Contact Info: Paul Pietroski Department of Linguistics University of Maryland Marie Mount Hall College Park, MD 20742 USA Email: [email protected] Phone: +1 301-395-1747..

The meaning of 'most' can be described in many ways. We offer a framework for distinguishing semantic descriptions, interpreted as psychological hypotheses that go beyond claims about sentential truth conditions, and an experiment that tells against an attractive idea: 'most' is understood in terms of one-to-one correspondence. Adults evaluated 'Most of the dots are yellow', as true or false, on many trials in which yellow dots and blue dots were displayed for 200 ms. Displays manipulated the ease of using a (...) 'one-to-one with remainder' strategy, and a strategy of using the Approximate Number System to compare of (approximations of) cardinalities. Interpreting such data requires care in thinking about how meaning is related to verification. But the results suggest that 'most' is understood in terms of cardinality comparison, even when counting is impossible. (shrink)

This paper proposes an Interface Transparency Thesis concerning how linguistic meanings are related to the cognitive systems that are used to evaluate sentences for truth/falsity: a declarative sentence S is semantically associated with a canonical procedure for determining whether S is true; while this procedure need not be used as a verification strategy, competent speakers are biased towards strategies that directly reflect canonical specifications of truth conditions. Evidence in favor of this hypothesis comes from a psycholinguistic experiment examining adult judgments (...) concerning ‘Most of the dots are blue’. This sentence is true if and only if the number of blue dots exceeds the number of nonblue dots. But this leaves unsettled, e.g., how the second cardinality is specified for purposes of understanding and/or verification: via the nonblue things, given a restriction to the dots, as in ‘|{x: Dot(x) & ~Blue(x)}|’; via the blue things, given the same restriction, and subtraction from the number of dots, as in ‘|{x: Dot(x)}| – |{x: Dot(x) & Blue(x)}|’; or in some other way. Psycholinguistic evidence and psychophysical modeling support the second hypothesis. (shrink)

Kotek et al. argue on the basis of novel experimental evidence that sentences like ‘Most of the dots are blue’ are ambiguous, i.e. have two distinct truth conditions. Kotek et al. furthermore suggest that when their results are taken together with those of earlier work by Lidz et al., the overall picture that emerges casts doubt on the conclusions that Lidz et al. drew from their earlier results. We disagree with this characterization of the relationship between the two studies. Our (...) main aim in this reply is to clarify the relationship as we see it. In our view, Kotek et al.’s central claims are simply logically independent of those of Lidz et al.: the former concern which truth condition a certain kind of sentence has, while the latter concern the procedures that speakers choose for the purposes of determining whether a particular truth condition is satisfied in various scenes. The appearance of a conflict between the two studies stems from inattention to the distinction between questions about truth conditions and questions about verification procedures. (shrink)

chapter 1 Introduction 1.1 Goals In this book I will explore the syntactic and semantic properties of movement and adjunction in natural language, ...

The classification of grammars that became known as the Chomsky hierarchy was an exploration of what kinds of regularities could arise from grammars that had various conditions imposed on their structure. Intersubstitutability is closely related to the way different levels on the Chomsky hierarchy correspond to different kinds of memory. This chapter deals with the general concept of a string‐rewriting grammar, which provides the setting in which the Chomsky hierarchy can be formulated. An unrestricted rewriting grammar works with a specified (...) set of nonterminal symbols, and specified set of terminal symbols. From the very outset there were doubts about about whether context‐free grammars (CFGs) could form the basis of a theory of natural language syntax. The grammar's rewrite rules correspond to the automaton's transitions. Chomsky argued that even if the generative capacity of CFGs turned out to be sufficient for English, the resulting grammars would be unreasonably complex. (shrink)

Aravind Joshi famously hypothesized that natural language syntax was characterized (in part) by mildly context-sensitive generative power. Subsequent work in mathematical linguistics over the past three decades has revealed surprising convergences among a wide variety of grammatical formalisms, all of which can be said to be mildly context-sensitive. But this convergence is not absolute. Not all mildly context-sensitive formalisms can generate exactly the same stringsets (i.e. they are not all weakly equivalent), and even when two formalisms can both generate a (...) certain stringset, there might be differences in the structural descriptions they use to do so. It has generally been difficult to find cases where such differences in structural descriptions can be pinpointed in a way that allows linguistic considerations to be brought to bear on choices between formalisms, but in this paper we present one such case. The empirical pattern of interest involves wh-movement dependencies in languages that do not enforce the wh-island constraint. This pattern draws attention to two related dimensions of variation among formalisms: whether structures grow monotonically from one end to another, and whether structure-building operations are conditioned by only a finite amount of derivational state. From this perspective, we show that one class of formalisms generates the crucial empirical pattern using structures that align with mainstream syntactic analysis, and another class can only generate that same string pattern in a linguistically unnatural way. This is particularly interesting given that (i) the structurally-inadequate formalisms are strictly more powerful than the structurally-adequate ones from the perspective of weak generative capacity, and (ii) the formalism based on derivational operations that appear on the surface to align most closely with the mechanisms adopted in contemporary work in syntactic theory (merge and move) are the formalisms that fail to align with the analyses proposed in that work when the phenomenon is considered in full generality. (shrink)

The target article focuses on evidence from nonlinguistic faculties to defend the claim that cognition generally traffics in language-of-thought (LoT)-type representations. This focus creates needed space to discuss the mounting accumulation of nonclassical evidence for LoT, but it also misses relevant work in linguistics that directly offers a perspective on specific hypotheses about candidate LoT representations.

The Rediscovery of the mind By John Searle MIT Press, 1992. Pp. xv + 270. ISBN 0–262–19321–3 £19.95 hbk.The Ethics of Authenticity By Charles Taylor Harvard University Press, 1991. Pp. 152. ISBN 0–674–26863–6. $17.95Multiculturalism and ‘The Politics of Recognition’ By Charles Taylor Princeton University Press, 1992. p. 112. ISBN 0–691–0878–65. $14.95New books on feminismAbjection, Melancholia and Love: The Work of Julia Kristeva By John Fletcher and Andrew Benjamin Routledge, 1990. Pp. 224. ISBN 0–415–04155–4. £35 hbk.Feminist Literary Studies: An Introduction By (...) K. K. Ruthven Canto, 1991 (first published 1984). Pp. 152 ISBN 0–521–398525. £4.95 pbk.Socialism, Feminism and Philosophy: A Radical Philosophy Reader Edited by Sean Sayers and Peter Sayers Routledge, 1990. Pp. 256. ISBN 0–415–05627–6. £35 hbk.Luce Irigaray: Philosophy in the Feminine By Margaret Whitford Routledge, 1991. Pp. 304. ISBN 0–415–05968–2. £35 hbk.New books on wittgensteinWittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations. Text and Context Edited by Robert C. Arrington and Hans‐Johann Glock Routledge, 1992. Pp. 256. ISBN 0415–07035‐X. £35.00 hbk.Wittgenstein on Words as Instruments. Lessons in Philosophical Psychology By J. M. F. Hunter Savage, Barnes and Noble Books, 1990. Pp. 192. ISBN 0–389–20920–1. $42.00Wittgenstein on Ethics and Religious Belief By Cyrill Barrett Blackwell, 1991. Pp. 304. ISBN 0–631–16815‐X. £45.00. (shrink)

In this paper, I plan to show that the use of a specific population concept—Millstein’s Causal Interactionist Population Concept (CIPC)—has interesting and counter-intuitive ramifications for discussions of the reality of biological race in human beings. These peculiar ramifications apply to human beings writ large and to individuals. While this in and of itself may not be problematic, I plan to show that the ramifications that follow from applying Millstein’s CIPC to human beings complicates specific biological racial realist accounts—naïve or otherwise. (...) I conclude with the notion that even if biological races do exist—by fulfilling all of the criteria needed for Millstein’s population concept (which, given particular worries raised by Gannett (Synthese 177:363–385, 2010), and Winther and Kaplan (Theoria 60:54–80, 2013) may not)—the lower-bound limit for the scope of biological racial realism is at the level of populations, and as such they cannot say anything about whether or not individual organisms themselves have races. (shrink)

Some have claimed that people with very different beliefs literally see the world differently. Thus Thomas Kuhn: ‘what a man sees depends both upon what he looks at and also upon what his previous visual—conceptual experience has taught him to see’ (Kuhn 1970, p. ll3). This view — call it ‘Perceptual Relativism’ — entails that a scientist and a child may look at a cathode ray tube and, in a sense, the first will see it while the second won’t. The (...) claim is not, of course, that the child’s experience is ‘empty’; but that, unlike the scientist, it does not see the tube as a cathode ray tube. One way of supporting this claim is to say that one cannot see something as an F unless one has the concept F. Since the child plainly lacks the concept of a cathode ray tube, it cannot see it as a cathode ray tube. Although Perceptual Relativism is hard to believe, this supporting suggestion is not so implausible. After all, when we see (and more generally, perceive) the world, the world is presented to us in a particular way; so how can we see it as being that way unless we have some idea or conception of the way it is presented? We need not be committed to a representative theory of perception to think that perceptions in some sense represent the world. We can express this by saying that perceptions have content. Now it is a commonplace that the contents of beliefs and the other propositional attitudes involve concepts. The belief that this thing is a cathode ray tube involves, in some sense, the concept cathode ray tube. So the line of thought behind Perceptual Relativism may be expressed thus: seeing an F as an F is a state with content. (shrink)

Philosophical accounts of the nature of belief, at least in the western tradition, are framed in large part by two ideas. One is that believing is a form of representing. The other is that a belief plays a causal role when a person acts on it. The standard picture of belief as a mental entity with representational properties and causal powers merges these two ideas. We are to think of beliefs as things that are true or false and that interact (...) with desires, intentions, and emotions to bring about rational action. Both ideas, I think, are ill-founded. One effect of abandoning them is a further blurring of the distinction between what is inside and what is outside our minds. Another is a shift towards a less mentalistic picture of the roots of rational action. (shrink)

In this essay, I draw out some implications of a position called “Wittgensteinian Quasi-Fideism” for the theory and practice of interreligious communication. After setting out the main tenets of that position, I articulate what its theoretical and practical implications in this area would be if it were true. I thereby sketch a new, Wittgensteinian model of interreligious communication, concluding with a number of suggestions as to some points of focus for further work in this area.

This paper examines the debate that has arisen in connection with J. L. Schellenberg's work on divine hiddenness. It singles out as especially deserving of attention Paul Moser's proposal that the debate distinguish more clearly between classical theism and Hebraic theisms. This worthwhile proposal, I argue, will be unlikely to exert its full potential influence upon the debate unless certain features of Christian incarnation belief are recognized and addressed in connection with it.

This paper argues that a notion of statistical explanation, based on Salmon’s statistical relevance model, can help us better understand deep neural networks. It is proved that homogeneous partitions, the core notion of Salmon’s model, are equivalent to minimal sufficient statistics, an important notion from statistical inference. This establishes a link to deep neural networks via the so-called Information Bottleneck method, an information-theoretic framework, according to which deep neural networks implicitly solve an optimization problem that generalizes minimal sufficient statistics. The (...) resulting notion of statistical explanation is general, mathematical, and subcausal. (shrink)

Against transmission -- For attention -- Education in the minor key -- Anthropology, art and the university.

This article surveys recent literature by Parsons, McGee, Shapiro and others on the significance of categoricity arguments in the philosophy of mathematics. After discussing whether categoricity arguments are sufficient to secure reference to mathematical structures up to isomorphism, we assess what exactly is achieved by recent ‘internal’ renditions of the famous categoricity arguments for arithmetic and set theory.

The phenomenal character of perceptual experience involves the representation of colour, shape and motion. Does it also involve the representation of high-level categories? Is the recognition of a tomato as a tomato contained within perceptual phenomenality? Proponents of a conservative view of the reach of phenomenal content say ’No’, whereas those who take a liberal view of perceptual phenomenality say ’Yes’. I clarify the debate between conservatives and liberals, and argue in favour of the liberal view that high-level content can (...) directly inform the phenomenal character of perception. (shrink)

Ineffability—that which cannot be explained in words—lies at the heart of the Christian mystical tradition. It has also been part of every discussion of religious experience since the early twentieth century. Despite this centrality, ineffability is a concept that has largely been ignored by philosophers of religion. In this book, Bennett-Hunter builds on the recent work of David E. Cooper, who argues that the meaning of life can only be understood in terms of an ineffable source on which life (...) depends, and engages with the work of continental philosophers, such as Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty and Karl Jaspers. This is the first book to explore the concept of ineffability within contemporary philosophy of religion and provides a starting point for further scholarly debate. It will be of interest to scholars of philosophy of religion, theology, existentialism and phenomenology. -/- 'Bennett Hunter’s book is a timely contribution to the growing theological and philosophical literature on mystery and ineffability. Written in a lucid and elegant style, the book makes a convincing case for the ineffability of religious experience and explores its relationship to a sense that our lives are answerable to such experience.' — David E. Cooper. -/- 'Philosophers have long concentrated on linguistic forms in a way that has isolated language from the rest of life, and this isolation has increasingly obscured for them the vast range of things that cannot be spoken. Bennett-Hunter is not the first philosopher to try and map this distracted field, but he is remarkable in the width and sympathy of his approach to the highly various thinkers whom he invokes to illuminate it.' — Mary Midgley. (shrink)

In recent years there has been an increase in the number of calls for moral education to receive greater public attention. In our pluralist society, however, it is difficult to find agreement on what exactly moral education requires. Philosophical Discussion in Moral Education develops a detailed philosophical defence of the claim that teachers should engage students in ethical discussions to promote moral competence and strengthen moral character. Paying particular attention to the teacher's role, this book highlights the justification for, and (...) methods of, creating a classroom community of ethical inquiry. (shrink)

In this ingenious and powerfully argued book Tim Maudlin sets out a novel account of logic and semantics which allows him to deal with certain notorious paradoxes which have bedevilled philosophical theories of truth. All philosophers interested in logic and language will find this a stimulating read.

In “Models and Reality” (1980), Putnam sketched a version of his internal realism as it might arise in the philosophy of mathematics. Here, I will develop that sketch. By combining Putnam’s model-theoretic arguments with Dummett’s reflections on Gödelian incompleteness, we arrive at (what I call) the Skolem-Gödel Antinomy. In brief: our mathematical concepts are perfectly precise; however, these perfectly precise mathematical concepts are manifested and acquired via a formal theory, which is understood in terms of a computable system of proof, (...) and hence is incomplete. Whilst this might initially seem strange, I show how internal categoricity results for arithmetic and set theory allow us to face up to this Antinomy. This also allows us to understand why “Models are not lost noumenal waifs looking for someone to name them,” but “constructions within our theory itself,” with “names from birth.”. (shrink)

Featuring contributions by preeminent scholars of early China, _Confucius and the_ Analects _Revisited: New Perspectives on Composition, Dating, and Authorship_ advances and examines debates surrounding the history of the Confucian _Analects_.

Tim Button explores the relationship between words and world; between semantics and scepticism. -/- A certain kind of philosopher – the external realist – worries that appearances might be radically deceptive. For example, she allows that we might all be brains in vats, stimulated by an infernal machine. But anyone who entertains the possibility of radical deception must also entertain a further worry: that all of our thoughts are totally contentless. That worry is just incoherent. -/- We cannot, then, be (...) external realists, who worry about the possibility of radical deception. Equally, however, we cannot be internal realists, who reject all possibility of deception. We must position ourselves somewhere between internal realism and external realism, but we cannot hope to say exactly where. We must be realists, for what that is worth, and realists within limits. -/- In establishing these claims, The Limits of Realism critically explores and develops several themes from Hilary Putnam’s work: the model-theoretic arguments; the connection between truth and justification; the brain-in-vat argument; semantic externalism; and conceptual relativity. The book establishes the continued significance of these topics for all philosophers interested in mind, logic, language, or the possibility of metaphysics. (shrink)

In 1997, a Scottish surgeon by the name of Robert Smith was approached by a man with an unusual request: he wanted his apparently healthy lower left leg amputated. Although details about the case are sketchy, the would-be amputee appears to have desired the amputation on the grounds that his left foot wasn’t part of him – it felt alien. After consultation with psychiatrists, Smith performed the amputation. Two and a half years later, the patient reported that his life had (...) been transformed for the better by the operation [1]. A second patient was also reported as having been satisfied with his amputation [2]. (shrink)

In this paper, I try to make sense of the idea that true knowledge attributions characterize something that is more valuable than true belief and that survives even if, as Contextualism implies, contextual changes make it no longer identifiable by a knowledge attribution. I begin by sketching a familiar, pragmatic picture of assertion that helps us to understand and predict how the words “S knows that P” can be used to draw different epistemic distinctions in different contexts. I then argue (...) that the examples provided by Cohen and DeRose meant to illustrate Contextualism fail to do so, and I construct an example that does. I conclude by considering the response that an objective assessment of skepticism depends, not on what we might use sentences of the form “S knows that P” to say, but on what such sentences themselves say—on their literal, context-invariant meanings. I argue that there is little reason to believe that our words have such context-invariant meanings, and I suggest that the pragmatic picture of assertion can secure a rich enough conception of objectivity to address the skeptic. (shrink)

Beginning with the familiar -- The difference between families and political communities -- States of nature and social contracts -- Order, but not order alone -- On freedom (and liberty) -- Justice -- A brief attempt at describing good politics -- Focus on the Christian contribution -- Concluding thoughts.

Essential Philosophy of Psychiatry is a concise introduction to the growing field of philosophy of psychiatry. Divided into three main aspects of psychiatric clinical judgement, values, meanings and facts, it examines the key debates about mental health care, and the philosophical ideas and tools needed to assess those debates, in six chapters. In addition to outlining the state of play, Essential Philosophy of Psychiatry presents a coherent and unified approach across the different debates, characterized by a rejection of reductionism and (...) an emphasis on the ineliminability of uncodified skilled judgement. The first part, Values, outlines the debate about whether diagnosis of mental illness is essentially value-laden and argues that the prospects for reducing illness or disease to plainly factual matters are poor. It also explains the important role of skilled contextual judgement, rather than a principles-based deduction, in ethical judgement. The second part, Meanings, examines the central role of understanding and a shared first person perspective, both against attempts to reduce meaning to basic information-processing mechanisms and to explain away the difficulties of understanding psychopathology in recent models of delusion. The third part, Facts, shows the importance of uncodified clinical judgements, both in assessing the validity of psychiatric taxonomy and in the application of Evidence Based Medicine. Despite advances in the codifaction of practice and operationalism of diagnosis, an element of judgement remains in the assessment both of what, at one level, is good evidence for diagnosis and treatment and what, at a higher level, is good evidence for the validity of classification overall. (shrink)

Tim Bayne draws on philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience in defence of the claim that consciousness is unified. He develops an account of what it means to say that consciousness is unified, and then applies this account to a variety of cases - drawn from both normal and pathological forms of experience - in which the unity of consciousness is said to break down. He goes on to explore the implications of the unity of consciousness for theories of consciousness, for the (...) sense of embodiment, and for accounts of the self. The Unity of Consciousness draws on a wide range of findings within philosophy and the sciences of the mind to construct an account of the unity of consciousness that is both conceptually sophisticated and scientifically informed. (shrink)

The paper concentrates on two questions: first, the problem of how to introduce students to philosophical argument in a contextualised and pluralist manner; and, second, the question of what kind of texts such a pedagogy requires at its disposal. The two questions are of course intimately related, as the dominance of the single-aim present-centred approach brings with it a highly selective publication of the archive, in editions typically suited to the aims of rational reconstruction rather than historical investigation.

I advocate scepticism about epistemic blame; the view that we have good reason to think there is no distinctively epistemic form of blame. Epistemologists often find it useful to draw a distinction between blameless and blameworthy norm violation. In recent years, this has led several writers to develop theories of ‘epistemic blame.’ I present two challenges against the very idea of epistemic blame. First, everything that is supposedly done by epistemic blame is done by epistemic evaluation, at least according to (...) a prominent view about the social role of epistemic evaluation. Parsimony considerations count against introducing an idle mechanism that does the same work as an existing one. Second, no current theory of epistemic blame includes a plausible account of the force of epistemic blame or the practices that could express it. I conclude that we should give up the notion of epistemic blame. (shrink)

One of the central problems in the study of consciousness concerns the ascription of consciousness. We want to know whether certain kinds of creatures—such as non-human animals, artificially created organisms, and even members of our own species who have suffered severe brain-damage—are conscious, and we want to know what kinds of conscious states these creatures might be in if indeed they are conscious. The identification of accurate markers of consciousness is essential if the science of consciousness is to have any (...) chance of success. (shrink)

Does thought have distinctive experiential features? Is there, in addition to sensory phenomenology, a kind of cognitive phenomenology--phenomenology of a cognitive or conceptual character? Leading philosophers of mind debate whether conscious thought has cognitive phenomenology and whether it is part of conscious perception and conscious emotion.

Philosophy and model theory frequently meet one another. Philosophy and Model Theory aims to understand their interactions -/- Model theory is used in every ‘theoretical’ branch of analytic philosophy: in philosophy of mathematics, in philosophy of science, in philosophy of language, in philosophical logic, and in metaphysics. But these wide-ranging appeals to model theory have created a highly fragmented literature. On the one hand, many philosophically significant mathematical results are found only in mathematics textbooks: these are aimed squarely at mathematicians; (...) they typically presuppose that the reader has a significant background in mathematics; and little clue is given as to their philosophical significance. On the other hand, the philosophical applications of these results are then scattered across disconnected pockets of papers, separated by decades or more. -/- The first aim of Philosophy and Model Theory, then, is to consider the philosophical uses of model theory. On a technical level, we try to show how philosophically significant results connect to one another, and also to state the best version of a result for philosophical purposes. On a philosophical level, we show how similar dialectical situations arise repeatedly, across fragmented debates in varied philosophical areas. -/- The second aim of Philosophy and Model Theory, though, is to consider the philosophy of model theory. Model theory itself is rarely taken as the subject matter of philosophising (contrast this, say, with the philosophy of biology, or the philosophy of set theory). But model theory is a beautiful part of pure mathematics, and worthy of philosophical study in its own right. (shrink)

This chapter aims to bring to the fore some of the ontological presuppositions that undergird the concepts of race and racism as they are used in public health. Included are discussions of differing accounts for race in public health, the ways in which racism is understood to be a public health issue, and where future research in public health, as it relates to the concepts of race and racism, is headed.

We outline a framework for analyzing episodes from the history of science in which the application of mathematics plays a constitutive role in the conceptual development of empirical sciences. Our starting point is the inferential conception of the application of mathematics, recently advanced by Bueno and Colyvan. We identify and discuss some systematic problems of this approach. We propose refinements of the inferential conception based on theoretical considerations and on the basis of a historical case study. We demonstrate the usefulness (...) of the refined, dynamical inferential conception using the well-researched example of the genesis of general relativity. Specifically, we look at the collaboration of the physicist Einstein and the mathematician Grossmann in the years 1912--1913, which resulted in the jointly published ``Outline of a Generalized Theory of Relativity and a Theory of Gravitation,'' a precursor theory of the final theory of general relativity. In this episode, an independently developed mathematical theory, the theory of differential invariants and the absolute differential calculus, was applied in the process of physical theorizing aiming at finding a relativistic theory of gravitation. We argue that the dynamical inferential conception not only provides a natural framework to describe and analyze this episode, but it also generates new questions and insights. We comment on the mathematical tradition on which Grossmann drew, and on his own contributions to mathematical theorizing. We argue that the dynamical inferential conception allows us to identify both the role of heuristics and of mathematical resources as well as the systematic role of problems and mistakes in the reconstruction of episodes of conceptual innovation and theory change. (shrink)

No-futurists ('growing block theorists') hold that that the past and the present are real, but that the future is not. The present moment is therefore privileged: it is the last moment of time. Craig Bourne (2002) and David Braddon-Mitchell (2004) have argued that this position is unmotivated, since the privilege of presentness comes apart from the indexicality of 'this moment'. I respond that no-futurists should treat 'x is real-as-of y' as a nonsymmetric relation. Then different moments are real-as-of different times. (...) This reunites privilege with indexicality, but entails that no-futurists must believe in ineliminably tensed facts. (shrink)

Keränen (2001) raises an argument against realistic (ante rem) structuralism: where a mathematical structure has a non-trivial automorphism, distinct indiscernible positions within the structure cannot be shown to be non-identical using only the properties and relations of that structure. Ladyman (2005) responds by allowing our identity criterion to include 'irreflexive two-place relations'. I note that this does not solve the problem for structures with indistinguishable positions, i.e. positions that have all the same properties as each other and exactly the same (...) relations to all objects (including themselves). I conclude that realistic structuralists must compromise and treat some structures eliminativistically. (shrink)

Amie Thomasson and Eli Hirsch have both attempted to deflate metaphysics, by combining Carnapian ideas with an appeal to ordinary language. My main aim in this paper is to critique such deflationary appeals to ordinary language. Focussing on Thomasson, I draw two very general conclusions. First: ordinary language is a wildly complicated phenomenon. Its implicit ontological commitments can only be tackled by invoking a context principle; but this will mean that ordinary language ontology is not a trivial enterprise. Second: ordinary (...) language often points in different directions simultaneously, so that a wide variety of existence questions cannot be deflated merely by appealing to ordinary language. (shrink)

We defend the view that we are not identical to organisms against the objection that it implies that there are two subjects of every conscious state one experiences: oneself and one’s organism. We then criticize animalism —the view that each of us is identical to a human organism—by showing that it has unacceptable implications for a range of actual and hypothetical cases of conjoined twinning : dicephalus, craniopagus parasiticus, and cephalopagus.

Hunter Vaughan interweaves phenomenology and semiotics to analyze cinema's ability to challenge conventional modes of thought. Merging Maurice Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of perception with Gilles Deleuze's image-philosophy, Vaughan applies a rich theoretical framework to a comparative analysis of Jean-Luc Godard's films, which critique the audio-visual illusion of empirical observation (objectivity), and the cinema of Alain Resnais, in which the sound-image generates innovative portrayals of individual experience (subjectivity). Both filmmakers radically upend conventional film practices and challenge philosophical traditions to alter our (...) understanding of the self, the world, and the relationship between the two. Films discussed in detail include Godard's _Vivre sa vie_ (1962), _Contempt_ (1963), and _2 or 3 Things I Know About Her_ (1967); and Resnais's _Hiroshima, mon amour_ (1959), _Last Year at Marienbad_ (1961), and _The War Is Over_ (1966). Situating the formative works of these filmmakers within a broader philosophical context, Vaughan pioneers a phenomenological film semiotics linking two disparate methodologies to the mirrored achievements of two seemingly irreconcilable artists. (shrink)

Brentano’s account of what he called intentionale Inexistenz — what we now call intentionality — is without question one of the most important parts of his philosophy, and one of the most influential ideas in late 19th-century philosophy. Here I will explain how this idea figures in Brentano’s central text, Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint (Brentano 1995a). I will then briefly explain how Brentano’s ideas about intentionality evolved after the first publication of this work in 1874, and how they were (...) then misinterpreted by some influential analytic philosophers. (shrink)

Peer reporting is a specific form of whistelblowing in which an individual discloses the wrongdoing of a peer. Previous studies have examined situational variables thought to influence a person's decision to report the wrongdoing of a peer. The present study looked at peer reporting from the individual level. Five hypotheses were developed concerning the relationships between (1) religiosity and ethical ideology, (2) ethical ideology and ethical judgments about peer reporting, and (3) ethical judgments and intentions to report peer wrongdoing.Subjects read (...) a vignette concerning academic cheating, and were asked to respond to a question-naire concerning the vignette. Data were analyzed using structural equation methodology. (shrink)

Elements of Mind provides a unique introduction to the main problems and debates in contemporary philosophy of mind. Author Tim Crane opposes those currently popular conceptions of the mind that divide mental phenomena into two very different kinds (the intentional and the qualitative) and proposes instead a challenging and unified theory of all the phenomena of mind. In light of this theory, Crane engages students with the central problems of the philosophy of mind--the mind-body problem, the problem of intentionality (or (...) mental representation), the problem of consciousness, and the problem of perception--and attempts to find solutions to these problems. A fresh and engaging exploration of the main issues in the philosophy of mind, Elements of Mind is easily accessible to students with no background in the subject. (shrink)

Michael Weisberg and Kenneth Reisman argue that the Volterra Principle can be derived from multiple predator-prey models and that, therefore, the Volterra Principle is a prime example for robustness analysis. In the current article, I give new results regarding the Volterra Principle, extending Weisberg’s and Reisman’s work, and I discuss the consequences of these results for robustness analysis. I argue that we do not end up with multiple, independent models but rather with one general model. I identify the kind of (...) situation in which this generalization approach may occur, and I analyze the generalized Volterra Principle from an explanatory perspective. (shrink)

The present paper provides an analysis of Euler’s solutions to the Königsberg bridges problem. Euler proposes three different solutions to the problem, addressing their strengths and weaknesses along the way. I put the analysis of Euler’s paper to work in the philosophical discussion on mathematical explanations. I propose that the key ingredient to a good explanation is the degree to which it provides relevant information. Providing relevant information is based on knowledge of the structure in question, graphs in the present (...) case. I also propose computational complexity and logical strength as measures of relevant information. (shrink)