The competing expressions of ideology flooding the contemporary political landscape have taken a turn toward the absurd. The Radiance Foundation’s recent anti-abortion campaign targeting African-American women, including a series of billboards bearing the slogan “The most dangerous place for an African-American child is in the womb”, is just one example of political "discourse" that is both infuriating and confounding. Discourse with these features – problematic intelligibility, disinterest in the truth, and inflammatory rhetoric – has become increasingly common in politics, the (...) press, and even the arguments made by ordinary folk. It is often criticized for its falsehood or its hurtfulness; however, these critiques tend to miss its pernicious potential. This essay characterizes this insidious discourse as purposeful nonsense. Part of the way that purposeful nonsense functions, we argue, relies on taking advantage of harmful stereotypes and denigrating narratives that are already present in our culture. Purposeful nonsense both draws upon harmful ideology and fortifies it. The effect is that members of oppressed social groups are confronted with disparaging ideology, while its authors are free to deny responsibility for it. Black feminist and intersectional analysis – particularly in the discussion of race, abortion, and reproductive justice – are useful in identifying and criticizing the harmful subtext in the Radiance Foundation’s billboard campaign. The notion of purposeful nonsense serves to extend the reach of these criticisms. Purposeful nonsense – disguised as merely logically confused discourse – is a key factor in maintaining an oppressive and unjust society; however, feminist, black feminist, and intersectional analysis contextualizes purposeful nonsense, potentially disrupting its harmful influence. We conclude that purposeful nonsense employs a variation on stereotype threat, a phenomenon in which being reminded of negative stereotypes about one’s social group causes stereotypical performance failures. We suggest that the notion of stereotype threat combined with intersectional analysis offers a fruitful avenue along which research on this sort of discourse might be expanded. (shrink)

According to an influential reading of his later philosophy, Wittgenstein thinks that nonsense can result from combining expressions in ways prohibited by the rules to which their use is subject. According to another influential reading, the later Wittgenstein thinks that nonsense only ever results from privation—that is, from a failure to assign a meaning to one or more of the relevant expressions. This chapter challenges Glock’s defence of the view that the later Wittgenstein allows for combinatorial nonsense. (...) In doing so, it defends a version of the privation view. According to it, Wittgenstein thinks that nonsense results, not so much from a failure to assign a meaning to an expression, as a failure to use an expression in a way that has a point or purpose. As the chapter shows, this interpretation is consistent with prominent themes in Wittgenstein’s later philosophy, such as that meaning and explanation are coordinate notions, that for a word to have a meaning is for there to be a rule-governed practice of using it, that the rules of the practice are arbitrary, and that they determine the bounds of sense. (shrink)

I offer an interpretation of Carnap and Quine’s views on cognitive significance and insignificance. The basic idea behind their views is as follows: to judge an expression is insignificant is to recommend it not be used in or explicated into languages used to express truth-valued judgments in inquiry; to judge an expression is significant is to recommend it be used in or explicated into such languages. These judgments are pragmatic judgments, made in light of purposes for language use in inquiry. (...) For Carnap at least, these pragmatic judgments are non-cognitive. This basic idea is only a roughly correct statement of their views. This is because the details of the scientific languages they recommend for inquiry are necessary to understand their views and the way they understand their own views. Even so, I offer two reasons to suggest that this basic idea is worthy of our consideration today. First, it provides a conception of significance that captures the natural thought that epistemological concerns can lead us to consider expressions to be insignificant without requiring an objectionable form of verificationism. Second, if we appeal also to Carnap and Quine’s pluralistic attitude toward explication, we can make a pragmatic judgment that an expression is insignificant while judging it to be significant on a distinct explication of significance fit for describing and explaining natural language. (shrink)

In this essay I analyze a passage from Ludwig Wittgenstein’s On Certainty. This excerpt contains the expression “O, rubbish!” (Ach Unsinn), which I consider to be closely related to the notions of “bullshit” developed by Harry Frankfurt and Gerald A. Cohen. The relevance of this essay is illustrated with lively examples, both related to contemporary society and identified by Wittgenstein about 70 years ago. The paper is organized in six sections containing 1) an introduction to the topic, 2) an explanation (...) of “bullshit” as found in the works of Frankfurt and Cohen, 3) an explanation of Wittgenstein’s work on certainty and propositions beyond doubt, 4) an identification of reasonable and unreasonable doubt and their connection to “bullshit”, 5) an explanation of the different kinds of “bullshit” with the intention of mapping them in relation to each other, and 6) a summarizing conclusion. The main purpose of this paper is to expound on Wittgenstein’s views on “bullshit” and relate them to contemporary philosophy of nonsense. (shrink)

Dylan Dog, l’Indagatore dell’Incubo (the nightmare investigator), lives and works at 7 Craven Road in London. The comic book character is English, but he was created in Italy by Tiziano Sclavi in 1986, and it is still published today monthly. Dylan had enormous success, not only in Italy but worldwide. His job is to investigate, together with his assistant, Groucho, the paranormal, the irrational, the nightmare that can assume different forms and aspects. Dylan fights against all types of monsters: vampires, (...) zombies, werewolves, witches, even against Death itself. However, the horror that he faces is not always paranormal. The monsters are often extremely human. Maybe that is the reason why Dylan remains extremely skeptical and rational. Everything in Dylan Dog’s world revolves around the absurd, the chaos without explanation, without sense, and the need to find meaning in it. This chaos can take different forms: the horror that Dylan fights, but also the satirical and nonsense humor of Groucho. This irrational dimension manifests itself also through Dylan’s love and sexual life: in almost every story, Dylan falls in love with a different woman, who usually will die or will break his heart. Love and sex are strongly connected with horror and death in Dylan Dog’s narrative: they are irrational forces, from which it is not possible to escape. The purpose of this essay is to analyze the irrational and fearful dimension in Dylan Dog: l’orrore, as he calls it, but also its connection to sexuality and the comic relief provided by Groucho. This chaotic and monstrous reality will be analyzed mainly—but not only—through the Nietzschean concepts of Apollonian and Dionysian related to the concept of absurd as described by Albert Camus. In this frame, the analysis of René Girard’s Violence and the Sacred will also be helpful. Violence is an irrational and uncontrollable force, and its manifestation is tightly linked with the horror and the monstrous reality that it unveils. (shrink)

In this book, the words ‘science’ and ‘social science’ are used in their limited sense that refer to experience-based knowledge. This should not indicate that experience is being used in a positivistic sense. Rather, the important insights of all kinds of post-positivist views are embraced to give an extensive meaning to experience. However, the most important characteristic of experience and science that should never be excluded is its dependence on observation and observational evidence. Thus, when ‘science’ is used in combination (...) with ‘religion’, it should not be confused by religious knowledge. The latter might refer to, perhaps, a certain kind of knowledge that could be found in religious texts and might be different from other kinds of knowledge. However, when the phrase of ‘religious science’ is used, it refers to a scientific knowledge, even though because of its religious presuppositions it is called religious. And this relation between religion and science is exactly the point that is at issue in this book. On one hand, the issue of religious science raises challenges on the ground that the contemporary science has been explicitly non-religious or perhaps in some cases anti-religious. Objectivity of science is usually understood in a way that it does not permit to combine ‘science’ with ‘religion’. Thus, in the first step, the phrase of religious science is considered as nonsense. On the other hand, as far as religious people are concerned, the issue of religious science is enthusiastic. These people sometimes think that a real religion should include all scientific truths. Thus, facing the issue, they immediately verdict that there are or should be religious sciences. However, neither that strong challenge with the possibility of any religious science, nor this hot enthusiasm could be in congruence with the spirit of scientific endeavor. As far as social scientists are concerned, the possibility of religious science should not be rejected a priori. This possibility should not be necessarily considered as a threat for science, rather the plausibility of its being a chance for the development of science should also be taken into account. On the other hand, as far as the religious people are concerned, they should not necessarily consider the possibility of talking about religious sciences as a chance for spreading their religion, rather the plausibility of its being a threat for their purpose should also be considered. This is because entering of a religion into a job which is not relevant to it could be dangerous. Far from these two kinds of biases, it is attempted in this book to deal with the issue in a reflective manner. It seems that thinking about ‘religious science’ requires us to take three steps. In the first step, we need to think about the nature or characteristics of science. In the second step, we need to think about the nature or characteristics of religion. And finally, in the third step, it seem necessary to think about the combination of them. These three steps show the direction of the discussion in what follows. (shrink)

Many philosophers suppose that sometimes we think we are saying or thinking something meaningful when in fact we’re not saying or thinking anything at all: we are producing nonsense. But what is nonsense? An account of nonsense must, I argue, meet two constraints. The first constraint requires that nonsense can be rationally engaged with, not just mentioned. In particular, we can reason with nonsense and use it within that-clauses. An account which fails to meet this (...) constraint cannot explain why nonsense appears meaningful. The second constraint requires that nonsense does not express thoughts. An account which fails to meet this constraint undercuts the critical force of the concept of nonsense. I offer an account which meets both constraints. The central idea is that to be under the illusion that some nonsense makes sense is to enter a pretence that the nonsense is meaningful. (shrink)

Inspired by the early Wittgenstein’s concept of nonsense (meaning that which lies beyond the limits of language), we define two different, yet complementary, types of nonsense: formal nonsense and pragmatic nonsense. The simpler notion of formal nonsense is initially defined within Tarski’s semantic theory of truth; the notion of pragmatic nonsense, by its turn, is formulated within the context of the theory of pragmatic truth, also known as quasi-truth, as formalized by da Costa and (...) his collaborators. While an expression will be considered formally nonsensical if the formal criteria required for the assignment of any truth-value (whether true, false, pragmatically true, or pragmatically false) to such sentence are not met, a (well-formed) formula will be considered pragmatically nonsensical if the pragmatic criteria (inscribed within the context of scientific practice) required for the assignment of any truth-value to such sentence are not met. Thus, in the context of the theory of pragmatic truth, any (well-formed) formula of a formal language interpreted on a simple pragmatic structure will be considered pragmatically nonsensical if the set of primary sentences of such structure is not well-built, that is, if it does not include the relevant observational data and/or theoretical results, or if it does include sentences that are inconsistent with such data. (shrink)

In this chapter, Nonsense is approached as a category that reveals a close relation both to order and disorder, rationality and illogicality, conventionality and arbitrariness, reality and dream. Among its various illustrations, quite a prominent role is assigned to the Duchess’ sentence, which, in spite of being universally acknowledged as one of the best pieces of Nonsense, is rarely discussed in detail in philosophical and literary investigations: ‘Be what you would seem to be’ - or, if you’d like (...) it put more simply – ‘Never imagine yourself not to be otherwise than what it might appear to others that what you were or might have been was not otherwise than what you had been would have appeared to them to be otherwise.’. (shrink)

I introduce a perceptual phenomenon so far overlooked in the philosophical literature: ‘visual evanescence’. ‘Evanescent’ objects are those that due to their structured visible appearances have a tendency to vanish or evanesce from sight at certain places and for certain ‘biologically apt’ perceivers. Paradigmatically evanescent objects are those associated with certain forms of animal camouflage. I show that reflection on visual evanescence helps create conceptual room for a treatment of looks statements not explicit in the contemporary literature, one which takes (...) its cue from the relatively neglected philosophy of perception of G.E.M. Anscombe. In sensory contexts in which evanescence is known to have occurred, the use of ‘looks invisible’ seems to be intelligible, a fact that sensationalist and objectivist treatments of the nature of looks, as I call them, cannot obviously accommodate - at least, as I explain, when coupled with what Cora Diamond (1981) describes as a ‘natural’ understanding of nonsense. Focusing on a number of imaginative scenarios in which the statement ‘looks invisible’ is permissible, I oppose these ontological treatments with the grammatical approach I draw from Anscombe and in doing so I uncover a degree of unity across the cases I consider: something can intelligibly be said to ‘look invisible’ if one can see or appears to see the entirety of the region that the ‘invisible’ thing occupies. The region ‘looks empty’ but is full. (shrink)

In this chapter, we follow Edward Craig?s advice: ask what the concept of knowledge does for us and use our findings as clues about its application conditions. What a concept does for us is a matter of what we can do with it, and what we do with concepts is deploy them in thought and language. So, we will examine the purposes we have in attributing knowledge. This chapter examines two such purposes, agent evaluation and informant-suggestion, and brings the results (...) to bear on an important debate about the application conditions of the concept of knowledge?the debate between contextualists and their rivals. (shrink)

Is there such a thing as philosophical nonsense? For the best part of a century now philosophers have been accusing each other of talking nonsense. This practice presupposes that people can be wrong in thinking they mean anything by what they say, that there can be an illusion of meaning. But the assumption that illusions of meaning are possible has not, the author believes, been seriously examined; nor has the problem of how such illusions could be diagnosed been (...) satisfactorily answered. This book extends the work of a number of recent writers on Wittgenstein who have advocated an 'austere' view of nonsense, but in a more sceptical direction than they have taken. It argues that nonsensicalism is radically misguided and should be abandoned. The possibility that illusions of meaning occur outside philosophy - in dreams, in certain hoaxes, in madness or under the influence of drugs - is also examined. IAN DEARDEN read philosophy at Downing College, Cambridge, and Bedford College, London. He taught philosophy at Bedford College, the City University, the Polytechnic of North London and the University of Essex, and also for the London University Department of Extra-Mural Studies. (shrink)

Typically, if I understand a sentence, then it expresses a proposition that I entertain. Nonsensical sentences don’t express propositions, but there are contexts in which we talk about understanding nonsensical sentences. For example, we accept various kinds of semantically defective sentences in fiction, philosophy, and everyday life. Furthermore, it is a standard assumption that if a sentence is nonsensical, then it makes no sense to say that it implies anything or is implied by other sentences. Semantically uninterpreted sentences don’t have (...) logical characteristics. Hence, the riddle of understanding nonsense arises. We seem to use nonsensical sentences in reasoning, thinking, judging, and drawing conclusions, but they convey no propositions, which are the vehicles of their semantic properties. In this article, I propose the pretence theory of understanding nonsense to explain the riddle of understanding nonsense, and discuss alternative frameworks that are insufficient to solve it. -/- . (shrink)

This paper concerns Wittgenstein’s conception of philosophical and mathematical problems. Both in his earlier and in his later writings Wittgenstein grapples with the tendency of philosophers to misconstrue the nature of the difficulties that they are facing. Whereas philosophers tend to assume that their problems are comparable to those that come up in the sciences, and take these problems to consist in questions the answers to which will provide them with substantive knowledge, Wittgenstein compares philosophical problems with riddles. What is (...) characteristic of riddles is that solving them involves an alteration of the use of language, but it does not tend to involve the acquisition of new knowledge. In his middle and later period, the comparison with riddles serves to highlight and resolve a related confusion in the way philosophers of mathematics understand the nature of mathematical problems. Wittgenstein rejects the realist approach according to which every mathematical theorem, whether proven or not, meaningfully specifies a possible fact which would make it true or false. By contrast, Wittgenstein construes unproven conjectures on the model of riddle phrases, whose meaning, prior to our finding the solution to them, has not been determined. Moreover, Wittgenstein draws our attention to the fact that we can be caught up in an attempt to solve a riddle even if the riddle does not have a solution; the same applies, in his mind, to our engagement with philosophical and mathematical problems. When it comes to philosophical riddles, Wittgenstein is convinced that they do not have a solution at all. The specific difficulty presented by unproven mathematical conjectures is different; in this case, we cannot tell in advance whether or not they present us with a solvable riddle. The paper situates these issues in the context of ongoing debates in the scholarship concerning Wittgenstein’s conception of nonsense, his methodology, his engagement with mathematical realism and verificationism, and his response to skepticism. (shrink)

[A. W. Moore] There are criteria of ineffability whereby, even if the concept of ineffability can never serve to modify truth, it can sometimes serve to modify other things, specifically understanding. This allows for a reappraisal of the dispute between those who adopt a traditional reading of Wittgenstein's Tractatus and those who adopt the new reading recently championed by Diamond, Conant, and others. By maintaining that what the nonsense in the Tractatus is supposed to convey is ineffable understanding, rather (...) than ineffable truth, we can do considerable justice to each of these readings. We can also do considerable justice to the Tractatus. /// [Peter Sullivan] Moore proposes to cut between 'traditional' and 'new' approaches to the Tractatus, suggesting that Wittgenstein's intention is to convey, through the knowing use of nonsense, ineffable understanding. I argue, first, that there is indeed room for a proposal of Moore's general kind. Secondly, though, I question whether Moore's actual proposal is not more in tune with Wittgenstein's later thought than with the attitude of the Tractatus. (shrink)

[A. W. Moore] Criteria of ineffability are presented which, it is claimed, preclude the possibility of truths that are ineffable, but not the possibility of other things that are ineffable—not even the possibility of other things that are non-trivially ineffable. Specifically, they do not preclude the possibility of states of understanding that are ineffable. This, it is argued, allows for a reappraisal of the dispute between those who adopt a traditional reading of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus and those who adopt the new (...) reading recently championed by Cora Diamond, James Conant, and others. By maintaining that what the nonsense in the Tractatus is supposed to convey is ineffable understanding, rather than ineffable truth, we can do considerable justice to each of these readings. We can also do considerable justice to the Tractatus. /// [Peter Sullivan] Moore proposes to cut between 'traditional' and 'new' approaches to the Tractatus, suggesting that Wittgenstein's intention is to convey, through the knowing use of nonsense, ineffable understanding. I argue, first, that there is indeed room for a proposal of Moore's general kind. Secondly, though, I question whether Moore's actual proposal is not more in tune with Wittgenstein's later thought than with the attitude of the Tractatus. (shrink)

Public discussions of science are often marred by two pernicious phenomena: a widespread rejection of scientific findings (e.g., the reality of anthropogenic climate change, the conclusion that vaccines do not cause autism, or the validity of evolutionary theory), coupled with an equally common acceptance of pseudoscientific notions (e.g., homeopathy, psychic readings, telepathy, tall tales about alien abductions, and so forth). The typical reaction by scientists and science educators is to decry the sorry state of science literacy among the general public, (...) and to call for more science education as the answer to both problems. But the empirical evidence concerning the relationship between science literacy, rejection of science and acceptance of pseudoscience is mixed at best. In this chapter I argue that—while certainly important—efforts at increasing public knowledge of science (science education) need to be complemented by attention to common logical fallacies (philosophy), cognitive biases and dissonance (psychology), and the role of ideological commitments (sociology). Even this complex, multi-disciplinary approach to science education will likely only yield measurable results in the very long term. Meanwhile science remains, as Carl Sagan famously put it, a candle in the dark, delicate and in need of much nurturing. (shrink)

Sören Halldén’s logic of nonsense is one of the most well-known many-valued logics available in the literature. In this paper, we discuss Peter Woodruff’s as yet rather unexplored attempt to advance a version of such a logic built on the top of a constructive logical basis. We start by recalling the basics of Woodruff’s system and by bringing to light some of its notable features. We then go on to elaborate on some of the difficulties attached to it; on (...) our way to offer a possible solution to such difficulties, we discuss the relation between Woodruff’s system and two-dimensional semantics for many-valued logics, as developed by Hans Herzberger. (shrink)

Our aim is to provide a sequent calculus whose external consequence relation coincides with the three-valued paracomplete logic `of nonsense' introduced by Dmitry Bochvar and, independently, presented as the weak Kleene logic K3W by Stephen C. Kleene. The main features of this calculus are (i) that it is non-reflexive, i.e., Identity is not included as an explicit rule (although a restricted form of it with premises is derivable); (ii) that it includes rules where no variable-inclusion conditions are attached; and (...) (iii) that it is hybrid, insofar as it includes both left and right operational introduction as well as elimination rules. (shrink)

In his Paradoxes (1995: Cambridge University Press: 149) Mark Sainsbury presents the following pair of sentences: Line 1: The sentence written on Line 1 is nonsense. Line 2: The sentence written on Line 1 is nonsense. Sainsbury (1995: 149, 154) here makes three assertions: (1) The sentence in Line 1 is so viciously self-referential that it falls into the truth-value gap. The sentence is really nonsense. (2) The sentence in Line 2 is by contrast true. For it (...) states precisely that the sentence in Line 1 is nonsense. (3) The two sentences in Lines 1 and 2 are an example of the principle that two sentence tokens of the same sentence-type can have different truth-values, although they have the same reference and state the same property of the object of reference. In this paper, I argue that Sainsbury’s assumptions are false in all three cases. (shrink)

The austere view of nonsense says that the source of nonsense is not a violation of the rules of logical syntax, but nonsense is always due to a lack of meaning in one of the components of a sentence. In other words, the necessary and sufficient condition for nonsensicality is that no meaning has been assigned to a constituent in a sentence. The austere conception is the key ingredient of the resolute reading of Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus that presents (...) a therapeutical interpretation of the work, and rejects a possibility of conveying some ineffable truths by means of nonsensical sentences. In this paper, I defend the austere view against the most important objections. Firstly, I discuss textual sources for ascribing to Wittgenstein the austere view that have not been sufficiently thoroughly discussed yet. Next, I indicate that the apparent occurrence of words out of the context of a sentence on lists of verbs and in definitions is not in conflict with the version of the context principle recommended by austere theorists, since this argument does not sufficiently take into account the distinction between sign and symbol. Furthermore, I argue that the austere conception and the principle of compositionality are jointly tenable, for the former view does not exclude the existence of syntactic and semantic rules, but only shows that they are recognizable conditionally. Finally, I indicate that the austere view of nonsense should be seen as a viable option by a contemporary theorist of nonsense, for it helps us to avoid making controversial assumptions about the nature of meaning and content. (shrink)

This study investigated the effects of internal and demographic variables on civic development in late adolescence using the construct civic purpose. We conducted surveys on civic engagement with 480 high school seniors, and surveyed them again two years later. Using multivariate regression and linear mixed models, we tested the main effects of civic purpose dimensions (beyond-the-self motivation, future civic intention), ethnicity, and education on civic development from Time 1 to Time 2. Results showed that while there is an overall decrease (...) in civic engagement in the transition out of high school, both internal and social factors protected participants from steep civic decline. Interaction effects varied. Ethnicity and education interacted in different ways with the dimensions of civic purpose to predict change in traditional and expressive political engagement, and community service engagement. (shrink)

This paper argues that all-purpose pejoratives such as ‘jerk’ or ‘bastard’ are just plain vanilla descriptions of personality traits that are generally seen as impairing for the self and for interpersonal relationships across different contexts. Thus, all-purpose pejoratives derogate their referents through generalized conversational implicatures: it is common knowledge that those who use these terms accept certain kind of (negative) evaluations and that uses of those terms express such evaluations. One of the main advantages of this approach is that it (...) can be extended to more ‘thick’ pejoratives such as ‘wimp’ or ‘chicken’, which, as Kaplan (1998) himself suggested, are ‘purely descriptive’ of personality traits that are generally seen as ‘personal failings’. Before defending this theory, I criticize i) the standard assumption that allpurpose pejoratives are expressive and ii) the alternative semantic view that allpurpose pejoratives are conventionally associated with a judge parameter. (shrink)

The German philosopher K.C.F. Krause found deep conceptual parallels between his panentheistic system and the Indian philosophy of Vedānta. This article critically examines Krause’s understanding of Vedānta and popular Hindu religion. I argue that while Krause was correct in viewing the mystical panentheistic doctrine of Vedānta as a precursor to his own philosophy, he was also frequently misled by unreliable translations and secondary texts. Krause, I suggest, was mistaken in characterizing the Hindu practice of image worship as “polytheism” and “idolatry,” (...) and I contend, from a Vedāntic standpoint, that Krause’s denial of the divinity of Jesus is inconsistent with his own panentheistic metaphysics. (shrink)

In recent years, there has been a concerted attack on many of the precepts of Western civilization relating to the concept of God, truth, Christianity, morality, sex, the family, and even modern science, especially biology. The concern of this volume is to explore these and other attacks through the tools of philosophy, theology, science, and intuition. It seeks to bring clarity to the ongoing struggle of Western civilization to preserve its values and traditions. -/- The West is crumbling at an (...) accelerated rate. The unfolding erasure of history, objective morality, and truth has paved the way for our current predicament. We are now standing at the precipice of the future of human civilization. The attacks on the human person are unrelenting, malicious, multifaceted, and wide-ranging in their scope and breadth, from the time prior to birth until the moment of death. If you are granted the “right” to live, then you must be prepared for unending assaults on your, mind, body, and soul. Nevertheless, the spirit of man and the greatness of God are infinitely greater than any of these assaults. It is by making sense of nonsense that humanity will be able to navigate out of the West’s current quagmire. (shrink)

This chapter examines the ways in which French philosopher Gilles Deleuze offers conceptual resources for an enactive account of language, in particular his extensive consideration of language in The Logic of Sense. Specifically, Deleuze’s distinction between the nonsense of Lewis Carroll’s portmanteau creations and that of Antonin Artaud’s “transla- tion” of Carroll’s Jabberwocky highlights the need for an enactive, rather than merely embodied, approach to sense-making, particularly with regard to the general category of what Jakobson and Halle (1956) call (...) “sound symbolism”. (shrink)

ABSTRACT In the present study, I explore the relationship between purpose, which was measured by the Claremont Purpose Scale, and moral psychological indicators, moral reasoning, moral identity, and empathy. Purpose was quantified in terms of three subcomponents: meaning, goal, and beyond-the-self motivation. Moral reasoning was assessed in terms of utilization of postconventional moral reasoning. Moral identity was examined with two subscales: moral internalization, and symbolization. Among diverse subscales of empathy, I focused on empathic concern and perspective taking, which have been (...) reported to be strongly related to morality. To explore the best prediction models using the data, I employed Bayesian Model Selection and Bayesian regression analysis. In general, purpose was significantly predicted by most surveyed moral psychological indicators but not by moral symbolization. The best prediction model for beyond-the-self motivation included the most moral psychological indicator predictors including moral reasoning, which did not significantly predict other dependent variables. (shrink)

Positions taken in the current debate over free will can be seen as responses to the following conditional: -/- If every action is caused solely by another event and a cause necessitates its effect, then there is no action to which there is an alternative (C). -/- The Libertarian, who believes that alternatives are a requirement of free will, responds by denying the right conjunct of C’s antecedent, maintaining that some actions are caused, either mediately or immediately, by events whose (...) effects could be different, even if they were to recur under identical circumstances. We have here a denial of Laplacian Determinism (LD), according to which the condition of the world at any instant makes only one state possible at any other instant. One prominent defender of this view, Robert Kane, holds that unless an agent’s neural mechanisms operated indeterministicly in forming her character she is not responsible for its manifestations. This requirement is entailed by the principle of “ultimate responsibility” (UR) according to which an act is freely willed only if (a) its agent is personally responsible for its performance in the sense of having caused it to occur by voluntarily doing something that was avoidable and (b) there is no sufficient condition for its performance for which its agent is not personally responsible. The orthodox Compatibilist, adducing counterexamples to UR, argues that even if C and its antecedent are true, free will is possible. Ned Markosian has provided the Compatibilist with yet another response to UR-based objections to her view, wedding it to the notion of agent causation: here the deterministic causing of an act by its agent is necessary and sufficient for its being “morally free.” I criticize this view as inconsistent with the agent causalist's belief that moral responsibility precludes causation of a choice by any power other than the maker thereof: he being its efficient cause. (shrink)

This paper explores Plato’s views on the purpose of rhetorical form by surveying the way in which Socrates engages in speechmaking at several points in the Gorgias. I argue that Socrates has nothing in principle against the use of a long speech as part of the practice of philosophical inquiry and argument, provided that the speech is geared toward understanding. This reflects a key and relatively unremarked distinction that Socrates makes in the Gorgias between persuasion that comes from being convinced (...) and persuasion that comes from being taught. The kind of long speeches that Socrates objects to are those that have a conviction-based purpose. However, this leaves open the use of a wide variety of rhetorical techniques—pieces of argument, speechifying, analogy, myth, and exhortation—that have a teaching-based purpose, which is precisely the sort of rhetoric that Socrates licenses in the dialogue. (shrink)

This essay takes up the significance of Wittgenstein's philosophy for our understanding of literature (and vice versa) through a comparative reading of the stakes and aims of Kafka's and Wittgenstein's respective circa 1922 puzzle texts “Von den Gleichnissen” (“On Parables”) and the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. The essay builds upon the so-called resolute program of Wittgenstein interpretation developed by Cora Diamond, James Conant, and others, bringing its insights to bear on Kafka's perplexing work. The essay explores the ethical weight of these two (...) writers' investment in the philosophical depth of riddles, irony, and parabolic and nonsensical expression as unorthodox modes of indirect instruction about ordinary language and world, the yearning for transcendence, and the failure to achieve it. Both demanding works deal with the ethical difference between “getting” the philosophical import of a story or joke and not getting it in the context of an examination of the relationship (or lack thereof) between the activities and difficulties of everyday life, on the one hand, and those of literary expression and/or spiritual or philosophical teaching, on the other. Both strive to open readers to experience — as revealed through everyday language — by leading us beyond the dichotomy of facticity and transcendence, away from the urge to transcend the limits of language, and toward a recognition of the possibility of seeing our ordinary dealing with things as presenting a face of significance that is at once linguistically meaningful and ethically valuable. The central aim of this discussion of Wittgenstein's Tractatus and “Lecture on Ethics” alongside Kafka's parable is to examine the ways in which Wittgenstein's philosophical outlook, writing, and method (shaped by his general attraction to the Book and book writing as well as by his reading of certain works of literature) are deeply relevant to literary studies, and particularly to our understanding of literary modernism. (shrink)

Recent work in judgment and decisionmaking has stressed that institutions, like individuals, often rely on decisionmaking heuristics. But most of the institutional decisionmaking heuristics studied to date are highly firm- and industry-specific. This contrasts to the individual case, in which many heuristics are general-purpose rules suitable for a wide range of decision problems. Are there also general-purpose heuristics for institutional decisionmaking? In this paper, I argue that a number of methods recently developed for decisionmaking under deep uncertainty have a good (...) claim to be understood as general-purpose decisionmaking heuristics suitable for a broad range of institutional decision problems. (shrink)

Purported evidence for purposeful divine action in the cosmos may appear to warrant describing God as personal, as Swinburne proposes. In this paper, however, I argue that the primary understanding of what is meant by a person is formed by the experience of ”I’ -- ”you’ or second-person relatedness, a mode of relation with God that is not part of natural theology. moreover, even among human beings, the recognition of purposeful agency does not invariably lead to the attribution (...) of personhood in the usual sense. ”Person’ is therefore a misleading term to use of God on the evidence of cosmic purpose alone in the absence of suitable revelation. (shrink)

There has been considerable debate in legal philosophy about how to attribute purposes to rules. Separately, within cognitive science, there has been a growing body of research concerned with questions about how people ordinarily attribute purposes. Here, we argue that these two separate fields might be connected by experimental jurisprudence. Across four studies, we find evidence for the claim that people use the same criteria to attribute purposes to physical objects and to rules. In both cases, purpose attributions appear to (...) be governed not so much by original intention or by moral value as by current practice. We argue that these findings in the cognitive science of purpose attribution have implications for jurisprudential questions involving purposivist legal interpretation. (shrink)

This paper proposes a philosophically informed decision-making methodology, inspired by Aristotle, that encourages constructive discussions amongst employers and employees; is directed towards shared higher-level goals; is consistent with planning frameworks already in place in many businesses; can be amended over time without disruptive disputes; and accounts for the particularities of each industry, enterprise, workplace, and job. It seeks to establish a more fundamental basis for discussions about remote vs. in-person office work: specifically, the purpose and nature of the work of (...) those affected. If these matters can be decided, then subsequent discussions might be focused more upon the shared outcomes to which stakeholders are committed and less upon individual preferences and ‘hunches.’. (shrink)

Institutions undertake a huge variety of constitutive purposes. One of the roles of legitimacy is to protect and promote an institution’s pursuit of its purpose; state legitimacy is generally understood as the right to rule, for example. When considering legitimacy beyond the state, we have to take account of how differences in purposes change legitimacy. I focus in particular on how differences in purpose matter for the stringency of the standards that an institution must meet in order to be legitimate. (...) An important characteristic of an institution’s purpose is its deontic status, i.e. whether it is morally impermissible, merely permissible, or mandatory. Although this matters, it does so in some non-obvious ways; the mere fact of a morally impermissible purpose is not necessarily delegitimating, for example. I also consider the problem of conflicting, multiple, and contested institutional purposes, and the different theoretical roles for institutional purpose. Understanding how differences in purpose matter for an institution’s legitimacy is one part of the broader project of theorizing institutional legitimacy in the many contexts beyond the traditional context of the state. (shrink)

Study of Wittgenstein's claim in the Preface of the Tractatus that his thoughts are unassailably true and his declaration at the end of the work that his propositions are nonsensical.

The recent distribution of nude photos of a number of high profile Hong Kong celebrities has provoked intense discussion about the state of Hong Kong's obscenity and indecency laws. In this paper, I argue that Hong Kong's laws prohibiting the transfer of obscene and indecent information and images between consenting adults are both under-inclusive and over-inclusive. The Control of Obscene and Indecent Articles Ordinance is under-inclusive in that it does not adequately criminalise grave violations of privacy. It is also over-inclusive (...) because it is a blanket prohibition against the transfer by all parties (including consenting adults) of all forms of obscene and indecent materials. The laws unnecessarily violate the free expression rights of both the producer and consenting viewer of the offensive materials. The producer/publisher of such materials does not harm his or her audience as they willingly view such materials. The justification for maintaining a blanket prohibition against all transfers of such materials is invalid and utterly and totally out of touch with modern life in Hong Kong. The proponents of such laws have used Victorian positive morality considerations to justify continued criminalisation. These laws should be abrogated and replaced with a new piece of legislation that is narrowly tailored to deal with those types of offensive displays that are wrongful in a critical rather than a mere positive morality sense. Criminalisation should be limited to those offences that target children or use children in the production process, violate the rights of non-consenting adult audiences not to receive certain intimate information in certain public contexts, and violate privacy rights by publishing a person's private and intimate information without consent. If x obtains y's profoundly private information and publishes it without y's consent, then x violates y's privacy rights in a grave way. The violation in the right circumstances will justify a criminal law response rather than a mere civil law response. Similarly, if x and y copulate on a public bus they subject the captive audience to an offensive display which violates the non-consenting audience's right not to receive certain intimate information. I argue below that these types of privacy violations give the lawmaker a legitimate justification for invoking the criminal law. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to show that a corollary of resolute readings of Wittgenstein’s conception of nonsense cannot be sustained. First, I describe the corollary. Next, I point out the relevance to it of Wittgenstein’s discussion of family resemblance concepts. Then, I survey some typical uses of nonsense to see what they bring to an ordinary language treatment of the word “nonsense” and its relatives. I will subsequently consider the objection, on behalf of a resolute (...) reading, that “nonsense” is a term of philosophical criticism. Finally, I conclude that resolute readings have not sufficiently accounted for how nonsense behaves in our language; they have failed to heed Wittgenstein’s warning: “don’t think, but look!”. (shrink)

In this paper, findings from research in neuroscience of morality will be reviewed to consider the purposes of moral education. Particularly, I will focus on two main themes in neuroscience, novel neuroimaging and experimental investigations, and Bayesian learning mechanism. First, I will examine how neuroimaging and experimental studies contributed to our understanding of psychological mechanisms associated with moral functioning while addressing methodological concerns. Second, Bayesian learning mechanism will be introduced to acquire insights about how moral learning occurs in human brains. (...) Based on the reviewed neuroscientific research on morality, I will examine how evidence can support the model of moral education proposed by virtue ethics, Neo-Aristotelian moral philosophy in particular. Particularly, two main aims of virtue ethics-based moral education, the habituation of virtues and the cultivation of phronesis, will be discussed as the important purposes of moral education based on neuroscientific evidence. (shrink)

Numerous high-profile ethics scandals, rising inequality, and the detrimental effects of climate change dramatically underscore the need for business schools to instill a commitment to social purpose in their students. At the same time, the rising financial burden of education, increasing competition in the education space, and overreliance on graduates’ financial success as the accepted metric of quality have reinforced an instrumentalist climate. These conflicting aims between social and financial purpose have created an existential crisis for business education. To resolve (...) this impasse, we draw on the concept of moral self-awareness to offer a system-theoretical strategy for crowding-in a culture of ethics within business schools. We argue that to do so, business schools will need to (1) reframe the purpose of business, (2) reframe the meaning of professional success, and (3) reframe the ethos of business education itself. (shrink)

I aim to show that perception depends counterfactually on the action we want to perform. Perception is not all-purpose: what we want to do does influence what we see. After clarifying how this claim is different from the one at stake in the cognitive penetrability debate and what counterfactual dependence means in my claim, I will give a two-step argument: one’s perceptual attention depends counterfactually on one’s intention to perform an action and one’s perceptual processing depends counterfactually on one’s perceptual (...) attention. If we put these claims together, what we get is that one’s perceptual processing depends counterfactually on one’s intention to perform an action. (shrink)

Despite recent breakthroughs in the field of artificial intelligence (AI) – or more specifically machine learning (ML) algorithms for object recognition and natural language processing – it seems to be the majority view that current AI approaches are still no real match for natural intelligence (NI). More importantly, philosophers have collected a long catalogue of features which imply that NI works differently from current AI not only in a gradual sense, but in a more substantial way: NI is closely related (...) to consciousness, intentionality and experiential features like qualia (the subjective contents of mental states)1 and allows for understanding (e.g., taking insight into causal relationships instead of ‘blindly’ relying on correlations), as well as aesthetical and ethical judgement beyond what we can put into (explicit or data-induced implicit) rules to program machines with. Additionally, Psychologists find NI to range from unconscious psychological processes to focused information processing, and from embodied and implicit cognition to ‘true’ agency and creativity. NI thus seems to transcend any neurobiological functionalism by operating on ‘bits of meaning’ instead of information in the sense of data, quite unlike both the ‘good old fashioned’, symbolic AI of the past, as well as the current wave of deep neural network based, ‘sub-symbolic’ AI, which both share the idea of thinking as (only) information processing: In symbolic AI, the name explicitly references to its formal system based, i.e. essentially rule-based, nature, but also sub-symbolic AI is (implicitly) rule-based, only now via globally parametrized, nested functions. In the following I propose an alternative view of NI as information processing plus ‘bundle pushing’, discuss an example which illustrates how bundle pushing can cut information processing short,and suggest first ideas for scientific experiments in neuro-biology and information theory as further investigations. (shrink)

The paper indicates how social kinds may be internally and objectively unified in a way continuous with physical kinds. It argues that the practice of theorizing is continuous with other practices to the extent that theorists, like anyone engaged in a practice, needs to make choices that are responsive to purposes (and corresponding values) guiding the practice. The paper discusses Epstein's theory of anchoring, and argues for a theory of scaffolding social kinds.

This study investigated teachers’ and counsellors’ perception of a purpose-based career coaching as a strategy for increasing employability of graduates in Nigeria. The design employed to conduct this study was a cross-sectional survey design that featured desk research and sensitivity workshop. The participants were 100 teachers and 100 counsellors from South-East region of Nigeria. Multi-stage sampling procedure was adopted in this study. Purpose-based Career Coaching and Employability Questionnaire" (PCCEQ) was used to collect data, while descriptive and inferential analysis were used (...) to analyse data. The results obtained revealed that the knowledge level of the teachers and counsellors increased through the sensitivity workshop with respect to the use of purpose-based career coaching as a strategy for increasing employability of graduates. In addition, with a slight significant difference, the perception of both teachers and the counsellors was high in terms of application, workability and effectiveness of the purpose-based career coaching. Gender did not have any significant contribution or influence on the participants’ perceptions. Therefore, the conclusion reached in this study is that teachers and counsellors perceived purpose-based career coaching as effective, applicable and workable strategy for increasing employability of graduates in Nigeria. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that a commitment to science and the methodo- logical commitment to causal closure do not require a rejection of the idea that the choices of souls explain the occurrence of certain events in the physical world. Stated slightly differently, I maintain that one can both affirm science and believe that souls causally interfere in the course of events in the physical world. Such an affirmation and belief are compatible. In short, science vis-à-vis the methodological principle (...) of causal closure poses no problem for souls as explanatory agents. (shrink)

Linguistics of saying studies language in its birth. Language is the mental activity executed by speaking subjects. Linguistics of saying consists in analyzing speech acts as the result of an act of knowing. Speaking subjects speak because they have something to say. Tthey say because they define themselves before the circumstance they are in. And this is possible because they are able to know. Speaking, then, is speaking, saying and knowing. In this sense there is a progressive determination. Knowing makes (...) possible saying, and saying determines speaking, or, in other words: speaking involves saying and knowing, and saying involves knowing. The problem thus is to determine the meaningful intentional purpose of the individual speaker to say something in every speech act. (shrink)

This thesis has two parts. In Part I there is an argument for the conclusion that a linguistic phenomenon known as (radical) context-sensitivity is to be expected given the limitations of those who use language to reason about empirical states of affairs. The phenomenon arises as a consequence of a process that must be performed to use language to reason validly. In Part II it is explained why the phenomenon, understood in light of the discussion of Part I, does not (...) threaten the possibility of communication. Some potential readers might be interested to know that in Part I there's a fair amount of exegesis of arguments for the existence of (radical) context-sensitivity put forward by Charles Travis. Some potential readers might be interested to know that in Part II use is made of work by Erving Goffman and some conversation analysts. (shrink)

The paper starts with some textual distinctions concerning the concept of God in the metaphysical framework of two classical schools of Hindu philosophy, Sāṃkhya and Yoga. Then the author focuses on the functional and pedagogical aspects of prayer as well as practical justification of “religious meditation” in both philosophical schools. A special attention is put on the practice called īśvarapraṇidhāna, recommended in Yoga school, which is interpreted by the author as a form of non-theistic devotion. The meaning of the central (...) object of this concentration, that is puruṣa-viśeṣa, is reconsidered in detail. The subject matter is discussed in the wider context of yogic self-discipline that enables a practitioner to overcome ignorance ( avidyā) and the narrowness of egotic perspective (asmitā), recognized in the Hindu darśanas as the root-cause of all suffering or never-fulfilled-satisfaction ( duḥkha). The non-theistic devotion and spiritual pragmatism assumed by the adherents of Sāṃkhya-Yoga redefines the concept of “God” ( īśvara) as primarily an object of meditative practice and a special tool convenient for spiritual pedagogy. (shrink)