The study of biodiversity spans many disciplines and includes data pertaining to species distributions and abundances, genetic sequences, trait measurements, and ecological niches, complemented by information on collection and measurement protocols. A review of the current landscape of metadata standards and ontologies in biodiversity science suggests that existing standards such as the Darwin Core terminology are inadequate for describing biodiversity data in a semantically meaningful and computationally useful way. Existing ontologies, such as the Gene Ontology and others in the Open (...) Biological and Biomedical Ontologies (OBO) Foundry library, provide a semantic structure but lack many of the necessary terms to describe biodiversity data in all its dimensions. In this paper, we describe the motivation for and ongoing development of a new Biological Collections Ontology, the Environment Ontology, and the Population and Community Ontology. These ontologies share the aim of improving data aggregation and integration across the biodiversity domain and can be used to describe physical samples and sampling processes (for example, collection, extraction, and preservation techniques), as well as biodiversity observations that involve no physical sampling. Together they encompass studies of: 1) individual organisms, including voucher specimens from ecological studies and museum specimens, 2) bulk or environmental samples (e.g., gut contents, soil, water) that include DNA, other molecules, and potentially many organisms, especially microbes, and 3) survey-based ecological observations. We discuss how these ontologies can be applied to biodiversity use cases that span genetic, organismal, and ecosystem levels of organization. We argue that if adopted as a standard and rigorously applied and enriched by the biodiversity community, these ontologies would significantly reduce barriers to data discovery, integration, and exchange among biodiversity resources and researchers. (shrink)

Apollonius Dyscolus’ use of ambiguity in grammatical problem-solving has in recent years had the benefit of two scholarly studies. David Blank, in the course of his analysis of the Syntax as a whole, has described the broad functions which Apollonius assigns to ambiguity. Jean Lallot's 1988 paper, ‘Apollonius Dyscole et l'ambigüité linguistique: problemes et solutions’, is devoted exclusively to the treatment of linguistic ambiguity in Apollonius’ work. Yet it is to be feared that the flood of light thrown by these (...) scholars on what had been an unregarded corner of ancient grammar has shown up rather more than Apollonius would have cared to admit, both about the nature, and about the prospects for success, of the enterprise on which he was engaged. At the same time, certain structural features of ancient grammar, at least of the ancient grammar which Apollonius himself constructed, have come into sharper focus: features clear enough with the benefit of hindsight, but glimpsed, it appears, all too dimly by Apollonius himslf. It is now worryingly clear not only that ambiguity was ambiguous for Apollonius, but also that the ambiguity of ambiguity represented a genuine threat to the coherence and value of his work. In this paper I set out to justify both these claims. (shrink)

The professional situation is considered a major interface of practicum training, here conceived as a School of conjunction, a school where one learns to make links, a foundation for the engineering of professionalization. The notion of situation is here developed based on the study of a data corpus elaborated during an experience with a practicum training model centred on writing and the construction of the professional situation by a subject-actor-author of the situation, in interaction with others, in the context of (...) nurse training. The analysis and interpretation of data brings to light a complex and unique unit, constructed in the space-time of a professional practice, a process during which several states succeed one another. The critical moment in action characterizes this unit; it is central to the process, mobilizing reflection in action, internal deliberation, and action-related decision. La situation professionnelle est identifiée comme interface majeure de la formation en alternance conçue ici comme une Ecole de la conjonction, une école où l’on apprend à relier, fondement d’une ingénierie de professionnalisation. La notion de situation est approfondie à partir de l’étude d’un corpus de données constitué au fil de l’expérimentation d’un modèle de formation en alternance centrée sur l’écriture et la construction de la situation professionnelle par un sujet-acteur-auteur de la situation, en interaction avec autrui, dans le contexte de la formation en soins infirmiers. L’analyse et l’interprétation des données permettent de mettre en évidence une unité singulière complexe, construite dans l’espace-temps d’une pratique professionnelle, un processus au cours duquel plusieurs états se succèdent. Le moment critique dans l’action la caractérise ; il occupe la place centrale du processus, mobilisant réflexion dans l’action, délibération intérieure et décision d’action. (shrink)

The professional situation is considered a major interface of practicum training, here conceived as a School of conjunction, a school where one learns to make links, a foundation for the engineering of professionalization. The notion of situation is here developed based on the study of a data corpus elaborated during an experience with a practicum training model centred on writing and the construction of the professional situation by a subject-actor-author of the situation, in interaction with others, in the context of (...) nurse training. The analysis and interpretation of data brings to light a complex and unique unit, constructed in the space-time of a professional practice, a process during which several states succeed one another. The critical moment in action characterizes this unit; it is central to the process, mobilizing reflection in action, internal deliberation, and action-related decision. La situation professionnelle est identifiée comme interface majeure de la formation en alternance conçue ici comme une Ecole de la conjonction, une école où l’on apprend à relier, fondement d’une ingénierie de professionnalisation. La notion de situation est approfondie à partir de l’étude d’un corpus de données constitué au fil de l’expérimentation d’un modèle de formation en alternance centrée sur l’écriture et la construction de la situation professionnelle par un sujet-acteur-auteur de la situation, en interaction avec autrui, dans le contexte de la formation en soins infirmiers. L’analyse et l’interprétation des données permettent de mettre en évidence une unité singulière complexe, construite dans l’espace-temps d’une pratique professionnelle, un processus au cours duquel plusieurs états se succèdent. Le moment critique dans l’action la caractérise ; il occupe la place centrale du processus, mobilisant réflexion dans l’action, délibération intérieure et décision d’action. (shrink)

A central passage in Cusset’s essay states: “God, for Sade, is fiction that ‘took hold of the minds of men’. What makes God’s weakness, the impossibility of rationally proving his existence, is precisely what constitutes his strength as fiction. Negated as authority, eliminated as the figure of the almighty father, God is nonetheless everywhere in the Sadean novel: he exists as the fiction principle. Libertines are never done with God because his name represents the power, not of the law, but (...) of the imagination. In showing their contempt for God, libertines reveal their anger against fiction, which does not have the power to prove its own truth: fiction — and Sade chose to write novels, not philosophical essays — is based on the desire for illusion” (119). Sade’s L’Histoire de Juliette, argues Cusset, breaks from his earlier writings in that Juliette has an agency missing from Sade’s previous female characters, and she, unlike earlier characters, breaks through the central Sadean impasse: “her ‘story’ represents the solution through which Sade paradoxically resolves the aporia of libertinage” (120). She is perfectly aware of scientific explanations for phenomena, but, “for the sake of play, Juliette chooses metaphor, and does not try to ‘unveil truth’ entirely. Juliette distinguishes herself from her teachers and masters through her relation to imagination. […] The end of the novel confirms Juliette’s choice of a playful imagination” (123). In short, Juliette is the libertine who breaks the very rules of the libertines by means of resurrecting the sense of play, imagination, and romantic delicacy which her fellow criminals forbid. Cusset concludes: “Sade invites us to read his texts as fictive and humorous texts, and not, as suggested the French feminist Elisabeth Badinter who wanted to censor Sade’s novel, as rational demonstrations inviting readers to commit murder. Juliette’s transformation through the novel allows us to understand why Sade entitled his last long novel L 'Histoire de Juliette. Juliette chooses fiction, without trying to prove its truth; she chooses pleasure, without trying to annihilate every belief, since imaginary belief is a component of pleasure. What Sade tells us with the invention of Juliette is that freedom is the very choice of limit. […] L’Histoire de Juliette is Sade’s critique of pure fiction” (129). (shrink)

Biologists, historians of biology, and philosophers of biology often ask what is it to be an individual, really. This book does not answer that question. Instead, it answers a much more interesting one: How do biologists individuate individuals? In answering that question, the authors explore why biologists individuate individuals, in what ways, and for what purposes. The cross-disciplinary, dialogical approach to answering metaphysical questions that is pursued in the volume may seem strange to metaphysicians who are not biologically focused, but (...) it is adroitly achieved by the editors. Scott Lidgard (a paleontologist and marine ecologist) and Lynn K. Nyhart (a historian of biology) orchestrate a dialogue among historians of biology, philosophers of biology, and practicing biologists over 10 chapters. These are followed by three reflective commentaries written to frame the different disciplinary perspectives and to highlight the historical, biological, and philosophical themes across the chapters. The result is a volume—in structure and in content—that has much to be generously commended. Biological individuality is a hotly discussed topic, but it is also part of a series of long-standing arguments within both the history and philosophy of biology (HPB) and metaphysics. Notable and fervent debates have centered on evolution and the units of selection, predominantly on Michael T. Ghiselin’s and David L. Hull’s notion of species as individuals, Peter Godfrey-Smith’s Darwinian individuals, and Ellen Clarke’s individuating mechanisms. Lately, it has encompassed non-Darwinian individuals, symbiotic associations like Thomas Pradeu’s immunological individuals, and John Dupré and Maureen A. O’Malley’s metabolic individuals.2 The present volume is curated in a way to introduce the reader to new research in HPB that articulates these debates as well as to introduce and engage in the study of further notions of biological individuality. But its aim is more than an introduction. As the subtitle suggests, it is also intended to give the reader insight into the working together of biologists, historians of biology, and philosophers of biology in figuring out how the notion of biological individuality is instantiated. As such, the problem-centered dialogue that results does more than talk through biological individuality. It shows how the different and often divergent goals of the authors’ disciplines shape not only how they think about individuality but how they communicate this thinking in reciprocal collaboration with others in different disciplines. … cont’d…. (shrink)

In this article, Catherine Kirchner-Blanchard et Frédéric Lefrançois question the decolonial stance of Caribbean artists who pursue artistic freedom and agency without relating or comparing their work to the great models of Western art history.

Psychologists and philosophers have argued that the capacity for perseverance or “grit” depends both on willpower and on a kind of epistemic resilience. But can a form of hopefulness in one’s future success also constitute a source of grit? I argue that substantial practical hopefulness, as a hope to bring about a desired outcome through exercises of one’s agency, can serve as a distinctive ground for the capacity for perseverance. Gritty agents’ “practical hope” centrally involves an attention-fuelled, risk-inclined weighting of (...) two competing concerns over action: when facing the decision of whether to persevere, hopeful gritty agents prioritize the aim of choosing a course of action which might go very well over that of choosing a course of action which is very likely to go fairly well. By relying on the notion of a “risk-inclined attentional pattern” as a dimension of gritty agents’ practical hope, we can explain that form of hope’s contribution to their motivation and practical rationality, especially on a risk-weighted expected utility framework. The upshot is a more pluralistic view of the sources of grit. (shrink)

I defend the thesis that friendship can constitutively require epistemic irrationality against a recent, forceful challenge, raised by proponents of moral and pragmatic encroachment. Defenders of the “encroachment strategy” argue that exemplary friends who are especially slow to believe that their friends have acted wrongly are simply sensitive to the high prudential or moral costs of falsely believing in their friends’ guilt. Drawing on psychological work on epistemic motivation (and in particular on the notion of “need for closure”), I propose (...) a different picture of what friendship requires in the doxastic realm. I argue that contrary to what the encroachment strategy suggests, exemplary friends’ belief formation ought not be guided by a concern with accuracy or error avoidance, but instead by a need to avoid a “specific closure” – namely, a need to avoid concluding in their friends’ guilt. I propose that exemplary friendship often generates a defeasible, doxastic obligation to exemplify such a need, despite its inherent corrupting effects on exemplary friends’ epistemic faculties. (shrink)

Hope is often seen as at once valuable and dangerous: it can fuel our motivation in the face of challenges, but can also distract us from reality and lead us to irrationality. How can we learn to “hope well,” and what does “hoping well” involve? Contemporary philosophers disagree on such normative questions about hope and also on how to define hope as a mental state. This article explores recent philosophical debates surrounding the concept of hope and the norms governing hope. (...) It also underlies hope's significance for the philosophy of emotion and the ethics of interpersonal relations. (shrink)

Pursuing difficult long-term goals typically involves encountering substantial evidence of possible future failure. If decisions to pursue such goals are serious only if one believes that one will act as one has decided, then some of our lives’ most important decisions seem to require belief against the evidence. This is the puzzle of difficult action, to which I offer a solution. I argue that serious decisions to φ do not have to give rise to a belief that one will φ, (...) but can instead be accompanied by a hope to φ. Hope can motivate and rationalize the various actions that we associate with serious commitment. It can also account for the existence of special pressures to adopt an agential stance toward one’s future. Because hope can be cognitively rational when belief is not, there is no problematic tension between the ideal of epistemic rationality and the phenomenon of difficult action. (shrink)

I argue that Plato distinguishes between personal immortality and immortality of the soul. I begin by criticizing the consensus view that Plato identifies the person and the soul. I then turn to the issue of immortality. By considering passages from 'Symposium' and 'Timaeus', I make the case that Plato thinks that while the soul is immortal by nature, if a person is going to be immortal, they must become so. Finally, I argue that Plato has a psychological continuity approach to (...) personal identity. Thus, for Plato, a person becomes immortal by avoiding reincarnation and securing for themselves psychological continuity forever. (shrink)

At Republic 370c–372d, Plato presents us with an early polis that is self-sufficient, peaceful, cooperative, and which provides a comfortable life for its inhabitants. While Glaucon derides this polis as a ‘city for pigs’, Socrates is quick to defend its virtues characterizing it as a city which is not only ‘complete’, but a ‘true’ and ‘healthy’ city. Is Plato sincere when he lauds the city of pigs? if so, why does the city of pigs degenerate so precipitously into the luxurious (...) city? Some commentators have been unable to find any place for the ‘city of pigs’ in the substantive argument of the Republic. Other commentators have supposed that the source of instability in the city of pigs is the nature of human desire. I argue that these interpretations miss what is most deeply interesting about the city of pigs. On my reading, the city of pigs is healthy and true in that it is a unified community. However, this unity depends on good fortune, is highly contingent, and thus unstable. (shrink)

In this paper, we present a survey of the development of the technique of argument diagramming covering not only the fields in which it originated - informal logic, argumentation theory, evidence law and legal reasoning – but also more recent work in applying and developing it in computer science and artificial intelligence. Beginning with a simple example of an everyday argument, we present an analysis of it visualised as an argument diagram constructed using a software tool. In the context of (...) a brief history of the development of diagramming, it is then shown how argument diagrams have been used to analyze and work with argumentation in law, philosophy and artificial intelligence. (shrink)

We often form intentions to resist anticipated future temptations. But when confronted with the temptations our resolutions were designed to withstand, we tend to revise our previous evaluative judgments and conclude that we should now succumb—only to then revert to our initial evaluations, once temptation has subsided. Some evaluative judgments made under the sway of temptation are mistaken. But not all of them are. When the belief that one should now succumb is a proper response to relevant considerations that have (...) newly emerged, can acting in line with one’s previous intention nonetheless be practically rational? To answer this question, I draw on recent debates on the nature of higher-order evidence and on what rationally responding to such evidence involves. I propose that agents facing temptation often have evidence of “deliberative unreliability”, which they ought to heed even when it is “misleading” (that is, even when their evaluative judgments are in fact proper responses to the relevant considerations then available). Because evidence of deliberative unreliability can “dispossess” agents of normative reasons for evaluative judgments and actions that they would otherwise have, being continent despite judging that one should now succumb can often be more rational than giving in. (shrink)

Feminist philosophers have argued that the family, as an institution, falls short of justice and have raised concerns about the effects of the family on women and girls. Three lines of critique have focused on John Rawls’ account of the family in A Theory of Justice and Political Liberalism. First, Rawlsian liberalism fails to provide sufficiently robust protections against sexist non-public associations (including the traditional family). Second, Rawlsian liberalism fails to recognize that families, as a rule, are unfair for women (...) and girls. Third, Rawlsian liberalism gives insufficient attention to the moral development of children within families. In this paper, I defend the place of the family in Rawlsian liberalism against these criticisms. In particular, I argue that family autonomy and family privacy are important for securing a primary good- the development of individuals’ capacity for partiality. (shrink)

In this paper, we examine how a research institution’s social structure and academic opinion leaders’ presence shaped the early adoption of a scientific innovation. Our case considers the early engagement of mathematical economists at the Cowles Commission with John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern’s Theory of Games and Economic Behavior. We argue that scholars with administrative leadership functions who were not only scientifically but also organizationally central – in our case the director of research Jacob Marschak – played a crucial (...) role in promoting the adoption of the Theory of Games. We support our argument with a scientometric analysis of all acknowledgments made in 488 papers published from 1944 to 1955 in the two main paper series at Cowles. We apply blockmodeling techniques to the acknowledgments network to reconstruct the formal and informal social structure at Cowles at the time. Our findings suggest that studies of the early adoption of scientific theories benefit from complementary perspectives on the role of academic leaders and scientists. Our study reveals the importance of formal and informal social structures and the agenda of administrative leaders in these structures to explain their adoption. (shrink)

Critical notice of R. Mayhew's, The Female In Aristotle's Biology.

A familiar post-Kantian criticism contends that Kant enslaves sensibility under the yoke of practical reason. Friedrich Schiller advanced a version of this criticism to which Kant publicly responded. Recent commentators have emphasized the role that Kant’s reply assigns to the pleasure that accompanies successful moral action. In contrast, I argue that Kant’s reply relies primarily on the sublime feeling that arises when we merely contemplate the moral law. In fact, the pleasures emphasized by other recent commentators depend on this sublime (...) feeling. These facts illuminate Kant’s views regarding the relationship between morality, freedom, and the development of moral feelings. (shrink)

This paper explores how Charles Peirce’s habit-based epistemology leads him to theorise perception. I show how Peirce’s triadic semiotic analysis of perceptual judgment renders his theory of perception neither a representationalism nor a relationism /direct realism, but an interesting hybrid of the two. His view is also extremely interesting, I argue, in the way that by analysing symbols as habits it refuses the common assumption that perception is an affair best understood synchronically, as a ‘language-entry event’. Relatedly, I extend previous (...) work (Legg 2008) which argues that Peirce’s epistemology counts as a ‘hyperinferentialism’ in Robert Brandom’s terms, but this does not mean that Peirce’s theory of perception cannot accommodate unmediated contact with reality - what Peirce called ‘the outward clash’. (shrink)

Free will is often said—by compatibilists and incompatibilists alike—to be a power (or complex of powers) of agents. This paper offers proposals for, and examines the prospects of, a powers-conception of free will that takes the powers in question to be causal dispositions. A difficulty for such an account stems from the idea that when one exercises free will, it is up to oneself whether one wills to do this or that. The paper also briefly considers whether a powers-conception that (...) invokes powers of a different kind, such as agent-causal or noncausal powers, might fare better with respect to this problem. (shrink)

Ecological Psychology and Enactivism both challenge representationist cognitive science, but the two approaches have only begun to engage in dialogue. Further conceptual clarification is required in which differences are as important as common ground. This paper enters the dialogue by focusing on important differences. After a brief account of the parallel histories of Ecological Psychology and Enactivism, we cover incompatibility between them regarding their theories of sensation and perception. First, we show how and why in ecological theory perception is, crucially, (...) not based on sensation. We elucidate this idea by examining the biological roots of work in the two fields, concentrating on Gibson and Varela and Maturana. We expound an ecological critique of any sensation-based approach to perception by detailing two topics: classic retinal image theories and perception in single-celled organisms. The second main point emphasizes the importance of the idea of organism-environment mutuality and its difference from structural coupling of sensations and motor behavior. We point out how ecological - phenomenological methods of inquiry grow out of mutualism and compare Gibson’s idea of visual kinesthesis to Merleau-Ponty’s idea of the lived body. Third, we conclude that Ecological Psychology and varieties of Enactivism are laying down different paths to pursue related goals. Thus, convergence of Ecological Psychology and Enactivism is not possible given their conflicting assumptions, but cross-fertilization is possible and desirable. (shrink)

This paper contrasts the scholastic realisms of David Armstrong and Charles Peirce. It is argued that the so-called 'problem of universals' is not a problem in pure ontology (concerning whether universals exist) as Armstrong construes it. Rather, it pertains to which predicates should be applied where, issues which Armstrong sets aside under the label of 'semantics', and which from a Peircean perspective encompass even fundamentals of scientific methodology. It is argued that Peirce's scholastic realism not only presents a more nuanced (...) ontology (distinguishing existence and reality) but also illuminates why scholastic realism is a position worth fighting for. (shrink)

UMI Number: 3319553 This study is a historical ethnography of religious diversity in post-revolutionary Nicaragua from the vantage point of Catholics who live in the city of Masaya located on the Pacific side of Nicaragua at the end of the twentieth century. My overarching research question is: How may ethnographically observed patterns in Catholic religious practices in contemporary Nicaragua be understood in historical context? Utilizing anthropological theory and method grounded in Weberian historical theory, I explore Catholic ritual as contested politico-religious (...) cultural terrain. The patron saint celebration of Masaya becomes a contested symbol in 1999 as those who carry Saint Jerome in street procession refuse to honor a sitting president, challenging his right to rule. The deep Marian devotion of the Nicaraguan people is reflected in the household and neighborhood celebrations of the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin Mary, while nation-building elites have a long history of claiming the Virgin as patron saint of the nation. While these traditional Catholic saint celebrations figure in imagining a nation, three "new" Catholic movements also compete for attention, while the polity is increasingly exposed to Protestant and Pentecostal groups. When Anastasio Somoza Debayle was overthrown in 1979, ending the 40-year family dictatorship, the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) ruled for a decade with the attention of the world placed on its religion of revolution, the Christian base community and liberation theology. At the same time, however, two other movements began growing quietly. They, like liberation theology, draw their justification from the second Vatican Council. In Masaya, Catholic Charismatic Renewal and the Neocatechumenal Way are "exemplary" prophetic movements gaining ground within the Catholic Church in competition with the "ethical" prophets of the Christian base community. Selectively adopting "protestant-like" forms of worship through these modern movements, the Nicaraguan Roman Catholic Church reacts to the challenge to its cultural hegemony coming from evangelical competitors. New history is continuously being made as people in this part of Nicaragua struggle over the direction of their country within a complex terrain of religious competition. (shrink)

Hegel famously criticizes Kant’s resolution of the antinomies. According to Sedgwick, Hegel primarily chastises Kant’s resolution for presupposing that concepts are ‘one-sided’, rather than identical to their opposites. If Kant had accepted the dialectical nature of concepts, then (according to Sedgwick) Kant would not have needed to resolve the antinomies. However, as Ameriks has noted, any such interpretation faces a serious challenge. Namely, Kant’s first antinomy concerns the universe’s physical dimensions. Even if we grant that the concept of the finite (...) is necessarily related to that of the infinite, the physical universe cannot both have and lack a temporal beginning. I argue that Hegel neither adopts Sedgwick’s view that Kant’s antinomies require no resolution nor absurdly accepts that the physical universe both has and lacks a temporal beginning. Instead, Hegel proposes a sophisticated resolution of Kant’s first antinomy (including its physical aspect) that depends on Hegel’s theory of the Absolute. (shrink)

Students of Stoic philosophy, especially of Stoic ethics, have a lot to swallow. Virtues and emotions are bodies; virtue is the only good, and constitutes happiness, while vice is the only evil; emotions are judgements ; all sins are equal; and everyone bar the sage is mad, bad and dangerous to know. Non-Stoics in antiquity seem for the most part to find these doctrines as bizarre as we do. Their own philosophical or ideological perspectives, and the criticisms of the Stoa (...) to which these gave rise, are no less open to criticism than are the paradoxes and puzzles under attack – but they may be, often are, better documented, less provocatively attention-begging, or simply more familiar. Even disputes within the Stoa can be obscured or distorted by modern prejudices. Posidonius rejected Chrysippus' theory of a unitary soul, one rational through and through, on the grounds that such a theory could not satisfactorily account for the genesis of bad – excessive and irrational – emotions, the πάθη. Posidonius' own Platonising, tripartite soul feels more familiar to us because the Republic tends to be a set text rather more often than do the fragments of Chrysippus' de anima; and the balance in Plato's favour is unlikely to change. When Posidonius wrote, on the other hand, the Chrysippean soul was school orthodoxy, and Platonism the latest thing in radical chic. (shrink)

À propos de : Catherine et Raphaël Larrère, Penser et agir avec la nature : Une enquête philosophique, Paris, La Découverte, 2015. -/- L’idée d’une nature sauvage à protéger des avancées techniques ne prend en compte ni la complexité des artefacts, ni ce qu’implique aujourd’hui la protection de la nature. En mettant l’accent sur la notion de biodiversité, C. et R. Larrère cherchent à donner un nouveau fondement à l’écologie politique.

Discussions of psychiatric nosology focus on a few popular examples of disorders, and on the validity of diagnostic criteria. Looking at Anorexia Nervosa, an example rarely mentioned in this literature, reveals a new problem: the DSM has a strict taxonomic structure, which assumes that disorders can only be located on one branch. This taxonomic assumption fails to fit the domain of psychopathology, resulting in obfuscation of cross-category connections. Poor outcomes for treatment of Anorexia may be due to it being pigeonholed (...) as an Eating Disorder, when a disturbance of body perception may be a more central symptom than food restriction. This paper explores the possibility of restructuring the DSM taxonomy to allow for a pluralist classification of disorders. This change could improve treatment and research without requiring any changes to diagnostic criteria. (shrink)

In his essay ‘Of the Standard of Taste,’ Hume argues that artworks with morally flawed outlooks are, to some extent, aesthetically flawed. While Hume's remarks regarding the relationship between art and morality have influenced contemporary aestheticians, Hume's own position has struck many people as incoherent. For Hume appears to entangle himself in two separate contradictions. First, Hume seems to claim both that true judges should not enter into vicious sentiments and that true judges should adopt the standpoint of an artwork's (...) intended audience. But The Iliad, say, was obviously intended for an audience that shared Homer's flawed moral outlook. Second, Hume appears to claim that our moral sentiments are both highly resistant to change and extremely fragile. This essay defends Hume against these two objections by drawing increased attention to the role that Hume's aesthetics assigns to the faculty of good sense or sound reason. (shrink)

Argumentation schemes can be described as abstract structures representing the most generic types of argument, constituting the building blocks of the ones used in everyday reasoning. This paper investigates the structure, classification, and uses of such schemes. Three goals are pursued: 1) to describe the schemes, showing how they evolved and how they have been classified in the traditional and the modern theories; 2) to propose a method for classifying them based on ancient and modern developments; and 3) to outline (...) and show how schemes can be used to describe and analyze or produce real arguments. To this purpose, we will build on the traditional distinctions for building a dichotomic classification of schemes, and we will advance a modular approach to argument analysis, in which different argumentation schemes are combined together in order to represent each step of reasoning on which a complex argument relies. Finally, we will show how schemes are applied to formal systems, focusing on their applications to Artificial Intelligence, AI & Law, argument mining, and formal ontologies. (shrink)

A commonly raised criticism against celebrity culture is that it celebrates people who become famous without any connection to their skills, talents or achievements. A culture in which people become famous simply for being famous is criticized for being shallow and inauthentic. In this paper we offer a defence of celebrity by arguing against this criticism. We begin by outlining what we call the Talent Argument: celebrity is a negative cultural phenomenon because it creates and sustains fame without any connection (...) to the accomplishments that arise from an expression of talent or skill. By appealing to the metaphysics of talent and skill, we argue against the Talent Argument and propose that being a celebrity requires the skills that are necessary to acquire and maintain one’s status as a celebrity. A celebrity is more likely to be talented and successful in their expression of these skills, and even celebrities who are ‘famous for being famous’ will often display talents and skills that give rise to their fame. This means that those who critique celebrity culture should not do so by appealing to the Talent Argument. We show how our account of celebrity, talent and skill works to reject both the strong version of the Talent Argument, as well as a weaker and more plausible version of the argument we call the Valuable Talents argument. We conclude by noting that our analysis has demonstrated the need to explore more closely the kinds of skills that are necessary to cultivate celebrity status. This allows for a more nuanced understanding of what a celebrity is, and the values that are attached to celebrity culture. (shrink)

The influential apoha theory of concept formation of the seventh-century Buddhist Dharmakīrti stands as a philosophically powerful articulation of how language could work in the absence of real universals. In brief, Dharmakīrti argues that concepts are constructed through a goaloriented process that delimits the content of an experience by ignoring whatever does not conform to one's conditioned expectations. There are no real similarities that ground this process. Rather, a concept is merely what's left over once one has glossed over enough (...) of the differences between elements of one's awareness that one can judge the remainder to have the same effects as what one... (shrink)

The account of natural kinds as stable property clusters is premised on the possibility of separating the epistemic value of natural kinds from their underlying metaphysics. On that account, the co-instantiation of any sub-cluster of the properties associated with a given natural kind raises the probability of the co-instantiation of the rest, and this clustering of property instantiation is invariant under all relevant counterfactual perturbations. We argue that it is not possible to evaluate the stability of a cluster of properties (...) without taking stock of the metaphysical picture used to account for that stability. Thus, even on the stable property cluster account, the epistemic value of natural kinds remains partly grounded in their metaphysical status. (shrink)

In this paper we look at the manual analysis of arguments and how this compares to the current state of automatic argument analysis. These considerations are used to develop a new approach combining a machine learning algorithm to extract propositions from text, with a topic model to determine argument structure. The results of this method are compared to a manual analysis.

Charles Peirce's diagrammatic logic — the Existential Graphs — is presented as a tool for illuminating how we know necessity, in answer to Benacerraf's famous challenge that most ‘semantics for mathematics’ do not ‘fit an acceptable epistemology’. It is suggested that necessary reasoning is in essence a recognition that a certain structure has the particular structure that it has. This means that, contra Hume and his contemporary heirs, necessity is observable. One just needs to pay attention, not merely to individual (...) things but to how those things are related in larger structures, certain aspects of which relations force certain other aspects to be a certain way. (shrink)

In many diagrams one seems to perceive necessity – one sees not only that something is so, but that it must be so. That conflicts with a certain empiricism largely taken for granted in contemporary philosophy, which believes perception is not capable of such feats. The reason for this belief is often thought well-summarized in Hume's maxim: ‘there are no necessary connections between distinct existences’. It is also thought that even if there were such necessities, perception is too passive or (...) localized a faculty to register them. We defend the perception of necessity against such Humeanism, drawing on examples from mathematics. (shrink)

Feminists note an association of arguing with aggression and masculinity and question the necessity of this connection. Arguing also seems to some to identify a central method of philosophical reasoning, and gendered assumptions and standards would pose problems for the discipline. Can feminine modes of reasoning provide an alternative or supplement? Can overarching epistemological standards account for the benefits of different approaches to arguing? These are some of the prospects for argumentation inside and outside of philosophy that feminists consider. -/- (...) The further concern is that the academic study of argumentation – in philosophy and other disciplines – has failed to account for the type of reasoning needed for social justice movements. What resources for addressing these concerns can be found in informal logic and interdisciplinary argumentation theory? Since part of the perceived problem derives from assuming that arguing is a contest, are more collaborative epistemological frameworks better? Can regular politeness or civility hedge against undesirable tendencies of argumentation? Can “critical thinking” pedagogy involving argument educations answer the needs of social justice? (shrink)

When travelling to a new city, we acquire knowledge about its physical terrain, directions, historical facts and aesthetic features. Engaging in tourism practices, such as guided walking tours, provides experiences of a city that are necessarily mediated and partial. This has led scholars in tourism studies, and more recently in philosophy, to question the epistemological value of city tours, critiquingthem as passive, lacking in autonomous agency, and providing misrepresentative experiences of the city. In response, we argue that the mediated and (...) partial knowledge of a city acquired through city tours is not epistemologically disvaluable. Although city tours involve the transmission of testimonial knowledge, this does not necessarily render tourists as passive and non-autonomous. Instead,tourists have the potential to participate in the generation of their knowledge actively. Moreover, we argue that city tours also provide a tourist with valuable ‘objectual’ knowledge of a city, whichhas the potential to be first-personal and active, and does not necessarily misrepresent the city’s identity. This type of knowledge is valuable both for tourists as credible epistemic agents, and for the city itself, as the knowledge generated by the tour can facilitate an accurate representation of the city and promote social transformation. We conclude by highlighting four further epistemic and ethical implications of our argument. (shrink)

Mainstream philosophy has seen a recent flowering in discussions of intellectualism which revisits Gilbert Ryle’s famous distinction between ‘knowing how’ and ‘knowing that’, and challenges his argument that the former cannot be reduced to the latter. These debates so far appear not to have engaged with pragmatist philosophy in any substantial way, which is curious as the relation between theory and practice is one of pragmatism’s main themes. Accordingly, this paper examines the contemporary debate in the light of Charles Peirce’s (...) habit-based epistemology. We argue both that knowing-that can be understood as a particularly sophisticated form of knowing-how, and that all bodily competencies—if sufficiently deliberately developed—can be analysed as instantiating propositional structure broadly conceived. In this way, intellectualism and anti-intellectualism are seen to be not opposed, and both true, although Peirce’s original naturalistic account of propositional structure does lead him to reject what we shall call ‘linguistic intellectualism’. (shrink)

This entry explores Charles Peirce's account of truth in terms of the end or ‘limit’ of inquiry. This account is distinct from – and arguably more objectivist than – views of truth found in other pragmatists such as James and Rorty. The roots of the account in mathematical concepts is explored, and it is defended from objections that it is (i) incoherent, (ii) in its faith in convergence, too realist and (iii) in its ‘internal realism’, not realist enough.

A conspicuous feature of contemporary modelling practices is the use of the same mathematical forms and modelling methods across different scientific domains. This model transfer raises many philosophical questions concerning, for example, the exact object of transfer, the relationship between the model and the target domain, the specific challenges such transfer confronts, and the ways in which model transfer relates to scientific progress. While the interest in studying model transfer has increased among philosophers of science in recent years, the phenomenon (...) has not yet received its due attention. The literature is scattered and much of it has addressed questions around the factors that might explain model transfer, such as whether the different target phenomena to which a model is applied eventually prove to be structurally and dynamically similar, or whether they have to share more fundamental ontological features that explain the interdisciplinary success of distinct models. This chapter surveys the existing literature on model transfer with the main goal of highlighting the main findings of existing discussions and pointing out open issues whose discussion would improve our understanding of this highly relevant phenomenon in science. (shrink)

Homology is a natural kind concept, but one that has been notoriously elusive to pin down. There has been sustained debate over the nature of correspondence and the units of comparison. But this continued debate over its meaning has focused on defining homology rather than on its use in practice. The aim of this chapter is to concentrate on the practices of homologizing. I define “homologizing” to be a concept-in-use. Practices of homologizing are kinds of rule following, the satisfaction of (...) which demarcates a category—that of being a homologue. Identifying, explaining, discovering, and understanding are exchanges that connect practice to concept through the performance of a rule by practitioners. These practices are constitutive of natural kinding activities. If homologizing is a kind of kinding, consideration of these practices of discovery, tracking, and identification not only clarifies the meaning, use, and progression of the concept of homology, but provides further understanding of the processes and progression of natural kinds and kinding practices in general. (shrink)

Robert Brandom’s expressivism argues that not all semantic content may be made fully explicit. This view connects in interesting ways with recent movements in philosophy of mathematics and logic (e.g. Brown, Shin, Giaquinto) to take diagrams seriously - as more than a mere “heuristic aid” to proof, but either proofs themselves, or irreducible components of such. However what exactly is a diagram in logic? Does this constitute a semiotic natural kind? The paper will argue that such a natural kind does (...) exist in Charles Peirce’s conception of iconic signs, but that fully understood, logical diagrams involve a structured array of normative reasoning practices, as well as just a “picture on a page”. (shrink)

Ethnobotanical research provides ample justification for comparing diverse biological nomenclatures and exploring ways that retain alternative naming practices. However, how (and whether) comparison of nomenclatures is possible remains a subject of discussion. The comparison of diverse nomenclatural practices introduces a suite of epistemic and ontological difficulties and considerations. Different nomenclatures may depend on whether the communities using them rely on formalized naming conventions; cultural or spiritual valuations; or worldviews. Because of this, some argue that the different naming practices may not (...) be comparable if the ontological commitments employed differ. Comparisons between different nomenclatures cannot assume that either the naming practices or the object to which these names are intended to apply identifies some universally agreed upon object of interest. Investigating this suite of philosophical problems, I explore the role grey nomenclatures play in classification. ‘Grey nomenclatures’ are defined as those that employ names that are either intentionally or accidentally non-Linnaean. The classification of the lichen thallus (a symbiont) has been classified outside the Linnaean system by botanists relying on the International Code of Nomenclature for algae, fungi, and plants (ICN). But, I argue, the use of grey names is not isolated and does not occur exclusively within institutionalized naming practices. I suggest, ‘grey names’ also aptly describe nomenclatures employed by indigenous communities such as the Samí of Northern Finmark, the Sherpa of Nepal, and the Okanagan First Nations. I pay particular attention to how naming practices are employed in these communities; what ontological commitments they hold; for what purposes are these names used; and what anchors the community’s nomenclatural practices. Exploring the history of lichen naming and early ethnolichenological research, I then investigate the stakes that must be considered for any attempt to preserve, retain, integrate, or compare the knowledge contained in both academically formalized grey names and indigenous nomenclatures in a way that preserves their source-specific informational content. (shrink)

I defend a one category ontology: an ontology that denies that we need more than one fundamental category to support the ontological structure of the world. Categorical fundamentality is understood in terms of the metaphysically prior, as that in which everything else in the world consists. One category ontologies are deeply appealing, because their ontological simplicity gives them an unmatched elegance and spareness. I’m a fan of a one category ontology that collapses the distinction between particular and property, replacing it (...) with a single fundamental category of intrinsic characters or qualities. We may describe the qualities as qualitative charactersor as modes, perhaps on the model of Aristotelian qualitative (nonsubstantial) kinds, and I will use the term “properties” interchangeably with “qualities”. The qualities are repeatable and reasonably sparse, although, as I discuss in section 2.6, there are empirical reasons that may suggest, depending on one’s preferred fundamental physical theory, that they include irreducibly intensive qualities. There are no uninstantiated qualities. I also assume that the fundamental qualitative natures are intrinsic, although physics may ultimately suggest that some of them are extrinsic. On my view, matter, concrete objects, abstract objects, and perhaps even spacetime are constructed from mereological fusions of qualities, so the world is simply a vast mixture of qualities, including polyadic properties (i.e., relations). This means that everything there is, including concrete objects like persons or stars, is a quality, a qualitative fusion, or a portion of the extended qualitative fusion that is the worldwhole. I call my view mereological bundle theory. (shrink)

Discussions over whether these natural kinds exist, what is the nature of their existence, and whether natural kinds are themselves natural kinds aim to not only characterize the kinds of things that exist in the world, but also what can knowledge of these categories provide. Although philosophically critical, much of the past discussions of natural kinds have often answered these questions in a way that is unresponsive to, or has actively avoided, discussions of the empirical use of natural kinds and (...) what I dub “activities of natural kinding” and “natural kinding practices”. The natural kinds of a particular discipline are those entities, events, mechanisms, processes, relationships, and concepts that delimit investigation within it—but we might reasonably ask: How are these natural kinds discovered?, How are they made?, Are they revisable?, and Where do they come from? A turn to natural kinding practices reveals a new set of questions open for investigation: How do natural kinds explain through practice?, What are natural kinding practices and classifications and why should we care?, What is the nature of natural kinds viewed as a set of activities?, and How do practice approaches to natural kinds shape and reconfigure scientific disciplines? Natural kinds have traditionally been discussed in terms of how they classify the contents of the world. The metaphysical project has been one which identifies essences, laws, sameness relations, fundamental properties, and clusters of family resemblances and how these map out the ontological space of the world. But actually how this is done has been less important in the discussion than the resultant categories that are produced. I aim to rectify these omissions and suggest a new metaphysical project investigating kinds in practice. (shrink)

Philosophical discussion of truthmaking has flourished in recent times, but what exactly does it mean to ‘make’ a truth-bearer true? I argue that ‘making’ is a concept with modal force, and this renders it a problematic deployment for truthmaker theorists with nominalist sympathies, which characterises most current theories. I sketch the outlines of what I argue is a more genuinely realist truthmaker theory, which is capable of answering the explanatory question: In virtue of what does each particular truthmaker make its (...) particular truthbearer(s) true? I do this by drawing on recent work by Frederik Stjernfelt on Charles Peirce’s account of the proposition as having a ‘particular double structure’, according to which a proposition not only depicts certain characters of an object, it also depicts itself claiming those characters to pertain to the object. This double structure, I shall argue, also resolves important issues in analytic philosophers’ truthmaker theory, including the proper distinction between reference and truthmaking, and a dilemma concerning an infinite regress of truthmaking. (shrink)

Charles Peirce famously divided all signs into icons, indices and symbols. The past few decades have seen mainstream analytic philosophy broaden its traditional focus on symbols to recognise the so-called essential indexical. Can the moral now be extended to icons? Is there an “essential icon”? And if so, what exactly would be essential about it? It is argued that there is and it consists in logical form. Danielle Macbeth’s radical new “expressivist” interpretation of Frege’s logic and Charles Peirce’s existential graphs (...) are mobilized in support of this claim. (shrink)