional discourse. Realists about fictional discourse believe that: (a) it contains true sentences that have fictional names as their subjects; (b) sentences containing names can be true only if those names have referents; (c) fictional names have fictional characters – abstract objects – as their referents. The fundamental problem that arises for realists is that not (...) all true sentences containing fictional names are plausibly about abstract objects. This leads to the need to introduce disjunctive conceptions of property attribution that Garcia-Carpintero claims are implausible, and that realism should therefore be rejected. He also maintains, however, that (a) is correct. I agree. Furthermore, I am also committed to anti-realism about fictional discourse – that fictional names have no referents. Garcia-Carpintero claims that my view is simply a notational variant of realism. I argue that this is false – that my view could not possibly be a notational variant of any extant realist theory. (shrink)

von Fintel and Gillies : 329–360, 2007) have proposed a dynamic strict conditional account of counterfactuals as an alternative to the standard variably strict account due to Stalnaker and Lewis. Von Fintel’s view is motivated largely by so-called reverse Sobel sequences, about which the standard view seems to make the wrong predictions. More recently Moss :561–586, 2012) has offered a pragmatic/epistemic explanation that purports to explain the data without requiring abandonment of the standard view. So far the small amount of (...) subsequent literature has focused primarily on the original class of cases motivating the strict conditional view. What is needed in the debate is an examination of the predictions of the dynamic strict conditional account for a broader range of data. I undertake this task here, presenting a slew of cases that are problematic for the strict conditional view but not for Moss’s view, and considering some possible responses. Ultimately I take my contribution to constitute a significant blow to the dynamic strict conditional view, though not a decisive verdict against it. (shrink)

Résumé Si l’absence de moralité des psychopathes a été largement étudiée, il existe peu de recherches sur leurs capacités esthétiques. Pourtant, beaucoup d’études cliniques de cas montrent qu’ils présentent un grave déficit dans ce domaine. Cet article se propose d’en chercher les causes. Il analyse les forces et les limites de l’hypothèse d’un manque d’empathie pour expliquer ces carences esthétiques, et montre pourquoi l’hypothèse d’un manque de distance psychique se révèle plus féconde. Celle-ci permet en outre de comprendre le lien (...) de l’esthétique et de l’éthique par leur filiation commune : elles ont pour socle commun la capacité à prendre de la distance par rapport à des intérêts étroitement égoïstes. (shrink)

Natural/social kind essentialism is the view that natural kind categories, both living and non-living natural kinds, as well as social kinds (e.g., race, gender), are essentialized. On this view, artifactual kinds are not essentialized. Our view—teleological essentialism—is that a broad range of categories are essentialized in terms of teleology, including artifacts. Utilizing the same kinds of experiments typically used to provide evidence of essentialist thinking—involving superficial change (study 1), transformation of insides (study 2) and inferences about offspring (study 3)—we find (...) support for the view that a broad range of categories—living natural kinds, non-living natural kinds and artifactual kinds—are essentialized in terms of teleology. Study 4 tests a unique prediction of teleological essentialism and also provides evidence that people make inferences about purposes which in turn guide categorization judgments. (shrink)

This paper describes an Intelligent Tutoring System for helping users with ADO NET called ADO-Tutor. The IntellTutoring System was designed and developed using (ITSB) authoring tool for building intelligent educational systems. The user learns through the intelligent tutoring system ADO NET, the technology used by Microsoft NET to connect to databases. The material includes lessons, examples, and questions. Through the feedback provided by the intelligent tutoring system, the user's understanding of the material is assessed, and accordingly can be guided to (...) different difficulty level of exercises and/or the lessons. The Intelligent Tutoring System was evaluated by a group of users and the results were more than satisfactory in terms of the quality of the material and the design of the system. (shrink)

This is what I hope is an illuminating, and to a certain degree, novel exposition of Montague Grammar. It is against many standard interpretations, and perhaps even against things Montague himself says at times. However, it makes more sense of how his various commitments fit together in a systematic way. Why, for instance, is it called "Montague Grammar" rather than "Montague Semantics," and what role does his commitment to Fregeanism plays in his conception of language? It is clear that he (...) is committed to the idea that function application is the fundamental mode of semantic composition, and that he is committed to an intensional framework. However, intensions have, since Carnap, been understood as nearly conceptually equivalent to functions from possible worlds to sets of individuals. But, in truth, possible worlds semantics is just dressed up extensional semantics. There are just more objects to go around to serve as inputs for functions, whatever we think of their ontological status. That is, possible worlds semantics is really a semantic reduction of intensional semantics achieved by expanding our ontological commitments. It would be difficult to make sense of Montague's strong commitment to Fregean semantics, if his notion of intension was that of Carnap's. According to my interpretation, Montague's notion of intension must be distinct from the version adopted by possible world semantics. Montague took seriously the idea that intensional semantics was something quite different from extensionalist semantics. The first was not reducible to the second semantically speaking. Just as Frege believed that meaning consisted of both sense and reference, so too did Montague. However, just as Frege also believed, Montague thought that sense and reference were systematically related. As I illustrate, interpreting Montague as adopting a different notion of intension can also resolve the apparent problem of distinguishing the difference in meaning between intensional equivalents. It might also enable us to draw a distinction in epistemic logic between an agent having contradictory beliefs and believing contradictions. (shrink)

This book is about whether reference to an individual is the essential feature of a proper name -- a widely held view -- or whether referring to an individual is simply a contingent feature. Three questions need resolving, then. First, whether all names in particular contexts are themselves referring devices. Second, whether recognizing names types and the consequent issue of their ambiguity can be resolved simply by distinguishing between name types and tokens thereof. Last, whether names are ever referential in (...) the way Kripke and others have convincingly argued. The answer to first two questions is negative. The answer to third is a qualified "yes." I explain the theory that allows for these answers in the manuscript, as well as addressing other issues such as: the problem of fictional names; descriptive names; empty names; what an act of naming consists of; an account of ontological commitment; and the data that suggests that names are predicates. (shrink)

Empty names vary in their referential features. Some of them, as Kripke argues, are necessarily empty -- those that are used to create works of fiction. Others appear to be contingently empty -- those which fail to refer at this world, but which do uniquely identify particular objects in other possible worlds. I argue against Kripke's metaphysical and semantic reasons for thinking that either some or all empty names are necessarily non-referring, because these reasons are either not the right reasons (...) for thinking that a name necessarily must fail to refer, or they are too broad -- they make every empty name necessarily non-referential. Plausibly, the explanation for the necessary non-reference of fictional names should be semantic, yet the explanation should not rule out a priori the contingent non-reference of certain other empty names. In light of this, I argue that a name's semantic value needs to carry information about its referential potential. I claim that names do so by encoding information about the way they were introduced into discourse. Names that are fictional will be marked as being non-referential -- they will fail to refer as a matter of their semantics. In contrast, names that are contingently empty will be marked as referential, but they will be failed referential names that could have been successful. The reason, then, for the non-referential status of a fictional name, will be semantic, as our intuitions suggest it should be. Likewise, the reason for the non-referential status of other empty names, those created by acts of failed attempts to refer, will be metaphysical, again, in keeping with our intuitions. (shrink)

To say Early Confucians advocated the possession of a sense of shame as a means to moral virtue underestimates the tact and forethought they used successfully to mold natural dispositions to experience shame into a system of self, familial, and social governance. Shame represents an adaptive system of emotion, cognition, perception, and behavior in social primates for measurement of social rank. Early Confucians understood the utility of the shame system for promotion of cooperation, and they build and deploy cultural modules (...) – e.g., rituals, titles, punishments – with this in mind. These policies result in subtle alterations to components of the evolved shame system that are detectable in data form contemporary cross-cultural psychology that show that populations in the Confucian diaspora have a unique shame profile compared to Western and non-Western populations. The status of Confucian diaspora populations as outliers in the context of shame is partially explained by appeal to the cultural transmission and historical endurance of relevant Early Confucian cultural modules. (shrink)

This was a public talk given in the spring of 2013 during sexual assault awareness week. I believe roughly 800 attended. The philosophy dept was NOT expecting that but at any rate, this is the gist: While there are many different motivations for raising questions about the Sexual Assault Awareness Movement, at least one motivation comes from feminist controversies about what counts as consensual sex. Historically, this controversy arose between those known as "anti-pornography feminists", and "sex positive feminists" whose proponents (...) had very different understandings of what counts as sexual autonomy for women. It is important to understand that questioning the current definitions of what counts as an instance of sexual assault does not entail an anti-feminist agenda. There is not a unified feminist front on this topic. To assume otherwise is to risk silencing victims of sexual assault even further by imposing a particular conception of sexual assault upon them that they might themselves reject. If we are to properly address sexual assault as feminists we must listen to victims of sexual assault and develop a theory of consent in tandem with victims' own understanding of that concept. (shrink)

This article revisits, analyzes and critiques Bruce Chatwin’s 1987 bestseller, The Songlines,1 more than three decades after its publication. In Songlines, the book primarily responsible for his posthumous celebrity, Chatwin set out to explore the essence of Central and Western Desert Aboriginal Australians’ philosophical beliefs. For many readers globally, Songlines is regarded as a—if not the—definitive entry into the epistemological basis, religion, cosmology and lifeways of classical Western and Central Desert Aboriginal people. It is argued that Chatwin’s fuzzy, ill-defined use (...) of the word-concept “songlines”2 has had the effect of generating more heat than light. Chatwin’s failure to recognize the economic imperative underpinning Australian desert people’s walking praxis is problematic: his own treks through foreign lands were underpropped by socioeconomic privilege. Chatwin’s ethnocentric idée fixe regarding the primacy of “walking” and “nomadism,” central to his Songlines thématique, well and truly preceded his visits to Central Australia. Walking, proclaimed Chatwin, is an elemental part of “Man’s” innate nature. It is argued that this unwavering, preconceived, essentialist belief was a self-serving construal justifying Chatwin’s own “nomadic” adventures of identity. Is it thus reasonable to regard Chatwin as a “rogue author,” an unreliable narrator? And if so, does this matter? Of greatest concern is the book’s continuing majority acceptance as a measured, accurate account of Aboriginal belief systems. With respect to Aboriginal desert people and the barely disguised individuals depicted in Songlines, is Chatwin’s book a “rogue text,” constituting an act of epistemic violence, consistent with Spivak’s usage of that term? (shrink)

There are many examples offered as evidence that proper names are predicates. Not all of these cases speak to a name’s semantic content, but many of them do. Some of these include attributive, quantifier, and ambiguity cases. We will explore those cases here, and we will see that none of them conclusively show that names are predicates. In fact, all of these constructions can be given alternative analyses that eliminate the predicative characteristics of names they feature. These analyses do not (...) involve having names functioning as predicates in any way at all. In attributive cases, the names within them are to be understood as occurring in a comparative construction, not an attributive construction. In the last two sorts of cases, the names that occur are analyzed as part of a more complex referring device for a specific domain, rather than functioning as predicates. Both paraphrases can be given plausible semantic treatments that have significant advantages over their competitors. For this reason, there is less motivation to focus on predicative views of proper names. (shrink)

This essay discusses Cecilia Heyes’ groundbreaking new book Cognitive Gadgets: The Cultural Evolution of Thinking. Heyes’ point of departure is the claim that current theories of cultural evolution fail adequately to make a place for the mind. Heyes articulates a cognitive psychology of cultural evolution by explaining how eponymous “cognitive gadgets,” such as imitation, mindreading and language, mental technologies, are “tuned” and “assembled” through social interaction and cultural learning. After recapitulating her explanations for the cultural and psychological origins of these (...) gadgets, we turn to criticisms. Among those, we find Heyes’ use of evolutionary theory confusing on several points of importance; alternative theories of cultural evolution, especially those of the Tomasello group and of Boyd, Richerson and Henrich, are misrepresented; the book neglects joint attention and other forms of intersubjectivity in its explanation of the origins of cognitive gadgets; and, whereas Heyes accuses other theories of being “mindblind,” we find her theory ironically other-blind and autistic in character. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that standard psychological continuity theory does not account for an important feature of what is important in survival – having the property of personhood. I offer a theory that can account for this, and I explain how it avoids the implausible consequences of standard psychological continuity theory, as well as having certain other advantages over that theory.

Assume for the sake of argument that doing philosophy is intrinsically valuable, where ‘doing philosophy’ refers to the practice of forging arguments for and against the truth of theses in the domains of metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, etc. The practice of the history of philosophy is devoted instead to discovering arguments for and against the truth of ‘authorial’ propositions, i.e. propositions that state the belief of some historical figure about a philosophical proposition. I explore arguments to think that doing history of (...) philosophy is valuable, specifically, valuable in such a way that its value does not reduce to the value of doing philosophy. Most such arguments proffered by historians of philosophy fail egregiously, as I show. I then offer a proposal about what makes doing history of philosophy uniquely valuable, but it is one that many historians will not find agreeable. (shrink)

According to EJ Lowe, diachronic necessity and synchronic necessity are logically independent. Diachronic possibility concerns what could happen to an object over time and therefore concerns future possibilities for that object given its past history. Synchronic possibility concerns what is possible for an object in the present or at a past present moment. These are logically independent, given certain assumptions. While it may true that because I am 38, it is impossible diachronically for me to be 30 (at least once (...) we restrict the degree of relevant possibility), it is possible, given that at some point in the past, I may have been conceived slightly earlier than I was, that I am now 37. Likewise, it is possible diachronically for me to be somewhere other than where I am, but given that one object cannot be in different places at the same time, it is impossible for me now to be somewhere other than where I am, and this is true at each past point in my history too. There are, then, two axis upon which to distinguish what is and is not possible: tensed possibilities and possibilities of degree, which include nomic, metaphysical, and logical necessities, among others. I examine the interactions between these possibilities and I come to the conclusion that logical necessity is not in fact logical necessity simpliciter. Whether something is logically necessary depends upon tensed possibilities. I argue that while synchronic logical necessity entails diachronic logical necessity, the reverse entailment does not hold. I explore the consequences of this for certain philosophical debates in semantics including the concept of rigid designation, and descriptive names. (shrink)

Gratitude plays a critical role in our social lives. It helps to build and strengthen relationships, and it enhances wellbeing. Gratitude is typically thought of as involving oneself having a positive feeling towards another self. But this kind of self-to-self gratitude seems to be at odds with the central Buddhist view that there is no self. Feeling gratitude to someone for some past generosity seems misplaced since there is no continuing self who both performed the generous action and is now (...) the recipient of gratitude. In this paper, we explore how the Buddhist might respond to this problem. In response, Buddhists characterize a kind of gratitude (anumodanā) that is not fully propositional, but nor is it a notion that critically implicates the problematic concept of self. Anumodanā (literally rejoicing in good deeds of another) is best thought of as an expression of sympathetic joy (mudita) which is classified among the “sublime abidings” or “perfections” in Buddhism. In this paper we explain the notion of anumodanā and its functioning in the context of dāna (gift-giving or almsgiving in the Buddhist monastic context) to explain how it recovers some of the benefits of our ordinary reactive attitude of gratitude without implicating the self. (shrink)

Some are skeptical about the possibility of objectivity in law. In this article, I argue that common law legal adjudication can yield objective judgments, based on a legitimate conception of objectivity, one that shares in the kind of objectivity available to scientific and ethical judgments.

Standard rigid designator accounts of a name’s meaning have trouble accommodating what I will call a descriptive name’s “shifty” character -- its tendency to shift its referent over time in response to a discovery that the conventional referent of that name does not satisfy the description with which that name was introduced. I offer a variant of Kripke’s historical semantic theory of how names function, a variant that can accommodate the character of descriptive names while maintaining rigidity for proper names. (...) A descriptive name’s shiftiness calls for a semantic account of names that makes their semantic values bipartite, containing both traditional semantic contents and what I call "modes of introduction." Both parts of a name's semantic value are derived from the way a name gets introduced into discourse -- from what I refer to as its "context of introduction." Making a name's semantic value bipartite in this way allows for a definite description to be a part of proper name's meaning without thereby sacrificing that name’s status as a rigid designator. On my view, a definite description is part of descriptive name’s mode of introduction. That is, it is part of what determines the content assigned to that name. As it turns out, making a definite description part of a descriptive name’s mode of introduction allows for that definite description to play the role of a mere reference-fixer regarding that name’s content, as Kripke would have it. However, my account allows a definite description to fix a descriptive name’s content actively over time, thereby explaining its inherent shiftiness. (shrink)

Recently, and rather startlingly, given the history of the debate about a name's semantic content, some claim that names are in fact predicates -- predicativism. Some of predicativists claim that a name's semantic content involves the concept of being called -- calling accounts that have been traditionally meta-linguistic. However, these accounts fail to be informative. Inspired by Burge's claim that proper names are literally true of the individuals that have them, Fara develops a non-meta-linguistic concept of being called analysed in (...) terms of property attributions. I offer seven separate reasons for rejecting the account, one of which is that Fara's development of the view, at least, has implausible consequences for a theory of name acquisition. I sketch an alternative account of name acquisition that is meta-linguistic in nature, but because it is not offered as a theory of name's content, the standard worries fail to apply. In fact, I argue that an account of name acquisition must be meta-linguistic, and therefore a more nuanced conception of meta-linguistic speech acts is required. The account invokes Austin's performative-constative distinction. It analyses name acquisition as due to performative meta-linguistic speech acts. (shrink)

Psychopaths are the bugbears of moral philosophy. They are often used as examples of perfectly rational people who are nonetheless willing to do great moral wrong without regret; hence the disorder has received the epithet “moral insanity” (Pritchard 1835). But whereas philosophers have had a great deal to say about psychopaths’ glaring and often horrifying lack of moral conscience, their aesthetic capacities have received hardly any attention, and are generally assumed to be intact or even enhanced. Popular culture often portrays (...) psychopaths in ways that suggest a great gap between their amorality and their aesthetic sensitivity. In The Silence of the Lambs (Jonathan Demme, 1991), Hannibal Lecter appreciates fine art, fashion, and wine, while he eats his way through his enemies. His real-life counterparts, however, do not demonstrate the same sensitivities. There is no evidence that psychopaths are capable of real aesthetic appreciation, and some evidence that they are not. In this paper, we set out the limited evidence for the psychopath’s deficient aesthetic sensitivity. The best explanations of what the psychopath lacks turn out to implicate abilities that are also thought to be central to moral thought and action: an impaired capacity for empathizing with others and deficient ability to take a disinterested attitude towards things (socalled distance). We endorse the latter explanation. Thinking about what underlies the psychopath’s deficient aesthetic understanding turns out to throw light on a difficult problem: the connection between ethics and aesthetics. (shrink)

My aim in this paper is to show that the existence of empty names raise problems for the Millian that go beyond the traditional problems of accounting for their meanings. Specifically, they have implications for Millian strategies for dealing with puzzles about belief. The standard move of positing a referent for a fictional name to avoid the problem of meaning, because of its distinctly Millian motivation, implies that solving puzzles about belief, when they involve empty names, do in fact hang (...) on Millian assumptions after all. (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)

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 (...) the sense of mineness. We argue that this new model of the sense of identity has implications for debates about quasi-memory. In addition, articulating the components of the sense of identity promises to bear on the extent to which this sense of identity provides evidence of personal identity. (shrink)

What makes a person the same over time is a question dealt with by many philosophers. I too offered a purely metaphysical answer in a different work, however, as with many other theorists, I offered an answer outside of considering the political consequences of the theory I offered. Upon reflection, I now see that this was a mistake in need of correction. This is because theories concerning how an individual person remains one and the same over time presupposes an understanding (...) of the nature of personhood as an ontological kind. While being a person is a purely metaphysical matter, the fact is that having the status of being a person is highly significant both morally and politically, as any social movement fighting for being granted this status to groups of individuals who have been denied it. To ignore the moral and political consequences of a metaphysical theory of persons is therefore ethically irresponsible. I argue that many of the assumptions concerning personhood are ethically and politically biased in favor of a conception of persons that disadvantages certain individuals, and that examining and correcting these biases is essential to be ethically responsible theorists of personhood. (shrink)

The philosophical foundation of human rights has become more explicit, given that the presumption of peace in the Preamble to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights demands further development, both in its definition and in the conditions or requirements for its fulfillment. Based on the discussion of the human right to peace, we propose to reinterpret the Arendtine expression “The right to have rights” as the philosophical formula that calls for the ascension of peace to a legal enunciation; this is (...) based on the critique of Human Rights, the valuation of human singularity, and on believing in the merging of actions and discourses that characterize Hannah Arendt’s politics.Keywords: peace, human rights, stateless persons, philosophical foundation, the human right to peace. (shrink)

This article approaches the reflections of Paul Ricoeur regarding testimony to befound in his work Memory, History,Forgetting. Through reading of this work, we pos-tulate the idea that to consider others as readers or spectators of our actions forms animportant part of the construction of human subjectivity. The thesis that subjectivityarises as a discourse towards the other is proposed here, inasmuch as human experi-ences are transmitted narratively in the form of testimony, which stands as an examplefor the understanding of the experiences (...) of the past. (shrink)

Nonviolent movements mainly characterized by not taking part in and resist-ing violent practices developed no multiple levels have had a significant contribution inputting an end to wars and oppressive systems. However, it is worth asking whether theyhave, consequently, contributed to the construction of peace. This article, centered onGandhi, reflects upon the general contribution of nonviolence for historical changes ar-ticulated through Paul Ricoeur’s critique and interpretation of the influence of these move-ments in the intricate relationship between politics and violence. -/- .

The idea that incompatibilism is intuitive is one of the key motivators for incompatibilism. Not surprisingly, then philosophers who defend incompatibilism often claim that incompatibilism is the natural, commonsense view about free will and moral responsibility (e.g., Pereboom 2001, Kane Journal of Philosophy 96:217–240 1999, Strawson 1986). And a number of recent studies find that people give apparently incompatibilist responses in vignette studies. When participants are presented with a description of a causal deterministic universe, they tend to deny that people (...) are morally responsible in that universe. Although this suggests that people are intuitive incompatibilists, Eddy Nahmias and Dylan Murray, in a recent series of important papers, have developed an important challenge to this interpretation. They argue that people confuse determinism with bypassing, the idea that one’s mental states lack causal efficacy. Murray and Nahmias present new experiments that seem to confirm the bypassing hypothesis. In this paper, we use structural equation modeling to re-examine the issue. We find support instead for an incompatibilist explanation of the bypassing results, i.e., incompatibilist judgments seem to cause bypassing judgments. We hypothesize that this phenomenon occurs because people think of decisions as essentially indeterministic; thus, when confronted with a description of determinism they tend to think that decisions do not even occur. We provide evidence for this in three subsequent studies which show that many participants deny that people make decisions in a deterministic universe; by contrast, most participants tend to allow that people add numbers in a deterministic universe. Together, these studies suggest that bypassing results don’t reflect a confusion, but rather the depth of the incompatibilist intuition. (shrink)

This paper concerns two topics which, I hope to show, are vitally connected. One is the distinctive importance of appellate adjudication in the legal system of United States. The other is the workings of entangled concepts in the law. That appellate adjudication is important in some sense may seem obvious to everybody (to a few it will seem obvious that appellate adjudication is unimportant). My point will be that via appellate adjudication courts engineer entangled legal concepts, and it is this (...) aspect of appellate adjudication that is both crucial and unique to it, at least in the U.S. legal system. Entangled concepts intertwine description and evaluation; entangled legal concepts facilitate and constrain legal reasoning and legal judgments, in ways that distinguish legal adjudication from pure politics or the implementation of public policy. In the paper itself, I demonstrate more fully what it is for a legal concept to be an entangled one and how entanglement supplies guidance in adjudication. I also broach how entanglement in legal concepts and engineered entanglement have significance for legal pedagogy; appellate adjudication; the respective roles of the judiciary, the legislature, and administrative agencies; the erosion of the distinction between so-called public law and so-called private law; and our understanding of the fact/value distinction. -/- Understanding more specifically the nature of the entanglement at work in appellate adjudication requires much closer scrutiny of appellate opinions than we usually give. I examine carefully the background to MacPherson v. Buick and Justice Benjamin Cardozo’s particular re-engineering of ‘negligence’ and ‘duty,’ entangled concepts belonging to the same legal taxonomy. Via this scrutiny, I demonstrate the flaws in the engineering of some concepts in the buildup to MacPherson, and how these flaws led to those concepts’ collapse and ultimately to Cardozo’s re-engineering of ‘negligence’ and ‘duty.’ I also explain why careful understanding of the engineering of entangled legal concepts can make us appreciate that even the most successful of such concepts have within in them the grounds for their own obsolescence. -/- To show that conceptual engineering of entangled concepts occurs outside the context of state common law, I also examine how the U.S. Supreme Court has engineered ‘commerce’, itself an entangled concept. The recent decision regarding the individual mandate in the Affordable Care Act makes this example particularly timely. This secondary example also clarifies the nature of entanglement and engineering it. -/- This article concerns appellate adjudication in any area of law. I maintain that whether we are dealing with private law or public law, common law or statutory law or Constitutional law, the defining feature of appellate adjudication is its continuous engineering and reengineering of entangled legal concepts. The merger of fact and value in these concepts explains both the fertility of appellate adjudication and the constraints judges work with when they work with legal concepts that entangle fact and value. (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)

Many philosophers have claimed that the folk endorse moral universalism. Some have taken the folk view to support moral universalism; others have taken the folk view to reflect a deep confusion. And while some empirical evidence supports the claim that the folk endorse moral universalism, this work has uncovered intra-domain differences in folk judgments of moral universalism. In light of all this, our question is: why do the folk endorse moral universalism? Our hypothesis is that folk judgments of moral universalism (...) are generated in part by a desire to punish. We present evidence supporting this across three studies. On the basis of this, we argue for a debunking explanation of folk judgments of moral universalism. Our results not only further our understanding of the psychological processes underpinning folk judgments of moral universalism. They also bear on philosophical discussions of folk meta-ethics. (shrink)

Given the wide the range of legally available options for end-of-life care in recent decades: from aggressive, even experimental, treatment to active euthanasia, our ethical analysis struggles to keep pace with technology and law. In this essay I show that the principle of double effect (PDE) remains, and will continue to be, a useful tool for ethical analysis of end-of-life care. According to PDE, an agent may ethically perform an act that s/he foresees will have a significant bad effect (e.g., (...) death) in addition to a good effect (e.g., pain relief) only if s/he does not intend the bad effect, the act is not bad for reasons other than its causing the bad effect, and there is a proportionately serious reason to act. Following a brief explanation of PDE and preliminary considerations in favor of counting death as a bad effect, I analyze several end-of-life options in terms of the principle. I begin with those that enjoy significant consensus among proponents of PDE: active euthanasia, “passive euthanasia,” and palliative care. Then I consider the less-straightforward cases of drug provision, refusing food and water, and terminal sedation, arguing that participation in such actions is justifiable via PDE only under very limited conditions. (shrink)

The tracer study for the Bachelor of Science in Business Administration (BSBA) degree with Business Economics (BE), Financial Management (FM), Human Resource Management (HRM), and Marketing Management (MM) of the School of Business Administration (SBA) tracks and gathers information about the career outcomes and experiences of graduates of the degree program. This study focuses on determining the employment opportunities pursued by the graduates of 2018–2022, as well as exploring the influence their education from the SBA of San Isidro College (SIC) (...) has had on their careers. Through this tracer study, valuable insight has been gained into the effectiveness of the SBA's BSBA program offered by SIC and its graduates' overall success and impact in the job market. The lack of respondents in the BE major suggests a need to revisit and modify the curriculum and marketing efforts to generate more interest among potential students. The FM, HRM, and MM major should be capitalized and sustained to maintain the positive momentum. The study's findings show a mix of employment outcomes for graduates, with opportunities for both early career growth and long-term employment. The program equips graduates with a diverse skillset for various job levels and industries. Most graduates find employment within the province, implying effectiveness in equipping them with the necessary skills. However, the distribution of salaries suggests potential issues with the job market or degree value, requiring further investigation. The program has successfully developed graduates with communication, human relations, and entrepreneurial skills but may need improvement in marketing management, problem-solving, and critical thinking. The study concludes that graduates have higher communication skills but lower problem-solving and critical thinking skills, emphasizing the need for curriculum modifications and additional support to improve overall skills. (shrink)

Critics of Institutional Review Board (IRB) practices often base their charges on the claim that IRB review began with and is premised upon a "medical model" of research, and hence a "medical model" of risk. Based on this claim, they charge that IRB review, especially in the institutional Reviw boardsocial and behavioral sciences, has experienced "mission creep". This paper argues that this line of critique is fundamentally misguided. While it remains unclear what critics mean by "medical model", the point of (...) contemporary human research subjects regulation remains the same across all domains of research. That point is to protect the autonomy of human subjects, primarily through the use of informed consent. In fields as different as biomedical self-experimentation and ethnography there is the danger of losing sight of subjects' autonomy. Critiques of the so-called medical model are sometimes libertarian and sometimes utilitarian in spirit. Either way, such critiques have not yet demonstrated that these philosophical schools of thought have the resources to guard against the potential risk of harm that lexically prioritizing the autonomy of human subjects does. Precisely because IRB review recognizes that human subjects research occurs in different fields using different research methods, IRB review requires researchers to explain their particular methods, the particular risks of harm created by these methods, and the implementation of procedures by which subjects may autonomously consent to precisely those risks. (shrink)

How do people think about the mental states of robots? Experimental philosophers have developed various models aiming to specify the factors that drive people's attributions of mental states to robots. Here we report on a new experiment involving robots, the results of which tell against competing models. We advocate a view on which attributions of mental states to robots are driven by the same dual-process architecture that subserves attributions of mental states more generally. In support of this view, we leverage (...) recent psychological research on human-robot interaction that involve ecologically-valid stimuli such as Roombas and humanoid robots. (shrink)

Vows play a central role in Buddhist thought and practice. Monastics are obliged to know and conform to hundreds of vows. Although it is widely recognized that vows are important for guiding practitioners on the path to enlightenment, we argue that they have another overlooked but equally crucial role to play. A second function of the vows, we argue, is to facilitate group harmony and cohesion to ensure the perpetuation of the dhamma and the saṅgha. However, the prominence of vows (...) in the Buddhist tradition seems at odds with another central part of the doctrine. For vows, like other promises, seem to involve representing a persisting self as the individual who undertakes the vow. And to explicitly appeal to a persisting self conflicts with one of the most important philosophical commitments of Buddhism – the no self view. We argue though that once we articulate the details of how vows generate behavior that conforms to them, we can see that no appeal to the self is required to internalize and act on vows. (shrink)

Do young children have a teleological conception of the essence of natural kinds? We tested this by examining how the preservation or alteration of an animal’s purpose affected children’s persistence judgments (N = 40, ages 4 - 12, Mean Age = 7.04, 61% female). We found that even when surface-level features of an animal (e.g., a bee) were preserved, if the entity’s purpose changed (e.g., the bee now spins webs), children were more likely to categorize the entity as a member (...) of a different natural kind (e.g., a spider) and these effects were similar in magnitude to altering the surface-features of a natural kind. Our results suggest that we might view teleological properties as partially constitutive of the essence of natural kinds. (shrink)

A tradition of work in cognitive science indicates that much of our mental lives is not available to introspection . Though the researchers often present these results as surprising, little has been done to explore the degree to which people presume introspective access to their mental events. In this paper, we distinguish two dimensions of introspective access: the power of access, i.e. whether people believe they can unfailingly or only typically introspect mental events; and the domain of access, i.e. what (...) types of mental events people believe they are able to introspect. We report five experiments carried out to discover where lay beliefs about introspection fall on these dimensions. In our experiments, people did not presume universal introspective access, but they did overestimate the amount of access they actually have, particularly in the case of decisions. (shrink)

If you start taking courses in contemporary cognitive science, you will soon encounter a particular picture of the human mind. This picture says that the mind is a lot like a computer. Specifically, the mind is made up of certain states and certain processes. These states and processes interact, in accordance with certain general rules, to generate specific behaviors. If you want to know how those states and processes got there in the first place, the only answer is that they (...) arose through the interaction of other states and processes, which arose from others... until, ultimately, the chain goes back to factors in our genes and our environment. Hence, one can explain human behavior just by positing a collection of mental states and psychological processes and discussing the ways in which these states and processes interact. This picture of the mind sometimes leaves people feeling deeply uncomfortable. They find themselves thinking something like: 'If the mind actually does work like that, it seems like we could never truly be morally responsible for anything we did. After all, we would never be free to choose any behavior other than the one we actually performed. Our behaviors would just follow inevitably from certain facts about the configuration of the states and processes within us.' Many philosophers think that this sort of discomfort is fundamentally confused or wrongheaded. They think that the confusion here can be cleared up just by saying something like: 'Wait! It doesn't make any sense to say that the interaction of these states and processes is preventing you from controlling your own life. The thing you are forgetting is that the interaction of these states and processes – this whole complex system described by cognitive science – is simply you. So when you learn that these states and processes control your behavior, all you are learning is that you are controlling your behavior. There is no reason at all to see these discoveries as a threat to your freedom or responsibility.'2 Philosophers may regard this argument as a powerful one, perhaps even irrefutable.. (shrink)