This paper offers a detailed reconstruction of Frege’s theory of side-thoughts and its relation to other parts of his pragmatics, most notably to the notion of colouring, to the notion of presupposition, and to his implicit notion of multi-propositionality. I also highlight some important differences between the subsemantic categories employed by Frege and those used in contemporary pragmatics.

What, exactly, is the difference between words such as ‘dead’ and ‘deceased’? In this paper, I argue that such differences in register, or style, ought to be construed as genuine differences in non-truth-conditional meaning. I also show that register cannot plausibly accounted for in terms of either presupposition or conventional implicature. Register is, rather, an instance of what I call pure use-conditional meaning. In the case of register, a difference in meaning does not correspond to a difference in the contents (...) speakers intend to convey. (shrink)

Many scholars claim that Frege's theory of colouring is committed to a radical form of subjectivism or emotivism. Some other scholars claim that Frege's concept of colouring is a precursor to Grice's notion of conventional implicature. I argue that both of these claims are mistaken. Finally, I propose a taxonomy of Fregean colourings: for Frege, there are purely aesthetic colourings, communicative colourings or hints, non-communicative colourings.

The author argues that there is no such thing as a unique and general taxonomy of non-at-issue contents. Accordingly, we ought to shun large categories such as “conventional implicature”, “F-implicature”, “CI”, “Class B” or the like. As an alternative, we may, first, describe the “semantic profile” of linguistic devices as accurately as possible. Second, we may explicitly tailor our categories to particular theoretical purposes.

This paper is partly exegetical, partly systematic. I argue that Frege's account of what he called “colouring” contains some important insights on how communication is related to mental states such as mental images or emotions. I also show that the Fregean perspective is supported by current research in psycholinguistics and that a full understanding of some linguistic phenomena that scholars have accounted for in terms of either semantics or pragmatics need involve psycholinguistic elements.

I argue that “general pejoratives” such as “jerk” or “bastard” differ crucially from items such as “that damn N”. While items such as the latter typically serve to give vent to one's attitudes, general pejoratives essentially involve judgments about a person's behaviour or character. This is particularly evident in cases where pejoratives occur not as epithets, but as predicate nominals. If we want to account for the overall contribution of words such as “jerk”, there are three kinds of content that (...) ought to be distinguished: truth-conditional contents, evaluative presuppositions, and expressive contents that are either at-issue (in the case of expressive predicates) or non-at-issue (in the case of epithets). (shrink)

Frege's mature writings apparently contain two different criteria of sense identity. While in "Über Sinn und Bedeutung" (1892) and in "Kurze Übersicht meiner logischen Lehren" (1906?) he seems to advocate a psychological criterion, his letter to Husserl of December 12, 1906 offers a thoroughly logical criterion of sense identity. It is argued that the latter proposal is not a "momentary aberration", but rather Frege's official criterion; his psychological criteria only serve as a way of illustrating questions of sense identity by (...) appealing to the thoughts of completely rational thinkers. (shrink)

Why did Frege offer only proper names as examples of presupposition triggers? Some scholars claim that Frege simply did not care about the full range of presuppositional phenomena. This paper argues, in contrast, that he had good reasons for employing an extremely narrow notion of ‘Voraussetzung’. On Frege’s view, many devices that are now construed as presupposition triggers either express several thoughts at once or merely ‘illuminate’ a thought in a particular way. Fregean presuppositions, in contrast, are essentially tied to (...) names. (shrink)

Policy-makers must sometimes choose between an alternative which has somewhat lower expected value for each person, but which will substantially improve the outcomes of the worst off, or an alternative which has somewhat higher expected value for each person, but which will leave those who end up worst off substantially less well off. The popular ex ante Pareto principle requires the choice of the alternative with higher expected utility for each. We argue that ex ante Pareto ought to be rejected (...) because it conflicts with the requirement that, when possible, one ought to decide as one would with full information. We apply our argument in an analysis of US policy on screening for breast cancer. -/- . (shrink)

The idea that Eastern and Western societies should do everything together because they're exactly the same and their interests are identical is not, as some would have it, a sign of evolutionary maturity or scientific insight, but a desperate form of political manipulation, new Western imperialism, and, yes, wishful thinking. Surely our cultural differences and identities make the world more colorful." Thorsten Pattberg's East-West Dichotomy discusses the philosophical concept that two diametrically opposed hemispheres exist - East and West. As (...) the Peking University scholar demonstrates with numerous examples, their cultures and way of thinking differ radically; one could say they are 180 degrees apart. Pattberg's underlying argument is that because of the dichotomy Westerners, who are mostly rugged individualists, are more analytic and deductive in their thinking, while Easterners, who are more focused on the collective, favor a more intuitive, inductive, "holistic" approach to life. Moreover, he explores the origin and the future of the dichotomy, and shows how it has shaped the West's and the East's different attitudes towards nature, philosophy (both epistemology and ethics), as well as gender and society. Pattberg also shows his willingness to take on any potential critic of his theory in his chapter "Problems with the Dichotomy." This book is a valuable resource for those eager to gain a better understanding of the "Western" and "Eastern" psyches and of how they both harmonize and clash. (shrink)

The KenoNitroProject (KNP) is a philosophical project aimed at decrypting the natural source code, seen as the language of nature, in order to connect mind and matter and integrate energy as a third component in a cybernetic organism. The core statements of KNP are: 1) Nature is a cybernetic organism, 2) Energy is Matter is Consciousness in the Infinite (EMC8), 3) The aim of KNP is to decrypt the natural source code, 4) KNP tries to connect mind and matter, 5) (...) KNP intends to decrypt the atom code to reprogram matter on a nuclear level, 6) KNP sees evolution as intelligent, learning from random and error, 7) KNP aims to connect nature, human, and machine in the natural source code, 8) Decrypting the atom code could lead to the creation of artificial molecules and DNA strings to create artificial life, 9) Using the energy metabolism in the atom nucleus is an effective way to transform energy into creative processes, and 10) The concepts of time and space are human-made constructs that can be understood by the interaction of matter, energy, and consciousness. Moreover, KNP proposes new philosophical perspectives, such as: 1) The concept of nature as a cybernetic organism controlled by a natural source code that challenges traditional ideas of dualism and monism, 2) The concept of EMC8 that aims to overcome traditional boundaries between physics, philosophy, and psychology, 3) The aim of decrypting the atom code to reprogram matter on a nuclear level, which could lead to new insights into the nature of matter and technological development, 4) The idea that evolution is an intelligent process learning from random and error that questions traditional views of natural selection, 5) The concept of the connection between nature, human, and machine in the natural source code, which provides new insights into the relationships between humans and technology, and 6) The use of the energy metabolism in the atom nucleus as an effective way to produce and transform energy into creative processes. KNP challenges traditional philosophical concepts and aims to create new insights into the nature of reality. (shrink)

One of the main tenets of current teleosemantic theories is that simple representations are Pushmi-Pullyu states, i.e. they carry descriptive and imperative content at the same time. In the paper I present an argument that shows that if we add this claim to the core tenets of teleosemantics, then (1) it entails that, necessarily, all representations are Pushmi-Pullyu states and (2) it undermines one of the main motivations for the Pushmi-Pullyu account.

Mendelovici (forthcoming) has recently argued that (1) tracking theories of mental representation (including teleosemantics) are incompatible with the possibility of reliable misrepresentation and that (2) this is an important difficulty for them. Furthermore, she argues that this problem commits teleosemantics to an unjustified a priori rejection of color eliminativism. In this paper I argue that (1) teleosemantics can accommodate most cases of reliable misrepresentation, (2) those cases the theory fails to account for are not objectionable and (3) teleosemantics is not (...) committed to any problematic view on the color realism-antirealism debate. (shrink)

Expressive-Assertivism, a metaethical theory championed by Daniel Boisvert, is sometimes considered to be a particularly promising form of hybrid expressivism. One of the main virtues of Expressive-Assertivism is that it seems to offer a simple solution to the Frege-Geach problem. I argue, in contrast, that Expressive-Assertivism faces much the same challenges as pure expressivism.

The prevalent views of animal liberty among animal advocates suggest that liberty is merely instrumentally valuable and invasive paternalism is justified. In contrast to this popular view, I argue that liberty is intrinsically good for animals. I suggest that animal well-being is best accommodated by an Objective List Theory and that liberty is an irreducible component of animal well-being. As such, I argue that it is good for animals to possess liberty even if possessing liberty does not contribute towards their (...) subjective well-being, and even in some cases where it has a negative effect upon their subjective well-being. To establish this view I argue that if animals are agents, as I assume they are, then like humans they must be able to determine the course of their own lives (to some extent). Further, having the opportunity to self-determine one’s life just is the very same thing as liberty, and having the opportunity to determine the course of one’s life is intrinsically good. Thus liberty has intrinsic value for humans and animals. So, in addition to the instrumental harms of having one’s liberty restricted, I claim that restricting animals’ liberty in principle harms them because it undermines their capacity for self-determination and fails to acknowledge their authority as agents to make their own choices. (shrink)

We introduce the virtual special issue on content in signalling systems. The issue explores the uses and limits of ideas from evolutionary game theory and information theory for explaining the content of biological signals. We explain the basic idea of the Lewis-Skyrms sender-receiver framework, and we highlight three key themes of the issue: (i) the challenge of accounting for deception, misinformation and false content, (ii) the relevance of partial or total common interest to the evolution of meaningful signals, and (iii) (...) how the sender-receiver framework relates to teleosemantics. (shrink)

In der neueren Sprachphilosophie ist wiederholt der soziale Charakter des Redens betont worden. Das Buch versucht, diese These auf der Grundlage einer genauen Untersuchung der Abfolge einzelner sprachlicher Handlungen zu verteidigen. Die orthodoxe Sprechakttheorie hat sich bislang weitgehend auf die Gelingensbedingungen einzelner sprachlicher Vollzüge konzentriert. Isolierte Redehandlungen stellen allerdings in der kommunikativen Praxis einen Ausnahmefall dar: Ein kompetenter Sprecher muss nicht nur die vom sprachlichen Kontext unabhängigen Korrektheitsstandards kennen; vielmehr muss er auch in der Lage sein, die eigenen Sprechakte im (...) Rahmen eines Textes kohärent miteinander zu verknüpfen und auf Redehandlungen anderer so zu reagieren, dass ein genuiner Diskurs zwischen den Parteien entsteht – im Gegensatz zu einer bloßen Aneinanderreihung “für sich” korrekter Äußerungen. Das Buch verfolgt das Ziel, das für die Struktur derartiger Rede(handlungs)sequenzen einschlägige Reglement in seinen wesentlichen Aspekten zu rekonstruieren und insbesondere die für ein solches Projekt relevanten sprachphilosophischen Grundfragen zu klären. (shrink)

Quite a few scholars claim that many implicata are propositions about the speaker's epistemic or doxastic states. I argue, on the contrary, that implicata are generally non-epistemic. Some alleged cases of epistemic implicature are not implicatures in the first place because they do not meet Grice's non-triviality requirement, and epistemic implicata in general would infringe on the maxim of quantity. Epistemic implicatures ought to be construed as members of a larger family of implicature-like phenomena.

On 4 December 2006, during discussions on the Corporate Manslaughter and Corporate Homicide Bill, Andrew Dismore, Member of Parliament and then Chair of the Joint Committee on Human Rights, said, ‘Organisations can kill people … but it is the actions and omissions of people in organisations that cumulatively cause death’. However, the corporate entity is a vehicle for the communal actions of those who guide the business activities. Attempting to seek out persons or people that are solely responsible for deaths (...) and violations of human rights caused by companies is fruitless. The entity is a vehicle for those actions, it possesses its own, often deep, pockets of finance and resources, and it has a public image. It is more useful to punish the corporate entity, in instances where the corporate behaviour has led to death and human rights abuses, as it is in seeking out individual defendants. Soft law options have not brought about a sufficient reduction in instances of deaths caused by corporate behaviour across jurisdictional borders. This article will argue that the time has now come to establish an international hard law on corporate killing, and for states to ensure that there is a viable path towards a redress for victims and their families along with adopting a duty to assist the victim or their family to pursue redress to ensure a fair balance of power against transnational companies. (shrink)

According to judgment internalism, there is a conceptual connection between moral judgment and motivation. This paper offers an argument against that kind of internalism that does not involve counterexamples of the amoralist sort. Instead, it is argued that these forms of judgment internalism fall prey to a Frege-Geach type argument.

Une des contributions phares de Luc Bégin à l’éthique publique est d’avoir bien documenté les obstacles auxquels les gardiens institutionnels québécois doivent porter une attention particulière. Bégin s’est notamment intéressé aux conditions dans lesquelles les ordres professionnels, comme l’Ordre des ingénieurs du Québec, sont moins susceptibles de protéger le public contre des pratiques répréhensibles (corruption, collusion, etc.). Je poursuis les réflexions de Bégin à partir d’un point de vue « épistémique ». Je montre d’abord comment les ordres professionnels ont tendance (...) à produire des connaissances sur l’état de la profession à partir des informations partagées par leurs propres membres. J’analyse comment cette pratique peut générer un biais du survivant, et obscurcir des problèmes centraux à une profession. Finalement, je propose des pistes de solution à ce problème pour les ordres professionnels. (shrink)

Dem "Manifestationsargument" zufolge steht eine realistische Semantik der Wahrheitsbedingungen im Widerspruch zu dem Gedanken, dass das Verstehen von Sätzen eine Fähigkeit ist, die sich im Handeln manifestieren können muss. – Der Aufsatz zeigt, dass sowohl Realisten als auch Anti-Realisten die These aufzugeben haben, dass das Verstehen eines Satzes im Erfassen der jeweiligen Wahrheitsbedingungenbesteht. Die realistische Annahme der Existenz verifikationstranszendenter Wahrheiten steht – unabhängig vom Manifestationsprinzip – im Widerspruch zu einer wahrheitskonditionalen Semantik. Die von heutigen Anti-Realisten vertretenen Theorien des Verstehens sind (...) allerdings einem ähnlichen Einwand ausgesetzt, insofern sie gleichfalls nicht unsere Fähigkeit, unentscheidbare Sätze zu verstehen, erklären können. (shrink)

According to the “paradox of knowability”, the moderate thesis that all truths are knowable – ... – implies the seemingly preposterous claim that all truths are actually known – ... –, i.e. that we are omniscient. If Fitch’s argument were successful, it would amount to a knockdown rebuttal of anti-realism by reductio. In the paper I defend the nowadays rather neglected strategy of intuitionistic revisionism. Employing only intuitionistically acceptable rules of inference, the conclusion of the argument is, firstly, not ..., (...) but .... Secondly, even if there were an intuitionistically acceptable proof of ..., i.e. an argument based on a different set of premises, the conclusion would have to be interpreted in accordance with Heyting semantics, and read in this way, the apparently preposterous conclusion would be true on conceptual grounds and acceptable even from a realist point of view. Fitch’s argument, understood as an immanent critique of verificationism, fails because in a debate dealing with the justification of deduction there can be no interpreted formal language on which realists and anti-realists could agree. Thus, the underlying problem is that a satisfactory solution to the “problem of shared content” is not available. I conclude with some remarks on the proposals by J. Salerno and N. Tennant to reconstruct certain arguments in the debate on anti-realism by establishing aporias. (shrink)

Deception has recently received a significant amount of attention. One of main reasons is that it lies at the intersection of various areas of research, such as the evolution of cooperation, animal communication, ethics or epistemology. This essay focuses on the biological approach to deception and argues that standard definitions put forward by most biologists and philosophers are inadequate. We provide a functional account of deception which solves the problems of extant accounts in virtue of two characteristics: deceptive states have (...) the function of causing a misinformative states and they do not necessarily provide direct benefits to the deceivers and losses to the targets. (shrink)

Following recent work by Don Ross (Ross, 2000; Ross & Spurrett, 2004), I contrast the influential theories of Daniel Dennett and Paul Churchland in information-theoretic terms. Dennett makes much of the fact that the morphological shorthand which emerges before a witness as she looks upon cohesive aggregates of matter commands some measure of predictive power. This, for him, speaks against eliminating recourse to an intentional vocabulary. By contrast, the eliminative materialism defended by Churchland does not gloss such informational compressibility as (...) an explanatory desideratum, and thus regards the informational noise which accrues at higher levels of description as patently unacceptable. Yet, since it is unlikely, as Ross, Ladyman, and Collier (2007) have recently suggested, that anything remains once we subtract the appeal to patterns, I argue that the ubiquity of informational compression in scientific explanation seriously undermines the claim that talk of the mental could be eliminated. (shrink)

In this paper, I aim to show that agency-based accounts of moral status are more plausible than many have previously thought. I do this by developing a novel account of moral status that takes agency, understood as the capacity for intentional action, to be the necessary and sufficient condition for the possession of moral status. This account also suggests that the capacities required for sentience entail the possession of agency, and the capacities required for agency, entail the possession of sentience. (...) Thus on this account sentient beings possess agency and agents possess sentience. If this is correct, it will show that an Agency Account of moral status can offer a plausible defence of the moral status of all sentient beings, something that previous Agency Accounts have not succeeded in doing. What is more, this account could establish that all sentient animals are not just moral status holders per se, but that they are owed pro tanto obligations regarding continued existence and liberty, similar in kind, though not always in strength, to those owed to humans. (shrink)

In this paper I discuss a recent theory on functions called Organizational Account. This theory seeks to provide a new definition of function that overcomes the distinction between etiological and dispositional accounts and that could be used in biology as well as in technology. I present a definition of function that I think captures the intuitions of Organizational Accounts and consider several objections.

This paper uses the evolutionary frame provided by the Victorian jurist Henry Sumner Maine to describe the process by which trust can be seen as the product of a gradual development that starts with small-scale communities and later allows market exchanges to develop themselves. I also argue, using the work of Elinor Ostrom (1990), that trust emerges first within small-scale communities, where first- and second-degree collective action problems need to be resolved. The development of a social disposition to trust is (...) closely linked with an institutional context that encourages individuals to take the externalities of their actions into account. This is made possible by customary mechanisms, as the development of social trust at this stage cannot rely on a mighty “Leviathan”. Therefore, this paper questions the claim that social trust is the product of market exchanges. Market exchanges might favor the further growth of social trust, hands in hands with the right institutional frame. However, this growth is not just the transposition of a previously acquired disposition to trust. The work of Henry Sumner Maine interestingly underlines the importance of the co-development of institutions and trust, from its origin in small communities to its expansion to market exchanges. Both Ostrom’s and Maine’s perspectives underline the fact that trust and trustworthiness are complementary and question a-rational perspectives on trust. This paper also elaborates on the claim, coming from the literature on contract law, that focusing on sanctioning mechanisms can be highly counterproductive. (shrink)

When considering the social valuation of a life-year, there is a conflict between two basic intuitions: on the one hand, the intuition of universality, according to which the value of an additional life-year should be universal, and, as such, should be invariant to the context considered; on the other hand, the intuition of complementarity, according to which the value of a life-year should depend on what this extra-life-year allows for, and, hence, on the quality of that life-year, because the quantity (...) of life and the quality of life are complement to each other. This paper proposes three distinct accounts of the intuition of universality, and shows that those accounts either conflict with a basic monotonicity property, or lead to indifference with respect to how life-years are distributed within the population. Those results support the abandon of the intuition of universality. But abandoning the intuition of universality does not prevent a social evaluator from giving priority, when allocating life-years, to individuals with the lowest quality of life. (shrink)

There is much that Christian churches can learn from relevant secularapproaches and adapt to support integration and participation within ourcongregations for adults with impairments. One of these approaches isSocial Role Valorization developed by Dr. Wolf Wolfensberger. In thisapproach, one considers the relevance of image and competency of deval-ued individuals and how these two areas impact access to “the good thingsof life.” This article applies these principles to the inclusion of vulnerablecongregational members into the life of the Christian church, asking thequestion, (...) “What would be better?” as a prompt for those in leadership toreflect on their current practices with an eye toward maturity in their prac-tices as they intersect the lives of devalued people. (shrink)

This essay argues that acknowledging the existence of mind-independent facts is a matter of vital importance, in that acquiescence before the layout of the world is something demanded of knowing agents from the most elementary empirical deliverance to the most abstract construct. Building on the idea that normativity requires the presence of more than one option to choose from, the essay shows how the cessation of one's life is the disjunctive alternative of any experiential episode. This much has been missed, (...) it argues, because of a generalized failure to appreciate how even the simplest atomic contents embroil their subjects in acts of assent. Its account thus casts a new light on relativism and skepticism, revealing them to be provisional luxuries supported only by the cognitive labor of others. (shrink)

Informational theories of semantic content have been recently gaining prominence in the debate on the notion of mental representation. In this paper we examine new-wave informational theories which have a special focus on cognitive science. In particular, we argue that these theories face four important difficulties: they do not fully solve the problem of error, fall prey to the wrong distality attribution problem, have serious difficulties accounting for ambiguous and redundant representations and fail to deliver a metasemantic theory of representation. (...) Furthermore, we argue that these difficulties derive from their exclusive reliance on the notion of information, so we suggest that pure informational accounts should be complemented with functional approaches. (shrink)

Efforts to bridge emotion theory with neurobiology can be facilitated by dynamic systems (DS) modeling. DS principles stipulate higher-order wholes emerging from lower-order constituents through bidirectional causal processes cognition relations. I then present a psychological model based on this reconceptualization, identifying trigger, self-amplification, and self-stabilization phases of emotion-appraisal states, leading to consolidating traits. The article goes on to describe neural structures and functions involved in appraisal and emotion, as well as DS mechanisms of integration by which they interact. These mechanisms (...) include nested feedback interactions, global effects of neuromodulation, vertical integration, action-monitoring, and synaptic plasticity, and they are modeled in terms of both functional integration and temporal synchronization. I end by elaborating the psychological model of emotion–appraisal states with reference to neural processes. (shrink)

The idea that only complex brains can possess genuine representations is an important element in mainstream philosophical thinking. An alternative view, which I label ‘liberal representationalism’, holds that we should accept the existence of many more full-blown representations, from activity in retinal ganglion cells to the neural states produced by innate releasing mechanisms in cognitively unsophisticated organisms. A promising way of supporting liberal representationalism is to show it to be a consequence of our best naturalistic theories of representation. However, several (...) philosophers and scientists have recently argued against this strategy. In the paper I counter these objections in defense of liberal representationalism. (shrink)

In his 1927 Analysis of Matter and elsewhere, Russell argued that we can successfully infer the structure of the external world from that of our explanatory schemes. While nothing guarantees that the intrinsic qualities of experiences are shared by their objects, he held that the relations tying together those relata perforce mirror relations that actually obtain (these being expressible in the formal idiom of the Principia Mathematica). This claim was subsequently criticized by the Cambridge mathematician Max Newman as true but (...) trivial, insofar as from a closed body of observations (or “Ramsey sentence”) one can always generate other equally-satisfactory networks of relations, provided they respect the original set’s cardinality. Since any model thus generated will be empirically adequate, “[t]he defence is therefore driven back from the fairly safe fictitious-real classification to the much less tenable ‘trivial’ and ‘important’” (Newman 1928). Given the definitional rigour afforded by the initial appeal to isomorphism (via one-to-one correspondences in extension), the received assessment, shared by Russell himself, is that retreating to a pragmatic adjudication would betoken a fatal blow. However, I suggest that reliance on “importance” can be avoided if we incorporate an impersonal criterion of diachronic precedence. When collecting observations, an ordinality emerges alongside the cardinality which gives that underived structure an irrevocable epistemological privilege. Hence, I argue that, all other things being equal, any construct parasitic on an antecedent theory ought to be regarded as inferior/dispensable, since it was generated by an algorithm lacking the world-involving pedigree of its host structure. (shrink)

Building on the notational principles of C. S. Peirce’s graphical logic, Pietarinen has tried to develop a propositional logic unfolding in the medium of sound. Apart from its intrinsic interest, this project serves as a concrete test of logic’s range. However, I argue that Pietarinen’s inaugural proposal, while promising, has an important shortcoming, since it cannot portray double-negation without thereby portraying a contradiction.

The received view holds that there is a significant divide between full-blown representational states and so called ‘detectors’, which are mechanisms set off by specific stimuli that trigger a particular effect. The main goal of this paper is to defend the idea that many detectors are genuine representations, a view that I call ‘Strong Liberal Representationalism’. More precisely, I argue that ascribing semantic properties to them contributes to an explanation of behavior, guides research in useful ways and can accommodate misrepresentation.

The indeterminacy problem is one of the most prominent objections against naturalistic theories of content. In this essay I present this difficulty and argue that extant accounts are unable to solve it. Then, I develop a particular version of teleosemantics, which I call ’explanation-based teleosemantics’, and show how this outstanding problem can be addressed within the framework of a powerful naturalistic theory.

In an effort to carve a distinct place for social facts without lapsing into a holistic ontology, John Greenwood has sought to define social phenomena solely in terms of the attitudes held by the actor in question. I argue that his proposal allows for the possibility of a “lone collectivity” that is unpalatable in its own right and incompatible with the claim that sociology is autonomous from psychology. As such, I conclude that the relevant beliefs need to be held by (...) more than one person. (shrink)

The debate on the notion of function has been historically dominated by dispositional and etiological accounts, but recently a third contender has gained prominence: the organizational account. This original theory of function is intended to offer an alternative account based on the notion of self-maintaining system. However, there is a set of cases where organizational accounts seem to generate counterintuitive results. These cases involve cross-generational traits, that is, traits that do not contribute in any relevant way to the self-maintenance of (...) the organism carrying them, but instead have very important effects on organisms that belong to the next generation. We argue that any plausible solution to the problem of cross-generational traits shows that the organizational account just is a version of the etiological theory and, furthermore, that it does not provide any substantive advantage over standard etiological theories of function. (shrink)

Naturalistic theories of representation seek to specify the conditions that must be met for an entity to represent another entity. Although these approaches have been relatively successful in certain areas, such as communication theory or genetics, many doubt that they can be employed to naturalize complex cognitive representations. In this essay I identify some of the difficulties for developing a teleosemantic theory of cognitive representations and provide a strategy for accommodating them: to look into models of signaling in evolutionary game (...) theory. I show how these models can be used to formulate teleosemantics and expand it in new directions. (shrink)

Stressing that the pronoun "I" picks out one and only one person in the world (i.e., me), I argue against Hunt (and other like-minded Rand commentators) that the supposed "hard case" of destructive people who do not care for their own lives poses no special difficulty for rational egoism. I conclude that the proper response to a terse objection like "What about suicide bombers?" is the equally terse assertion "But I don't want to get blown up.".

It is usually thought that only one being can be all-knowing, all-powerful, and all-loving. Challenging this monotheist conviction, I propose a universe ruled by two deities: ‘day shift God’ oversees the events that occur while the sun is up, whereas ‘night shift God’ oversees the events that occur while the sun is down. I survey objections to this proposal and conclude that the real obstacle is not an argument, but an aesthetic preference.

What is structural rationality? Specifically, what is the distinctive feature of structural requirements of rationality? Some philosophers have argued, roughly, that the distinctive feature of structural requirements is coherence. But what does coherence mean, exactly? Or, at least, what do structuralists about rationality have in mind when they claim that structural rationality is coherence? This issue matters for making progress in various active debates concerning rationality. In this paper, I analyze three strategies for figuring out what coherence means in the (...) debates on structural rationality. I argue that these strategies face problems. (shrink)

Street’s (Philos Stud 127(1):109–166, 2006) Darwinian Dilemma purports to show that evolutionary considerations are in tension with realist theories of value, which include moral realism. According to this argument, moral realism can only be defended by assuming an implausible tracking relation between moral attitudes and moral facts. In this essay, I argue that this tracking relation is not as implausible as most people have assumed by showing that the three main objections against it are flawed. Since this is a key (...) premise in the reasoning, I conclude that the Darwinian Dilemma against moral realism can be resisted. (shrink)

Although the definition of ‘signal’ has been controversial for some time within the life sciences, current approaches seem to be converging toward a common analysis. This powerful framework can satisfactorily accommodate many cases of signaling and captures some of its main features. This paper argues, however, that there is a central feature of signals that so far has been largely overlooked: its special causal role. More precisely, I argue that a distinctive feature of signals is that they are minimal causes. (...) I explain this notion, suggest some strategies for identifying its instances and defend its relevance by means of conceptual and empirical considerations. (shrink)

Max Weber examined Chinese society and European Puritanism at the beginning of the Twentieth Century in order to find out why capitalism did not develop in China. He found that Confucianism and Puritanism are mutually exclusive, which enabled him to oppose both in the form of two different kinds of rationalism. I attempt neither to refute nor to confirm the Weberian thought model. Instead I show that a similar model applies to Jean Baudrillard’s vision of American culture, a culture that (...) he determined in terms of hyperreality. Instead of rejecting Weber’s thoughts right away, I give Weber’s model a further push and show that through a further twist that “Western culture” has received within particular American constellations, Weber’s understanding of Confucianism and Baudrillard’s understanding of American civilization manifest amazing similarities. (shrink)