Il famoso formicaio E.O. Wilson è sempre stato uno dei miei eroi -- non solo un biologo eccezionale, ma uno della piccola e svanire minoranza di intellettuali che almeno osa accennare alla verità sulla nostra natura che gli altri non riescono a cogliere, o nella misura in cuisi trovano, evitano scrupolosamente per l'opportunità politica. Purtroppo, sta terminando la sua lunga carriera in modo più sordido come festa per un attacco ignorante e arrogante alla scienza motivato almeno in parte dal (...) fervore religioso dei suoi colleghi di Harvard. Mostra le vili conseguenze quando le università accettano denaro da gruppi religiosi, le riviste scientifiche sono così spaventate da grandi nomi che evitano una corretta revisione tra pari e quando gli ego sono autorizzati a sscappare dal controllo. Ci porta nella natura dell'evoluzione, nelle basi della metodologia scientifica, nel modo in cui la matematica si relaziona con la scienza, su ciò che costituisce una teoria, e persino quali atteggiamenti nei confronti della religione e della generosità sono appropriati mentre ci avviciniamo inesorabilmente al crollo della civiltà industriale. Coloro che desiderano un quadro aggiornato completo per il comportamento umano dalla moderna vista a due systems possono consultare il mio libro 'La struttura logica dellafilosofia, psicologia, Mind e il linguaggio in Ludwig Wittgenstein e John Searle' 2nd ed (2019). Coloro che sono interessati a più dei miei scritti possono vedere 'TalkingMonkeys--Filosofia, Psicologia, Scienza, Religione e Politica su un Pianeta Condannato--Articoli e Recensioni 2006-2019 3rd ed (2019) e Suicidal Utopian Delusions in the 21st Century 4th ed (2019) . (shrink)

Questo non è un libro perfetto, ma è unico, e se scorri le prime 400 pagine o giù di lì, le ultime 300 (circa 700) sono un buon tentativo di applicare ciò che è noto sul comportamento ai cambiamenti sociali nella violenza e nelle maniere nel tempo. L'argomento di base è: come fa la nostra genetica a controllare e limitare il cambiamento sociale? Sorprendentemente non riesce a descrivere la natura della selezione dei parenti (idoneità inclusiva) che spiega gran parte della (...) vita sociale animale e umana. Egli manca anche (come quasi tutti) manca di un quadro chiaro per descrivere la struttura logica della razionalità (termine preferito di John Searle) che preferisco chiamare la Psicologia descrittiva del Pensiero dell'Ordine Superiore (DPHOT). Avrebbe dovuto dire qualcosa sui molti altri modi di abusare e sfruttare le persone e il pianeta, dal momento che questi sono ora molto più gravi da rendere quasi irrilevanti altre forme di violenza. Estendere il concetto di violenza per includere leconseguenze globali a lungoterminedella replicazione dei geni diqualcuno, e avere una comprensione della natura di come funziona l'evoluzione (cioè la selezione dei parenti) fornirà una prospettiva molto diversa sulla storia, gli eventi attuali e come le cose probabilmente andranno nei prossimi centinaia di anni. Si potrebbe iniziare notando che la diminuzione della violenza fisica nel corso della storia è stata abbinata (e resa possibile) dallo stupro spietato in costante aumento del pianeta (cioè dalla distruzione del futuro del proprio discendente).’ Pinker (come la maggior parte delle persone) è spesso distratto dalle superficialità della cultura quando è la biologia che conta. Guarda le mie recenti recensioni di Wilson 'The Social Conquest of Earth' e 'SuperCooperators' di Nowak e Highfield qui e in rete per un breve riassunto della vacuità del 'vero altruismo'(selezione di gruppo), e l'operazione di selezione dei parenti e l'inutilità e la superficialità di descrivere il comportamento in termini culturali. Questo è il classico problema della natura/nutrimento e la natura vince nutrita --infinitamente. Ciò che conta veramente è la violenza fatta sulla terra dall'incessante aumento della popolazione e della distruzione delle risorse (a causa della medicina e della tecnologia e della repressione dei conflitti da parte della polizia e dei militari). Circa 200.000 persone in più al giorno (un altro Las Vegas ogni 10 giorni, un'altra Los Angeles ogni mese), le 6 tonnellate o giù di lì di pisolino che vanno in mare / persona / anno – circa l'1% del totale del mondo che scompare ogni anno, ecc. significa che se qualche miracolo accadrà la biosfera e la civiltà crollerà in gran parte durante i prossimi due secoli, e ci sarà fame, violenza e violenza di ogni tipo su scala impressionante. Le maniere, le opinioni e le tendenze delle persone a commettere atti violenti non hanno alcuna importanza a meno che non possano fare qualcosa per evitare questa catastrofe, e non vedo come ciò accadrà. Non c'è spazio per gli argomenti, e nessun punto sia (sì io sono un fatalista), quindi mi limiterò a fare alcuni commenti come se fossero fatti. Non immaginate di avere un'informazione personale nel promuovere un gruppo a spese degli altri. Io sono 78, nonhanno discendenti e non hanno parenti stretti e non si identificano con alcun gruppo politico, nazionale o religioso e considerano quelli a cui appartengo di default come ripugnanti come tutti gli altri. I genitori sono i peggiori nemici della vita sulla Terra e, tenendo la vista generale delle cose, le donne sono violente come gli uomini se si considera il fatto che la violenza delle donne (come la maggior parte di quella fatta dagli uomini) è in gran parte fatta al rallentatore, a distanza nel tempo e nello spazio e per lo più effettuata per procura dai loro discendenti e dagli uomini. Sempre più spesso, le donne portano figli indipendentemente dal fatto che abbiano un compagno e l'effetto di impedire a una donna di riprodursi è in media molto maggiore dell'arresto di un uomo, poiché sono il collo di bottiglia riproduttivo. Si può ritenere che le persone e la loro prole meritino riccamente qualsiasi miseria arrivi la loro strada e (con rare eccezioni) i ricchi e famosi sono i peggiori trasgressori. Meryl Streep o Bill Gates o J.K Rowling e ognuno dei loro figli può distruggere 50 tonnellate di suolo ogni anno per generazioni nel futuro, mentre un contadino indiano e il suo possono distruggere 1 tonnellata. Se qualcuno nega che va bene, e ai loro discendenti dico "Benvenuti all'inferno sulla Terra" (WTHOE). Oggi l'accento è sempre posto sui diritti dell'uomo, ma è chiaro che se si vuole che la civiltà abbia una possibilità, le responsabilità umane devono sostituire i diritti umani. Nessuno ottiene diritti senza essere un cittadino responsabile e la prima cosa che ciò significa è ladistruzione ambientalemi nimal. La responsabilità più fondamentale non è quella dei bambini a meno che la vostra società non vi chieda di produrli. Una società o un mondo che permette alle persone di allevare a caso sarà sempre sfruttato dai geni egoisti fino a quando non crolla (o raggiunge un punto in cui la vita è così orribile che non vale la pena di vivere). Se la società continua a mantenerei diritti umani come primari, ai loro discendenti si può dire con fiducia "WTHOE". Coloro che desiderano un quadro aggiornato completo per il comportamento umano dalla moderna vista a due systems possono consultare il mio libro 'La struttura logica dellafilosofia, psicologia, Mind e il linguaggio in Ludwig Wittgenstein e John Searle' 2nd ed (2019). Coloro che sono interessati a più dei miei scritti possono vedere 'Talking Monkeys--Filosofia, Psicologia, Scienza, Religione e Politica su un Pianeta Condannato--Articoli e Recensioni 2006-2019 3rd ed (2019) e Suicidal Utopian Delusions nel 21st Century 4th ed (2019) . (shrink)

Dal momento che Gintis è un economista senior e ho letto alcuni dei suoi precedenti libri con interesse, mi aspettavo qualche più intuizione sul comportamento. Purtroppo, fa le mani morte della selezione di gruppo e della fenomenologia nei pezzi centrali delle sue teorie del comportamento, e questo invalida in gran parte l'opera. Peggio ancora, dal momento che mostra un tale cattivo giudizio qui, mette in discussione tutto il suo lavoro precedente. Il tentativo di resuscitare la selezione di gruppo da parte (...) dei suoi amici ad Harvard, Nowak e Wilson, alcuni anni fa è stato uno dei maggiori scandali della biologia nell'ultimo decennio, e ho raccontato la triste storia nel mio articolo 'Altruismo, Gesù e la fine del mondo: come la Templeton Foundation ha acquistato una cattedra di Harvard e ha attaccato Evolution, Rationality and Civilization - Una recensione di E.O. Wilson 'The Social Conquest of Earth' (2012) e Nowak and Highfield 'SuperCooperators'). A differenza di Nowak, Gintis non sembra essere motivato dal fanatismo religioso, ma dal forte desiderio di generare un'alternativa alle cupe realtà della natura umana, reso facile dalla mancanza (quasi universale) della comprensione della biologia umana di base e dello slateismo in bianco degli scienziati comportamentali, di altri accademici e del pubblico in generale. Gintis attacca giustamente (come ha fatto molte volte prima) economisti, sociologi e altri scienziati comportamentali per non avere un quadro coerente per descrivere il comportamento. Naturalmente, il quadro necessario per comprendere il comportamento è evolutivo. Purtroppo, non riesce a fornire uno se stesso (secondo i suoi molti critici e io concordo), e il tentativo di innestare il cadavere marcio di selezione di gruppo su qualsiasi teoria economica e psicologica che ha generato nei suoi decenni di lavoro, invalida semplicemente il suo intero progetto. Anche se Gintis fa uno sforzo coraggioso per capire e spiegare la genetica, come Wilson e Nowak, è lontano da un esperto, e come loro, la matematica lo acceca alle impossibilità biologiche e, naturalmente, questa è la norma nella scienza. Come Wittgenstein notoriamente ha notato sulla prima pagina di Cultura e Valore "Non esiste una denominazione religiosa in cui l'uso improprio delle espressioni metafisiche è stato responsabile di tanto peccato come ha fatto in matematica." È sempre stato chiaro che un gene che provoca un comportamento che diminuisce la propria frequenza non può persistere, ma questo è il nucleo della nozione di selezione del gruppo. Inoltre, è stato ben noto e spesso dimostrato che la selezione di gruppo riduce solo alla forma fisica inclusiva (selezione dei parenti), che, come ha notato Dawkins, è solo un altro nome per l'evoluzione per selezione naturale. Come Wilson, Gintis ha lavorato in questa arena per circa 50 anni e ancora non l'ha afferrato, ma dopo lo scandalo è rotto, mi ci sono voluti solo 3 giorni per trovare, leggere e capire il lavoro professionale più rilevante, come descritto nel mio articolo. È da capo giro rendersi conto che Gintis e Wilson non sono stati in grado di raggiungere questo obiettivo in quasi mezzo secolo. Discuto gli errori di selezione di gruppo e fenomenologia che sono la norma nel mondo accademico come casi speciali della quasi universale incapacità di comprendere la natura umana che stanno distruggendo l'America e il mondo. Coloro che desiderano un quadro aggiornato completo per il comportamento umano dalla moderna vista a due systems possono consultare il mio libro 'La struttura logica dellafilosofia, psicologia, Mind e il linguaggio in Ludwig Wittgenstein e John Searle' 2nd ed (2019). Coloro che sono interessati a più dei miei scritti possono vedere 'TalkingMonkeys--Filosofia, Psicologia, Scienza, Religione e Politica su un Pianeta Condannato--Articoli e Recensioni 2006-2019 3rd ed (2019) e Suicidal Utopian Delusions nel 21st Century 4th ed (2019) . (shrink)

This chapter looks for “continuity and convergence” between Davidson’s and Wittgenstein’s work, identifies common themes and family resemblances, as well as disagreements, especially in the theory of meaning. I take up in turn: -/- (1) their shared rejection of the utility of an ontology of meanings; (2) a convergence on the idea that we must show rather than say what an expression means; (3) the similarities and differences between them on meaning as use and the sense in which rule following (...) is essential for meaning; (4) the publicity of language, first in connection with radical interpretation; and (5) then with Davidson’s later work on triangulation in securing objective thought. (shrink)

This volume of twelve specially commissioned essays about species draws on the perspectives of prominent researchers from anthropology , botany, developmental psychology , the philosophy of biology and science, protozoology, and zoology . The concept of species has played a focal role in both evolutionary biology and the philosophy of biology , and the last decade has seen something of a publication boom on the topic (e.g., Otte and Endler 1989; Ereshefsky 1992b; Paterson 1994; lambert and Spence 1995; Claridge, Dawah, (...) and Wilson 1997; Wheeler and Meier 1999; Howard and Berlocher 1998). (shrink)

This chapter introduces psychologism as the thesis that social facts can explained in terms of more basic facts about individuals, their psychological states, their actions, their relations, and their environments. It argues psychologism should be our default stance toward social reality. It reviews psychologistic approaches to shared intention and how shared intentions can help explain conventions, status functions, and organizations. It provides a deflationary account of corporate attitudes. It argues that neither physical nor social externalism about thought content are incompatible (...) with psychologism. It argues that social construction views of the self that conflict with psychologism are implausible. Finally, it points out that it is no objection to psychologism that social facts can change without changes in psychological facts because this is compatible with psychologism as explained here. (shrink)

Quotation marks in natural language that do not function straightforwardly as devices for securing reference to linguistic objects have generally been categorized as instances of either mixed quotation or scare quotation. I argue that certain uses of quotation marks in natural language resist assimilation to either of these two theoretical categories, as well as to the more familiar categories of pure and direct quotation. It follows that we must recognize a novel type of quotation in natural language, which I call (...) dummy quotation because it involves the contribution of semantically minimal `dummy meanings' to composition. I develop a semantic theory of dummy quotation and show that it is better able than rival proposals to account for the troublesome examples in question. (shrink)

Social externalism is the view that the contents of a person's propositional attitudes are logically determined at least in part by her linguistic community's standards for the use of her words. If social externalism is correct, its importance can hardly be overemphasized. The traditional Cartesian view of psychological states as essentially first personal and non-relational in character, which has shaped much theorizing about the nature of psychological explanation, would be shown to be deeply flawed. I argue in this paper that (...) social externalism faces insuperable difficulties. The first difficulty is that if syntax and semantics are independent, then social externalism is committed to the absurd consequence that many people have beliefs with formally inconsistent contents. I argue none of the possible responses to this objection are plausible. The second difficulty is that if syntax and semantics are independent, then social externalists are committed to a contradiction. After raising and defending these objections, I identify what I think is the underlying flaw in the social externalist position, a failure to pay attention to the structure of communication intentions, and briefly indicate how to neutralize the linguistic evidence social externalists advance in favor of their view. (shrink)

The inclusion problem for theories of gender arises when those theories inappropriately fail to include certain individuals in the gender categories to which they ought to belong. The inclusion problem affects both of the most influential traditions in feminist theorizing about gender: social-position accounts and identity accounts. I argue that the inclusion problem can be solved by adopting a structured theory of gender, which incorporates aspects of both social-position accounts and identity accounts. According to the theory I favor, an individual’s (...) gender is determined by their gender identity if they have one; otherwise, it is determined by their social position. My structured approach to gender offers a more direct solution to the gender inclusion problem than alternatives recently advocated by Barnes (2020), Jenkins (2023), and others. It also points the way to a simple solution to inclusion problems that arise at the level of gendered language. (shrink)

Radical skepticism about the external world is founded on two assumptions: one is that the mind and the external world are logically independent; the other is that all our evidence for the nature of that world consists of facts about our minds. In this paper, I explore the option of denying the epistemic, rather than the logical assumption. I argue that one can do so only by embracing externalism about justification, or, after all, by rejecting the logical independence assumption. Since (...) (I argue) externalism is not a solution to the problem of skepticism, this means that skepticism is false only if the mind and the world are not logically independent. (shrink)

The puzzle that concerns me is whether it is possible to establish a substantive difference between photographic images and other kinds of visual image, which can explain the special epistemic and aesthetic qualities of photographs, without giving way to scepticism about photographic art. In this essay I offer a philosophical account of the photographic process which is able to resolve this tension. I use this account to argue that, while some photographs are mind independent, mind independence is not a defining (...) feature of all photographs. My account is substantive because it distinctively distinguishes the photographic process from other image-making processes and is able to explain the special qualities of photographs. It is also schematic, because it covers the fullest range of photographic technologies across a comprehensive range of applications. Finally, it is clarificatory because it is able to clear up misunderstandings and resolve philosophical problems. Beyond these theoretical aims, my broader purpose is to provide an account that has applicability for a wide range of art history cases and, furthermore, is acceptable to photographic practitioners. The paper was first presented at the Stockholm Museum of Modern Art, in an interdisciplinary symposium. (shrink)

It is not a particularly hard thing to want or seek explanations. In fact, explanations seem to be a large and natural part of our cognitive lives. Children ask why and how questions very early in development and seem genuinely to want some sort of answer, despite our often being poorly equipped to provide them at the appropriate level of sophistication and detail. We seek and receive explanations in every sphere of our adult lives, whether it be to understand why (...) a friendship has foundered, why a car will not start, or why ice expands when it freezes. Moreover, correctly or incorrectly, most of the time we think we know when we have or have not received a good explanation. There is a sense both that a given, successful explanation satisfies a cognitive need, and that a questionable or dubious explanation does not. There are also compelling intuitions about what make good explanations in terms of their form, that is, a sense of when they are structured correctly. (shrink)

Recent third person approaches to thought experiments and conceptual analysis through the method of surveys are motivated by and motivate skepticism about the traditional first person method. I argue that such surveys give no good ground for skepticism, that they have some utility, but that they do not represent a fundamentally new way of doing philosophy, that they are liable to considerable methodological difficulties, and that they cannot be substituted for the first person method, since the a priori knowledge which (...) is our object in conceptual analysis can be acquired only from the first person standpoint. (shrink)

This chapter identifies the central issue between Michael Dummett and Donald Davidson on the role of convention in language and argues they are not as far apart in the end as they take themselves to be.

I address a criticism of the use of thought experiments in conceptual analysis advanced on the basis of the survey method of so-called experimental philosophy. The criticism holds that surveys show that intuitions are relative to cultures in a way that undermines the claim that intuition-based investigation yields any objective answer to philosophical questions. The crucial question is what intuitions are as philosophers have been interested in them. To answer this question we look at the role of intuitions in philosophical (...) inquiry. When we have done this, we can see that it is impossible for intuitions properly understood to be relative in the way that has been suggested as they are conceived of as expressions of competence in the concepts deployed in their contents. The remaining methodological issues, though not to be dismissed, present no in principle objection to the method of thought experiments. (shrink)

From Buñuel and Dali’s Un Chien Andalou to recent works by Danish filmmaker Nicolas Winding Refn, the cinematic destruction of the eye has become iconic due to its striking effect upon film spectators’ visceral experiences as well as its ability to influence their symbolic or fetishistic desires. By exploiting the natural discomfort and disgust produced by these types of images and then situating them within an aesthetic and psychoanalytic framework, Refn and other filmmakers provide a visual showcase for a unique (...) type of cinematic violence, one which demands that viewers reappraise the value of their own eyes as well as the values which reflect social attitudes towards law enforcement, crime, and justice. (shrink)

Essentialism is widely regarded as a mistaken view of biological kinds, such as species. After recounting why (sections 2-3), we provide a brief survey of the chief responses to the “death of essentialism” in the philosophy of biology (section 4). We then develop one of these responses, the claim that biological kinds are homeostatic property clusters (sections 5-6) illustrating this view with several novel examples (section 7). Although this view was first expressed 20 years ago, and has received recent discussion (...) and critique, it remains underdeveloped and is often misrepresented by its critics (section 8). (shrink)

Recent advances in natural language processing have given rise to a new kind of AI architecture: the language agent. By repeatedly calling an LLM to perform a variety of cognitive tasks, language agents are able to function autonomously to pursue goals specified in natural language and stored in a human-readable format. Because of their architecture, language agents exhibit behavior that is predictable according to the laws of folk psychology: they function as though they have desires and beliefs, and then make (...) and update plans to pursue their desires given their beliefs. We argue that the rise of language agents significantly reduces the probability of an existential catastrophe due to loss of control over an AGI. This is because the probability of such an existential catastrophe is proportional to the difficulty of aligning AGI systems, and language agents significantly reduce that difficulty. In particular, language agents help to resolve three important issues related to aligning AIs: reward misspecification, goal misgeneralization, and uninterpretability. (shrink)

In the latter half of the twentieth century, philosophers of science have argued (implicitly and explicitly) that epistemically rational individuals might compose epistemically irrational groups and that, conversely, epistemically rational groups might be composed of epistemically irrational individuals. We call the conjunction of these two claims the Independence Thesis, as they together imply that methodological prescriptions for scientific communities and those for individual scientists might be logically independent of one another. We develop a formal model of scientific inquiry, define four (...) criteria for individual and group epistemic rationality, and then prove that the four definitions diverge, in the sense that individuals will be judged rational when groups are not and vice versa. We conclude by explaining implications of the inconsistency thesis for (i) descriptive history and sociology of science and (ii) normative prescriptions for scientific communities. (shrink)

The legal, political, and social meaning of the work of Charles Darwin has been claimed as resident to conservative and liberal homes alike. Peter Singer’s unique admixture of personal liberal politics and what may look to be an extremely conservative philosophy of nature expose some over-simplicity in traditional ‘right’ and ‘left’ categories. In ‘‘Recovering the Left from Darwin in the 21st Century’’, Steve Fuller provides us with insightful historical and sociological contexts for Singer’s challenges. In this article, Kirk Junker (...) takes one aspect of the trajectory ‘the notion of natural rights’ and examines their social construction, linguistic maintenance, and legal ramifications. (shrink)

This paper attacks an old dogma in the philosophy of action: the idea that in order to intend to do something one must believe that there is at least some chance that one will succeed at what one intends. I think that this is a mistake, and that recognizing this will force us to rethink standard accounts of what it is to intend to do something and to do it intentionally.

Jim Joyce argues for two amendments to probabilism. The first is the doctrine that credences are rational, or not, in virtue of their accuracy or “closeness to the truth” (1998). The second is a shift from a numerically precise model of belief to an imprecise model represented by a set of probability functions (2010). We argue that both amendments cannot be satisfied simultaneously. To do so, we employ a (slightly-generalized) impossibility theorem of Seidenfeld, Schervish, and Kadane (2012), who show that (...) there is no strictly proper scoring rule for imprecise probabilities. -/- The question then is what should give way. Joyce, who is well aware of this no-go result, thinks that a quantifiability constraint on epistemic accuracy should be relaxed to accommodate imprecision. We argue instead that another Joycean assumption — called strict immodesty— should be rejected, and we prove a representation theorem that characterizes all “mildly” immodest measures of inaccuracy. (shrink)

This paper shows that recent arguments from group problem solving and task performance to emergent group level cognition that rest on the social parity and related principles are invalid or question begging. The paper shows that standard attributions of problem solving or task performance to groups require only multiple agents of the outcome, not a group agent over and above its members, whether or not any individual member of the group could have accomplished the task independently.

The Abrahamic faiths of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam are typically recognized as the world’s major monotheistic religions. However, African Traditional Religion is, despite often including lesser spirits and gods, a monotheistic religion with numerous adherents in sub-Saharan Africa; it includes the idea of a single most powerful God responsible for the creation and sustenance of everything else. This Element focuses on drawing attention to this major world religion that has been much neglected by scholars around the globe, particularly those working (...) in the West or Northern Hemisphere. It accomplishes this primarily by bringing it into conversation with topics in the Anglo-American philosophy of religion. (shrink)

This open-access editorial discusses confronting silences in different disciplinary contexts, such as science and technology studies, cultural anthropology, and philosophy. It has a focus on race and concludes with thoughts about Indigenous expertise, the Australian referendum on the Indigenous Voice, to parliament, and racism.

There is an inherent phenomenological tendency in British moral theory, especially from John Locke onward. The purpose of his Essay was, he said, to consider the discerning faculties of a man, as they are employed about the objects which they have to do with. This is language that might serve well in a general description of the work of Husserl and other phenomenologists.

Assertoric sentences are sentences which admit of truth or falsity. Non-assertoric sentences, imperatives and interrogatives, have long been a source of difficulty for the view that a theory of truth for a natural language can serve as the core of a theory of meaning. The trouble for truth-theoretic semantics posed by non-assertoric sentences is that, prima facie, it does not make sense to say that imperatives, such as 'Cut your hair', or interrogatives such as 'What time is it?', are truth (...) or false. Thus, the vehicle for giving the meaning of a sentence by using an interpretive truth theory, the T-sentence, is apparently unavailable for non-assertoric sentences. This paper shows how to incorporate non-assertoric sentences into a theory of meaning that gives central place to an interpretive truth theory for the language, without, however, reducing the non-assertorics to assertorics, or treating their utterances as semantically equivalent to one or more utterances of assertoric sentences. Four proposals for how to incorporate non-assertoric sentences into a broadly truth-theoretic semantics are reviewed. The proposals fall into two classes, those that attempt to explain the meaning of non-assertoric sentences solely by appeal to truth conditions, and those that attempt to explain the meaning of non-assertroic sentences by appeal to compliance conditions, which can be treated as one variety of fulfillment conditions for sentences of which truth conditions are another variety. The paper argues that none of the extant approaches is successful, but develops a version of the generalized fulfillment approach which avoids the difficulties of previous approaches and still exhibits a truth theory as the central component of a compositional meaning theory for all sentences of natural language. (shrink)

In looking toward the futures of Europe, the focal point of the legal and governmental aspects of European life has recently become the Treaty Establishing a Constitution of Europe - or just the "Constitution" as it has become colloquially known. That socio-linguistic act of referring to a document as a constitution is a mammoth move. First, it ignores all of the concerns and handwringing around the idea of producing a legal document called a constitution that might immediately be thought of (...) as a sovereign-building document, such as the German constitution of the Irish constitution. Second, it suggests that the people of Europe are in some way similarly situated as together to constitute something. In this article, the author continues a series of reflections on words regarding futures, and takes an extensive look at the use, misuse and power of the word "constitution". (shrink)

An important objection to sententialist theories of attitude reports is that they cannot accommodate the principle that one cannot know that someone believes that p without knowing what it is that he believes. This paper argues that a parallel problem arises for propositionalist accounts that has gone largely unnoticed, and that, furthermore, the usual resources for the propositionalist do not afford an adequate solution. While non-standard solutions are available for the propositionalist, it turns out that there are parallel solutions that (...) are available for the sententialist. Since the difficulties raised seem to show that the mechanism by which sentential complements serve to inform us about attitudes and about sentence meaning does not depend on their referring to propositions, this casts doubt on whether talk of propositions should retain a significant theoretical role in the enterprise of understanding thought, language and communication. (shrink)

This paper defends the autonomy thesis, which holds that one can intend to do something even though one believes it to be impossible, against attacks by Fred Adams. Adams denies the autonomy thesis on the grounds that it cannot, but must, explain what makes a particular trying, a trying for the aim it has in view. If the autonomy thesis were true, it seems that I could try to fly across the Atlantic ocean merely by typing out this abstract, a (...) palpable absurdity. If we deny the autonomy thesis, we have an easy explanation: one simply cannot try to do something which one believes to be impossible. In response, I argue, first, by means of examples, that one clearly can try and intend to do what one believes to be impossible; and then l show how we can provide an answer to Adams’s challenge even so. (shrink)

Much too often, we are guilty of monumentalizing historical persons. As monuments, these people stop being persons, and instead function as placeholders. Monuments can be placeholders for that which is good, or that which is bad. Depending upon one's predictions for such phenomena as "The Enlightenment" and "The Scientific Revolution", one is likely to place either wreaths or garbage at the foot of the monument that is René Descartes. To his credit, Keith Devlin does neither in "Goodbye,Descartes". In the post-war (...) era, trendy circles often find Descartes to be the convenient whipping-boy for all that is wrong with our relationship to the natural world: the subject-object divide, a dispassionate attitude, hyper-rationality, and a context-free world of practices. This use of Descartes ultimately means that no longer does anyone seriously examine his work or closely trace its ramifications. Instead one just evokes his name as the locus of rationality, the side of the Enlightenment, or the turning point from enchantment. (shrink)

ABSTRACT: “Evil is really only a privation.” This philosophical commonplace reflects an ancient solution to the problem of theodicy in one of its dimensions: is evil of such a nature that it must have God as its author? Stated in this particular way, it also reflects the commonplace identification of the real with natural being—the realm of what exists independently of human thought and perspectives—as opposed to all that is termed, by comparison, “merely subjective” and “unreal”. If we stick with (...) this way of construing the meaning of “reality”, then by the excellent arguments of the tradition we are also stuck with defending the sufficiency of privation as a response to what evil “really is”. -/- In this article, we argue against both ways of being stuck. We argue, first, that a one-sided focus upon the being of nature blocks an adequate understanding of the world we actually live in: the semiotically constituted lifeworld that is the proper locus of human realities, including moral evil. We argue, second, that the positivity of moral evil consists not only, nor even primarily, in the positivity of “action” as such, but in structures of objectivity engendered by creative reason that oppose the due end, and that involve a specific genus of pure object which we call a mystical daydream. Like any objects, these objects are communicable and formative in relation to the lifeworld, within which they in turn engender further interpretants for both those who do and those who suffer evil, thanks to the causality of signs. (shrink)

It is generally assumed that existing artificial systems are not phenomenally conscious, and that the construction of phenomenally conscious artificial systems would require significant technological progress if it is possible at all. We challenge this assumption by arguing that if Global Workspace Theory (GWT) — a leading scientific theory of phenomenal consciousness — is correct, then instances of one widely implemented AI architecture, the artificial language agent, might easily be made phenomenally conscious if they are not already. Along the way, (...) we articulate an explicit methodology for thinking about how to apply scientific theories of consciousness to artificial systems and employ this methodology to arrive at a set of necessary and sufficient conditions for phenomenal consciousness according to GWT. (shrink)

This article responds to a case-based argument by Mark Richard that rule of reference is not essential to meaning. It objects that the argument requires shifting between understanding the relevant term in the case, ‘marriage,’ as a determinable, in order to support one premise, and a determinate, in order to support another. On no univocal interpretation can both premises be made true.

When introducing the respective roles of the philosopher and the mathematician in Being and Event, Alain Badiou notes that when representing mathematics: "placing being in the general position of an object, would immediately corrupt the necessity, for any ontological operation, of de-objedification. Hence, of course, the attitude of those the Americans call working mathematicians: they always find general considerations about their discipline vain and obsolete. They only trust whomever works hand in hand with them grinding away at the latest mathematical (...) problem. . . .Empirically, the mathematician always suspects the philosopher of not knowing enough about mathematics to have earned the right to speak." While the discipline of law does not have the ontological purchase of the discipline of mathematics, the working lawyer, like the working mathematician, would feel disconnected from "the rigorous description of the generic essence of [his] operations" that the philosopher might offer. Badiou further reports that "justice" is a philosophical word if we do not include juridical significations in it. It is precisely here, when the juridical significations are left aside, that the lawyer (not the legislator) is excluded from the benefits of a "rigorous description" that a philosopher might offer. What can be done to extend the ontological understanding of justice to include the subjectivity of the lawyer and to determine whether the juridical is capable of Badiou's sense of "event?". (shrink)

This article considers the role of law as an active force in educating citizens on norms of the society. The norms are created and enforced in the law in general, but of particular importance are those in environmental law. In environmental law the environment is not protected only for the sake of serving human beings. To learn this lesson, however, one must look at the specifics of the law and its application. Some laws purport to be concerned with the environment (...) for its own sake, but a review of the language of that law shows it to be indirectly benefitting humans. (shrink)

We evaluate the asymptotic performance of boundedly-rational strategies in multi-armed bandit problems, where performance is measured in terms of the tendency (in the limit) to play optimal actions in either (i) isolation or (ii) networks of other learners. We show that, for many strategies commonly employed in economics, psychology, and machine learning, performance in isolation and performance in networks are essentially unrelated. Our results suggest that the appropriateness of various, common boundedly-rational strategies depends crucially upon the social context (if any) (...) in which such strategies are to be employed. (shrink)

Although we were again reminded in 2008 of the unreliability of markets, pollution mitigation and environmental improvement become increasingly intertwined with market economics. We seem irrationally to continue and in fact, increase the role of the market in maintaining and improving human health and the environment. In this article, the author reviews four popular schemes for market particiption in human health and the environment: emissions trading, the top runner program, corporate average fuel economy (CAFE), and technology forcing. This review demonstrates (...) that when each of these programs has been deemed "effective", it generally means "economically profitable", not effective in improving human health or the environment. The review further shows that as these four methods are compared one to the other, when they do work to improve human health or the environement, their relative ability to do so is directly proportional to the degree of legal control, and indirectly proportional to the role of the market. (shrink)

On September 7, 2008 the executive administration of American President George W. Bush announced that his government would take over the giant mortgage finance companies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, costing the citizens $200 billion. One week later, the 160 year-old American investment bank Lehman Brothers filed for the largest bankruptcy in U.S. history. What would soon be known worldwide as “the financial crisis” had begun. In response to that crisis, less than a month later, on October 3, 2008, the (...) United States Congress passed the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008, which established the Troubled Asset Relief Program and authorized the use of $700 billion in taxpayer funds to bail out the banking and finance industry. As a result, the U.S. Treasury reports that the total bailout gave Bank of America $45 billion, Citigroup Bank $45 billion, AIG Bank $40 billion, J. P Morgan $25 billion, Wells Fargo $25 billion, General Motors $10.4 billion, Goldman Sachs $10 billion, Morgan Stanley $10 billion, GMAC $5 billion, and Chrysler corporation, a mere $4 billion. This response to a perceived crisis was not limited to the United States. On October 12, 2008—in one day alone—the United Kingdom coughed up the equivalent of €679 billion in bank relief. And in Germany, Der Spiegel reported on December 23, 2008 “The German government whipped its €480 billion bank bailout package through parliament in record time.". (shrink)

A dynamical system is called chaotic if small changes to its initial conditions can create large changes in its behavior. By analogy, we call a dynamical system structurally chaotic if small changes to the equations describing the evolution of the system produce large changes in its behavior. Although there are many definitions of “chaos,” there are few mathematically precise candidate definitions of “structural chaos.” I propose a definition, and I explain two new theorems that show that a set of models (...) is structurally chaotic if it contains a chaotic function. I conclude by discussing the relationship between structural chaos and structural stability. (shrink)

The axiological question in the philosophy of religion is the question of what impact, if any, God’s existence does make to the axiological value of our world. It has recently been argued that we should prefer a theistic world where God is hidden to an atheistic world or a theistic world where God isn’t hidden. This is because in a hidden theistic world all of the theistic goods obtain in addition to the experience of atheistic goods. I complete this line (...) of argument by showing that theistic goods do indeed obtain in a world where God hides. In doing so I indirectly argue against proponents of divine hiddenness arguments such as J.L. Schellenberg. The correct answer to the axiological question turns out to be a solution to the problem of divine hiddenness. (shrink)

Epistemic decision theory (EDT) employs the mathematical tools of rational choice theory to justify epistemic norms, including probabilism, conditionalization, and the Principal Principle, among others. Practitioners of EDT endorse two theses: (1) epistemic value is distinct from subjective preference, and (2) belief and epistemic value can be numerically quantified. We argue the first thesis, which we call epistemic puritanism, undermines the second.

Contextology is the science of the dynamics of the conversational context. Contextology formulates laws governing how the shared information states of interlocutors evolve in response to assertion. More precisely, the contextologist attempts to construct a function which, when provided with just a conversation’s pre-update context and the content of an assertion, delivers that conversation’s post-update context. Most contextologists have assumed that the function governing the evolution of the context is simple: the post-update context is just the pre-update context intersected with (...) the content of the assertion. We argue that this assumption is wrong: not only is it false, it is also incoherent given standard contextological assumptions. Moreover, it is impossible in principle to revise it to correctly describe the dynamics of context. We conclude that there can be no science of Contextology. The laws governing the evolution of the context in response to assertion must make essential reference to the private information states of interlocutors. (shrink)

On the fiftieth anniversary of the Treaties of Rome, the Berlin Declaration declared the period of reflection on the failed Treaty to Establish a Constitution for Europe to be at an end. To replace it, a reform treaty was signed in Lisbon in December of 2007, and newspapers from Dublin to Beijing reported on the communique issued by EU leaders in Brussels that stated ,,The Lisbon Treaty provides the Union with a stable and lasting institutional framework. We expect no change (...) in the foreseeable future, so that the Union will be able to fully concentrate on addressing the concrete challenges ahead, including globalisation and climate change ..."2 In choosing the problems to highlight in the press release for what still might constitute the legal framework for Europe in the foreseeable future, why did these leaders state, and why did these journalists repeat these two issues together - globalisation and climate change? ,,Globalisation" and the various processes it describes as such have already been thoroughly discussed in legal literature many times over. (shrink)

Introduction in chapter viii of book ii of An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, John Locke provides various putative lists of primary qualities. Insofar as they have considered the variation across Locke's lists at all, commentators have usually been content simply either to consider a self-consciously abbreviated list (e.g., "Size, Shape, etc.") or a composite list as the list of Lockean primary qualities, truncating such a composite list only by omitting supposedly co-referential terms. Doing the latter with minimal judgment about what (...) terms are co-referential gives us the following list of eleven qualities (in the order in which they appear in this chapter of the Essay): solidity, extension, figure, mobility, motion or rest, number, bulk, texture, motion, size, and situation. Perhaps surprisingly given the attention to the primary/secondary distinction since Locke, Locke's primary qualities themselves have received little more than passing mention in the bulk of the subsequent literature. In particular, no discussion both offers an interpretation of Locke's conception of primary qualities and makes sense of Locke's various lists as lists of primary qualities. A central motivation for this paper is the idea that these two tasks are not independent. (shrink)

Christian B. Miller has noted a “realism challenge” for virtue ethicists to provide an account of how the character gap between virtuous agents and non-virtuous agents can be bridged. This is precisely one of Han Feizi’s key criticisms against Confucian virtue ethics, as Eric L. Hutton argues, which also cuts across the Aristotelian one: appealing to virtuous agents as ethical models provides the wrong kind of guidance for the development of virtues. Hutton, however, without going into detail, notes that the (...) notion of rituals in the Confucian tradition may be able to sidestep Han Feizi’s criticism. In this essay, I wish to explore not only how the notion of rituals, alongside its corollaries in Xunzi’s Confucian program for ethical cultivation, indeed addresses Han Feizi’s criticism, but also observe that Aristotle’s tragic poetry plays functionally equivalent roles in his own understanding of ethical upbringing. I will begin by considering Han Feizi’s critique of ethical cultivation in virtue ethics as such and how it poses a specific problem for the acquisition of the ‘constitutive reasoning’ shared by Aristotle and Xunzi. I will then briefly note that this problem trades on the synthetic structure of human nature found in both Aristotle and Xunzi (the rational/irrational parts of the soul and the heartmind/five faculties), which grounds the way they understand ethical action and agency. Finally, I will suggest how both Aristotle and Xunzi understand the role of the arts in their extensive programme of ethical cultivation, allowing them to respond to Han Feizi’s attack as too narrow a construal of their respective ethical projects. It is hoped that, through this, we may gain a better sense of how more recent virtue ethicists may similarly draw on aesthetic resources for ethical development. (shrink)

A picture held us captive. And we could not get outside it, for it lay in our language and our language seemed to repeat it to us inexorably. -/- Can an image create a future? Can a word create a future? Most emphatically,‘yes’, I would say. Moreover, not only can words and images create a future, they are the only means of future creation. They are that important because they are that close to our creation of meaning. Thus, it makes (...) perfect sense to look to word and image in its most voluminous form—film—to see suggestions of what some of the future(s) might be. -/- This is not an analysis in the standard sense of a film review. My only comments lie with the creation of future(s) in language and for present purposes, perhaps even more so, in image. There is one important point to be made about one particular word right here at the outset, though. One of the most important criticisms in future studies is that we treat the future as an inevitable manifesting of itself—something that happens ‘out there’, beyond our control or influence. Consequently, there is only one future, as though it is already written in the script of a God, and we are playing it out on stage. This attitude is reflected in language insofar as we consider it standard to use definite, rather than indefinite articles; that is, to say the future, just as we say the present and the past. In fact, we do have some say in the future(s). It is not some sort of intentionally-guided say that we have, however. And it is certainly not some sort of happy control of destiny. It is more of a structural influence. That influence is an influence whereby we create an atmosphere of possibilities. (shrink)

In his essay "Opponents, Audiences, Constituencies, and Community," Edward W. Said throws down a gage to literary theorists and challenges them to break out of disciplinary ghettos, "to reopen the blocked social processes ceding objective representations (hence power) of the world to a small coterie of experts and their clients, to consider that the audience for literacy is not a closed circle of three thousand professional critics but the community of human beings living in society . . . ."' To (...) the literary critic he admonishes: "When you discuss Keats or Shakespeare or Dickens, you may touch on political subjects, of course, but it is assumed that the skills traditionally associated with modern literary criticism . . . are there to be applied to literary texts, not, for instance, to a government document . . . . The intellectual toll this has taken in the work of the most explicitly political of recent critics . . . is very high." Should lawyers not match Said's gage by throwing down one of their own? If literary criticism should be socially engaged, should the social practice of law not be literate? If so, to what end? (shrink)