A supplemental document for "Metalinguistic Gradability".

Multiple states are at risk of becoming uninhabitable due to climate change, forcing their populations to flee. While the 1951 Refugee Convention provides the gold standard of international protection, it is only applied to a limited subset of people fleeing their countries, those who suffer persecution, which most people fleeing climate change cannot establish. While many journalists and non-lawyers freely use the term “climate refugees,” governments, and courts, as well as UNHCR and many refugee experts, have excluded most climate refugees (...) from the Convention as a matter of legal interpretation. In our 2015 paper, “Unable to Return in the 1951 Refugee Convention: Stateless Refugees and Climate Change”, we sought to reopen the debate on “climate refugees” by arguing that some climate refugees qualify under the 1951 Convention as it is currently written (even if they are not persecuted): those who are stateless and are unable to return to their country of origin because climate change has rendered it uninhabitable. Our interpretation, however, has been rejected by Goodwin-Gill and McAdam (2021) and by Foster and Lambert (2019), which explicitly responds to our paper. Here, we address and respond to their arguments, and develop a new supplementary one, drawing on the principle of systemic integration, as enshrined in Article 31(3)(c) of the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties. (shrink)

When is a belief or judgment justified? One might be forgiven for thinking the search for single answer to this question to be hopeless. The concept of justification is required to fulfil several tasks: to evaluate beliefs epistemically, to fill in the gap between truth and knowledge, to describe the virtuous organization of one’s beliefs, to describe the relationship between evidence and theory (and thus relate to confirmation and probabilification). While some of these may be held to overlap, the prospects (...) for fulfilling all may well seem poor. Furthermore the internalist requires that justification be an introspectible property of beliefs and a fundamental epistemic concept, while the externalist is often happy to ignore the concept altogether or at best regard it as an embarrassing add-on to their epistemology. In the light of this one might reasonably give up on justification altogether or adopt pluralist approach, denying that justification is any single property of beliefs of judgments. (shrink)

In this paper we discuss how Causal Decision Theory should be modified to handle a class of problematic cases involving deterministic laws. Causal Decision Theory, as it stands, is problematically biased against your endorsing deterministic propositions (for example it tells you to deny Newtonian physics, regardless of how confident you are of its truth). Our response is that this is not a problem for Causal Decision Theory per se, but arises because of the standard method for assessing the truth of (...) certain counterfactuals. The truth of deterministic laws is `modally fragile' on the standard semantics for counterfactuals: if determinism is true and you were to do otherwise, the laws would be different. We provide two ways of avoiding this problem: 1) supplement the standard semantics for counterfactuals with impossible worlds, or 2) introduce rigid designators into the description of problematic decision situations. We argue that both of these approaches are well-motivated and can be readily incorporated into Lewisian Causal Decision Theory. (shrink)

Two sources of possible disagreement in bioethics may be associated with pessimism about what bioethics can achieve. First, pluralism implies that bioethics engages with interlocutors who hold divergent moral beliefs. Pessimists might believe that these disagreements significantly limit the extent to which bioethics can provide normatively robust guidance in relevant areas. Second, the interdisciplinary nature of bioethics suggests that interlocutors may hold divergent views on the nature of bioethics itself—particularly its practicality. Pessimists may suppose that interdisciplinary disagreements could frustrate the (...) goals of bioethics. In this article, I explore how wonder may alleviate the concerns of the first group of pessimists regarding problems associated with pluralism, provided that we are willing to accept some interdisciplinary frustrations. Then, I invite readers of this issue of The Journal of Medicine & Philosophy to test these intuitions by considering the role of wonder in these articles. (shrink)

I develop an expressivist account of verbal disagreements as practical disagreements over how to use words rather than factual disagreements over what words actually mean. This account enjoys several advantages over others in the literature: it can be implemented in a neo-Stalnakerian possible worlds framework; it accounts for cases where speakers are undecided on how exactly to interpret an expression; it avoids appeals to fraught notions like subject matter, charitable interpretation, and joint-carving; and it naturally extends to an analysis of (...) metalinguistic negotiations. (shrink)

A common objection to the very idea of conceptual engineering is the topic continuity problem: whenever one tries to “reengineer” a concept, one only shifts attention away from one concept to another. Put differently, there is no such thing as conceptual revision: there’s only conceptual replacement. Here, I show that topic continuity is compatible with conceptual replacement. Whether the topic is preserved in an act of conceptual replacement simply depends on what is being replaced (a conceptual tool or a conceptual (...) role) and what the topic under discussion is. Thus, the topic continuity problem only arises from a failure to specify these two things. (shrink)

This paper commences by making a case for a naturalized approach to knowledge‐first epistemology. On this basis it then goes on to describe and defend a naturalized, functionalist account of group knowledge. It then contrasts this with Jennifer Lackey's (2021) account of the epistemological status of groups.

In the paper, a detailed analysis of some new logical aspects of Cantor’s diagonal proof of the uncountability of continuum is presented. For the first time, strict formal, axiomatic, and algorithmic definitions of the notions of potential and actual infinities are presented. It is shown that the actualization of infinite sets and sequences used in Cantor’s proof is a necessary, but hidden, condition of the proof. The explication of the necessary condition and its factual usage within the framework of Cantor’s (...) proof makes, Cantor’s proof invalid. It’s shown that traditional Cantor’s proof has a second necessary, but hidden as well, condition which is teleological by its nature, i.e., is not mathematical. The explication of the second necessary condition makes Cantor’s statement on the uncountability of continuum unprovable from the point of view of classical logic.One of the most dramatic facts in history of science is connected just with the notion of actual infinity and consists in the following. On the one hand, Aristotle, Berkeley, Locke, Descartes, Spinoza, Gauss, Kant, Cauchy, Kronecker, Hermite, Poincaré, Bair, Borel, Brouwer, Quine, Wittgenstein, Weyl, Luzin, and a lot of other outstanding creators of classical logic and classical mathematics, during millenniums, stated categorically and insistently warned about that the actual infinity is a self-contradictory notion and its usage in mathematics is inadmissible (e.g., according to Poincare, “There is no actual infinity. - Cantorians forgot that and fell into contradictions. Later generations will regard Mengenlehre (set theory) as a disease from which one has recovered”). On the other hand, a lot of outstanding scientists of the XX c.c., such as Hilbert, Church, Turing, Gödel, etc., and modern axiomatic set theory as a whole ignored this (intuitive though) opinion of genii and accepted Cantor’s “transfinite paradise”, based on the actual infinity. In the paper some logical, philosophical, and psychological aspects of this historical “favorable opposition” are analyzed, and the fact that the scientific intuition of genii has won the historical battle against the mytho-’logic’ of Cantor’s transfinite ‘paradise’ is explained and logically justified. (shrink)

In the paper, a detailed analysis of some new logical aspects of Cantor’s diagonal proof of the uncountability of continuum is presented. For the first time, strict formal, axiomatic, and algorithmic definitions of the notions of potential and actual infinities are presented. It is shown that the actualization of infinite sets and sequences used in Cantor’s proof is a necessary, but hidden, condition of the proof. The explication of the necessary condition and its factual usage within the framework of Cantor’s (...) proof makes, Cantor’s proof invalid. It’s shown that traditional Cantor’s proof has a second necessary, but hidden as well, condition which is teleological by its nature, i.e., is not mathematical. The explication of the second necessary condition makes Cantor’s statement on the uncountability of continuum unprovable from the point of view of classical logic.One of the most dramatic facts in history of science is connected just with the notion of actual infinity and consists in the following. On the one hand, Aristotle, Berkeley, Locke, Descartes, Spinoza, Gauss, Kant, Cauchy, Kronecker, Hermite, Poincaré, Bair, Borel, Brouwer, Quine, Wittgenstein, Weyl, Luzin, and a lot of other outstanding creators of classical logic and classical mathematics, during millenniums, stated categorically and insistently warned about that the actual infinity is a self-contradictory notion and its usage in mathematics is inadmissible (e.g., according to Poincare, “There is no actual infinity. - Cantorians forgot that and fell into contradictions. Later generations will regard Mengenlehre (set theory) as a disease from which one has recovered”). On the other hand, a lot of outstanding scientists of the XX c.c., such as Hilbert, Church, Turing, Gödel, etc., and modern axiomatic set theory as a whole ignored this (intuitive though) opinion of genii and accepted Cantor’s “transfinite paradise”, based on the actual infinity. In the paper some logical, philosophical, and psychological aspects of this historical “favorable opposition” are analyzed, and the fact that the scientific intuition of genii has won the historical battle against the mytho-’logic’ of Cantor’s transfinite ‘paradise’ is explained and logically justified. (shrink)

A new speculative ontology of aesthetics. In Aesthesis and Perceptronium, Alexander Wilson presents a theory of materialist and posthumanist aesthetics founded on an original speculative ontology that addresses the interconnections of experience, cognition, organism, and matter. Entering the active fields of contemporary thought known as the new materialisms and realisms, Wilson argues for a rigorous redefining of the criteria that allow us to discriminate between those materials and objects where aesthesis (perception, cognition) takes place and those where it doesn't. (...) Aesthesis and Perceptronium negotiates between indiscriminately pluralist views that attribute mentation to all things and eliminative views that deny the existence of mentation even in humans. By recasting aesthetic questions within the framework of "epistemaesthetics," which considers cognition and aesthetics as belonging to a single category that can neither be fully disentangled nor fully reduced to either of its terms, Wilson forges a theory of nonhuman experience that avoids this untenable dilemma. Through a novel consideration of the evolutionary origins of cognition and its extension in technological developments, the investigation culminates in a rigorous reevaluation of the status of matter, information, computation, causality, and time in terms of their logical and causal engagement with the activities of human and nonhuman agents. (shrink)

This is the second part of a two-part series on the logic of hyperlogic, a formal system for regimenting metalogical claims in the object language (even within embedded environments). Part A provided a minimal logic for hyperlogic that is sound and complete over the class of all models. In this part, we extend these completeness results to stronger logics that are sound and complete over restricted classes of models. We also investigate the logic of hyperlogic when the language is enriched (...) with hyperintensional operators such as counterfactual conditionals and belief operators. (shrink)

For a novice this book is a mathematically-oriented introduction to modal logic, the discipline within mathematical logic studying mathematical models of reasoning which involve various kinds of modal operators. It starts with very fundamental concepts and gradually proceeds to the front line of current research, introducing in full details the modern semantic and algebraic apparatus and covering practically all classical results in the field. It contains both numerous exercises and open problems, and presupposes only minimal knowledge in mathematics. A specialist (...) can use the book as a source of references. Results and methods of many directions in propositional modal logic, from completeness and duality to algorithmic problems, are collected and systematically presented in one volume. (shrink)

Paul Boghossian has argued, on grounds concerning the holistic nature of belief fixation, that there are principled reasons for thinking that 'optimal conditions' versions of reductive dispositionalism about content cannot hope to satisfy a condition of extensional accuracy. I discern three separable strands of argument in Boghossian's work—the circularity objection, the open-endedness objection, and the certification objection—and argue that each of these objections fails. My conclusion is that for all that Boghossian has shown, 'optimal conditions' versions of reductive dispositionalism have (...) to be assessed on a case-by-case basis. (shrink)

Kant and Fichte developed the concept of a worldview as a way of reflecting on experience as a whole. But what does it mean to form a worldview? And what role did it play in the German Idealist tradition? This paper seeks to answer these questions through a detailed analysis of the form of a philosophical worldview and its historical portent, both of which remain unexplored in the literature. The dearth of attention is partially to blame on Kant’s desultory development (...) of it, as well as its place in Fichte’s understudied lectures on religion. In this paper, I first reconstruct Kant’s conception as the starting point and then trace it to Fichte who went on to evolve it further. Fichte endorses the basic conceptual shape pioneered by Kant, namely, a reflective process of positing an idea and then checking the coherence of necessary judgments relative to it. However, Fichte came to realize that its philosophical function needed expanding. Beyond recognizing the possibility for alternative worldviews, Fichte further fleshed out how worldview creation could lead to human flourishing. The common feature between both thinkers is that the formation of a worldview aims to turn philosophy into a life-orienting exercise. (shrink)

Kant’s accounts of the Highest Good and the moral argument for God and immortality are central features of his philosophy. But both involve lingering puzzles. In this entry, we first explore what the Highest Good is for Kant and the role it plays in a complete account of ethical life. We then focus on whether the Highest Good involves individuals only, or whether it also connects with Kant’s doctrines about the moral progress of the species. In conclusion, we look into (...) three ways of articulating the moral argument for God and immorality that take our commitment to the Highest Good as their point of departure. (shrink)

The aim of the paper is to discuss and compare major aspects of Saussure’s linguistic theory — including his recently discovered manuscript, published as Écrits de linguistique générale — and Derrida’s philosophy, focusing on its structuralist (not Kantian or phenomenological, or supposed pragmatist) foundations, in order to show the radical debt of Derrida to Saussure. To see Derrida as a structuralist is crucial for the understanding of his work. A major Saussurean concept, adopted by Derrida as the foundation of his (...) deconstruction, is the concept of “value”; this concept leads to the impossibility of a positive and stable delimitation of signification, which thus is shown to be a phantasmatic entity emerging from the nodes of a network of differences. In this context, I focus on three issues concerning limits, the one leading to the other: the above limitlessness of the linguistic signified, the ensuing limitlessness of linguistic semiosis, in the sense that there is no clear limit between it and the referent, and thus the limit imposed by semiosis in preventing the possibility of knowledge of material reality. I examine Saussure’s ambiguous view on this issue and argue that Derrida’s approach is contradictory, since he occasionally reintroduces the referent in the form of empirical evidence with no theoretical justification. (shrink)

The object of this paper is the domain of semiotic theories, from “traditional” semiotics to poststructuralism and postmodernism, excluding “semiotizing” approaches such as phenomenology or cultural studies. Thus, it is metatheoretical. It is based on two matrices. The first maps semiotic theories on the basis of the continuity or discontinuity between them. The second displays the logical categories of the relationship between semiotics and Marxism, which has historically been an important influence on the field. The paper presents the views of (...) the main authors of the domain in terms of these two matrices. Some of the conclusions are: the irreconcilability between Saussurean and Peircean semiotics; the greater historical development of the former in comparison to the latter; the different orientation between Central and Eastern European semiotics on the one hand and French semiotics on the other; the strong influence of Saussure and Levi-Straussian structuralism on poststructuralism; the increase of the influence of Marxism from structuralism to poststructuralism; and the transformation from poststructuralism to North American postmodernism.The paper closes with some thoughts about the present status of the main semiotic currents and a proposal for a fertile future orientation for semiotics. (shrink)

The aim of the paper is to discuss and compare major aspects of Saussure’s linguistic theory — including his recently discovered manuscript, published as Écrits de linguistique générale — and Derrida’s philosophy, focusing on its structuralist (not Kantian or phenomenological, or supposed pragmatist) foundations, in order to show the radical debt of Derrida to Saussure. To see Derrida as a structuralist is crucial for the understanding of his work. A major Saussurean concept, adopted by Derrida as the foundation of his (...) deconstruction, is the concept of “value”; this concept leads to the impossibility of a positive and stable delimitation of signification, which thus is shown to be a phantasmatic entity emerging from the nodes of a network of differences. In this context, I focus on three issues concerning limits, the one leading to the other: the above limitlessness of the linguistic signified, the ensuing limitlessness of linguistic semiosis, in the sense that there is no clear limit between it and the referent, and thus the limit imposed by semiosis in preventing the possibility of knowledge of material reality. I examine Saussure’s ambiguous view on this issue and argue that Derrida’s approach is contradictory, since he occasionally reintroduces the referent in the form of empirical evidence with no theoretical justification. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to review the main aspects of a major super-paradigm running through spatial studies, a paradigm that I have called “subjectivism” and that may also be called the “conceptual” paradigm, with emphasis placed on postmodern approaches to space; it is opposed to another super-paradigm, the “objectivist” or “materialist” paradigm. While the objectivist paradigm approaches space as a material entity, the conceptual paradigm studies the conceptual world of social subjects, either the meaning that spatial objects have (...) for them or the ideas associated with them. Thus, the conceptual orientation is a semiotic orientation in the wide sense and hence a cultural orientation.Postmodern theorizing is only the latest subjectivist tendency in spatial studies, and there is a whole series of antecedents, which are thus a kind of “pre-postmodern” approaches. In this context, I discuss sociocultural human ecology, environmental psychology, behavioral geography, and humanistic geography from the Anglo-Saxon tradition, and structural anthropology and the semiotics of space from the French tradition. My discussion also covers the postmodern approaches to space in human geography , social anthropology, archaeology, and architecture and urban design.Subjectivism and objectivism in spatial studies are opposed and antagonistic paradigms. However, I believe that both of them are partial approaches that need to be articulated into a unified theory. Works of major authors show how this articulation may be realized, something which implies the integration of subjectivism with political economy. (shrink)

The research question of the present paper is what relation exists between biology and cultural semiosis and I examine as a token of this question the relation between the physiological senses of proprioception and the cultural concepts corresponding to them. While the origins of semiosis are biological, the origin of proprioceptive concepts is debated. Against the biological view that the proprioceptive senses define directly the concepts corresponding to them, there is an opposite view supporting that these concepts are culture-specific. The (...) concept of “classification system” is counter-proposed as the structural framework for the study of proprioceptive concepts. The paper discusses the senses and concepts of proprioception on the basis of a large corpus of anthropological and archaeological material concerning the semiotic systems of precapitalist societies and with the help of a set of metalinguistic spatial concepts. These metalinguistic concepts are up vs. down, front vs. rear, and right vs. left. The senses corresponding to them lead to the senses and concepts of spatial orientation and presuppose a point of reference, closely related to the sense of equilibrium. My conclusion is that the cultural concepts corresponding to these senses are not directly extrapolated from the senses themselves, but are culture-specific and each time integrated within a different cultural and social environment. (shrink)

The familiar Vendler-Kenny scheme of verb-types, viz., performances (further differentiated by Vedler into accomplishments and achievements), activities, and states, is too narrow in two important respects. First, it is narrow linguistically. It fails to take into account the phenomenon of verb aspect. The trichotomy is not one of verbs as lexical types but of predications. Second, the trichotomy is narrow ontologically. It is a specification in the context of human agency of the more fundamental, topic-neutral trichotomy, event-process-state.The central component in (...) this ontological trichotomy, event, can be sharply differentiated from its two flanking components by adapting a suggestion by Geoffrey N. Leech and others that the contrast between perfective and imperfective aspect in verbs corresponds to the count/mass distinction in the domain of nouns. With the help of two distinctions, of cardinal count adverbials versus frequency adverbials, and of occurrence versus associated occasion, two interrelated criteria for event predication are developed. Accordingly, Mary capsized the boat is an event predication because (a) it is equivalent to There was at least one capsizing of the boat by Mary, or (b) because it admits cardinal count adverbials, e.g., at least once, twice, three times. Ontologically speaking, events are defined as those occurrences that are inherently countable. (shrink)

Modern health care relies extensively on the use of technologies forassessing and treating patients, so it is important to be certain that health care technologies (i.e., pharmaceuticals, devices, procedures, and organizational systems) perform their professed functions in an effective and safe manner. Philosophers of technology have developed methods to assign and evaluate the functions of technological products, the major elements of which are described in the ICE theory. This paper questions whether the standard of evidence advocated by the ICE theory (...) is adequate for ascribing and assessing technologies employed in health care. The paper proposes that the general problem with the standard of evidence embodied in the ICE theory (i.e.,testimony and evidence of mechanisms) is too permissive for assessing medical technologies, in that it does not take into account the relative benefit and harm of medical technologies in ensuring safe functional performance in patients. The paper illustrates how evidence-based medicine (EBM) has demonstrated the value of clinical research methods, including observational studies, randomized and non-randomized clinical trials, and formal techniques, such as meta-analysis, to measure therapeutic effectiveness. I argue, therefore, that evidence from clinical research studies should take precedence over the testimonial evidence and other types of non-clinical evidence, inproviding justification for health technologies. (shrink)

The theological problems of the ethics of love for one’s neighbour are considered: the impossibility of literal fulfilment of the commandments and doubtfulness of their applicability in public and state life. One of the approaches to solving these problems is based on the principle of reverence for life, proposed by Albert Schweitzer and expressing, in his opinion, the essence of love for one’s neighbour. Subsequently, this principle was borrowed by Karl Barth, who gave it a theological justification. Although Barth’s texts (...) on reverence for life are well known, some fundamental issues are still insufficiently investigated. Why did Barth claim that reverence for life does not fully express the essence of Christian ethics? What is the fundamental difference between the Barth’s and Schweitzer’s approaches to Christian ethics? How was this difference of approaches manifested in the practical recommendations? The article provides a comparative analysis of Barth’s and Schweitzer’s ethics and answers the above questions. (shrink)

The present article offers the first systematic scholarly analysis of ConKisses, i.e., a sub-class of conative animal calls (i.e., directives addressed to animals) that draw on speech kisses (i.e., sounds that are made with a kiss-like articulatory mechanism). The author examines the pragma-semantics, phonetics, and morphology of ConKisses in 50 languages within a prototype-driven approach to categorization and concludes the following: ConKisses comply with the features associated with the prototype of a conative animal call and may therefore be regarded as (...) the prototype’s canonical instantiations – in fact, they constitute the most canonical subset within the entire conative-animal-call category and thus a highly extra-systematic one from sentence-grammar’s perspective. (shrink)