This article offers an overview of the risks related to some representations of epigenetics in the process of making social and medical recommendations. After exploring different representations of epigenetics in popular literature and media discourses, I identify some of the premature conclusions that could emerge from such discourses, stressing issues related to parental responsibility—especially as they relate to women—regarding the transmission of epigenetic marks. I then propose some epistemological considerations regarding developmental biology in order to draw a more nuanced picture (...) of epigenetic responsibility. I argue that such considerations are important to clarify our general understanding of epigenetic research as well as its potential translation outside the scientific area. (shrink)

In this short but dense monograph, Roques sets out to fill a significant lacuna in the literature on William of Ockham's logic, epistemology, and metaphysics: his theory of real definitions. Remarkably, the subject has received little attention, given that nominal definitions, specifically in connection to complex connotative concepts in mental language and their role in Ockham's ontological reductionism, have been a central focus since the early 1980s. One reason for this oversight may be the historical association between real definitions and (...) the realist view that essences are universal entities. Ockham, a resemblance nominalist, holds that all essences are individual entities; this does not, as Roques's present... (shrink)

Natural deduction is the type of logic most familiar to current philosophers, and indeed is all that many modern philosophers know about logic. Yet natural deduction is a fairly recent innovation in logic, dating from Gentzen and Jaśkowski in 1934. This article traces the development of natural deduction from the view that these founders embraced to the widespread acceptance of the method in the 1960s. I focus especially on the different choices made by writers of elementary textbooks—the standard conduits of (...) the method to a generation of philosophers—with an eye to determining what the ‘essential characteristics’ of natural deduction are. (shrink)

Ce livre présente une lecture globale du corpus kantien sous un angle particulier : comment "penser" le mal? Comme simple absence du bien? Comme erreur? Ou, ainsi que Kant l'a mis en évidence, comme une "grandeur négative", qui appartient à...

Towards the end of Aline Medeiros Ramos’s study of John Buridan on craft as an intellectual virtue, she mentions William Ockham in passing and points towards his conception of craft. In this paper, I take up her implicit invitation to explore that conception. I begin by reconstructing Ockham’s notion of craft, and then proceed to discuss three consequences of that conception: the moral neutrality of craft, the role of deliberation in craftwork, and the epistemic status of craft and the craftworker. (...) I conclude by summarizing a number of issues that Buridan, according to Medeiros Ramos, finds it important to discuss, and which are noticeably absent from Ockham’s considerations. (shrink)

Some utterances of sentences such as ‘Every student failed the midterm exam’ and ‘There is no beer’ are widely held to be true in a conversation despite the facts that not every student in the world failed the midterm exam and that there is, in fact, some beer somewhere. For instance, the speaker might be talking about some particular course, or about his refrigerator. Stanley and Szabó (in Mind and Language v. 15, 2000) consider many different approaches to how contextual (...) information might give meaning to these ‘restricted quantifier domains’, and find all of them but one wanting. The present paper argues that their considerations against one of these other theories, considerations that turn on notions of compositionality, are incorrect. (shrink)

(2012). DEL-sequents for regression and epistemic planning. Journal of Applied Non-Classical Logics: Vol. 22, No. 4, pp. 337-367. doi: 10.1080/11663081.2012.736703.

In the case of an actual proper name such as ‘Aristotle’ opinions as to the Sinn may differ. It might, for instance, be taken to be the following: the pupil of Plato and teacher of Alexander the Great. Anybody who does this will attach another Sinn to the sentence ‘Aristotle was born in Stagira’ than will a man who takes as the Sinn of the name: the teacher of Alexander the Great who was born in Stagira. So long as the (...) Bedeutung remains the same, such variations of Sinn may be tolerated, although they are to be avoided.. (shrink)

In an attempt to address the theoretical gap between linguistics and philosophy, a group of semanticists, calling itself the Generic Group, has worked to develop a common view of genericity. Their research has resulted in this book, which consists of a substantive introduction and eleven original articles on important aspects of the interpretation of generic expressions. The introduction provides a clear overview of the issues and synthesizes the major analytical approaches to them. Taken together, the papers that follow reflect the (...) current state of the art in the semantics of generics, and afford insight into various generic phenomena. (shrink)

In an interesting experimental study, Bonini et al. (1999) present partial support for truth-gap theories of vagueness. We say this despite their claim to find theoretical and empirical reasons to dismiss gap theories and despite the fact that they favor an alternative, epistemic account, which they call ‘vagueness as ignorance’. We present yet more experimental evidence that supports gap theories, and argue for a semantic/pragmatic alternative that unifies the gappy supervaluationary approach together with its glutty relative, the subvaluationary approach.

Dans cet ouvrage collectif, l'article de Guy Bouchard intitulé "Comment émasculiniser l' écriture philosophique" met d'abord en lumière le sexisme qui a caractérisé tant la philosophie que le langage en général; il s'interroge ensuite sur les façons "d'émasculiniser" l' écriture philosophique et au niveau de la pensée, et à celui du langage.

Dans un article intitulé "Féminisme et théorie politique" inclus dans cet ouvrage collectif, Guy Bouchard présente la critique féministe de la théorie politique, tant dans son volet philosophique que dans sa dimension scientifique; il insiste sur l'actualité de cette critique, puisque l'image officielle d'elle-même que projette la discipline continue à ignorer les femmes; et il discute trois modèles de rapports entre féminisme et théorie politique: (1) le rejet féministe de cette théorie; (2) l'intégration à celle-ci des préoccupations féministes; (3) sa (...) reconstruction dans une perspective féministe, reconstruction pouvant emprunter trois voies: remplacer l'androcentrisme par le gynocentrisme; juxtaposer la théorie politique traditionnelle et une théorie politique féministe; élaborer une orientation qui ne soit ni androcentrique ni gynocentrique et qui transcende la simple juxtaposition. (shrink)

Dynamic Epistemic Logic (DEL) deals with the representation and the study in a multi-agent setting of knowledge and belief change. It can express in a uniform way epistemic statements about: 1. what is true about an initial situation 2. what is true about an event occurring in this situation 3. what is true about the resulting situation after the event has occurred. We axiomatize within the DEL framework what we can infer about (iii) given (i) and (ii). Given three formulas (...) φ,φ' and φ" describing respectively (i), (ii) and (iii), we also show how to build a formula φ ? φ' which captures all the information which can be inferred about (iii) from φ and φ'. We show how our results extend to other modal logics than K. In our proofs and definitions, we resort to a large extent to the normal form formulas for modal logic originally introduced by Kit Fine. In a companion paper (Aucher, 2012), we axiomatize what we can infer about (ii) given (i) and (iii), and what we can infer about (i) given (ii) and (iii), and show how to build two formulas φ ? φ" and φ' ? φ" which capture respectively all the information which can be inferred about (ii) from φ and φ", and all the information which can be inferred about (i) from φ' and φ". (shrink)

One way social scientists explain phenomena is by building structural models. These models are explanatory insofar as they manage to perform a recursive decomposition on an initial multivariate probability distribution, which can be interpreted as a mechanism. Explanations in social sciences share important aspects that have been highlighted in the mechanisms literature. Notably, spelling out the functioning the mechanism gives it explanatory power. Thus social scientists should choose the variables to include in the model on the basis of their function (...) in the mechanism. This paper examines the notion of ‘function’ within structural modelling. We argue that ‘functions’ ought to be understood as the theoretical underpinnings of the causes, namely as the role that causes play in the functioning of the mechanism. (shrink)

Representing an epistemic situation involving several agents obviously depends on the modeling point of view one takes. We start by identifying the types of modeling points of view which are logically possible. We call the one traditionally followed by epistemic logic the perfect external approach, because there the modeler is assumed to be an omniscient and external observer of the epistemic situation. In the rest of the paper we focus on what we call the internal approach, where the modeler is (...) one of the agents involved in the situation. For this approach we propose and axiomatize a logical formalism based on epistemic logic. This leads us to formalize some intuitions about the internal approach and about its connections with the external ones. Finally, we show that our internal logic is decidable and PSPACE-complete. (shrink)

The Grand Challenges literature brings under its umbrella a wide variety of disjointed phenomena but runs the risk of reinventing the wheel as well as overlooking incremental progress and past work. To avert this, scholars need to (dis)connect (dis)similar issues, build on past research on these issues, and create opportunities for generalizability through theoretical examinations.

While Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) is often seen to involve voluntary and deliberative approaches such as certification, governments have recently stepped into the picture through national legislation. France’s Law on Duty of Vigilance adopted in 2017 is a landmark case of such legislation. Years of voluntary CSR certification schemes led by Civil Society were replaced by a new philosophy of fighting for mandatory CSR controlled by a judge. We depict the change of mindset and the related change of roles inside (...) the coalition of Civil Society actors represents a Machiavellian Moment. The combination of collective civil society actors’ roles (namely nongovernmental organizations and labor unions) as Machiavellian _Virtue_ with disruptive events as Machiavellian _Fortuna_ made the law’s adoption possible. Based on this case study, we provide an analysis of civil society roles in the development of CSR-related legislation. (shrink)

The general aim of this volume is to investigate the nature of the relation between pictorial experience and aesthetic appreciation. In particular, it is concerned with the character and intimacy of this relationship: is there a mere causal connection between pictorial experience and aesthetic appreciation, or are the two relata constitutively associated with one another? The essays in the book's first section investigate important conceptual issues related to the pictorial experience of paintings. In Section II, the essays discuss the notion (...) of styles, techniques, agency, and facture, and also take into account the experience of photographic and cinematic pictures. The Pleasure of Pictures goes substantially beyond current debates in the philosophy of depiction to launch a new area of reflection in philosophical aesthetics. (shrink)

After observing that the truth conditions of connectives of non–classical logics are generally defined in terms of formulas of first–order logic, we introduce ‘protologics’, a class of logics whose connectives are defined by arbitrary first–order formulas. Then, we introduce atomic and molecular logics, which are two subclasses of protologics that generalize our gaggle logics and which behave particularly well from a theoretical point of view. We also study and introduce a notion of equi-expressivity between two logics based on different classes (...) of models. We prove that, according to that notion, every pure predicate logic with \ variables and constants is as expressive as a predicate atomic logic, some sort of atomic logic. Then, we prove that the class of protologics is equally expressive as the class of molecular logics. That formally supports our claim that atomic and molecular logics are somehow ‘universal’. Finally, we identify a subclass of molecular logics that we call predicate molecular logics and which constitutes its representative core: every molecular logic is as expressive as a predicate molecular logic. (shrink)

In update logic as studied by Baltag, Moss, Solecki and van Benthem, little attention is paid to the interpretation of an action by an agent, which is just assumed to depend on the situation. This is actually a complex issue that nevertheless complies to some logical dynamics. In this paper, we tackle this topic. We also deal with actions that change propositional facts of the situation. In parallel, we propose a formalism to accurately represent an agent's epistemic state based on (...) hyperreal numbers. In that respect, we use infinitesimals to express what would surprise the agents (and by how much) by contradicting their beliefs. We also use a subjective probability to model the notion of belief. It turns out that our probabilistic update mechanism satisfies the AGM postulates of belief revision. (shrink)

T. K. Menas [4, pp. 225-234] introduced a combinatorial property χ (μ) of a measure μ on a supercompact cardinal κ and proved that measures with this property also have the partition property. We prove here that Menas' property is not equivalent to the partition property. We also show that if α is the least cardinal greater than κ such that P κ α bears a measure without the partition property, then α is inaccessible and Π 2 1 -indescribable.

This edited volume presents new lines of research dealing with the language of thought and its philosophical implications in the time of Ockham. It features more than 20 essays that also serve as a tribute to the ground-breaking work of a leading expert in late medieval philosophy: Claude Panaccio. Coverage addresses topics in the philosophy of mind and cognition, concepts, logic and language, action theory, and more. A distinctive feature of this work is that it brings together contributions in both (...) French and English, the two major research languages today on the main theme in question. It unites the most renowned specialists in the field as well as many of Claude Panaccio’s former students who have engaged with his work over the years. In furthering this dialogue, the essays render key topics in fourteenth-century thought accessible to the contemporary philosophical community without being anachronistic or insensitive to the particularities of the medieval context. As a result, this book will appeal to a general population of philosophers and historians of philosophy with an interest in logic, philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, and metaphysics. (shrink)

Guillaume Collett questions to what extent we can locate Deleuze within the Lacanian School during the late-1960s, prior to Guattari. In so doing, he offers a new, integrated reading of Deleuze's The Logic of Sense by understanding it as a 'psychoanalysis of sense', and gives a new interpretation of Deleuze's conception of philosophy itself. The Psychoanalysis of Sense shows that Deleuze was not merely aware of the debates animating the Lacanian School during the 1960s: he sought to contribute to (...) them. Emphasising his appropriation of the work of post-Lacanian Serge Leclaire, Collett explains how Deleuze constructed a more singular and immanent theory of the linguistic structure of the unconscious - granting the erogenous body a larger structuring role. (shrink)

In epistemic logic, some axioms dealing with the notion of knowledge are rather convoluted and difficult to interpret intuitively, even though some of them, such as the axioms.2 and.3, are considered to be key axioms by some epistemic logicians. We show that they can be characterized in terms of understandable interaction axioms relating knowledge and belief or knowledge and conditional belief. In order to show it, we first sketch a theory dealing with the characterization of axioms in terms of interaction (...) axioms in modal logic. We then apply the main results and methods of this theory to obtain specific results related to epistemic and doxastic logics. (shrink)

Critical thinking is often taught with some emphasis on categories and operations of cognitive biases. The underlying thought is that knowledge of biases equips students to reduce them. The empirical evidence, however, doesn’t provide much support for this thought. We have previously argued that the emphasis on debiasing in critical thinking education is worth preserving, but in light of a more explicit and broader conception of debiasing. We now argue that this broader conception of debiasing strategies obliges critical thinking instructors (...) and curriculum designers to reflect on the teaching approaches that might facilitate the use of those strategies. We propose some teaching techniques to expand the scope of debiasing in the classroom—some untested, some only rarely and recently characterized as critical thinking strategies, rather than as pragmatic considerations in, e.g., design, engineering, marketing. These methods and others like them, we suggest, broaden the prospects for teaching a range of effective critical thinking techniques for debiasing. (shrink)

A generic statement is a type of generalization that is made by asserting that a "kind" has a certain property. For example we might hear that marshmallows are sweet. Here, we are talking about the "kind" marshmallow and assert that individual instances of this kind have the property of being sweet. Almost all of our common sense knowledge about the everyday world is put in terms of generic statements. What can make these generic sentences be true even when there are (...) exceptions? A mass term is one that does not "divide its reference;" the word water is a mass term; the word dog is a count term. In a certain vicinity, one can count and identity how many dogs there are, but it doesn't make sense to do that for water--there just is water present. The philosophical literature is rife with examples concerning how a thing can be composed of a mass, such as a statue being composed of clay. Both generic statements and mass terms have led philosophers, linguists, semanticists, and logicians to search for theories to accommodate these phenomena and relationships. The contributors to this interdisciplinary volume study the nature and use of generics and mass terms. Noted researchers in the psychology of language use material from the investigation of human performance and child-language learning to broaden the range of options open for formal semanticists in the construction of their theories, and to give credence to some of their earlier postulations--for instance, concerning different types of predications that are available for true generics and for the role of object recognitions in the development of count vs. mass terms. Relevant data also is described by investigating the ways children learn these sorts of linguistic items: children can learn how to sue generic statements correctly at an early age, and children are adept at individuating objects and distinguishing them from the stuff of which they are made also at an early age. (shrink)

Unlike in physics, the category of thought experiment is not very common in biology. At least there are no classic examples that are as important and as well-known as the most famous thought experiments in physics, such as Galileo’s, Maxwell’s or Einstein’s. The reasons for this are far from obvious; maybe it has to do with the fact that modern biology for the most part sees itself as a thoroughly empirical discipline that engages either in real natural history or in (...) experimenting on real organisms rather than fictive ones. While theoretical biology does exist and is recognized as part of biology, its role within biology appears to be more marginal than the role of theoretical physics within physics. It could be that this marginality of theory also affects thought experiments as sources of theoretical knowledge. Of course, none of this provides a sufficient reason for thinking that thought experiments are really unimportant in biology. It is quite possible that the common perception of this matter is wrong and that there are important theoretical considerations in biology, past or present, that deserve the title of thought experiment just as much as the standard examples from physics. Some such considerations may even be widely known and considered to be important, but were not recognized as thought experiments. In fact, as we shall see, there are reasons for thinking that what is arguably the single most important biological work ever, Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, contains a number of thought experiments. There are also more recent examples both in evolutionary and non-evolutionary biology, as we will show. Part of the problem in identifying positive examples in the history of biology is the lack of agreement as to what exactly a thought experiment is. Even worse, there may not be more than a family resemblance that unifies this epistemic category. We take it that classical thought experiments show the following characteristics: They serve directly or indirectly in the non-empirical epistemic evaluation of theoretical propositions, explanations or hypotheses. Thought experiments somehow appeal to the imagination. They involve hypothetical scenarios, which may or may not be fictive. In other words, thought experiments suppose that certain states of affairs hold and then try to intuit what would happen in a world where these suppositions are true. We want to examine in the following sections if there are episodes in the history of biology that satisfy these criteria. As we will show, there are a few episodes that might satisfy all three of these criteria, and many more if the imagination criterion is dropped or understood in a lose sense. In any case, this criterion is somewhat vague in the first place, unless a specific account of the imagination is presupposed. There will also be issues as to what exactly “non-empirical” means. In general, for the sake of discussion we propose to understand the term “thought experiment” here in a broad rather than a narrow sense here. We would rather be guilty of having too wide a conception of thought experiment than of missing a whole range of really interesting examples. (shrink)

We report the results of two studies that evaluated the perceptions of supervisor and top leader ethics. In our first study, we re-analyzed data from Pelletier and Bligh (J Bus Ethics 67:359–374, 2006) and found that the Perceptions of Ethical Leadership Scale from that study could be used to differentiate perceptions of supervisor and top leader ethics. In a second study with a different sample, we examined the relationships between (1) individual employees’ perceptions of top managers’ and immediate supervisors’ (...) ethical tendencies, and (2) organizational climate, confidence in top leadership direction, commitment, and citizenship behavior. Results indicated that employee perceptions of top managers’ and supervisors’ ethics were significantly related to climate, top leadership direction, organizational commitment and the OCB dimension, civic virtue. (shrink)

Pour Hegel, le sens s’élabore dans le langage, mais l’usage du langage ne fait pas nécessairement sens. Au niveau du discours, il semble même qu’un problème inévitable survienne. Si l’expérience d’un sens s’élaborant dans le langage ne s’accomplit que sous la forme d’un système autoréférent, comment ce sens peut-il se communiquer sans se contredire? Hegel n’échappe pas à ce problème si bien que l’on peut se poser la question de savoir si la dialectique du système est compatible avec les éléments (...) dialogiques (préfaces, notes, etc.) qui visent à l’instanciation de ce système? Nous montrons alors que pour nouer l’autoréférence du sens à l’idée de communication, Hegel présuppose le moyen terme d’un esprit commun, un "Nous". À partir de celui-ci, nous construisons un modèle dialogique et autoréférent qui dessine certains enjeux propres aux philosophies contemporaines de la communication. (shrink)