This paper provides a method for characterizing space events using the framework of conceptual spaces. We focus specifically on estimating and ranking the likelihood of collisions between space objects. The objective is to design an approach for anticipatory decision support for space operators who can take preventive actions on the basis of assessments of relative risk. To make this possible our approach draws on the fusion of both hard and soft data within a single decision support framework. Contextual data is (...) also taken into account, for example data about space weather effects, by drawing on the Space Domain Ontologies, a large system of ontologies designed to support all aspects of space situational awareness. The framework is coupled with a mathematical programming scheme that frames a mathematically optimal approach for decision support, providing a quantitative basis for ranking potential for collision across multiple satellite pairs. The goal is to provide the broadest possible information foundation for critical assessments of collision likelihood. (shrink)

This paper describes an AFOSR-supported basic research program that focuses on developing a new framework for combining hard with soft data in order to improve space situational awareness. The goal is to provide, in an automatic and near real-time fashion, a ranking of possible threats to blue assets (assets trying to be protected) from red assets (assets with hostile intentions). The approach is based on Conceptual Spaces models, which combine features from traditional associative and symbolic cognitive models. While Conceptual Spaces (...) are revolutionary, they lack an underlying mathematical framework. Several such frameworks have attempted to represent Conceptual Spaces, but by far the most robust is the model developed by Holender. His model utilizes integer linear programming in order to obtain an overall similarity value between observations and concepts that support the formation of hypotheses. This paper will describe a method for building Conceptual Spaces models for threats that utilizes ontologies as a means to provide a clear semantic foundation for this inferencing process; in particular threat ontologies and space domain ontologies are developed and employed in this approach. A space situational awareness use-case is presented involving a kinetic kill scenario and results are shown to assess the performance of this fusion-based inferencing framework. (shrink)

The overall goal of the approach developed in this paper is to estimate the likelihood of a given kinetic kill scenario between hostile spacebased adversaries using the mathematical framework of Complex Conceptual Spaces Single Observation. Conceptual spaces are a cognitive model that provide a method for systematically and automatically mimicking human decision making. For accurate decisions to be made, the fusion of both hard and soft data into a single decision framework is required. This presents several challenges to this data (...) fusion framework. The first is the challenge involved in handling multiple complex terminologies, which is addressed by drawing on a set of Space Domain Ontologies. Another challenge is the complex combinatorics involved when considering all possible feature combinations. This can be mitigated by using integer linear programming optimization that is outlined by the Complex Conceptual Spaces Single Observation mathematical model framework. A third challenge is the complicated physics that is involved in a spacecraft collision that must be addressed to obtain a better understanding of threat assessment. Overcoming these various challenges allows for a quantitative ranking for the potential of a kinetic kill collision across multiple spacecraft pairs. In addition to overcoming these challenges this paper will break down threat assessment into four domains and identify a ranking of threat both for each individual domain and for the four domains combined. Simulation results are shown to verify the developed concepts. (shrink)

Previous work has shown that the Complex Conceptual Spaces − Single Observation Mathematical framework is a useful tool for event characterization. This mathematical framework is developed on the basis of Conceptual Spaces and uses integer linear programming to find the needed similarity values. The work of this paper is focused primarily on space event characterization. In particular, the focus is on the ranking of threats for malicious space events such as a kinetic kill. To make the Conceptual Spaces framework work, (...) the similarity values between the contents of observations on the one hand and the properties of the entities observed on the other needs to be found. This paper shows how to exploit Dempster-Shafer theory to implement a statistical approach for finding these similarities values. This approach will allow a user to identify the uncertainty involved in similarity value data, which can later be propagated through the developed mathematical model in order for the user to know the overall uncertainty in the observation-to-concept mappings needed for space event characterization. (shrink)

The parceling of land into real estate is more than a simple geometrical affair. Real estate is a historical product of interaction between human beings, political, legal and economic institutions, and the physical environment. And while many authors, from Jeremy Bentham to Hernando de Soto, have drawn attention to the ontological (metaphysical) aspect of property in general, no comprehensive analysis of landed property has been attempted. The paper presents such an analysis and shows how landed property differs from other (...) types of property in a way which implies a special role for political and economic philosophy of property rights in land. This is the Chinese translation of "The Metaphysics of Real Estate", Topoi, 20: 2 (September 2001), 161–172. (shrink)

Wilfrid Sellars’s ethical theory was rich and deeply innovative. On Sellars’s view, moral judgments express a special kind of shared intention. Thus, we should see Sellars as an early advocate of an expressivism of plans and intentions, and an early theorist of collective intentionality. He supplemented this theory with a sophisticated logic of intentions, a robust theory of the categorical validity of normative expressions, a subtle way of reconciling the cognitive and motivating aspects of moral judgment, and much more— all (...) within a strict nominalism that preserves Sellars’s commitment to naturalism. The Ethics of Wilfrid Sellars offers the first systematic treatment of this sadly neglected aspect of Sellars’s work and demonstrates that his ethical theory— just like his more widely discussed epistemology— has much to contribute to current debates. (shrink)

It's often said that according to deflationary theories of truth, truth is not a ‘substantial’ property. While this is a fine slogan, it is far from transparent what deflationists mean (or ought to mean) in saying that truth is ‘insubstantial’. Focusing so intently upon the concept of truth and the word ‘true’, I argue, deflationists and their critics have been insufficiently attentive to a host of metaphysical complexities that arise for deflationists in connection with the property of truth. My aim (...) is to correct several misunderstandings as to what deflationists are after here—including some harboured by deflationists themselves—and to offer an account of the commitments about truth's nature that they ought to undertake. In developing this account, I focus particularly upon the issue of what metaphysics of truth a Horwichian minimalist ought to adopt. (shrink)

It is plausible that there are epistemic reasons bearing on a distinctively epistemic standard of correctness for belief. It is also plausible that there are a range of practical reasons bearing on what to believe. These theses are often thought to be in tension with each other. Most significantly for our purposes, it is obscure how epistemic reasons and practical reasons might interact in the explanation of what one ought to believe. We draw an analogy with a similar distinction between (...) types of reasons for actions in the context of activities. The analogy motivates a two-level account of the structure of normativity that explains the interaction of correctness-based and other reasons. This account relies upon a distinction between normative reasons and authoritatively normative reasons. Only the latter play the reasons role in explaining what state one ought to be in. All and only practical reasons are authoritative reasons. Hence, in one important sense, all reasons for belief are practical reasons. But this account also preserves the autonomy and importance of epistemic reasons. Given the importance of having true beliefs about the world, our epistemic standard typically plays a key role in many cases in explaining what we ought to believe. In addition to reconciling (versions of) evidentialism and pragmatism, this two-level account has implications for a range of important debates in normative theory, including the interaction of right and wrong reasons for actions and other attitudes, the significance of reasons in understanding normativity and authoritative normativity, the distinction between ‘formal’ and ‘substantive’ normativity, and whether there is a unified source of authoritative normativity. (shrink)

When should you engage with difficult arguments against your cherished controversial beliefs? The primary conclusion of this book is that your obligations to engage with counterarguments are more limited than is often thought. In some standard situations, you shouldn't engage with difficult counterarguments and, if you do, you shouldn't engage with them open-mindedly. This conclusion runs counter to aspects of the Millian political tradition and political liberalism, as well as what people working in informal logic tend to say about argumentation. (...) -/- Not all misleading arguments wear their flaws on their sleeve. Each step of a misleading argument might seem compelling and you might not be able to figure out what's wrong with it. Still, even if you can't figure out what's wrong with an argument, you can know that it's misleading. One way to know that an argument is misleading is, counterintuitively, to lack expertise in the methods and evidence-types employed by the argument. When you know that a counterargument is misleading, you shouldn't engage with it open-mindedly and sometimes shouldn't engage with it at all. You shouldn't engage open-mindedly because you shouldn't be willing to reduce your confidence in response to arguments you know are misleading. And you sometimes shouldn't engage closed-mindedly, because to do so can be manipulative or ineffective. -/- In making this case, Jeremy Fantl discusses echo chambers and group polarization, the importance in academic writing of a sympathetic case for the opposition, the epistemology of disagreement, the account of open-mindedness, and invitations to problematic academic speakers. (shrink)

[COMMENTARY on Walter Veit's "A Philosophy for the Science of Animal Consciousness"] The framework Veit introduces for animal consciousness turns on finding and articulating its evolutionary origins. Veit argues that consciousness first evolved as affective experience in the Cambrian period. His argument centers around the plausible need of organisms in the Cambrian for a common currency of subjective valuation. I argue that such an adaptive pressure is unlikely to result in affective experience. I review other processes that instantiate common currencies (...) of subjective valuation: unconscious (non-experiential) affect and the reward learning system and argue that each is likely to have evolved prior to affective experience. (shrink)

We offer a general framework for theorizing about the structure of knowledge and belief in terms of the comparative normality of situations compatible with one’s evidence. The guiding idea is that, if a possibility is sufficiently less normal than one’s actual situation, then one can know that that possibility does not obtain. This explains how people can have inductive knowledge that goes beyond what is strictly entailed by their evidence. We motivate the framework by showing how it illuminates knowledge about (...) the future, knowledge of lawful regularities, knowledge about parameters measured using imperfect instruments, the connection between knowledge, belief, and probability, and the dynamics of knowledge and belief in response to new evidence. (shrink)

In this article, I attempt to provide a complete and exhaustive list of all of the offices and major political roles proposed within the constitution of Magnesia, detailing the title of the office, number of offices, method of appointment, age or gender restrictions, length of term, and explicit responsibilities assigned to that office. This tabulation is intended to be useful for new readers of the Laws and to scholars of various methodological approaches interested in the political arrangements of Magnesia.

This paper develops the Value-Based Theory of Reasons in some detail. The central part of the paper introduces a number of theoretically puzzling features of normative reasons. These include weight, transmission, overlap, and the promiscuity of reasons. It is argued that the Value-Based Theory of Reasons elegantly accounts for these features. This paper is programmatic. Its goal is to put the promising but surprisingly overlooked Value-Based Theory of Reasons on the table in discussions of normative reasons, and to draw attention (...) to a number of areas for fruitful further research. (shrink)

This chapter offers an opinionated introduction to higher-order formal languages with an eye towards their applications in metaphysics. A simply relationally typed higher-order language is introduced in four stages: starting with first-order logic, adding first-order predicate abstraction, generalizing to higher-order predicate abstraction, and finally adding higher-order quantification. It is argued that both β-conversion and Universal Instantiation are valid on the intended interpretation of this language. Given these two principles, it is then shown how we can use pure higher-order logic to (...) ask, and begin to answer, metaphysical questions with non-trivial implications. In particular, while we must reject the popular idea that structural differences between sentences correspond to parallel distinctions in the logical structure of extra-linguistic reality, it may still be possible to give a purely logical characterization of objectual aboutness and related notions. (shrink)

How is what we believe related to how we act? That depends on what we mean by ‘believe’. On the one hand, there is what we're sure of: what our names are, where we were born, whether we are sitting in front of a screen. Surety, in this sense, is not uncommon — it does not imply Cartesian absolute certainty, from which no possible course of experience could dislodge us. But there are many things that we think that we are (...) not sure of. For example, you might think that it will rain sometime this month, but not be sure that it will. Both what we're sure of and what we think have important normative connections to action. But the connections are quite different. This paper explores these issues with respect to assertion, inquiry, and decision making. We conclude by arguing that there is no theoretically significant notion of ‘full belief’ intermediate in strength between thinking and being sure. (shrink)

Consider the sentence “Lois knows that Superman flies, but she doesn’t know that Clark flies”. In this paper we defend a Millian contextualist semantics for propositional attitude ascriptions, according to which ordinary uses of this sentence are true but involve a mid-sentence shift in context. Absent any constraints on the relevant parameters of context sensitivity, such a semantics would be untenable: it would undermine the good standing of systematic theorizing about the propositional attitudes, trivializing many of the central questions of (...) epistemology, the philosophy of mind, and the philosophy of action. In response to this problem, we prove a series of tenability results. We show that, given certain constraints on the parameters of context sensitivity, there is a broad class of principles of propositional attitude psychology whose good standing follows from corresponding claims about people’s mental representations. But these constraints also have some surprising consequences: they are jointly incompatible with coarse-grained theories of propositions, and they are in tension with a natural picture of how speakers and hearers coordinate on the interpretation of attitude ascriptions. In light of these consequences we explore different ways in which the contextualist picture might be developed, and argue that our preferred way compares favorably with Fregeanism and neo-Russellianism. (shrink)

Objectives -/- Surveys in various countries suggest 17% to 80% of doctors prescribe ‘placebos’ in routine practice, but prevalence of placebo use in UK primary care is unknown. Methods -/- We administered a web-based questionnaire to a representative sample of UK general practitioners. Following surveys conducted in other countries we divided placebos into ‘pure’ and ‘impure’. ‘Impure’ placebos are interventions with clear efficacy for certain conditions but are prescribed for ailments where their efficacy is unknown, such as antibiotics for suspected (...) viral infections. ‘Pure’ placebos are interventions such as sugar pills or saline injections without direct pharmacologically active ingredients for the condition being treated. We initiated the survey in April 2012. Two reminders were sent and electronic data collection closed after 4 weeks. Results -/- We surveyed 1715 general practitioners and 783 (46%) completed our questionnaire. Our respondents were similar to those of all registered UK doctors suggesting our results are generalizable. 12% (95% CI 10 to 15) of respondents used pure placebos while 97% (95% CI 96 to 98) used impure placebos at least once in their career. 1% of respondents used pure placebos, and 77% (95% CI 74 to 79) used impure placebos at least once per week. Most (66% for pure, 84% for impure) respondents stated placebos were ethical in some circumstances. Conclusion and implications -/- Placebo use is common in primary care but questions remain about their benefits, harms, costs, and whether they can be delivered ethically. Further research is required to investigate ethically acceptable and cost-effective placebo interventions. (shrink)

Efficient markets are alienating if they inhibit us from recognizably caring about one another in our productive activities. I argue that efficient market behaviour is both exclusionary and fetishistic. As exclusionary, the efficient marketeer cannot manifest care alongside their market behaviour. As fetishistic, the efficient marketeer cannot manifest care in their market behaviour. The conjunction entails that efficient market behavior inhibits care. It doesn’t follow that efficient market behavior is vicious: individuals might justifiably commit to efficiency because doing so serves (...) the common good. But efficient market systems nevertheless have significant opportunity costs. The discussion yields a range of desiderata for non-alienated economic organization. (shrink)

The explanatory role of natural selection is one of the long-term debates in evolutionary biology. Nevertheless, the consensus has been slippery because conceptual confusions and the absence of a unified, formal causal model that integrates different explanatory scopes of natural selection. In this study we attempt to examine two questions: (i) What can the theory of natural selection explain? and (ii) Is there a causal or explanatory model that integrates all natural selection explananda? For the first question, we argue that (...) five explananda have been assigned to the theory of natural selection and that four of them may be actually considered explananda of natural selection. For the second question, we claim that a probabilistic conception of causality and the statistical relevance concept of explanation are both good models for understanding the explanatory role of natural selection. We review the biological and philosophical disputes about the explanatory role of natural selection and formalize some explananda in probabilistic terms using classical results from population genetics. Most of these explananda have been discussed in philosophical terms but some of them have been mixed up and confused. We analyze and set the limits of these problems. (shrink)

In his book Mind and World, John McDowell grapples with the problem that the world must and yet seemingly cannot constrain our empirical thought. I first argue that McDowell’s proposed solution to the problem throws him onto the horns of his own, intractable dilemma, and thus fails to solve the problem of rational constraint by the world. Next, I will argue that Wilfrid Sellars, in a series of articles written in the 1950s and 1960s, provides the tools to solve the (...) dilemma McDowell sets before us. We will see how, borrowing from Sellars and certain neo-Sellarsians, we can solve the problem of rational constraint by perception without resorting to a McDowellian quasi-enchantment of the world. (shrink)

Philosophers of science have insisted that evidence of underlying mechanisms is required to support claims about the effects of medical interventions. Yet evidence about mechanisms does not feature on dominant evidence-based medicine “hierarchies.” After arguing that only inferences from mechanisms (“mechanistic reasoning”)—not mechanisms themselves—count as evidence, I argue for a middle ground. Mechanistic reasoning is not required to establish causation when we have high-quality controlled studies; moreover, mechanistic reasoning is more problematic than has been assumed. Yet where the problems can (...) be overcome, mechanistic reasoning can and should be used as evidence. (shrink)

Picturing is a poorly understood element of Sellars’s philosophical project. We diagnose the problem with picturing as follows: on the one hand, it seems that it must be connected with action in order for it to do its job. On the other hand, the representational states of a picturing system are characterized in descriptive and seemingly static terms. How can static terms be connected with action? To solve this problem, we adopt a concept from recent work in Sellarsian metaethics: the (...) idea of a material practical inference, which (we argue) features centrally in how we picture. The key distinction is that the picturing of nonhuman animals involves only Humean material practical inference, in which representational states are corrected only by feedback from the environment and not from discursive interactions. The resulting view shows that Sellars’s contributions to practical philosophy (especially theory of action and metaethics) cannot be separated from his contributions to philosophy of mind, language, and cognitive science. Further, the view makes it clear that picturing is neither a version of the Given, nor is it a fifth wheel to inferential role in explaining representation, but is essential to Sellars’s model of how animals—including humans—represent their environment. (shrink)

A collection of material on Husserl's Logical Investigations, and specifically on Husserl's formal theory of parts, wholes and dependence and its influence in ontology, logic and psychology. Includes translations of classic works by Adolf Reinach and Eugenie Ginsberg, as well as original contributions by Wolfgang Künne, Kevin Mulligan, Gilbert Null, Barry Smith, Peter M. Simons, Roger A. Simons and Dallas Willard. Documents work on Husserl's ontology arising out of early meetings of the Seminar for Austro-German Philosophy.

This book is a survey of the most important developments in Austrian philosophy in its classical period from the 1870s to the Anschluss in 1938. Thus it is intended as a contribution to the history of philosophy. But I hope that it will be seen also as a contribution to philosophy in its own right as an attempt to philosophize in the spirit of those, above all Roderick Chisholm, Rudolf Haller, Kevin Mulligan and Peter Simons, who have done so much (...) to demonstrate the continued fertility of the ideas and methods of the Austrian philosophers in our own day. For some time now, historians of philosophy have been gradually coming to terms with the idea that post-Kantian philosophy in the German-speaking world ought properly to be divided into two distinct traditions which we might refer to as the German and Austrian traditions, respectively. The main line of the first consists in a list of personages beginning with Kant, Fichte, Hegel and Schelling and ending with Heidegger, Adorno and Bloch. The main line of the second may be picked out similarly by means of a list beginning with Bolzano, Mach and Meinong, and ending with Wittgenstein, Neurath and Popper. As should be clear, it is the Austrian tradition that has contributed most to the contemporary mainstream of philosophical thinking in the Anglo-Saxon world. For while there are of course German thinkers who have made crucial contributions to the development of exact or analytic philosophy, such thinkers were outsiders when seen from the perspective of native German philosophical culture, and in fact a number of them found their philosophical home precisely in Vienna. When, in contrast, we examine the influence of the Austrian line, we encounter a whole series of familiar and unfamiliar links to the characteristic concerns of more recent philosophy of the analytic sort. As Michael Dummett points out in his Origins of Analytic Philosophy, the newly fashionable habit of referring to analytic philosophy as "Anglo-American" is in this light a "grave historical distortion". If, he says, we take into account the historical context in which analytic philosophy developed, then such philosophy "could at least as well be called "Anglo-Austrian" (1988, p. 7). Much valuable scholarly work has been done on the thinking of Husserl and Wittgenstein, Mach and the Vienna Circle. The central axis of Austrian philosophy, however, which as I hope to show in what follows is constituted by the work of Brentano and his school, is still rather poorly understood. Work on Meinong or Twardowski by contemporary philosophers still standardly rests upon simplified and often confused renderings of a few favoured theses taken out of context. Little attention is paid to original sources, and little effort is devoted to establishing what the problems were by which the Austrian philosophers in general were exercised -- in spite of the fact that many of these same problems have once more become important as a result of the contemporary burgeoning of interest on the part of philosophers in problems in the field of cognitive science. (shrink)

Can testimony provide reasons to believe some proposition about an artwork’s aesthetic character? Can testimony bring an agent into a position where they can issue an aesthetic judgement about that artwork? What is the epistemic value of aesthetic communication? These questions have received sustained philosophical attention. More fundamental questions about aesthetic communication have meanwhile been neglected. These latter questions concern the nature of aesthetic communication, the criteria that determine when aesthetic communication is successful, and the frequency of communicative success in (...) aesthetic communication. The neglect of these questions is a serious oversight, not least because they bear directly on each of the other questions listed. This paper’s focus is the more fundamental set of questions. I argue for a restricted form of communicative pessimism. Discerning aesthetic communication about an artwork typically fails unless its recipient is both acquainted with that artwork and able to coordinate with the speaker on an aesthetic understanding of it. I arrive at this conclusion by challenging the standard conception of the nature of aesthetic communication that the literature presupposes, as well as an accompanying criterion of communicative success. I introduce an alternative view. In closing I relate my discussion to the former set of questions. (shrink)

I investigate the role of geometric intuition in Frege’s early mathematical works and the significance of his view of the role of intuition in geometry to properly understanding the aims of his logicist project. I critically evaluate the interpretations of Mark Wilson, Jamie Tappenden, and Michael Dummett. The final analysis that I provide clarifies the relationship of Frege’s restricted logicist project to dominant trends in German mathematical research, in particular to Weierstrassian arithmetization and to the Riemannian conceptual/geometrical tradition at Göttingen. (...) Concurring with Tappenden, I hold that Frege’s logicism should not be understood as a continuing a project of reductionist arithmetization. However, Frege does not quite take up the Riemannian banner either. His logicism supports a hierarchical understanding of the structure of mathematical knowledge, according to which arithmetic is applicable to geometry but not vice versa because the former is more general, as revealed by the strictly logical nature of its objects in comparison to the intuitional nature of geometric objects. I suggest, in particular, that Frege intended that foundational work would show the use of geometric intuition in complex analysis, a source of error for Riemann that Weierstrass was proud to have uncovered, to be inessential. (shrink)

Searle’s tool for understanding culture, law and society is the opposition between brute reality and institutional reality, or in other words between: observer-independent features of the world, such as force, mass and gravitational attraction, and observer-relative features of the world, such as money, property, marriage and government. The question posed here is: under which of these two headings do moral concepts fall? This is an important question because there are moral facts – for example pertaining to guilt and responsibility – (...) which hover uncomfortably close to the boundary between the observer-relative and the observer-independent. By means of a thought experiment involving an imagined Chinese society in which guilt is determined by the random throwing of sticks, I seek to show that moral concepts threaten the foundations of Searle’s philosophy of social reality. (shrink)

Abstract The values of the healthcare sector are fairly ubiquitous across the globe, focusing on caring and respect, patient health, excellence in care delivery, and multi-stakeholder collaboration. Many individual pharmacists embrace these core values. But their ability to honor these values is significantly determined by the nature of the system they work in. -/- The paper starts with a model of the prevailing pharmacist workforce model in Scotland, in which core roles are predominantly separated into hierarchically disaggregated jobs focused on (...) one professional ‘pillar’: Clinician /Practice Provider; Educator; Leader/Manager; and Researcher. This is the ‘Atomistic’ Model. This skills-segregation yields a workforce of individuals working in isolation rather than collaborating together, and lacking a shared information flow, purpose and identity. Key strategic flaws include suboptimal responsiveness to population and subpopulation needs, inconsistency and inequity of care, an erosion of professional agency, and lower job satisfaction. It is conjectured that this results from a lack of congruence between values, professional ethos, and organizational structure. ‘Atomism’ culminates in a syndrome of widespread professional-level cognitive dissonance. -/- The paper contrasts this with a new emerging workforce vision, The Collaborative Care Model. This new model defines a systems-first-approach, built on the principle that all jobs must include all four professional ‘pillars’. Vertical skills integration, involving education and task sharing, will support sustainability and succession planning. Horizontal skills integration (across practice, leadership and research) is included to improve responsiveness to population need and individual professional agency. The working conditions, supportive ethos, and career structure needed to make the model work are described. Moral theory and workforce theory are used to justify why the model may be more effective for population health, delivering greater job satisfaction for individuals and ultimately helping systematically realize and honor healthcare values. Finally, the paper sketches the first steps needed to implement the model at the national level, starting with the operationalization of new multi-pillar professional curricula across the career spectrum. Potential pitfalls and challenges are also discussed. -/- Co-Authors: 1. Paul Forsyth (PF) Lead Pharmacist Clinical Cardiology, Pharmacy, NHS Greater Glasgow & Clyde. Contribution: Conceptualization; Model Curation; Model Theory; Model Visualization; Writing - original draft (lead author), Writing - review & editing (lead author) 2. Andrew Radley (AR), Consultant in Public Health Pharmacy, NHS Tayside. Contribution: Conceptualization; Model curation; Model Theory; Writing - review & editing 3. Gordon Rushworth (GR), MPharm MSc FFRPS FRPharmS (Consultant). Programme Director, Highland Pharmacy Education & Research Centre, NHS Highland, Inverness. Contribution: Model curation; Writing - review & editing 4. Fiona Marra (FM) National Lead Clinician Scottish Infection and Immunology Network (SPAIIN) / Advanced Pharmacist HCV / HIV, NHS Greater Glasgow & Clyde. Contribution: Model curation; Writing - review & editing 5. Susan Roberts (SR) Associate Postgraduate Pharmacy Dean, NHS Education for Scotland. Contribution: Model curation; Writing - review & editing 6. Roisin O’Hare (RO) Lead Teacher Practitioner Pharmacist, Northern Ireland University Network, Southern Health and Social Care Trust. Contribution: Model curation; Writing - review & editing 7. Catherine Duggan (CD) Chief Executive Officer, International Pharmaceutical Federation (FIP). Contribution: Model curation; Writing - review & editing 8. Barry Maguire (BM) Senior Lecturer, School of Philosophy, Psychology and Life Sciences, The University of Edinburgh. Contribution: Conceptualization; Model Curation; Model Theory; Model Visualization; Supervision; Writing - original draft (senior academic supervisor), Writing - review & editing (senior academic supervisor) -/- . (shrink)

What explains why we are subjects for whom objects can have value, and what explains which objects have value for us? Axiologicians say that the value of humanity is the answer. I argue that our value, no matter what it is like, cannot perform this task. We are animals among others. An explanation of the value of objects for us must fit into an explanation of the value of objects for animals generally. Different objects have value for different animals. Those (...) differences depend on differences in animal natures and, in particular, on the diverse characteristic capacities of different animals. Once we invoke animal natures, there is nothing for the value of animality, including the value of humanity, to explain. (shrink)

Most people who defend physician-assisted death (PAD) endorse the Joint View, which holds that two conditions—autonomy and welfare—must be satisfied for PAD to be justified. In this paper, we defend an Autonomy Only view. We argue that the welfare condition is either otiose on the most plausible account of the autonomy condition, or else is implausibly restrictive, particularly once we account for the broad range of reasons patients cite for desiring PAD, such as “tired of life” cases. Moreover, many of (...) the common objections to an Autonomy Only view fail once we understand the extent of the autonomy condition’s requirements—in particular, the importance of one’s values for autonomous choices. If our view is correct, then the scope of permissible PAD is broader than is currently accepted in both the philosophical literature and the law, and therefore poses an important challenge to this widely accepted view on justified PAD. (shrink)

In this paper, I discuss two concerns for pluralist truth theories: a concern about a key detail of these theories and a concern about their viability. The detail-related concern is that pluralists have relied heavily upon the notion of a domain, but it is not transparent what they take domains to be. Since the notion of a domain has been present in philosophy for some time, it is important for many theorists, not only truth pluralists, to be clear on what (...) domains are and what work they can do. The viability-related concern is that it’s not clear how a pluralist truth theory could explain the truth-conditions of mixed atomic propositions. To address this concern, truth pluralists should recognize something to which they have not been sufficiently attentive: that some atomic propositions belong to more than one domain. But, recognizing this requires rethinking the relationships between the nature of propositions, their membership in domains, and their truth. I address these issues and propose an understanding of them that is preferable to the best existing account of them, that offered by Michael Lynch. (shrink)

Plato is often acknowledged as the first philosophical critic of democracy and his Republic is regularly taken as a paradigm of an anti-democratic work. While it is true that Plato objected to much about the democracy of his own time, Plato’s political theorizing also reveals an interest in improving democratic institutions. This chapter explores three themes in Plato’s thinking about democracy: firstly, Plato's insistence that rulers should be knowledgeable and his claim that most people are politically incompetent (§1); secondly, Plato's (...) criticisms of oratory and the corrupting effects of public rhetoric (§2); thirdly, Plato's use of democratic institutions in the Laws (§3). Once we appreciate these different evaluations of democratic practices, we can see that Plato was not simply ‘anti-democratic’ or ‘pro-democratic’ but thought some democratic practices should be abandoned, some reformed, and some adopted. (shrink)

Did Plato intend the laws of the Laws to change? While most scholars agree that there is to be legal change in Magnesia, I contend that this issue has been clouded by confusing three distinct questions: (1) whether there are legal mechanisms for changing the law in Magnesia, (2) what the attitudes of Magnesian citizens towards innovation and legal change are, and (3) whether Plato thinks the law is always the ultimate political authority. Once we separate these issues and look (...) at the relevant texts more closely, we see that the Athenian Visitor is primarily concerned with supplementing the original lawgiver’s laws and that any innovation that occurs should be consistent with this lawcode. This does not settle the question about whether it is always right to act in accordance with the existing laws, though it does provide a valuable framework for understanding a central aspect of Platonic political philosophy. Thus, although Plato’s ideal places knowledge above the law, in practice the laws of Magnesia will be fixed and authoritative for those people living under them. (shrink)

Consider a game of blind chess between two chess masters that is recorded in some standard chess notation. The recording is a representation of the game. But what is the game itself? This question is, we believe, central to the entire domain of social ontology. We argue that the recorded game is a special sort of quasi-abstract pattern, something that is: (i) like abstract entities such as numbers or forms, in that it is both nonphysical and nonpsychological; but at the (...) same time, (ii) through its association with specific players and a specific occasion, tied to time and history. We discover other abstract patterns of this sort especially in the domains of law and commerce. This essay draws on the work in social ontology, we of Hernando de Soto and of John Searle to develop an ontology of the social world based on an analysis of the peculiar interdependence between quasi-abstract patterns and their representations in documents of different sorts. (shrink)

This essay falls into three parts. Section 1 describes how Politics Book I, which includes Aristotle’s famous claims that the human being is by nature a political animal (politikon zōon) and that the polis (city-state) is natural and naturally prior to the individual, and his infamous claim that it is just to enslave those who are slaves by nature, may be connected with the rest of the Politics, which is about politeiai (constitutions). Section 2 examines Aristotle’s ideal politeia in Politics (...) VII-VIII in the light of his criticisms of other politeiai in Book II. Section 3 discusses non-ideal constitutions in Politics III-VI. (shrink)

This chapter addresses concerns that pragmatic encroachers are committed to problematic knowledge variance. It first replies to Charity Anderson and John Hawthorne’s new putative problem cases, which purport to show that pragmatic encroachment is committed to problematic variations in knowledge depending on what choices are available to the potential knower. It argues that the new cases do not provide any new reasons to be concerned about the pragmatic encroacher’s commitment to knowledge-variance. The chapter further argues that concerns about knowledge-variance are (...) not limited to the pragmatic encroacher, but come up for traditional purist invariantism as well. (shrink)

We show that, contrary to conventional wisdom, Frege’s distinction between sense and reference does not reconcile a classical logic of identity with apparent counterexamples to it involving proper names embedded under propositional attitude verbs.

Recent defenders of the divine command theory like Adams and Alston have confronted the Euthyphro dilemma by arguing that although God’s commands make right actions right, God is morally perfect and hence would never issue unjust or immoral commandments. On their view, God’s nature is the standard of moral goodness, and God’s commands are the source of all obligation. I argue that this view of divine goodness fails because it strips God’s nature of any features that would make His goodness (...) intelligible. An adequate solution to the Euthyphro dilemma may require that God be constrained by a standard of goodness that is external to Himself -- itself a problematic proposal for many theists. (shrink)

There is pragmatic encroachment on some epistemic status just in case whether a proposition has that status for a subject depends not only on the subject's epistemic position with respect to the proposition, but also on features of the subject's non-epistemic, practical environment. Discussions of pragmatic encroachment usually focus on knowledge. Here we argue that, barring infallibilism, there is pragmatic encroachment on what is arguably a more fundamental epistemic status – the status a proposition has when it is warranted enough (...) to be a reason one has for believing other things. (shrink)

Abstract below. The published version of this article is available open access at The Monist's website. Part of Plato’s complaint about the cognitive status of art cites the pollution of aesthetic cognition by the affective side of our natures. Schopenhauer, by contrast, takes aesthetic cognition to transcend (some of) the limitations of everyday cognition precisely because in it agents become the “pure, will-less subject of cognition” (WWR I 219). On the orthodox reading of his later philosophy, Nietzsche scorns Plato and (...) Schopenhauer’s association of the value of art with its truthfulness. I challenge the orthodox reading and argue that one strand of art’s value is its penetrative cognitive power. In contrast to Schopenhauer, Nietzsche understands this cognitive power to result from the embracing and exploitation of the affects in the artistic process rather than their extirpation. (shrink)

I propose and articulate a novel theory of desire, called the Revised Reward Theory. As the name suggests, the theory is based—and expands—on Arpaly and Schroeder’s (2014) Reward Theory of Desire. The initial Reward Theory identifies desires with states of the reward learning system such that for an organism to desire some P is for its reward system to treat P as a reward upon receipt. The Revised Reward Theory identifies desires with a different state of the same system, such (...) that for an organism to desire some P is for its reward system to expect or predict that P will be rewarding (roughly) prior to receipt. The difference amounts to equating desires with what we ultimately find rewarding or satisfying versus those that underlie our motivations to obtain that which we take ourselves to desire. I argue that the structure of the reward system is incompatible with the original Reward Theory but compatible with the Revised Reward Theory. I demonstrate that this difference has important philosophical implications. I focus on moral responsibility and demonstrate Arpaly and Schroeder’s argument, that addiction can mitigate moral responsibility, turns on this precise difference. Arpaly, Schroeder, and I all ascribe to a meta-theory called ‘natural kindism’ which identifies mental kinds with neurocognitive kinds. This discussion, in addition to defending a theory of desire, is intended to act as a proof of concept for natural kindism as offering a powerful framework for relating empirical results to philosophical issues. (shrink)

Conditional excluded middle (CEM) is the following principe of counterfactual logic: either, if it were the case that φ, it would be the case that ψ, or, if it were the case that φ, it would be the case that not-ψ. I will first show that CEM entails the identity of indiscernibles, the falsity of physicalism, and the failure of the modal to supervene on the categorical and of the vague to supervene on the precise. I will then argue that (...) we should accept these startling conclusions, since CEM is valid. (shrink)

Abstracts of each chapter may be found by typing in your browser search bar, "Jeremy Horne, Managing Complexity Through Social Intelligence: Foundations of the Modern Organic Corporatist State", going to the Springer Publishing website and reading the abstracts for each chapter.

Unlike its friendly cousin the placebo effect, the nocebo effect (the effect of expecting a negative outcome) has been almost ignored. Epistemic and ethical confusions related to its existence have gone all but unnoticed. Contrary to what is often asserted, adverse events following from taking placebo interventions are not necessarily nocebo effects; they could have arisen due to natural history. Meanwhile, ethical informed consent (in clinical trials and clinical practice) has centred almost exclusively on the need to inform patients about (...) intervention risks with patients to preserve their autonomy. Researchers have failed to consider the harm caused by the way in which the information is conveyed. In this paper, I argue that the magnitude of nocebo effects must be measured using control groups consisting of untreated patients. And, because the nocebo effect can produce harm, the principle of non-maleficence must be taken into account alongside autonomy when obtaining (ethical) informed consent and communicating intervention risks with patients. (shrink)

Since 2002 we have been testing and refining a methodology for ontology development that is now being used by multiple groups of researchers in different life science domains. Gary Merrill, in a recent paper in this journal, describes some of the reasons why this methodology has been found attractive by researchers in the biological and biomedical sciences. At the same time he assails the methodology on philosophical grounds, focusing specifically on our recommendation that ontologies developed for scientific purposes should be (...) constructed in such a way that their terms are seen as referring to what we call universals or types in reality. As we show, Merrill’s critique is of little relevance to the success of our realist project, since it not only reveals no actual errors in our work but also criticizes views on universals that we do not in fact hold. However, it nonetheless provides us with a valuable opportunity to clarify the realist methodology, and to show how some of its principles are being applied, especially within the framework of the OBO (Open Biomedical Ontologies) Foundry initiative. (shrink)

This paper investigates a generalization of Boolean algebras which I call agglomerative algebras. It also outlines two conceptions of propositions according to which they form an agglomerative algebra but not a Boolean algebra with respect to conjunction and negation.

American teachings use the idea of shields to describe how we meet, receive and respond to the world, and I have found some equivalencies in Eastern teachings, as well. I’ll tell you about a few that I’ve learned, and then we’ll expand those ideas to embrace the core ideas of this book.

An ethical theory is alienating if accepting the theory inhibits the agent from fitting participation in some normative ideal, such as some ideal of integrity, friendship, or community. Many normative ideals involve non-consequentialist behavior of some form or another. If such ideals are normatively authoritative, they constitute counterexamples to consequentialism unless their authority can be explained or explained away. We address a range of attempts to avoid such counterexamples and argue that consequentialism cannot by itself account for the normative authority (...) of all plausible such ideals. At best, consequentialism can find a more modest place in an ethical theory that includes non-consequentialist principles with their own normative authority. (shrink)