Human nature has always been a foundational issue for philosophy. What does it mean to have a human nature? Is the concept the relic of a bygone age? What is the use of such a concept? What are the epistemic and ontological commitments people make when they use the concept? In What’s Left of Human Nature? Maria Kronfeldner offers a philosophical account of human nature that defends the concept against contemporary criticism. In particular, she takes on challenges related to (...) social misuse of the concept that dehumanizes those regarded as lacking human nature (the dehumanization challenge); the conflict between Darwinian thinking and essentialist concepts of human nature (the Darwinian challenge); and the consensus that evolution, heredity, and ontogenetic development results from nurture and nature. After answering each of these challenges, Kronfeldner presents a revisionist account of human nature that minimizes dehumanization and does not fall back on outdated biological ideas. Her account is post-essentialist because it eliminates the concept of an essence of being human; pluralist in that it argues that there are different things in the world that correspond to three different post-essentialist concepts of human nature; and interactive because it understands nature and nurture as interacting at the developmental, epigenetic, and evolutionary levels. On the basis of this, she introduces a dialectical concept of an ever-changing and “looping” human nature. Finally, noting the essentially contested character of the concept and the ambiguity and redundancy of the terminology, she wonders if we should simply eliminate the term “human nature” altogether. (shrink)

In this Chapter, Maria Kronfeldner discusses whether psychological essentialism is a necessary part of dehumanization. This involves different elements of essentialism, and a narrow and a broad way of conceptualizing psychological essentialism, the first akin to natural kind thinking, the second based on entitativity. She first presents authors that have connected essentialism with dehumanization. She then introduces the error theory of psychological essentialism regarding the category of the human, and distinguishes different elements of psychological essentialism. On that basis, Kronfeldner (...) connects historical, socio-psychological, and philosophical insights in order to show that although essentialism can act as a catalyst for dehumanization, it is not necessary for it. Examples relate to dehumanization in the context of colonialism and evolutionary thinking, to the history of dehumanizing women from Aristotle to 19th-century craniology, and to contemporary self-dehumanization and ‘lesser mind’ attribution. (shrink)

Escribir hoy en día un libro sobre hermenéutica, que tal hermenéutica se refiera a la desarrollada por G. Gadamer en su conocido Verdad y método y que se pretenda añadir algo nuevo a lo mucho escrito sobre el tema parecería, a primera vista, empresa irrealizable. Que ambas pretensiones inspiren la sólida monografía de María G. Navarro —titulada Interpretar y argumentar— constituye empresa audaz y arriesgada, plena de coraje innovador, que provoca admiración, curiosidad e interés. Contra lo que pudiera parecer a (...) primera vista, el libro contiene un alto componente de originalidad y creatividad, debido a la estratagema metodoló-gica de que se sirve la autora. A saber, una hermenéutica in obliquo, estrategia consistente en interpretar a la hermenéutica gadameriana a través del prisma de la lógica de la argumentación. (shrink)

Data involving epistemic modals suggest that some classically valid argument forms, such as _reductio_, are invalid in natural language reasoning as they lead to modal collapses. We adduce further data showing that the classical argument forms governing the existential quantifier are similarly defective, as they lead to a _de re–de dicto_ collapse. We observe a similar problem for disjunction. But if the classical argument forms for negation, disjunction and existential quantification are invalid, what are the correct forms that govern the (...) use of these items? Our diagnosis is that epistemic modals interfere with hypothetical reasoning. We present a modal first-order logic and model theory that characterizes hypothetical reasoning with epistemic modals in a principled manner. One upshot is a sound and complete natural deduction system for reasoning with epistemic modals in first-order logic. (shrink)

Ignorance is often a perfectly good excuse. There are interesting debates about whether non-culpable factual ignorance and mistake subvert obligation, but little disagreement about whether non-culpable factual ignorance and mistake exculpate. What about agents who have all the relevant facts in view but fail to meet their obligations because they do not have the right moral beliefs? If their ignorance of their obligations derives from mistaken moral beliefs or from ignorance of the moral significance of the facts they have in (...) view, should they be excused for failing to meet their moral obligations? It is not obvious that they should. In this paper we argue that the best non-skeptical accounts of moral responsibility acknowledge that factual ignorance and mistake will diminish moral responsibility in a way that moral ignorance and mistake will not. That is because factual ignorance is often non-culpable so long as it meets certain merely procedural epistemic standards but the same is not true of moral ignorance. Our argument is that the assumption that it is gets the standards of culpability for moral ignorance wrong, and that the mistake is encouraged by the thought that culpability in general requires an instance of known wrongdoing: that acting wrongly requires de dicto unresponsiveness to one’s obligations at some stage. We deny this and conclude that, therefore, ignorance and mistaken belief are indeed often perfectly good excuses – but far less often than some philosophers claim. (shrink)

In this paper I propose a way of characterizing human agency in terms of the concept of a two‐way power. I outline this conception of agency, defend it against some objections, and briefly indicate how it relates to free agency and to moral praise‐ and blameworthiness.

Maria Kronfeldner’s Preface and Introduction to the Routledge Handbook of Dehumanization maps the landscape of dehumanization studies. She starts with a brief portrayal of the history of the field. The systematically minded sections that follow guide the reader through the resulting rugged landscape represented in the Handbook’s contributions. Different realizations, levels, forms, and ontological contrasts of dehumanization are distinguished, followed by remarks on the variety of targets of dehumanization. A discussion on valence and emotional aspects is added. Causes, functions, (...) and consequences of dehumanization, and the prospects for reducing or undoing it, are introduced. The systematic overview closes with a discussion of some important theoretical complexities that arise in studying dehumanization. After these systematic sections, the scholarly work on dehumanization gets situated in the broader intellectual landscape of debates about the ‘human’ in the humanities and social sciences. The Introduction ends with some notes on scope, limitations, and intended readership of the Handbook. (shrink)

Creativity has often been declared, especially by philosophers, as the last frontier of science. The assumption is that it will defy explanation forever. I will defend two claims in order to oppose this assumption and to demystify creativity: (1) the perspective that creativity cannot be explained wrongly identifies creativity with what I shall call metaphysical freedom; (2) the Darwinian approach to creativity, a prominent naturalistic account of creativity, fails to give an explanation of creativity, because it confuses conceptual issues with (...) explanation. I will close with some remarks on the status and differences in some explanations available in contemporary cognitive science. (shrink)

This chapter discusses the topics of trust and expertise from the perspective of political epistemology. In particular, it addresses four main questions: (§1) How should we characterise experts and their expertise? (§2) How can non-experts recognize a reliable expert? (§3) What does it take for non-experts to trust experts? (§4) What problems impede trust in experts?

This paper aims to show that a proper understanding of what Leibniz meant by “hypercategorematic infinite” sheds light on some fundamental aspects of his conceptions of God and of the relationship between God and created simple substances or monads. After revisiting Leibniz’s distinction between (i) syncategorematic infinite, (ii) categorematic infinite, and (iii) actual infinite, I examine his claim that the hypercategorematic infinite is “God himself” in conjunction with other key statements about God. I then discuss the issue of whether the (...) hypercategorematic infinite is a “whole”, comparing the four kinds of infinite outlined by Leibniz in 1706 with the three degrees of infinity outlined in 1676. In the last section, I discuss the relationship between the hypercategorematic infinite and created simple substances. I conclude that, for Leibniz, only a being beyond all determinations but eminently embracing all determinations can enjoy the pure positivity of what is truly infinite while constituting the ontological grounding of all things. (shrink)

This paper argues that the so-called ‘paradox’ of dehumanization is a mirage arising from misplaced abstraction. The alleged ‘paradox’ is taken as a challenge that arises from a skeptical stance. After reviewing the history of that skeptical stance, it is reconstructed as an argument with two premises. With the help of an epistemologically structured but pluralistic frame it is then shown how the two premises of the Skeptic’s argument can both be debunked. As part of that it emerges that there (...) are a couple of ways how dehumanization can be realized, and one such realization can be sufficient for affirming the reality of dehumanization for a specific case. (shrink)

Human nature is a concept that transgresses the boundary between science and society and between fact and value. It is as much a political concept as it is a scientific one. This chapter will cover the politics of human nature by using evidence from history, anthropology and social psychology. The aim is to show that an important political function of the vernacular concept of human nature is social demarcation (inclusion/exclusion): it is involved in regulating who is ‘us’ and who is (...) ‘them.’ It is a folk concept that is used for dehumanization, for denying (a) membership in humankind or (b) full humanness to certain people in order to include or exclude them from various forms of politically relevant aspects of human life, such as rights, power, etc. (shrink)

In the face of causal complexity, scientists reconstitute phenomena in order to arrive at a more simplified and partial picture that ignores most of the 'bigger picture.' This paper will distinguish between two modes of reconstituting phenomena: one moving down to a level of greater decomposition (toward organizational parts of the original phenomenon), and one moving up to a level of greater abstraction (toward different differences regarding the phenomenon). The first aim of the paper is to illustrate that phenomena are (...) moving targets, i.e., they are not fixed once and for all, but are adapted, if necessary, on the basis of the preferred perspective adopted for pragmatic reasons. The second aim is to analyze in detail the second mode of reconstituting phenomena. This includes an exposition of the kind of pragmatic-pluralistic picture resulting from the fact that phenomena are reconstituted by a move up to a level of greater abstraction. (shrink)

In 1969 Harry Frankfurt published his hugely influential paper 'Alternate Possibilities and Moral Responsibility' in which he claimed to present a counterexample to the so-called 'Principle of Alternate Possibilities' ('a person is morally responsible for what he has done only if he could have done otherwise'). The success of Frankfurt-style cases as counterexamples to the Principle has been much debated since. I present an objection to these cases that, in questioning their conceptual cogency, undercuts many of those debates. Such cases (...) all require a counterfactual mechanism that could cause an agent to perform an action that he cannot avoid performing. I argue that, given our concept of what it is for someone to act, this requirement is inconsistent. Frankfurt-style alleged counterexamples are cases where an agent is morally responsible for an action he performs even though, the claim goes, he could not have avoided performing that action. However, it has recently been argued, e.g. by John Fischer, that a counterexample to the Principle could be a 'Fischer-style case', i.e. a case where the agent can either perform the action or do nothing else. I argue that, although Fischer-style cases do not share the conceptual flaw common to all Frankfurt-style cases, they also fail as counterexamples to the Principle. The paper finishes with a brief discussion of the significance of the Principle of Alternate Possibilities. (shrink)

What does it mean to be an aesthetic beholder? Is it different than simply being a perceiver? Most theories of aesthetic perception focus on 1) features of the perceived object and its presentation or 2) on psychological evaluative or emotional responses and intentions of perceiver and artist. In this chapter I propose that we need to look at the process of engaged perception itself, and further that this temporal process of be- coming a beholder must be understood in its embodied, (...) contextual and dynamic speci- ficity. Through both phenomenological and neuroscientific explorations I analyze what is characteristic about a more “aesthetic stance” and argue that there is a certain asym- metry between beholder and beheld, which has to do with a disengagement of goal- directed action, and which allows for other kinds of perceptual involvement than in a more “practical stance”. It is a multi-disciplinary project integrating a sensorimotor no- tion of aesthetic affordances, 18th century philosophy, and large-scale brain network findings. What ensues is a new dynamic framework for future empirical and theoretical research on aesthetic perception. (shrink)

Interview with the author of "why We are in Need of Tails." Iguana Books, Toronto, Canada.

I propose that Mandarin ｡-sentences (units marked by ｡) are aspectual topic-comment sequences, where an initial update (terminating in a pause) introduces a topic state for comment by one or more clauses. Each comment anaphorically refers to the topic state via the aspect feature of the verbal predicate. This proposal explains why Mandarin ｡-sentences have controversial boundaries, since speakers may disagree where one topic state ends and the next one begins. It also explains various manifestations of aspect-prominence and topic-prominence in (...) Mandarin discourse. In Bittner (2014), this proposal is formally implemented in Categorial Grammar and a new dynamic logic called Update with Centering. (shrink)

This paper spells out the ways in which we need to be pluralists about “human nature”. It discusses a conceptual pluralism about the concept of “human nature”, stemming from post-essentialist ontology and the semantic complexity of the term “nature”; a descriptive pluralism about the “descriptive nature” of human beings, which is a pluralism regarding our self-understanding as human beings that stems from the long list of typical features of, and relations between, human beings; a natural kind term pluralism, which is (...) a pluralism that concerns the choices we have in deciding how to apply the kind term “human”; and an explanatory pluralism that results from the causal complexity of life. Because of the complexity of being human, which gives rise to these pluralisms, being human is, the paper claims, a kaleidoscopic affair, and one far from concerning the life sciences only. (shrink)

Academic freedom has often been defended in a progressivist manner: without academic freedom, creativity would be in peril, and with it the advancement of knowledge, i.e. the epistemic progress in science. In this paper, I want to critically discuss the limits of such a progressivist defense of academic freedom, also known under the label ‘argument from truth.’ The critique is offered, however, with a constructive goal in mind, namely to offer an alternative account that connects creativity and academic freedom in (...) a way that goes beyond mere reference to epistemic progress and involves reference to the freedom to think independently as the freedom we mean when we point to creativity and when we point to academic freedom. The resulting causal independence account is not only epistemologically stronger than a progressivist account, it also allows to counter the curbing of academic freedom in the name of progress. The latter becomes key, for instance, when authoritarian political regimes limit or negate academic freedom with reference to an epistemic progress suitably defined for that regime. (shrink)

How and when do we learn to understand other people’s perspectives and possibly divergent beliefs? This question has elicited much theoretical and empirical research. A puzzling finding has been that toddlers perform well on so-called implicit false belief (FB) tasks but do not show such capacities on traditional explicit FB tasks. I propose a navigational approach, which offers a hitherto ignored way of making sense of the seemingly contradictory results. The proposal involves a distinction between how we navigate FBs as (...) they relate to (1) our current affordances (here & now navigation) as opposed to (2) presently non-actual relations, where we need to leave our concrete embodied/situated viewpoint (counterfactual navigation). It is proposed that whereas toddlers seem able to understand FBs in their current affordance space, they do not yet possess the resources to navigate in abstraction from such concrete affordances, which explicit FB tests seem to require. It is hypothesized that counterfactual navigation depends on the development of “sensorimotor priors,” i.e., statistical expectations of own kinesthetic re-afference, which evidence now suggests matures around age four, consistent with core findings of explicit FB performance. (shrink)

Readers are awaiting a new encounter with stories united under the common title Why We Are in Need of Tales. Let me remind you that these deep philosophical books were written by Maria daVenza Tillmanns, a professional philosopher dedicated to the study of philosophizing with children, who has gained valuable experience in this field. Maria’s books are inspired by her work with her students at El Toyon Elementary School in National City (California), with whom Maria held philosophy (...) with children classes for three years before COVID-19. With parental permission, the children provided their drawings, which are used as illustrations for the books. I read Why We Are in Need of Tales, Part III with great pleasure. The focus of this book is on making decisions, sometimes very hard decisions. In Part II, the focus is on dreams — hopes and wishes we have for life. This book looks at how we may best decide how to make those hopes and wishes come true. And the answer Huk and Tuk suggest is deceptively easy: by making decisions “with your eyes wide open.” (5, p. ix). The author of this excellent book managed to describe how to make decisions with your eyes wide open through the playful dialogue between Huk and Tuk. The books are written in dialogue so the reader immediately plunges into the context of a lively conversation. Dialogue not only sharpens attention, but also invites the reader to participate in the conversation. In this way, the reader becomes a listener at the same time. (shrink)

The term ‘human nature’ can refer to different things in the world and fulfil different epistemic roles. Human nature can refer to a classificatory nature (classificatory criteria that determine the boundaries of, and membership in, a biological or social group called ‘human’), a descriptive nature (a bundle of properties describing the respective group’s life form), or an explanatory nature (a set of factors explaining that life form). This chapter will first introduce these three kinds of ‘human nature’, together with seven (...) reasons why we disagree about human nature. In the main, this chapter focuses on the explanatory concept of human nature, which is related to one of the seven reasons for disagreement, namely, the scientific authority inherent in the term ‘nature’. I will examine why, in a number of historical contexts, it was attractive to refer to ‘nature’ as an explanatory category, and why this usage has led to the continual contestation of the term within the sciences. The claim is that even if the contents of talk about ‘nature’ varied historically, the term’s pragmatic function of demarcation stayed the same. The term ‘nature’ conveys scientific authority over a territory; ‘human nature’ is a concept used to divide causes, as well as experts, and thereby conquer others who threaten to invade one’s epistemic territory. Analysing this demarcation, which has social as well as epistemic aspects, will help us to understand why the explanatory role has been important and why it is unlikely that people will ever agree on either the meaning or the importance of ‘human nature’ as an explanatory category. (shrink)

The COVID-19 pandemic health protocols have adversely impacted the economic profit and business operations of micro, small, and medium enterprises (MSMEs). This study aimed to evaluate the business strategies employed by MSMEs as they are facing the public health crisis in Bato, Leyte, Philippines. A random sample of 200 MSMEs were surveyed using a structured questionnaire. Some descriptive statistics and Chi-square test for independence were used to summarize and determine the relationship among variables, respectively. Results showed that dominantly more of (...) the MSMEs are operated by owner-managers during the pandemic. On average, most (97.5%) of the enterprise operating are micro and operates for about 3 years. About 63.5% of the MSMEs during the pandemic has adopted a new strategies to cope with COVID-19’s negative impact and most of them are micro in nature. The major business strategies adopted to survive the adverse impact of the pandemic are as follows: following health protocols (50%), finding suppliers in nearby towns (33.8%), seeking alternative sources (26%), increasing prices of items sold (24.5%), and local outsourcing (22.5%), among others. It is concluded that age is a significant factor in implementing business strategies (p-value<0.019). This implies that owner-managers with higher age (average is 40 years old) are more likely to adopt business strategies. Moreover, as they are experiencing vulnerability to the pandemic such as economic profits being significantly reduced, then they are more likely to implement strategies (p-value<0.001). Short and long term plans are considered in order to survive and sustain its business operations. Hence, the study recommends that the government should help and enhance the capability of enterprises in managing risk as well as ensuring MSME’s continuity amidst the pandemic. (shrink)

This paper addresses whether the often-bemoaned loss of unity of knowledge about humans, which results from the disciplinary fragmentation of science, is something to be overcome. The fragmentation of being human rests on a couple of distinctions, such as the nature-culture divide. Since antiquity the distinction between nature (roughly, what we inherit biologically) and culture (roughly, what is acquired by social interaction) has been a commonplace in science and society. Recently, the nature/culture divide has come under attack in various ways, (...) in philosophy as well as in cultural anthropology. Regarding the latter, for instance, the divide was quintessential in its beginnings as an academic dis-cipline, when Alfred L. Kroeber, one of the first professional anthropologists in the US, rallied for (what I call) the right to ignore—in his case, human nature—by adopting a separationist epistemic stance. A separationist stance will be understood as an epistemic research heuristic that defends the right to ignore a specif-ic phenomenon (e.g., human nature) or a specific causal factor in an explanation typical for a disciplinary field. I will use Kroeber’s case as an example for making a general point against a bias towards integration (synthesis bias, as I call it) that is exemplified, for instance, by defenders of evolutionary psychology. I will claim that, in principle, a separationist stance is as good as an integrationist stance since both can be equally fruitful. With this argument from fruitful sepa-ration in place, not just the separationist stance but also the nature/culture di-vide can be defended against its critics. (shrink)

This article illustrates in which sense genetic determinism is still part of the contemporary interactionist consensus in medicine. Three dimensions of this consensus are discussed: kinds of causes, a continuum of traits ranging from monogenetic diseases to car accidents, and different kinds of determination due to different norms of reaction. On this basis, this article explicates in which sense the interactionist consensus presupposes the innate?acquired distinction. After a descriptive Part 1, Part 2 reviews why the innate?acquired distinction is under attack (...) in contemporary philosophy of biology. Three arguments are then presented to provide a limited and pragmatic defense of the distinction: an epistemic, a conceptual, and a historical argument. If interpreted in a certain manner, and if the pragmatic goals of prevention and treatment are taken into account, then the innate?acquired distinction can be a useful epistemic tool. It can help, first, to understand that genetic determination does not mean fatalism, and, second, to maintain a system of checks and balances in the continuing nature?nurture debates. (shrink)

In English, discourse reference to time involves grammatical tenses interpreted as temporal anaphors. Recently, it has been argued that conditionals involve modal discourse anaphora expressed by a parallel grammatical system of anaphoric modals. Based on evidence from Kalaallisut, this paper argues that temporal and modal anaphora can be just as precise in a language that does not have either grammatical category. Instead, temporal anaphora directly targets eventualities of verbs, without mediating tenses, while modal anaphora involves anaphoric moods and/or attitudinal verbs.

Faced with current urgent calls for more trust in experts, especially in high impact and politically sensitive domains, such as climate science and COVID-19, the complex and problematic nature of public trust in experts and the need for a more critical approach to the topic are easy to overlook. Scepticism – at least in its Humean mitigated form that encourages independent, questioning attitudes – can prove valuable to democratic governance, but stands in opposition to the cognitive dependency entailed by epistemic (...) trust. In this paper, we investigate the tension between the value of mitigated scepticism – understood as the exercise of reason-based doubt in a particular domain – and the need for trust in experts. We offer four arguments in favour of mitigated scepticism: the argument from loss of intellectual autonomy; the argument from democratic deficit; the argument from the normative failures of science; and the argument from past and current injustices. These arguments highlight the tension between the requirements for trust and justified scepticism about the role of experts. One solution, which we reject, is the idea that reliance, rather than trust, is sufficient for the purposes of accommodating experts in policy matters. The solution we endorse is to create a ‘climate of trust’, where questioning experts and expertise is welcomed, but the epistemic trust necessary for action upon information which the public cannot obtain first-hand is enabled and encouraged through structural, institutional, and justice-based measures. (shrink)

Reasons can play a variety of roles in a variety of contexts. For instance, reasons can motivate and guide us in our actions (and omissions), in the sense that we often act in the light of reasons. And reasons can be grounds for beliefs, desires and emotions and can be used to evaluate, and sometimes to justify, all these. In addition, reasons are used in explanations: both in explanations of human actions, beliefs, desires, emotions, etc., and in explanations of a (...) wide range of phenomena involving all sorts of animate and inanimate substances. This diversity has encouraged the thought that the term 'reason' is ambiguous or has different senses in different contexts. Moreover, this view often goes hand in hand with the claim that reasons of these different kinds belong to different ontological categories: to facts (or something similar) in the case of normative/justifying reasons, and to mental states in the case of motivating/explanatory reasons. In this paper I shall explore some of the main roles that reasons play and, on that basis, I shall offer a classification of kinds of reasons. As will become clear, my classification of reasons is at odds with much of the literature in several respects: first, because of my views about how we should understand the claim that reasons are classified into different kinds; second, because of the kinds into which I think reasons should be classified; and, finally, because of the consequences I think this view has for the ontology of reasons. (shrink)

To have a well-functioning principle of academic freedom, we need to distin-guish critique from an infringement of academic freedom. To achieve this goal, this paper presents three necessary conditions for something to be an infringe-ment of academic freedom. These conditions allow to delineate cases in which at least one of the three conditions is not fulfilled. These are contrast cases that might – at first glance – look like infringements of academic freedom but are, in fact, not so. I will (...) refer to five such kinds of contrast cases: (1) discrimination and thus a more general kind of unjust treatment of a person engaged in aca-demic affairs, (2) infringement of freedom of speech or other non-academic intel-lectual freedoms, (3) mere critique, (4) justified critique that leads to justified limitations of someone’s academic freedom, and (5) cases of deep disagreement. Special attention will be given to vulnerabilities concerning unjustified silencing of critique, which haunt fields that lack clear and agreed-on ethical or academic standards. (shrink)

This contribution discusses Leibniz’s conception of the Christian church, his life-long ecumenical efforts, and his stance toward religious toleration. Leibniz’s regarded the main Christian denominations as particular churches constituting the only one truly catholic or universal church, whose authority went back to apostolic times, and whose theology was to be traced back to the entire ecclesiastical tradition. This is the ecclesiology which underpins his ecumenism. The main phases and features of his work toward reunification of Protestants and Roman Catholics, and (...) unification of Protestant churches are briefly explored, before turning to the issue of religious toleration. It is argued that a remarkably inclusive conception of toleration can be gleaned from a broad sample of Leibniz’s writings and correspondence. It is thanks to the philosophical and theological grounds of this conception that toleration can in principle be extended, for Leibniz, to all men and women of good will, including non-Christians, pagans, and atheists. (shrink)

It is generally agreed that for blame to be appropriate the wrongdoer must be blameworthy. However, blameworthiness is not sufficient for appropriate blame. It has been argued that for blame to be appropriate the blamer must have standing to blame. Philosophers writing on the topic have distinguished several considerations that might defeat someone’s standing to blame. This paper examines the underexplored consideration of how personal relationships can influence who has the standing to express blame. We seem to assume that if (...) we do not stand in the right relation to the wrongdoer, it is not our business to blame them. I identify three challenges to this view. First, we do not know what is wrong with meddling (whether it is morally or prudentially wrong). Second, there are cases where we have no close relation to the wrongdoer, but where we seem to have standing nonetheless – murder and other serious moral offences are examples of this. Third, we don’t seem to have a clear conception of what ‘standing’ means, and this makes it hard to see how discussion on standing can help us determine the propriety of blame. This paper defends the notion of standing as a propriety condition on blame in cases of meddling. I argue that personal relationships influence who has the standing to blame through constitution of relationship-specific norms; and that the role these norms play in developing and regulating our relationships can explain why meddlesome blame is morally wrong. (shrink)

This paper is on the problem of causal selection and comments on Collingwood's classic paper "The so-called idea of causation". It discusses the relevance of Collingwood’s control principle in contemporary life sciences and defends that it is not the ability to control, but the willingness to control that often biases us towards some rather than other causes of a phenomenon. Willingness to control is certainly only one principle that influences causal selection, but it is an important one. It shows how (...) norms make causes. (shrink)

The Cell Ontology (CL) is designed to provide a standardized representation of cell types for data annotation. Currently, the CL employs multiple is_a relations, defining cell types in terms of histological, functional, and lineage properties, and the majority of definitions are written with sufficient generality to hold across multiple species. This approach limits the CL’s utility for cross-species data integration. To address this problem, we developed a method for the ontological representation of cells and applied this method to develop a (...) dendritic cell ontology (DC-CL). DC-CL subtypes are delineated on the basis of surface protein expression, systematically including both species-general and species-specific types and optimizing DC-CL for the analysis of flow cytometry data. This approach brings benefits in the form of increased accuracy, support for reasoning, and interoperability with other ontology resources. 104. Barry Smith, “Toward a Realistic Science of Environments”, Ecological Psychology, 2009, 21 (2), April-June, 121-130. Abstract: The perceptual psychologist J. J. Gibson embraces a radically externalistic view of mind and action. We have, for Gibson, not a Cartesian mind or soul, with its interior theater of contents and the consequent problem of explaining how this mind or soul and its psychological environment can succeed in grasping physical objects external to itself. Rather, we have a perceiving, acting organism, whose perceptions and actions are always already tuned to the parts and moments, the things and surfaces, of its external environment. We describe how on this basis Gibson sought to develop a realist science of environments which will be ‘consistent with physics, mechanics, optics, acoustics, and chemistry’. (shrink)

Mirror neuron research has come a long way since the early 1990s, and many theorists are now stressing the heterogeneity and complexity of the sensorimotor properties of fronto-parietal circuits. However, core aspects of the initial ‘ mirror mechanism ’ theory, i.e. the idea of a symmetric encapsulated mirroring function translating sensory action perceptions into motor formats, still appears to be shaping much of the debate. This article challenges the empirical plausibility of the sensorimotor segregation implicit in the original mirror metaphor. (...) It is proposed instead that the teleological organization found in the broader fronto-parietal circuits might be inherently sensorimotor. Thus the idea of an independent ‘purely perceptual’ goal understanding process is questioned. Further, it is hypothesized that the often asymmetric, heterogeneous and contextually modulated mirror and canonical neurons support a function of multisensory mapping and tracking of the perceiving agents affordance space. Such a shift in the interpretative framework offers a different theoretical handle on how sensorimotor processes might ground various aspects of intentional action choice and social cognition. Mirror neurons would under the proposed “social affordance model” be seen as dynamic parts of larger circuits, which support tracking of currently shared and competing action possibilities. These circuits support action selection processes—but also our understanding of the options and action potentials that we and perhaps others have in the affordance space. In terms of social cognition ‘ mirror ’ circuits might thus help us understand not only the intentional actions others are actually performing—but also what they could have done, did not do and might do shortly. (shrink)

Over the last four decades arguments for and against the claim that creative hypothesis formation is based on Darwinian ‘blind’ variation have been put forward. This paper offers a new and systematic route through this long-lasting debate. It distinguishes between undirected, random, and unjustified variation, to prevent widespread confusions regarding the meaning of undirected variation. These misunderstandings concern Lamarckism, equiprobability, developmental constraints, and creative hypothesis formation. The paper then introduces and develops the standard critique that creative hypothesis formation is guided (...) rather than blind, integrating developments from contemporary research on creativity. On that basis, I discuss three compatibility arguments that have been used to answer the critique. These arguments do not deny guided variation but insist that an important analogy exists nonetheless. These compatibility arguments all fail, even though they do so for different reasons: trivialisation, conceptual confusion, and lack of evidence respectively. Revisiting the debate in this manner not only allows us to see where exactly a ‘Darwinian’ account of creative hypothesis formation goes wrong, but also to see that the debate is not about factual issues, but about the interpretation of these factual issues in Darwinian terms. (shrink)

Continuing Franz Boas' work to establish anthropology as an academic discipline in the US at the turn of the twentieth century, Alfred L. Kroeber re-defined culture as a phenomenon sui generis. To achieve this he asked geneticists to enter into a coalition against hereditarian thoughts prevalent at that time in the US. The goal was to create space for anthropology as a separate discipline within academia, distinct from other disciplines. To this end he crossed the boundary separating anthropology from biology (...) in order to secure the boundary. His notion of culture, closely bound to the concept of heredity, saw it as independent of biological heredity (culture as superorganic) but at the same time as a heredity of another sort. The paper intends to summarise the shifting boundaries of anthropology at the beginning of the twentieth century, and to present Kroeber?s ideas on culture, with a focus on how the changing landscape of concepts of heredity influenced his views. The historical case serves to illustrate two general conclusions: that the concept of culture played and plays different roles in explaining human existence; that genetics and the concept of Weismannian hard inheritance did not have an unambiguous unidirectional historical effect on the vogue for hereditarianism at that time; on the contrary, it helped to establish culture in Kroeber's sense, culture as independent of heredity. (shrink)

The Eskimo language Kalaallisut (alias West Greenlandic) has traditionally been described as having a rich tense system, with three future tenses (Kleinschmidt 1851, Bergsland 1955, Fortescue 1984) and possibly four past tenses (Fortescue 1984). Recently however, Shaer (2003) has challenged these traditional claims, arguing that Kalaallisut is in fact tenseless.

Partee (1973) noted anaphoric parallels between English tenses and pronouns. Since then these parallels have been analyzed in terms of type-neutral principles of discourse anaphora. Recently, Stone (1997) extended the anaphoric parallel to English modals. In this paper I extend the story to languages of other types. This evidence also shows that centering parallels are even more detailed than previously recognized. Based on this evidence, I propose a semantic representation language (Logic of Change with Centered Worlds), in which the observed (...) parallels can be formally analyzed. (shrink)

(Bonus material: a critique of the genesis myth of Western philosophy as well as of the exclusions and policing practices of both analytic and continental traditions).

Natural languages exhibit a great variety of grammatical paradigms. For instance, in English verbs are grammatically marked for tense, whereas in the tenseless Eskimo-Aleut language Kalaallisut they are marked for illocutionary mood. Although time is a universal dimension of the human experience and speaking is part of that experience, some languages encode reference to time without any grammatical tense morphology, or reference to speech acts without any illocutionary mood morphology. Nevertheless, different grammatical systems are semantically parallel in certain respects. Specifically, (...) I propose that English tenses form a temporal centering system, which monitors and updates topic times, whereas Kalaallisut moods form a modal centering system, which monitors and updates modal discourse referents. To formalize these centering parallels I define a dynamic logic that represents not only changing information but also changing focus of attention in discourse (Update with Centering, formalizing Grosz et al 1995). Different languages can be translated into this typed logic by directly compositional universal rules of Combinatory Categorial Grammar (CCG) The resulting centering theory of tense and illocutionary mood draws semantic parallels across different grammatical systems. The centering generalizations span the extremes of the typological spectrum, so they are likely to be universal. In addition, the theory accounts for the translation equivalence of tense and illocutionary mood in a given utterance context. Following Stalnaker (1978) I assume that the very act of speaking up has a ‘commonplace effect’ on the context. It focuses attention on the speech act and thereby introduces default modal and temporal topics. These universal defaults complement language-specific grammars, e.g. English tenses and Kalaallisut moods. In a given utterance context the universal discourse-initial defaults plus language-specific grammatical marking may add up to the same truth conditions.. (shrink)

This short piece explores the many reasons why we hide faces and how hiding faces relates to dehumanization, in particular if faces are hidden by others and thus prevented to speak.

The paper discusses the aesthetic aspects of place‑making practices in the urban environment of Western metropoles that are struggling with the progressive undifferentiation of their space and the weakening of communal and personal bonds. The paper starts by describing the general characteristics of an urban environment as distinct from the traditional vision of a city as a well‑structured entity, and in relation to formal and informal aesthetics and participatory design ideas. The author then focuses on two contrary but complementary tactics (...) for translating a space into a positively evaluated p l a ce: by dome ticating it through introducing nature into an urbanscape; and by accentuating its alienness with the example of the urban exploration movement. The growing popularity of the latter is presented in relation to the discourses related to the decline of cities and the romantic endeavours for reaching into the realm of the unknown or the uncanny in order to rediscover and enrich the unique identity of a place. The paper ends with conclusions that present the necessity for the cultivation of a multidimensional aesthetic awareness and an aesthetic engagement as a crucial issue in the complex task of endowing places with a density of meaning. (shrink)

This paper explores the question of Leibniz’s contribution to the rise of modern ‘science’. To be sure, it is now generally agreed that the modern category of ‘science’ did not exist in the early modern period. At the same time, this period witnessed a very important stage in the process from which modern science eventually emerged. My discussion will be aimed at uncovering the new enterprise, and the new distinctions which were taking shape in the early modern period under the (...) banner of the old Aristotelian terminology. I will argue that Leibniz begins to theorize a distinction between physics and metaphysics that tracks our distinction between the autonomous enterprise of science in its modern meaning, and the enterprise of philosophy. I will try to show that, for Leibniz, physics proper is the study of natural phenomena in mathematical and mechanical terms without recourse for its explanations to metaphysical notions. This autonomy, however, does not imply for Leibniz that physics can say on its own all that there is to be said about the natural world. Quite the opposite. Leibniz inherits from the Aristotelian tradition the view that physics needs metaphysical roots or a metaphysical grounding. For Leibniz, what is ultimately real is reached by metaphysics, not by physics. This is, in my view, Leibniz’s chief insight: the new mathematical physics is an autonomous enterprise which offers its own kind of explanations but does not exhaust what can (and should) be said about the natural world. (shrink)

This paper introduces a framework for direct surface composition by online update. The surface string is interpreted as is, with each morpheme in turn updating the input state of information and attention. A formal representation language, Logic of Centering, is defined and some crosslinguistic constraints on lexical meanings and compositional operations are formulated.

Two conceptions of motivating reasons, i.e. the reasons for which we act, can be found in the literature: (1) the dominant 'psychological conception', which says that motivating reasons are an agent's believing something; and (2) the 'non-psychological' conception, the minority view, which says that they are what the agent believes, i.e. his beliefs. In this paper I outline a version of the minority view, and defend it against what have been thought to be insuperable difficulties - in particular, difficulties concerning (...) 'error cases' (cases where what the agent believes is false); and difficulties concerning the explanation of action. Concerning error cases, I argue that if we are motivated by something believed that is true, what motivates us to act is a motivating reason. By contrast, if we are motivated by something believed that is false, then what motivates us to act is merely an apparent motivating reason. Either way, what motivates us is, as the non-psychological conception says, what we believe and not our believing it. I offer an account of the relation between motivating reasons and the explanation of action, and argue that this account helps bring out two important points. One is that the fact that we often do, and indeed sometimes must, use explanations such as 'He did it because he believed that p' does not vindicate the psychological conception of motivating reasons. The other is that endorsing the non-psychological conception of motivating reasons does not commit one to a non-factive view of explanations of action. (shrink)

The relationship between the necessity to ensure that information is shared in the stages of deliberation and the overcoming of what Dryzek (2001) called constriction of deliberative economy is directly related to the proponents and opponents’ propensity to submit and add information differently, in a plural manner. This article describes the salient features of the deliberative turn in order to defend that this propensity is not individual. The evolution of the public space in science and in politics are both paradigmatic (...) examples to appreciate that individual deliberation, and even mere aggregation of opinions, are consistently interpreted only if they are part of social practices and collective institutions aimed at defending tolerance towards positions, beliefs and interpretations that are different or even confronted. This paper argues that the so called model of contestatory deliberative democracy contributes to the acquisition of knowledge precisely because it fosters a plurality of epistemic states associated with practices as consensus and dissent. (shrink)

Rooth & Partee (1982) and Rooth (1985) have shown that the English-specific rule-by-rule system of PTQ can be factored out into function application plus two transformations for resolving type mismatch (type lifting and variable binding). Building on these insights, this article proposes a universal system for type-driven translation, by adding two more innovations: local type determination for gaps (generalizing Montague 1973) and a set of semantic filters (extending Cooper 1983). This system, dubbed Cross-Linguistic Semantics (XLS), is shown to account for (...) various phenomena — including scope relations in English and Greenlandic Eskimo, internally headed relative clauses in Lakhota, serial verbs in Yoruba and VP ellipsis in English. (shrink)

Wie können Philosoph/innen mit der Bedrohung der akademischen Freiheit umgehen, die von rechtspopulistischen Strömungen (in Deutschland, Europa und weltweit) und autoritären Staaten (wie der Türkei und Ungarn) ausgeht? – Diese Frage stand im Zentrum der Podiumsdiskussion „Bedrohtes Denken“, die während des DGPhil Kongresses in Berlin am Tag der Bundestagswahl 2017 stattfand. Es war eine Diskussion, deren Ende von der bedrückenden Nachricht überschattet wurde, die rechtsextreme AfD werde drittstärkste Kraft im neuen Bundestag. Angesichts dieses zutiefst beunruhigenden Wahlergebnisses glauben wir, dass es (...) wichtig ist, diese Diskussion weiterzuführen. Dieser Kommentar soll dazu einen Anstoß geben. (shrink)

This paper advances the view that the history of philosophy is both a kind of history and a kind of philosophy. Through a discussion of some examples from epistemology, metaphysics, and the historiography of philosophy, it explores the benefit to philosophy of a deep and broad engagement with its history. It comes to the conclusion that doing history of philosophy is a way to think outside the box of the current philosophical orthodoxies. Somewhat paradoxically, far from imprisoning its students in (...) outdated and crystallized views, the history of philosophy trains the mind to think differently and alternatively about the fundamental problems of philosophy. It keeps us alert to the fact that latest is not always best, and that a genuinely new perspective often means embracing and developing an old insight. The upshot is that the study of the history of philosophy has an innovative and subversive potential, and that philosophy has a great deal to gain from a long, broad, and deep conversation with its history. (shrink)