Philosophers ask just whose expression, if anyone’s, we hear in lyric poetry. Walton provides a novel possibility: it’s the reader who “uses” the poem (just as a speech giver uses a speech) who makes the language expressive. But worries arise once we consider poems in particular social or political settings, those which require a strong self-other distinction, or those with expressions that should not be disassociated from the subjects whose experience they draw from. One way to meet this challenge is (...) to consider the poem expressive of a plural subject, which frees us from looking for a particular individual whose voice we hear in the work, whether she be fictional or actual. Some lyrics give voice to a group whose experience is attended to in the work. This may be done through a posited fictional speaker, but the ontology of the speaker is shown to be less important. Attending to a group whose concerns are voiced allows us to explain how poems can manage to address our-worldly concerns even when lacking actual persons whose expressions we encounter in the poems. (shrink)

A longstanding orthodoxy holds that the Mohists regard the promotion of li (benefit, 利) as their ultimate normative criterion, meaning that they measure what is yi (just, 義) or buyi (unjust, 不義) depending on whether it maximizes li or not. This orthodoxy dates back at least to Joseph Edkins (1859), who saw Mozi as a utilitarian and an ally of Bentham. In this paper, we will argue that this orthodoxy should be reconsidered because it does not square with several passages (...) from the Mozi. That the Mohists place a strong weight on the promotion of ‘li for the whole world (tianxia zhi li, 天下之利)’ is uncontroversial. We argue, however, that in certain cases the Mohist moral calculus diverges in its rationale or outcome from li-promotionalism. This position rejects the orthodoxy by showing that Mohism and li-promotionalism are not entirely coterminous. (shrink)

The notion of intentionality has been in the center of the debate between dualism and physicalism quite some time. Dualism insists that intentionality is the mark of mental phenomena which separates humans from other animals whereas physicalism roughly claims that whatever there is either reducible to some physical states or explainable in terms of some physical language. But both of them are deeply troubled. Is there any other alternative? Where can we look for one? We know that Asian tradition is (...) full of organic world views. I am inclined to think that one alternative world view may come from this background. This paper tries to show that the notion of cheng(誠) intentionality is such a candidate. -/- I will advance a thesis in this paper that cheng(誠) intentionality is holistic. The notion is not only applicable to humans but also to all other phenomena. This may seem indistinguishable from physicalism in its monistic settings. Since I believe that the notion of cheng(誠) is more persuasive in explaining mental phenomena in evolutionary terms, I would argue here that the thesis can also be supported by some notions like that an information is a syntactical structure which reflects physical states and that the physicalisitic view of the world is not sufficient. (shrink)

The conjunction fallacy is the well-documented empirical finding that subjects sometimes rate a conjunction A&B as more probable than one of its conjuncts, A. Most explanations appeal in some way to the fact that B has a high probability. But Tentori et al. (2013) have recently challenged such approaches, reporting experiments which find that (1) when B is confirmed by relevant evidence despite having low probability, the fallacy is common, and (2) when B has a high probability but has not (...) been confirmed by relevant evidence, the fallacy is less common. They conclude that degree of confirmation, rather than probability, is the central determinant of the conjunction fallacy. In this paper, we address a confound in these experiments: Tentori et al. (2013) failed to control for the fact that their (1)-situations make B conversationally relevant, while their (2)-situations do not. Hence their results are consistent with the hypothesis that con- versationally relevant high probability is an important driver of the conjunction fallacy. Inspired by recent theoretical work that appeals to conversational relevance to explain the conjunction fallacy, we report on two experiments that control for this issue by making B relevant without changing its degree of probability or confirmation. We find that doing so increases the rate of the fallacy in (2)-situations, and leads to comparable fallacy-rates as (1)-situations. This suggests that (non-probabilistic) conversational relevance indeed plays a role in the conjunction fallacy, and paves the way toward further work on the interplay between relevance and confirmation. (shrink)

We introduce an expected-value theory of linguistic modality that makes reference to expected utility and a likelihood-based confirmation measure for deontics and epistemics, respectively. The account is a probabilistic semantics for deontics and epistemics, yet it proposes that deontics and epistemics share a common core modal semantics, as in traditional possible-worlds analysis of modality. We argue that this account is not only theoretically advantageous, but also has far-reaching empirical consequences. In particular, we predict modal versions of reasoning fallacies from the (...) heuristics and biases literature. Additionally, we derive the modal semantics in an entirely transparent manner, as it is based on the compositional semantics of Korean modal expressions that are morphosyntactically decomposed into a conditional and an evaluative predicate. (shrink)

This article offers a critical overview of a set of normative theories, namely Tianxia 天下 (all-under-heaven), whose purpose is to provide a renewed conceptual framework for the improvement of the world system. First, the article introduces the origins, main features, and differences within Tianxia, before discussing two major criticisms leveled against it. The article then argues that the most powerful parts of these criticisms come from the challenges posed against Tianxia’s legitimacy. The article elaborates on this and introduces two additional (...) challenges of the same kind which were not discussed before. While the article leaves open the question of whether Tianxia is a realistic utopia, it insists that meaningful discussion of Tianxia must take legitimacy challenges seriously. It ends with a discussion concerning whether China can be understood as a civilization-state and how this understanding affects Tianxia’s reception as a realistic utopia. (shrink)

The article explores the inner logic and defining features of Daoist freedom. It argues that Daoist freedom can be meaningfully understood as psychological hygiene, and it suggests that Daoist xuan-jie (懸解) can be rendered possible only if one can rid oneself of intensional suffering—an idea ultimately inspired by Friedrich Nietzsche. This comparative approach enables the article to contribute to the received way of understanding Daoist freedom by stressing its dialectics: by being at ease with one’s social and political environment, Daoist (...) freedom demands social criticism, calling for room for people to be able to act spontaneously so that all can nurture their distinctive natures and have a full and free exercise of their natural abilities. The article aims to achieve two objectives at once: it aims to argue for the understanding of Daoist freedom as psychological hygiene, and it defends this reading by bringing two dimensions of Daoist freedom into a consistent whole. In a constantly changing and increasingly pluralistic world, psychological hygiene and social criticism are both necessary for leading a robust and healthy human life. (shrink)

An observation of Hume’s has received a lot of attention over the last decade and a half: Although we can standardly imagine the most implausible scenarios, we encounter resistance when imagining propositions at odds with established moral (or perhaps more generally evaluative) convictions. The literature is ripe with ‘solutions’ to this so-called ‘Puzzle of Imaginative Resistance’. Few, however, question the plausibility of the empirical assumption at the heart of the puzzle. In this paper, we explore empirically whether the difficulty we (...) witness in imagining certain propositions is indeed due to claim type (evaluative v. non-evaluative) or whether it is much rather driven by mundane features of content. Our findings suggest that claim type plays but a marginal role, and that there might hence not be much of a ‘puzzle’ to be solved. (shrink)

The ‘seeds’ Thoughts proposed by YU Youngmo and HAM Sukhun may each be summed up by propositions expressed in “People are a May-fly seed” and “Seeds embody the eternal sense”. They used “seed” to refer to humans or people on the one hand and placed the notion of seed in the holistic context of the Eastern Asian tradition on the other. Then, I seek to connect the anthropological notion and the holistic notion via cheng(誠) or integration. Zhungyong-The Doctrine of the (...) Mean, one of 4 Confucian texts, says that the ultimate integration(至誠) is to reflect the total nature of objects involved (盡性) so that it will show that self realization and all other realizations are one and not two(成己成物) and it will ultimately reach the stage of holiness(聖). Important elements of cheng intentionality can be read out of the two thinker’s various conceptual aspects. YU’s interpretation of history to be internalistic, his view of Hangul(Korean written language) as a revelational medium, his hermeneutics of Christian God as the emptiness cannot be understood on the dichotomous model of human-nature. HAM’s seed holism, his beliefs that humans’s minds are the heavenly mind and that all things under the heaven should come to be unified are best to be understood on the model of cheng intentionality of integration. (shrink)

In lieu of Abstract: With inequality of various sorts ballooning worldwide, a critique of democracy has come of age, and a change of political ethos is underway. Against this background, the critique of democracy becomes not only possible but also popular, and examples in China and many Western democracies abound. It is no exaggeration to say, in this context, that sufficient momentum has gathered to qualify the situation as "democratic recession," despite people may have different understandings as to the exact (...) nature of this recession and how long it will last. Accompanying this recession, Confucian political meritocracy, whose aim is to correct the wrongs of democracy, is constructed as an alternative to liberal democracy. Many argue that the end of history is not nigh but will continue in and by Confucian political meritocracy... (shrink)

_ Source: _Page Count 25 This is a pre-print. Please cite only the revised published version. This paper presents an original, ambitious, truth-directed transcendental argument for the existence of an ‘external world’. It begins with a double-headed starting-point: Stroud’s own remarks on the necessary conditions of language in general, and Hegel’s critique of the “fear of error.” The paper argues that the sceptical challenge requires a particular critical concept of thought as that which may diverge from reality, and that this (...) concept is possible only through reflection on situations of error, in which how things are thought to be diverges from how things really are with independent items in an objective world. The existence of such a world is therefore a necessary condition of the possibility of scepticism: such scepticism is therefore false. I defend the argument against objections from Stroud’s sceptic and others. Drawing on Heidegger, the paper concludes by indicating that the chain of necessary conditions includes practical engagement with the world. (shrink)

In this study, we examine the philosophical bases of one of the leading clinical psychological methods of therapy for anxiety, anger, and depression, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT). We trace this method back to its philosophical roots in the Stoic, Buddhist, Taoist, and Existentialist philosophical traditions. We start by discussing the tenets of CBT, and then we expand on the philosophical traditions that ground this approach. Given that CBT has had a clinically measured positive effect on the psychological well-being of individuals, (...) it becomes important to study the philosophical foundations on which this therapy is based. (shrink)

This paper argues that the standard formulations of the question of how consciousness emerges, both synchronically and diachronically, from the physical world necessarily use a concept of the physical without either a clear grasp of the concept or an understanding of the necessary conditions of its possibility. This concept will be elucidated and some of the necessary conditions of its possibility explored, clarifying the place of the mental and the physical as abstractions from the totality of an agent engaged in (...) the life world. The notion of a disruption or breakdown in the agent’s normal engagements in the world will play a key role in the argument, which in turn provides a transcendental underpinning to recent enactive and embodied theories of mind by exploring some of the necessary conditions of being an agent in the world. (shrink)

In men and women sexual arousal culminates in orgasm, with female orgasm solely from sexual intercourse often regarded as a unique feature of human sexuality. However, orgasm from sexual intercourse occurs more reliably in men than in women, likely reflecting the different types of physical stimulation men and women require for orgasm. In men, orgasms are under strong selective pressure as orgasms are coupled with ejaculation and thus contribute to male reproductive success. By contrast, women's orgasms in intercourse are highly (...) variable and are under little selective pressure as they are not a reproductive necessity. The proximal mechanisms producing variability in women's orgasms are little understood. In 1924 Marie Bonaparte proposed that a shorter distance between a woman's clitoris and her urethral meatus (CUMD) increased her likelihood of experiencing orgasm in intercourse. She based this on her published data that were never statistically analyzed. In 1940 Landis and colleagues published similar data suggesting the same relationship, but these data too were never fully analyzed. We analyzed raw data from these two studies and found that both demonstrate a strong inverse relationship between CUMD and orgasm during intercourse. Unresolved is whether this increased likelihood of orgasm with shorter CUMD reflects increased penile–clitoral contact during sexual intercourse or increased penile stimulation of internal aspects of the clitoris. CUMD likely reflects prenatal androgen exposure, with higher androgen levels producing larger distances. Thus these results suggest that women exposed to lower levels of prenatal androgens are more likely to experience orgasm during sexual intercourse. . (shrink)

Drawing on the work of John Rawls and Thomas Pogge, I argue that the U.S. is in part responsible for the immigration of Mexicans and Central Americans into the U.S. By seeking to further its national interests through its foreign policies, the U.S. has created economic and politically oppressive conditions that Mexican and Central American people seek to escape. The significance of this project is to highlight the role of the U.S. in illegal immigration so that we may first acknowledge (...) our responsibility in order to seek lasting humane solutions. (shrink)

A non-relativistic quantum mechanical theory is proposed that describes the universe as a continuum of worlds whose mutual interference gives rise to quantum phenomena. A logical framework is introduced to properly deal with propositions about objects in a multiplicity of worlds. In this logical framework, the continuum of worlds is treated in analogy to the continuum of time points; both “time” and “world” are considered as mutually independent modes of existence. The theory combines elements of Bohmian mechanics and of Everett’s (...) many-worlds interpretation; it has a clear ontology and a set of precisely defined postulates from where the predictions of standard quantum mechanics can be derived. Probability as given by the Born rule emerges as a consequence of insufficient knowledge of observers about which world it is that they live in. The theory describes a continuum of worlds rather than a single world or a discrete set of worlds, so it is similar in spirit to many-worlds interpretations based on Everett’s approach, without being actually reducible to these. In particular, there is no splitting of worlds, which is a typical feature of Everett-type theories. Altogether, the theory explains (1) the subjective occurrence of probabilities, (2) their quantitative value as given by the Born rule, and (3) the apparently random “collapse of the wavefunction” caused by the measurement, while still being an objectively deterministic theory. (shrink)

S. C. Gibb holds that some mental events enable physical events to take place by acting as ‘double preventers’ which prevent other mental events from effecting change in the physical domain. She argues that this enables a dualist account of psychophysical interaction consistent with the causal relevance of mental events, their distinctness from physical events, the causal closure of the physical and the exclusion of systematic overdetermination. While accepting the causal powers metaphysic, this paper argues that: Closure is maintained only (...) on the assumption of an implausible pre-ordained harmony between preventing and double-preventing mental events. Distinctness is preserved only at the cost of positing brute unexplained powers of mental and physical events to causally interact with each other. Exclusion is systematically violated in a substantial number of everyday cases. The case for Relevance made by the Double Prevention model is accordingly too weak to sustain a dualist approach to mental causation. (shrink)

These comments, which take the form of criticism and response, were the basis of a zoom conversation at the Eastern APA, January 2021. Josh is putting them up on philpapers (with permission from all involved) in case they are helpful to people interested in the themes of this book.

Subtractive schooling is a type of pedagogy that subtracts from the student aspects of her identity in order to assimilate and reshape her identity to fit the American mainstream. Here, I question the value of assimilation as it takes place in our public school systems. Currently, immigrant children are often made to feel inadequate for being culturally different. This is detrimental to their development as students given that at their young age they do not yet have the emotional maturity to (...) know that their experience, language and culture are legitimate and valuable. My goal is to shift the focus of subtractive schooling to one that fosters the growth of students through recognition. I suggest that John Dewey’s and Paulo Freire’s pedagogy of recognition is a helpful approach to this problem. Both Dewey and Freire’s pedagogy emphasize recognition as central to their pedagogy. (shrink)

One of the best-known aspects of José Carlos Mariátegui’s philosophy is his concept of a revolutionary myth. What does this revolutionary myth entail, how and why did Mariátegui develop this idea? The following article situates Mariátegui’s thought in both the historical and intellectual context of the 1920’s in order to answer these questions. This is relevant because Mariátegui’s philosophy and his revolutionary myth have influenced several Latin American revolutionaries such as Ernesto Che Guevara and Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path). Mariátegui’s ideas (...) have thus changed the lives and history of Latin Americans and it is important that we neither demonize nor idolize Mariátegui’s intellectual work without first attempting to understand it. (shrink)

How can we ameliorate the current immigration policies toward Mexican people immigrating to the United States? This study re-examines how the development of scenarios assisted South Africa to dismantle apartheid without engaging in a bloody civil war. Following the scenario approach, we articulate positions taken by different interest groups involved in the debate concerning immigration from Mexico. Next, we formulate a set of scenarios which are evaluated as to how well each contributes to the well-being of the populace both of (...) Mexico and of the United States. The South African scenario model has proven to be an effective tool in times of political disagreement. It fosters a common language among competing groups, non-hierarchal communication among groups, and acknowledgement of the concerns of each group involved. (shrink)

This article examines whether Nietzschean agonistic democracy theory can be a plausible alternative to Chantal Mouffe’s model. Agonistic democracy theory has Carl Schmitt or Nietzsche as its philosophical source. In the case of Mouffe, she constructed her model based on Schmitt. However, her Schmitt-based model is vulnerable to four criticisms. First, the distinction between ‘worthy opponents’ and ‘enemy’ is ambiguous. Second, it is inconsistent to simultaneously claim ‘the ontological fundamentality of antagonism’ and ‘agonism without antagonism.’ Third, her agonism can not (...) capture the pluralistic world, since it is trapped in the telos of self-preservation. Fourth, there are no theoretical factors to maintain her agonism, and there is no explanation for the degree of conflict that can sustain her model. Unlike Mouffe, Nietzschean like Connolly and Owen provides agonistic democracy theories based on Nietzsche. After analyzing and reconstructing Nietzsche’s text and Nietzschean’s discussions, I will argue that the Nietzschean model can overcome some thresholds of Mouffe’s model. (shrink)

Reluctance to adopt mask-wearing as a preventive measure is widely observed in many Western societies since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemics. This reluctance toward mask adoption, like any other complex social phenomena, will have multiple causes. Plausible explanations have been identified, including political polarization, skepticism about media reports and the authority of public health agencies, and concerns over liberty, amongst others. In this paper, we propose potential explanations hitherto unnoticed, based on the framework of epistemic injustice. We show how (...) testimonial injustice and hermeneutical injustice may be at work to shape the reluctant mask adoption at both the societal and individual levels. We end by suggesting how overcoming these epistemic injustices can benefit the global community in this challenging situation and in the future. (shrink)

Contextualist accounts of “woman,” including Saul (2012), Diaz-Leon (2016), and Ichikawa (2020), aim to capture the variability of the meaning of the term, and do justice to the rights of trans women. I argue that (i) there is an internal tension between a contextualist stance and the commitment to trans-inclusive language, and that (ii) we should recognize and tackle the broader and deeper theoretical and practical difficulties implicit in the semantic debates, rather than collapsing them all into semantics. Moving on, (...) I sketch three strategies to help us advance feminist philosophical endeavors, including how attending to contextual matters can lead us to further reflect on the meta-contextual, such as our role in shaping contexts and whether the working of language is indicative of a larger oppressive social structure. (shrink)

A well-ordered society faces a crisis whenever a sufficient number of noncompliers enter into the political system. This has the potential to destabilize liberal democratic political order. This article provides a formal analysis of two competing solutions to the problem of political stability offered in the public reason liberalism literature—namely, using public reason or using convergence discourse to restore liberal democratic political order in the well-ordered society. The formal analyses offered in this article show that using public reason fails completely, (...) and using convergent discourse, although doing better, has its own critical limitations that have not been previously recognized properly. (shrink)

Inspired by impossibility theorems of social choice theory, many democratic theorists have argued that aggregative forms of democracy cannot lend full democratic justification for the collective decisions reached. Hence, democratic theorists have turned their attention to deliberative democracy, according to which “outcomes are democratically legitimate if and only if they could be the object of a free and reasoned agreement among equals” (Cohen 1997a, 73). However, relatively little work has been done to offer a formal theory of democratic deliberation. This (...) article helps fill that gap by offering a formal theory of three different modes of democratic deliberation: myopic discussion, constructive discussion, and debate. We show that myopic discussion suffers from indeterminacy of long run outcomes, while constructive discussion and debate are conclusive. Finally, unlike the other two modes of deliberation, debate is path independent and converges to a unique compromise position, irrespective of the initial status quo. (shrink)

What is gender and on what should gender classification be based? Dembroff (2018) has recently claimed that, for reasons of social justice, gender classification should not track extant gender kinds. They further argue for ontological pluralism—the existence of many gender kinds, and recommend that we combat oppression by imitating the gender kinds and classification practices in non-oppressive communities. Contra Dembroff, I argue that the analysis is subject to a number of internal problems, including a misguided self-characterization and a tension between (...) ontological pluralism and imitation. In addition, I sketch a different perspective on the relation between gender kinds and gender classification practices that upholds Dembroff’s intended goal but ameliorates the unintended complications. (shrink)

Human behavior is frequently described both in abstract, general terms and in concrete, specific terms. We asked whether these two ways of framing equivalent behaviors shift the inferences people make about the biological and psychological bases of those behaviors. In five experiments, we manipulated whether behaviors are presented concretely (i.e. with reference to a specific person, instantiated in the particular context of that person’s life) or abstractly (i.e. with reference to a category of people or behaviors across generalized contexts). People (...) judged concretely framed behaviors to be less biologically based and, on some dimensions, more psychologically based than the same behaviors framed in the abstract. These findings held true for both mental disorders (Experiments 1 and 2) and everyday behaviors (Experiments 4 and 5) and yielded downstream consequences for the perceived efficacy of disorder treatments (Experiment 3). Implications for science educators, students of science, and members of the lay public are discussed. (shrink)

Philip Kitcher’s The Ethical Project trios to vindicates ethics through an analysis of its evolutionary and cultural history, a history which in turn, he thinks, supports a particular conception of the role of moral thinking and normative practices in human social life. As Kitcher sees it, that role could hardly be more central: most of what makes human life human, and preferable to the fraught and impoverished societies of the great apes, depends on moral cognition. Prom this view of the (...) role of the ethical project as a social technology, Kitcher derives an account of moral progress and even moral truth: a normative analogue of the idea that truth is the convergence of rational enquiry. To Kitcher’s history, I present an anti-history. Most of what is good about human social life depends on the expansion of our social emotions, not on our capacities to articulate and internalise explicit norms. Indeed, since the Holocene and the origins of complex society, normative thought and normative institutions have been more prominent as tools of exploitation and oppression than as mechanisms of a social peace that balances individual desire with collective co-operation. I argue that the vindication project fails in its own terms: even given Kitcher’s distinctive pragmatic concept of vindication, history debunks rather than vindicates moral cognition. (shrink)

Being robustly committed to state neutrality which does not permit the promotion of liberal-perfectionist ideals and denying that there is anything normatively relevant or ‘special’ about religion leaves liberal-egalitarians embroiled in a paradox. If religion is not special, how and why do liberal states afford it differential treatment (in comparison with non-religious analogues like secular doctrines or deeply-held beliefs of individual conscience)? This paper explores liberal-egalitarian strategies for resolving this paradox with predominant reference to the disaggregation strategy advanced by Cécile (...) Laborde. After discussing the novelty and advantages of disaggregation relative to other liberal-egalitarian strategies, the paper distinguishes between the coverage and the basis in justification of differential treatment to argue that disaggregation does not ultimately succeed in solving the latter. Despite this, reflecting on the clarifications achieved through disaggregation and the deeper issues of justification and justice emerging therefrom, the paper concludes by proposing the need to consider a lateral solution to the paradox and speculating on what this might look like. (shrink)

Being robustly committed to state neutrality which does not permit the promotion of liberal-perfectionist ideals and denying that there is anything normatively relevant or ‘special’ about religion leaves liberal-egalitarians embroiled in a paradox. If religion is not special, how and why do liberal states afford it differential treatment (in comparison with non-religious analogues like secular doctrines or deeply-held beliefs of individual conscience)? This paper explores liberal-egalitarian strategies for resolving this paradox with predominant reference to the disaggregation strategy advanced by Cécile (...) Laborde. After discussing the novelty and advantages of disaggregation relative to other liberal-egalitarian strategies, the paper distinguishes between the coverage and the basis in justification of differential treatment to argue that disaggregation does not ultimately succeed in solving the latter. Despite this, reflecting on the clarifications achieved through disaggregation and the deeper issues of justification and justice emerging therefrom, the paper concludes by proposing the need to consider a lateral solution to the paradox and speculating on what this might look like. (shrink)

Socioeconomic status refers to the family's social and economic standing in society. It is measured by combining an individual or group's economic and social position, which is often based on income, education, and occupation. It significantly affects academic performance and even one's health status. The pandemic changed the educational system, causing a huge transition from traditional learning methods to online learning. This shift resulted in confusion, burden, and difficulty among students from different walks of life. This study was conducted to (...) determine the academic stress on online learning among nursing students in relation to their economic status and their ability to access technology. The study utilized a quantitative-correlational method aided by a standard questionnaire. Two hundred thirty-six University of Bohol nursing students enrolled in the second semester of SY 2021–2022 were included in the study by random selection. Data revealed a significant correlation between economic status and the level of stress related to academic expectations and a significant correlation between economic status and access to technology after being subjected to the Spearman rho test of correlation. However, no significant correlation was found between access to technology and the respondents' level of academic stress. (shrink)

As physicalisms of various kinds have faced difficulties in recent years, the time has come to explore possible alternatives, one of which is yinyang ontology. A yinyang theorist is expected to provide a plausible account of causation to replace the traditional notion of causation. The present paper is critical of the Humean tradition, which understands the relata of causal relations in terms of passive materiality so that humans use referential terms to describe causal relations constructively. But an alternative notion of (...) reference is available according to which causal relata are active processors of the information with which they interact. On this latter view, humans use referential language to describe the structure in which the relata interrelate themselves so that the structure can be understood hermeneutically. Reference on this view is naturalized. In this article I advance two arguments for this thesis, one concerning the informationality of states and the other related to the essentiality of properties. (shrink)

Special relativity has changed the fundamental view on space and time since Einstein introduced it in 1905. It substitutes four dimensional spacetime for the absolute space and time of Newtonian mechanics. It is believed that the validities of Lorentz invariants are fully confirmed empirically for the last one hundred years and therefore its status are canonical underlying all physical principles. However, spacetime metric is a geometric approach on nature when we interpret the natural phenomenon. A geometric flaw on this will (...) be exhibited and the alternative is suggested. The reasonable geometric model of space and time is a three dimensional space which is translating along the time direction. This model legitimately represents the true characteristic of nature. (shrink)

Philosophers of dispositionalism deny the Humean account of causality in terms of constant conjunction, contiguity, temporal priority and contingency. And some of them go further to explain the causal relation not between events or objects, but between properties, in terms of reciprocity, simultaneity, ubiquity, intentionality and holism. But their exposition seems to remain fragmented even though they try to make use of the notions of intentionality and holim. I would inquire reasons why it is piecemeal, by analysing that they employ (...) these notions of intentionality and holism which has been constructed within the dualistic tradition. If one wants to make the dispositional project to be powerful, she should look for the notions of intentionality and holism which are free of the dualistic traits and which have been constructed in the tradition of naturalism. The concept of integrationality may be a candidate for such a task. This conception was coined in Zhongyong under the name of cheng in that there is nothing without cheng, and was developed in one of Sok-hon Ham's thesis that any entity in the world contains "seed" within it to realize objectives shared by all involved. Humans are privileged and distinct from other natures, but there is continuity between them. An example of the integrationality applied to the case of humans would be that realization of myself and realizations of all others are one and not two. I would summarize notions of "cheng" and "seed" by offering the integrationality thesis, that is, that there is integrationality in any entity like dispositions such that the integrationality is a power to realize the embedded objective of it in the context where it interacts with all others. I would claim that integrationality is a metaphysical basis for a way of human thinking, by arguing that it is a necessary part of presupposition for our understanding of the world without which the world is not intelligible. The notion of integrationality is involved empirically as well as conceptually. Empirically, there are numerous reports from physics, biology and information science, which provide with a clue which may well be taken to show the ubiquitous integrationality. But some conceptual considerations would also indicate necessarily toward the same direction. These would include various theses of ontology, epistemology, disposition, modality, naturalized intentionality, fitting and topics like these. I will investigate some of them in order to justify my claim of this paper. (shrink)

The controversy around the accommodation of conscientious objections in medicine persists, especially for such contentious services as abortions. COs are typically considered in their negativ...

Whereas the Humean accounts of causality in terms of contiguity, temporal priority, constant conjunction, and contingency face difficulties of one sort, the dispositional explanations of causality...

Notions of fitting seem to be attractive in explaining language understanding. This paper tries to interpret "fitting" in terms of holistic (cheng, 誠) intentionality rather than the dualistic one. I propose to interpret “cheng” as a notion of integration: The cheng of an entity is the power to realize the embedded objective of it in the context where it interacts with all others; "Mind" refers to the ability of not a single kind of entity but to that of all entities (...) of complex degrees in processing informations and to any agent that integrates. I would like to discuss some cases where this notion of fitting is working. First, building of a primitive language could have been done by fittings of primitive expressions which came out of people's basic needs and desires, their forms of life. Second, we do not identify an object on the basis of a criterion of similarity, but by asking questions like whether it would be more fitting to identify two objects in the present context than not to.Third, what is involved in our recognition of a fact is a context. A context does not dictate one single description but does allow any number of descriptions, some of which are more or less fitting and others of which are more or less unfitting. It may take time for the community of language involved to come to a more fitting description. For the sake of convenience, this description may come to have a grammar for the community where it can be classified as true and others as false. (shrink)