The Great Psychotherapy Debate: Models, Methods, and Findings comprehensively reviews the research on psychotherapy to dispute the commonly held view that the benefits of psychotherapy are derived from the specific ingredients contained in a given treatment (medical model). The author reviews the literature related to the absolute efficacy of psychotherapy, the relative efficacy of various treatments, the specificity of ingredients contained in established therapies, effects due to common factors, such as the working alliance, adherence and allegiance to the therapeutic protocol, (...) and effects that are produced by different therapists. In each case, the evidence convincingly corroborates the contextual model and disconfirms the prevailing medical model. (shrink)

The second edition of The Great Psychotherapy Debate has been updated and revised to include a history of healing practices, medicine, and psychotherapy, an expanded theoretical presentation of the contextual model, an examination of therapist effects, and a thorough review of the research on common factors such as the alliance, expectations, and empathy.

Beall’s (e.g., 2009, 2021) transparency theory of truth is recognized as a prominent, deflationist solution to the liar paradox. However, it has been neglected by truth theorists who have attempted to show that a deflationist theory of truth can (or cannot) account for truth dependence, i.e., the claim that the truth of a proposition depends on how things described by the proposition are, but how these things are does not depend on the truth of the proposition. Truth theorists interested in (...) truth dependence have, instead, been focused on Horwich’s Minimalism (e.g., 1998). The goal of this paper is twofold. First, I construct what versions of the transparency theory would say about truth dependence. Second, I argue that even the best version of transparent truth ultimately fails to account for truth dependence. On the assumption that accounting for truth dependence is an adequacy condition on any theory of truth, the paper rejects transparency theory as an adequate theory of truth. (shrink)

Micheline Sauvage of the French National Scientific Research Centre traces for us the story of this great Athenian and great philosopher, as seen both by his contemporaries and by the European philosophers who followed after him.

Recent advances in the Super Linguistics of pictures have laid the Super Semantic foundation for modelling the phenomena of narrative sequencing and co-reference in pictorial and mixed linguistic-pictorial discourses. We take up the question of how one arrives at the pragmatic interpretations of such discourses. In particular, we offer an analysis of: (i) the discourse composition problem: how to represent the joint meaning of a multi-picture discourse, (ii) observed differences in narrative sequencing in prima facie equivalent linguistic vs pictorial discourses, (...) and (iii) the phenomenon of co-referencing across pictures. We extend Segmented Discourse Representation Theory to spell out a formal Super Pragmatics that applies to linguistic, pictorial and mixed discourses, while respecting the particular ‘genius’ of either medium and computing their distinctive pragmatic interpretations. (shrink)

A study of Philo and Paul and the first-century sophistic movement.

In Against Moral Responsibility, Bruce Waller launches a spirited attack on a system that is profoundly entrenched in our society and its institutions, deeply rooted in our emotions, and vigorously defended by philosophers from ancient times to the present. Waller argues that, despite the creative defenses of it by contemporary thinkers, moral responsibility cannot survive in our naturalistic-scientific system. The scientific understanding of human behavior and the causes that shape human character, he contends, leaves no room for moral responsibility. (...) Waller argues that moral responsibility in all its forms--including criminal justice, distributive justice, and all claims of just deserts--is fundamentally unfair and harmful and that its abolition will be liberating and beneficial. What we really want--natural human free will, moral judgments, meaningful human relationships, creative abilities--would survive and flourish without moral responsibility. In the course of his argument, Waller examines the origins of the basic belief in moral responsibility, proposes a naturalistic understanding of free will, offers a detailed argument against moral responsibility and critiques arguments in favor of it, gives a general account of what a world without moral responsibility would look like, and examines the social and psychological aspects of abolishing moral responsibility. Waller not only mounts a vigorous, and philosophically rigorous, attack on the moral responsibility system, but also celebrates the benefits that would result from its total abolition. (shrink)

Offers a compelling vision of how to achieve and conduct a liberal but democratic society through the ideal of Neutrality--between people and ideas of the good--and using the tool of Neutral dialogue.

The traditional view is that 'now’ is a pure indexical, denoting the utterance time. Yet, despite its initial appeal, the view has faced criticism. A range of data reveal 'now’ allows for discourse-bound (i.e., anaphoric) uses, and can occur felicitously with the past tense. The reaction to this has typically been to treat ‘now’ as akin to a true demonstrative, selecting the prominent time supplied by the non-linguistic context or prior discourse. We argue this is doubly mistaken. The first mistake (...) concerns the semantic value of ‘now’, which is not a time, but a state — the consequent state of a prominent event. The second is that ‘now’ is a pure indexical after all, insofar as its interpretation is determined without recourse to extra-linguistic supplementation. Specifically, we argue that any occurrence of 'now’ selects the consequent state of the most prominent event, where event-prominence is linguistically maintained through prominence-affecting updates contributed by coherence relations. Our analysis accounts straightforwardly for a wide range of discourse initial and discourse bound uses of ‘now’, while giving it a simple indexical meaning. (shrink)

John Fischer has recently argued that the value of acting freely is the value of self-expression. Drawing on David Velleman’s earlier work, Fischer holds that the value of a life is a narrative value and free will is valuable insofar as it allows us to shape the narrative structure of our lives. This account rests on Fischer’s distinction between regulative control and guidance control. While we lack the former kind of control, on Fischer’s view, the latter is all that is (...) needed for self-expression. I first develop Fischer’s narrative account, focusing on his reliance on temporal loops as giving us control over the value of our lives. Second, I argue that the narrative account grants us greater power over the past than Fischer would allow: since narrative allows not only for changes in how we feel about episodes in our past but what those episodes in fact were, it allows for a kind of retroactive self-constitution. Finally, I suggest that this modification of the narrative view opens the possibility of a conception of freedom far stronger than guidance control. It does not give us the libertarian control over whether to choose A or B in the present, but it does provide a measure of control over the sort of person an agent has been, and thus whether she is the sort of person who will choose A or B in the future. (shrink)

Since the introduction of mathematical population genetics, its machinery has shaped our fundamental understanding of natural selection. Selection is taken to occur when differential fitnesses produce differential rates of reproductive success, where fitnesses are understood as parameters in a population genetics model. To understand selection is to understand what these parameter values measure and how differences in them lead to frequency changes. I argue that this traditional view is mistaken. The descriptions of natural selection rendered by population genetics models are (...) in general neither predictive nor explanatory and introduce avoidable conceptual confusions. I conclude that a correct understanding of natural selection requires explicitly causal models of reproductive success. *Received May 2006; revised December 2006. †To contact the author, please write to: Department of Philosophy, Kansas State University, 201 Dickens Hall, Manhattan, KS 66506; e‐mail: [email protected] . (shrink)

Heidegger, like Kierkegaard, has recently been claimed as a narrativist about selves. From this Heideggerian perspective, we can see how narrative expands upon the psychological view, adding a vital teleological dimension to the understanding of selfhood while denying the reductionism implicit in the psychological approach. Yet the narrative approach also inherits the neo-Lockean emphasis on the past as determining identity, whereas the self is fundamentally about the future. Death is crucial on this picture, not as allowing for the possibility of (...) a final meaning to our lives, but as determining Dasein as ‘pure unactualizable possibility.’ Ultimately, therefore, narrative is not what constitutes selfhood – but this does not mean that narrative is not relevant to personal identity, because narrative allows identity to be expressed in action. (shrink)

Editors provide a substantive introduction to the history and theories of perfectionism and neutrality, expertly contextualizing the essays and making the collection accessible.

This monograph investigates the temporal interpretation of narrative discourse in two parts. The theme of the first part is narrative progression. It begins with a case study of the adverb ‘now’ and its interaction with the meaning of tense. The case study motivates an ontological distinction between events, states and times and proposes that ‘now’ seeks a prominent state that holds throughout the time described by the tense. Building on prior research, prominence is shown to be influenced by principles of (...) discourse coherence and two coherence principles, NARRATION and RESULT, are given a formally explicit characterization. The key innovation is a new method for testing the definitional adequacy of NARRATION and RESULT, namely by an abductive argument. This contribution opens a new way of thinking about how eventive and stative descriptions contribute to the perceived narrative progression in a discourse. -/- The theme of the second part of the monograph is the semantics and pragmatics of tense. A key innovation is that the present and past tenses are treated as scalar alternatives, a view that is motivated by adopting a particular hypothesis concerning stative predication. The proposed analysis accounts for tense in both matrix clauses and in complements of propositional attitudes, where the notorious double access reading arises. This reading is explored as part of a corpus study that provides a glimpse of how tense semantics interacts with Gricean principles and at-issueness. Several cross-linguistic predictions of the analysis are considered, including their consequences for the Sequence of Tense phenomenon and the Upper Limit Constraint. Finally, a hypothesis is provided about how tense meanings compose with temporal adverbs and verb phrases. Two influential analysis of viewpoint aspect are then compared in light of the hypothesis. (shrink)

Williams’s famous argument against immortality rests on the idea that immortality cannot be desirable, at least for human beings, and his contention has spawned a cottage industry of responses. As I will intend to show, the arguments over his view rest on both a difference of temperament and a difference in the sense of desire being used. The former concerns a difference in whether one takes a forward-looking or a backward-looking perspective on personal identity; the latter a distinction between our (...) normal desire to continue living and the kind of desire implied in desiring immortality. Showing that there is some sense of identity and desire that support Williams’s conclusion goes some way toward providing support for his argument, if not a full-fledged defense of it. (shrink)

An introductory text in linguistic semantics, uniquely balancing empirical coverage and formalism with development of intuition and methodology. -/- This introductory textbook in linguistic semantics for undergraduates features a unique balance between empirical coverage and formalism on the one hand and development of intuition and methodology on the other. It will equip students to form intuitions about a set of data, explain how well an analysis of the data accords with their intuitions, and extend the analysis or seek an alternative. (...) No prior knowledge of linguistics is required. After mastering the material, students will be able to tackle some of the most difficult questions in the field even if they have never taken a linguistics course before. -/- After introducing such concepts as truth conditions and compositionality, the book presents a basic symbolic logic with negation, conjunction, and generalized quantifiers, to serve as the basis for translation throughout the book. It then develops a detailed compositional semantics, covering quantification (scope and binding), adverbial modification, relative clauses, event semantics, tense and aspect, as well as pragmatic phenomena, notably deictic pronouns and narrative progression. -/- A Course in Semantics offers a large and diverse set of exercises, interspersed throughout the text; those labeled “Important practice and looking ahead” prepare students for material to come; those labeled “Thinking about ” invite students to think beyond the content of the book. (shrink)

Analogies come in several forms that serve distinct functions. Inductive analogy is a common type of analogical argument, but critical thinking texts sometimes treat all analogies as inductive. Such an analysis ignores figurative analogies, which may elucidate but do not argue; and also neglects a priori arguments by analogy, a type of analogical argument prominent in law and ethics. A priori arguments by analogy are distinctive, but--contrary to the claims of Govier and Sunstein-they are best understood as deductive, rather than (...) a special form of non deductive reasoning. (shrink)

We propose to analyze well-known cases of "imaginative resistance" from the philosophical literature (Gendler, Walton, Weatherson) as involving the inference that particular content should be attributed to either: (i) a character rather than the narrator or, (ii) an unreliable, irrational, opinionated, and/or morally deviant "first person" narrator who was originally perceived to be a typical impersonal, omniscient, "effaced" narrator. We model the latter type of attribution in terms of two independently motivated linguistic mechanisms: accommodation of a discourse referent (Lewis, Stalnaker, (...) Kamp) and 'cautious' updating as a model of non-cooperative information exchange (Eckardt). (shrink)

Samuel Scheffler defends “The Afterlife Conjecture”: the view that the continued existence of humanity after our deaths—“the afterlife”—lies in the background of our valuing; were we to lose confidence in it, many of the projects we engage in would lose their meaning. The Afterlife Conjecture, in his view, also brings out the limits of our egoism, showing that we care more about yet unborn strangers than about personal survival. But why does the afterlife itself matter to us? Examination of Scheffler’s (...) second argument helps answer this question, thereby undermining his argument. Our concern for the afterlife involves bootstrapping: we care more about the afterlife than about personal survival precisely because the latter has such salient limits that our lives are structured by adaptation to mortality, and it is only because the afterlife does provide a measure of personal survival that it can give meaning to our projects. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:A Vexed Pharmacopeia: Musings on Two Thousand Years of Scholarship Regarding the Ancient Spice Trade ROGER MICHEL ALEXY KARENOWSKA GEORGE ALTSHULER MATTHEW COBB Alice went back to the table. She found a little bottle on it, and round the neck of the bottle was a paper label, with the words “DRINK ME” beautifully printed on it in large letters. It was all very well to say “Drink me,” (...) but the wise little Alice was not going to do that in a hurry. “No, I’ll look first,” she said, “and see whether it’s marked ‘poison’ or not.” However, the bottle was not marked “poison,” so Alice ventured to taste it, and finding it very nice, (it had, in fact, a sort of mixed flavour of cherry-tart, custard, pine-apple, roast turkey, toffee, and hot buttered toast), she very soon finished it off. “What a curious feeling!” said Alice. —Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) যে ব্যামোর দেখবেন সাতান্ন রকমের ওষুধ, বুঝে নেবেন, সে ব্যামো ওষুধে সারে না।1 —Syed Mujtaba Ali, চাচা কাহিনী (1955) introduction Mankind’s fascination with spice dates back at least 8,000 years—both culinary and medicinal herbs are referenced in the Vedas, Hinduism’s oldest religious text. Spice is also peppered throughout the Old Testament.2 The Song of Solomon recites: “Thy plants are an orchard of pomegranates, with pleasant fruits; camphire, with spikearion 28.1 spring/summer 2020 2 a vexed pharmacopeia nard and saffron; calamus and cinnamon, with all trees of frankincense; myrrh and aloes, with all the chief spices.”3 Every one of these fruits, plants and spices remained popular in the West throughout antiquity, into the Middle Ages, and beyond. As early as 3000 bc, trade routes had connected the Mediterranean to the near east. Courtesy of this “Spice Road,” ancient Mediterranean civilizations had access to a wide range of horseradishes, mustards, peppers, gingers and other spices. The Greeks and Romans had a special relationship with black pepper—so much so that four out of five recipes in Apicius’s famous 1st century cookbook4 called for a sprinkling of this sometimes-costly commodity. It is perhaps not coincidental that black pepper contains heat-producing alkaloids very similar to those found in New World chili peppers. Much has been written about the important role of chilis in South and Central American culture—a region that, by the Middle Ages, was in many respects the equal of Europe in “artistic sensibility, social complexity, and political organization.”5 The habanero and its capsainoid cousins were at the heart of the culinary and ceremonial customs of Mesoamerica, their biting heat and florid livery an apt metaphor for the “extravagant feats of human butchery”6 —very much in the tradition of the spectacular venationes of ancient Rome—for which the Aztecs at least were well known. To what extent was hot spice also a significant part of the culinary, medical and cultural landscape of the Old World? At a conference hosted by the Institute for Digital Archaeology at the University of Oxford last December, experts from Europe and North America examined the literary, historical, archaeological and scientific evidence around these questions. Their inquiry received a boost from new and rapidly developing techniques for examining the physical evidence of ancient diet and food production—laboratory techniques not available even five years ago. There was also fresh medical evidence to consider: significant research is being done in the area of chemosensation in the context of spicy foods. This Roger Michel, Alexy Karenowska, George Altshuler, Matthew Cobb 3 includes trying to understand how different so-called “TRP channels” in the nervous system process spice information— in particular, the connection between spice and endorphin levels. It appears that many of the hot spices available in antiquity could potentially trigger the same TRP channels as the capsaicin-charged Mesoamerican peppers. This creates a nice connection between old and new world spice that helps to explain and contextualize both. However, in the end, firm conclusions at the Oxford conference were scarce. It quickly became clear that more work, a greater diversity of viewpoints, better refined questions, and a change of venue were required to make additional progress. To paraphrase William Boot, the accidental protagonist of Evelyn Waugh’s autobiographical Scoop (wherein events around... (shrink)

This book is the complete story of the creation of the universe, as it was understood by the ancient Egyptians. It is a collection of harmonic and radical 'Black Thoughts' and the pursuit of equality for all of this planet's inhabitants"--P. vii.

Since its publication in 1982, _Beyond Positivism _has become established as one of the definitive statements on economic methodology. The book’s rejection of positivism and its advocacy of pluralism were to have a profound influence in the flowering of work methodology that has taken place in economics in the decade since its publication. This edition contains a new preface outlining the major developments in the area since the book’s first appearance. The book provides the first comprehensive treatment of twentieth century (...) philosophy of science which emphasizes the issues relevant to economics. It proceeds to demonstrate this relevance by reviewing some of the key debates in the area. Having concluded that positivism has to be rejected, the author examines possible alternative bases for economic methodology. Arguing that there is no best method, he advocates methodological pluralism. (shrink)

This squib presents a rebuttal to two of King’s (Complex demonstratives: A quantificational account. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2001) arguments that complex demonstratives are quantifier phrases like every man. The first is in response to King’s argument that because complex demonstratives induce weak crossover effects, they are quantifier phrases. I argue that unlike quantifier phrases and like other definite determiner phrases, complex demonstratives in object position can corefer with singular pronouns contained in the subject DP. Although complex demonstratives could undergo (...) LF-movement, the ruling out by weak crossover is empirically undetectable. The second rebuttal is in response to King’s argument that because complex demonstratives allow antecedent-contained deletion, they are quantifier phrases. I present data showing that along with quantifier phrases, complex demonstratives pattern with proper names in allowing ACD with restrictive modification, but usually not with non-restrictive modification. (shrink)

Hobbs (2010) introduced ‘clause-internal coherence’ (CIC) to describe inferences in, e.g., ‘A jogger was hit by a car,’ where the jogging is understood to have led to the car-hitting. Cohen & Kehler (2021) argue that well-known pragmatic tools cannot account for CIC, motivating an enrichment account familiar from discourse coherence research. An outstanding question is how to compositionally derive CIC from coherence relations. This paper takes strides in answering this question. It first provides experimental support for the existence of CIC (...) via offline evidence that attributive (non-)deverbal adjectives can trigger the same causal inferences within clauses that their predicative counterparts can trigger across clauses, albeit more weakly. To explain the experimental results, we use tools in Segmented Discourse Representation Theory (SDRT), which allows us to show that causal inferences can be derived in various ways, depending on whether deverbal adjectives are used attributively or predicatively. If the former, they are presupposition triggers and the coherence relations Elaboration/Continuation compete with Background; if the latter, Explanation/Result compete with Background. These different competitions -- cashed out in terms of interaction between default axioms -- correlate with the difference in the relative salience of the causal inferences. (shrink)

We investigate a novel use of the English temporal modifier ‘now’, in which it combines with a subordinate clause. We argue for a univocal treatment of the expression, on which the subordinating use is taken as basic and the non-subordinating uses are derived. We start by surveying central features of the latter uses which have been discussed in previous work, before introducing key observations regarding the subordinating use of ‘now’ and its relation to deictic and anaphoric uses. All of these (...) data, it is argued, can be accounted for on our proposed analysis. We conclude by comparing ‘now’ to a range of other expressions which exhibit similar behavior. (shrink)

Through imaginative engagement readers of fiction become, to an extraordinary extent, the narrator’s ‘children’: they often submit themselves to the narrator’s authority without reserve. But precisely because of that, readers are deeply at a loss when their trust is betrayed. This underscores a core function of fiction, namely to evoke emotional response in the reader. In this paper, we hypothesize how a reader’s imaginative engagement can be subjected to narrative frustration due to processing or moral complexity. The types of narrative (...) frustration we consider differ in terms of their sources, and their emotional and behavioral impacts on the reader. Here, we break down these frustrations into their component parts, in an effort to better characterize the different classes of frustrations. We propose that frustrations arise from different combinations of local uncertainty, moral clash and global uncertainty. These sources of frustration in turn explain the reader’s emotional response and their consequent reading behavior as they imaginatively engage with fiction. (shrink)

The city of Cork experienced a political odyssey between Easter 1916 and the end of 1918. Wartime policies conceived in London manifested themselves unexpectedly in Cork--The Defence of the Realm Act was used to repress political speech; deficit spending generated massive inflation; mandatory arbitration encouraged workers to join trade unions; food rationing panicked a country scarred by the Potato Famine; and military conscription generated virtual rebellion. As a result, the Cork public increasingly turned against the war. The book examines the (...) political situation in Cork prior to the Easter Rising; local reactions to the rebellion; the rapid creation of the Republican mass movement; the dramatic decline of the Irish Party; the explosion of anti-authority street rioting; the mobilization of women in the independence struggle; disturbances against venereal disease treatments and visiting American sailors; the emergence of radical trade unionism; agitation over the retention of local food supplies; the nationalist mobilization during the Conscription Crisis; and Sinn Féin's triumph in the 1918 General Election. (shrink)

Deliberation issues in decision, and so might be taken as a paradigmatic volitional activity. Character, on the other hand, may appear pre-volitional: the dispositions that constitute it provide the background against which decisions are made. Bernard Williams offers an intriguing picture of how the two may be connected via the concept of practical necessities, which are at once constitutive of character and deliverances of deliberation. Necessities are thus the glue binding character and the will, allowing us to take responsibility for (...) our characters. Intriguing though the picture may be, it did not receive a thorough elaboration in Williams’s work. My aim here is to work out and defend what I take to be the most valuable aspect of Williams’s view of agency: its model of the way character and the will can jointly determine agency through mutual constitution. However, I argue that Williams’s attempt to use this model to ground his attack on Kantian morality does not succeed, because the primacy Williams accords to character over the will cannot yield the appropriate kind of normative authority, even from the perspective of the agent. I urge that we retain Williams’s model of the interaction between character and the will, modified to allow the will an authority that is not derived from the necessity of character. (shrink)