Conclusion: The present results support adequate psychometric properties in terms of factorial validity, reliability, convergent validity, and measurement invariance for the PHQ-4 in young adults in Hong Kong. The PHQ-4 demonstrated a substantial mediating role in the relationship between meaning in life and SI in the distress group. These findings support clinical relevance for using the PHQ-4 as a brief and valid measure of psychological distress in the Chinese context.

The precise nature of the relation between cognition and aesthetic judgment is clearly central to an understanding of Kant’s theory of taste in the “Critique of Aesthetic Judgment.” The Critique of Judgment itself is necessary, Kant says, because judgment constitutes a cognitive power in its own right, and its critique is therefore necessarily a part of the overall critique of pure reason. More particularly, however, the connection between cognition and aesthetic judgment plays a crucial role in Kant’s deduction of judgments (...) of taste: That deduction is intended to vindicate the claim to intersubjective validity implicit in the judgment of taste. This claim can only be justified, Kant thinks, if the judgment of taste has as its “determining ground” some form or aspect of cognition, for “[n]othing... can be communicated universally except cognition, as well as presentation insofar as it pertains to cognition.” The “purposiveness without purpose” exhibited by the beautiful object must therefore be purposiveness for “cognition in gener¬al.”[Erkenntnis überhaupt, V:217] But this use of cognition to establish the intersubjective validity of judgments of taste is also the source of the most serious problem with Kant’s theory. Kant clearly holds the view that to judge an object to be beautiful is to judge that it is in some sense suited for cognition. The theory of knowledge presented in the Critique of Pure Reason, however, concludes that all objects of experience are cognizable in the sense of being susceptible of subsumption under pure concepts of the understanding. If to say that an object is beautiful is to say that it is cognizable, and all objects are cognizable, then Kant’s theory has the consequence that all objects are beautiful. Furthermore, this connection between beauty and cognition threatens to make beauty a determinate concept, like the concepts of ‘cause’ or ‘chair.’ The result is that dealing with what I will call the problem of ugliness has become, in the words of one commentator, the “pre-eminent task” of interpretation of the third Critique. I will argue that this problem is best solved if we recognize a connection between Kant’s need in both the first and third Critiques for a defense of reason, and his claim, at the end of the “Critique of Aesthetic Judgment” that “beauty is the symbol of the morally good.”[V:353] The latter claim is the culmination of the “Critique of Aesthetic Judgment,” the argument of which is intended by Kant to show that every rational being must view at least some objects in nature as being suited for inclusion in a philosophical system organized around ideas of pure reason. In this system moral reason and theoretical understanding are related in a harmonious whole, with moral reason taking the leading role. The cognizability which is claimed for the object in the judgment of taste does not consist in the object’s being susceptible of subsumption under a concept. Rather, to say that an object is suited for “cognition in general” is to attribute to it the more specific property of being subsumable under a concept which can in turn be included in a unified philosophical system. At the same time, the relation between beauty and morality is only “indirect,” which is why beauty is the symbol but not the schema of the morally good. A key aspect of this reading will be the claim that from an epistemological standpoint the relation between natural beauty and the idea of the morally good is just the same as that between appearances and ideas of pure reason if the systematization of cognition is to be possible– the existence of beauty in nature serves to “establish the reality” of these ideas. Adopting this reading of the argument of the “Critique of Aesthetic Judgment” not only allows us to avoid saddling Kant with the view that all objects are beautiful, but also makes clear the hitherto less than clear relation between the published Introduction to the Critique of Judgment, in which Kant is primarily concerned with the concept of a philosophical system, and the “Critique of Aesthetic Judgment,” which centers on the seemingly unrelated notion of beauty as “purposiveness without purpose.”. (shrink)

This paper articulates a way to ground a relatively high prior probability for grand explanatory theories apart from an appeal to simplicity. I explore the possibility of enumerating the space of plausible grand theories of the universe by using the explanatory properties of possible views to limit the number of plausible theories. I motivate this alternative grounding by showing that Swinburne’s appeal to simplicity is problematic along several dimensions. I then argue that there are three plausible grand views—theism, atheism, and (...) axiarchism—which satisfy explanatory requirements for plausibility. Other possible views lack the explanatory virtue of these three theories. Consequently, this explanatory grounding provides a way of securing a nontrivial prior probability for theism, atheism, and axiarchism. An important upshot of my approach is that a modest amount of empirical evidence can bear significantly on the posterior probability of grand theories of the universe. (shrink)

Evidentialism is one of the most sensible claims of recent philosophy. Yet it is often joined with other theses about the structure of justification and the nature of experience that are dubious. In this paper, I argue that experience is not a basic source of evidence. I contend that for an experience to justify a belief, it must be independently plausible that the experience is reliable based on background information. The paper develops an account of plausibility and examines cases, including (...) differences in expertise, clairvoyance, and social perceptions, to illustrate how background knowledge is necessary for the justification of experiential beliefs. I consider challenges from Bergmann's distinction between learned and unlearned doxastic responses and Lyons's inferential reliabilism. I conclude that these challenges do not succeed; perceptual evidence requires a broader perspective that supports the reliability of the experiential evidence. (shrink)

In both the Treatise on Human Nature and the Enquiry Concerning Human Understand-ing David Hume defends the thesis that we are responsible for actions only insofar as those ac-tions reflect our character. In this paper I argue that this “character thesis” is untenable, and is incompatible with the naturalism that underlies his overall philosophy. His argument for the character thesis depends crucially on his account of the causation of human actio¬n. This is in contrast to Alisdair MacIntyre, who defends a (...) similar thesis in On Virtue on the basis of his view about the intelligibility of human actions. But if we examine the connection between Hume’s character ethic and his account of causation, we find that it conflicts with his claim that one cannot derive an ‘ought’ from an ‘is.’ This is no more than MacIntyre says is neces-sary for any virtue ethic. So what if we simply drop the ‘no ought from is’ thesis? This thesis is crucial to Hume’s naturalism, which is itself appealing to moral philosophers because it promises to avoi¬d picturing human thought as a sort of supernatural occurrence. As a result, we can conclude that if, in attempting to save H’s virtue ethic, we must give up his naturalism, we must also give up one the main reasons for being attracted to H’s worldview. We may also have to give up the very basis for Hume’s account of causation, and thus for his virtue ethic. Finally, there is a potential problem in that Hume’s causation thesis may not be as different from MacIntyre’s intelligibility thesis as they at first appear, and thus the incoherence of Hume’s view threatens MacIntyre’s virtue ethic as well. (shrink)

It is a widespread intuition that the coherence of independent reports provides a powerful reason to believe that the reports are true. Formal results by Huemer, M. 1997. “Probability and Coherence Justification.” Southern Journal of Philosophy 35: 463–72, Olsson, E. 2002. “What is the Problem of Coherence and Truth?” Journal of Philosophy XCIX : 246–72, Olsson, E. 2005. Against Coherence: Truth, Probability, and Justification. Oxford University Press., Bovens, L., and S. Hartmann. 2003. Bayesian Epistemology. Oxford University Press, prove that, under (...) certain conditions, coherence cannot increase the probability of the target claim. These formal results, known as ‘the impossibility theorems’ have been widely discussed in the literature. They are taken to have significant epistemic upshot. In particular, they are taken to show that reports must first individually confirm the target claim before the coherence of multiple reports offers any positive confirmation. In this paper, I dispute this epistemic interpretation. The impossibility theorems are consistent with the idea that the coherence of independent reports provides a powerful reason to believe that the reports are true even if the reports do not individually confirm prior to coherence. Once we see that the formal discoveries do not have this implication, we can recover a model of coherence justification consistent with Bayesianism and these results. This paper, thus, seeks to turn the tide of the negative findings for coherence reasoning by defending coherence as a unique source of confirmation. (shrink)

From Kant’s point of view, the puzzle about judgments of taste is that they claim to normativity—in Kant’s terms, to intersubjective validity or communicability—but nevertheless have only a subjective basis or “determining ground (Bestimmungsgrund).” The task of §9 of the Critique of Judgment in particular is to delineate an account of aesthetic response that accommodates Kant’s solution to this puzzle. If the aesthetic pleasure “precedes” the judgment—in other words, if the judgment is about the pleasure—then the judgment of taste would (...) be merely private, like other judgments about things that cause us pleasure. So the judgment must precede the pleasure. But “nothing… can be universally communicated except cognition, and representation so far as it belongs to cognition. (V:217) Therefore, the determining ground of the judgment of taste must be “the mental state encountered in the relation of the mental powers of representation to each other insofar as they relate a given cognition to cognition in general.” (V:217) A bit later, he calls this state of mind a “feeling of the free play of the powers of representation in a given representation for a given representation for a cognition in general.” The appeal to ‘cognition in general’ can do what Kant needs it to do only if it conveys the normativity of cognition simpliciter but not its conceptual determinacy. I want to propose that we take ‘cognition in general’ to mean ‘integration into a unified system of empirical cognition.’ If I am successful, it will have the consequence that the basis for the normativity of taste— that is, the expectation that others ought to agree with our judgments-- is the same as the basis for the normativity of cognitive judgments. (shrink)

The coherence of independent reports provides a strong reason to believe that the reports are true. This plausible claim has come under attack from recent work in Bayesian epistemology. This work shows that, under certain probabilistic conditions, coherence cannot increase the probability of the target claim. These theorems are taken to demonstrate that epistemic coherentism is untenable. To date no one has investigated how these results bear on different conceptions of coherence. I investigate this situation using Thagard’s ECHO model of (...) explanatory coherence. Thagard’s ECHO model provides a natural representation of the evidential significance of multiple independent reports. (shrink)

Prerequisite to memory is a past distinct from present. Because wave evolution is both continuous and time-reversible, the undisturbed quantum system lacks a distinct past and therefore the possibility of memory. With the quantum transition, a reversibly evolving superposition of values yields to an irreversible emergence of definite values in a distinct and transient moment of time. The succession of such moments generates an irretrievable past and thus the possibility of memory. Bohm’s notion of implicate and explicate order provides a (...) conceptual basis for memory as a general feature of nature akin to gravity and electromagnetism. I propose that natural memory is an outcome of the continuity of implicate time in the context of discontinuous explicate time. Among the ramifications of natural memory are that laws of nature can propagate through time much like habits and that personal memory does not require neural information storage. (shrink)

The problem of biological memory led Russell to propose the existence of mnemic causation, a mechanism by which past experience influences current thought directly, that is, without the need for a material intermediary in the form of a neural "memory trace." Russell appears to have been inspired by German biologist Richard Semon's concept of mnemic homophony, which conveys memory to consciousness on the basis of similarity between current and past circumstances. Semon, however, in no way denied a role for stable (...) neural structures or "engrams" in the memory process. In contrast to Russell, contemporary biologist Rupert Sheldrake provides a viable theory of memory by remaining true to Semon's original idea and expanding it beyond personal memory to the collective memory of species, encompassing not only mental but developmental memory. (shrink)

Bas van Fraassen has argued that explanatory reasoning does not provide confirmation for explanatory hypotheses because explanatory reasoning increases information and increasing information does not provide confirmation. We compare this argument with a skeptical argument that one should never add any beliefs because adding beliefs increases information and increasing information does not provide confirmation. We discuss the similarities between these two arguments and identify several problems with van Fraassen’s argument.

Though Einstein explained time dilation without recourse to a universal frame of reference, he erred by abolishing universal present moments. Relative simultaneity is insufficiently relativistic insofar as it depends on the absolute equality of reference frames in the measurement of the timing of events. Yet any given set of events privileges the frame in which the events take place. Relative to those events, the privileged frame yields the correct measurement of their timing while all other frames yield an incorrect measurement. (...) Instead of multiple frames occupying multiple times, one frame is correct and all others incorrect within a shared present moment. With the collapse of relative simultaneity, we may regard time as a succession of universal moments. Absolute simultaneity, in turn, explains why an accelerated inertial frame dilates in time rather than regressing to a prior moment relative to non-accelerated frames. In the context of flowing time, absolute simultaneity predicts time dilation while relative simultaneity predicts time regression. Einstein's explanation of time dilation is therefore incomplete. (shrink)

Johann Georg Hamann's "Metakritik über den Purismum der Vernunft" begins with an allusion to Hume's endorsement of Berkeley's rejection of abstract ideas. On the basis of a close examination of the text of the Metakritik, I show that Hamann's overall point is that Kant cannot, or anyway does not, justify the relation of his own linguistic framework to natural language. Thus the Critique cannot meet its own standard for critical self-examination.

In this paper I defend two closely related claims. The first claim, to which the first section of the paper is devoted, is that for Kant taste is a sort of cognition, that is, a form of awareness of reality for which questions of justification are appropriate. Nevertheless, In our appreciation of natural beauty we are aware of the suitability of appearances for inclusion in a rational system, albeit in a way that is subject to important limitations in comparison with (...) scientific cognition. In the second section of the paper, I will use this reading of Kant’s theory of taste to throw new light on Kant’s account of genius later in the “Critique of Aesthetic Judgment.”. (shrink)

The INBIOSA project brings together a group of experts across many disciplines who believe that science requires a revolutionary transformative step in order to address many of the vexing challenges presented by the world. It is INBIOSA’s purpose to enable the focused collaboration of an interdisciplinary community of original thinkers. This paper sets out the case for support for this effort. The focus of the transformative research program proposal is biology-centric. We admit that biology to date has been more fact-oriented (...) and less theoretical than physics. However, the key leverageable idea is that careful extension of the science of living systems can be more effectively applied to some of our most vexing modern problems than the prevailing scheme, derived from abstractions in physics. While these have some universal application and demonstrate computational advantages, they are not theoretically mandated for the living. A new set of mathematical abstractions derived from biology can now be similarly extended. This is made possible by leveraging new formal tools to understand abstraction and enable computability. [The latter has a much expanded meaning in our context from the one known and used in computer science and biology today, that is "by rote algorithmic means", since it is not known if a living system is computable in this sense (Mossio et al., 2009).] Two major challenges constitute the effort. The first challenge is to design an original general system of abstractions within the biological domain. The initial issue is descriptive leading to the explanatory. There has not yet been a serious formal examination of the abstractions of the biological domain. What is used today is an amalgam; much is inherited from physics (via the bridging abstractions of chemistry) and there are many new abstractions from advances in mathematics (incentivized by the need for more capable computational analyses). Interspersed are abstractions, concepts and underlying assumptions “native” to biology and distinct from the mechanical language of physics and computation as we know them. A pressing agenda should be to single out the most concrete and at the same time the most fundamental process-units in biology and to recruit them into the descriptive domain. Therefore, the first challenge is to build a coherent formal system of abstractions and operations that is truly native to living systems. Nothing will be thrown away, but many common methods will be philosophically recast, just as in physics relativity subsumed and reinterpreted Newtonian mechanics. -/- This step is required because we need a comprehensible, formal system to apply in many domains. Emphasis should be placed on the distinction between multi-perspective analysis and synthesis and on what could be the basic terms or tools needed. The second challenge is relatively simple: the actual application of this set of biology-centric ways and means to cross-disciplinary problems. In its early stages, this will seem to be a “new science”. This White Paper sets out the case of continuing support of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) for transformative research in biology and information processing centered on paradigm changes in the epistemological, ontological, mathematical and computational bases of the science of living systems. Today, curiously, living systems cannot be said to be anything more than dissipative structures organized internally by genetic information. There is not anything substantially different from abiotic systems other than the empirical nature of their robustness. We believe that there are other new and unique properties and patterns comprehensible at this bio-logical level. The report lays out a fundamental set of approaches to articulate these properties and patterns, and is composed as follows. -/- Sections 1 through 4 (preamble, introduction, motivation and major biomathematical problems) are incipient. Section 5 describes the issues affecting Integral Biomathics and Section 6 -- the aspects of the Grand Challenge we face with this project. Section 7 contemplates the effort to formalize a General Theory of Living Systems (GTLS) from what we have today. The goal is to have a formal system, equivalent to that which exists in the physics community. Here we define how to perceive the role of time in biology. Section 8 describes the initial efforts to apply this general theory of living systems in many domains, with special emphasis on crossdisciplinary problems and multiple domains spanning both “hard” and “soft” sciences. The expected result is a coherent collection of integrated mathematical techniques. Section 9 discusses the first two test cases, project proposals, of our approach. They are designed to demonstrate the ability of our approach to address “wicked problems” which span across physics, chemistry, biology, societies and societal dynamics. The solutions require integrated measurable results at multiple levels known as “grand challenges” to existing methods. Finally, Section 10 adheres to an appeal for action, advocating the necessity for further long-term support of the INBIOSA program. -/- The report is concluded with preliminary non-exclusive list of challenging research themes to address, as well as required administrative actions. The efforts described in the ten sections of this White Paper will proceed concurrently. Collectively, they describe a program that can be managed and measured as it progresses. (shrink)

Kant says that the Critique of Judgment offers a “transcendental deduction” for the principle of the purposiveness of nature, or PPN. This is the proposition that empirical laws must be viewed as “having been given by an understanding (even though not ours)” so that they can be unified in a system. I argue that if we take the PPN to concern the application to appearances of ideas of pure reason, we can understand why its transcendental deduction is so important to (...) Kant’s philosophical project, and why he is correct in thinking that it does not mark a retraction of his central philosophical views. (shrink)

In this paper I will be making a connection between Kant’s Critique of Judgment and John McDowell’s Mind and World. This connection is an apt one because McDowell’s work is concerned with the same issue that is at the center of the third Critique, namely the question of a “fit” between our concepts and the world of our experience. In the first section of the paper, I situate McDowell’s view in relation to Kant. Their key point of difference, I think, (...) is that McDowell wants to reject Kant’s distinction between phenomena and noumena. In the second section, I argue that in the Critique of Judgment Kant takes up the same problem with which McDowell is concerned in Mind and World, but without adopting his solution to this problem. In the third and final section, I speculate on Kant’s reasons for insisting on holding on to the distinction between phenomena and noumena. (shrink)

Kant tells us that just as understanding unifies appearances under concepts, reason seeks to unify empirical concepts into a system. But why do empirical concepts require unification in a system? The text of the Critique of Pure Reason provides the basis for starkly divergent answers to this question. On the one hand, Kant seems to take the Transcendental Analytic to have demonstrated the ability of the understanding to employ both pure and empirical concepts without participation by reason. On the other (...) hand, in a number of places Kant says things that imply that reason’s assumption that empirical concepts can and ought to be unified in a hierarchical system implicates understanding in addition to the categories, perhaps even elevating systematicity to a condition of the possibility of experience on a par with the categories. I argue for the intermediary position that systematization is necessary for the coherence of our empirical concepts, which is for Kant the criterion of empirical truth. The goal of complete coherence among our concepts is part of reason’s task of criticizing itself, and thus for the project of setting metaphysics on the “secure course of a science.” (Bvii). (shrink)

The central dilemma motivating the Antinomy of Taste in the “Critique of Aesthetic Judgment” centers on two seemingly incompatible but generally accepted propositions: On the one hand, we demand (Kant thinks) that others agree with our judgments of taste, which would be nonsensical if we did not suppose that beauty were in some sense a property of objects; on the other hand, disputes about taste cannot be settled through argument or proof in the manner of theoretical or moral disputes, which (...) suggests that we do not think of beauty as an objective property. Kant’s solution to this antinomy is to claim that judgments of taste indeed make use of a concept, but an indeterminate concept. I argue that judgments of taste are about objects [Gegenstände], and that the indeterminate concept of beauty differs from determinate ones in the manner of evidence that can be given for claims making use of it-- they can be supported only by the appeal to the subjective feeling of the harmony of the faculties. (shrink)

Bradford Hill (1965) highlighted nine aspects of the complex evidential situation a medical researcher faces when determining whether a causal relation exists between a disease and various conditions associated with it. These aspects are widely cited in the literature on epidemiological inference as justifying an inference to a causal claim, but the epistemological basis of the Hill aspects is not understood. We offer an explanatory coherentist interpretation, explicated by Thagard's ECHO model of explanatory coherence. The ECHO model captures the complexity (...) of epidemiological inference and provides a tractable model for inferring disease causation. We apply this model to three cases: the inference of a causal connection between the Zika virus and birth defects, the classic inference that smoking causes cancer, and John Snow’s inference about the cause of cholera. (shrink)

Alex Worsnip's recent book, Fitting Things Together: Coherence and the Demands of Structural Rationality, provides a sustained, wide-ranging defence of dualism.

Ted Honderich's theory of consciousness as existence, which he here calls Radical Externalism, starts with a good phenomenological observation: that perceptual experience appears to involve external things being immediately present to us. As P.F. Strawson once observed, when asked to describe my current perceptual state, it is normally enough simply to describe the things around me (Strawson, 1979, p. 97). But in my view that does not make the whole theory plausible.

This study focuses on the engagement of children and youth in their communities and the ways they are included in and excluded from community life. Using a content analysis of a small town United States newspaper over a one-year period, examples of engagement were identified and classified into 12 categories: programs, clubs and special events; fundraising and community ser- vice; business and community support; participation in community events; school events; athle- tic and other performances; employment; involvement in local planning and (...) decision making; serving as a community representative; visibility and recognition; criminal activity and accidents; and use of public space. Examples of community exclusion were identified as well. Young peo- ple were engaged primarily through activities that were adult-directed or supervised, or organi- zed through schools, churches, and youth clubs. There was little involvement in local planning, decision making, or activism. Some evidence existed of peer teaching, leadership, and self-initia- ted activities, as well as intentional efforts by adults to give youth a greater voice in community activities. Implications include several ethical issues regarding the role of young people in com- munity life, particularly young children, and the need for greater awareness on the part of com- munities of the contributions young people can make. (shrink)

Ted Poston's book Reason and Explanation: A Defense of Explanatory Coherentism is a book worthy of careful study. Poston develops and defends an explanationist theory of (epistemic) justification on which justification is a matter of explanatory coherence which in turn is a matter of conservativeness, explanatory power, and simplicity. He argues that his theory is consistent with Bayesianism. He argues, moreover, that his theory is needed as a supplement to Bayesianism. There are seven chapters. I provide a chapter-by-chapter summary along (...) with some substantive concerns. (shrink)

In this critical notice, I focus my attention on the chapters that deal with the explanationist response to skepticism.

This paper raises questions concerning Ted Morris’ interpretation of Hume’s notion of meaning and investigates the private and public aspects of Hume’s notion of meaning.

The genesis of time is explained in the spirit of constructivism combined with the activity approach to cognition. The cardinal temporal categories of present, past, and fu- ture are discussed in terms of action-thoughts understood as elementary units of activity whose structure is determined by linguistic semiosis. Husserl’s tripartite model of the phenomenology of time (prime perception, retention, protention) is applied to the ana- lysis of the subject’s experience of his actions. It is demonstrated that, while our lived present is (...) composed of the actually performed actions, our past and future are construc- ted by reflexive action-thoughts in the cognitive domain of language. It is emphasized that the construction of a temporal sequence that unites what is and what already or still is not, is possible only in linguistic semiosis. The analogy with Husserl’s tripartite structure of the time-consciousness flow helps elucidate the triad ‘present-past-future’ as an instance of the epistemological trap of language: ‘past’ and ‘future’ are mental const- ructs that belong to the present just as any other act of thinking. (shrink)

Perhaps no one has written more extensively, more deeply, and more insightfully about determinism and freedom than Ted Honderich. His influence and legacy with regard to the problem of free will—or the determinism problem, as he prefers to frame it—looms large. In these comments I would like to focus on three main aspects of Honderich ’s work: his defense of determinism and its consequences for origination and moral responsibility; his concern that the truth of determinism threatens and restricts, but does (...) not eliminate, our life-hopes; and his attack on the traditional justifications for punishment. In many ways, I see my own defense of free will skepticism as the natural successor to Honderich ’s work. There are, however, some small differences between us. My goal in this paper is to clarify our areas of agreement and disagreement and to acknowledge my enormous debt to Ted. If I can also move him toward my own more optimistic brand of free will skepticism that would be great too. (shrink)

In the third and final part of his A Theory of Determinism (TD) Ted Honderich addresses the fundamental question concerning “the consequences of determinism.” The critical question he aims to answer is what follows if determinism is true? This question is, of course, intimately bound up with the problem of free will and, in particular, with the question of whether or not the truth of determinism is compatible or incompatible with the sort of freedom required for moral responsibility. It is (...) Honderich’s aim to provide a solution to “the problem of the consequences of determinism” and a key element of this is his articulation and defence of an alternative response to the implications of determinism that collapses the familiar Compatibilist/Incompatibilist dichotomy. Honderich offers us a third way – the response of “Affirmation” (HFY 125-6). Although his account of Affirmation has application and relevance to issues and features beyond freedom and responsibility, my primary concern in this essay will be to examine Honderich’s theory of “Affirmation” as it concerns the free will problem. (shrink)

A chapter in an edited volume discussing philosophy and Ted Chiang's short stories. In this chapter, I show how philosophical debates about imaginative resistance and what can/can't be fictionally true influence our interpretation of "Division by Zero.".

I raise a problem about the possibility of metaphysics originally raised by Kant: what explains the fact that the terms in our metaphysical theories (e.g. “property”) refer to entities and structures (e.g. properties) in the world? I distinguish a meta-metaphysical view that can easily answer such questions (“deflationism”) from a meta-metaphysical view for which this explanatory task is more difficult (which I call the “substantive” view of metaphysics). I then canvass responses that the substantive metaphysician can give to this Kantian (...) demand for an explanation of reference in metaphysics. I argue that these responses are either inadequate, or depend, implicitly or explicitly, on the idea of “joint carving”: carving at the joints is part of the explanation of reference-facts quite generally and our metaphysical terms in particular refer because they carve at the joints. I examine Ted Sider’s recent work on joint carving and structure and argue that it cannot fill the explanatory gap. I conclude that this is reason ceterus paribus to reject the substantive view of metaphysics. Kant’s critique, far from being obsolete, applies to the most cutting-edge of contemporary meta-metaphysical views. (shrink)

Ask most any cognitive scientist working today if a digital computational system could develop aesthetic sensibility and you will likely receive the optimistic reply that this remains an open empirical question. However, I attempt to show, while drawing upon the later Wittgenstein, that the correct answer is in fact available. And it is a negative a priori. It would seem, for example, that recent computational successes in generative AI and textual attribution, most notably those of Donald Foster (famed finder of (...) Ted Kazinski a.k.a. “the Unibomber”) speak favorably of the connectionist model's capacity to overcome the “aspect blindness” handicap in this domain. I argue however that such results are only achievable when rigid input‐to‐output parameters are given, and that this element is precisely what is absent in standard examples of aesthetic judgment. I thus conclude that while the connectionist model anticipated by Turing may provide the best approach for the AI project, its capacity for meeting its own sufficiency requirements is necessarily crippled by its inability to share in what can be generally referred to as the collective engagements of human solidarity. (shrink)

Book review of Earl Conee and Ted Sider's "Riddles of Existence: A Guided Tour of Metaphysics", written in Spanish. || Reseña del libro "Riddles of Existence: A Guided Tour of Metaphysics", escrito por Earl Conee y Ted Sider.

Ted Sider’s Proportionality of Justice condition requires that any two moral agents instantiating nearly the same moral state be treated in nearly the same way. I provide a countermodel in supervaluation semantics to the proportionality of justice condition. It is possible that moral agents S and S' are in nearly the same moral state, S' is beyond all redemption and S is not. It is consistent with perfect justice then that moral agents that are not beyond redemption go determinately to (...) heaven and moral agents that are beyond all redemption go determinately to hell. I conclude that moral agents that are in nearly the same moral state may be treated in very unequal ways. (shrink)

Ted Sider has shown that my indeterminism argument for comparativist theories of quantity also applies to Mundy's absolutist theory. This is because Mundy's theory posits only "pure" relations, i.e. relations between values of the same quantity (between masses and other masses, or distances and other distances). It is straightforward to solve the problem by positing additional mixed relations.

Ted Honderich's edited volume, with introductions to his chosen philosophers shows his contempt/ignorance of the non-white world's thinkers. Further, this review points out the iterative nature of Western philosophy today. The book under review is banal and shows the pathetic state of philosophising in the West now in 2020.

I here argue that Ted Sider's indeterminacy argument against vagueness in quantifiers fails. Sider claims that vagueness entails precisifications, but holds that precisifications of quantifiers cannot be coherently described: they will either deliver the wrong logical form to quantified sentences, or involve a presupposition that contradicts the claim that the quantifier is vague. Assuming (as does Sider) that the “connectedness” of objects can be precisely defined, I present a counter-example to Sider's contention, consisting of a partial, implicit definition of the (...) existential quantifier that in effect sets a given degree of connectedness among the putative parts of an object as a condition upon there being something (in the sense in question) with those parts. I then argue that such an implicit definition, taken together with an “auxiliary logic” (e.g., introduction and elimination rules), proves to function as a precisification in just the same way as paradigmatic precisifications of, e.g., “red”. I also argue that with a quantifier that is stipulated as maximally tolerant as to what mereological sums there are, precisifications can be given in the form of truth-conditions of quantified sentences, rather than by implicit definition. (shrink)

In this essay, Heidegger's theses on art, as he develops them in the text "On the Origin of the Work of Art," are reconstructed, interpreted, and critically evalua- ted. In doing so, we pursue a threefold goal. First, his theses on art are put in relation to the main theme of his philosophy: the question of being. Second, the different ways in which Heidegger takes art to be epistemically valuable are dif- ferentiated and reconstructed in detail. Third, Heidegger's theses are (...) related to the contemporary debate on the epistemic value of art and critically discussed. (shrink)

In Writing the Book of the World, Ted Sider argues that David Lewis’s distinction between those predicates which are ‘perfectly natural’ and those which are not can be extended so that it applies to words of all semantic types. Just as there are perfectly natural predicates, there may be perfectly natural connectives, operators, singular terms and so on. According to Sider, one of our goals as metaphysicians should be to identify the perfectly natural words. Sider claims that there is a (...) perfectly natural first-order quantifier. I argue that this claim is not justified. Quine has shown that we can dispense with first-order quantifiers, by using a family of ‘predicate functors’ instead. I argue that we have no reason to think that it is the first-order quantifiers, rather than Quine’s predicate functors, which are perfectly natural. The discussion of quantification is used to provide some motivation for a general scepticism about Sider’s project. Shamik Dasgupta’s ‘generalism’ and Jason Turner’s critique of ‘ontological nihilism’ are also discussed. (shrink)

This special issue of the Canadian Journal of Philosophy is dedicated to Timothy Williamson's work on modality. It consists of a new paper by Williamson followed by papers on Williamson's work on modality, with each followed by a reply by Williamson. -/- Contributors: Andrew Bacon, Kit Fine, Peter Fritz, Jeremy Goodman, John Hawthorne, Øystein Linnebo, Ted Sider, Robert Stalnaker, Meghan Sullivan, Gabriel Uzquiano, Barbara Vetter, Timothy Williamson, Juhani Yli-Vakkuri.

There is currently debate between deflationists and anti-deflationists about the ontology of persisting objects. Some deflationists think that disputes between, for example, four-dimensionalists (e.g. Ted Sider and David Lewis) and quasi-nihilists (e.g. Peter Van Inwagen and Trenton Merricks) are merely verbal disputes. Anti-deflationists deny this. Eli Hirsch is a deflationist who maintains that many ontological disputes are merely verbal. Theodore Sider maintains that the disputes are not merely verbal. Hirsch and Sider are thus engaged in a metaontological dispute. In this (...) paper, I argue that Hirsch's metaontological dispute with Sider is, by Hirsch's own lights, itself merely verbal. I conclude that the mere verbalness of his metaontological dispute with Sider suggests that Hirsch's account of what makes a dispute merely verbal may be problematic. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Drawing inspiration from Fred Dretske, L. S. Carrier, John A. Barker, and Robert Nozick, we develop a tracking analysis of knowing according to which a true belief constitutes knowledge if and only if it is based on reasons that are sensitive to the fact that makes it true, that is, reasons that wouldn’t obtain if the belief weren’t true. We show that our sensitivity analysis handles numerous Gettier-type cases and lottery problems, blocks pathways leading to skepticism, and validates the (...) epistemic closure thesis that correct inferences from known premises yield knowledge of the conclusions. We discuss the plausible views of Ted Warfield and Branden Fitelson regarding cases of knowledge acquired via inference from false premises, and we show how our sensitivity analysis can account for such cases. We present arguments designed to discredit putative counterexamples to sensitivity analyses recently proffered by Tristan Haze, John Williams and Neil Sinhababu, which involve true statements made by untrustworthy informants and strange clocks that sometimes display the correct time while running backwards. Finally, we show that in virtue of employing the paradox-free subjunctive conditionals codified by Relevance Logic theorists instead of the paradox-laden subjunctive conditionals codified by Robert Stalnaker and David Lewis. (shrink)

I explore the claim that “fictive imagining” – imagining what it is like to be a character – can be morally dangerous. In particular, I consider the controversy over William Styron’s imagining the revolutionary protagonist in his Confessions of Nat Turner. I employ Ted Cohen’s model of fictive imagining to argue, following a generally Kantian line of thought, that fictive imagining can be dangerous if one has the wrong motives. After considering several possible motives, I argue that only internally directed (...) motives can satisfy the moral concern. Finally, I suggest that when one has the right motives, fictive imagining is morally praiseworthy since it improves one’s ability to imagine the lives of others. (shrink)

In the Phaedrus, Socreates sympathetically describes the ability “to cut up each kind according to its species along its natural joints, and to try not to splinter any part, as a bad butcher might do.” (265e) In contemporary philosophy, Ted Sider (2009, 2011) defends the same idea. As I shall put it, Plato and Sider’s idea is that limning structure is an epistemic goal. My aim in this paper is to articulate and defend this idea. First, I’ll articulate the notion (...) of a structural proposition (§1), and the notion of an epistemic goal (§2), where I’ll assume that epistemic goals are species of accuracy. Then (§3), I’ll argue against some proposals for understanding the idea that limning structure is an epistemic goal: limning structure is neither an aim of belief (§3.1), nor of inquiry (§3.2), nor of concept possession (§3.3). Importantly, non-structural belief is not thereby inaccurate; belief does not “aim” at being structural. Next (§4), I’ll propose a framework for understanding the idea that limning structure is an epistemic goal, and defend that idea. What is required, to defend the view that limning structure is an epistemic goal, is the notion of (what I call) theorizing – a propositional attitude that, unlike belief, does “aim” at being structural (§4.1). I’ll argue that structural truths constitute a species of “important” truths (§4.2), and that apt theorizing is a species of understanding (§4.3). Finally (§5), I’ll discuss the possibility that there is no structure. (shrink)

I argue for the possibility of a proprioceptive art in addition to, for example, visual or auditory arts, where aspects of some martial arts will serve as examples of that art form. My argument is inspired by a thought of Ted Shawn’s, one of the pioneers of American modern dance: "Dance is the only art wherein we ourselves are the stuff in which it is made.” In a first step, I point out that in some practices of martial arts (in (...) the paper I will introduce “hyongs” & “katas”), we are, too, the stuff these performances are made of. Second, I show that we, as martial arts practitioners, are not in the first place visual or auditorial observers (as common in painting or music or ballet) but introspective, proprioceptive perceivers of our bodies and their movements. (As a corollary we get that we are, in such a case, necessarily our exclusive audience.) In an third crucial step, I show that the martial arts practices referred to, hyongs & katas, and especially the proprioceptive aspects thereof, can indeed count as art. Thus, proprioceptive art is possible because some practices of some martial arts are actual existing examples of that art form. (shrink)

Special Issue “Risks of artificial general intelligence”, Journal of Experimental and Theoretical Artificial Intelligence, 26/3 (2014), ed. Vincent C. Müller. http://www.tandfonline.com/toc/teta20/26/3# - Risks of general artificial intelligence, Vincent C. Müller, pages 297-301 - Autonomous technology and the greater human good - Steve Omohundro - pages 303-315 - - - The errors, insights and lessons of famous AI predictions – and what they mean for the future - Stuart Armstrong, Kaj Sotala & Seán S. Ó hÉigeartaigh - pages 317-342 - - (...) - The path to more general artificial intelligence - Ted Goertzel - pages 343-354 - - - Limitations and risks of machine ethics - Miles Brundage - pages 355-372 - - - Utility function security in artificially intelligent agents - Roman V. Yampolskiy - pages 373-389 - - - GOLEM: towards an AGI meta-architecture enabling both goal preservation and radical self-improvement - Ben Goertzel - pages 391-403 - - - Universal empathy and ethical bias for artificial general intelligence - Alexey Potapov & Sergey Rodionov - pages 405-416 - - - Bounding the impact of AGI - András Kornai - pages 417-438 - - - Ethics of brain emulations - Anders Sandberg - pages 439-457. (shrink)

This paper presents a mutual confrontation of the oeuvres of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881–1955) and Jacques Lacan (1901–1980), highlighting their relevance for the planetary challenges we are facing today. I will present their views on technoscience, environmental pollution and religious faith, focussing on human genomics as a case study. Both authors claim that technoscience reflects a tendency towards symbolisation: incorporating the biosphere (liv- ing nature) into the “symbolic order’ (Lacan) or ‘noosphere’ (Teilhard). On various occasions, Lacan refers to Teilhard’s (...) concept of the hominization of the planet and their dialogue culminates in a ‘final conversation’ between Teilhard and Lacan in 1954, during a reception organised by the journal Psyché. I will conclude that the Teilhard-Lacan dialogue is highly relevant for current debates concerning the Anthropocene, as a moment of global awakening and global crisis. Processes of hominization allowed humans to become literate beings, littering the planet as well: humans as literate litterers. Whereas Teilhard argues that technoscience and self-direc- ted evolution are about to culminate in what he refers to as point Omega, Lacan rather stresses the hazards involved in this optimistic desire towards all-encompassing synthesis, unification and fulfilment. (shrink)

Arrival offers a useful thought experiment in the philosophy of mind and language. Assessing human linguists' interpretive efforts to understand the alien heptapod form of life in both the movie and the novella from which it was adapted (Ted Chiang’s “Story of Your Life”) teach us how our understanding of selfhood shapes our conception of agency. Arrival’s reflexive commentary on the cinematic experience is also an argument for the value of learning to communicate in cinematic language.

Bob Solomon enjoyed humor, a good laugh. He was not a teller and collector of jokes or of humorous stories, as Ted Cohen and Noël Carroll are. He did not cultivate clever witticisms. Rather, his interest was in viewing life’s contingency and absurdity for the humor that can be found there, and the target of this humor was as likely to be himself or his friends as it was to be strangers. Bob also displayed philosophical courage. He once argued before (...) an incredulous audience of philosophers that the Three Stooges are funny, and admitted unashamedly to being a life-long devotee. In the published version of that talk he observes: “few adults in their chosen professions would dare attempt a Stooges gesture at risk of being terminally dismissed, but most men carry the secret knowledge around with them, and, in a wild fit of catharsis, display a tell-tale Stooges gesture when the door closes and the boss is out of view. I only hesitate to suggest that it is one of the most basic bonds between men, and perhaps the fact that it mystifies and sometimes horrifies women is far more elemental than the mere phrase ‘a sense of humor’ could ever suggest”. (shrink)