Elaborating on the notions that humans possess different modalities of decision-making and that these are often influenced by moral considerations, we conducted an experimental investigation of the Trolley Problem. We presented the participants with two standard scenarios (‹lever’ and ‹stranger’) either in the usual or in reversed order. We observe that responses to the lever scenario, which result from (moral) reasoning, are affected by our manipulation; whereas responses to the stranger scenario, triggered by moral emotions, are unaffected. Furthermore, when asked (...) to express general moral opinions on the themes of the Trolley Problem, about half of the participants reveal some inconsistency with the responses they had previously given. (shrink)

Joshua Knobe found that people are more likely to describe an action as intentional if it has had a bad outcome than a good outcome, and to blame a bad outcome than to praise a good one. These asymmetries raised numerous questions about lay moral judgement. Frank Hindriks recently proposed that one acts intentionally if one fails to comply with a normative reason against performing the action, that moral praise requires appropriate motivation, whereas moral blame does not, and that these (...) asymmetries are normal features of a theory of intentional action, not anomalies. I present two empirical studies revealing asymmetries in lay judgements of intentionality and moral blameworthiness; these cannot be explained by Hindriks' theory of intentional action. (shrink)

Fiery Cushman and Alfred Mele recently proposed a ‘two-and-a-half rules’ theory of folk intentionality. They suggested that laypersons attribute intentionality employing: one rule based on desire, one based on belief, and another principle based on moral judgment, which may either reflect a folk concept (and so count as a third rule) or a bias (and so not count as a rule proper) and which they provisionally count as ‘half a rule’. In this article, I discuss some cases in which an (...) agent is judged as having neither belief nor desire to bring about an action, and yet laypersons find the agent’s action to be intentional. Many lay responses apparently follow a rule, but many other seem biased. The contribution of this study is two-fold: by addressing actions performed without desire or belief, it expands Mele and Cushman’s account; it also helps discriminate between a two-rules and a three-rules theory. As a conclusion, I argue in favor of a three-and-a-half concepts theory. (shrink)

The profession of academic economics has been widely criticized for being excessively dependent on technical models based on unrealistic assumptions about rationality and individual behavior, and yet it remains a sparsely studied area. This volume presents a series of background readings on the profession by leading scholars in the history of economic thought and economic methodology. Adopting a fresh critique, the contributors investigate the individual incentives prevalent in academic economics, describing economists as rational actors who react to their intellectual environment (...) and the incentives for economic research. Timely topics are addressed, including the financial crisis and the consequences for the discipline, as well as more traditional themes such as pluralism in research, academic organizations, teaching methodology, gender issues and professional ethics. This collection will appeal to scholars working on topics related to economic methodology and the teaching of economics. (shrink)

Several game-theoretical lab experiments helped establish the belief that economists are more selfish than non-economists. Since differences in behaviour between experiment participants who are students of economics and those who are not may be observed among junior students as well, it is nowadays widely believed that the origin of the greater selfishness is not the training they undergo, but self-selection. In other words, selfish people voluntarily enrol in economics. Yet, I argue that such explanation is unsatisfactory for several reasons. I (...) also suggest alternative explanations for the observed differences, which have been so far unduly disregarded. (shrink)

In this paper, I try to expatiate on the poetic function of language on the basis of considerations by Jakobson and Waugh. I try to bring in the consideration that pragmatics plays an important role in elucidating the poetic function of language. Contextualism allows us to interpret a poem: referents must be fixed or need not be fixed due to the requirements of the discourse; citations are brought in through pragmatic ways; polyphony is achieved by taking into account the context (...) of previous analyses of a poetic text; the vicinity of a certain word, or concept or line is likely to affect the interpretation of a certain expression; the poetic text can take different forms, from graffiti to discourse at the market place, to discourse between lovers. All these forms of poetic text would not exist if the notion of poetry did not include the idea of semantic/pragmatic compression which is matched, in interpretation, by expansions. (shrink)

Explicatures are not cancellable. Theoretical considerations.

Kalisch et al. argue that appraisal and reappraisal are key mechanisms promoting resilience; however, experimental findings seem to contradict this simplistic view. We argue that a deeper look at affective neuroscience may provide complementary and stronger evidence on how emotional reactivity and emotion regulation may affect resilience.

Relationship between default semantics and modularity of mind (in particular mind reading through the principle of Relevance).

Although the role of emotion in socioeconomic decision making is increasingly recognised, the impact of specific emotional disorders, such as anxiety disorders, on these decisions has been surprisingly neglected. Twenty anxious patients and twenty matched controls completed a commonly used socioeconomic task (the Ultimatum Game), in which they had to accept or reject monetary offers from other players. Anxious patients accepted significantly more unfair offers than controls. We discuss the implications of these findings in light of recent models of anxiety, (...) in particular the importance of interpersonal factors and assertiveness in an integrated model of decision making. Finally, we were able to show that pharmacological serotonin used to treat anxious symptomatology tended to normalise decision making, further confirming and extending the role of serotonin in co-operation, prosocial behaviour, and social decision making. These results show, for the first time, a different pattern of socioeconomic behaviour in anxiety disordered patients, in addition to the known memory, attentional and emotional biases that are part of this pathological condition. (shrink)

In this paper, I explore Bach’s idea (Bach, 2000) that null appositives, intended as expanded qua-clauses, can resolve the puzzles of belief reports. These puzzles are crucial in understanding the semantics and pragmatics of belief reports and are presented in a section. I propose that Bach’s strategy is not only a way of dealing with puzzles, but also an ideal way of dealing with belief reports. I argue that even simple unproblematic cases of belief reports are cases of pragmatic intrusion, (...) involving null appositives, or to use the words of Bach, ‘qua-clauses’. The main difference between my pragmatic approach and the one by Salmon (1986) is that this author uses the notion of conversational implicature, whereas I use the notion of pragmatic intrusion and explicature. From my point of view, statements such as ‘‘John believes that Cicero is clever’’ and ‘‘John believes that Tully is clever’’ have got distinct truth-values. In other words, I claim that belief reports in the default case illuminate the hearer on the mental life of the believer, that includes specific modes of presentation of the referents talked about. Furthermore, while in the other pragmatic approaches, it is mysterious how a mode of presentation is assumed to be the main filter of the believer’s mental life, here I provide an explanatory account in terms of relevance, cognitive effects, and processing efforts. The most important part of the paper is devoted to showing that null appositives are required, in the case of belief reports, to explain certain anaphoric effects, which would otherwise be mysterious. My examples show that null appositives are not necessitated at logical form, but only at the level of the explicature, in line with the standard assumptions by Carston and Recanati on pragmatic intrusion. I develop a potentially useful analysis of belief reports by exploiting syntactic and semantic considerations on presuppositional clitics in Romance. (shrink)

Within the author’s long-term project of updating John Rawls’s paradigm of “political liberalism” to a historical context different from the original one, this paper focuses on how political liberalism can help us understand populism and help liberal democracy survive the populist upsurge. In the first section, political liberalism is argued to be of help in directing our attention to three constitutive aspects of all sorts of populism: the conflation of “the people” with the electorate and the electorate with the nation, (...) the attribution of constituent power to the electorate, and a penchant for so-called “justified intolerance.” In the second section, enfeebled democracies and postliberal democracies are discussed as two distinctly dangerous outcomes of populist contagion. Finally, in the third section the containment of populism is argued to require targeting the socioeconomic factors undergirding the populist upsurge and the jettisoni... (shrink)

Analysis of Barack Obama's rhetorical strategies.

Explicatures are not cancellable. Theoretical considerations.

'de se' attitudes and pragmatic intrusion. A critique of Higginbotham (2003).

In this chapter I deal with indirect reports in terms of language games. I try to make connections between the theory of language games and the theory of indirect reports, in the light of the issue of clues and cues. Indirect reports are based on an interplay of voices. The voice of the reporter must allow hearers to ‘reconstruct’ the voice of the reported speaker. Ideally, it must be possible to separate the reporter’s voice from that of the reported speaker. (...) When we analyze the language game of indirect reporting, we ideally want to establish which parts belong to the primary voice and which parts belong to the reporter’s voice. In this paper I apply considerations on language games by Dascal et al. and I explore the dialectics between abstract pragmatics principles and considerations about situated uses that are sensitive to cues and clues. (shrink)

This volume addresses the intriguing issue of indirect reports from an interdisciplinary perspective. The contributors include philosophers, theoretical linguists, socio-pragmaticians, and cognitive scientists. The book is divided into four sections following the provenance of the authors. Combining the voices from leading and emerging authors in the field, it offers a detailed picture of indirect reports in the world’s languages and their significance for theoretical linguistics. Building on the previous book on indirect reports in this series, this volume adds an empirical (...) and cross-linguistic approach that covers an impressive range of languages, such as Cantonese, Japanese, Hebrew, Persian, Dutch, Spanish, Catalan, Armenian, Italian, English, Hungarian, German, Rumanian, and Basque. (shrink)

This study on the contemporary relevance of Rousseau’s ethical and social thought, the “ethic of authenticity,” responds to the tensions of modern morality and rivals the answers generated by the more mainstream tradition of the “ethic of autonomy.”.

Translated from the 1989 Italian edition, Ferrara (sociology, U. of Rome) intertwines an exploration of the ethical and social thought of 17th-century French philosopher Rousseau, with an analysis of contemporary culture through those ...

This paper pursues two main aims. First, it distinguishes two kinds of improvisation: expert and inexpert. Expert improvisation is a (usually artistic) practice that the agent consciously sets as their goal and is evaluated according to (usually artistic) standards of improvisation. Inexpert improvisation, by contrast, supports and structures the agent’s action as it moves them towards their (usually everyday life) goals and is evaluated on its success leading the agent to the achievement of those goals. The second aim is to (...) describe inexpert improvisation as a robustly distributed affair, one that involves the ongoing integration of embodied practices with social and material resources within our surrounding environments. On the wide approach to improvisation fostered in this paper, inexpert improvisation is claimed to be our default way of inhabiting our world. (shrink)

This text is an integrated and comprehensive account of theories of justice and judgement in contemporary political and moral philosophy. It offers a critical examination of judgement and normative validity in the recent works of Rawls, Habermas, Ackerman, Michaleman, and Dworkin. Ferrara demonstrates how the understanding of justice and normative validity, since the linguistic turn in philosophy, is defined in terms of reflective judgement. This demonstration comprises of an historical overview of the judgement model in contemporary political philosophy that focuses (...) on Rawls on ` justice as fairness' and Habermas on the discourse theory of law and the public sphere. The discussion then examines situated judgement; the work of Ackerman on the function of the constitution; and Michaelman on deliberative democracy. Justice and Judgement concludes with an exhaustive and exacting discussion of universalism and contemporary liberalism; and the judgement view of justice. The key themes of this examination are the good; equal respect; and reflexive judgement. (shrink)

semantic minimalism and moderte contextualism.

The two sections of this volume present theoretical developments and practical applicative papers respectively. Theoretical papers cover topics such as intercultural pragmatics, evolutionism, argumentation theory, pragmatics and law, the semantics/pragmatics debate, slurs, and more. The applied papers focus on topics such as pragmatic disorders, mapping places of origin, stance-taking, societal pragmatics, and cultural linguistics. This is the second volume of invited papers that were presented at the inaugural Pragmasofia conference in Palermo in 2016, and like its predecessor presents papers by (...) well-known philosophers, linguists, and a semiotician. The papers present a wide variety of perspectives independent from any one school of thought. (shrink)

This article examines recent theories of democratic citizenship as well as the institutional separation of religion and politics in light of shortcomings with the traditional secularization thesis. Due to the fact that juridical norms and forms of consciousness develop at a more rapid pace than religious ones, received accounts of both democratic equality and toleration need to be reconceptualized. Questions concerning the legitimacy and neutrality of religious reasoning in democratic politics, as pursued in the work of Rawls and Habermas, also (...) need to be informed by further reflection on the confessional context and other empirical features of post-secular societies. Comparing the politics of same-sex marriage in Canada and Italy helps to illustrate this point. (shrink)

The present paper is an inventory and a description of the known manuscripts of the Nyāyamañjarī, meant as a tool for philological research on Bhaṭṭa Jayanta’s magnum opus. The inventory is gradually built through a systematic analysis of archival data found in catalogi catalogorum, bibliographies of catalogues, individual catalogues, unpublished lists, and editions of the Nyāyamañjarī. The list is followed by a concise description of each manuscript, including an external description, an outline of the contents, and historical information.

Classical Indian Thought and the English Language: Perspectives and Problems, edited by Mohini Mullick and Madhuri Santanam Sondhi, contains the proceedings of the workshop "Rendering of the Categories of Classical Indian Thought in the English Language: Perspectives and Problems," held in New Delhi in December 2011. Of the ten papers included in this volume, those by Sudipta Kaviraj, S. N. Balagangadhara, and Claus Oetke concern methodological issues of broader application, so they will be reviewed here in greater detail.Each paper is (...) followed by the response of a discussant and by a debate in the form of selected questions and comments from the audience at the workshop. The most relevant points raised in these... (shrink)

The epistemology of śabda is one of the main themes in Bhaṭṭa Jayanta’s Nyāyamañjarī, and, in the hypotheses explored in this paper, also the conceptual basis of Jayanta’s textual re-use. The sixth chapter of the Nyāyamañjarī contains a debate between Vaiyākaraṇas and Mīmāṃsakas who, respectively, advocated an holistic or atomistic theory of language. Selected Jayanta’s re-uses from Vyākaraṇa, Mīmāṃsā, and Nyāya sources are here surveyed and analyzed, with a focus on their meaning and on the context. The method of analysis (...) is partially following Moravcsik’s scheme for a classification of citations, as well as Small’s classification by symbolic functions. By re-using texts Jayanta not only imparted authority to his own arguments, but also reassessed the relation of his tradition with other ones. Re-used ideas and words stand for symbols of those authors’ tenets, and those authors represent symbols of their respective traditions. Moreover, by quoting a certain author Jayanta often anointed him with a symbolic status of trustworthy authority, and his statement with a status of śabdapramāṇa. (shrink)

The Nyayamanjari was composed in Kashmir, in the ninth century CE, by Bhatta Jayanta. It is a compendium of theses concerning ontological, epistemological and linguistic issues developed in the classical period of Indian philosophy. Jayanta's approximate date is confirmed by both internal and external evidences, so the Nyayamanjari has become a landmark in the historiography of Indian philosophy. Despite its relevance, however, the history of the textual transmission of the Nyayamanjari is in many respects still unknown. This new critical edition (...) is based on a comprehensive inventory of all the known sources, on a detailed description of the manuscripts, on a textual bibliography of the printed editions, on a genealogical study of the textual transmission, and on a rich apparatus of the indirect transmission. An important result of this research has been the development of a new, rigorous, and yet pragmatic method to edit Nyayamanjari passages, without the demand of formidable resources in terms of time, man-power, and funds. The first part of this publication includes all the propaedeutic steps in view of the critical edition. More specifically, it consists of the recensio of the known Nyayamanjari sources, including their inventory, their description, the collation of their variants, and the study of their genealogy, resulting in a fully documented stemma codicum which guides the editorial choices during the reconstruction of the edited text. The second part contains the critical edition, which covers the first of the three sections composing the sixth book of the Nyayamanjari. This particular section consists of a discussion on semantics and epistemology from the perspective of the Vyakarana, Mimansa and Nyaya traditions, hinging around the holistic theory of the sphota. (shrink)

The Bloomsbury Research Handbook of Indian Philosophy of Language presents a systematic survey of philosophy of language in the Indian tradition, providing an up-to-date research resource for better understanding the history and future direction of the field. Each chapter addresses a particular philosophical problem from the viewpoint of seminal traditions and specific thinkers. Covering the philosophical insight on language found in the mainstream philosophies of Vyakarana, Mima?sa, Nyaya, Vedanta, Buddhism, and Alankarasastra, the chapters tackle crucial semantic and pragmatic questions such (...) as the relation of the speaker to reality, the use of metalanguage, the distinction between sentences, elliptic statements, and figurative usages, and the impact of textual structures on the philosophical message. Complete with further reading suggestions and an annotated bibliography, this collection makes an important contribution to both Eastern and Western contemporary philosophy of language. (shrink)

In this paper, we discuss an utterance/pragmeme/pract by Donald Trump addressed to FBI Director Comey: ‘I hope you will let Flynn go’ ). We consider the explicature of this utterance and its illocutionary and perlocutionary effects. We argue that while Republicans opt for an Austinian or Searlian analysis, in the attempt to deny that this utterance constitutes an attempt to influence Comey, there are reasons for adopting a Strawsonian analysis, casting it in the framework of pragmemes, worked out by to (...) cast a socio-pragmatic analysis of utterance interpretation in context. According to this analysis, Trump illicitly tried to persuade Comey to drop the Russian investigation, interfering with the judiciary power. A case can be made for obstruction of justice. (shrink)

Frank Michelman’s recent book Constitutional Essentials. On the Constitutional Theory of Political Liberalism is discussed from a specific angle, related to how Rawls’s ‘deflection procedure’ – called by Michelman ‘justification by constitution’ – is affected by two recent innovations in the paradigm of political liberalism: first, the extension of reasonable pluralism to a family of liberal political conceptions of justice that coexist in a liberal-democratic society; second, the idea of legitimation based on the criterion of reciprocity, aimed at supplementing the (...) liberal principle of legitimacy. In the attempt to probe Michelman’s assessment of the impact of these two innovations, three critical points are mentioned, for each of them, that suggest a somewhat more sceptical attitude than Michelman’s about the capacity of ‘justification by constitution’ to remain substantially unaltered, once these innovations are in place. (shrink)

In this chapter, I am going to discuss a very interesting case brought to our attention by Saul and references therein: NP-related substitution failure in simple sentences. Whereas it is well known that opacity occurs in intensional contexts and that in such contexts it is not licit to replace an NP with a co-referential one, one would not expect that substitution failure should also be exhibited by simple sentences in the context of stories about Superman. The suggested explanation of these (...) cases is to posit an embedding explicature, that is to say the insertion of structure that ipso facto creates an intensional context capable of blocking substitution. I consider various complications to this story in the light of important objections by García-Carpintero and, finally, I consider how this story fares when one applies constraints on explicatures along the lines of those proposed by Hall in an interesting paper.In general, this chapter exploits interesting considerations by Norrick on the structural similarities between stories and indirect reports. Norrick believes there are important differences, but he is inclined to concede that we could study structural similarities. An important similarity, brought out by the examples discussed by Saul, is that the narrative frame, once it is inserted into the interaction, can be left implicit and, during the act of narrating or referring to the story, one need not repeat the words ‘the story says’ or ‘we are told that…’ every time. Although implicit, these words are heard because they do some work at the structural level, as is shown by this attempt to resolve an otherwise intractable philosophical problem. The explicatures of simple sentences are perceived because they are integrated into the speakers’/hearers’ perception of the overall plan of discourse, as Haugh most interestingly notes:As Haugh and Jaszczolt note, this means that any putative “communicative intention of A is embedded within his higher-order intention”. In other words, to figure out the implicature that evidently arises here, the participants are necessarily making inferences about some kind of overall aim. According to this view, then, inferences about the intended implicature arise concomitant with inferences about the overall aim of the speaker.It follows from the considerations by Haugh that, since the explicature connected with simple sentences depends on the perception of the overall aim or plan of the conversation, it is not easily cancelled. Readers can check by themselves that the explicatures due to simple sentences cannot be cancelled, as cancelling them would involve returning to illogical discourses.. Haugh’s considerations about the overall aim of the discourse are precious in explaining how the embedding explicatures I posit are calculated once and for all for the whole stretch of the discourse framed by the narrative act. (shrink)

In this article by way of reply, the author responds to the challenging comments on The Democratic Horizon provided by Michelman, Benhabib, White, Scheuerman and Laden. In response to Michelman, some reflections are propounded on the function of judicial review, in order to alleviate the tension between two understandings of the mandate of the highest interpreter of the constitution as aimed at remedying either an occlusion of democratic authorship or a shortfall of agreement, and on the need to rethink how (...) the authority of the supreme interpreter relates to the will of the people in a deeply changed historical context. In response to Benhabib, the author discusses the new limits of the accommodation of diversity in Fairburg, a fictional polity that expands the Rawlsian standard of ‘ reasonable disagreement’, and defends the normative relevance and democratic credentials of his notion of ‘ multivariate polity’. In response to White, after recalling the importance of putting the ‘democratic ethos’ at the center of a reflection on the democratic quality of complex societies where formal procedures often mask elitist substance, the author defends the ‘political, not metaphysical’ credentials of ‘openness’ and accepts a complementarity of ‘openness’ and ‘presumptive generosity’. In response to Scheuerman, the author restates his focus on the democratic ethos as a supplement to, not a replacement of, the reflection on democratic procedures and defends the conceptual diversity of governance from government. In response to Laden, the author highlights the diversity of contexts to which his own and Laden’s versions of ‘democratic justification’ are responding and defends a more moderate version of ‘openness’, which still keeps constitutional essentials and political values shielded from ongoing questioning. Finally, the author interprets the debate aroused by The Democratic Horizon as indicative of the persistent vitality of the Rawlsian legacy in the 21st century. (shrink)

With the publication of Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns (1981) and of his essays “A Reply to my Critics” (1982), “Diskursethik — Notizen zu einem Bugründungsprogramm” (1983), “Moralbewusstsein und kommunikatives Handeln” (1983), and “Über Moralität und Sitdichkeit — Was macht eine Lebensform ‘rational’?” (1984), Habermas has considerably developed and systematized his views on ethics. Up to Communication and the Evolution of Society (1979), ethics had been of interest to Habermas mainly insofar as certain concepts related to it — such as the (...) ideal speech situation, communicative action, presuppositions of argumentation, etc. — were crucial for the purpose of grounding a universalistic point of view in philosophy and in social theory. (shrink)

Cristina Lafont’s Democracy Without Shortcuts enriches the discussion of deliberative democracy with new insights. After discussing her three objections against Waldron’s denunciation of judicial review as antidemocratic, the main flaw of Waldron’s thesis is argued to remain out of focus. The constitution is understood by him as owned by the living citizens, in a pattern of serial sovereignty that raises three problems: the ‘wanton republic’; the under-individuation of the polity; generational inequality. The answer to Lafont’s question ‘Can We Own the (...) Constitution?’ is then argued to be that only ‘we the people’, including past, present and future ‘free and equal’ generations, own the constitution. The living citizens are the segment of ‘the people’ endowed with agency, have a voice, can modify the inherited political scheme, but cannot legitimately disfigure it, under penalty of destroying the regulatory function of the constitution. (shrink)

In this essay I argue that the notion of religious transcendence was a latecomer in human evolution. It did not appear before the Axial Age, and in its extreme form as a realm of ultimate meanings beyond human reach it had only a locally and temporally bounded existence. Once it appeared, however, the idea of religious transcendence set an evolutionary dynamic in motion, which soon led to various forms of “immanent transcendence,” starting from the “Papal Revolution” and continuing with the (...) Reformation, the Enlightenment, the Kantian notion of the transcendental and its Hegelian and Habermasian modifications. In my conclusion I briefly discuss two alternative versions of modern immanent transcendence—cognitive and exemplary—and their consequences for political philosophy. (shrink)