According to the computational theory of mind , to think is to compute. But what is meant by the word 'compute'? The generally given answer is this: Every case of computing is a case of manipulating symbols, but not vice versa - a manipulation of symbols must be driven exclusively by the formal properties of those symbols if it is qualify as a computation. In this paper, I will present the following argument. Words like 'form' and 'formal' are ambiguous, as (...) they can refer to form in either the syntactic or the morphological sense. CTM fails on each disambiguation, and the arguments for CTM immediately cease to be compelling once we register that ambiguity. The terms 'mechanical' and 'automatic' are comparably ambiguous. Once these ambiguities are exposed, it turns out that there is no possibility of mechanizing thought, even if we confine ourselves to domains where all problems can be settled through decision-procedures. The impossibility of mechanizing thought thus has nothing to do with recherché mathematical theorems, such as those proven by Gödel and Rosser. A related point is that CTM involves, and is guilty of reinforcing, a misunderstanding of the concept of an algorithm. (shrink)

En temps normal, les contrefactuels sont conçus comme produisant des énoncés portant sur des états de choses, mais des états de choses se trouvant dans des mondes simplement possibles ou alternes. Analysés ainsi, il s’avère que presque tous les contrefactuels sont incohérents. Tout contrefactuel analysé de la sorte exige qu’il y ait un monde métaphysiquement (et pas épistémiquement seulement) possible w où les lois sont les mêmes qu’ici, et où la quasi-totalité des faits sont les mêmes qu’ici. (Les différences factuelles (...) sont liées à l’antécédent et au conséquent du contrefactuel.) Mais comme je vais le montrer, cette exigence implique de manière typique la postulation de mondes dont on peut démontrer la nécessaire non-existence au moyen de déductions assez élémentaires. De plus, l’analyse des contrefactuels en termes de mondes possibles est coupable de circularité cachée. Analysés ainsi, les contrefactuels ne peuvent effectivement être compris qu’en termes de lois de la nature (les lois qui s’appliquent ici sont présupposées dans le monde hypothétique — excepté dans le cas atypique où le contrefactuel est également un contre-nomique). Mais il y a un argument répandu voulant que le concept de loi ne puisse pas être défini lui-même, sinon dans les termes de la notion de contrefactuel (une loi est, entre autres, quelque chose qui vient à l’appui des contrefactuels). Je donnerai une analyse purement épistémique des contrefactuels, déclarant que ce sont des propositions pseudo-probabilistes. Je déclarerai également que le type de probabilité en question peut être défini intégralement en termes de ce qui a été le cas (non pas de ce qui aurait été le cas, ni même de ce qui doit être le cas en un sens nomique.) Mon analyse n’est donc coupable d’aucune sorte de circularité. (shrink)

A brief but rigorous description of the logical structure of mathematical truth.

A number of psychologists hold that aggression is a basic instinct, meaning that it is a primitive drive and therefore cannot be derived from, or decomposed into, other drives. The truth is that aggression is not a basic drive. Desire for power is a basic drive, and aggression is what results when that desire is frustrated.

Do I know that my chair won’t sprout wings and fly away? I know that it would be needlessly anomaly-generative to believe that it will. Setting aside limiting-cases, such as my knowledge that I am conscious, what we refer to as knowing that such-and-such is really knowledge that it would be needlessly anomaly-generative to believe otherwise. Consequently, what we typically refer to knowing that such-and-such is the case is really meta-knowledge to the effect that granting such-and-such eliminates mysteries and denying (...) it creates them. (shrink)

The modern philosophical establishment is a bureaucracy, and all of the philosophy it produces is an attempt to give a sheen of legitimacy to that fact.

Religion is shown to be distinct from both rationalism and spiritualism but to combine elements of both. It is further shown that modern rationaiism, much like an unregulated economy, collapses into its own antithesis, it being one of the purposes of religion to prevent this collapse.

Borderline Personality Disorder is female privilege. It is to be understood primarily in political terms, and only secondarily in psychoanalytic terms.

The meaning of morpheme (a minimal unit of linguistic significance) cannot diverge from what it is taken to mean. But the meaning of a complex expression can diverge without limit from what it is taken to mean, given that the meaning of such an expression is a logical consequence of the meanings of its parts, coupled with the fact that people are not infallible ratiocinators. Nonetheless, given Chomsky’s distinction between competence (ability) and performance (ability to deploy ability), what a complex (...) expression means does, after a fashion, coincide with what it is taken to mean: to the extent that speaker-performance approximates to speaker-competence---i.e. to the extent that people are able to operationalize their linguistic competence---what speakers take complex expressions to mean coincides with they in fact mean; and herein lies an answer to the question “what is linguistic meaning?” that holds with respect to both simple and complex expressions. (shrink)

One cannot have the concept of a red object without having the concept of an extended object. But the word "red" doesn't contain the word "extended." In general, our concepts are interconnected in ways in which the corresponding words are not interconnected. This is not an accidental fact about the English language or about any other language: it is inherent in what a language is that the cognitive abilities corresponding to a person's abilities to use words cannot possibly be reflected (...) in semantic relations holding among those words. This fact in its turn is a consequence of the fact that expressions are, whereas concepts are not, digital structures, for which reason the ways in which cognitive abilities interact cannot possibly bear any significant resemblance to the ways in which expressions interact. Consequently, there is no truth to the contention that our thought-processes are identical with, or bear any resemblance to, the digital computations that mediate computer-activity. (shrink)

A series of representations must be semantics-driven if the members of that series are to combine into a single thought: where semantics is not operative, there is at most a series of disjoint representations that add up to nothing true or false, and therefore do not constitute a thought at all. A consequence is that there is necessarily a gulf between simulating thought, on the one hand, and actually thinking, on the other. A related point is that a popular doctrine (...) - the so-called 'computational theory of mind' (CTM) - is based on a confusion. CTM is the view that thought-processes consist in 'computations', where a computation is defined as a 'form-driven' operation on symbols. The expression 'form-driven operation' is ambiguous, as it may refer either to syntax-driven operations or to morphology-driven operations. Syntax-driven operations presuppose the existence of operations that are driven by semantic and extra-semantic knowledge. So CTM is false if the terms 'computation' and 'form-driven operation' are taken to refer to syntax-driven operations. Thus, if CTM is to work, those expressions must be taken to refer to morphology-driven operations. CTM therefore fails, given that an operation must be semantics-driven if it is to qualify as a thought. CTM therefore fails on each possible disambiguation of the expressions 'formal operation' and 'computation,' and it is therefore false. (shrink)

"Jim would still be alive if he hadn't jumped" means that Jim's death was a consequence of his jumping. "x wouldn't be a triangle if it didn't have three sides" means that x's having a three sides is a consequence its being a triangle. Lewis takes the first sentence to mean that Jim is still alive in some alternative universe where he didn't jump, and he takes the second to mean that x is a non-triangle in every alternative universe where (...) it doesn't have three sides. Why did Lewis have such obviously wrong views? Because, like so many of his contemporaries, he failed to grasp the truth that it is the purpose of the present paper to demonstrate, to wit: No coherent doctrine assumes that statements about possible worlds are anything other than statements about the dependence-relations governing our world. The negation of this proposition has a number of obviously false consequences, for example: all true propositions are necessarily true (there is no modal difference between "2+2=4" and "Socrates was bald"); all modal terms (e.g. "possible," "necessary") are infinitely ambiguous; there is no difference between laws of nature (e.g. "metal expands when heated") and accidental generalizations (e.g. "all of the coins in my pocket are quarters"); and there is no difference between the belief that 1+1=2 and the belief that arithmetic is incomplete. Given that possible worlds are identical with mathematical models, it follows that the concept of model-theoretic entailment is useless in the way of understanding how inferences are drawn or how they should be drawn. Given that the concept of formal-entailment is equally useless in these respects, it follows that philosophers and mathematicians have simply failed to shed any light on the nature of the consequence-relation. Q's being either a formal or a model-theoretic consequence of P is parasitic on its bearing some third, still unidentified relation to P; and until this relation has been identified, the discipline of philosophical logic has yet to begin. (shrink)

Una guía concisa de epistemología moderna. -/- .

This paper shows that Russell’s theory of descriptions gives the wrong se-mantics for definite descriptions occurring in questions and imperatives. Depending on how that theory is applied, it either assigns nonsense to per-fectly meaningful questions and assertions or it assigns meanings that di-verge from the actual semantics of such sentences, even after all pragmatic and contextual variables are allowed for. Given that Russell’s theory is wrong for questions and assertions, it must be wrong for assertoric state-ments; for the semantics of (...) ‘the phi’ obviously doesn’t vary depending on whether it occurs in a question or an assertion or a command. (shrink)

On the basis of arguments put forth by (Kripke, 1977a) and (Kripke, 1980), it is widely held that one can sometimes rationally accept propositions of the form "P and not-P" and also that there are necessary a posteriori truths. We will find that Kripke's arguments for these views appear probative only so long as one fails to distinguish between semantics and presemantics—between the literal meanings of sentences, on the one hand, and the information on the basis of which one identifies (...) those literal meanings, on the other. This same failure, it will be argued, underlies the popular thesis that intersubstituting co-referring terms sometimes turns true sentences into false ones and vice versa. Though seemingly plausible, this thesis has a number of counterintuitive consequences, among them that the occurrence of “snow” in “it is true that snow is white” doesn’t refer to snow. An understanding of the distinction between semantics and presemantics suggests a way to develop a semantic system that doesn’t have these consequences and that, moreover, reconciles our intuitions concerning cognitive content with some powerfully argued theses of contemporary philosophy of language. Some of this paper's main contentions are anticipated by Andrzej Boguslawski in his 1994 paper “Sentential Complementation and Truth.”. (shrink)

Linguistic expressions must be decrypted if they are to transmit information. Thoughts need not be decrypted if they are to transmit information. Therefore thought-processes do not consist of linguistic expressions: thought is not linguistic. A consequence is that thought is not computational, given that a computation is the operationalization of a function that assigns one expression to some other expression (or sequence of expressions).

A person with one dollar is poor. If a person with n dollars is poor, then so is a person with n + 1 dollars. Therefore, a person with a billion dollars is poor. True premises, valid reasoning, a false a conclusion. This is an instance of the Sorites-paradox. (There are infinitely many such paradoxes. A man with an IQ of 1 is unintelligent. If a man with an IQ of n is unintelligent, so is a man with an IQ (...) of n+1. Therefore a man with an IQ of 200 is unintelligent.) Most attempts to solve this paradox reject some law of classical logic, usually the law of bivalence. I show that this paradox can be solved while holding on to all the laws of classical logic. Given any predicate that generates a Sorites-paradox, significant use of that predicate is actually elliptical for a relational statement: a significant token of "Bob is poor" means that Bob is poor compared to x, for some value of x. Once a value of x is supplied, a definite cutoff line between having and not having the paradox-generating predicate is supplied. This neutralizes the inductive step in the associated Sorites argument, and the would-be paradox is avoided. (shrink)

The semantic rules governing natural language quantifiers (e.g. "all," "some," "most") neither coincide with nor resemble the semantic rules governing the analogues of those expressions that occur in the artificial languages used by semanticists. Some semanticists, e.g. Peter Strawson, have put forth data-consistent hypotheses as to the identities of the semantic rules governing some natural-language quantifiers. But, despite their obvious merits, those hypotheses have been universally rejected. In this paper, it is shown that those hypotheses are indeed correct. Moreover, data-consistent (...) hypotheses are put forth as to the identities of the semantic rules governing the words "most" and "many," the semantic rules governing which semanticists have thus far been unable to identify. The points made in this paper are anticipated in a paper, published in the same issue of the Journal of Pragmatics, by Andrzej Boguslawski. (shrink)

Sense-perceptions do not have to be deciphered if their contents are to be uploaded, the reason being that they are presentations, not representations. Linguistic expressions do have to be deciphered if their contents are to be uploaded, the reason being that they are representations, not presentations. It is viciously regressive to suppose that information-bearing mental entities are categorically in the nature of representations, as opposed to presentations, and it is therefore incoherent to suppose that thought is mediated by expressions or, (...) therefore, by linguistic entities. Attempts to neutralize this criticism inevitably overextend the concept of what it is to be a linguistic symbol, the result being that such attempts eviscerate the very position that it is their purpose to defend. Also, it is inherent in the nature of such attempts that they assume the truth of the view that for a given mental entity to bear this as opposed to that information is for that entity to have this as opposed to that causal role. This view is demonstrably false, dooming to failure the just-mentioned attempts to defend the contention that thought is in all cases mediated by linguistic symbols. (shrink)

Easy to understand philosophy papers in all areas. Table of contents: Three Short Philosophy Papers on Human Freedom The Paradox of Religions Institutions Different Perspectives on Religious Belief: O’Reilly v. Dawkins. v. James v. Clifford Schopenhauer on Suicide Schopenhauer’s Fractal Conception of Reality Theodore Roszak’s Views on Bicameral Consciousness Philosophy Exam Questions and Answers Locke, Aristotle and Kant on Virtue Logic Lecture for Erika Kant’s Ethics Van Cleve on Epistemic Circularity Plato’s Theory of Forms Can we trust our senses? Yes (...) we can Descartes on What He Believes Himself to Be The Role of Values in Science Modern Science Kant’s Moral Philosophy Plato’s Republic as Pol Potist Bureaucracy Schopenhauer on Human Suffering Bertrand Russell on the Value of Philosophy The Philosophical Value of Uncertainty Logic Homework: Theorems and Models Searle vs. Turing on the Imitation Game Hume, Frankfurt, and Holbach on Personal Freedom Manifesto of the University of Wisconsin, Madison Secular Society Michael’s Analysis of the Limits of Civil Protections Bentham and Mill on Different Types of Pleasure Set Theory Homework Aristotle on Virtue Nagel On the Hard Problem Wittgenstein on Language and Thought Camus and Schopenhauer on the Meaning of Life Camus’ Hero as Rebel without a Cause My Little Finger: Camus’ Absurdism Illustrated Are Late-term Abortions Ethical? Does Mathematics Assume the Truth of Platonism? The Self-defeating Nature of Utilitarianism and Consequentialism Generally What is The Good Life? Bentham and Mill regarding types of pleasures Kant’s Moral Philosophy Five Short Papers on Mind-body Dualism Tracy Latimer’s Father had the Right to Kill Her: Towards a doctrine of generalized self-defense Arguments Concerning God and Morality Goldman, Rousseau and von Hayek on the Ideal State J.S Mill on Liberty and Personal Freedom A Kantian Analysis of a Borderline Date-rape Situation Living Well as Flourishing: Aristotle’s Conception of the Good Life Three Essays on Medical Ethics: Answers to Exam Questions on Elective Amputation, Vaccination, and Informed Consent Hobbes, Marx, Rousseau, Nietzsche: Their Central Themes De Tocqueville on Egoism Mill vs. Hobbes on Liberty Exam-Essays on the Moral Systems of Mill, Bentham, and Kant Kant’s Moral System Aristotle on Virtue Plato’s Cave Allegory An Ethical Quandary Superorganisms The Tuskegee Experiment A Rawlsian Analysis Why Moore’s Proof of an External World Fails A Defense of Nagel’s Argument Against Materialism A Utilitarian Analysis of a Case of Theft The Paradox of the Self-aware Wretch: An Analysis of Pascal’s Moral Philosophy Jean-Paul Sartre: Decline and Fall of a Marxist Sell-out A One Page Proof of Plato’s Theory of Forms Plato’s Republic as Pol Potist Bureaucracy The problem of the one and the many Four Short Essays on Truth and Knowledge What is ‘the Good Life?’ The Ontological Argument Different Political Philosophies: Plato, Locke, Madison, Rousseau, Hayek, and Mill on the State What do I know with certainty? Skepticism about skepticism Neuroscience and Freewill Operant Conditioning What makes us special? Are Late-term Abortions Ethical? No Two Papers on Epistemology: Gettier and Bostrom Examination Nietzsche on Punishment God’s Foreknowledge and Moral Responsibility . (shrink)

A clear and concise exposition and critique of Kant's arguments for God's existence.

In this work, it is shown that given a correct understanding of the nature of reference and of linguistic meaning generally, it is possible to produce non-revisionist analyses of the nature of -/- *Perceptual content, *Mental content generally, *Logical equivalence, *Logical dependence generally, *Counterfactual truth, *The causal efficacy of mental states, and *Our knowledge of ourselves and of the external world. -/- In addition, set-theoretic interpretations of several semantic concepts are put forth. These concepts include truth, falsehood, negation, and conjunction.

Solutions to ninety paradoxes, some old, some new.

Short papers on OCD, philosophy, psychopathy, psychopathology generally, and their interrelations.

Education has to go digital, and this will involve a lot more than just on-lining brick-and-mortar classes. Also, the process of doing this will be real epistemology, as in, it will involve people doing epistemology, instead of just impotently and unoriginally talking about it.

In the first part of this two-part work, the economics of higher education are explained. It is made clear how a university’s business model differs from that of a company that has to compete on the open market. On this basis, it is explained: -/- (i)Why universities are in no way threatened by low retention-rates and graduation-rates; (ii)Why universities cannot significantly improve or otherwise alter the quality of their educational services without imperiling their very existences; (iii)Why universities do not have (...) to improve the quality of their educational services; (iv)Why universities couldn’t improve the quality of their services even if they wanted to; (v)Why the fact that many universities have low retention- and graduation-rates does not a represent a business opportunity, or opportunity of any other kind, for anyone, whether inside or outside of academia; and (vi)Why principles of Knowledge Management (KM) that are so useful when it comes to helping businesses that compete on the open market are completely useless, and indeed of negative utility, when it comes to helping universities solve their problems. -/- In the second part of this work, it is explained how to construct an online university that is both lucrative and also provides instruction that is faster, better, cheaper, and more useful than the instruction provided by any existing (or possible) brick-and-mortar university. Finally, it is explained how the principles of KM can be used to optimize such a university, once it is up and running. (shrink)

Contemporary philosophy and theoretical psychology are dominated by an acceptance of content-externalism: the view that the contents of one's mental states are constitutively, as opposed to causally, dependent on facts about the external world. In the present work, it is shown that content-externalism involves a failure to distinguish between semantics and pre-semantics---between, on the one hand, the literal meanings of expressions and, on the other hand, the information that one must exploit in order to ascertain their literal meanings. It is (...) further shown that, given the falsity of content-externalism, the falsity of the Computational Theory of Mind (CTM) follows. It is also shown that CTM involves a misunderstanding of terms such as "computation," "syntax," "algorithm," and "formal truth." Novel analyses of the concepts expressed by these terms are put forth. These analyses yield clear, intuition-friendly, and extensionally correct answers to the questions "what are propositions?, "what is it for a proposition to be true?", and "what are the logical and psychological differences between conceptual (propositional) and non-conceptual (non-propositional) content?" Naively taking literal meaning to be in lockstep with cognitive content, Burge, Salmon, Falvey, and other semantic externalists have wrongly taken Kripke's correct semantic views to justify drastic and otherwise contraindicated revisions of commonsense. (Salmon: What is non-existent exists; at a given time, one can rationally accept a proposition and its negation. Burge: Somebody who is having a thought may be psychologically indistinguishable from somebody who is thinking nothing. Falvey: somebody who rightly believes himself to be thinking about water is psychologically indistinguishable from somebody who wrongly thinks himself to be doing so and who, indeed, isn't thinking about anything.) Given a few truisms concerning the differences between thought-borne and sentence-borne information, the data is easily modeled without conceding any legitimacy to any one of these rationality-dismantling atrocities. (It thus turns out, ironically, that no one has done more to undermine Kripke's correct semantic points than Kripke's own followers!). (shrink)

Philosophy is the science of the science; it is the analysis of the assumptions underlying empirical inquiry. Given that these assumptions cannot possibly be examined or even identified on the basis of empirical data, it follows that philosophy is a non-empirical discipline. And given that our linguistic and cultural practices cannot possibly be examined or even identified except on the basis of empirical data, it follows that philosophical questions are not linguistic questions and do not otherwise concern our conventions or (...) our cultural practices. This entails that philosophical truths are not tautologous or otherwise trivial. It also entails that empiricism is false and, therefore, that Platonism is correct. Given a clear understanding of why Platonism is correct and of what this implies, a number of shibboleths of contemporary analytic philosophy are speedily demolished and are no less speedily replaced with independently corroborated and intuitively plausible alternatives. New answers are given to age-old questions concerning scientific explanation, causal and logical dependence, linguistic meaning, personal identity, the structure of the psyche, and the nature of personal responsibility. Existing answers to these question are thoroughly considered and duly extended, modified, or replaced. Every technical term is defined; every philosophy-specific concept is explained; and the positions defended are consistent with commonsense, so far as their being consistent with the relevant data allows them to be. Therefore, this book is intelligible to philosophically minded laymen. At the same time, it is appropriate for advanced scholars, given that it defends original viewpoints and given also that, even though it discusses old viewpoints, it does so in new ways. Because it is clearly written, it is intelligible to neophytes; but it is not an introductory text and it is not a textbook. There are two appendices: the first, a thorough exposition of the rudiments of formal logic, along with the conceptual underpinnings of that discipline; the second, a definition and analytic discussion of each technical term that occurs in the text. Most of the chapters are followed by study-questions and by practice tests. (shrink)

It is argued (a) that laws are assurances of protections of rights and (b) that governments are protectors of rights. Lest those assurances be empty and thus not really be assurances at all, laws must be enforced and governments must therefore have the power to coerce. For this reason, the government of a given region tends to have, as Max Weber put it, a "monopoly on power" in that region. And because governments are power-monopolizers, it is tempting to think that (...) the concepts of government and law are to be understood in terms of the concept of power. In actuality, the first two concepts are to be understood primarily in terms of the concept of morality--of rights-protection, to be specific--and only secondarily in terms of the concept of power. Contentions (a) and (b) appear to be inconsistent with obvious facts (e.g. the fact that Pol Pot's regime violated the rights of those over whom it had power). But (a) and (b) are compatible with those facts. This is a consequence of two principles. First, moral requirements have a "dimension of weight," as Dworkin put it, meaning that one moral imperative can be outweighed, without being obliterated, by another moral imperative. Second, sentential operators can have different degrees of scope. "It is hereby assured that" is such an operator. Linguistic surface structure may obfuscate the degree of scope that it has in a given sentence. That fact compatibilizes our analysis with the fact that there are evil laws and evil governments. (shrink)

In order to understand a sentence, one must know the relevant semantic rules. Those rules are not learned in a vacuum; they are given to one through one's senses. As a result, knowledge of semantic rules sometimes comes bundled with semantically irrelevant, but cognitively non-innocuous, knowledge of the circumstances in which those rules were learned. Thus, one must work through non-semantic information in order to know what is literally meant by a given sentence-token. A consequence is that one's knowledge of (...) what is literally meant by a given sentence-token is sometimes embedded in non-semantic knowledge, resulting in a cleavage between what that sentence-token literally means and what the auditor in question takes it to mean. Such deviations obviously have nothing to do with the principles put forth by Grice, since those principles only concern sentence-tokens that have already been understood---since, to put it another way, those principles only concern post-semantic implicature. The just-described deviations are appropriately described as being due to "pre-semantic implicature." Given the phenomenon of pre-semantic implicature, it is easily shown that Russell's Theory of Descriptions, if taken as a theory of literal meaning, is false. In the present volume, these rather elementary principles are entirely ignored, and all of the articles in it are sterile repetitions of the points made by Russell and Strawson. The blinkered approach to language embodied in this volume must be reconsidered in light of psychological principles relating to language-acquisition and language-use. Unfortunately, analytic philosophers shy away from such topics, as is made clear by the papers in this grim volume. (shrink)

What are laws, and do they necessarily have any basis in morality? The present work argues that laws are governmental assurances of protections of rights and that concepts of law and legal obligation must therefore be understood in moral terms. There are, of course, many immoral laws. But once certain basic truths are taken into account – in particular, that moral principles have a “dimension of weight”, to use an expression of Ronald Dworkin’s, and also that principled relations are not (...) always expressed by perfect statistical concomitances – the existence of iniquitous laws poses no significant threat to a moralistic analysis of law. Special attention is paid to the debate between Ronald Dworkin and H.L.A. Hart. Dworkin’s over-all position is argued to be correct, but issue is taken with his argument for that position. Hart’s analysis is found to be vitiated by an impoverished conception of morality and also of the nature of government. Our analysis of law enables us to answer three questions that, at this juncture of history, are of special importance: Are there international laws? If not, could such laws exist? And if they could exist, would their existence necessarily be desirable? The answers to these questions are, respectively: “no”, “yes”, and “no.” Our analysis of law enables us to hold onto the presumption that so-called legal interpretation is a principled endeavor, and that some legal interpretations are truer to existing laws than others. At the same time, it accommodates the obvious fact that the sense in which a physicist interprets meter-readings, or in which a physician interprets a patient’s symptoms, is different from the sense in which judges interpret the law. So our analysis of law enables us to avoid the extreme views that have thus far dominated debates concerning the nature of legal interpretation. On the one hand, it becomes possible to avoid the cynical view (held by the so-called “legal realists”) that legal interpretation is mere legislation and that no legal interpretation is more correct than any other. On the other hand, it becomes possible to avoid Blackstone’s view (rightly descried by Austin as a “childish fiction”) that judges merely discover, and do not create, the law. (shrink)

Rivka Weinberg advances an error theory of ultimate meaning with three parts: (1) a conceptual analysis, (2) the claim that the extension of the concept is empty, and (3) a proposed fitting response, namely being very, very sad. Weinberg’s conceptual analysis of ultimate meaning involves two features that jointly make it metaphysically impossible, namely (i) the separateness of activities and valued ends, and (ii) the bounded nature of human lives. Both are open to serious challenges. We offer an internalist alternative (...) to (i) and a relational alternative to (ii). We then draw out implications for (2) and conclude with reasons to be cheerful about the prospects of a meaningful life. (shrink)

The fact that Gilbert Ryle and J.L. Austin seem to disagree about the ordinary use of words such as ‘voluntary’, ‘involuntary’, ‘voluntarily’, and ‘involuntarily’ has been taken to cast doubt on the methods of ordinary language philosophy. As Benson Mates puts the worry, ‘if agreement about usage cannot be reached within so restricted a sample as the class of Oxford Professors of Philosophy, what are the prospects when the sample is enlarged?’ (Mates 1958, p. 165). In this chapter, we evaluate (...) Mates’s criticism alongside Ryle’s and Austin’s specific claims about the ordinary use of these words, assessing these claims against actual examples of ordinary use drawn from the British National Corpus (BNC). Our evaluation consists in applying a combination of methods: first aggregating judgments about a large set of samples drawn from the corpus, and then using a clustering algorithm to uncover connections between different types of use. In applying these methods, we show where and to what extent Ryle’s and Austin’s accounts of the use of the target terms are accurate as well as where they miss important aspects of ordinary use, and we demonstrate the usefulness of this new combination of methods. At the heart of our approach is a commitment to the idea that systematically looking at actual uses of expressions is an essential component of any approach to ordinary language philosophy. (shrink)

For each positive n , two alternative axiomatizations of the theory of strings over n alphabetic characters are presented. One class of axiomatizations derives from Tarski's system of the Wahrheitsbegriff and uses the n characters and concatenation as primitives. The other class involves using n character-prefixing operators as primitives and derives from Hermes' Semiotik. All underlying logics are second order. It is shown that, for each n, the two theories are definitionally equivalent [or synonymous in the sense of deBouvere]. It (...) is further shown that each member of one class is synonymous with each member of the other class; thus that all of the theories are definitionally equivalent with each other and with Peano arithmetic. Categoricity of Peano arithmetic then implies categoricity of each of the above theories. (shrink)

A case study exploring the importance of compassion for enemies appealing to a series of targeting decisions, co-written with the senior Marine in Iraq in 2003-4.

In the exploratory study reported here, we tested the efficacy of an intervention designed to train teenagers with Möbius syndrome (MS) to increase the use of alternative communication strategies (e.g., gestures) to compensate for their lack of facial expressivity. Specifically, we expected the intervention to increase the level of rapport experienced in social interactions by our participants. In addition, we aimed to identify the mechanisms responsible for any such increase in rapport. In the study, five teenagers with MS interacted with (...) three naïve participants without MS before the intervention, and with three different naïve participants without MS after the intervention. Rapport was assessed by self-report and by behavioral coders who rated videos of the interactions. Individual non-verbal behavior was assessed via behavioral coders, whereas verbal behavior was automatically extracted from the sound files. Alignment was assessed using cross recurrence quantification analysis and mixed-effects models. The results showed that observer-coded rapport was greater after the intervention, whereas self-reported rapport did not change significantly. Observer-coded gesture and expressivity increased in participants with and without MS, whereas overall linguistic alignment decreased. Fidgeting and repetitiveness of verbal behavior also decreased in both groups. In sum, the intervention may impact non-verbal and verbal behavior in participants with and without MS, increasing rapport as well as overall gesturing, while decreasing alignment. (shrink)

The social welfare functional approach to social choice theory fails to distinguish a genuine change in individual well-beings from a merely representational change due to the use of different measurement scales. A generalization of the concept of a social welfare functional is introduced that explicitly takes account of the scales that are used to measure well-beings so as to distinguish between these two kinds of changes. This generalization of the standard theoretical framework results in a more satisfactory formulation of welfarism, (...) the doctrine that social alternatives are evaluated and socially ranked solely in terms of the well-beings of the relevant individuals. This scale-dependent form of welfarism is axiomatized using this framework. The implications of this approach for characterizing classes of social welfare orderings are also considered. (shrink)

This paper explores the theoretical compatibility of substance dualism with a physicalist framework, challenging the notion that physicalism inherently precludes dualism. Acknowledging foundational physicalist principles like reductionism, weakly-emergent consciousness, conservation laws, and the limited impact of quantum indeterminacy, we challenge the conclusion that the universe is thus causally closed. Instead, we propose a speculative model where an extra-physical entity (akin to a “soul”) might intentionally influence quantum outcomes, and examine it as a possible mechanism for libertarian free will. We consider (...) the “amplification problem” faced by the approach: the challenge of scaling subtle quantum influences, typically inconsequential, to a level that significantly impacts processes associated with human free will. Bob Doyle's Cogito model provides a solution, wherein quantum-level events can be linked to conscious human choices. Our paper does not seek to demonstrate that such a dualist model is probable, only that it is possible to construct a plausible dualist model within established scientific parameters. (shrink)

The fact that Gilbert Ryle and J.L. Austin seem to disagree about the ordinary use of words such as ‘voluntary’, ‘involuntary’, ‘voluntarily’, and ‘involuntarily’ has been taken to cast doubt on the methods of ordinary language philosophy. As Benson Mates puts the worry, ‘if agreement about usage cannot be reached within so restricted a sample as the class of Oxford Professors of Philosophy, what are the prospects when the sample is enlarged?’ (Mates, Inquiry 1:161–171, 1958, p. 165). In this chapter, (...) we evaluate Mates’s criticism alongside Ryle’s and Austin’s specific claims about the ordinary use of these words, assessing these claims against actual examples of ordinary use drawn from the British National Corpus (BNC). Our evaluation consists in applying a combination of methods: first aggregating judgments about a large set of samples drawn from the corpus, and then using a clustering algorithm to uncover connections between different types of use. In applying these methods, we show where and to what extent Ryle’s and Austin’s accounts of the use of the target terms are accurate as well as where they miss important aspects of ordinary use, and we demonstrate the usefulness of this new combination of methods. At the heart of our approach is a commitment to the idea that systematically looking at actual uses of expressions is an essential component of any approach to ordinary language philosophy. (shrink)

When the benefits of surgery do not outweigh the harms or where they do not clearly do so, surgical interventions become morally contested. Cutting to the Core examines a number of such surgeries, including infant male circumcision and cutting the genitals of female children, the separation of conjoined twins, surgical sex assignment of intersex children and the surgical re-assignment of transsexuals, limb and face transplantation, cosmetic surgery, and placebo surgery.

Borges’ The Circular Ruins tells the story of a magician who turns out to be a character in a dream. Leibowitz (2021) argues that this scenario undermines the rational indubitability of Descartes’ Cogito. The magician, he argues, is an unreal appearance and therefore does not exist. I argue that Borges drew a distinction between reality and existence and that he was right to do so. There are various senses of reality and the sense in which a dreamt character is unreal (...) poses no threat to their existence or to the indubitability of the Cogito. The magician is unreal because he is a mind-dependent, illusory and fake. Nonetheless, he can be certain that he thinks, therefore he is. (shrink)

Reasoning about analogical arguments is known to be subject to a variety of cognitive biases, and a lack of clarity about which factors can be considered strengths or weaknesses of an analogical argument. This can make it difficult both to design empirical experiments to study how people reason about analogical arguments, and to develop scalable tutoring tools for teaching how to reason and analyze analogical arguments. To address these concerns, we describe WG-A (Warrant Game — Analogy), a framework for people (...) to analyze analogical arguments based on Bartha’s (2010) Articulation Model of analogical argumentation. We carry out two experiments designed to probe WG-A’s effectiveness in improving participants’ ability to reason about analogical arguments and argumentation in general, and argue that WG-A is a promising approach, though it is in need of further development. (shrink)

Searle’s Chinese Room Argument (CRA) has been the object of great interest in the philosophy of mind, artificial intelligence and cognitive science since its initial presentation in ‘Minds, Brains and Programs’ in 1980. It is by no means an overstatement to assert that it has been a main focus of attention for philosophers and computer scientists of many stripes. It is then especially interesting to note that relatively little has been said about the detailed logic of the argument, whatever significance (...) Searle intended CRA to have. The problem with the CRA is that it involves a very strong modal claim, the truth of which is both unproved and highly questionable. So it will be argued here that the CRA does not prove what it was intended to prove. (shrink)

The ontology of decision theory has been subject to considerable debate in the past, and discussion of just how we ought to view decision problems has revealed more than one interesting problem, as well as suggested some novel modifications of classical decision theory. In this paper it will be argued that Bayesian, or evidential, decision-theoretic characterizations of decision situations fail to adequately account for knowledge concerning the causal connections between acts, states, and outcomes in decision situations, and so they are (...) incomplete. Second, it will be argues that when we attempt to incorporate the knowledge of such causal connections into Bayesian decision theory, a substantial technical problem arises for which there is no currently available solution that does not suffer from some damning objection or other. From a broader perspective, this then throws into question the use of decision theory as a model of human or machine planning. (shrink)

We argue that many recent philosophical discussions about the reference of everyday concepts of intentional states have implicitly been predicated on descriptive theories of reference. To rectify this, we attempt to demonstrate how a causal theory can be applied to intentional concepts. Specifically, we argue that some phenomena in early social de- velopment ðe.g., mimicry, gaze following, and emotional contagionÞ can serve as refer- ence fixers that enable children to track others’ intentional states and, thus, to refer to those states. (...) This allows intentional concepts to be anchored to their referents, even if folk psy- chological descriptions turn out to be false. (shrink)

This paper reports on an ongoing ARC Discovery Project that is conducting design research into learning in collaborative virtual worlds (CVW).The paper will describe three design components of the project: (a) pedagogical design, (b)technical and graphics design, and (c) learning research design. The perspectives of each design team will be discussed and how the three teams worked together to produce the CVW. The development of productive failure learning activities for the CVW will be discussed and there will be an interactive (...) demonstration of the project's CVW. (shrink)

Recent studies tend to explain the importance of communication in the organisation as well as prescribing the most commonly practised techniques adopted by school managers. Studies on financial management are quite limited with the available ones suggesting that poor financial management is a source of conflict between school leaders and host communities. Little seems to be known on the connection between principals’ communication patterns and funds’ management as predictors of school-community relationship. This study builds on existing studies and appears to (...) be the first to assess the linkages between principals’ communication patterns, fund management practices and school- community relationship based on empirical rather than subjective data. A structural modelling approach was adopted to examine the nexus using quantitative primary data obtained from a random sample of 2108 respondents. A questionnaire which was designed and validated by the researchers served as the data collection device. Collected data were subjected to Exploratory and Confirmatory Factor Analyses, as well as Multiple Regression Analysis. Findings revealed various significant communication, funds management and school-community relationship practices that are available for adoption. However, it was found that the extent to which principals utilised such practices were below expected minimum standards. It was also found that there were no significant partial and composite effects of principals’ communication and funds management practices on school-community relationship (SCR). Based on these results, relevant theoretical, policy and practical implications are discussed. (shrink)

Discerning the decisionmaking of Kim Jong-Un and the North Korean regime on issues of peaceful engagement and warlike actions endures as a mighty challenge for U.S. intelligence analysts and policymakers. In this report, we seek to inform analysis of Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) leadership decisionmaking. To do so, we use three discussion papers that were written to facilitate discussion of an interagency working group. The three papers are assembled here in a single report. The first discussion paper describes (...) decisionmaking among different authoritarian regimes, including North Korea, and the opening up of those economies to outside engagement. The second paper outlines two different scenarios that might occur when conventional deterrence on the Korean Peninsula breaks down and the resulting decisions that North Korea’s leadership could face. The third paper assesses DPRK decisionmaking about nuclear weapon use. The report concludes with some observations, drawn from the issues covered in these three discussion papers, about DPRK decisionmaking and stability on the Korean Peninsula. (shrink)