In the maximal form of indirect development found in many taxa of marine invertebrates, embryonic cell lineages of fixed fate and limited division capacity give rise to the larval structures. The adult arises from set‐aside cells in the larva that are held out from the early embryonic specification processes, and that retain extensive proliferative capacity. We review the locations and fates of set‐aside cells in two protostomes, a lophophorate and a deuterostome. The distinct adult body plans of many phyla develop (...) from homologous set‐aside cells within homologous larvae. We argue that the stocks from which these phyla arose utilized these respective larvae, and the diversity of their adult body plans reflects diverse pattern formation processes executed in their set‐aside cell populations. Chordates and arthropods develop directly, but share adult characters with indirectly developing phyla. Thus the deuterostome and protostome stocks that were ancestral to chordates and arthropods, respectively, also utilized maximal indirect development. (shrink)

We present a one per cent measurement of the cosmic distance scale from the detections of the baryon acoustic oscillations in the clustering of galaxies from the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey, which is part of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey III. Our results come from the Data Release 11 sample, containing nearly one million galaxies and covering approximately 8500 square degrees and the redshift range 0.2 < z < 0.7. We also compare these results with those from the publicly released (...) DR9 and DR10 samples. Assuming a concordance Λ cold dark matter cosmological model, the DR11 sample covers a volume of 13 Gpc3 and is the largest region of the Universe ever surveyed at this density. We measure the correlation function and power spectrum, including density-field reconstruction of the BAO feature. The acoustic features are detected at a significance of over 7σ in both the correlation function and power spectrum. Fitting for the position of the acoustic features measures the distance relative to the sound horizon at the drag epoch, rd, which has a value of rd,fid = 149.28 Mpc in our fiducial cosmology. We find DV = at z = 0.32 and DV = at z = 0.57. At 1.0 per cent, this latter measure is the most precise distance constraint ever obtained from a galaxy survey. Separating the clustering along and transverse to the line of sight yields measurements at z = 0.57 of DA = and H =. Our measurements of the distance scale are in good agreement with previous BAO measurements and with the predictions from cosmic microwave background data for a spatially flat CDM model with a cosmological constant. © 2014 The Author Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Royal Astronomical Society. (shrink)

This chapter is a revealing journey through the world of Pandora and the huge range of philosophical themes raised by James Cameron's groundbreaking film, Avatar. The Na'vi's intimate connection to all life on Pandora makes humanity's vicious attitude toward the natural world unfathomable to them. The insanity of the “sky people” is exemplified by their irrational anthropocentricism, an attitude that has regrettably been prevalent in Western philosophy since the time of the ancient Greeks. The philosopher Aristotle argued in the (...) De anima that every living thing – plant, animal, or human being – possessed a soul; but he deemed the human soul alone to be capable of rational thought. In the final scene of Avatar, Jake attains the pinnacle of seeing by passing through the eye of Eywa and returning to the world of the Na'vi, a feat that perhaps no other living being on Pandora had ever accomplished. (shrink)

Greg Ray (2014) believes he has discovered a crucial oversight in Donald Davidson’s semantic programme, recognition of which paves the way for a novel approach to Davidsonian semantics. We disagree: Ray’s novel approach involves a tacit appeal to pre-existing semantic knowledge which vitiates its interest as a development of the Davidsonian programme.

This book marks the first publication of celebrated philosopher Donald Davidson's 1970 Locke Lectures. In detailing his work on the theory of meaning, the role of a truth theory, the ontological commitments of a truth theory, and the notion of logical form, these lectures offer a rare insight into Davidson's thought at a key moment in his career.

Many contemporary philosophers favor coherence theories of knowledge (Bender 1989, BonJour 1985, Davidson 1986, Harman 1986, Lehrer 1990). But the nature of coherence is usually left vague, with no method provided for determining whether a belief should be accepted or rejected on the basis of its coherence or incoherence with other beliefs. Haack's (1993) explication of coherence relies largely on an analogy between epistemic justification and crossword puzzles. We show in this paper how epistemic coherence can be understood in (...) terms of maximization of constraint satisfaction, in keeping with computational models that have had a substantial impact in cognitive science. A coherence problem can be defined in terms of a set of elements and sets of positive and negative constraints between pairs of those elements. Algorithms are available for computing coherence by determining how to accept and reject elements in a way that satisfies the most constraints. Knowledge involves at least five different kinds of coherence - explanatory, analogical, deductive, perceptual, and conceptual - each requiring different sorts of elements and constraints. (shrink)

When I was a student in the mid-1980s, Donald Davidson loomed larger over the philosophical scene than any other living thinker. His writings figured prominentl.

This paper defends a new norm of assertion: Assert that p only if you are in a position to know that p. We test the norm by judging its performance in explaining three phenomena that appear jointly inexplicable at first: Moorean paradoxes, lottery propositions, and selfless assertions. The norm succeeds by tethering unassertability to unknowability while untethering belief from assertion. The PtK‐norm foregrounds the public nature of assertion as a practice that can be other‐regarding, allowing asserters to act in the (...) best interests of their audience when psychological pressures would otherwise prevent them from communicating the knowable truth. (shrink)

The connection between whole and part is intimate: not only can we share the same space, but I’m incapable of leaving my parts behind; settle the nonmereological facts and you thereby settle what is a part of what; wholes don’t seem to be an additional ontological commitment over their parts. Composition as identity promises to explain this intimacy. But it threatens to make the connection too intimate, for surely the parts could have made a different whole and the whole have (...) had different parts. In this paper I attempt to offer an account of parthood that is intimate enough but not too intimate: the parts generate the whole, but they are not themselves the whole. (shrink)

Schlenker (Semant Pragmat 2(3):1–78, 2009; Philos Stud 151(1):115–142, 2010a; Mind 119(474):377–391, 2010b) provides an algorithm for deriving the presupposition projection properties of an expression from that expression’s classical semantics. In this paper, we consider the predictions of Schlenker’s algorithm as applied to attitude verbs. More specifically, we compare Schlenker’s theory with a prominent view which maintains that attitudes exhibit belief projection, so that presupposition triggers in their scope imply that the attitude holder believes the presupposition (Karttunen in Theor Linguist 34(1):181, (...) 1974; Heim in J Semant 9(3):183–221, 1992; Sudo in The art and craft of semantics: a festschrift for Irene Heim, MIT Press, 2014). We show that Schlenker’s theory does not predict belief projection, and discuss several consequences of this result. (shrink)

Decades of research conducted in Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, & Democratic (WEIRD) societies have led many scholars to conclude that the use of mental states in moral judgment is a human cognitive universal, perhaps an adaptive strategy for selecting optimal social partners from a large pool of candidates. However, recent work from a more diverse array of societies suggests there may be important variation in how much people rely on mental states, with people in some societies judging accidental harms just (...) as harshly as intentional ones. To explain this variation, we develop and test a novel cultural evolutionary theory proposing that the intensity of kin-based institutions will favor less attention to mental states when judging moral violations. First, to better illuminate the historical distribution of the use of intentions in moral judgment, we code and analyze anthropological observations from the Human Area Relations Files. This analysis shows that notions of strict liability—wherein the role for mental states is reduced—were common across diverse societies around the globe. Then, by expanding an existing vignette-based experimental dataset containing observations from 321 people in a diverse sample of 10 societies, we show that the intensity of a society's kin-based institutions can explain a substantial portion of the population-level variation in people's reliance on intentions in three different kinds of moral judgments. Together, these lines of evidence suggest that people's use of mental states has coevolved culturally to fit their local kin-based institutions. We suggest that although reliance on mental states has likely been a feature of moral judgment in human communities over historical and evolutionary time, the relational fluidity and weak kin ties of today's WEIRD societies position these populations' psychology at the extreme end of the global and historical spectrum. (shrink)

This paper defends a theory of fictional truth. According to this theory, there is a fact of the matter concerning the number of hairs on Sherlock Holmes' head, and likewise for any other meaningful question one could ask about what's true in a work of fiction. We argue that a theory of this form is needed to account for the patterns in our judgments about attitude reports that embed fictional claims. We contrast our view with one of the dominant approaches (...) to fictional truth, which originates with David Lewis. Along the way we explore the relationship between fiction, counterfactuals, and vagueness. (shrink)

Harry Chalmers argues that monogamy involves restricting one’s partner’s access to goods in a morally troubling way that is analogous to an agreement between partners to have no additional friends. Chalmers finds the traditional defenses of monogamy wanting, since they would also justify a friendship-restricting agreement. I show why three traditional defenses of monogamy hold up quite well and why they don’t, for the most part, also justify friendship-restricting agreements. In many cases, monogamy can be justified on grounds of practicality, (...) specialness, or jealousy. (shrink)

Is there a distinctively epistemic kind of blame? It has become commonplace for epistemologists to talk about epistemic blame, and to rely on this notion for theoretical purposes. But not everyone is convinced. Some of the most compelling reasons for skepticism about epistemic blame focus on disanologies, or asymmetries, between the moral and epistemic domains. In this paper, I defend the idea that there is a distinctively epistemic kind of blame. I do so primarily by developing an account of the (...) nature of epistemic blame. My account draws on a prominent line of theorizing in moral philosophy that ties blame to our relationships with one another. I argue that with my account of epistemic blame on hand, the most compelling worries about epistemic blame can be deflated. There is a distinctively epistemic kind of blame. (shrink)

Does Aristotle offer a definition of the soul? In fact, he rejects the possibility of defining the soul univocally. Because “life” is a homonymous concept, so too is “soul”. Given the specific causal role that Aristotle envisages for form and essence, the soul requires multiple different definitions to capture how it functions as a cause in each form of life. Aristotle suggests demonstrations can be given which express these causal definitions; I reconstruct these demonstrations in the paper.

The Ideal Worlds Account of Desire says that S wants p just in case all of S’s most highly preferred doxastic possibilities make p true. The account predicts that a desire report ⌜S wants p⌝ should be true so long as there is some doxastic p-possibility that is most preferred. But we present a novel argument showing that this prediction is incorrect. More positively, we take our examples to support alternative analyses of desire, and close by briefly considering what our (...) cases suggest about the logic of desire. (shrink)

The analysis of desire ascriptions has been a central topic of research for philosophers of language and mind. This work has mostly focused on providing a theory of want reports, that is, sentences of the form ‘S wants p’. In this paper, we turn from want reports to a closely related but relatively understudied construction, namely hope reports, that is, sentences of the form ‘S hopes p’. We present two contrasts involving hope reports and show that existing approaches to desire (...) fail to explain these contrasts. We then develop a novel account that combines some of the central insights in the literature. We argue that our theory provides an elegant account of our contrasts and yields a promising analysis of hoping. (shrink)

A single mother is a person who is accountable for raising their children alone because they do not have a husband or live-in partner. Single mothers claim to have no co-parenting relationships at all, comparing single parents to those who are married, cohabiting, or without children, single parents experience the worst work-life balance. A single parent may feel overwhelmed by the demands of juggling child care, a career, paying bills, and maintaining household responsibilities. Single-parent households frequently deal with several extra (...) obligations and possible complications that other families would not. The study also emphasizes the difficulties and coping mechanisms faced by contractual single parents as well as their lived experiences. The study's findings, which were based on an Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis, were as follows: (1) Work-life balance can be difficult for single parents. They struggle to keep their jobs while taking care of their family because they are the only ones in charge of the children. (2) Single contractual mothers face particular difficulties due to a lack of resources for basic expenses. (3) Contractual single women lean on their kids, the good people in their lives, and their faith in God to get through problems. (shrink)

This paper is about two requirements on wish reports whose interaction motivates a novel semantics for these ascriptions. The first requirement concerns the ambiguities that arise when determiner phrases, such as definite descriptions, interact with ‘wish’. More specifically, several theorists have recently argued that attitude ascriptions featuring counterfactual attitude verbs license interpretations on which the determiner phrase is interpreted relative to the subject’s beliefs. The second requirement involves the fact that desire reports in general require decision-theoretic notions for their analysis. (...) The current study is motivated by the fact that no existing account captures both of these aspects of wishing. I develop a semantics for wish reports that makes available belief-relative readings but also allows decision-theoretic notions to play a role in shaping the truth conditions of these ascriptions. The general idea is that we can analyze wishing in terms of a two-dimensional notion of expected utility. (shrink)

In this paper, we present two puzzles involving desire reports concerning series of events. What does a person want to happen in the first event – is it the event with the highest expected return, or the event that is the initial part of the best series? We show that existing approaches fail to resolve the puzzles around this question and develop a novel account of our own. Our semantics is built around three ideas. First, we propose that desire ascriptions (...) are evaluated relative to a contextually supplied set of propositions, or alternatives. The semantic value of an ascription ‘S wants p’ is determined by S's preference ordering over these alternatives. Second, we propose that desire reports carry a requirement to the effect that the prejacent of the ascription must be suitably related to the background set of alternatives. Finally, we suggest that desire reports carry a dominance condition concerning the subject's ranking of the alternatives. Overall, we argue that our theory provides us with an elegant resolution of our puzzles, and yields a promising approach to desire. (shrink)

This paper presents a puzzle involving embedded attitude reports. We resolve the puzzle by arguing that attitude verbs take restricted readings: in some environments the denotation of attitude verbs can be restricted by a given proposition. For example, when these verbs are embedded in the consequent of a conditional, they can be restricted by the proposition expressed by the conditional’s antecedent. We formulate and motivate two conditions on the availability of verb restrictions: a constraint that ties the content of restrictions (...) to the “dynamic effects” of sentential connectives and a constraint that limits the availability of restriction effects to present tense verbs with first-person subjects. However, we also present some cases that make trouble for these conditions, and outline some possible ways of modifying the view to account for the recalcitrant data. We conclude with a brief discussion of some of the connections between our semantics for attitude verbs and issues concerning epistemic modals and theories of knowledge. (shrink)

This paper provides a critical overview of recent work on epistemic blame. The paper identifies key features of the concept of epistemic blame and discusses two ways of motivating the importance of this concept. Four different approaches to the nature of epistemic blame are examined. Central issues surrounding the ethics and value of epistemic blame are identified and briefly explored. In addition to providing an overview of the state of the art of this growing but controversial field, the paper highlights (...) areas where future work is needed. (shrink)

In this short paper, I critically examine Veli Mitova’s proposal that social-identity groups can have collective epistemic reasons. My primary focus is the role of privileged access in her account of how collective reasons become epistemic reasons for social-identity groups. I argue that there is a potentially worrying structural asymmetry in her account of two different types of cases. More specifically, the mechanisms at play in cases of “doxastic reasons” seem fundamentally different from those at play in cases of “epistemic-conduct (...) reasons”. The upshot is a need for further explanation of what unifies these dimensions of the account. (shrink)

A growing number of epistemologists have endorsed the Ignorance Norm for Inquiry. Roughly, this norm says that one should not inquire into a question unless one is ignorant of its answer. I argue that, in addition to ignorance, proper inquiry requires a certain kind of knowledge. Roughly, one should not inquire into a question unless one knows it has a true answer. I call this the Knowledge Norm for Inquiry. Proper inquiry walks a fine line, holding knowledge that there is (...) an answer in the left hand and ignorance of the answer in the right. (shrink)

In this paper, I raise a problem for standard precisifications of the Relational Analysis of attitude reports. The problem I raise involves counterfactual attitude verbs. such as ‘wish’. In short, the trouble is this: there are true attitude reports ‘ S wishes that P ’ but there is no suitable referent for the term ‘that P ’. The problematic reports illustrate that the content of a subject’s wish is intimately related to the content of their beliefs. I capture this fact (...) by moving to a framework in which ‘wish’ relates subjects to sets of pairs of worlds, or paired propositions, rather than—as is standardly assumed—sets of worlds. Although other types of counterfactual attitude reports, for example those involving ‘imagine’, may be similarly problematic, at this stage it is unclear whether they can be handled the same way. (shrink)

One challenge in developing an account of the nature of epistemic blame is to explain what differentiates epistemic blame from mere negative epistemic evaluation. The challenge is to explain the difference, without invoking practices or behaviors that seem out of place in the epistemic domain. In this paper, I examine whether the most sophisticated recent account of the nature of epistemic blame—due to Jessica Brown—is up for the challenge. I argue that the account ultimately falls short, but does so in (...) an instructive way. Drawing on the lessons learned, I put forward an alternative approach to the nature of epistemic blame. My account understands epistemic blame in terms of modifications to the intentions and expectations that comprise our “epistemic relationships” with one another. This approach has a number of attractions shared by Brown’s account, but it can also explain the significance of epistemic blame. (shrink)

In this paper, we propose a novel account of desire reports, i.e. sentences of the form 'S wants p'. Our theory is partly motivated by Phillips-Brown's (2021) observation that subjects can desire things even if those things aren't best by the subject's lights. That is, being best isn't necessary for being desired. We compare our proposal to existing theories, and show that it provides a neat account of the central phenomenon.

ABSTRACT:Deliberative democratic theory, commonly used to explore questions of “political” corporate social responsibility, has become prominent in the literature. This theory has been challenged previously for being overly sanguine about firm profit imperatives, but left unexamined is whether corporate contexts are appropriate contexts for deliberative theory in the first place. We explore this question using the case of Starbucks’ “Race Together” campaign to show that significant challenges exist to corporate deliberation, even in cases featuring genuinely committed firms. We return to (...) the underlying social theory to show that this is not an isolated case: for-profit firms are predictably hostile contexts for deliberation, and significant normative and strategic problems can be expected should deliberative theory be imported uncritically to corporate contexts. We close with recent advances in deliberative democratic theory that might help update the PCSR project, and accommodate the application of deliberation to the corporate context, albeit with significant alterations. (shrink)

The chapter develops a taxonomy of views about the epistemic responsibilities of citizens in a democracy. Prominent approaches to epistemic democracy, epistocracy, epistemic libertarianism, and pure proceduralism are examined through the lens of this taxonomy. The primary aim is to explore options for developing an account of the epistemic responsibilities of citizens in a democracy. The chapter also argues that a number of recent attacks on democracy may not adequately register the availability of a minimal approach to the epistemic responsibilities (...) of citizens in a democracy. (shrink)

Although much has been written about the truth-conditions of de re attitude reports, little attention has been paid to certain ‘ultra-liberal’ uses of those reports. We believe that if these uses are legitimate, then a number of interesting consequences for various theses in philosophical semantics follow. The majority of the paper involves describing these consequences. In short, we argue that, if true, ultra-liberal reports: bring counterexamples to a popular approach to de re attitude ascriptions, which we will call ‘descriptivism’; and (...) combine with independently plausible principles about the logic of belief to imply that subjects can achieve omniscience about what exists from the armchair. Although we are not committed to the view that ultra-liberal reports are false, in the final part of the paper we discuss the prospects of pursuing a line according to which the acceptability of such reports ought not be taken at face value. We conclude by arguing that those who are sympathetic with this move might have reason to doubt the truth of an even broader class of acceptable de re attitude reports, namely those that have been taken to undermine orthodox accounts of de re attitude ascriptions. (shrink)

I give an account of the compositional semantics of unconditionals that explains their relationship to if -conditionals in the Lewis/Kratzer/Heim tradition. Unconditionals involve an alternative-denoting adjunct that supplies domain restrictions pointwise to a main-clause operator such as a modal. The differences from if -clauses follow from the structure of the adjuncts; both are conditionals in the Lewisian sense. In the course of treating unconditionals, I provide a concrete implementation of conditionals where conditional adjuncts in general are a species of correlative, (...) and show what detaching this hypothesis from if involves. (shrink)

In this chapter, Kyle Ferguson argues for an individualist account of Sellarsian we-intentions. According to the individualist account, we-intentions’ intersubjective form renders them shareable rather than requiring that they be shared. Contrary to collectivist accounts, one may we-intend independently of whether and without presupposing that one's community shares one's we-intentions. After providing textual support, Ferguson proposes and implements a strategy of reportorial ascent, which strengthens the case for the individualist account. Reportorial ascent involves reflecting on the sentences one would (...) use to report or self-ascribe we-intentions. As Ferguson argues, we-intention-reporting sentences have ‘I’ as their subjects, which reveals that their truth conditions, like the performance conditions of their expressive counterparts, are satisfied by the individual who reports or expresses those intentions rather than by the host community. We-intention-reporting sentences, which make explicit both dimensions of independence and shareability, also reveal that intersubjective form is a feature of we-intentions qua mental states rather than a feature of their contents. Ferguson concludes that although the individualist account needs further development, the sketch provided in this chapter is compelling enough to demand that individualism and independence be moved from the periphery to the core of our study of we-intentions in Sellars's practical philosophy. (shrink)

Inheritance is the principle that deontic `ought' is closed under entailment. This paper is about a tension that arises in connection with Inheritance. More specifically, it is about two observations that pull in opposite directions. One of them raises questions about the validity of Inheritance, while the other appears to provide strong support for it. We argue that existing approaches to deontic modals fail to provide us with an adequate resolution of this tension. In response, we develop a positive analysis, (...) and show that this proposal provides a satisfying account of our intuitions. (shrink)

Several theorists have observed that attitude reports have what we call “revisionist” uses. For example, even if Pete has never met Ann and has no idea that she exists, Jane can still say to Jim ‘Pete believes Ann can learn to play tennis in ten lessons’ if Pete believes all 6-year-olds can learn to play tennis in ten lessons and it is part of Jane and Jim’s background knowledge that Ann is a 6-year-old. Jane’s assertion seems acceptable because the claim (...) she reports Pete as believing is entailed by Pete’s beliefs if they are revised in light of Jane and Jim’s background knowledge. We provide a semantic theory of revisionist reports based on this idea. We observe that the admissible “revisions” are limited in a striking way. Jane cannot say ‘Pete thinks Ann is a 6-year-old and can play tennis in ten lessons’ in the same context that she can say ‘Pete believes Ann can learn to play tennis ten lessons’, even though this too follows from Jane and Jim’s background knowledge together with what Pete believes. Our theory predicts the infelicity of these latter reports. It also has the resources to predict the truth of “exported” attitude reports and casts the relationship between these reports and “singular thought” in a new light. We conclude by discussing how revisionist reports make trouble for a simplistic view of the connection between the relations expressed by attitude verbs in natural language and the relations of most interest to philosophers of mind and cognitive science. (shrink)

For the first time, this book brings Kierkegaard into a dialogue with various postmodern forms of Christianity, on topics like revelation and the Bible, the atonement and moralism, and the church as an apologetic of witness.