The goal of this paper is to develop a theory of content for vague language. My proposal is based on the following three theses: (1) language-mastery is not rulebased— it involves a certain kind of decision-making; (2) a theory of content is to be thought of instrumentally—it is a tool for making sense of our linguistic practice; and (3) linguistic contents are only locally defined—they are only defined relative to suitably constrained sets of possibilities. CiteULike Connotea Del.icio.us What's this?

La llamada transición al paradigma digital está erosionando la autonomía del campo cultural que se había conseguido durante los siglos XIX y XX, subyugándolo a las dinámicas económicas y tecnológicas. Sin embargo, el discurso hegemónico tiende a interpretar esta como un proceso netamente positivo para la creatividad, centrando la atención en el aumento de la disponibilidad de recursos informativos y de herramientas para la creación. No obstante, un análisis desde las teorías y los conceptos de la sociología de la cultura (...) nos revela un balance más ambivalente. Si bien la noción de autoría y creación puede ser interpretada desde un punto de vista más cooperativo y relativista, es discutible que pueda ser eliminada. Además, si bien el análisis de la intermediación cultural debe tener en cuenta el papel más complejo y activo de los intermediarios, difícilmente se puede concebir el sistema cultural sin su existencia. En definitiva, el artículo se propone contrastar los discursos sobre la transición a lo digital con las teorías clásicas y contemporáneas de la sociología de la cultura para, de este modo, plantear futuras líneas de investigación sociológica sobre las consecuencias en los agentes y en la industria cultural en su conjunto. Con ello se pretende generar una perspectiva neutral que tenga en consideración los efectos sociales y sistémicos de la tecnología en la creatividad de los sectores culturales. (shrink)

Ética e subjetividade no Budismo chinês contemporâneo Resumo: O presente artigo procura pensar as questões da ética e da subjetividade no contexto do pensamento budista na China contemporânea. Ele parte de uma genealogia do conceito de subjetividade conforme desenvolvido através do debate entre a escola Yogacãra do Budismo indiano e o Novo Confucionismo. Ao mesmo tempo, aponta para as possíveis implicações deste conceito de subjetividade em sua relação com as questões éticas presentes na China contemporânea. Palavras-chave: Ética. Subjetividade. Escola Yogacãra (...) do Budismo indiano. Novo Confucionismo. Ethics and subjectivity in contemporary Chinese Buddhism: This article tries to think the matters of ethics and subjectivity in the context of Buddhist thought in contemporary China. It has its starting point in an analysis of the concept of subjectivity as developed in the debate between the Yogacãra school of indian Buddhism and the New Confucianism. At the same time, it points to the possible implications of this concept of subjectivity for the ethical matters in contemporary chinese society. Keywords: Ethics. Subjectivity. Yogacãra school of indian Buddhism. New Confucianism. Ética y subjetividad en el budismo chino contemporáneo Resumen: Este artículo busca reflexionar sobre cuestiones de ética y subjetividad en el contexto del pensamiento budista en la China contemporánea. Comienza con una genealogía del concepto de subjetividad desarrollado a través del debate entre la escuela Yogacara del budismo indio y el nuevo confucianismo. Al mismo tiempo, señala las posibles implicaciones de este concepto de subjetividad en su relación con los problemas éticos presentes en la China contemporánea. Palabras clave: Ética. Subjetividad. Escuela de yogacara del budismo indio. Nuevo confucianismo. Data de registro: 29/07/2020 Data de aceite: 21/10/2020. (shrink)

El objetivo de este artículo es explorar la manera en que Joaquim Xirau y Miguel de Unamuno concibieron el amor. A pesar de que no hay motivos suficientes para concluir una influencia directa y filosóficamente relevante de Unamuno en la obra de Xirau, sí podemos concluir que la forma en que ambos autores concibieron el amor guarda ciertas similitudes. Así, ambos coinciden en concebir la entrega amorosa como un ejercicio de afirmación individual que trae consigo un incremento de la (...) propia singularidad. También, tanto Unamuno como Xirau conciben la entrega amorosa como un acto que, aun surgiendo del propio individuo y no de como es de hecho el mundo, personifica aquello amado, dejando de ser así visto como un mero objeto y mostrándose bajo una forma personal. Y ambos, aunque de un modo distinto, hacen del relato bíblico acerca de la vida y Resurrección de Cristo un aspecto central de sus maneras de entender el amor. (shrink)

I propose a way of thinking about content, and a related way of thinking about ontological commitment.

Here is an account of logical consequence inspired by Bolzano and Tarski. Logical validity is a property of arguments. An argument is a pair of a set of interpreted sentences (the premises) and an interpreted sentence (the conclusion). Whether an argument is logically valid depends only on its logical form. The logical form of an argument is fixed by the syntax of its constituent sentences, the meanings of their logical constituents and the syntactic differences between their non-logical constituents, treated as (...) variables. A constituent of a sentence is logical just if it is formal in meaning, in the sense roughly that its application is invariant under permutations of individuals.1 Thus ‘=’ is a logical constant because no permutation maps two individuals to one or one to two; ‘∈’ is not a logical constant because some permutations interchange the null set and its singleton. Truth functions, the usual quantifiers and bound variables also count as logical constants. An argument is logically valid if and only if the conclusion is true under every assignment of semantic values to variables (including all non-logical expressions) under which all its premises are true. A sentence is logically true if and only if the argument with no premises of which it is the conclusion is logically valid, that is, if and only if the sentence is true under every assignment of semantic values to variables. An interpretation assigns values to all variables. (shrink)

Grounding is claimed to offer a promising characterization of the fundamental as thatwhich is ungrounded. Detractors of this view argue that there can be fundamental and yet mutuallygrounded entities. Such a possibility undermines the denition of the fundamental as theungrounded. I aim to show, however, that the possibility of fundamental mutually grounded entitiesdoes not force us to renounce the prospects of characterizing fundamentality in terms of ground-ing. To accomplish this aim, I defend a grounding-based view that accommodates fundamentalmutually grounded entities (...) straightforwardly. My denition of fundamentality is similar to, butimportantly different from, one that Karen Bennett discusses. I conclude by resisting two objec-tions raised by Jessica Wilson against the Bennettian framework that also target theproposed view. (shrink)

In order to predict and explain behavior, one cannot specify the mental state of an agent merely by saying what information she possesses. Instead one must specify what information is available to an agent relative to various purposes. Specifying mental states in this way allows us to accommodate cases of imperfect recall, cognitive accomplishments involved in logical deduction, the mental states of confused or fragmented subjects, and the difference between propositional knowledge and know-how .

Ground is all the rage in contemporary metaphysics. But what is its nature? Some metaphysicians defend what we could call, following Skiles and Trogdon (2021), the inheritance view: it is because constitutive forms of metaphysical explanation are such-and-such that we should believe that ground is so-and-so. However, many putative instances of inheritance are not primarily motivated by scientific considerations. This limitation is harmless if one thinks that ground and science are best kept apart. Contrary to this view, we believe that (...) ground is a highly serviceable tool for investigating metaphysical areas of science. In this paper, we defend a naturalistic version of the inheritance view which takes constitutive scientific explanation as a better guide to ground. After illustrating the approach and its merits, we discuss some implications of the emerging scientific conception for the theory of ground at large. (shrink)

What grounds facts of ground? Some metaphysicians invoke fundamental grounding laws to answer this question. These are general principles that link grounded facts to their grounds. The main business of this paper is to advance the debate about the metaphysics of grounding laws by exploring the prospects of a plausible yet underexplored minimalist account, one which is structurally analogous to a familiar Humean conception of natural laws. In the positive part of this paper, I articulate such a novel view and (...) argue for its merits. The minimalist account shuns essences and takes laws to be unmysterious elite regularities. Therefore, it is a promising alternative for theorists of ground who spurn the acceptance of essentialism about the grounding laws but think that these are needed in our theorizing. In the negative part, I argue that widely accepted principles of ground, coupled with the tenets of minimalism, jeopardize the fundamentality of the grounding laws. I discuss two immediately available and prima facie appealing strategies to evade this threat. However, I show that both have undesirable theoretical costs. I conclude by casting doubts on whether the benefits of a minimalist account of fundamental grounding laws outweigh such costs. (shrink)

In contemporary metaphysics, the doctrine that the fundamental facts are those which are wholly ungrounded is the received view or something near enough. Against this radical brutalism, several metaphysicians argued in favour of the existence of fundamental facts that are moderately brute or merely partially grounded. However, the arguments for moderately brute facts rely on controversial metaphysical scenarios. This paper aims to counteract the tendency in favour of radical brutalism on scientific grounds. It does so by showing that naturalistic metaphysicians (...) can appeal to plausible considerations from physical theory to establish the existence of moderately brute facts. But should the naturalistic metaphysician embrace moderate brutalism, namely the view that the fundamental facts are those which are merely partially ungrounded? Here I argue for a negative answer, recommending a more inclusive pluralism about the kinds of brute facts we can expect to find in nature. (shrink)

Dispositionality and qualitativity are key notions to describe the world that we inhabit. Dispositionality is a matter of what a thing is disposed to do in certain circumstances. Qualitativity is a matter of how a thing is like. According to the Identity Theory of powers, every fundamental property is at once dispositional and qualitative, or a powerful quality. Canonically, the Identity Theory holds a contentious identity claim between a property’s dispositionality and its qualitativity. In the literature, this view faces a (...) contradiction objection that undermines its merits. We should therefore consider an alternative version that does not embrace the identity claim. My aim is to show that we can enjoy the benefits of the Identity Theory without embracing the identity between the dispositional and the qualitative. I shall argue that a distinction between two senses of dispositionality and qualitativity serves the purpose. I will then discuss three readings of the identity claim that can be formulated in light of such a distinction. I will conclude that even if the identity were to fail in any of the suggested readings, it would be possible to hold an account of fundamental powerful qualities. (shrink)

[...] Eu não sou "educador". Basta-me ser um dentre os demais seres do universo. Ou a ventura de ter procurado ser na vida um pedagogo. Nos últimos tempos tenho pensado muito nisto. Acho mesmo que a partir do final da década de 60 nós permitimos a despedagogização do ensino neste país de nome Brasil. Que é verde. amarelo, azul e branco! É mesmo. E pronto. Nestas duas décadas mataram ou permitimos que matassem a disciplina e a seriedade e o prazer (...) na Escola. E, aí, vale a questão: "escola para quê?" [...] Palavras-chave: Educador; Pedagogo; Escola; Brasil; Competência pedagógica. (shrink)

Our conception of logical space is the set of distinctions we use to navigate the world. Agustn Rayo argues that this is shaped by acceptance or rejection of 'just is'-statements: e.g. 'to be composed of water just is to be composed of H2O'. He offers a novel conception of metaphysical possibility, and a new trivialist philosophy of mathematics.

In a recent paper, Jc Beall and A. J. Cotnoir proposed a bi-modal solution to the fundamental problem of Christology - the problem of reconciling the apparent contradiction implied by Christ’s divine and human natures. According to their solution, the contradiction could be resolved if one takes Christ’s dual nature as implying two different theological modal notions: one ranging over divine possibilities and the other over human possibilities. As a riposte, I argue that as novel and ingenious as Beall and (...) Cotnoir’s solution may be, it still fails to account for the very crux of the fundamental problem, viz., the true proposition about Christ being God-incarnate. (shrink)

Gödel claimed that Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory is 'what becomes of the theory of types if certain superfluous restrictions are removed'. The aim of this paper is to develop a clearer understanding of Gödel's remark, and of the surrounding philosophical terrain. In connection with this, we discuss some technical issues concerning infinitary type theories and the programme of developing the semantics for higher-order languages in other higher-order languages.

A respectable assessment of priority-based ontic structuralism demands an elucidation of its metaphysical backbone. Here we focus on two theses that stand in need of clarification: the Fundamentality Thesis states that structures are fundamental, and the Priority Thesis states that these structures are prior to putative fundamental objects, if these exist. Candidate notions to illuminate and such as supervenience and ontological dependence failed at this task. Our purpose is to show that grounding is the best competitor to articulate and, and (...) regiment such theses in a desirable unified way. Our strategy is two-fold. First, we make the case that grounding does better than ontological dependence and supervenience. Second, we show that the distinction between partial and full grounds permits us to respond to an objection raised by Kerry McKenzie against the proposal of interpreting priority-based Ontic Structuralism in the idiom of metaphysical determination. Our conclusion is that priority ontic structuralists have compelling reasons for adopting a grounding-based approach. (shrink)

Ao dar conta da sua obra global de Paul Ricoeur, o presente estudo, em forma de glosa filosófica, busca apresentar os 'mundos do homem' sob o signo da relação de ipseidade e alteridade, da ipseidade colhida como 'identidade reflexiva' e da alteridade apreendida nos múltiplos registos filosoficamente permitidos. Para concretizar este objectivo são exploradas a Psicologia e Psicanálise, a História, a Linguagem e a Filosofia Prática, terminando a investigação com uma conclusão aporética sobre a ontologia em jogo.

It would be good to have a Bayesian decision theory that assesses our decisions and thinking according to everyday standards of rationality — standards that do not require logical omniscience (Garber 1983, Hacking 1967). To that end we develop a “fragmented” decision theory in which a single state of mind is represented by a family of credence functions, each associated with a distinct choice condition (Lewis 1982, Stalnaker 1984). The theory imposes a local coherence assumption guaranteeing that as an agent's (...) attention shifts, successive batches of "obvious" logical information become available to her. A rule of expected utility maximization can then be applied to the decision of what to attend to next during a train of thought. On the resulting theory, rationality requires ordinary agents to be logically competent and to often engage in trains of thought that increase the unification of their states of mind. But rationality does not require ordinary agents to be logically omniscient. (shrink)

The problem of absolute generality has attracted much attention in recent philosophy. Agustin Rayo and Gabriel Uzquiano have assembled a distinguished team of contributors to write new essays on the topic. They investigate the question of whether it is possible to attain absolute generality in thought and language and the ramifications of this question in the philosophy of logic and mathematics.

O presente trabalho tem o objetivo de analisar a influência do pensamento de Jean Piaget na proposta das Concepções Abertas no ensino da Educação Física. A epistemologia do autor constituiu uma das referências para a proposta em questão, o que torna necessário o estudo dos pressupostos gnosiológicos e ontológicos da teoria piagetiana para a melhor compreensão das implicações político-pedagógicas do ensino aberto. É possível identificar problemas e limitações das Concepções Abertas, que, por herdar as visões de homem e sociedade defendidas (...) por Piaget, encontra-se presa aos parâmetros do ensino centrado no aluno.This paper aims to analyze the influence of the Piaget’s thought in the proposal of Open Conceptions in the teaching of Physical Education. The epistemology of the author was one of the references to the proposal in question, which calls for the study of epistemological and ontological assumptions of piagetian theory for better understanding of the political and pedagogical implications of open education. It’s possible to identify problems and limitations of Open Conceptions, which, by inheriting the visions of man and society advocated by Piaget, is attached to the parameters of education focused on students. (shrink)

This book provides new theoretical approaches to the subject of virtuality. All chapters reflect the importance of extending the analysis of the concept of “the virtual” to areas of knowledge that, until today, have not been fully included in its philosophical foundations. The respective chapters share new insights on art, media, psychic systems and technology, while also presenting new ways of articulating the concept of the virtual with regard to the main premises of Western thought. Given its thematic scope, this (...) book is intended not only for a philosophical audience, but also for all scientists who have turned to the humanities in search of answers to their questions. (shrink)

In the fields of linguistics and psychology the didactic implementation of new knowledge relative to argumentative discourse and its acquisition has led us to develop a didactic sequence focused on the teaching of argumentation in 11–12 year old pupils. This sequence was experimented in six schools in order to assess the effect of these new educational methods on the capacities of pupils to treat the dialogic dimensions of argumentation in the writing of monologues. An analysis of the productions of the (...) puils who had been submitted to the didactic sequence, compared with those of a control group, showed a significant improvement in the capacities of the first group. These improvements concerned aspects such as backing up arguments, acknowledging the addressee, negotiating with an eventual contradictor and using of a certain number of units and linguistic expressions t specific to argumentative texts (expressions of responsability taking, textual organisers of cause and conclusion, modalisations of probability and of certitude, concessions and polite expressions). (shrink)

Pode a história das instituições de ensino superior nos ajudar a compreender as causas de controvérsias filosóficas e os processos de mudança intelectual pelo qual velhos estilos intelectuais são substituídos por novos? Neste artigo, associo a emergência da filosofia pós-analítica nos Estados Unidos a partir da década de 1970 à reforma e expansão do sistema de ensino superior daquele país na segunda metade do século XX, que afetou a filosofia enquanto disciplina acadêmica e profissão. Tomando como ponto de partida as (...) reflexões de Richard Rorty a respeito do estado da disciplina no início dos anos 1980, mostro como seu diagnóstico de crise disciplinar, elaborado na forma de uma crítica filosófica aos pressupostos teóricos e metodológicos da filosofia analítica, é resultado de um processo mais longo e amplo de transformação das bases institucionais da vida filosófica profissional nos Estados Unidos. (shrink)

This paper offers a contribution to debates around integrative aspects of systems biology and engages with issues related to the circumstances under which physicists look at biological problems. We use oral history as one of the methodological tools to gather the empirical material, conducting interviews with physicists working in systems biology. The interviews were conducted at several institutions in Brazil, Germany, Israel and the U.S. Biological research has been increasingly dependent on computational methods, high-throughput technologies, and multidisciplinary skills. Quantitative scientists (...) are joining biological departments and collaborations between physicists and biologists are particularly vigorous. This state of affairs raises a number of questions, such as: What are the circumstances under which physicists approach biological problems in systems biology? What kind of interdisciplinary challenges must be tackled? The paper suggests that, concerning physicists’ move to work on biological systems, there are common reasons to move, the transition must be understood in terms of degrees, physicists have a rationale for simplifying systems, and distinct conceptions of model and modeling strategies are recurrent. We identified problems regarding linguistic clarity and integration of epistemological aims. We conclude that cultural unconformities within the systems biology community have important consequences to the flow of scientific knowledge. (shrink)