Resolving to finish reading a novel, staying true to your punk style, or dedicating your life to an artistic project: these are examples of aesthetic commitments. I develop an account of the nature of such commitments, and I argue that they are significant insofar as they help us manage the temporally extended nature of our aesthetic agency and our relationships with aesthetic objects. At the same time, focusing on aesthetic commitments can give us a better grasp on the nature of (...) aesthetic normativity; this is because, in making aesthetic commitments, we are capable of giving aesthetic concerns the weight of obligation. I argue that appealing to aesthetic commitments allows us to account for the existence of aesthetic obligations as well as their grounding. I conclude by arguing that, although the aesthetic domain is a domain of play and freedom of choice, there is nevertheless an important place in it for both aesthetic commitments and the aesthetic obligations they generate. (shrink)

Most recent discussions of reasons in art criticism focus on reasons that justify beliefs about the value of artworks. Reviving a long-neglected suggestion from Paul Ziff, I argue that we should focus instead on art-critical reasons that justify actions—namely, particular ways of engaging with artworks. I argue that a focus on practical rather than theoretical reasons yields an understanding of criticism that better fits with our intuitions about the value of reading art criticism, and which makes room for a nuanced (...) distinction between criticism that aims at universality and criticism that is resolutely personal. (shrink)

The following is not a successful skeptical scenario: you think you know you have hands, but maybe you don't! Why is that a failure, when it's far more likely than, say, the evil genius hypothesis? That's the question.<br><br>This is an earlier draft.

The aesthetic domain is a social one. We coordinate our individual acts of creation, appreciation, and performance with those of others in the context of social aesthetic practices. More strongly, many of the richest goods of our aesthetic lives are constitutively social; their value lies in the fact that individuals are engaged in joint aesthetic agency, participating in cooperative and collaborative project that outstrips what can be realized alone. I provide an account of nature and value of two such social (...) aesthetic goods—aesthetic communities and aesthetic traditions—and further argue that such goods are a core constituent of an aesthetically good life. At the same time, I argue that the ideals of the dominant theory of aesthetic value, aesthetic value hedonism, are incompatible with a full commitment to these social aesthetic goods; the hedonist is thereby alienated from the other participants within aesthetic communities and traditions. This sets up a dilemma for the hedonist: either the hedonist must bite the bullet, accepting that the theory leads to a problematic form of aesthetic alienation; or, we must reject aesthetic value hedonism and adopt a different theory of aesthetic value which accommodates the value of social aesthetic goods. I argue that we should take the second horn of the dilemma. (shrink)

This article explains and defends a novel idea about how people can be misled by a discussion topic, even if the discussion itself does not explicitly involve the making of false claims. The crucial aspect of this idea is that people are liable to infer, from the fact that a particular topic is being discussed, that this topic is important. As a result, they may then be led to accept certain beliefs about the state of the world they consider necessary (...) for the topic’s importance. What the article calls “importance misrepresentation” occurs when these beliefs about the state of the world are false or otherwise mistaken. The article explores different ways in which importance misrepresentation can occur, and it uses this idea to help clarify and strengthen some well‐known criticisms of the topic choices of academic philosophers. (shrink)

Reductionists about dispositions must either say the natural properties are all dispositional or individuate properties hyperintensionally. Lewis stands in as an example of the sort of combination I think is incoherent: properties individuated by modal profile + categoricalism.

In recent years, an increasing number of contemporary artists have incorporated live animals into their work. Although this development has attracted a great deal of attention in the artworld and among animal rights activists, it has not been much discussed in the philosophy of art—which is quite remarkable, given the serious ethical and artistic questions that these artworks prompt. I focus on answering two such questions. First, is the use of animals in these artworks ethically objectionable? Or are such artworks (...) instead morally permissible or even laudable? Second, what might be the distinctive value or good of incorporating animals into artworks in this way? In response to both questions, I argue that one distinctive value of some of the artworks I discuss is their ability to facilitate a relationship of moral concern and respect on the part of an audience toward the animals that are a part of the artwork. Insofar as artworks facilitate such relationships, they are not simply artistically important; they are also, to that extent, morally good. (shrink)

An extended critical investigation of Plantinga's evolutionary argument against naturalism (EAAN). -/- I wrote this a couple of years ago as a way of thinking through the argument, but now lack the ambition to revise it into a paper. (It's too long to be a paper, too short and too narrowly focused on one person's argument to be a book.) Rather than let it age in private, I'm sharing it publicly for anyone interested in Plantinga's argument.

Some writers appear to believe that a theory of justice must somehow pick people up by the scruff of the neck and force them to behave justly, regardless of their beliefs or inclinations. This is an absurd demand... (B. Barry, Justice as Impartiality).

Bu çalışma, dağarcık ağı tekniği kullanılarak, Türkiye'deki 20 Müslüman ilâhiyat öğretim görevlisinin?gerçek' Müslümanların arzu edilir vasışarı ile ilgili bilişsel kurgularını ortaya koyma denemesidir. Verilerin faktör analizi ve diğer istatistikî yöntem ve teknikler, öğretim görevlilerinin arzu edilen Müslüman niteliklerini temsil eden 200 bilişsel kurgusuna ve bunlardan da 18 bilişsel kurgu grubuna ulaşılmasını sağlamıştır. Bu 18 nitelikler grubu "Diğerkâmlık"tan "Sıkı Çalışkanlık"a ve "Bilişsel Dindarlık"tan "Samimiyet"e kadar dindarlıkla ilgili çeşitli konuları kapsamaktadır. Bu gruplardan önemli olanları, diğerkâmlık, bilişsel dindarlık, dürüstlük ve samimiyet, içtenlik olarak (...) ortaya çıkmıştır. Yazarlar, bu şekilde algılanan İslâmî dindarlık niteliklerinin modern çoğulcu toplumların değer yargılarıyla uzlaşma içinde olup olmadıklarını değerlendirdiler. (shrink)

New theological understanding can emerge with the advancement of scientific knowledge and the use of new concepts, or older concepts in new ways. Here, the authors present a proposal to extend the concept of “rescue and recovery” found in the United Nations Law of the High Seas, off‐world and within a broader purview of other intelligent and self‐aware species that humans may someday encounter. The notion of a morality that extends to off‐world species is not new, but in this analysis, (...) rescue and recovery become an imperative when any intelligent and self‐aware species is in harm's way. Rescue and recovery encompass a necessary action component except perhaps in those cases where rescuers are in danger. The authors explore three biblical examples of rescue and recovery to derive a fundamental meaning of the concept. (shrink)

A community based cross-sectional study was carried out by a self-structured questionnaire on 168 participants aged between 18 and 60 years at two arsenic prone area of Bangladesh to determine the association between extent of depression and socio-demographic as well as illness characteristics in arsenicosis population. The mean age ± SD was 42 ± 10.15 years. Female respondents were almost twice (63.1%) than the males (36.9%) in this study. Most of the respondents (94.0%) were shallow tube well water user. (...) Among them most (80.0%) of the respondents were detected as arsenic contaminated water consumer over more than six months. Study estimated that almost half (44.3%) of the participants had suffered from mild to moderate depression in the moderate arsenicosis group. Less than quarter (20.8%) participants suffered severe depression in severe arsenicosis group. Quarter (26.7%) had mild arsenicosis with no depression. This difference was not significant. Gender had significant influence on proportion of level of depression. Females significantly suffered more from depressive symptoms than males. More than two third of the female respondents suffered from some kind of depressive symptoms; where less than one third of the males were suffered from depressive symptoms. Age has no significant relation with depression. Respondents who were 48 years and above age group had highest percentages of severe depressive symptoms (35.8%). This age group also suffered from highest percentage of mild to moderate depression (37.1%). Though most of the respondent (85.1) had no diabetes and hypertension. Respondents with physical illness suffered more from some sorts of depression than those without illness, but the result is not statistically significant. We understood that depression has health challenges in adult arsenicosis patients. Therefore, physicians should take account depression in their treatment management when deal with arsenicosis patients. (shrink)

In my first year at the Graduate Theological Union (Berkeley); I was required to read Oscar Cullmann's <b> Immortality of the Soul or the Resurrection of the Dead? </b> (1956). I was shocked and dumbfounded by what I discovered. Giving my religious instruction under the guidance of the Ursuline nuns at Holy Cross Grade School, it never entered my mind that Jesus did not believe that every person had an immortal soul that survived the death of the body. After (...) a single reading, however, I suddenly realized that Jesus never endorsed the immortality of the soul. I suffered a crisis of faith--I realized that my Catholic upbringing had been contaminated by dubious ideas that originated with Socrates.<br> More recently, the international NT scholar and Bishop N.T. Wright has challenged the Christian churches to drop Socratic ideas and to return to the faith of Jesus:<br> <quote>Mention salvation, and almost all Western Christians assume that you mean going to heaven when you die. But a moment’s thought, in the light of all we have said so far, reveals that this simply cannot be right. . . . If God’s good creation—of the world, of life as we know it, or our glorious and remarkable bodies, brains, and bloodstreams—really is good . . . , then to see the death of the body and the escape of the soul as salvation is not simply slightly off course, in need of a few subtle alterations and modifications. It is totally and utterly wrong! </quote> In my article, I use my personal story to illustrate how Socratic doctrines had distorted my faith in Jesus. I use my training in historical theology to illustrate (a) how Socrates became the patron saint of the Church Fathers; (b) how Jesus' mission in Hades expanded during the first three centuries; and (c) how Hades began as a cool place where the souls of saints and sinners resided together and ended up as a hot place where grave sinners were eternally tormented. Along the way, I show how Socrates failed to resolve key issues such as (a) whether the soul survives death; (b) whether communication between souls is even possible after death; and (c) whether souls in the heavenly realm are locked in a permanent coma. In brief, I supply N.T. Wright with massive evidence of just how "utterly wrong" the "going to Heaven" movement has been.<br><br> Note: I just finished this paper and hope to publish it. Any help you can give me to improve its readability or content, would be appreciated. (shrink)

We provide new findings that add to the growing body of empirical evidence that important epistemic intuitions converge across cultures. Specifically, we selected three recent studies conducted in the US that reported surprising effects of knowledge attribution among English speakers. We translated the vignettes used in those studies into Mandarin Chinese and Korean and then ran the studies with participants in Mainland China, Taiwan, and South Korea. We found that, strikingly, all three of the effects first obtained in the US (...) also emerged in the East Asian cultures we studied. Our findings not only cohere with but also provide—at least moderate—support for the existence of extensive convergences of important epistemic intuitions across cultures. (shrink)

Many defend the thesis that when someone knows p, they couldn’t easily have been wrong about p. But the notion of easy possibility in play is relatively undertheorized. One structural idea in the literature, the principle of Counterfactual Closure (CC), connects easy possibility with counterfactuals: if it easily could have happened that p, and if p were the case, then q would be the case, it follows that it easily could have happened that q. We first argue that while CC (...) is false, there is a true restriction of it to cases involving counterfactual dependence on a coin flip. The failure of CC falsifies a model where the easy possibilities are counterfactually similar to actuality. Next, we show that extant normality models, where the easy possibilities are the sufficiently normal ones, are incompatible with the restricted CC thesis involving coin flips. Next, we develop a new kind of normality theory that can accommodate the restricted version of CC. This new theory introduces a principle of Counterfactual Contamination, which says roughly that any world is fairly abnormal if at that world very abnormal events counterfactually depend on a coin flip. Finally, we explain why coin flips and other related events have a special status. A central take home lesson is that the correct principle in the vicinity of Safety is importantly normality-theoretic rather than (as it is usually conceived) similarity-theoretic. (shrink)

ABSTRACT The proper relationship between phenomenology and naturalism has reemerged as a pressing issue following interdisciplinary developments in the cognitive sciences. Most solutions opt for a naturalized phenomenology, rather than a phenomenological naturalism. This article takes up the latter approach, confronting the implications of Merleau-Ponty's reformulation of Husserl's paradox of subjectivity. I argue that Merleau-Ponty's formulation—which I term “the paradox of madness”—reveals a deep, ontological contingency in what Husserl took to be necessary transcendental structures of consciousness and world, revealing that (...) these transcendental structures are in fact embedded in and contaminated by the very world they constitute and disclose. (shrink)

We argue that philosophers are competent to facilitate public discussion concerning restrictions on human migration across political borders. We also argue that presenting public audiences with a prima facie case for open borders offers a unique opportunity to elucidate important aspects of philosophical reasoning. Finally, we share resources and a lesson plan for those keen to examine the case for open borders with students, or to facilitate public discussion on these issues.

In “Normativity and Epistemic Intuitions”, Weinberg, Nichols and Stich famously argue from empirical data that East Asians and Westerners have different intuitions about Gettier -style cases. We attempted to replicate their study about the Car case, but failed to detect a cross - cultural difference. Our study used the same methods and case taken verbatim, but sampled an East Asian population 2.5 times greater than NEI’s 23 participants. We found no evidence supporting the existence of cross - cultural (...) difference about the intuition concerning the Gettier car case. Taken together with the failures of both of the existing replication studies, our results provide strong evidence that the purported cross - cultural difference in Gettier intuitions does not exist. (shrink)

This paper provides a categorization of cross-modal experiences. There are myriad forms. Doing so allows us to think clearly about the nature of different cross-modal experiences and allows us to clearly formulate competing hypotheses about the kind of experiences involved in different cross-modal phenomena.

Linguistic data are commonly considered a defeasible source of evidence from which it is legitimate to draw philosophical hypotheses and conclusions. Traditionally epistemologists have relied almost exclusively on linguistic data from western languages, with a primary focus on contemporary English. However, in the last two decades there has been an increasing interest in cross-linguistic studies in epistemology. In this entry, we provide a brief overview of cross-linguistic data discussed by contemporary epistemologists and the philosophical debates they have generated.

This paper connects recent findings from experimental epistemology to several major themes in classical Indian epistemology. First, current evidence supports a specific account of the ordinary knowledge concept in contemporary anglophone American culture. According to this account, known as abilism, knowledge is a true representation produced by cognitive ability. I present evidence that abilism closely approximates Nyāya epistemology’s theory of knowledge, especially that found in the Nyāya-sūtra. Second, Americans are more willing to attribute knowledge of positive facts than of negative (...) facts, especially when such facts are inferred and even when the positive and negative “facts” are logically equivalent. Similar suspicions about knowledge of negative facts seemingly occur in classical Indian epistemology, suggesting that the asymmetry might not be an American quirk but instead reflect a cross-culturally robust tendency in knowledge attributions. Each of these themes—abilism and the positive/negative asymmetry—presents an exciting opportunity for further research in experimental cross-cultural epistemology. (shrink)

Cross-domain descriptions are descriptions of features pertaining to one domain in terms of vocabulary primarily associated with another domain. Notably, we routinely describe psychological features in terms of the sensory domain and vice versa. Sorrow is said to be ‘bitter’ and fear ‘cold’. Music can be described as ‘happy’, ‘sad’, ‘mournful’, and so on. Such descriptions are rife in both everyday discourse and literary writings. What is it about psychological features that invites descriptions in sensory terms and what is (...) it about the sensory that invites descriptions in terms of the psychological? Drawing on the literature on polysemy, this paper sheds light on cross-domain descriptions pertaining to the sensory and the psychological domains. (shrink)

The research focused on the cross-boundary impacts of ecological changes on the livelihood of communities in three villages in Stung Treng province, Cambodia. The research objectives were to analyze river ecological changes and their drivers, and to explore the impacts of these changes on the livelihood of the communities. The research was conducted in Kraom, Kaoh Snaeng, and Tonsang villages. The study found that there have been significant changes in the environment of these villages. The fishery resources have declined (...) between 2019 and 2022 due to factors such as population growth, illegal fishing, loss of flooded forests, and the presence of hydropower dams. The extent of flooded forests has also significantly decreased, negatively impacting fish populations and the overall ecosystem. Water level fluctuations have become irregular since 2018, with lower water levels during the rainy season compared to previous years. Riverbank landslides have been a concern, posing threats to safety and livelihoods. Excessive algae growth in the rivers has also been observed. The research findings indicate a decline in income from fish catch in all three villages, with varying levels of stability. Expenses for food have also varied. Migration patterns have been observed, with individuals seeking better opportunities elsewhere due to the decline in fish stocks. Crop damages have been attributed to irregular flooding and fluctuating water levels, leading to a decrease in crop cultivation. Changes in water quality, including the presence of lime and algae, have impacted the well-being of the residents. Overall, the research highlights the need for interventions and support to address the economic challenges faced by the communities, mitigate the loss of equipment and housing, and improve water quality. (shrink)

Nobody doubts that culture plays a decisive role in understanding human forms of life. But it is unclear how this decisive role should be integrated into a comprehensive explanatory model of human behaviour that brings together naturalistic and social-scientific perspectives. Cultural difference, cultural learning, cultural determination do not mix well with the factors that are normally given full explanatory value in the more naturalistic approaches to the study of human behaviour. My purpose in this paper is to alert to some (...) of the theoretical vulnerabilities or concerns that the cross-cultural study of mind and behaviour might entail. I classify these theoretical concerns into three, loosely defined, categories: epistemological, ontological and ethical. The first have to do with what in anthropology was once labelled as ‘butterfly collecting’. What kind of supplementary, or additional, general theoretical knowledge do we produce when we add to the research different, particularistic, culturally determined, ways of knowing? Ontological concerns refer to the underlying reality that those ways of knowing are meant to disclose. If there are so many ways of knowing the world, where is the reality to be known? Ethical concerns are those entailed in the forms of ‘othering’ that unqualified cross-cultural research is likely to produce in research participants. (shrink)

Debates about God’s personhood, or lack thereof, are central to philosophy of religion. This paper aims to advance these debates by presenting the “greatness of personhood argument” for God’s personhood and a dilemma for those who deny God’s personhood. I also consider various objections to this argument and this dilemma and argue that they fail. Notably, my reasoning in defence of personal theism is cross-cultural insofar as personal theists across various religious traditions can use it. Thus, this paper defends (...) personal theism in a manner that can bring Western and non-Western theists into closer dialogue regarding the topic of God’s personhood. (shrink)

The Gamer’s Dilemma refers to the philosophical challenge of justifying the intuitive difference people seem to see between the moral permissibility of enacting virtual murder and the moral impermissibility of enacting virtual child molestation in video games (Luck Ethics and Information Technology, 1:31, 2009). Recently, Luck in Philosophia, 50:1287–1308, 2022 has argued that the Gamer’s Dilemma is actually an instance of a more general “paradox”, which he calls the “paradox of treating wrongdoing lightly”, and he proposes a graveness resolution to (...) this paradox. In response, we argue for four key claims. First, we accept Luck’s expansion of the Gamer’s Dilemma to be applicable to a wider set of media, but give a novel recasting of this in terms of the Paradox of Fictionally Going Too Far. Second, we develop a novel criticism of Luck in Philosophia, 50:1287–1308, 2022 graveness resolution to this broader paradox. Third, we argue that the Paradox of Fictionally Going Too Far helps to expose an implicit moralism in the Gamer’s Dilemma literature when compared to relevant nearby literatures about other forms of media. Fourth, we consider a range of non-moral, cultural and media conventions that plausibly help to dissolve the intuitive moral gap between non-sexual and sexual violence that is central to this paradox. (shrink)

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

Nobody doubts that culture plays a decisive role in understanding human forms of life. But it is unclear how this decisive role should be integrated into a comprehensive explanatory model of human behaviour that brings together naturalistic and social-scientific perspectives. Cultural difference, cultural learning, cultural determination do not mix well with the factors that are normally given full explanatory value in the more naturalistic approaches to the study of human behaviour. My purpose in this paper is to alert to some (...) of the theoretical vulnerabilities or concerns that the cross-cultural study of mind and behaviour might entail. I classify these theoretical concerns into three, loosely defined, categories: epistemological, ontological and ethical. The first have to do with what in anthropology was once labelled as ‘butterfly collecting’. What kind of supplementary, or additional, general theoretical knowledge do we produce when we add to the research different, particularistic, culturally determined, ways of knowing? Ontological concerns refer to the underlying reality that those ways of knowing are meant to disclose. If there are so many ways of knowing the world, where is the reality to be known? Ethical concerns are those entailed in the forms of ‘othering’ that unqualified cross-cultural research is likely to produce in research participants. (shrink)

According to Leininger, presentists and growing blockers cannot explain why past and present regularities persist in the future. In order to do so, they would have to appeal to enforcers, such as causation, laws or dispositions. But in a world with no future, these enforcers are powerless and cannot guarantee future regularity. I disagree and argue that Leininger’s coordination problem can be met by distinguishing type- from token-level necessitation. Whereas token-level necessitation is cross-temporal and subject to Leininger’s coordination problem, (...) type-level necessitation is atemporal and immune to the coordination problem. For this solution to work, though, type-level necessitation must be ontologically prior to token-level necessitation. This forces us to adopt a Platonist position according to which universals are transcendent, and not immanent. (shrink)

Ever since Darwin people have worried about the sceptical implications of evolution. If our minds are products of evolution like those of other animals, why suppose that the beliefs they produce are true, rather than merely useful? In this chapter we apply this argument to beliefs in three different domains: morality, religion, and science. We identify replies to evolutionary scepticism that work in some domains but not in others. The simplest reply to evolutionary scepticism is that the truth of beliefs (...) in a certain domain is, in fact, connected to evolutionary success, so that evolution can be expected to design systems that produce true beliefs in that domain. We call a connection between truth and evolutionary success a ‘Milvian bridge’, after the tradition which ascribes the triumph of Christianity at the battle of the Milvian bridge to the truth of Christianity. We argue that a Milvian bridge can be constructed for commonsense beliefs, and extended to scientific beliefs, but not to moral and religious beliefs. An alternative reply to evolutionary scepticism, which has been used defend moral beliefs, is to argue that their truth does not depend on their tracking some external state of affairs. We ask if this reply could be used to defend religious beliefs. (shrink)

In this brief reply I respond to criticisms of my book, The referential mechanism of proper names, from Michael Devitt and Nicolo D'Agruma. I focus on the question of whether the perspectivism advocated in the book explains the empirical results there detailed.

Recent trends in psychiatry involve a transition from categorical to dimensional frameworks, in which the boundary between health and pathology is understood as a difference in degree rather than as a difference in kind. A major tenet of dimensional approaches is that no qualitative distinction can be made between health and pathology. As a consequence, these approaches tend to characterize such a threshold as pragmatic or conventional in nature. However, dimensional approaches to psychopathology raise several epistemological and ontological issues. First, (...) we review major sources of evidence usually recruited in support of the dimensional trend (focusing on clinical observation and biological data), and we show that these are connected to different conceptualizations of how dimensional traits extend across health and pathology. Second, we criticize two unquestioned assumptions that stand at the core of the dimensional trend: a) that there is continuity from health to pathology at the symptomatic level; b) that such continuity reflects an underlying continuity in the genetic liability for pathological conditions. Third, we argue against the idea of a conventional threshold by showing that such a view implies a linear relationship between the genotype and the phenotype. Fourth, drawing on epigenetics and developmental biology, we offer a characterization of mental disorders as stable and dynamic constellations of multi-level variables that differ qualitatively from ‘healthy states’. We conclude by showing that our account has several theoretical advantages over both categorical and dimensional approaches. Notably, it provides crucial insights into psychological development over time and individual differences, with major implications in terms of intervention and clinical decision-making. (shrink)

The thesis of this paper is that the capacity to think of one’s perceptions as cross-modally integrated is incompatible with a reductionist account of the self. In §2 I distinguish three versions of the argument from cross-modality. According to the ‘unification’ version of the argument, what needs to be explained is one’s capacity to identify an object touched as the same as an object simultaneously seen. According to the ‘recognition’ version, what needs to be explained is one’s capacity, (...) having once seen an object, to reidentify that same object by touch alone. According to the ‘objectivity’ version, what needs to be explained is one’s capacity to think of one’s perceptions in different modalities as perceptions of one and the same object. The third version seems to establish that one must conceive of oneself substantially, as the numerically identical owner of one’s experiences, a conclusion in agreement with recent work in developmental psychology claiming to show that an infant’s cross-modal capacities are essentially implicated in their development of a sense of self. There is further work to be done if this is to be tumed into an argument against reductionism: there is no swift route from the epistemology of self-consciousness to the metaphysics of the self. In the §3, I will claim that there is, nevertheless, an argument linking the two. What I propose is an argument derived, not from the token-reflexive rule for the first-person, but resting on its anaphoric behaviour spanning intensional operators. (shrink)

This essay is a defense of the social construction of racialism. I follow a standard definition of “racialism” which is the belief that “there are heritable characteristics, possessed by members of our species, that allow us to divide them into a small set of races, in such a way that all the members of these races share certain traits and tendencies with each other that they do not share with other members of any other race”. In particular I want to (...) defend the “radical” social-constructive thesis that holds “the concept of race is exclusively the product of historical and cultural causes. It claims that humans do not tend to classify people into races when groups with different phenotypes meet, save for particular historical circumstances”. The quoted position is the consensus view among historians, sociologists, anthropologists, and other social scientists who study racialism but has recently been criticized by philosophical defenders of cognitive/evolutionary psychological approaches to racialism. Drawing on developmental studies as well as historical and contemporary cross-cultural research, CEP philosophers point to similarities of racialism across time and space. They hold that social constructionist approaches to racialism cannot explain these similarities. I hold that SC approaches do explain these similarities and that such similarities actually pose a significant challenge to the proposed CEP research program on racialism. (shrink)

Three different types of low cost soil amendments, namely, EDTA, elemental S and N-fertilizer, were investigated with Vetiver grass, Vetiveria zizanioides (Linn.) Nash growing under highly mixed Cd–Pb contamination conditions. A significant increase (p < 0.05) in Cd and Pb accumulation were recorded in the shoots of all EDTA and N-fertilizer assisted treatments. The accumulation of Cd in 25 mmol EDTA/kg soil and 300 mmol N/kg soil showed relatively higher translocation factor (1.72 and 2.15) and percentage metal efficacy (63.25 (...) % and 68.22 %), respectively, compared to other treatments. However, it was observed that the increased application of elemental S may inhibit the availability of Pb translocation from soil-to-root and root-to-shoot. The study suggests that viable application of 25 mmol EDTA/kg, 300 mmol N/kg and 20 mmol S/kg soil have the potential to be used for soil amendment with Vetiver grass growing under contaminated mixed Cd–Pb soil conditions. (shrink)

The World Economic Forum notes that there is an economic gap between Indonesia and Malaysia every year as seen from GDP per capita. The economic disparity between the two countries caused differences in available employment opportunities. Limited employment opportunities in Indonesia cause an increase in unemployment in Indonesia. The high unemployment rate in West Kalimantan is the main cause of the migration of Indonesians to Malaysia with the aim of carrying out economic and trade activities in the Serikin Market which (...) is located in Sarawak, East Malaysia. The market only takes about 15 minutes from the Jagoi Babang. This study used primary data collected by using in-depth interview and observation techniques which was analyzed qualitatively. The study found that in general the migration patterns of Indonesian traders who traded in the Serikin Market practiced non-permanent mobility patterns. The opportunities of cross-border trade carried out by Indonesian traders are reducing unemployment, facilitating product marketing, increasing income. While the challenges faced are the inadequacy of the road infrastructure, the quality of merchandise that is not good, the unavailability of lodging for Indonesian traders in the border area of Jagoi Babang, shop rental prices are relatively expensive. Basically, this research is to provide empirical data regarding to opportunities and challenges of cross-border traders that will be able to be used for future research related to strategies in managing cross-border trade Hopefully, this research will contribute significantly to generate an effective migration policy in order to minimize transnational crimes. (shrink)

Divers (2014) argues that a Lewisian theory of modality which includes both counterpart theory and modal realism cannot account for the truth of certain intuitively true modal sentences involving cross-world comparatives. The main purpose of this paper is to defend the Lewisian theory against Divers’s challenge by developing a response strategy based on a degree-theoretic treatment of comparatives and by showing that this treatment is compatible with the theory.

Against the received translation-failure interpretation, this book presents a presuppositional interpretation of incommensurability, that is, the thesis of incommensurability as cross-language communication breakdown due to the incompatible metaphysical presuppositions underlying two competing presuppositional languages, such as scientific languages. This semantically sound, epistemologically well-established, and metaphysically profound interpretation not only affirms the tenability of the notion of incommensurability and confirms the reality of the phenomenon of incommensurability, but also makes some significant contributions to the discussion of many related issues, such (...) as the notion of conceptual schemes, the notion of truth-value status and truth-value conditions, and the issue of cross-language understanding and communication. (shrink)

Crossing the cultural divide, half a century after C.P. Snow.

The tenth volume of the Frontiers of Japanese Philosophy focuses on the theme of “transition,” dealing with transitory and intermediary phenomena and practices such as translation, transmission, and transformation. Written in English, German and Japanese, the contributions explore a wide range of topics, crossing disciplinary borders between phenomenology, linguistics, feminism, epistemology, aesthetics, political history, martial arts, spiritual practice and anthropology, and bringing Japanese philosophy into cross-cultural dialogue with other philosophical traditions. As exercises in “thinking in transition,” the essays reveal (...) novel modes of doing philosophy as a way of boundary crossing that takes transition not only as an object of inquiry, but also as a method of philosophical practice itself. (shrink)

This article, arising from a comparative European Commission project, analyses different national perspectives on bioethics issues.

Higher education institutions are expected to produce quality and competitive graduates for the job market and nation-building. In realizing this role, Bukidnon State University needs to ensure that graduates may land a job-relevant and align with their education and training. With this, a tracer study was conducted to verify whether the three batches of graduates are employed and are employable. It ascertained their employability based on their work experience from graduation to the present job. It employed a cross-sectional method (...) and data mining for the information of 326 graduates. The results revealed that the majority of graduates had jobs relevant to their education and training; yet, there was a significant difference in the employability of graduates across batches, except in terms of gender. Biological Science, Social Studies, and Math graduates were employable within the first six and twelve months compared to graduates from other curricula. It was claimed that the BukSU had prepared BSE graduates for employment. However, these results have implications for strategic options in improving the programs. The study made some recommendations for future tracer initiatives. (shrink)

Cross entropy measure is one of the best way to calculate the divergence of any variable from the priori one variable. We define a new cross entropy measure under interval neutrosophic set environment.

A wide family of many-valued logics—for instance, those based on the weak Kleene algebra—includes a non-classical truth-value that is ‘contaminating’ in the sense that whenever the value is assigned to a formula φ⁠, any complex formula in which φ appears is assigned that value as well. In such systems, the contaminating value enjoys a wide range of interpretations, suggesting scenarios in which more than one of these interpretations are called for. This calls for an evaluation of systems with multiple contaminating (...) values. In this paper, we consider the countably infinite family of multiple-conclusion consequence relations in which classical logic is enriched with one or more contaminating values whose behavior is determined by a linear ordering between them. We consider some motivations and applications for such systems and provide general characterizations for all consequence relations in this family. Finally, we provide sequent calculi for a pair of four-valued logics including two linearly ordered contaminating values before defining two-sided sequent calculi corresponding to each of the infinite family of many-valued logics studied in this paper. (shrink)

Description logics and other formal devices are frequently used as means for preventing or detecting mistakes in ontologies. Some of these devices are also capable of inferring the existence of inter-concept relationships that have not been explicitly entered into an ontology. A prerequisite, however, is that this information can be derived from those formal definitions of concepts and relationships which are included within the ontology. In this paper, we present a novel algorithm that is able to suggest relationships among existing (...) concepts in a formal ontology that are not derivable from such formal definitions. The algorithm exploits cross-lingual information that is implicitly present in the collection of terms used in various languages to denote the concepts and relationships at issue. By using a specific experimental design, we are able to quantify the impact of cross-lingual information in coping with underspecification in formal ontologies. (shrink)

Recent decades of women's rights advocacy have produced numerous regional and international agreements for protecting women's security, including a UN convention that affirms the state's responsibility to protect key gender-specific rights, with no exceptions on the basis of culture or religion. At the same time, however, the focus on universal women's rights has enabled influential feminists in the United States to view women's rights in opposition to culture, and most often in opposition to other people's cultures. Not surprisingly, then, feminists (...) across the global South have criticized the universal-women's-rights agenda. This article reviews representative critical responses to universal-women's-rights advocacy. The author argues that, taken collectively, these critical responses do not reject the possibility of cross-cultural feminist advocacy but they do suggest the need for feminists in the United States and Europe to focus less on transferring rights across the obstacles of culture and more on how they can revise and expand their own understanding of women's rights in response to the struggles of other women, many of whom view women's rights as organic to their own cultures and as connected to broader social struggles. (shrink)