Online research in philosophy

Despite all the attention philosophers have been paying to Naming and Necessity, they have not realized just how apt the title is: naming and necessity are intimately connected, even more intimately then Saul Kripke has led us to believe. The conception of necessity clarified by Kripke—metaphysical or counterfactual necessity—helps us understand what our ordinary practice of using proper names is about; and proper-name usage in turn helps us understand what counterfactual situations (possible worlds) are about. My aim is to propose (...) yet another picture: (i) inherent in proper-name usage is the expectation that names refer to modally robust individuals:1 individuals that can sustain modal predications like ‘is necessarily human’, or ‘might have discovered Goldbach’s conjecture’; (ii) these modally robust individuals are the fundamental building blocks on the basis of which possible worlds should be conceived in a modal semantics intended to mirror the conceptual apparatus behind ordinary modal talk. In Part II, I describe (i) and (ii), what I call the individual-driven picture. In Part III, I relate this picture to others. The pre-Kripkean pictures of individuals and modality were markedly different. First, there was the conception of modality as logical or analytic necessity. Second, there was the conception of possible worlds needed for physical necessity, giving rise to issues about the transworld identification of individuals. Third came Kripke’s proposal that proper names are rigid designators. Fourth, in the wake of Kripke’s Naming and Necessity lectures, David Kaplan suggested that proper names were directly referential expressions whose propositional contribution was their referent. Sections 1–4 summarize each of these four milestones. Kripke’s view was close to the individual-driven picture. Kaplan’s was even closer—when he was not talking about propositions and what proper names contribute to them.. (shrink)

In his influential Naming and Necessity lectures, Saul Kripke made new sense of modal statements: “Kant might have been a bachelor”, “Königsberg is necessarily identical with Kaliningrad”. Many took the notions he introduced-metaphysical necessity and rigid designation -- to herald new metaphysical issues and have important consequences. In fact, the Kripkean insight is at bottom semantic, rather than metaphysical: it is part of how proper names work that they purport to refer to individuals to whom modal properties can be ascribed. (...) We can see this by reflecting on analytic truths that ground modal claims like the two examples above. (shrink)

In this article we discuss the aspects of designing facial expressions for virtual humans (VHs) with a specific culture. First we explore the notion of cultures and its relevance for applications with a VH. Then we give a general scheme of designing emotional facial expressions, and identify the stages where a human is involved, either as a real person with some specific role, or as a VH displaying facial expressions. We discuss how the display and the emotional meaning of facial (...) expressions may be measured in objective ways, and how the culture of displayers and the judges may influence the process of analyzing human facial expressions and evaluating synthesized ones. We review psychological experiments on cross-cultural perception of emotional facial expressions. By identifying the culturally critical issues of data collection and interpretation with both real and VHs, we aim at providing a methodological reference and inspiration for further research. (shrink)