Temporal Changes in Ovarian Gonadotropin-Releasing Hormone mRNA Levels by Gonadotropins in the Rat Sung Ho Lee, Eun-Seob Song, Sun Kyeong Yu, Changmee Kim, Dae Kee Lee, Wan Sung Choi l and Kyungjin Kim* Department of Molecular Biofogy and SRC for Cell Differentiation, Seoul National University, Seoul 150-742, Korea; IDepartment of Anatomy, College of Medicine, Gyeongsanf; National University, Chinju 660-280, Korea (Recei·. cd on December 29, 1993) The present study examines whether gonadotropins are involved in the regulation of ovarian GnRH gene (...) expression and how ovarian GnRH gene expression temporalJy correlates with alterations in hypothalamic GnRH, pituitary LH~ gene expression in respons to gonadotropins. Hypothalamic and ovarian GnRH mRNA and pituitary LH~ mRNA levels were determined by respective RNA-blot hybridizations, and ovarian GnRH and estradiol contents and serum LH levels were measured by respective radioimmunoassays. Three animal models such as 1) PMSG-treated, 2) PMSG and heG-treated immature rats and 3) proestrous stage of adult rats were used. Immature rats (25-days old) were administered with PMSG (10 iu) at 10:00 hand 48 h later with heG (10 iu) to induce ovulation. In the PMSG-injected model, hypothalamic GnRH mRNA levels were markedly augmented about 9-fold at 50 h, and pituitary LH mRNA 3-fold at 52 h after PMSG administration. Serum LH levels were increased to the preovulatory surge levels at 56 h, and ovarian GnRH mRNA levels were augmented 4-fold at 60 h after PMSG injection. Administration of heG also induced a marked enhancement in ovarian GnRH mRNA levels in comparison to the values shown in both intact and PMSGtreated rats at 52 hand 54 h, respectively. In the proestrous stage of normal adult rats, pituitary LH~ mRNA levels were peaked at 16:00 h. The preovulatory LH surge was evident at 4 h before increment in ovarian GnRH mRNA levels as shown in PMSG-treated rats. The present study clearly showed the sequential increase in hypothalamic GnRH mRNA, pituitary LH~ mRNA and ovarian GnRH mRNA levels, indicating that ovarian GnRH may play a possible role in the control of follicular maturation and the ovulation process. (shrink)

The issue of how to identify the liability of subjects after a traffic accident takes place remains a puzzle regarding the SAE classification system. The SAE system is not good at dealing with the problem of responsibility evaluation; therefore, building a new classification system for self-driving cars from the perspective of the subject's liability is a possible way to solve this problem. This new system divides automated driving into three levels: i) assisted driving based on the will of drivers, ii) (...) automated driving based on the will of the manufacturers, and iii) fully automated driving based on social will. The corresponding responsible subjects for level one, level two, and level three are the drivers, the manufacturers, and society, respectively. (shrink)

For the past three years, Coronavirus-19 (Covid-19) has become one of the major global health problems. Unlike any previous virus in the past decades, Covid-19 has shown its unprecedented spreading speed, infection rate, fatality rate, etc. Under this urgent disease outbursting event, scientists around the globe, through the myriad of research and experiments, successfully developed effective vaccines. However, like many other medical innovations, Covid-19 vaccines are categorized as intellectual properties and a scarce resource. As a consequence, the citizens of developed (...) and developing countries face an imbalanced distribution of affordable vaccines. The formation of this issue is not only due to manufacturing, transportation, and other infrastructures, but also strongly correlated with aspects in the legal field, such as intellectual property rights (IPRs). With a humane common sense of vaccination many people, through comparative research method, this article aims to discuss the conflicts between the global crisis of Force Majeure and the interests of certain countries or corporations, possible solutions to resolve this conflict, and future coping strategies that ought to be published. (shrink)

Source: Author: Marwan Kadhim Mohammed, Wan Roselezam Wan Yahya Martin Amis's manipulation of the patriarchal concept of power is a notable indication of his transgressive attitudes that raise remarkable questions about the human identity. Transgressing power investigates the violation of the normal and familiar trends of literature in order to circulate a new discourse by which a new identity is reframed. Hence, the study of power in Martin Amis's novels, as an important technique of identity re-definition, is not taken into (...) consideration in the light of Foucault's theory of power. The objective of this study is to examine the role applied by transgression as a technique of subverting the common discourse of power in the field of identity re-formation. The study investigates the concept of power manipulated in Amis's Money to define the identity of the 'New Man'. Accordingly, the Foucauldian theory of power is taken as a framework of this study. The study reveals a conclusion in which the transgressive aspects of power are effectively utilized by Amis to re-define the identity of his protagonist in the novel. Although John Self-has finally lost his name and fortune, which are necessary demands to define one's self-in the patriarchal society, he finds his own new identity away from the materialistic norms of the common discourse. ]]>. (shrink)

Relationships with international students can be beneficial to higher education in terms of financial and human resources. For this reason, establishing and maintaining such relationships are usually pre-eminent concerns. In this study, we extended the application of the disconfirmation expectation model by incorporating components from subjective task value to predict the loyalty of international students toward their host countries. On a sample of 410 Vietnamese students enrolled in establishments of higher education in over 15 countries across the globe, we employed (...) structural equation model to construct the conceptual model. Our empirical findings revealed that while the roles of satisfaction and disconfirmation are still important as direct and indirect antecedents of international student loyalty, its most powerful predictors are the three components of subjective task value: attainment, utility and intrinsic. These insights result in a number of implications for actors on the higher ducation scene, such as heads of institutions and policy makers. (shrink)

Plagiarism, which Indiana University’s Writing Tutorial Service defines as "using others' ideas and words without clearly acknowledging the source of that information", is often described as a major problem. However, standard definitions such as this one suggest only limited solutions to the problem: acknowledging sources or forbidding reuse. Since all scholarship involves engaging with the ideas of others and academic writing tends to reuse certain expressions, these solutions – though important – are of limited utility. This paper examines a type (...) of plagiarism to which the standard solutions do not apply: the reuse of linguistic models without sufficient attention to the logic or thoughts the texts express. We present two cases of plagiarism, from which we can see that plagiarism shows a gap between the written texts and the thoughts of the author. In order to fill the gap, one needs to know how to integrate not only the texts borrowed from others into one’s writing but also the thoughts expressed by the texts. Thus a satisfactory solution to the plagiarism problem requires not only writing skills but also logical thinking skills. (shrink)

The current COVID-19 pandemic and the previous SARS/MERS outbreaks of 2003 and 2012 have resulted in a series of major global public health crises. We argue that in the interest of developing effective and safe vaccines and drugs and to better understand coronaviruses and associated disease mechenisms it is necessary to integrate the large and exponentially growing body of heterogeneous coronavirus data. Ontologies play an important role in standard-based knowledge and data representation, integration, sharing, and analysis. Accordingly, we initiated the (...) development of the community-based Coronavirus Infectious Disease Ontology in early 2020. -/- As an Open Biomedical Ontology (OBO) library ontology, CIDO is open source and interoperable with other existing OBO ontologies. CIDO is aligned with the Basic Formal Ontology and Viral Infectious Disease Ontology. CIDO has imported terms from over 30 OBO ontologies. For example, CIDO imports all SARS-CoV-2 protein terms from the Protein Ontology, COVID-19-related phenotype terms from the Human Phenotype Ontology, and over 100 COVID-19 terms for vaccines (both authorized and in clinical trial) from the Vaccine Ontology. CIDO systematically represents variants of SARS-CoV-2 viruses and over 300 amino acid substitutions therein, along with over 300 diagnostic kits and methods. CIDO also describes hundreds of host-coronavirus protein-protein interactions (PPIs) and the drugs that target proteins in these PPIs. CIDO has been used to model COVID-19 related phenomena in areas such as epidemiology. The scope of CIDO was evaluated by visual analysis supported by a summarization network method. CIDO has been used in various applications such as term standardization, inference, natural language processing (NLP) and clinical data integration. We have applied the amino acid variant knowledge present in CIDO to analyze differences between SARS-CoV-2 Delta and Omicron variants. CIDO's integrative host-coronavirus PPIs and drug-target knowledge has also been used to support drug repurposing for COVID-19 treatment. -/- CIDO represents entities and relations in the domain of coronavirus diseases with a special focus on COVID-19. It supports shared knowledge representation, data and metadata standardization and integration, and has been used in a range of applications. (shrink)

The current discussions of conceptual schemes and related topics are misguided; for they have been focused too much on the truth-conditional notions of meaning/concepts and translation/interpretation in Tarski's style. It is exactly due to such a Quinean interpretation of the notion of conceptual schemes that the very notion of conceptual schemes falls prey to Davidson's attack. We argue that what should concern us in the discussions of conceptual schemes and related issues, following the initiatives of I. Hacking, T. Kuhn, and (...) N. Rescher, is not the truth-values of assertions, but rather the truthvalue-status of the sentences used to make the assertions. This is because the genuine conceptual innovation between alternative theories/languages does not lie in differences in determining the truth-values of their sentences, but turns on whether these sentences have truth-values when considered within the context of a competing one. The core of conceptual relativism does not consist in the claim that different conceptual schemes may yield incommensurable truth claims, but rather that different conceptual schemes may yield incompatible truth-value-status and therefore lead to distinct perceptions of reality. Conceptual schemes are no longer seen as sentential languages consisting of a set of sentences accepted as true, but rather seen as metaphysical presuppositions of presuppositional languages.[ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]. (shrink)

What the authors attempt to address in this paper is a Kantian question: not whether, but how is cross -cultural understanding possible? And specifically, what is a more effective approach for cross -cultural understanding? The answer lies in an analysis of two different models of cross -cultural understanding, that is, propositional and hermeneutic understanding. To begin with, the author presents a linguistic interpretation of culture, i.e., a culture as a linguistically formulated and transmitted symbolic system with its conceptual core as (...) a scheme of basic cultural presuppositions, which it referred to as a cultural language. After exploring the essential role of cultural presuppositions in cross -cultural understanding, the author discusses the traditional model of cross -cultural understanding, namely, the propositional model. Through critically examining the two popular versions of the propositional model, i.e., the projective approach and the adoptive approach to cross -cultural understanding, it is found that cross -cultural propositional understanding is doomed to failure. To move us beyond the absolutism -relativism trap embedded within propositional understanding, the author first introduces and discusses Hans-Georg Gadamer’s hermeneutic understanding, and then applies Hans-Georg Gadamer’s hermeneutic model of understanding to cross -cultural understanding. It is finally concluded that cross -cultural understanding is essentially hermeneutic—including the case of cultural learning, not propositional. Therefore, cross -cultural understanding is hermeneutically possible. (shrink)

This paper is the introduction to the volume. It gives an argumentative view of the philosophical landscape concerning incommensurability and incomparability. It argues that incomparability, not incommensurability, is the important phenomenon on which philosophers should be focusing and that the arguments for the existence of incomparability are so far not compelling.

Can quite different values be rationally weighed against one another? Can the value of one thing always be ranked as greater than, equal to, or less than the value of something else? If the answer to these questions is no, then in what areas do we find commensurability and comparability unavailable? And what are the implications for moral and legal decision making? This book struggles with these questions, and arrives at distinctly different answers.".

This study used a flame atomic absorption spectrometer (FAAS) and atomic fluorescence spec-trophotometer (AFS) to detect the concentrations of chromium (Cr), cadmium (Cd), lead (Pb), hy-drargyrum (Hg) and arsenic (As) in soils and three genotypes of vegetables in greenhouse, as well as analyzed the physical and chemical properties of soils, including soil pH, soil organic matter (OM), basic nutrients, electrical conductivity (EC) and cation exchange capacity (CEC) in Guan- zhong areas, Shaanxi province, China. The results showed that comparing to subsoil, (...) the sampled topsoil is enriched in Cr, Cd, Pb, As and Hg. Cd (0.83 - 3.17 mg·kg-1) and Hg (0.40 - 1.44 mg·kg-1) are exceeding the limited value stated in “the 2006 Greenhouse Vegetable Producing Environmental Quality Evaluation Standards” of 0.40 mg·kg-1 and 0.35 mg·kg-1 respectively. However, Nanzhuang greenhouse soil is within the limits. The heavy metal pollution index (HPI) of soil in Sanyuan (8.10) is the highest and in Dongzhang (4.23) is the lowest. The contents of Pb (0.201 - 0.376 mg·kg-1) were exceeding the limited value (0.20 mg·kg-1) in vegetables species, and Cd (0.0363 - 0.0572 mg·kg-1) in some place were also exceeding the limited value (0.05 mg·kg-1). Greenhouse soils were becoming acidified year after year; the ratios of N, P and K in soil were seriously imbalanced. According to the impacting factors, OM, pH, available P, EC and CEC have obviously effected the accumulation of Cr and Hg. However, there was not enough evidence for the effects of available nitrogen and available potassium. (shrink)

As past studies of the association between parent-child relationship and problematic internet use show mixed results and are influenced by many factors, this meta-analysis of 75 primary Chinese and English language studies from 1990 to 2021 with 110,601 participants (aged 6−25 years) explored (a) the overall association between parent-child relationship and problematic internet use, and (b) whether the association is affected by their types, country, measures, objects of the parent-child relationship, gender, age, year and publication types. We used funnel plots, (...) Classic fail-safe N and Egger's test to test for publication bias and for moderation with the homogeneity tests. The results showed a negative association between quality of parent-child relationship and problematic internet use (r = −0.18, 95% CI = [−0.20, −0.15]). The moderation analysis found that compared with internet addiction tendency, the association between social media addiction and parent-child relationship was stronger. (shrink)

This paper investigates two puzzles in practical reason and proposes a solution to them. First, sometimes, when we are practically certain that neither of two alternatives is better than or as good as the other with respect to what matters in the choice between them, it nevertheless seems perfectly rational to continue to deliberate, and sometimes the result of that deliberation is a conclusion that one alternative is better, where there is no error in one’s previous judgment. Second, there are (...) striking differences between rational agents – some rational agents have most reason to pursue careers on Wall Street while others have most reason to take up a career in teaching, or scuba diving, or working for political causes. These differences aren’t plausibly explained by ‘passive’ facts about our psychology or their causal interaction with our environment; instead, these facts seem in some sense to ‘express who we are’. But what is this sense? These puzzles disappear if we adopt a novel view about the source of the normativity of reasons – some reasons are given to us and others are reasons in virtue of an act of will. We make certain considerations reasons through an act of will and thus sometimes make it true through an act of agency that we have most reason to do one thing rather than another. (shrink)

This article explores the main similarities and differences between Derek Parfit’s notion of imprecise comparability and a related notion I have proposed of parity. I argue that the main difference between imprecise comparability and parity can be understood by reference to ‘the standard view’. The standard view claims that 1) differences between cardinally ranked items can always be measured by a scale of units of the relevant value, and 2) all rankings proceed in terms of the trichotomy of ‘better than’, (...) ‘worse than’, and ‘equally good’. Imprecise comparability, which can be understood in terms of the more familiar notions of cardinality and incommensurability, rejects only the first claim while parity rejects both claims of the standard view. -/- I then argue that insofar as those attracted to imprecise comparability assume that all rankings are trichotomous, as Parfit appears to, the view should be rejected. This is because imprecise equality is not a form of equality but is a sui generis ‘fourth’ basic way in which items can be ranked. We should, I argue, understand imprecise equality as parity, and imprecise comparability as entailing ‘tetrachotomy’ – that if two items are comparable, one must better than, worse than, equal to, or on a par with the other. Thus those attracted to the idea that cardinality can be imprecise should abandon trichotomy and accept parity and tetrachotomy instead. -/- Finally, I illustrate the difference between Parfit’s trichotomous notion of imprecise comparability and parity by examining how each notion might be employed in different solutions to the problem posed by the Repugnant Conclusion in population ethics. I suggest that parity provides the arguably more ecumenical solution to the problem. (shrink)

This paper begins with a response to Josh Gert’s challenge that ‘on a par with’ is not a sui generis fourth value relation beyond ‘better than’, ‘worse than’, and ‘equally good’. It then explores two further questions: can parity be modeled by an interval representation of value? And what should one rationally do when faced with items on a par? I argue that an interval representation of value is incompatible with the possibility that items are on a par (a mathematical (...) proof is given in the appendix). I also suggest that there are three senses of ‘rationally permissible’ which, once distinguished, show that parity does distinctive practical work that cannot be done by the usual trichotomy of relations or by incomparability. In this way, we have an additional argument for parity from the workings of practical reason. (shrink)

What sorts of consideration can be normative reasons for action? If we systematize the wide variety of considerations that can be cited as normative reasons, do we find that there is a single kind of consideration that can always be a reason? Desire-based theorists think that the fact that you want something or would want it under certain evaluatively neutral conditions can always be your normative reason for action. Value-based theorists, by contrast, think that what plays that role are evaluative (...) facts (or the facts that subvene them) about what you want, such as the fact that having it would be good in some way. This paper argues that value-based theorists are wrong; if we try to find a single kind of consideration that can always be normative reason, we find that sometimes our reason is the fact that we want something and not any corresponding evaluative fact. (shrink)

This paper argues for the existence of a fourth positive generic value relation that can hold between two items beyond ‘better than’, ‘worse than’, and ‘equally good’: namely ‘on a par’.

Slurs are derogatory words and they are used to derogate certain groups. Theories of slurs must explain why they are derogatory words, as well as other features like independence and descriptive ineffability. This paper proposes an illocutionary force indicator theory of slurs: they are derogatory terms because their use is to perform the illocutionary act of derogation, which is a declarative illocutionary act to enforce norms against the target. For instance, calling a Chinese person “chink” is an act of derogation (...) to enforce racist norms that license exclusion of the Chinese, deny their rights to dignity, etc. The contribution of this paper is twofold. First, it offers a more comprehensive explanation of the features of slurs than earlier speech act approaches. Second, it provides a theory that is immune to the problems faced by existing theories, such as wrong predictions of truth-conditions, explaining unacceptability to non-bigots, and explaining slurs against the dominant groups. (shrink)

This encyclopedia entry urges what it takes to be correctives to common (mis)understandings concerning the phenomenon of incommensurability and incomparability and briefly outlines some of their philosophical upshots.

In virtue of what is something a reason for action? That is, what makes a consideration a reason to act? This is a metaphysical or meta-normative question about the grounding of reasons for action. The answer to the grounding question has been traditionally given in ‘pure’, univocal terms. This paper argues that there is good reason to understand the ground of practical normativity as a hybrid of traditional ‘pure’ views. The paper 1) surveys the three leading ‘pure’ answers to the (...) question of a normative ground, 2) examines one or two of the most difficult problems for each, proposing along the way a new objection to one, and 3) argues that a particular hybrid view about normative grounds –‘hybrid voluntarism’ – avoids each of the main problems faced by the three leading ‘pure’ views. (shrink)

The feeling of being offended, as a moral emotion, plays a key role in issues such as slurs, the offense principle, ethics of humor, etc. However, no adequate theory of offense has been developed in the literature, and it remains unclear what questions such a theory should answer. This paper attempts to fill the gap by performing two tasks. The first task is to clarify and summarize the questions of offense into two kinds, the descriptive questions (e.g., what features differentiate (...) offense from similar moral states like anger?) and the normative questions (e.g., what are the conditions for taking offense to be apt?). The second task is to answer these questions by developing what I call ‘the violated norm theory of offense’. According to this theory, feeling offended entails that the norm one endorses is judged to be violated by the offender. Appealing to the violated norm enables this theory to answer the descriptive questions (e.g., taking offense differs from anger because of features like not requiring victims and the difficulty of animal offense) and the normative questions of offense (e.g., taking offense is apt only if the violated norm is universalizable). (shrink)

This paper argues that there is a particular kind of ‘internal’ commitment typically made in the context of romantic love relationships that has striking meta-normative implications for how we understand the role of the will in practical normativity. Internal commitments cannot plausibly explain the reasons we have in committed relationships on the usual model – as triggering reasons that are already there, in the way that making a promise triggers a reason via a pre-existing norm of the form ‘If you (...) make a promise to x, then you have a reason to x’. Instead, internal commitments are that in virtue of which one has the special reasons of committed relationships; they are the grounds of such reasons. In this way, the will is a source of practical normativity. (shrink)

Recently, some of the leading proponents of the view that there is widespread incommensurability among goods have suggested that the incommensurability of some goods is a constitutive feature of the goods themselves. So, for example, a friendship and a million dollars are incommensurable because it is part of what it is to be a friendship that it be incommensurable with money. According to these ‘constitutive incommensurabilists’ incommensurability follows from the very nature of certain goods. In this paper, I examine this (...) idea and argue that constitutive incommensurabilists have mistaken for constitutive incommensurability a particular emphatic kind of comparability. This examination involves an account of ‘higher’ and ‘lower’ goods and an explanation of how goods of different ‘types’ figure in practical conflict. (shrink)

What makes a choice hard? I discuss and criticize three common answers and then make a proposal of my own. Paradigmatic hard choices are not hard because of our ignorance, the incommensurability of values, or the incomparability of the alternatives. They are hard because the alternatives are on a par; they are comparable, but one is not better than the other, and yet nor are they equally good. So understood, hard choices open up a new way of thinking about what (...) it is to be a rational agent. (shrink)

This study is done in order to find the factor of depression among the college student in Malaysia. Depression among the college student are increasing as it come from many factor. This study used behavioural theory as the foundations theories for the model development. The study involved 406 respondents, selected through google form responses involving all the university students around Malaysia. A structured questionnaire was used for data collection. All variables were measured through scales previously used by other researchers. In (...) behavioural theory, state that depression people precisely those who do not know how to cope with the fact that they are no longer receiving positive reinforcement like they before. Results shows the data analysis described that respondents having a financial problem where did not what how to differentiate between wants and need with the overall mean (M=2.51) and students always spend their money on uncertain things. (shrink)

‘Normative powers’ are capacities to create normative reasons by our willing or say-so. They are significant, because if we have them and exercise them, then sometimes the reasons we have are ‘up to us’. But such powers seem mysterious. How can we, by willing, create reasons? In this paper, I examine whether normative powers can be adequately explained normatively, by appeal to norms of a practice, normative principles, human interests, or values. Can normative explanations of normative powers explain how an (...) exercise of the will can afford us special freedom in determining our reasons? I argue that normative approaches to answering this question prove to be inadequate. To vindicate the thought that normative powers can make our reasons ‘up to us’, we need an altogether different approach to understanding them, one that is located not in the normative but in the metaphysical. I end the paper by sketching a metaphysical explanation of normative powers. This metaphysical defence of normative powers provides a window into a different, more agent-centered way of thinking about rational agency. (shrink)

This paper proposes a way to understand transformative choices, choices that change ‘who you are.’ First, it distinguishes two broad models of transformative choice: 1) ‘event-based’ transformative choices in which some event—perhaps an experience—downstream from a choice transforms you, and 2) ‘choice-based’ transformative choices in which the choice itself—and not something downstream from the choice—transforms you. Transformative choices are of interest primarily because they purport to pose a challenge to standard approaches to rational choice. An examination of the event-based transformative (...) choices of L. A. Paul and Edna Ullman-Margalit, however, suggests that event-based transformative choices don’t raise any difficulties for standard approaches to rational choice. An account of choice-based transformative choices—and what it is to be transformed—is then proposed. Transformative choices so understood not only capture paradigmatic cases of transformative choice but also point the way to a different way of thinking about rational choice and agency. (shrink)

Slurs are derogatory, and theories of slurs aim at explaining their “derogatory force”. This paper draws a distinction between the type derogatory force and the token derogatory force of slurs. To explain the type derogatory force is to explain why a slur is a derogatory word. By contrast, to explain the token derogatory force is to explain why an utterance of a slur is derogatory. This distinction will be defended by examples in which the type and the token derogatory force (...) come apart. Because of the distinction, an adequate theory of slurs must be plausible for both the type and the token derogatory force. However, I will argue that many theories fail to be plausible for both. In particular, Hom’s combinatorial externalism and the conventional implicature theory offer implausible accounts of the token derogatory force, whereas the prohibitionist theory is insufficient to explain the type derogatory force. (shrink)

Slurs are both derogatory and offensive, and they are said to exhibit “derogatory force” and “offensiveness.” Almost all theories of slurs, except the truth-conditional content theory and the invocational content theory, conflate these two features and use “derogatory force” and “offensiveness” interchangeably. This paper defends and explains the distinction between slurs’ derogatory force and offensiveness by fulfilling three goals. First, it distinguishes between slurs’ being derogatory and their being offensive with four arguments. For instance, ‘Monday’, a slur in the Bostonian (...) argot, is used to secretly derogate African Americans without causing offense. Second, this paper points out that many theories of slurs run into problems because they conflate derogatory force with offensiveness. For example, the prohibition theory’s account of offensiveness in terms of prohibitions struggles to explain why ‘Monday’ is derogatory when it is not a prohibited word in English. Third, this paper offers a new explanation of this distinction from the perspective of a speech act theory of slurs; derogatory force is different from offensiveness because they arise from two different kinds of speech acts that slurs are used to perform, i.e., the illocutionary act of derogation and the perlocutionary act of offending. This new explanation avoids the problems faced by other theories. (shrink)

This introductory article describes the phenomena of incommensurability and incomparability, how they are related, and why they are important. Since incomparability is the more significant phenomenon, the paper takes that as its focus. It gives a detailed account of what incomparability is, investigates the relation between the incomparability of values and the incomparability of alternatives for choice, distinguishes incomparability from the related phenomena of parity, indeterminacy, and noncomparability, and, finally, defends a view about practical justification that vindicates the importance of (...) incomparability — assuming it exists — for practical reason. (shrink)

This paper presents an argument against the widespread view that ‘hard choices’ are hard because of the incomparability of the alternatives. The argument has two parts. First, I argue that any plausible theory of practical reason must be ‘comparativist’ in form, that is, it must hold that a comparative relation between the alternatives with respect to what matters in the choice determines a justified choice in that situation. If comparativist views of practical reason are correct, however, the incomparabilist view of (...) hard choices should be rejected. Incomparabilism about hard choices leads us to an implausible error theory about the phenomenology of hard choices, threatens an unattractive view of human agency, and leaves us in perplexity about what we are doing when we choose in hard choices. The second part of the argument explores the main competitor to comparativist views of practical reason, noncomparativist view, according tow which a choice is justified so long as it is not worse than any of the alternatives. This view is often assumed by rational choice theorists but has its best philosophical defense in work by Joseph Raz. On Raz’s view, incomparabilism about hard choices avoids the problems faced if comparativism is correct, but it faces different difficulties. I argue that Raz’s noncomparativist view mistakenly assimilates practical reason to more restricted normative domains such as the law. (shrink)

This chapter argues that there is a particular kind of ‘internal’ commitment typically made in the context of romantic love relationships that has striking meta-normative implications for how we understand the role of the will in practical normativity. Internal commitments cannot plausibly explain the reasons we have in committed relationships on the usual model—as triggering reasons that are already there, in the way that making a promise triggers a reason via a pre-existing norm of the form ‘If you make a (...) promise to x, then you have a reason to x’. Instead, internal commitments are that in virtue of which one has the special reasons of committed relationships; they are the grounds of such reasons. In this way, the will is a source of practical normativity. (shrink)