Upon separation of the protein from the nucleic acid component of tobacco mosaic virus by phenol, using a fast and gentle procedure, the nucleic acid is infective in assays on tobacco leaves. A series of qualitative and quantitative control experiments demonstrates that the biological activity cannot depend on residual proteins in the preparation, but is a property of isolated nucleic acid which is thus the genetic material of the virus.

Extant literature on Goodman’s ‘New Riddle of Induction’ deals mainly with two versions. I consider both of them, starting from the (‘epistemic’) version of Goodman’s classic of 1954. It turns out that it belongs to the realm of applications of inductive logic, and that it can be resolved by admitting only significant evidence (as I call it) for confirmations of hypotheses. Sect. 1 prepares some ground for the argument. As much of it depends on the notion of evidential significance, this (...) concept is defined and its introduction motivated. Further, I introduce and explain the distinction between support and confirmation: put in a slogan, ‘confirmation is support by significant evidence’. The second section deals with the Riddle itself. I demonstrate that, given the provisions of the first section, not ‘anything confirms anything’: significant green-evidence confirms only green-hypotheses (and no grue-hypotheses), and significant grue-evidence confirms only grue-hypotheses (and no green-hypotheses), whichever terms we use for expressing these evidences or hypotheses. The third section rounds off my treatment. First I show that Frank Jackson’s use of his counterfactual condition is unsuccessful. Further, I argue that no unwanted consequences result, if one starts from the other, ‘objective’, definition of ‘grue’, as it constitutes no more than a mere fact of logic that cannot do any harm. Finally, I present a grue-case involving both kinds of definition, where the exclusive confirmation of either the green- or the grue-hypothesis is shown. (shrink)

Freitag (2015) and Schramm (2014) have proposed different, although converging, solutions of Goodman’s New Riddle of Induction. Answering their proposals, Dorst (2016 and 2018) has used the fictitious character of a ‘grue-speaker’ as his principal device for criticizing counterfactual-based treatments of the Riddle. In this paper, I argue that Dorst’s arguments fail: On the observation of no other than green emeralds, the ‘grue-speaker’ cannot use the symmetry between the ‘green’- and ‘grue’-languages for claiming ‘grue’- instead of ‘green’-evidence, and the (...) counterfactuals involved (explicitly by Schramm and implicitly by Freitag) remain unaffected by Dorst’s proposal for how to evaluate them. (shrink)

Edmund Gettier (1963) argued that there can be justified true belief (JTB) that is not knowledge. I question the correctness of his argument by showing that Smith of Gettier’s famous examples does not earn justification for his incidentally true beliefs, while a doxastically more conscientious person S would come to hold justified but false beliefs. So, Gettier’s (and analogous) cases do not result in justified _and_ true belief. This is due to a tension between deductive closure of justification and evidential (...) support. For being justified, any believing, disbelieving, or withholding of deductively inferred propositions must be distributed proportionally to given evidential support. This proportionality principle has primacy over deductive closure in case of conflict. My argument does not save the JTB-account. But, instead of merely referring to an intuition, it explains why subjects in Gettier situations do not earn knowledge. (shrink)

This paper constitutes one extended argument, which touches on various topics of Critical Rationalism as it was initiated by Karl Popper and further developed in his aftermath. The result of the argument will be that critical rationalism either offers no solution to the problem of induction at all, or that it amounts, in the last resort, to a kind of Critical Rationalist Inductivism as it were, a version of what I call Good Old Induction. One may think of David Miller (...) as a contemporary representative of what I consider as the ‘no solution’ version of critical rationalism, while Alan Musgrave stands for the version of ‘critical rationalist induction’. Popper’s own writings admit of either interpretation. (shrink)

In einer früheren Arbeit habe ich neben anderem auch Poppers Theorie der rationalen Präferabilität der bestbewährten Theorie kritisiert und festgestellt, daß sie weder als Theorie der theoretischen Rationalität (d.i. die Rationalität des bloßen, an keinem anderen Zweck als dem des an der wissenschaftlichen Neugierde orientierten Glaubens, Meinens oder Führwahrhaltens)noch als Theorie der praktischen Rationalität (d.i. die Rationalität der auch an sonstigen Zwecken orientierten Handlungen bzw. Handlungsentscheidungen)tauglich sei. Im wesentlichen habe ich argumentiert, daß es bei der Verfolgung des Zieles, sich der (...) Wahrheit anzunähern, um nichts rationaler sei, die jeweils bestbewährte Theorie zu präferieren als sie nicht zu präferieren (und anstelle dessen die Präferenz z.B. vom Ergebnis eines Münzwurfes abhängig zu machen). Allerdings habe ich im Rahmen dieser Kritik „rational“ mit „begründet“ i.S. von „gute Gründe haben“ gleichgesetzt (und ich halte dies auch nach wie vor für richtig). Da nun aber David Miller behauptet, daß Rationalität durchaus ohne Bezugnahme auf gute Gründe auskomme (abgesehen davon, daß gute Gründe gar nicht beizubringen und – selbst wenn es sie gäbe – völlig unnütz wären), werde ich meine Argumentation entsprechend erweitern. (shrink)

Keith Lehrer describes in his Theory of Knowledge a Justification Game which is played by a Claimant who tries to establish his justification for some contingent claim and a rather harmless Skeptic who tries to stop the Claimant. The doubts of a serious philosophical skeptic are - in opposition to Lehrer - analyzed as doubts concerning the justification of our beliefs and not their contents. Making the reglementations for a solid philosophical argumentation more precise the setting of a Serious Justification (...) Game is defined and thus replaying the game it tums out that the philosophical skeptic succeeds in providing a profound philosophical argumentation for his denial of Lehrer's positive claim for justification. (shrink)

Chisholm definiert seine ''Begriffe der epistemischen Bewertung" (z.B. "gewiß", "evident") mithilfe der Undefinierten Relation "vernünftiger als". Diese Relation ist zweideutig und es wird gezeigt, daß sich, wenn man die beiden Bedeutungen sorgfältig auseinanderhält, in jedem Fall die Chisholmschen Begriffe der epistemischen Bewertung als nicht adäquat definiert herausstellen.

Chisholm definiert seine ''Begriffe der epistemischen Bewertung" (z.B. "gewiß", "evident") mithilfe der Undefinierten Relation "vernünftiger als". Diese Relation ist zweideutig und es wird gezeigt, daß sich, wenn man die beiden Bedeutungen sorgfältig auseinanderhält, in jedem Fall die Chisholmschen Begriffe der epistemischen Bewertung als nicht adäquat definiert herausstellen.

Es wird ein System von Postulaten entwickelt, welches unter Interpretation durch epistemische Wörter (Glauben, Wissen, gerechtfertigtes Glauben etc.) eine Explikation der einschlägigen Begriffe liefert. Die solcherart explizierten Begriffe ergeben, daß nur noch die Wahl zwischen Totalskepsis oder fundamentalistischer Erkenntnistheorie offen bleibt: kein gerechtfertigtes Glauben ist möglich ohne ein zugrundeHegendes Wissen vorauszusetzen. Der traditionellen Wissensdefinition (wahres gerechtfertigtes Glauben) wird ein guter Sinn unterlegt bei gleichzeitiger Vermeidung der bekannten Schwierigkeiten (z.B. Gettiers Problem).

Starting from the question of whether Ernst Mach's well-known notion of "Elemente" (elements) must lead to the verdict that the arch-anti-metaphysician himself may be justly accused of holding an essantially metaphysical position, the idea of metaphysical neutrality is explained in Section I. Section II deals with Quine's verdict on abstract entities, among which Mach's elements would have to be counted if there were no way out of the Quinean test. Such a way out, it is proposed in section III, is (...) Carnap's Remedy: the distinction of external and internal questions. Finally, in Section IV, the empirical meaning of Mach's notion of elements is explained, from whence it's argued that Mach's "philosophy" is good, non-metaphysical, empirical science. (shrink)

Der erste Band der Meinong Studien vereinigt historische Beiträge zur Meinong-Forschung im engeren Sinn mit solchen, die Meinongsche Themen und Gedanken in systematischer Absicht wieder aufnehmen. Die angestellten Untersuchungen widmen sich der vor-gegenstandstheoretischen Periode Meinongs (Chrudzimski), seinen frühen erkenntnistheoretischen Untersuchungen (Manotta), seinen Theorien der Vorstellungsproduktion (Raspa) und der Annahmen (Dölling), konfrontieren seine Lehren mit jenen Franz Brentanos (Rollinger), Sartres und Russells (Hochberg) und analysieren die Fragen der Konsistenz des Meinong.

Im Aufsatz wird der Versuch unternommen, aus einem externen Blickwinkel dem Gehalt jener Wahrscheinlichkeitskonzeptionen nachzugehen, die von Meinong in Über Möglichkeit und Wahrscheinlichkeit dargelegt sind. Meinong befaßt sich darin zunächst mit der „objektiven" Wahrscheinlichkeit, die als Grade oder Abstufungen von Möglichkeit Objektiven in „unsubjektiver" Weise zukommt, und stellt ihr dann die eigentliche oder „Vermutungswahrscheinlichkeit" gegenüber, die in Meinongs Sinn insofern subjektiv ist, als sie in der Eigenschaft von Objektiven besteht, durch berechtigte Vermutungen erfaßt werden zu können.Meinongs Reihung folgend wird zunächst (...) die objektive, sodann die subjektive Theorie diskutiert. In beiden Fällen wird zu fragen sein, ob es sich auch nach heutiger Sicht um Wahrscheinlichkeiten im formalen Sinne handelt , weiters, welche Rechtfertigung für die Verteilung von Anfangswahrscheinlichkeiten angeboten wird, wie das Problem der Einzelfallswahrscheinlichkeit behandelt wird etc. Schließlich wird den Fragen nachgegangen, welche Parallelen bzw. welche auffälligen Unterschiede zu den heute üblicherweise besprochenen Interpretationen des Wahrscheinlichkeitskalküls vorliegen und ob Meinong mit seiner Konzeption der Wahrscheinlichkeiten den von ihm selbst bezweckten Zielen gerecht zu werden vermag. (shrink)

Im Aufsatz wird der Versuch unternommen, aus einem externen Blickwinkel dem Gehalt jener Wahrscheinlichkeitskonzeptionen nachzugehen, die von Meinong in Über Möglichkeit und Wahrscheinlichkeit dargelegt sind. Meinong befaßt sich darin zunächst mit der „objektiven" Wahrscheinlichkeit, die als Grade oder Abstufungen von Möglichkeit Objektiven in „unsubjektiver" Weise zukommt, und stellt ihr dann die eigentliche oder „Vermutungswahrscheinlichkeit" gegenüber, die in Meinongs Sinn insofern subjektiv ist, als sie in der Eigenschaft von Objektiven besteht, durch berechtigte Vermutungen erfaßt werden zu können.Meinongs Reihung folgend wird zunächst (...) die objektive, sodann die subjektive Theorie diskutiert. In beiden Fällen wird zu fragen sein, ob es sich auch nach heutiger Sicht um Wahrscheinlichkeiten im formalen Sinne handelt (was über Repräsentationstheoreme untersucht werden kann), weiters, welche Rechtfertigung für die Verteilung von Anfangswahrscheinlichkeiten angeboten wird, wie das Problem der Einzelfallswahrscheinlichkeit behandelt wird etc. Schließlich wird den Fragen nachgegangen, welche Parallelen bzw. welche auffälligen Unterschiede zu den heute üblicherweise besprochenen Interpretationen des Wahrscheinlichkeitskalküls vorliegen und ob Meinong mit seiner Konzeption der Wahrscheinlichkeiten den von ihm selbst bezweckten Zielen gerecht zu werden vermag. (shrink)

Dieser Sammelband von Vorträgen des IV. Kongesses der Österreichischen Gesellschaft für Philosophie (1996) bietet einen hervorragenden Überblick über das breite Spektrum der gegenwärtig in Österreich betriebenen Philosophie. Ergänzende Aufsätze von amerikanischen, englischen, deutschen, ungarischen und kroatischen Autoren machen den Band zu einem repräsentativen Querschnitt der vorherrschenden Forschungsbestrebungen in der Gegenwartsphilosophie.

Lehrer Semantics, as it was devised by Adrienne and Keith Lehrer, is imbedded in a comprehensive web of thought and observations of language use and development, communication, and social interaction, all these as empirical phenomena. Rather than for a theory, I take it for a ‘‘model’’ of the kind which gives us guidance in how to organize linguistic and language-related phenomena. My comments on it are restricted to three aspects: In 2 I deal with the question of how Lehrerian sense (...) can be empirically distinguished from Lehrerian reference as a precondition for the claim that sense relationships are in general more stable than reference relations. It seems that this very claim must already be presupposed for doing the respective empirical investigation. But in 3, I argue for the option to interpret the Lehrers’ concept of sense resp. sense vectors as intension concepts, by which move one may gain a generalized concept, so-to-say ‘‘graded analyticity’’, containing Carnapian strict analyticity for language systems as the extreme case of sense vectors with maximum value. Such graded sense may also be empirically investigated in the case of normal languages. In 4, I plead for my view that what the Lehrers take for communal languages are really collections of family-resembling idiolects of individual speakers and hypotheses of individual speakers about the idiolects of their fellow speakers. This move should free us from the fiction of, and sterile discussions about, the ‘‘true’’ meanings of words, but nevertheless keep normal language communication possible. As a concluding remark I propose in 5 to have both: normal languages from an empirical point of view, and codified languages from a logical reconstructionist one. (shrink)

Psychopathy has been the subject of investigations in both philosophy and psychiatry and yet the conceptual issues remain largely unresolved. This volume approaches psychopathy by considering the question of what psychopaths lack. The contributors investigate specific moral dysfunctions or deficits, shedding light on the capacities people need to be moral by examining cases of real people who seem to lack those capacities. -/- The volume proceeds from the basic assumption that psychopathy is not characterized by a single deficit--for example, the (...) lack of empathy, as some philosophers have proposed—but by a range of them. Thus contributors address specific deficits that include impairments in rationality, language, fellow-feeling, volition, evaluation, and sympathy. They also consider such issues in moral psychology as moral motivation, moral emotions, and moral character; and they examine social aspects of psychopathic behavior, including ascriptions of moral responsibility, justification of moral blame, and social and legal responses to people perceived to be dangerous. -/- As this volume demonstrates, philosophers will be better equipped to determine what they mean by “the moral point of view” when they connect debates in moral philosophy to the psychiatric notion of psychopathy, which provides some guidance on what humans need in order be able to feel the normative pull of morality. And the empirical work done by psychiatrists and researchers in psychopathy can benefit from the conceptual clarifications offered by philosophy. (shrink)

In this essay, I exploit an ambiguity in the concept of self-determination. Self-de Green termination can mean to determine oneself in choices and actions or to determine one’s self. The second kind of self-determination leads to our capacity to imagine alternative selves of ourselves, which are to be actualized. This creates the basis for a normative conception of self-determination, i.e. a conception that incorporates the aspect of a right or good way to determine oneself. I defend a normative interpretation of (...) self-determination, which is illustrated by reference to three theorists: Harry Frankfurt, Thomas Hill Green and John Stuart Mill. (shrink)

Decision-making capacity or mental competence is one of the most intensively discussed concepts in contemporary bioethics and medical ethics. In this paper I argue that anorexia nervosa, an eating disorder primarily afflicting adolescent girls and young women, seriously challenges what I label the traditional account of decision-making capacity. In light of these results, it may in addition be necessary to rethink a certain popular type of paternalistic argumentation that grounds the justification of compulsory treatment, for example of anorexic persons who (...) refuse treatment, on a lack of decision-making capacity. (shrink)

A dissertation in the tradition of logical positivism includes a discussion of the functions and methods of philosophy and a critique of ethics and theology.

The chapter focuses on cases of assisted suicide and voluntary euthanasia in relation to the rarely discussed notion of indirect paternalism. Indirect paternalism involves not just a paternalistic intervener and a person whose welfare is supposed to be protected, but also another party, whom I call “assistant.” Indirect paternalism interferes with an assistant in order to prevent harm to another person. I will introduce a strategy that paternalists can pursue to justify indirect paternalism. It specifically targets an element of assistance (...) cases, namely the fact that people do not necessarily have a justified claim or entitlement to demand such assistance. To prevent people from providing assistance seems normatively different from preventing a person to do something to herself by her own means. I critically discuss arguments from the goals of medicine and from the conscientious objection. These aspects are not deemed decisive when considering the case of indirect paternalistic intervention. Finally, I argue against the rationale of indirect paternalism by showing that there are at least two situations where it does not succeed. One such situation that undermines the justification of indirect paternalism is present when the offered service is itself harmless, another pertinent situation consists of a person necessarily requiring assistance to be really free. At least in some cases, these very conditions are given when contemplating assistance to die. (shrink)

Autonomous Agents addresses the related topics of self-control and individual autonomy. "Self-control" is defined as the opposite of akrasia-weakness of will. The study of self-control seeks to understand the concept of its own terms, followed by an examination of its bearing on one's actions, beliefs, emotions, and personal values. It goes on to consider how a proper understanding of self-control and its manifestations can shed light on personal autonomy and autonomous behaviour. Perspicuous, objective, and incisive throughout, Alfred Mele makes (...) a convincing case for the value of individual autonomy. (shrink)

This is the first wide-ranging, multi-authored handbook in the field of philosophy of medicine, covering the underlying conceptual issues of many important social, political and ethical issues in health care. It introduces and develops over 70 topics, concepts, and issues in the field. It is written by distinguished specialists from multiple disciplines, including philosophy, health sciences, nursing, sociology, political theory, and medicine. Many difficult social and ethical issues in health care are based on conceptual problems, most prominently on the definitions (...) of health and disease, or on epistemological issues regarding causality or diagnosis. Philosophy is the discipline that deals with such conceptual, metaphysical, epistemological, methodological, and axiological matters. (shrink)

Edited by a leading exponent of the school, this book offers--in the words of the movement's founders--logical positivism's revolutionary theories on meaning and metaphysics, the nature of logic and mathematics, the foundations of knowledge ...

What place does motivation have in the lives of intelligent agents? Mele's answer is sensitive to the concerns of philosophers of mind and moral philosophers and informed by empirical work. He offers a distinctive, comprehensive, attractive view of human agency. This book stands boldly at the intersection of philosophy of mind, moral philosophy, and metaphysics.

In this book, the author of "Language, Truth and Logic" tackles one of the central issues of philosophy - how we can know anything - by setting out all the sceptic's arguments and trying to counter them one by one.

In many European countries, the explicit discussion of race as a biological phenomenon has long been avoided. This has not meant that race has become obsolete or irrelevant all together. Rather, it is a slippery object that keeps shifting and changing. To understand its slippery nature, we suggest that race in Europe is best viewed as an absent presence, something that oscillates between reality and nonreality, which appears on the surface and then hides underground. In this special issue, we explore (...) how race has been configured in different practices and how race-based identities and technologies are entwined in various European settings. (shrink)

Misunderstanding other people can be interpreted as the result of an insufficient performance of people’s skills to understand other persons and their experiences. But what does understand mean in these contexts? And what are the relevant skills that need to be engaged to successfully understand other people? I argue that understanding other people is a form of recognition of the epistemic validity of another person’s perspective. I claim that minimal understanding does not require an endorsement of another person’s perspective. This (...) makes the avoidance of lack of understanding a feasible achievement in almost all cases, though it often requires effort in the interactive process of understanding. I specifically analyse the epistemic and normative roles of empathy in this process. In pursuing this aim, I also defend empathy against recent philosophical arguments that point at moral dangers of empathic processes. (shrink)

Territorial borders just like other boundaries are involved in a politics of belonging, a politics of “us” and “them”. Border management regimes are thus part of processes of othering. In this article, we use the management of borders and populations in Europe as an empirical example to make a theoretical claim about race. We introduce the notion of the phenotypic other to argue that race is a topological object, an object that is spatially and temporally folded in distributed technologies of (...) governance. To elaborate on these notions, we first examine a number of border management technologies through which both race and Europe are brought into being. More specifically we focus on how various such technologies aimed at monitoring the movement of individuals together with the management of populations have come to play crucial roles in Europe. Different border management regimes, we argue, do not only enact different versions of Europe but also different phenotypic others. We then shift the focus from border regimes to internal practices of governance, examining forensic DNA databanks to unravel articulations of race in the traffic between databases and societies. (shrink)

This book was originally conceived as a sequel to bertrand russell's "a history of western philosophy". it takes up where russell left off. rather than examining a wide number of philosophers superficially, this book deals with a small number of philosophers in depth. the book examines american pragmatists, the analytic movement, phenomenology and existentialism. it examines both critical and speculative philosophy. (staff).