More akin to the Roman Empire’s concept of civitas mobilis augescens, the distinction between the twentieth-century metropolis and the Roman model of a city must be sought in the eminently biopolitical character of the modern-day post-metropolis, conceived by Hardt and Negri as the new hegemonic paradigm of production. As a result, the primacy of time over space has been established as the only possible way of measuring the proximity of productive relationships: everything that can be converted into information is instantaneous (...) and the value of goods depends not on the requirements of its production process but on the cost of its transportation. As a kind of Phenomenology of the Urban Spirit, this paper develops the main milestones in the historical unfolding of this Logic of the Absolute Urban Spirit. (shrink)

Reasoning in medicine requires the critical use of a clinical methodology whose validity must be evaluated as well as its limits. In the last decade, an increasing amount of evidence has shown severe limitations and flaws in the conduct of prognostic studies. The main reason behind this fact is that prognostic judgments are at high risk of error. In this paper we investigate the pragmatic and illocutionary aspects of different forms of linguistic acts and judgments involved in clinical practice. More (...) specifically, we analyze the role of uncertainty with regard to ‘particular’ clinical judgments and its relation with ‘general’ evidence. Focusing on how prognostic judgments are formulated and justified, our main purpose is to highlight the explication, the structure and the limits of prognosis from a linguistic and epistemological perspective. (shrink)

This article contemplates symbols and values inscribed on Cairo’s landscape during the 2011 revolution and the period since, focusing on Tahrir Square and the role of the Egyptian flag in street discourses there. I start by briefly pondering how intertwined popular narratives readied the square and flag as emblems of dissent. Next I examine how these appropriations shaped protests in the square, and how military authorities who retook control in 2013 re-coopted the square and flag, with the reabsorption of each (...) critical to that of the other and executed in the same place: Tahrir. Pro-military factions have created the pretense that they were for the revolution by altering the square and structures around it. Furthermore, the square has remained open to the public, but ceased to be inviting. This relates to post-revolutionary alterations that psychologically repel entry. I consider these changes in light of affordance theory, value sensitive design research and especially the defensible space model, arguing that Tahrir Square has been symbolically cordoned and closed. (shrink)

The central aim of this paper is to argue that there is a meaningful sense in which a concept of rationality can apply to a city. The idea will be that a city is rational to the extent that the collective practices of its people enable diverse inhabitants to simultaneously live the kinds of life they are each trying to live. This has significant implications for the varieties of social practices that constitute being more or less rational. Some of these (...) implications may be welcome to a theorist that wants to identify collective rationality with a notion of justice, while others are unwelcome. There are some significant challenges to this use of the concept of rationality, but I claim that these challenges at the city level have parallels at the individual level, and may thus help deepen our understanding of rationality at all levels. (shrink)

Although it is mainly focused on medieval communes, Weber’s thought about the city is relevant because it questions every city and cohabitation: both because Weber tries to grasp its essence and because the medieval city embodies the ideal-type of the democratic city. This characteristic derives directly from the fact that it was born like a “revolutionary usurpation” against feudal and noble pre-existent powers, as a form of “non-legitimate power”. To better understand it, it is necessary to analyze its relation with (...) the Weberian sociology of domination and to observe what the city as “non-legitimate power” contests. (shrink)

In this paper, I show how phenomenological analysis of unreflective dimensions of our experience has implications for our participation in an increasingly urban and multicultural world. I draw on Merleau-Ponty’s account in Phenomenology of Perception of how bodily capabilities are rooted in unreflective, or “anonymous,” resources furnished by the environment. I apply his analysis to the experience of inhabiting a city, which I argue encourages the development of a perspective inclusive of diversity that offers a means of challenging forms of (...) social and political oppression. I consider how expression, as a further dimension of experience that draws on anonymous resources, plays a critical role in our developing the terms according to which we understand ourselves and the environment we inhabit. I argue that giving voice to diverse experiences is a crucial complement to the challenge to oppressive social and political structures we discover in the anonymous dimensions of urban experience. (shrink)

In this paper, I perform an analysis of Aristotle’s organic analogy when discussing the different “organs” of the Greek polis. I argue that this analysis demonstrates that the proper functioning of the polis depends upon the generation of different forms of life that will incline towards tension with one another, due to the fact that some members will be prevented by their form of life from enjoying the chief virtue of political life, namely, the accomplishment of human virtue and the (...) good life. I argue that, at least within the context of the polis, there remains the possibility that those disenfranchised people experience sensuous recognition that they are contributing to human thriving. I contrast this with the modern city, in which what existed as a natural and visible tension in the polis becomes a concealed tension, with the result that no such recognition is possible, leaving modern city-dwellers alienated from the conditions that generate their forms of life. (shrink)

Evidence-based medicine frequently uses statistical hypothesis testing. In this paradigm, data can only disconfirm a research hypothesis’ competitors: One tests the negation of a statistical hypothesis that is supposed to correspond to the research hypothesis. In practice, these hypotheses are often misaligned. For instance, directional research hypotheses are often paired with non-directional statistical hypotheses. Prima facie, one cannot gain proper evidence for one’s research hypothesis employing a misaligned statistical hypothesis. This paper sheds lights on the nature of and the reasons (...) for such misalignments and it provides a thorough analysis of whether they pose a threat to evidence-based medicine. The upshots are that the misalignments are often hidden for clinicians and that although some cases of misalignments can be partially counterbalanced, the overall threat is non-negligible. The counterbalances either lead to methodological inadequacy, loss of statistical power, or involve a lack of information that could be crucial for decision making. This result casts doubt on various findings of medical studies in addition to issues associated with under-powered studies or the replication crisis. (shrink)

In the domain of medical science, factual evidence is usually considered as the criterion on which to base decisions and construct hypotheses. Evidence-based medicine is the translation of this approach into the field of patient care, and it means providing only the type of care that is based on evidence that proves its effectiveness and appropriateness. However, while the literature has focused on the types and force of evidence used to establish the recommendation and treatment guidelines, the problem of how (...) evidence is used in doctor–patient interactions to motivate, or refuse, treatment or habit change has been almost completely neglected. In this specific context, characterized by the epistemic unbalance between the interlocutors and a specific conversational goal, the scientific categories of evidence are often irrelevant. The goal of this paper is to address this challenge by analyzing the role evidence plays in doctor–patient interactions in diabetes care. After introducing an analytical distinction between the epistemic and the pragmatic aspect of evidence, we will propose a classification of the types and functions of evidence in chronic care communication, and illustrate its possible uses through its application to our corpus of diabetes-care consultations. From our qualitative analyses, it is possible to observe how in this communicative context a crucial role is played by the conflicts of evidence, in which providers correct patients’ uses of evidence leading them to using less defeasible levels of evidence. (shrink)

[1st paragraph] A philosophical discussion on evidence-based medicine (EBM) can be probably perceived almost as an oxymoron. How can “the process of systematically finding, appraising, and using contemporaneous research findings as the basis for clinical decisions” (Jenicek 2012: 23) be compatible with the critical and systematic examination of fundamental problems such as the nature of being, reality, thinking, values and perception? How can a scientific field focused mainly on the search and evaluation of evidence and aimed at solid quantifications of (...) hypotheses (Jenicek 2003: 70) be approachable from a perspective that is characterized by probable or defeasible arguments? The challenge of this special issue is to show how a philosophical perspective on evidence is not opposed to, but rather at the grounds of evidence-based medicine. (shrink)

The concept of evidence has gone unanalysed in much of the current debate between proponents and critics of evidence-based medicine. In this paper I will suggest that part of the controversy rests on an understanding of the word “evidence” that is too broad, and therefore contains the contradictions that allow both camps to defend their position and charge their adversaries. I will argue that reconciling the different meanings of the word ‘evidence’ in “evidence-based medicine” should help put EBM in its (...) rightful place. (shrink)

The present study has two goals: to explore elementary students’ understanding of evidence and the ways they deploy it to construct arguments, and to examine whether eliciting their concept of evidence during argumentation improves students’ evidence-based reasoning. Individual semi-structured interviews were conducted with 4th and 6th graders in a public school in Mexico. We found significant differences between groups regarding the concept of evidence, with better performance in the older group. A positive correlation between the concept of evidence and the (...) quality of evidence-based reasoning was found. Also, three performance profiles were observed after eliciting the concept of evidence when grade was excluded as a factor. Results suggest that the concept of evidence plays an essential role in developing argumentative competence in pre-adolescence. (shrink)

The paper investigates the epistemological and communicative competences the experts need to use and communicate evidence in the reasoning process leading to diagnosis. The diagnosis and diagnosis communication are presented as intertwined processes that should be jointly addressed in medical consultations, to empower patients’ compliance in illness management. The paper presents defeasible reasoning as specific to the diagnostic praxis, showing how this type of reasoning threatens effective diagnosis communication and entails that we should understand diagnostic evidence as defeasible as well. (...) It argues that metaphors might be effective communicative devices to let the patients understand the relevant defeasors in the diagnostic reasoning process, helping to improve effective diagnosis communication, and also encouraging a change in patients’ beliefs and attitudes on their own experience of illness and illness’ management. (shrink)

Grounded in the practical problem of light pollution, this paper examines the aesthetic dimensions of urban and natural darkness, and its impact on how we perceive and evaluate nighttime lighting. It is argued that competing notions of the sublime, manifested through artificial illumination and the natural night sky respectively, reinforce a geographical dualism between cities and wilderness. To challenge this spatial differentiation, recent work in urban-focused environmental ethics, as well as environmental aesthetics, are utilized to envision the moral and aesthetic (...) possibilities of a new urban nocturnal sublime. Through articulating the aspirations and constraints of a new urban nocturnal experience, this paper elucidates the axiological dimensions of light pollution, draws attention to nightscapes as a site of importance for urban-focused philosophy, and examines the enduring relevance of the sublime for both the design of nighttime illumination and the appreciation of the night sky. (shrink)

Cities are mysteriously attractive. The more we get used to being citizens of the world, the more we feel the need to identify ourselves with a city. Moreover, this need seems in no way distressed by the fact that the urban landscape around us changes continuously: new buildings rise, new restaurants open, new stores, new parks, new infrastructures… Cities seem to vindicate Heraclitus’s dictum: you cannot step twice into the same river; you cannot walk twice through the same city. But, (...) as with the river, we want and need to say that it is the same city we are walking through every day. It is always different, but numerically self-identical. How is that possible? What sort of mysterious thing is a city? The answer, I submit, is that cities aren’t things. They are processes. Like rivers, cities unfold in time just as they extend in space, by having different temporal parts for each time at which they exist. And walking though one part and then again through another is, literally, walking through the same whole. (shrink)

Urban places are of central significance for cities both as built structures and as centers of everyday life. Due to the emergence of various design-led place-making policies and practices, “urban place” has largely become a marketed and branded product. Aesthetics plays a major role in this project of place-making, and the related interpretation of “commodified aesthetics of place” emphasizes certain experiential and qualitative place-attributes—such as authenticity—despite apparent conceptual confusions and controversies. A thorough reconsideration of central place-concepts is required to shed (...) light on this problematic sphere. This article provides an alternative reading of urban places and the related aesthetic dimensions, based primarily on a Heideggerian account of human existence as placed being in the world. Such an approach emphasizes the decisive difference between an object-based and a contextual interpretation of place, providing also a framework for understanding the aesthetics of place and its fundamental lifeworld-constituting role anew. (shrink)

Multimorbidity, the presence of multiple health conditions that must be addressed, is a particularly difficult situation in patient management raising issues such as the use of multiple drugs and drug-disease interactions. Clinical Guidelines are evidence-based statements which provide recommendations for specific health conditions but are unfit for the management of multiple co-occurring health situations. To leverage these evidence-based documents, it becomes necessary to combine them. In this paper, using a case example, we explore the use of argumentation schemes to reason (...) and combine evidence-based recommendations from clinical guidelines, expected effects, conflicts stemming from said recommendations, and preferences regarding treatment goals. We compare the results of reasoning using the schemes for practical reasoning and argument from negative consequences in the Carneades Argumentation System with those of ASPIC-G, an extension of the artificial intelligence system ASPIC+. (shrink)

According to standard assumptions in semantics, ordinary users of a language have implicit beliefs about the truth-conditions of sentences in that language, and they often agree on those beliefs. For example, it is assumed that if Anna and John are both competent users of English and the former utters ‘grass is green’ in conversation with the latter, they will both believe that that sentence is true if and only if grass is green. These assumptions play an important role in an (...) intuitively compelling picture of communication, according to which successful communication through literal assertoric utterances is normally effected thanks to our shared beliefs about the truth-conditions of the sentences uttered in the course of the conversation. Against these standard assumptions, this paper argues that the participants in a conversation rarely have the same beliefs about the truth-conditions of the sentences involved in a linguistic interaction. More precisely, it argues for Variance, the thesis that nearly every utterance is such that there is no proposition which more than one language user believes to be that utterance’s truth-conditional content. If Variance is true, we must reject the standard picture of communication. Towards the end of the paper I identify three ways in which ordinary conversations can be communication-like despite the truth of Variance and argue that the most natural amendments to the standard picture fail to explain them. (shrink)

When dealing with ‘meaning’ or related notions, one cannot ignore what for a long time was the dominant paradigm in semantics. According to such paradigm, truth-conditional formal semantics for natural language is a theory of semantic competence. In this article, I shall discuss a foundational problem for such semantic program. I shall first be following authors who claim that truth-conditional formal semantics is unable to provide a complete account of lexical competence, and, therefore, it suffers from incompleteness. Moreover, as a (...) few authors observed, a coherent completion of lexical meaning/competence cannot be easily provided in the philosophical framework of truth-conditional semantics. The problem is a consequence of Kripke’s and Putnam’s arguments against the view that semantic values of words are cognitively determined. I shall argue that these arguments undermine the notion that formal semantics can be, at the same time, a theory of truth-conditions and a theory of semantic competence. I shall outline and critically discuss two general attempts to solve this problem, which I shall refer to as the social/ideal route and the concepts route. The conclusions of the article are deliberately open. I shall argue that both these attempts are exposed to conceptual troubles and counterintuitive consequences, and so the lexical problem still remains a deep and unresolved issue for semantics. (shrink)

A recurring concern within contemporary philosophy of language has been with the ways in which speakers can be illocutionarily silenced, i.e. hindered in their capacity to do things with words. Moving beyond the traditional conception of silencing as uptake failure, Mary Kate McGowan has recently claimed that silencing may also involve other forms of recognition failure. In this paper I first offer a supportive elaboration of McGowan’s claims by developing a social account of speech act performance, according to which the (...) success of an illocutionary act is not only a function of the intentions of and the conventions deployed by the speaker, but partly depends on how the act is recognized or taken up by the hearer. I then provide a comprehensive definition of illocutionary silencing and spell out what it means for it to occur in a systematic manner. (shrink)

This paper reviews the debate about behavioral modernity in our species, listing counterexamples to the thesis that there was a dramatic change to the minds of Cro-Magnon sapiens in Europe in the Upper Paleolithic. It is argued that we were probably behaviorally modern from about 150,000 years ago, and that aspects of this mentality were apparent in developments in tool technologies and hunting practices across the prior Homo lineage. Key behaviors expressive of behavioral modernity include practical reasoning about the past (...) and future and role-differentiated rights-based cooperation, which are more obvious in their effects than is the vague but much-used notion of symbolic thinking. Behavioral modernity leads to technological innovation but is not sufficient to maintain such innovations in face of population loss and environmental instability, which along with the vagaries of preservation explains why the archaeological record of behavioral modernity in our species is patchy until the Upper Paleolithic. (shrink)

In this paper I briefly introduce work on ancient-DNA and give some examples of the impact this work has had on responses to questions in archaeology. Next, I spell out David Reich’s reasons for his optimism about the contribution aDNA research makes to archaeology. I then use Robert Chapman and Alison Wylie’s framework to offer an alternative to Reich’s view of relations between aDNA research and archaeology. Finally, I develop Steven Mithen’s point about the different questions archaeologists and geneticists ask, (...) arguing that different disciplinary perspectives color researchers’ perceptions of “the most important questions” or the “central topics” in a field. I conclude that evidence from aDNA research cannot solve archaeological disputes without closer, mutually respectful collaboration between aDNA researchers and archaeologists. Ancient DNA data, like radiocarbon data, is not a silver bullet for problems in archaeology. (shrink)

The paper has two parts: 1. A brief exposition of proof-theoretic semantics, not necessarily in connection to natural language. 2. A review, with a contrastive flavour, of some of the applications of PTS to NL with an indication of advantages of PTS as a theory of meaning for NL.

The Standard View is that, other things equal, speakers’ judgments about the meanings of sentences of their language are correct. After all, we make the meanings, so how wrong can we be about them? The Standard View underlies the Elicitation Method, a typical method in semantic fieldwork, according to which we should work out the truth-conditions of a sentence by eliciting speakers’ judgments about its truth-value in different situations. I put pressure on the Standard View and therefore on the Elicitation (...) Method: for quite straightforward reasons, speakers can be radically mistaken about meanings. Lewis gave a theory of convention in a game-theoretic framework. He showed how conventions could arise from repeated coordination games, and, as a special case, how meanings could arise from repeated signaling games. I put pressure on the Standard View by building on Lewis’s framework. I construct coordination games in which the players can be wrong about their conventions, and signaling games in which the players can be wrong about their messages’ meanings. The key idea is straightforward: knowing your own strategy and payoff needn’t determine what the others do, so leaves room for false beliefs about the convention and meanings. The examples are simple, explicit, new in kind, and based on an independently plausible meta-semantic story. (shrink)

According to pluralism about some concept, there are multiple non-equivalent, legitimate concepts pertaining to the ontological category in question. It is an open question whether conceptual pluralism implies anti-realism about that category. In this article, I argue that at least for the case of music, it does not. To undermine the application of an influential move from pluralism to anti-realism, then, I provide an argument in support of indifference realism about music, by appeal to music archaeological research, via an analogy (...) with Adrian Currie’s indifference realism about species licensed by paleobiological research. (shrink)

This paper introduces a Special Issue of Topoi entitled "Archaeology and philosophy".

The method of linguistic palaeontology has a controversial status within archaeology. According to its defenders, it promises the ability to see into the social and material cultures of prehistoric societies and uncover facts about peoples beyond the reach of archaeology. Its critics see it as essentially flawed and unscientific. Using a particular case-study, the Indo-European homeland problem, this paper attempts to discern the kinds of inference which proponents of linguistic palaeontology make and whether they can be warranted. I conclude that, (...) while the case for linguistic palaeontology has often been overstated, so has the case against it. (shrink)

The Bridge Principle states that one shouldn’t assert a sentence that is indeterminate relative to possibilities that are still live options. This principle serves as a bridge between semantic and pragmatic presuppositions. I argue that, given the phenomenon of vagueness, the bridge principle cannot be true as formulated. An alternative formulation of the Bridge Principle is offered.

This paper examines the inferential framework employed by Palaeolithic cognitive archaeologists, using the work of Wynn and Coolidge as a case study. I begin by distinguishing minimal-capacity inferences from cognitive-transition inferences. Minimal-capacity inferences attempt to infer the cognitive prerequisites required for the production of a technology. Cognitive-transition inferences use transitions in technological complexity to infer transitions in cognitive evolution. I argue that cognitive archaeology has typically used cognitive-transition inferences informed by minimal-capacity inferences, and that this reflects a tendency to favour (...) cognitive explanations for transitions in technological complexity. Next I look at two alternative explanations for transitions in technological complexity: the demographic hypothesis and the environmental hypothesis. This presents us with a dilemma: either reject these alternative explanations or reject traditional cognitive-transition inferences. Rejecting the former is unappealing as there is strong evidence that demographic and environmental influences play some causal role in technological transitions. Rejecting the latter is unappealing as it means abandoning the idea that technological transitions tell us anything about transitions in hominin cognitive evolution. I finish by briefly outlining some conceptual tools from the philosophical literature that might help shed some light on the problem. (shrink)

Davidson conjectured that suitably formulated Tarski-style theories of truth can “do duty” as theories of meaning for the spoken languages that humans naturally acquire. But this conjecture faces a pair of old objections that are, in my view, fatal when combined. Foster noted that given any theory of the sort Davidson envisioned, for a language L, there will be many equally true theories whose theorems pair endlessly many sentences of L with very different specifications of whether or not those sentences (...) are true. And if L includes words ‘true’, then for reasons stressed by Tarski, it’s hard to see how any truth theory for L could be correct. Moreover, each of these concerns amplifies the other. Appealing to possible worlds will not help with Foster’s Problem, for reasons that Chomsky discussed in the 1950s, and appealing to trivalent models of truth will not avoid concerns illustrated with Liar Sentences. (shrink)

The variably strict analysis of conditionals does not only largely dominate the philosophical literature, since its invention by Stalnaker and Lewis, it also found its way into linguistics and psychology. Yet, the shortcomings of Lewis–Stalnaker’s account initiated a plethora of modifications, such as non-vacuist conditionals, presuppositional indicatives, perfect conditionals, or other conditional constructions, for example: reason relations, difference-making conditionals, counterfactual dependency, or probabilistic relevance. Many of these new connectives can be treated as strengthened or weakened conditionals. They are definable conditionals. (...) This article develops a technique to infer the logic for such definable conditionals from the known logic of the underlying defining conditional. The technique is applied to central examples. The results show that a large part of the zoo of conditionals arises from a basic conditional—a constant nucleus of the different contextual and conceptual variations of variably strict conditionals. (shrink)

Because reference is not transparent, coreference is not transparent either: it is possible for the subject to refer to the same individual twice without knowing that the two acts of reference target the same individual. That happens whenever the subject associates two distinct yet coreferential files with two token singular terms. The subject may not know that the two files corefer, so her ascribing contradictory properties to the same object does not threaten her rationality. But if the subject deploys the (...) same file twice, in association with both of the singular terms, she is bound to know that she is referring to the same entity twice. (shrink)

The sentences that contain empty definite descriptions are sometimes perceived to be truth-valueless and sometimes perceived to be false. Strawson offered an account of this phenomenon. However, his proposal is empirically inadequate, as shown by von Fintel. von Fintel proposes an alternative account based on a mechanism of belief revision. In this paper, I argue that sentences with multiple failing presuppositions pose a problem for von Fintel’s account. Furthermore, I discuss two variants of von Fintel’s theory proposed by Elbourne to (...) see whether they fare any better than the original. The second variant yields an incorrect prediction for the cases at hand. However, the first variant can account for the problematic examples if the false presuppositions are processed in turn. I will propose a revision of this variant that enforces distinct applications of the mechanism for each presupposition. (shrink)

There is a very striking difference between even the simplest ethnographically known human societies and those of the chimps and bonobos. Chimp and bonobo societies are closed societies: with the exception of adolescent females who disperse from their natal group and join a nearby group, a pan residential group is the whole social world of the agents who make it up. That is not true of forager bands, which have fluid memberships, and regular associations with neighbouring bands. They are components (...) of a larger social world. The open and fluid character of forager bands brings with it many advantages, so the stability of this more vertically complex form of social life is not difficult to explain, once it establishes. But how did it establish, if, as is likely, earlier hominin social worlds resemble those of our close pan relatives in the suspicion of one band to another? How did hominin social organisation transition from life in closed bands, each distrustful of its neighbours, to the much more open social lives of foragers? I will discuss and synthesise two approaches to this problem, one ecological, based on the work of Robert Layton and his colleagues, and another that is organised around an expansion of kin recognition, an idea primarily driven by Bernard Chapais. The paper closes by discussing potential archaeological signatures both of more open social worlds, and of the supposed causal drivers of such worlds. (shrink)

According to a well-established tradition in the philosophy of language, we can understand what makes an arbitrary sound, gesture, or marking into a meaningful linguistic expression only by appealing to mental states, such as beliefs and intentions. In this paper, I explore the contrasting possibility of understanding the meaningfulness of linguistic expressions just in terms of observable linguistic behavior. Specifically, I explore the view that a type of sound becomes a meaningful linguistic expression within a group in virtue of the (...) production of that type of item becoming that group’s widespread, copied way of getting others to involve an object or relation in their activity. After discussing a preliminary version of the view, I develop it in response to some key concerns about whether it really does, as a matter of fact, eschew mental states, and about its adequacy as an account of linguistic meaning. (shrink)

Many generic sentences express stable inductive generalizations. Stable inductive generalizations are typically true for a causal reason. In this paper we investigate to what extent this is also the case for the generalizations expressed by generic sentences. More in particular, we discuss the possibility that many generic sentences of the form ‘ks have feature e’ are true because kind k have the causal power to ‘produce’ feature e. We will argue that such an analysis is quite close to a probabilistic (...) based analysis of generic sentences according to which ‘relatively many’ ks have feature e, and that, in fact, this latter type of analysis can be ‘grounded’ in terms of causal powers. We will argue, moreover, that the causal power analysis is sometimes preferred to a correlation-based analysis, because it takes the causal structure that gives rise to the probabilistic data into account. (shrink)