Some theorists on literary interpretation have suggested a connection between Monroe C. Beardsley’s anti-intentionalism and hypothetical intentionalism based on an implied author. However, a full exploration has never been attempted. I undertake this task in this paper. A close reading of Beardsley reveals that he assumes something very similar to the implied author in interpretation. I distinguish five types of fictional works in terms of their narrative mode and show that my claim stands in at least four of (...) the five types. The significance of my argument lies in exposing the above version of authorism in anti-intentionalism. -/- Beardsley is generally perceived as advocating the irrelevance of authorial intention to literary interpretation. The common interpretation of his theory is that work-meaning is generated by linguistic conventions, with intention playing no role in meaning-determination. All the interpreter needs is knowledge of public, linguistic conventions in order to recover textual meaning. -/- Nevertheless, when dealing with the problem of interpretation, Beardsley explicitly talks about attributing textual meaning to a fictional speaker. Although he does not elaborate on the nature of this speaker, clues scattered in his writings point to the striking similarity of this theoretical apparatus to an implied author. The key lies in his presumption that every fictional work must have an ultimate speaker to whom meaning inferred from the text should be attributed. This claim is almost the core of an implied author theory of interpretation. -/- A difficulty in classifying Beardsley’s view as a version of the implied author position is that his characterization of the story’s presenter might apply better to the story’s narrator than to its implied author. To test this, I examine different types of narrative modes to see whether the fictional speaker merges with the implied author in each of these scenarios. -/- The first factor to consider for classifying narrative modes is whether the narrator’s presence is explicit or implicit. The narrative scenario in which the narrator is implicit can be further divided into two sub-types: either the story is told from an omniscient viewpoint or centers on the experience of a third-person character. In either case, the story is not told by any of the characters in the story; rather, it is told by an implicit speaker whose words the work purports to be. It seems reasonable to identify this fictional speaker with the implied author, for both function as the subject to which textual meaning is attributed. -/- As for the narrative mode in which the narrator is explicit, this involves first-person narratives. In these, either the narrator is reliable or unreliable. When the narrator is unreliable, a transcendental perspective is required in determining the text’s meaning, because what is said ultimately in the work is not equivalent to what is literally said by the unreliable narrator. It follows that an implicit speaker has to be assumed and she again coincides with the implied author. -/- Where the narrator is reliable but textual meaning transcends what is literally expressed, an implicit speaker is at play again. This narrative scenario is thus better classified as a case in which the narrator’s presence is implicit. This leaves us with the narrative scenario in which the narrator is a reliable spokesperson for the implied author. -/- The identification of the narrator with the implied author in the case last mentioned is controversial. The crucial difference between them is that the former is dramatized in the story while the latter is not. I accept that the narrator here is not happily called an implied author, though I also point out several similarities between the two. -/- Finally, I discuss four complications to my argument. The first concerns multiple points of view in a story. To accommodate this kind of narrative, Beardsley could argue that an implicit narrator is needed to explain the definite meaning concealed behind what is literally said by different characters. The second complication is about the ontological status accorded to the narrator and the implied author. It might be objected that the two reside in different fictional worlds and this is what makes their merging impossible. But it is questionable whether this is a definitional feature of the implied author; moreover, the interpreter can take the implied author to be an instrumentalist concept and hence avoid talk about the ontological status of fictional entities. The third complication claims that versions of the implied author position developed by philosophers tend to be based on a contextualist ontology of literature; however, Beardsley’s account is acontextual. This is not true, for Beardsley has exhibited contextualist leanings in his writings. Finally, it has been objected that the formalist resources Beardsley has are not enough to guarantee a single right interpretation. But if Beardsley is actually a contextualist, contextual constraints will come into play and raise the chance of getting a single right interpretation. -/- The article concludes by reflecting on the significance of the misrepresentation of anti-intentionalism: it is the intention of the actual author which anti-intentionalism is against. The position in question is actually developed in an intentionalist framework based on the implied author. (shrink)

The utterance model is a popular basis for theories of interpretation in the contemporary analytic philosophy of literature. This model suggests that interpretation should be constrained by a work's identity‐relevant factors in its context of production because a work, like an utterance, acquires its identity and content in part from its relations with that context. From a descriptive point of view, I argue that the implied author account of interpretation best describes critical practice following the current positions based on (...) the utterance model. That is, people who interpret in accordance with these positions end up interpreting an implied author. (shrink)

Resumen: El presente trabajo explora el estatuto del arte en la filosofía de Spinoza, en el marco de la inversión copernicana que da origen a la estética y del barroco holandés. Si bien el pensamiento spinozista se inscribe en la conversión antropológica, en donde lo bello resulta ser un efecto en el sujeto y no una cualidad de los objetos, su comprensión del arte es inasimilable a la “estética” como ámbito diferenciado y autónomo que se consolida en el siglo XVIII, (...) y más bien concibe el arte integrado a la vida y a la experiencia común -a la vez que, en cuanto praxis de origen corporal al alcance de cualquiera, presenta puntos de contacto con las vanguardias históricas del siglo XX-. Spinoza, según se propone en este texto, concibe la producción de “obras de arte” menos como un hecho estético que como una actividad corporal éticamente orientada a la vida buena.: The present work explores the status of art in the philosophy of Spinoza, within the framework of the Copernican revolution that gives rise to aesthetics and the Dutch Baroque. Although the Spinozist thought is inscribed in the anthropological conversion by virtue of which beauty turns out to be an effect on the subject and not a property of objects, its understanding of art is unassimilable to "aesthetics" as a differentiated and autonomous area that it was consolidated in the eighteenth century, and rather conceived art integrated to life and common experience -at the same time, as praxis of bodily origin within the reach of anyone, presents points of contact with the historical avant-gardes of the twentieth century-. Spinoza conceives the production of "artworks" less as an aesthetic fact than as a body activity ethically oriented to the good life. (shrink)

As artefacts, the worlds of digital games are designed and developed to fulfil certain expressive, functional, and experiential objectives. During play, players infer these purposes and aspirations from various aspects of their engagement with the gameworld. Influenced by their sociocultural backgrounds, sensitivities, gameplay preferences, and familiarity with game conventions, players construct a subjective interpretation of the intentions with which they believe the digital game in question was created. By analogy with the narratological notion of the implied author, we call (...) the figure to which players ascribe these intentions ‘the implied designer’. In this article, we introduce the notion of the implied designer and present an initial account of how appreciators ascribe meaning to interactive, fictional gameworlds and act within them based on what they perceive to be the designer’s intentions. (shrink)

Religion and Laughter in a Digital Society.

According to epistemic deontologism, attributions of epistemic justification are deontic claims about what we ought to believe. One of the most prominent objections to this conception, due mainly to William P. Alston, is that the principle that ‘ought’ implies ‘can’ rules out deontologism because our beliefs are not under our voluntary control. In this paper, I offer a partial defense of Alston’s critique of deontologism. While Alston is right that OIC rules out epistemic deontologism, appealing to doxastic involuntarism is not (...) necessary for generating that tension. Deontologists would still have a problem with OIC if doxastic voluntarism turned out to be true or if deontologism did not require voluntarism. This is because, in short, epistemic justification does not imply ‘can’. If, as deontologists maintain, epistemic justification implies ‘oughts’, then epistemic justification must also imply ‘can’ given OIC. But since epistemic justification does not imply ‘can’, OIC dictates that we reject deontologism. I end by exploring the possible consequences of this incompatibility between OIC and deontologism. My conclusion is that at least one of the following claims must be true. Either ‘ought’ does not imply ‘can’, attributions of epistemic justification are not deontic claims, or epistemic claims lack necessary or categorical normative authority. (shrink)

In this paper, I offer a view beyond that which would narrowly reduce the role of parents in medical decision making to acting as custodians of the best interests of children and toward an account of family authority and family autonomy. As a fundamental social unit, the good of the family is usually appreciated, at least in part, in terms of its ability successfully to instantiate its core moral and cultural understandings as well as to pass on such commitments (...) to future generations. The putative rights of children to expression, information, freedom of thought, conscience, religion, and to freedom of association with others are, in this essay, assessed from the perspective of those conditions necessary for the family to function as a moral community. In so doing, I respond to the move to liberate children from parental authority and to effect the transformation of the family as implied by the United Nations’ "Convention on the Rights of the Child" and the pediatric bioethics it supports. (shrink)

We present asecond-personalaccount of corporate moral agency. This approach is in contrast to thefirst-personalapproach adopted in much of the existing literature, which concentrates on the corporation’s ability to identify moral reasons for itself. Our account treats relationships and communications as the fundamental building blocks of moral agency. The second-personal account rests on a framework developed by Darwall. Its central requirement is that corporations be capable of recognizing the authority relations that they have with other moral agents. We discuss the (...) relevance of corporate affect, corporate communications, and corporate culture to the second-personal account. The second-personal account yields a new way to specify first-personal criteria for moral agency, and it generates fresh insights into the reasons those criteria matter. In addition, a second-personal analysis implies that moral agency is partly a matter of policy, and it provides a fresh perspective on corporate punishment. (shrink)

According to the general rule explaining apparent authority, if the behaviour of a principal gives reasonable grounds for the third party to think that the principal has appointed the other person to be his agent, contracts concluded by the third party in the principal’s name shall be binding on the principal, notwithstanding the fact that the agent was not authorised by the principal to conclude particular contracts. In the absence of evidence of apparent authority the agent shall have (...) to redress the damage incurred on a third party in cases where the third party was not aware, and was under no obligation to be aware, of circumstances that the person acted in other person’s name without their express authorisation or in excess of their authority. The principal shall be liable for actions of the apparent agent if the following three requirements are proven: words or conduct of the principal caused the impression of authority; third party could reasonably presume the existence of sufficient authority; third party acted in good faith. The third party’s legitimate expectations must be aligned with the principal’s will in order to apply the doctrine of apparent authority efficiently. (shrink)

The pervasive dispositional model of belief is misguided. It fails to acknowledge the authority of first‐person ascriptions or avowals of belief, and the “decision principle”– that having decided the question whether p, there is, for me, no further question whether I believe that p. The dilemma is how one can have immediate knowledge of a state extended in time; its resolution lies in the expressive character of avowals – which does not imply a non‐assertoric thesis – and their non‐cognitive (...) status. The common claim that there are higher‐order beliefs concerning ones present beliefs is rejected as unintelligible. The decision principle is defended against claims of “unconscious belief”; there is no interesting such category, since all beliefs are liable at some time to be considered, but mostly to be out of mind. Belief is not constituted by a disposition, but is connected with dispositions – it is an “attitude concept”. (shrink)

In this article, I argue that God is authoritative over us because he is our divine, causal parent. As our causal parent, God has duties to relate to us, but he can only fulfill those duties if he has the practical authority to give us commands aimed at our sanctification. From ought-implies-can reasoning, I conclude that God has that authority. After I make this argument, I show how the view has significant advantages over extant arguments for divine (...) class='Hi'>authority and can help solve other significant problems in philosophy of religion. (shrink)

For Hannah Arendt, authority is the shape educational responsibility assumes. In our time, authority in Arendt’s sense is under pressure. The figure of Greta Thunberg shows the failure of adult generations, taken collectively, to take responsibility for the world and present and future generations of newcomers. However, in reflecting on Arendt’s use of authority, we argue that her account of authority also requires amendments. Arendt’s situating of educational authority in-between past and future adequately captures its (...) temporal dimension. We make explicit another, spatial, dimension: authority in-between world and earth. Arendt’s neglect of the material earth also has implications for the relational dimension of authority. Arendt’s authority depends on a dichotomy between the private and the public sphere. This is problematic. First, we agree with Arendt’s feminist critics that the personal can be made into the site of the political. Second, we point once more to Thunberg, the child, taking the public stage, thereby contesting the division between public and private. In response, we situate the relational dimension of authority in-between private and public. The three dimensions of educational authority taken together imply that it is situated in-between domains that cannot be reduced to each other or taken as absolutes: past and future, world and earth, and the private and public sphere. This brings us to our concept of ambiguous authority, which expresses the Arendtian nature of our reflections and the ways in which we seek to renew her original insights on educational authority. (shrink)

Expertise is commonly viewed as a professionalized competence in a specific field. Expert professional identities are produced and reproduced through professional training and other socialization mechanisms, which work to generate for a specific group of individuals a specific set of expert skills and knowledge. In this paper, I examine participants’ orientations to their distinct expert professional identities from the perspective of deontic authority. Drawing on 15 video-recorded church workplace meetings between pastors and cantors as data, and conversation analysis as (...) a theoretical and methodological framework, I analyze situations where a non-expert participant makes a proposal that the expert participant orients to as reasonable to comply with. Specifically, I demonstrate how the expert participants respond to these proposals with displays of deontic authority, arguably in an attempt to maintain their expert identities in the face of their de facto compliance with the proposals. In these situations, the expert participants are shown to invoke a past decision of their own, a future decision of their own, or a pattern that is beyond both participants’ control. Each of these practices involves the expert participant balancing resistance and compliance by minimally acknowledging the content of the non-expert participant’s proposal, while excluding the non-expert from those who have deontic authority in the matter. In so doing, the expert speaker implies that the non-expert proposal speaker lacks procedural knowledge about the specific matters about which it is relevant to make proposals to experts and access to the distinct experiential perspective that characterizes expert perception of things. It is thus argued that, in this context, the mere claims of deontic authority, produced without any substantial displays of expert knowledge, can serve the maintenance of expert professional identities. (shrink)

John Stuart Mill’s defense of free discussion in On Liberty includes the claim that silencing discussion implies an “assumption of infallibility.” This claim is often dismissed as absurd on the ground that a censor might attempt to silence an opinion he believes to be true but pernicious, or because rational assurance short of infallibility is obviously sufficient to justify censorship. This paper argues that Mill is concerned about the epistemic position one assumes with regard to future persons and circumstances as (...) a result of attempting to settle some matter irremediably. The irrationality of this "assumption" sets an important authority-limiting constraint on both social authority and individuals in matters that otherwise would fall under their rightful control. For individuals, in particular, it explains Mill's restriction on selling oneself into irrevocable slavery. (shrink)

The pervasive dispositional model of belief is misguided. It fails to acknowledge the authority of first‐person ascriptions or avowals of belief, and the “decision principle”– that having decided the question whether p, there is, for me, no further question whether I believe that p. The dilemma is how one can have immediate knowledge of a state extended in time; its resolution lies in the expressive character of avowals – which does not imply a non‐assertoric thesis – and their non‐cognitive (...) status. The common claim that there are higher‐order beliefs concerning ones present beliefs is rejected as unintelligible. The decision principle is defended against claims of “unconscious belief”; there is no interesting such category, since all beliefs are liable at some time to be considered, but mostly to be out of mind. Belief is not constituted by a disposition, but is connected with dispositions – it is an “attitude concept”. (shrink)

Church authority is a vicarious, sacramental, grace-communicating operation implying both service of the people of God and mutual responsiveness in a creative and ceaseless dialogue.

The principle “Ought implies can” has important connections with the problem of free will. In this chapter, I lay out these connections and proceed to consider a recent exercise in “experimental philosophy” whose results some have regarded as constituting an important challenge to the principle. Although many, perhaps most, philosophers regard the principle as an analytic truth, a survey of non-philosophers conducted in 2016 has led its authors to conclude that non-philosophers do not accept the “Ought implies can” principle. The (...) main topics of this chapter are a critical evaluation of the authors’ interpretation of the results of their survey and an examination of the implications of those results for the question whether the principle is true. (shrink)

The notion of ‘illocutionary silencing’ has been given a key role in defining the harms of pornography by several feminist philosophers. Though the literature on silencing focuses almost exclusively on the speech act of sexual refusal, oddly enough, it lacks a thorough analysis of that very act. My first aim is to fill this theoretical gap. I claim that refusals are “second-turn illocutions”: they cannot be accomplished in absence of a previous interrogative (or open) call by the hearer. Furthermore, I (...) maintain that refusals constitute authoritative illocutions only when preceded by requests for permission. The secondary goal of my paper is to assess Mary Kate McGowan’s (2009) account of silencing as authority denial. Despite its virtues, I argue that ultimately it should be rejected on two grounds: (i) it entails an objectification of female sexuality; (ii) if sexual advances are requests for permission (as McGowan implies), a man who asks a woman for sex cannot fail to ratify her authority over her own body. I conclude by sketching an alternative explanation for the failure of women’s refusals, according to which women may be unable to refuse sex for their interlocutors’ advances are intended as imperative (or closed) calls. (shrink)

We analyse a recent paper in which an alleged devastating criticism of the so called GRW proposal to account for the objectification of the properties of macroscopic systems has been presented and we show that the author has not taken into account the precise implications of the GRW theory. This fact makes his conclusions basically wrong. We also perform a survey of measurement theory aimed to focus better on the physical and the conceptual aspects of the so-called macro-objectification problem.

Many theist as well as many atheist philosophers have maintained that if God exists, then every instance of undeserved, unwanted suffering ultimately benefits the sufferer. Recently, several authors have argued that this implication of theism conflicts with ordinary morality. I show that these arguments all rest on a common mistake. Defenders of these arguments overlook the role of merely potential instances of suffering in determining our moral obligations toward suffering.

In this article, I consider several different ways of unpacking the metaphor of self-authorship, asking what an author might be and how authorship thus understood might be related to personal autonomy. First, I consider authors as makers or creators in a generic sense. Next, I consider authors as a particular sort of creator (the creator of a text), and, finally, authors as an interpretive construct implied by a text. Ultimately, I argue that we both construct ourselves as authors and (...) take responsibility for our self-constructs through narrative self-interpretation. Importantly, however, narrative self-interpretation is not simply a process of individual self-narration. Given the limitations placed on the autobiographical perspective by our temporal and subjective locations and the intersection of any one person's story with the stories of others, I argue that both autonomy and autobiography are best understood as relational. (shrink)

Each developed economic system is based on the principle of division of labor and can’t be imagined without the delegation of certain powers to agents. Any economic activity, particularly carried out through legal entity, is not able to function without the party’s right to authorize other persons to negotiate and make contracts on behalf of the principal. Due to the complexity of the economic order it is sometimes difficult to a third party to ascertain whether the agent acts with (...) class='Hi'>authority. Therefore legal regulation expands the scope of authority of the representatives beyond the actually granted powers—often the need to check the credentials of the representatives is rejected, when it is obvious from the facts that they have been granted necessary powers. (shrink)

This article discusses how Liang Shuming’s Eastern and Western Cultures and Their Philosophies adopted a genealogical mode of textual authorization which took shape in its depiction of Chinese history as a failure to live up to an ideal way of life imagined by Confucius. Implied in this discourse was the idea that Liang himself had been the first Confucian to understand what Confucius had truly meant. This genealogical discourse authorizing Liang and his text by linking them directly to Confucius (...) was further strengthened by a rhetoric which naturalized the discourse passed down from Confucius to Liang, distinguishing it from other forms of discourse seen as artificial. Finally, the text’s genealogical discourse also managed to incorporate the May Fourth critique of Confucianism by rejecting the historical manifestations of Confucianism before salvaging an ideal imagined by Confucius which was presented as uncontaminated by history and Confucianism’s enmeshment with state power. (shrink)

Blackburn and Searle have argued that Quine‘s thesis of the indeterminacy of translation results in a denial of the sort of first-person authority that we commonly concede we have over our mental and semantical content. For, the indeterminacy thesis implies that there is no determinate meaning to know at all. And, according to Quine, the indeterminacy holds at home too. For Blackburn, Quine must constrain the domain of indeterminacy to the case of translation only. Searle believes that Quine has (...) no other choice but to give up on his behaviorism. Hylton, however, has attempted to defend Quine against these objections, by arguing that Quine‘s naturalistic claim that speaking a language is nothing but possessing certain dispositions to act in specific ways would enable him to accommodate first-person authority. I will argue that the objections from Blackburn and Searle, as well as Hylton‘s solution, are all problematic when seen from within Quine‘s philosophy. I will introduce a sort of Strawsonian-Wittgensteinian conception of first-person authority and offer that it would be more than compatible with Quine‘s naturalistic philosophy. (shrink)

Upshot: I thank Mallen for providing some historical background concerning the origin of the Typist models and for helping clarify the theoretical issues addressed and motivations for creating the models. Whilst de Zeeuw acknowledges the Typist models as a useful contribution to first-order cybernetics, he questions their relevance for second-order cybernetics. I argue that, in the context of research on human learning, de Zeeuw’s characterisation is third- rather than second-order. Stewart questions the status of the model with respect to the (...) CTM and is concerned by our cursory treatment of “consciousness,” “semantics” and “embodiment.” We point out that the Typist models are digital models of cognitive processes rather than part of the CTM tradition. Franchi raises challenging questions about cognition and its embodiment. We acknowledge the contradiction implied when we talk about “implementing” the Typist models in a different form of processor, one that accommodates concurrency, as a processor of that kind would not be “programmable” in a conventional sense. (shrink)

Upshot: My answer focuses on two issues raised by the commentaries that it is essential to clarify in order to understand what radical neurophenomenology implies: Does radical neurophenomenology means stopping doing science? Does radical neurophenomenology require an intersubjective agreement on a method for investigating lived experience?

Ronan Reilly's connectionist simulation both strengthens and advances the theoretical model presented in my 1991 target article, “Language, Tools, and Brain: The Ontogeny and Phylogeny of Hierarchically Organized Sequential Behavior.” Reilly has tested the whole ontogenetic model with a single simulation study explicitly planned for this purpose. His methodology has established that the various components of the theoretical model imply and are compatible with one another. It has also indicated how learning can actualize a pre-established ontogenetic sequence of combining lingusitic (...) symbols and objects. His simulation suggests that the acquisition of linguistic speech may be facilitated by experience with object manipulation, but not vice versa. This hypothesis can and should be empirically tested through research on behavioral development in the two domains. Finally, Reilly has simulated brain architecture, as well as neural learning. His simulation therefore shows how the development of language and object manipulation can result from an interaction between preprogrammed neural architecture (analogous to network architecture) and experience (analogous to the network's training cycles). (shrink)

This paper assesses the first-person authority account (FPA) of gender, according to which X's self-identification of what X's gender is, is the final say on what X's gender is, such that if others disagree, they are mistaken. One main reason in support of FPA is respecting X's autonomy—that is, overriding X's self-identification amounts to denying X's autonomy. Ozturk criticizes this view using analogies of religious and patriotic self-identifications, such that there are cases in which someone can permissibly claim that (...) another is not, say, a true Muslim or a true patriot. This implies that there might also be cases of permissible rejections of gender self-identification. Ozturk offers instead the negotiative theory of identity, according to which it is permissible to reject a self identification as long as three constraints are satisfied: no harm is done to the self-identifier, and their privacy and dignity are not violated. (This essay is a slightly revised version of that found in the 7th edition of The Philosophy of Sex.). (shrink)

In a late reminiscence, Goethe recalled that during his close association with the poet Friedrich Schiller, he was constantly defending “the rights of nature" against his friend's “gospel of freedom.”1 Goethe’s characterization of his own view was artfully ironic, alluding as it did to the French Revolution's proclamation of the "Rights of Man." His remark implied that values lay within nature, values that had authority comparable to those ascribed to human beings by the architects of the Revolution. During (...) the time Goethe made his defense, he also faced another revolution, in which Schiller was a partisan—that of Kant in the intellectual sphere. Both upheavals had undermined the autonomy of nature, replacing her authority with that of human will and understanding. Previous papers in this volume have recorded the shifting fortunes of nature that brought her to this stage of jeopardy. In the early classical period, nature as a unified whole had not yet arisen. Animate and inanimate objects had natures— characteristic modes of action—but there was as yet, according Slatkin, no articulate concept of nature as a whole standing over against human beings. Park has described a long period of transition, when nature became personified in the form of a didactic female, a figure imaginatively based, it would seem, upon the system of a 1 natural philosophy that stood in contrast to the revealed wisdom of God. Nature in this guise yet derived her authority and nurturing capacity from that higher, divine power. During the seventeenth century, writers like Mandeville, as Allen has shown, began to suspect that nature might be a chimera, a fictive creature that disguised humanity's own hidden desires and inclinations. These doubts grew during the next century—with the likes of Hume accelerating the skepticism— till finally, in the two revolutions that so troubled Goethe, nature was completely stripped of her authority. Goethe had become confirmed in his defense of the rights of nature during his travels to Italy during the years 1786-1788. (shrink)

In some of Plato’s early dialogues we find a concern with correctly ascertaining the contents of a particular kind of one’s own psychological states, cognitive states. Indeed, one of the achievements of the elenctic method is to facilitate cognitive self-knowledge. In the Alcibiades, moreover, Plato interprets the Delphic injunction, ‘know yourself’, as crucially requiring cognitive self-knowledge, and ending in knowing oneself as subject to particular epistemic norms. Epistemic authority for self-knowledge is, for Plato, conferred on the basis of correct (...) application of norms to cognitive self-ascriptions, and not confined to the first-personal perspective. This implies first-personal plural epistemic authority for self-knowledge. (shrink)

The provider–patient relationship is typically regarded as an expert-to-novice relationship, and with good reason. Providers have extensive education and experience that have developed in them the competence to treat conditions better and with fewer harms than anyone else. However, some researchers argue that many patients with long-term conditions (LTCs), such as arthritis and chronic pain, have become “experts” at managing their LTC. Unfortunately, there is no generally agreed-upon conception of “patient expertise” or what it implies for the provider–patient relationship. I (...) review three prominent accounts of patient expertise and argue that all face serious objections. I contend, however, that a plausible account of patient expertise is available and that it provides a framework both for further empirical studies and for enhancing the provider–patient relationship. (shrink)

Abstract:This paper reports a phenomenological sub-study of a larger project investigating the way Hong Kong Chinese staff tackled their own ethical dilemmas at work. A special analysis was conducted of eight dilemma cases arising from a request by a boss or superior authority to do something regarded as ethically wrong. In reports of most such cases, staff expressed feelings of contractual or interpersonally based obligation to obey. They sought to save face and preserve harmony in their relationship with (...) class='Hi'>authority by choosing between “little potato” obedience, token obedience, and undercover disobedience. Only where no such obligation existed was face in relation to authority unimportant, and open disobedience chosen. In Kohlbergian terms, ethical reasoning at the conventional stages (three and four) predominated in dilemmas of obedience. Findings imply that if corruption were to originate at the top, codes of conduct recently introduced into Hong Kong may be of limited effect in stalling it. (shrink)

The association of passion with desire has a long history, from Aristotle to contemporary philosophers. The Aristotelian conception of passion as involving desire has exerted a considerable influence on modern philosophers. I shall take this idea to be the thesis that emotion implies desire. In order to elaborate this thesis, in this paper, I shall focus on Hume’s theory of passion in Book 2 of Treatise. To this end, I first of all present an interpretation of Hume that relies on (...) an account of desire as such that I have developed. Secondly, I demonstrate what kinds of authority, if any, desires have in Hume’s view of the explanation of action. (shrink)

Hawthorne, Landes, Wallmann and Williamson argue that the Principal Principle implies a version of the Principle of Indifference. We show that what the Authors take to be the Principle of Indifference can be obtained without invoking anything which would seem to be related to the Principal Principle. In the Appendix we also discuss several Conditions proposed in the same paper.

Power is one of the key ideas in management, and so is the concept of authority. However, most studies on power are rather instrumental, dealing with the place of power in management, and how to achieve it. Less attention has been paid to the essential concepts of power and authority themselves in management thought and how they have evolved. To clarify these concepts, and to better understand the notions of power and authority in management and their proper (...) use in organisations, this paper goes back to one of the pioneers in management thought: Mary Parker Follett (1868-1933). She had an original vision of power, holding that genuine power is not ‘power-over’, but ‘power-with’. At the same time, she defended an authority based on function and responsibility. We explain what her account implies for management in theory and practice. (shrink)

Empirical evidence suggests that people often confabulate when they are asked about their choices or reasons for action. The implications of these studies are the topic of intense debate in philosophy and the cognitive sciences. An important question in this debate is whether the confabulation studies pose a serious threat to the possibility of self-knowledge. In this paper we are not primarily interested in the consequences of confabulation for self-knowledge. Instead, we focus on a different issue: what confabulation implies for (...) the special status of self-attributions, i.e. first-person authority. In the first part of the paper, we propose that FPA is based on a capacity for self-regulation. Accordingly, FPA depends on the extent to which we are able to bridge the gap between our sayings and doings by aligning our actions with our avowed self-ascriptions and vice versa. FPA is withheld when we fail at such re-alignment. In the second part of the paper, we contrast our view with the accounts of Scaife and Bortolotti :227–249, 2018). We claim that the apparent fact that we cannot reliably distinguish, from a first-person perspective, when we are confabulating and when we are not, does not necessarily undermine FPA. We argue that a systematic failure to align our actions with our self-ascriptions and vice-versa is a genuine threat to FPA. In the last part of the paper, we introduce the concept of self-know-how—the know-how embodied in the way one is disposed to relate to oneself in making sense of oneself with or in the face of others—and briefly explored the importance of diminished or absent self-know-how in clinical cases. (shrink)

How do exercises of authority different from requests, threats and advice? It is common to answer this question by emphasising the role of obligation, or the role of justified coercion, to the exclusion of the other. Using a distinction between an office of authority and an exercise of authority, I develop a taxonomy of such views of authority and present arguments against each of them. In place of these views, I argue for a symmetrical view of (...) obligation and coercion within legal authority. On my view, authority is a conformance of one’s will to another’s will that the subject could recognise as consistent with the law’s respect for her, and this implies that obligation and coercion can equally be exercises of authority. (shrink)

There are two popular ways of explaining why a person has authority over her own gender identity: epistemic FPA and ethical FPA. Both have problems. Epistemic FPA attributes to the self-identifier an unrealistic degree of doxastic reliability. Ethical FPA implies the existence of an unqualified obligation not to reject which is too strong to be plausible. This essay offers a third explanation called “weak FPA” and investigates how far first-person authority reaches in terms of grounding rights and obligating (...) others. Weak FPA doesn’t obligate one not to reject but it implies that when self-identification can be satisfactorily defended against attempted defeaters, the self-identifier has the right to recognition, which entails the respect and all other legal and social rights any other self-identifier receives from her peers. (shrink)

In his discussions of life as narrative, and identity as narrative identity, Paul Ricoeur has claimed that we learn to become narrators and heroes of our own stories, without actually becoming the authors of our own lives. This idea, that we cannot be the author of our own life-story in the same way that the author of fictional narrative is the author of that story, seems at first incontestable, given that we are caught up within the enactment of the narrative (...) that is our life, unlike the author of a fictional story who also has an independent existence outside that story. This asymmetry leads Ricoeur to pronounce that an ineradicable difference exists between fictional and life narratives. But is this difference in fact ineffaceable, or is there a sense in which we can be said to be the authors of our own lives? In this article I suggest that there are more points of similarity than Ricoeur explicitly recognizes between what authors do in writing fictional narratives and what we do in figuring, prospectively, our lives. These similarities are brought to light by a revision of the naïve, received concept of author and, once acknowledged, serve to bridge the purportedly ‘unbridgeable gap’ between fictional narratives and life narratives. I then consider how bridging this gap — establishing ourselves as authors as well as narrators — has ethical implications with regard to creating our own lives: a creation which authoring implies, but which is — given the revised notion of author — limited, both by the reciprocity of the other as co-author and by those events in life which the life-author is not fully able to plot. (shrink)

The first-person authority view (FPA) is the current dominant view about what someone’s gender is. According to FPA the person has authority over her own gender identity; her sincere self-identification trumps the opinions of others. There are two versions of FPA: epistemic and ethical. Both versions try to explain why a person has authority over her own gender identity. But both have problems. Epistemic FPA attributes to the self-identifier an unrealistic degree of doxastic reliability. Ethical FPA implies (...) the existence of an unreasonably strong and unqualified obligation on the part of others not to reject the person’s identification. This essay offers an alternative: the negotiative theory of identity. Unlike epistemic FPA, the negotiative theory doesn’t presume the reliability of self-directed beliefs. Unlike ethical FPA, the negotiative theory doesn’t imply an obligation not to reject. Instead, it contends that an act of rejection is morally permissible if and only if it respects three ethical and epistemic constraints. In doing so, the negotiative theory combines the strengths and avoids the weaknesses of both versions of FPA, and gives us substantive insight into how far first-person authority reaches in terms of grounding rights and obligating others. (shrink)

Soma‐to‐germline feedback is forbidden under the neo‐Darwinian paradigm. Nevertheless, there is a growing realization it occurs frequently in immunoglobulin (Ig) variable (V) region genes. This is a surprising development. It arises from a most unlikely source in light of the exposure of co‐author EJS to the haplotype data of RL Dawkins and others on the polymorphism of the Major Histocompatibility Complex, which is generally assumed to be the most polymorphic region in the genome (spanning ∼4 Mb). The comparison between the (...) magnitude of MHC polymorphism with estimates for the human heavy chain immunoglobulin V locus (spanning ∼1 Mb), suggests IGHV could be many orders of magnitude more polymorphic than the MHC. This conclusion needs airing in the literature as it implies generational churn and soma‐to‐germline gene feedback. Pedigree‐based experimental strategies to resolve the IGHV issue are outlined. (shrink)

This article argues that, in public and policy contexts, the ways in which many scientists talk about uncertainty in simulations of future climate change not only facilitates communications and cooperation between scientific and policy communities but also affects the perceived authority of science. Uncertainty tends to challenge the authority of chmate science, especially if it is used for policy making, but the relationship between authority and uncertainty is not simply an inverse one. In policy contexts, many scientists (...) are compelled to talk about uncertainty but do not wish to imply that uncertainty is a serious challenge to the authority of scientific knowledge or to its substantial use in policy making. "Boundary-ordering devices, " the contextual discursive attempts to reconcile uncertainty and authority in science, depend critically for their success on their "dual" interpretation: at a general level across a boundary and differently on either side of it. The authors empirically identify a range of such boundary-ordering devices in the climate field. (shrink)

The author reviews the work of select theologians, ethicists, and biblical scholars who suggest that the difference between humans and animals should serve not solely as an ascription of a special status to humans but also as the foundation for a responsibility that humans bear toward animals. As an added reflection, the author explores common categorical differentiations in systematic theology: God and creation, human and nonhuman, elect and non-elect. In the first and last of these categorical differentiations, unique identity entails (...) both a special status and a responsibility. The latter is normatively directed to those who are categorically different. As such, the categorical difference between humans and animals establishes a foundation for moral concern. (shrink)

Available from UMI in association with The British Library. Requires signed TDF. ;This thesis proposes that the death of the author is neither a desirable, nor properly attainable goal of criticism, and that the concept of the author remained profoundly active even--and especially--as its disappearance was being articulated. ;As the phrase implies, the death of the author is seen to repeat the Nietzschean deicide. In Barthes, the idea of the author is explicitly connected to that of God, for Foucault and (...) Derrida, to that of the transcendental subject of knowledge. Nowhere, however, is any demonstration forwarded as to why we must conceive author, transcendental subject, and divinity as specifications of the same subject, and therefore implicated in a common closure. Always and everywhere, the death of the author proceeds on the basis of an idealized conception of authorship. ;In practical terms, such are the pressures exerted upon critical discourse by the death of the author that the author is implied from the outset. Barthes will insist that the authorial subject is constituted in and through language, whilst also recommending that we should regard certain authors as "founders of languages". With Foucault, the requisite transindividuality of archaeology is subverted by the absolutely privileged, metahistorical status it bestows upon Nietzsche. Derrida's history of logocentrism denies the author precisely because of the exorbitant recourse it must make to Rousseau as the single systematized instance of an age of logocentric metaphysics. ;The placement of the author reflects the experience of these critics in writing their texts. In Barthes, the return of the author is inseparable from his own autobiographical project; with Foucault, it relates to the rejection of the transcendental detachment of the archaelogist in favour of the engaged subjectivity of the genealogist; in Derrida, authorial reinscription coincides with his attempt to move beyond critical reading toward autobiographical literature. With hindsight, it appears that it is the becoming-author of the critic that is actually at issue. ;However, this revisionary phase has been largely neglected, and Barthes, Foucault and Derrida are continually invoked to underwrite critical resistance to the author. From the Russian Formalists onward, literary theory has shown itself incapable of accommodating authorial subjectivity. As such, the question of the author increasingly presents itself as the question of theory, of its adequacy as a descriptive science of literature and discourse in general. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to take the first steps toward providing a refurbished consent theory of political authority, one that rests in part on a reconception of the relationship between the surrender of judgment and the authoritativeness of political institutions. On the standard view, whatever grounds political authority implies that one ought to surrender one's judgment to that of one's political institutions. On the refurbished view, it is the surrender of one's judgment – which can plausibly (...) be considered a form of consent – that makes political institutions practically authoritative. (shrink)

Kant on Duty to Oneself and Resistance to Political Authority SVEN ARNTZEN in ms DOCTRI~tE OF Law and related writings? Kant denies the subject's right to resist political authority in the strongest terms. His argumentation to sup- port this denial is conceptual in character. The denial of a right of resistance follows from the relevant legal concepts of civil society, of the people as sub- ject, of the head of state as the supreme power in civil society, as (...) having only rights but no duties that he may be coerced to fulfill, and of a right as an authorization to use coercion. Civil society is the coexistence of persons as subject to a central authority, a supreme power, which is not itself subject to some other coercive authority. For the people as subject to have a right to resist the supreme power in civil society would be for it to have an authorization to use coercion to restrain that power, which would not, then, be the supreme power. In other words, a people's right to resist the supreme power would imply that the power is both supreme and not ' By Kant's Doctrine of Law I mean his Die metaphysische Anfangsgriinde der Rechtslehre, the first part ofD/e Metaphysik der Sitten, hereafter MdS . The other available translation of the Doctrine of Law is by John Ladd, and is rendered as The Metaphysical Elements of Justice (Indianapolis: The.. (shrink)