As moral injury is a still-emerging concept within the area of military mental health, prevalence estimates for moral injury and its precursor, potentially morally injurious events (PMIEs), remain unknown for many of the world’s militaries. The present study sought to estimate the prevalence of PMIEs in the Canadian Armed Forces (CAF), using data collected from CAF personnel deployed to Afghanistan, via logistic regressions controlling for relevant sociodemographic, military, and deployment characteristics. Analyses revealed that over 65% of CAF members reported exposure (...) to at least one event that would be considered a PMIE. The most commonly PMIEs individuals reported included seeing ill or injured women and children they were unable to help (48.4%), being unable to distinguish between combatants and non-combatants (43.6%), and finding themselves in a threatening situation where they were unable to respond due to the rules of engagement under which they were required to operate (35.4%). These findings provide support for both the presence of exposure to PMIEs in CAF members and the need for formal longitudinal data collection regarding PMIE exposure and moral injury development. (shrink)

Several interesting themes emerge from G. E. Moore’s previously unpub­lished review of _The Principles of Mathematics_. These include a worry concerning whether mathematical notions are identical to purely logical ones, even if coextensive logical ones exist. Another involves a conception of infinity based on endless series neglected in the Principles but arguably involved in Zeno’s paradox of Achilles and the Tortoise. Moore also questions the scope of Russell’s notion of material implication, and other aspects of Russell’s claim that mathematics reduces (...) to logic. (shrink)

Assertions are the centre of gravity in social epistemology. They are the vehicles we use to exchange information within scientific groups and society as a whole. It is therefore essential to determine under which conditions we are permitted to make an assertion. In this paper we argue and provide empirical evidence for the view that the norm of assertion is justified belief: truth or even knowledge are not required. Our results challenge the knowledge account advocated by, e.g. Williamson (1996), in (...) general, and more specifically, put into question several studies conducted by Turri (2013, 2016) that support a knowledge norm of assertion. Instead, the justified belief account championed by, e.g. Douven (2006), seems to prevail. (shrink)

This paper develops an account of the distinctive epistemic authority of avowals of propositional attitude, focusing on the case of belief. It is argued that such avowals are expressive of the very mental states they self-ascribe. This confers upon them a limited self-warranting status, and renders them immune to an important class of errors to which paradigm empirical (e.g., perceptual) judgments are liable.

A classic debate concerns whether reasonableness should be understood statistically (e.g., reasonableness is what is common) or prescriptively (e.g., reasonableness is what is good). This Article elaborates and defends a third possibility. Reasonableness is a partly statistical and partly prescriptive “hybrid,” reflecting both statistical and prescriptive considerations. Experiments reveal that people apply reasonableness as a hybrid concept, and the Article argues that a hybrid account offers the best general theory of reasonableness. -/- First, the Article investigates how ordinary people judge (...) what is reasonable. Reasonableness sits at the core of countless legal standards, yet little work has investigated how ordinary people (i.e., potential jurors) actually make reasonableness judgments. Experiments reveal that judgments of reasonableness are systematically intermediate between judgments of the relevant average and ideal across numerous legal domains. For example, participants’ mean judgment of the legally reasonable number of weeks’ delay before a criminal trial (ten weeks) falls between the judged average (seventeen weeks) and ideal (seven weeks). So too for the reasonable num- ber of days to accept a contract offer, the reasonable rate of attorneys’ fees, the reasonable loan interest rate, and the reasonable annual number of loud events on a football field in a residential neighborhood. Judgment of reasonableness is better predicted by both statistical and prescriptive factors than by either factor alone. -/- This Article uses this experimental discovery to develop a normative view of reasonableness. It elaborates an account of reasonableness as a hybrid standard, arguing that this view offers the best general theory of reasonableness, one that applies correctly across multiple legal domains. Moreover, this hybrid feature is the historical essence of legal reasonableness: the original use of the “reasonable person” and the “man on the Clapham omnibus” aimed to reflect both statistical and prescriptive considerations. Empirically, reasonableness is a hybrid judgment. And normatively, reasonableness should be applied as a hybrid standard. (shrink)

Certain advocates of the so-called “neo-logicist” movement in the philosophy of mathematics identify themselves as “neo-Fregeans” (e.g., Hale and Wright), presenting an updated and revised version of Frege’s form of logicism. Russell’s form of logicism is scarcely discussed in this literature and, when it is, often dismissed as not really logicism at all (in light of its assumption of axioms of infinity, reducibility and so on). In this paper I have three aims: firstly, to identify more clearly the primary meta-ontological (...) and methodological differences between Russell’s logicism and the more recent forms; secondly, to argue that Russell’s form of logicism offers more elegant and satisfactory solutions to a variety of problems that continue to plague the neo-logicist movement (the bad company objection, the embarrassment of richness objection, worries about a bloated ontology, etc.); thirdly, to argue that neo-Russellian forms of logicism remain viable positions for current philosophers of mathematics. (shrink)

This paper discusses certain problems arising within the treatment of the senses of functions in Alonzo Church's Logic of Sense and Denotation. Church understands such senses themselves to be "sense-functions," functions from sense to sense. However, the conditions he lays out under which a sense-function is to be regarded as a sense presenting another function as denotation allow for certain undesirable results given certain unusual or "deviant" sense-functions. Certain absurdities result, e.g., an argument can be found for equating any two (...) senses of the same type. An alternative treatment of the senses of functions is discussed, and is thought to do better justice to Frege's original theory. (shrink)

Bertrand Russell was one of the best-known proponents of logicism: the theory that mathematics reduces to, or is an extension of, logic. Russell argued for this thesis in his 1903 The Principles of Mathematics and attempted to demonstrate it formally in Principia Mathematica (PM 1910–1913; with A. N. Whitehead). Russell later described his work as a further “regressive” step in understanding the foundations of mathematics made possible by the late 19th century “arithmetization” of mathematics and Frege’s logical definitions of arithmetical (...) concepts. The logical system of PM sought to improve on earlier attempts by solving the contradictions found in, e.g., Frege’s system, by employing a theory of types. In this article, I also consider and critically evaluate the most common objections to Russell’s logicism, including the claim that it is undermined by Gödel’s incompleteness results, and Putnam's charge of “if-thenism”. I suggest that if we are willing to accept a slightly revisionist account of what counts as a mathematical truth, these criticisms do not obviously refute Russell’s claim to have established that mathematical truths generally are a species of logical truth. (shrink)

We develop a reading of Moore’s “Proof of an External World” that emphasizes the connections between this paper and Moore’s earlier concerns and strategies. Our reading has the benefit of explaining why the claims that Moore advances in “Proof of an External World” would have been of interest to him, and avoids attributing to him arguments that are either trivial or wildly unsuccessful. Part of the evidence for our view comes from unpublished drafts which, we believe, contain important clues concerning (...) Moore’s aims and intent. While our approach to PEW may be classified alongside other broadly "metaphysical" readings, we believe that a proper recognition of the continuity in Moore’s philosophical concerns and strategies across his philosophical career shows that the customary distinction between "epistemological" and "metaphysical" interpretative approaches to PEW is at best superficial. (shrink)

Our focus in this chapter will be the role the pride has played, both historically and contemporarily, in Christian theology and philosophical theology. We begin by delineating a number of different types of pride, since some types are positive (e.g., when a parent tells a daughter “I’m proud of you for being brave”), and others are negative (e.g., “Pride goes before a fall”) or even vicious. We then explore the role that the negative emotion and vice play in the history (...) of Christianity, with particular attention to a number of influential figures. We conclude by exploring how pride connects with a number of other central issues in Christian theology. (shrink)

Despite pervasive variation in the content of laws, legal theorists and anthropologists have argued that laws share certain abstract features and even speculated that law may be a human universal. In the present report, we evaluate this thesis through an experiment administered in 11 different countries. Are there cross‐cultural principles of law? In a between‐subjects design, participants (N = 3,054) were asked whether there could be laws that violate certain procedural principles (e.g., laws applied retrospectively or unintelligible laws), and also (...) whether there are any such laws. Confirming our preregistered prediction, people reported that such laws cannot exist, but also (paradoxically) that there are such laws. These results document cross‐culturally and –linguistically robust beliefs about the concept of law which defy people's grasp of how legal systems function in practice. (shrink)

Many epistemologists have argued that there is some degree of independence between individual and collective reliability (e.g., Kitcher 1990; Mayo-Wilson, Zollman, and Danks 2011; Dunn 2018). The question, then, is: To what extent are the two independent of each other? And in which contexts do they come apart? In this paper, I present a new case confirming the independence between individual and collective reliability optimization. I argue that, in voting groups, optimizing individual reliability can conflict with optimizing collective reliability. This (...) can happen even if various conditions are held constant, such as: the evidence jurors have access to, the voting system, the number of jurors, some independence conditions between voters, and so forth. This observation matters in many active debates on, e.g., epistemic dilemmas, the wisdom of crowds, independence theses, epistemic democracy, and the division of epistemic labour. (shrink)

Several studies in experimental philosophy and semantics have shown that a substantial number of English speakers consider a statement true even if it does not align with the facts, as long as it is justified from the speaker's perspective. These findings challenge the prevailing view among philosophers that truth is uniformly based on a statement's correspondence to reality and suggest that for some speakers truth is sensitive to epistemic perspectives. In this study, we show that this behavior depends on how (...) the critical question assessing the statement's truth is phrased. When participants were asked whether the proposition itself is true (e.g., "Is it true that [the uttered proposition]?"), almost everyone answered negatively. It is when the original speaker was mentioned in the question (e.g., "Is what [the speaker] said true?" or "Is [the speaker]’s answer true?") that around half of the participants answered positively. We explore four possible explanations for this behavior: (1) "true" might be ambiguous between a basic correspondence sense and a coherence sense, which may be activated in some people by the explicit mentioning of the speaker; (2) "true" could be a context-sensitive expression with an implicit perspective parameter such that some speakers shift to the speaker’s perspective when prompted by the question; (3) those who select "true" might ad hoc relativize the term to the speaker’s perspective; (4) those who select "true" might unconsciously substitute it with "truthful". In addition, we discuss the implications of the findings for other philosophical discussions concerning norms of assertion, sincerity, and the theory of reference. (shrink)

Several studies in experimental philosophy and semantics have shown that a substantial number of English speakers consider a statement true even if it does not align with the facts, as long as it is justified from the speaker's perspective. These findings challenge the prevailing view among philosophers that truth is uniformly based on a statement's correspondence to reality and suggest that for some speakers truth is sensitive to epistemic perspectives. In this study, we show that this behavior depends on how (...) the critical question assessing the statement's truth is phrased. When participants were asked whether the proposition itself is true (e.g., "Is it true that [the uttered proposition]?"), almost everyone answered negatively. It is when the original speaker was mentioned in the question (e.g., "Is what [the speaker] said true?" or "Is [the speaker]’s answer true?") that around half of the participants answered positively. We explore four possible explanations for this behavior: (1) "true" might be ambiguous between a basic correspondence sense and a coherence sense, which may be activated in some people by the explicit mentioning of the speaker; (2) "true" could be a context-sensitive expression with an implicit perspective parameter such that some speakers shift to the speaker’s perspective when prompted by the question; (3) those who select "true" might ad hoc relativize the term to the speaker’s perspective; (4) those who select "true" might unconsciously substitute it with "truthful". In addition, we discuss the implications of the findings for other philosophical discussions concerning norms of assertion, sincerity, and the theory of reference. (shrink)

Envy is, roughly, the disposition to desire that another lose a perceived good so that one can, by comparison, feel better about one’s self. The divisiveness of envy follows not just from one’s willing against the good of the other, but also from the other vices that spring from it. It is for this second reason that envy is a capital vice. This chapter begins by arguing for a definition of envy similar to that given by Aquinas and then considers (...) its relationship to other vices (e.g. jealousy, schadenfreude, and hate). At the heart of envy is a disposition to make relative comparisons which lead to a sense of inferiority. This is turn can lead a person to feel and act in ways destructive of community and the self. The present chapter also addresses recent work in both psychology and economics related to envy. (shrink)

Legal theorists seek to persuade other jurists of certain theories: Textualism or purposivism; formalism or realism; natural law theory or positivism; prison reform or abolition; universal or particular human rights? Despite voluminous literature about these debates, tremendous uncertainty remains about which views experts endorse. This Article presents the first-ever empirical study of American law professors about legal theory questions. A novel dataset of over six hundred law professors reveals expert consensus and dissensus about dozens of longstanding legal theory debates. -/- (...) Law professors also debate questions about the nature of the legal academy. Descriptively, which subjects (e.g. constitutional law) and methods (e.g. law & economics) are most central within the legal academy today? And prescriptively, should today’s legal academy prioritize additional areas (e.g. legislation) or methods (e.g. critical race theory)? There is great interest in these questions but no empirical dataset of experts’ views; this results in uncertainty about which views experts endorse. This Article’s empirical study also clarifies these questions, documenting law professors’ evaluation of over one-hundred areas of law. -/- The legal theory and legal academy findings support implications for legal scholarship, education, and practice. Clearly, debates about law and the legal academy’s evolution should not be settled by a survey. Nevertheless, insofar as law professors are experts about these issues, it is instructive to discover and carefully examine what views those experts hold, so as to help determine which views are most likely to be true and how the legal academy ought to develop. (shrink)

What does it take for lawyers and others to think or talk about the same legal topic—e.g., defamation, culpability? We argue that people are able to think or talk about the same topic not when they possess a matching substantive understanding of the topic, as traditional metasemantics says, but instead when their thoughts or utterances are related to each other in certain ways. And what determines the content of thoughts and utterances is what would best serve the core purposes of (...) the representational practice within which the thought or utterance is located. In thus favoring a “relational model” in metasemantics, we share Ronald Dworkin's goal of explaining fundamental legal disagreements, and also his reliance on constructive interpretation. But what we delineate is a far more general and explanatorily resourceful metasemantics than what Dworkin articulated, which also bypasses some controversial implications for the nature of law that Dworkin alleged. (shrink)

With An Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment? (1784) and What Does It Mean to Orient Oneself in Thinking? (1786), Kant presents the concept of public use of reason and defines its requirements, scope, and function. In outline, the public use of reason consists in sharing one’s thoughts with “the entire public of the world of readers” (8:37). As for its requirements, to the extent that someone communicates in their own person, i.e. not in the exercise of their function (...) as a public official, and bases their reasoning on universalizable grounds, their use of reason qualifies as public and shall be free from state censorship. Therefore, Kant’s concept of public use reason aims to establish a public debate that is free and includes in its scope, both as subjects and recipients, potentially all adult men. The ultimate function of the public use of reason is to foster moral progress and, with it, the reform of the political community according to the republican ideal. However, it is commonly held that Kant, with his 1798 essay The Conflict of the Faculties, deprives his notion of public use of reason of its progressive core and adjusts it to the absolutist conception of speech and civil service. Characterizations of state officials as “not free to make public use of their learning” (7:18) and “bound to uphold whatever […] the crown sanctions for them to expound publicly” (7:8), as well as the depiction of laypeople as “incompetent” (7:18) and “resigned to understanding nothing about [the sciences]” (7:34), have led influential interpreters to read Kant as redefining his notion of public use of reason by restricting its subjects to university professors and its recipients to government members (e.g. John Christian Laursen 1986, rpt. 1992 and 1996; Kevin Davis 1992; Steven Lestition 1993; Jay Franzel 2013). On my reading, with The Conflict of the Faculties, Kant does indeed redefine the concept of public use of reason making concessions to the absolutist notion of speech and civil service. However, a close reading of the text reveals that the public use of reason ends up being reaffirmed in its progressive core and extended in its scope. To substantiate my interpretation, I will systematically analyse and classify each of the 68 occurrences of the adjective ‘public’ in The Conflict of the Faculties and show how Kant employs the absolutist vocabulary to convey the progressive project of his previous writings. Accordingly, I argue that Kant holds on to the free public use of reason as a means to reform politics according to the republican ideal and that the employment of the absolutist vocabulary is motivated by a pragmatic attitude and a provocative stance. (shrink)

It is sometimes alleged that the study of emotion and the study of value are currently pursued as relatively autonomous disciplines. As Kevin Mulligan notes, “the philosophy and psychology of emotions pays little attention to the philosophy of value and the latter pays only a little more attention to the former.” (2010b, 475). Arguably, the last decade has seen more of a rapprochement between these two domains than used to be the norm (cf. e.g. Roeser & Todd 2014). But (...) there still seems to be considerable potential for exchange and dialogue if the situation is compared with their intimate relationship in central strands of early realist phenomenology. The philosopher perhaps most representative of this ecumenical approach is Husserl’s early student Dietrich von Hildebrand (1889-1977). From the very early stages of his philosophical career, Hildebrand has developed one of the most original, comprehensive and nuanced accounts of emotions at whose core is a detailed examination of their connection to value. While his central concern with the ethical significance of our affective life is in many ways continuous with Scheler’s work and draws crucially on Reinach’s philosophy of mind, Hildebrand’s own reflections considerably expand on and substantially modify the picture of the ontology and normative role of emotions defended by these authors. In this article, I reconstruct Hildebrand’s view of emotions with a particular focus on those aspects which represent his most distinctive contribution to this subject. (shrink)

Different people reason differently, which means that sometimes they reach different conclusions from the same evidence. We maintain that this is not only natural, but rational. In this essay we explore the epistemology of that state of affairs. First we will canvass arguments for and against the claim that rational methods of reasoning must always reach the same conclusions from the same evidence. Then we will consider whether the acknowledgment that people have divergent rational reasoning methods should undermine one’s confidence (...) in one’s own reasoning. Finally we will explore how agents who employ distinct yet equally rational methods of reasoning should respond to interactions with the products of each others’ reasoning. We find that the epistemology of multiple reasoning methods has been misunderstood by a number of authors writing on epistemic permissiveness and peer disagreement. (shrink)

The concept of moral wrongness, many think, has a distinctive kind of referential stability, brought out by moral twin earth cases. This article offers a new account of the source of this stability, deriving it from a metaphysics of content: “substantive” radical interpretation, and first-order normative assumptions. This story is distinguished from extant “reference magnetic” explanations of the phenomenon, and objections and replies are considered.

Learning programming is thought to be troublesome. One doable reason why students don’t do well in programming is expounded to the very fact that traditional way of learning within the lecture hall adds more stress on students in understanding the Material rather than applying the Material to a true application. For a few students, this teaching model might not catch their interest. As a result, they'll not offer their best effort to grasp the Material given. Seeing however the information is (...) applied to real issues will increase student interest in learning. As a consequence, this may increase their effort to be taught. In the current paper, we try to help students learn C# programming language using Intelligent Tutoring System. This ITS was developed using ITSB authoring tool to be able to help the student learn programming efficiently and make the learning procedure very pleasing. A knowledge base using ITSB authoring tool style was used to represent the student's work and to give customized feedback and support to students. (shrink)

Sometimes it is indeterminate what an agent morally ought do. This generates a Decision Ought Challenge—to give moral guidance to agents in such a scenario. This article is a field guide to the options for a theory of the decision ought for cases of indeterminacy. Three categories of view are evaluated, and the best representative for each is identified.

Many accounts of structural rationality give a special role to logic. This paper reviews the problem case of clear-eyed logical uncertainty. An account of rational norms on belief that does not give a special role to logic is developed: doxastic probabilism.

Supervaluationism is often described as the most popular semantic treatment of indeterminacy. There’s little consensus, however, about how to fill out the bare-bones idea to include a characterization of logical consequence. The paper explores one methodology for choosing between the logics: pick a logic thatnorms beliefas classical consequence is standardly thought to do. The main focus of the paper considers a variant of standard supervaluational, on which we can characterizedegrees of determinacy. It applies the methodology above to focus ondegree logic. (...) This is developed first in a basic, single-premise case; and then extended to the multipremise case, and to allowdegreesof consequence. The metatheoretic properties of degree logic are set out. On the positive side, the logic is supraclassical—all classical valid sequents are degree logic valid. Strikingly, metarules such as cut and conjunction introduction fail. (shrink)

Philosophers and linguists currently lack the means to reliably identify evaluative concepts and measure their evaluative intensity. Using a corpus-based approach, we present a new method to distinguish evaluatively thick and thin adjectives like ‘courageous’ and ‘awful’ from descriptive adjectives like ‘narrow,’ and from value-associated adjectives like ‘sunny.’ Our study suggests that the modifiers ‘truly’ and ‘really’ frequently highlight the evaluative dimension of thick and thin adjectives, allowing for them to be uniquely classified. Based on these results, we believe our (...) operationalization may pave the way for a more quantitative approach to the study of thick and thin concepts. (shrink)

Kevin Lynch's books are the classic underpinnings of modern urban planning and design, yet they are only a part of his rich legacy of ideas about human purposes and values in built form. City Sense and City Design brings together Lynch's remaining work, including professional design and planning projects that show how he translated many of his ideas and theories into practice. An invaluable sourcebook of design knowledge, City Sense and City Design completes the record of one of the (...) foremost environmental design theorists of our time and leads to a deeper understanding of his distinctively humanistic philosophy. The editors, both former students of Lynch, provide a cogent summary of his career and of the role he played in shaping and transforming the American urban design profession during the 1950s, the 1960s, and the 1970s. Each of the seven thematic groupings of writings and projects that follow begins with a short introduction explaining their content and their background. The essays in part I focus on the premises of Lynch's work: his novel reading of large-scale built environments and the notion that the design of an urban landscape should be as meaningful and intimate as the natural landscape. In part II, excerpts from Lynch's travel journals reveal his early ideas on how people perceive and interpret their surroundings—ideas that culminated in his seminal work, The Image of the City. This part of the book also presents Lynch's experiments with children and his assessment of environmental-perception research. The examples of both small-scale and large-scale analysis of visual form in part III are followed by three parts on city design. These include Lynch's more theoretical works on complex planning decisions involving both functional (spatial and structural organization) and normative (how the city works in human terms) approaches, articles discussing the principles that guided Lynch's teaching and practice of city design, and descriptions of Lynch's own projects in the Boston area and elsewhere. The book concludes with essays written late in Lynch's career, fantasy pieces describing utopias and offering new design freedoms and scenarios warning of horrifying "cacotopias.". (shrink)

Predictable polarization is everywhere: we can often predict how people’s opinions, including our own, will shift over time. Extant theories either neglect the fact that we can predict our own polarization, or explain it through irrational mechanisms. They needn’t. Empirical studies suggest that polarization is predictable when evidence is ambiguous, that is, when the rational response is not obvious. I show how Bayesians should model such ambiguity and then prove that—assuming rational updates are those which obey the value of evidence—ambiguity (...) is necessary and sufficient for the rationality of predictable polarization. The main theoretical result is that there can be a series of such updates, each of which is individually expected to make you more accurate, but which together will predictably polarize you. Polarization results from asymmetric increases in accuracy. This mechanism is not only theoretically possible, but empirically plausible. I argue that cognitive search—searching a cognitively accessible space for a particular item—often yields asymmetrically ambiguous evidence, I present an experiment supporting its polarizing effects, and I use simulations to show how it can explain two of the core causes of polarization: confirmation bias and the group polarization effect. (shrink)

John MacFarlane has made relativism popular again. Focusing just on his original discussion, I argue that the data he uses to motivate the position do not, in fact, motivatie it at all. Many of the points made here have since been made, independently, by Hermann Cappelen and John Hawthorne, in their book Relativism and Monadic Truth.

The Lockean Thesis says that you must believe p iff you’re sufficiently confident of it. On some versions, the 'must' asserts a metaphysical connection; on others, it asserts a normative one. On some versions, 'sufficiently confident' refers to a fixed threshold of credence; on others, it varies with proposition and context. Claim: the Lockean Thesis follows from epistemic utility theory—the view that rational requirements are constrained by the norm to promote accuracy. Different versions of this theory generate different versions of (...) Lockeanism; moreover, a plausible version of epistemic utility theory meshes with natural language considerations, yielding a new Lockean picture that helps to model and explain the role of beliefs in inquiry and conversation. Your beliefs are your best guesses in response to the epistemic priorities of your context. Upshot: we have a new approach to the epistemology and semantics of belief. And it has teeth. It implies that the role of beliefs is fundamentally different than many have thought, and in fact supports a metaphysical reduction of belief to credence. (shrink)

Context: At present, we lack a common understanding of both the process of cognition in living organisms and the construction of knowledge in embodied, embedded cognizing agents in general, including future artifactual cognitive agents under development, such as cognitive robots and softbots. Purpose: This paper aims to show how the info-computational approach (IC) can reinforce constructivist ideas about the nature of cognition and knowledge and, conversely, how constructivist insights (such as that the process of cognition is the process of life) (...) can inspire new models of computing. Method: The info-computational constructive framework is presented for the modeling of cognitive processes in cognizing agents. Parallels are drawn with other constructivist approaches to cognition and knowledge generation. We describe how cognition as a process of life itself functions based on info-computation and how the process of knowledge generation proceeds through interactions with the environment and among agents. Results: Cognition and knowledge generation in a cognizing agent is understood as interaction with the world (potential information), which by processes of natural computation becomes actual information. That actual information after integration becomes knowledge for the agent. Heinz von Foerster is identified as a precursor of natural computing, in particular bio computing. Implications: IC provides a framework for unified study of cognition in living organisms (from the simplest ones, such as bacteria, to the most complex ones) as well as in artifactual cognitive systems. Constructivist content: It supports the constructivist view that knowledge is actively constructed by cognizing agents and shared in a process of social cognition. IC argues that this process can be modeled as info-computation. (shrink)

This paper examines Bohdan Boichuk’s poetry by looking into the role his childhood memories played in forming his poetic imagination. Displaced by World War II, the poet displays a unique capacity to transcend his traumatic experiences by engaging in creative writing. Eyewitnessing war atrocities perpetrated by the Nazis does not destroy his belief in the healing power of poetry; on the contrary, it makes him appreciate poetry as the only existentially worthy enterprise. Invoking Gaston Bachelard’s classic work The Poetics of (...) Reveries: Childhood, Language, and the Cosmos, I argue that Boichuk’s vivid childhood memories, however painful they might be, helped him poetically recreate and reimagine fateful moments of his migrant life. (shrink)

In 2022, at an interdisciplinary conference on Creation and the Imago Dei, Biola psychologist Liz Hall posed a powerful challenge to the philosophers and theologians in the room. In the face of the “already and not yet” nature of Christian theology, she put forth the need for a “theology of tension.” Over and over again, while reading Biblical Philosophy, I was reminded of this challenge. The features Johnson puts forth as emblematic of Hebraic Philosophy can help in this respect, in (...) two clear ways: First, retrospectively, Johnson’s categories are useful for diagnosing both the philosophical missteps targeted by critiques of theodicy and the features held in common by some of the more successful accounts. Second, going forward, the convictions and modes of argument central to Hebraic philosophy may help guide future philosophical responses to suffering. In general, I believe that the philosophical problems related to suffering are especially well-suited to responses that are pixelated, networked, mysterianist, creationist, transdemographic, and ritualist. Perhaps Hebraic philosophy can succeed where Hellenist philosophy has struggled: in addressing the tension that arises from the experience of suffering in a world governed by a loving, providential, sovereign God. While I am largely in favor of Johnson’s Hebraic philosophy, I will conclude by breaking from his view in one important respect. Johnson presents the Biblical view as substantially contrasting with the correspondence theory affirmed by many contemporary philosophers. I will end by pushing back on this claim. On Johnson’s own account, the Hebraic notion of truth is determined with reference to the divinely designed order. I propose that we understand the Hebraic notion of truth as degrees of correspondence to this divinely ordered, absolute reality. (shrink)

Through a series of empirical studies involving native speakers of English, German, and Chinese, this paper reveals that the predicate “true” is inherently ambiguous in the empirical domain. Truth statements such as “It is true that Tom is at the party” seem to be ambivalent between two readings. On the first reading, the statement means “Reality is such that Tom is at the party.” On the second reading, the statement means “According to what X believes, Tom is at the party.” (...) While there appear to exist some cross-cultural differences in the interpretation of the statements, the overall findings robustly indicate that “true” has multiple meanings in the realm of empirical matters. (shrink)

This effort attempts to evaluate the claims of Daryl Bem and Dean Radin regarding psi research, in a manner that should lend itself accessible to a non-specialist, intelligent reader. Admitting the difficulties that claims of psi create in the philosophy of science, it examines in particular the work of Bem and his methodologies in light of contemporary research and its requirements. Briefly examining more than a dozen complaints about his findings, no compelling evidence was discovered that would adequately invalidate his (...) results. Evidence from Radin from his met-analyses of psi research in conjunction with other reputable sources were included. (shrink)

A sceptical response to the idea that wisdom may be turned into a new academic subject or science, and to the idea that to do so would be in any way be wise. .

There are many things—call them ‘experts’—that you should defer to in forming your opinions. The trouble is, many experts are modest: they’re less than certain that they are worthy of deference. When this happens, the standard theories of deference break down: the most popular (“Reflection”-style) principles collapse to inconsistency, while their most popular (“New-Reflection”-style) variants allow you to defer to someone while regarding them as an anti-expert. We propose a middle way: deferring to someone involves preferring to make any decision (...) using their opinions instead of your own. In a slogan, deferring opinions is deferring decisions. Generalizing the proposal of Dorst (2020a), we first formulate a new principle that shows exactly how your opinions must relate to an expert’s for this to be so. We then build off the results of Levinstein (2019) and Campbell-Moore (2020) to show that this principle is also equivalent to the constraint that you must always expect the expert’s estimates to be more accurate than your own. Finally, we characterize the conditions an expert’s opinions must meet to be worthy of deference in this sense, showing how they sit naturally between the too-strong constraints of Reflection and the too-weak constraints of New Reflection. (shrink)

An increasing number of philosophers argue that indeterminacy is metaphysical (or worldly) in the sense that indeterminacy has its source in the world itself (rather than how the world is represented or known). The standard arguments for metaphysical indeterminacy are centered around the sorites paradox. In this essay, I present a novel argument for metaphysical indeterminacy. I argue that metaphysical indeterminacy follows from the existence of constitutive social construction; there is indeterminacy in the social world because there is indeterminacy in (...) how the social world is constructed. (shrink)

Locke’s property rights are now usually understood to be both fundamental and strictly negative. Fundamental because they are thought to be basic constraints on what we may do, unconstrained by anything deeper. Negative because they are thought to only protect a property holder against the claims of others. Here, I argue that this widespread interpretation is mistaken. For Locke, property rights are constrained by the deeper ‘fundamental law of nature,’ which involves positive obligations to those in need and confines the (...) right to excess property within circumstances where it is not needed to preserve human life. (shrink)

Of the dozens of purported solutions to the liar paradox published in the past fifty years, the vast majority are "traditional" in the sense that they reject one of the premises or inference rules that are used to derive the paradoxical conclusion. Over the years, however, several philosophers have developed an alternative to the traditional approaches; according to them, our very competence with the concept of truth leads us to accept that the reasoning used to derive the paradox is sound. (...) That is, our conceptual competence leads us into inconsistency. I call this alternative the inconsistency approach to the liar. Although this approach has many positive features, I argue that several of the well-developed versions of it that have appeared recently are unacceptable. In particular, they do not recognize that if truth is an inconsistent concept, then we should replace it with new concepts that do the work of truth without giving rise to paradoxes. I outline an inconsistency approach to the liar paradox that satisfies this condition. (shrink)

This essay is a case study of the self-destruction that occurs in the work of a social-constructionist historian of science who embraces a radical philosophy of science. It focuses on Thomas Laqueur's Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud in arguing that a history of science committed to the social construction of science and to the central theses of Kuhnian, Duhemian, and Quinean philosophy of science is incoherent through self-reference. Laqueur's text is examined in detail in order (...) to make the main point; a similar phenomenon in the work of the feminist historian of science Evelyn Fox Keller is then briefly discussed. (shrink)

The study focused on the Digital Technology (DT) Competency of Certified Public Accountants (CPAs) in Ilocos Sur. This study will be beneficial for the upskilling of CPAs in Ilocos Sur and serve as a guide to development of competency-based curriculum for accounting students and intervention programs by accounting professional organizations. Using a validated survey instrument, the researcher considered 107 CPAs that responded. Total enumeration was used. The survey investigated the CPAs’ level of digital technology along five competency domains. Descriptive method (...) of research was utilized Their level of DT Competency is interpreted as “Proficient”. The study hints that they are not so far behind in terms of digital competency, and they have an enormous potential in relation to IT utilization, management, administration, and risk management. Reassessment of the BS Accountancy curriculum, encouraging CPAs to take advance studies and future research in this line is recommended. CPAs in Ilocos Sur can optimistically adapt to the ever-changing demands of the workplace. (shrink)

The view that metaphysics is a waste of time appears to be gaining in popularity. It is held openly by many scientists and even many philosophers. I argue here that this is a consequence of the way metaphysics is usually done and the futility of a certain approach to it, and not a reason to suppose there is no useful knowledge to be acquired from its study. -/- .

Assume that it is your evidence that determines what opinions you should have. I argue that since you should take peer disagreement seriously, evidence must have two features. (1) It must sometimes warrant being modest: uncertain what your evidence warrants, and (thus) uncertain whether you’re rational. (2) But it must always warrant being guided: disposed to treat your evidence as a guide. Surprisingly, it is very difficult to vindicate both (1) and (2). But diagnosing why this is so leads to (...) a proposal—Trust—that is weak enough to allow modesty but strong enough to yield many guiding features. In fact, I claim that Trust is the Goldilocks principle—for it is necessary and sufficient to vindicate the claim that you should always prefer to use free evidence. Upshot: Trust lays the foundations for a theory of disagreement and, more generally, an epistemology that permits self-doubt—a modest epistemology. (shrink)

A realist theory of truth for a class of sentences holds that there are entities in virtue of which these sentences are true or false. We call such entities ‘truthmakers’ and contend that those for a wide range of sentences about the real world are moments (dependent particulars). Since moments are unfamiliar, we provide a definition and a brief philosophical history, anchoring them in our ontology by showing that they are objects of perception. The core of our theory is the (...) account of truthmaking for atomic sentences, in which we expose a pervasive ‘dogma of logical form’, which says that atomic sentences cannot have more than one truthmaker. In contrast to this, we uphold the mutual independence of logical and ontological complexity, and the authors outline formal principles of truthmaking taking account of both kinds of complexity. (shrink)

Quantum Mechanics is a fundamental physical theory about atomic-scale processes. It was built between 1920 and 1940 by the most distinguished physicists of that time. The accordance between the predictions of the theory and experimental results is remarkable. The physical interpretation of its mathematical constructs, however, raised unprecedented controversies. Ontological, semantic, and epistemic vagueness abound in the orthodox interpretations and have resulted in serious misunderstandings that are often repeated in textbooks and elsewhere. In this work, we identify, criticize, and clarify (...) the most spread ones. (shrink)

There is a widespread view that Buddhist philosophy embodies logical contradictions such that there would be 'true' contradictions, This article explains that this is not the case and that Buddhist philosophy, more generally the Perennial philosophy, denies all contradictions for the sake of a doctrine of Unity.

The standard view in philosophy treats pains as phenomenally conscious mental states. This view has a number of corollaries, including that it is generally taken to rule out the existence of unfelt pains. The primary argument in support of the standard view is that it supposedly corresponds with the commonsense conception of pain. In this paper, we challenge this doctrine about the commonsense conception of pain, and with it the support offered for the standard view, by presenting the results of (...) a series of new empirical studies that indicate that lay people not only tend to believe that unfelt pains are possible, but actually, quite common. (shrink)

“Experimental jurisprudence” draws on empirical data to inform questions typically associated with jurisprudence or legal theory. Scholars in this flourishing movement conduct empirical studies about a variety of legal language and concepts. Despite the movement’s growth, its justification is still opaque. Jurisprudence is the study of deep and longstanding theoretical questions about law’s nature, but “experimental jurisprudence,” it might seem, simply surveys laypeople. This Article elaborates and defends experimental jurisprudence. Experimental jurisprudence, appropriately understood, is not only consistent with traditional jurisprudence; (...) it is an essential branch of it. (shrink)