There are many things—call them ‘experts’—that you should defer to in forming your opinions. The trouble is, many experts are modest: they’re less than certain that they are worthy of deference. When this happens, the standard theories of deference break down: the most popular (“Reflection”-style) principles collapse to inconsistency, while their most popular (“New-Reflection”-style) variants allow you to defer to someone while regarding them as an anti-expert. We propose a middle way: deferring to someone involves preferring to make any decision (...) using their opinions instead of your own. In a slogan, deferring opinions is deferring decisions. Generalizing the proposal of Dorst (2020a), we first formulate a new principle that shows exactly how your opinions must relate to an expert’s for this to be so. We then build off the results of Levinstein (2019) and Campbell-Moore (2020) to show that this principle is also equivalent to the constraint that you must always expect the expert’s estimates to be more accurate than your own. Finally, we characterize the conditions an expert’s opinions must meet to be worthy of deference in this sense, showing how they sit naturally between the too-strong constraints of Reflection and the too-weak constraints of New Reflection. (shrink)

Is there a language of transcendence which does not fall under the well-worn categories of monism, theism, pantheism, biblical or pagan monotheism, personal or tripersonal God, or an impersonal absolute, conceived as immanent and/or transcendent? The present set of studies from different fields of research centers on the question whether it is possible to speak at all of transcendence or a divinity, and if it is, under what limitations does such speech proceed. In current discussion in theology and in philosophy (...) of religion, there is a pervasive awareness that the inherited terms and alternatives, developed in the western tradition, no longer facilitate an adequate understanding of the divine. Increasing familiarity with the languages of 'immanence' and 'transcendence' (under erasure) in Hindu and Buddhist thought has further jumbled our coordinates, while holding out the promise of a more subtle and vital engagement with the matter itself of religious inquiry. A further long-established distinction, between 'personal' and 'impersonal, ' also takes on rich new hues in Asian contexts, where the very notion of 'person' may undergo unsettling critiques. Transgressing the categories of 'personal' and 'impersonal' points to the mystical depth of religious traditions, emphasizes their openness and reintegrates essential elements of both perspectives. Advancing with curiosity and caution, all the contributors take seriously the diversity of historical religious traditions, while nevertheless searching for a fresh language that may connect these traditions and provide a common ground of understanding. (shrink)

Wittgenstein’s Whewell’s Court Lectures contains previously unpublished notes from lectures given by Ludwig Wittgenstein between 1938 and 1941. The volume offers new insight into the development of Wittgenstein’s thought and includes some of the finest examples of Wittgenstein’s lectures in regard to both content and reliability.

Good’s theorem is the apparent platitude that it is always rational to ‘look before you leap’: to gather information before making a decision when doing so is free. We argue that Good’s theorem is not platitudinous and may be false. And we argue that the correct advice is rather to ‘make your act depend on the answer to a question’. Looking before you leap is rational when, but only when, it is a way to do this.

One of the central logical ideas in Wittgenstein’sTractatus logico-philosophicusis the elimination of the identity sign in favor of the so-called “exclusive interpretation” of names and quantifiers requiring different names to refer to different objects and (roughly) different variables to take different values. In this paper, we examine a recent development of these ideas in papers by Kai Wehmeier. We diagnose two main problems of Wehmeier’s account, the first concerning the treatment of individual constants, the second concerning so-called “pseudo-propositions” (Scheinsätze) of (...) classical logic such as$a=a$or$a=b \wedge b=c \rightarrow a=c$. We argue that overcoming these problems requires two fairly drastic departures from Wehmeier’s account: (1) Not every formula of classical first-order logic will be translatable into asingleformula of Wittgenstein’s exclusive notation. Instead, there will often be a multiplicity of possible translations, revealing the original “inclusive” formulas to beambiguous. (2) Certain formulas of first-order logic such as$a=a$will not be translatable into Wittgenstein’s notation at all, being thereby revealed as nonsensical pseudo-propositions which should be excluded from a “correct” conceptual notation. We provide translation procedures from inclusive quantifier-free logic into the exclusive notation that take these modifications into account and define a notion of logical equivalence suitable for assessing these translations. (shrink)

Religions commonly are taken to provide general orientation in leading one's life. We develop here the idea that religions also may have a much more concrete guidance function in providing systematic decision biases in the face of cognitive-control dilemmas. In particular, we assume that the selective reward that religious belief systems provide for rule-conforming behavior induces systematic biases in cognitive-control parameters that are functional in producing the wanted behavior. These biases serve as default values under uncertainty and affect performance in (...) any task that shares cognitive-control operations with the religiously motivated rule-conforming behavior the biases were originally developed for. Such biases therefore can be unraveled and objectified by means of rather simple tasks that are relatively well understood with regard to the cognitive mechanisms they draw on. (shrink)

Epistemologists have recently noted a tension between (i) denying access internalism, and (ii) maintaining that rational agents cannot be epistemically akratic, believing claims akin to ‘p, but I shouldn’t believe p’. I bring out the tension, and develop a new way to resolve it. The basic strategy is to say that access internalism is false, but that counterexamples to it are ‘elusive’ in a way that prevents rational agents from suspecting that they themselves are counterexamples to the internalist principles. I (...) argue that this allows us to do justice to the motivations behind both (i) and (ii). And I explain in some detail what a view of evidence that implements this strategy, and makes it independently plausible, might look like. (shrink)

This chapter covers the traditional role of responsibility, and the possible connections between response and responsibility. These connections are explored through the advance of trust and the surplus of the extraordinary in relation to the Third Party. The idea of responsibility comes from the sphere of juridical law, and has a theological touch. The classical conception presented suffers from a permanent erosion that is reinforced by systemic constraints. Trust is a natural element of every community that is together applied by (...) common aims in life. The phenomenon of trust refers to the bond, the nexus, which holds together the members of a community, creating the requisite solidarity. The term ‘trust’ or ‘confidence’ should not primarily read as a substantive, but as a verb or as the derivative of a verb. Furthermore, it is noted that the responsive ethics proposed could function as a permanent corrective. (shrink)

Traditional approaches to human information processing tend to deal with perception and action planning in isolation, so that an adequate account of the perception-action interface is still missing. On the perceptual side, the dominant cognitive view largely underestimates, and thus fails to account for, the impact of action-related processes on both the processing of perceptual information and on perceptual learning. On the action side, most approaches conceive of action planning as a mere continuation of stimulus processing, thus failing to account (...) for the goal-directedness of even the simplest reaction in an experimental task. We propose a new framework for a more adequate theoretical treatment of perception and action planning, in which perceptual contents and action plans are coded in a common representational medium by feature codes with distal reference. Perceived events (perceptions) and to-be-produced events (actions) are equally represented by integrated, task-tuned networks of feature codes – cognitive structures we call event codes. We give an overview of evidence from a wide variety of empirical domains, such as spatial stimulus-response compatibility, sensorimotor synchronization, and ideomotor action, showing that our main assumptions are well supported by the data. Key Words: action planning; binding; common coding; event coding; feature integration; perception; perception-action interface. (shrink)

In this paper we bring together results from a series of previous papers to prove the constructive version of the Gelfand duality theorem in any Grothendieck topos , obtaining a dual equivalence between the category of commutative C*-algebras and the category of compact, completely regular locales in the topos.

The article is dedicated to the application questions of a case study method known as casuistry. In its long tradition, it focuses on an influential variant of the early modern period and reconstructs its functionality. In the course of reading recent receptions, it is noted that some studies speak of a “casuistic revival” in moral case deliberation in health care. As a result of this revival, casuistry has been modified in such a way that it guides case discussions in practice (...) with the help of a tripartite methodology. However, as it turns out, casuistry, a case comparison method of ethical judgement based on reasoning logic, is less suitable for moral case deliberations in direct patient care. This stems from the fact that casuistry is a detailed procedure of ethical learning beneficial to institutionalized ethics committees or similar forms of ethics consultation in health care. (shrink)

Bernhard Nickel presents a theory of generic sentences and the kind-directed modes of thought they express. The theory closely integrates compositional semantics with metaphysics to solve the problem that generics pose: what do generics mean? Generic sentences are extremely simple, yet if there are patterns to be discerned in terms of which are true and which are false, these patterns are subtle and complex. Ravens are black, and lions have manes: statistical measures cannot do justice to the facts, but (...) what else is there that has a hope of giving us insight into what we are capturing across so many domains? Nickel argues that generics are the top of a fundamentally explanatory iceberg, and that this explanatory framework is deeply intertwined with the semantics of the language we use to express them. In providing an integrated semantic and metaphysical theory of generics, he aims to solve old puzzles and draw attention to new phenomena. (shrink)

The specter of the ‘group mind’ or ‘collective subject’ plays a crucial and fateful role in the current debate on collective intentionality. Fear of the group mind is one important reason why philosophers of collective intentionality resort to individualism. It is argued here that this measure taken against the group mind is as unnecessary as it is detrimental to our understanding of what it means to share an intention. A non-individualistic concept of shared intentionality does not necessarily have to get (...) stuck with some collectivist super-agent. Rather, the specter of the group mind arises from a deep-seated ‘Cartesian’ preconception concerning intentionality, which we should try to overcome. (shrink)

Dans ses Carnets de captivité, Levinas fait parler le fond intime de sa pensée : la vérité humaine trouvée dans l’expérience de l’inhumanité du Stalag. Mais cette « épochè » la plus radicale oblige à se détourner du Dasein heideggérien compris comme être-au-monde. Le problème existentiel devient : « Pourquoi ai-je le droit, tout simplement, d’être, d’être moi-même? ». C’est dans cette possibilité du Néant, dans cette solitude orpheline de monde, propre au « Je suis », que réside l’accès à (...) l’origine de l’historicité. Le chemin hors de la différence ontologique et de l’athéisme présupposé par le concept de l’Être conduit hors de la tentation métaphysique de l’être fermé monadologiquement sur lui-même, vers l’extériorité salvatrice. Le nouveau commencement de la pensée qui donne une orientation à l’être-soi mortel est trouvé en Autrui, plus précisément dans l’événement d’une rencontre avec Autrui, qui parle en son propre nom et me parle. L’être-pour-la-mort reçoit un nouveau sens : répondre à Autrui depuis une solitude devenue surnaturelle, pour commencer un nouvel avenir où je suis pour moi, en tant que mortelle liberté, moi-même. La réalisation salvatrice d’une histoire humaine repose donc sur cette compréhension infinie du Temps, car la relation à Autrui crée une certaine passivité, dans laquelle l’Infini se laisse éprouver. Qu’il soit impossible que le salut vienne de moi seul, qu’il doive se produire par l’entremise d’une relation religieuse au visage d’Autrui, prouve que nous sommes « élus » pour vivre. Amour et pardon, structures authentiques de l’humanité, remplacent « l’Être ». « Salut n’est pas l’être », écrit Levinas! (shrink)

How different neural crest derivatives differentiate in distinct embryonic locations in the vertebrate embryo is an intriguing issue. Many attempts have been made to understand the underlying mechanism of specific pathway choices made by migrating neural crest cells. In this speculative review we suggest a new mechanism for the regulation of neural crest cell migration patterns in avian and mammalian embryos, based on recent progress in understanding the expression and activity of receptor tyrosine kinases during embryogenesis. Distinct subpopulations of crest‐derived (...) cells express specific receptor tyrosine kinases while residing in a migration staging area. We postulate that the differential expression of receptor tyrosine kinases by specific subpopulations of neural crest cells allows them to respond to localized growth factor ligand activity in the embryo. Thus, the migration pathway taken by neural crest subpopulations is determined by their receptor tyrosine kinase response to the differential localization of their cognate ligand. (shrink)

. In logic, diagrams have been used for a very long time. Nevertheless philosophers and logicians are not quite clear about the logical status of diagrammatical representations. Fact is that there is a close relationship between particular visual (resp. graphical) properties of diagrams and logical properties. This is why the representation of the four categorical propositions by different diagram systems allows a deeper insight into the relations of the logical square. In this paper I want to give some examples.

The present paper reports the results of a vignette- and questionnaire-based research project investigating the influence of Moral Intensity (MI) on decision making in a New Zealand business context. The use of a relatively sensitive research design yielded results showing that – in contrast to previous research – objective manipulations, as well as subjective perceptions, of three of the six MI components were of particular importance in accounting for a comparatively large proportion of the variation in four outcome variables. There (...) were no interactions of appreciable magnitude between MI components, or variations across scenarios. Also, no support was found for a reliable multi-dimensional structure of perceptions of Moral Intensity. Implications of the findings are discussed. (shrink)

In this paper the Hurwicz decision rule is applied to an adjustment problem concerning the decision whether a given action should be improved in the light of some knowledge on the states of nature or on other actors' behaviour. In comparison with the minimax and the minimin adjustment principles the general Hurwicz rule reduces to these specific classes whenever the underlying loss function is quadratic and knowledge is given by an ellipsoidal set. In the framework of the adjustment model discussed (...) in this paper Hurwicz's optimism index can be interpreted as a mobility index representing the actor's attitude towards new external information. Examples are given that serve to illustrate the theoretical findings. (shrink)

A good commentary will protect against arbitrary interpretation by exposing its user to the larger community of interpretation where private views are checked, enriched, corrected, and deepened.

I contrast two approaches to the interpretation of generics such as ‘ravens are black:’ majority-based views, on which they are about what is the case most of the time, and inquiry-based views, on which they are about a feature we focus on in inquiry. I argue that majority-based views face far more systematic counterexamples than has previously been supposed. They cannot account for generics about kinds with multiple characteristic properties, such as ‘elephants live in Africa and Asia.’ I then go (...) on to sketch an inquiry-based view. (shrink)

It is God's covenant with Abraham, freely initiated by God, that constitutes Israel as a people who gratefully recall the past, who live obediently in the present, and who face the future in the assurance of God's promises.

Summary The historical development of the non-standard analysis is sketched. With the help of this mathematical branch infinite and infinitesimal quantities are placed in an extension of the real numbers and so find their justification. In this way an old mathematical and philosophical problem is solved in the 20th century, but not in such a manner, mathematicians with classical „standard methods thought of.

This paper seeks to introduce cultural techniques to an Anglophone readership. Specifically geared towards an Anglophone readership, the paper relates the re-emergence of cultural techniques to the changing intellectual constellation of postwar Germany. More specifically, it traces how the concept evolved from – and reacted against – so-called German media theory, a decidedly anti-hermeneutic and anti-humanist current of thought frequently associated with the work of Friedrich Kittler. Post-hermeneutic rather than anti-hermeneutic in its outlook, the reconceptualization of cultural techniques aims at (...) presenting them as chains of operations that link humans, things, media and even animals. To investigate cultural techniques is to shift the analytic gaze from ontological distinctions to the ontic operations that gave rise to the former in the first place. As Siegert points out, this shift recalls certain concurrent developments within the North American posthumanities; the paper therefore also includes a discussion of the similarities and differences between German and North American posthumanism. (shrink)

We present a modal logic for the class of subset spaces based on discretely descending chains of sets. Apart from the usual modalities for knowledge and effort the standard temporal connectives are included in the underlying language. Our main objective is to prove completeness of a corresponding axiomatization. Furthermore, we show that the system satisfies a certain finite model property and is decidable thus.

Various theorems for the preservation of set-theoretic axioms under forcing are proved, regarding both forcing axioms and axioms true in the Lévy collapse. These show in particular that certain applications of forcing axioms require to add generic countable sequences high up in the set-theoretic hierarchy even before collapsing everything down to ‮א‬₁. Later we give applications, among them the consistency of MM with ‮א‬ω not being Jónsson which answers a question raised in the set theory meeting at Oberwolfach in 2005.

In the present note we give a direct deduction of the Axiom of Choice from the Maximal Ideal Theorem for commutative rings with unit.

Solidarity is a complex theoretical and historical investigation of one of the most dynamic social movements in post-World War II Europe. For some time now, Touraine has attempted to develop a comprehensive theory of social movements. In Solidarity, he and fellow researchers François Dubet, Michel Wieviorka, and Jan Strezelecki, apply the theories of action, movement and sociological intervention elaborated in The Voice and The Eye to the situation in Poland 1980-1. Solidarity is one of many attempts by Touraine to combine (...) a comprehensive theory of social change and action with the history of a contemporary social movement. Here Touraine et al. attempt to explain “the nature, internal workings and the evolution of Solidarity.”. (shrink)

This volume documents for the first time the enormous variety of diverging interpretations and presents a text-oriented analysis of antinomy and its resolution ...

Free-variable semantic tableaux are a well-established technique for first-order theorem proving where free variables act as a meta-linguistic device for tracking the eigenvariables used during proof search. We present the theoretical foundations to extend this technique to propositional modal logics, including non-trivial rigorous proofs of soundness and completeness, and also present various techniques that improve the efficiency of the basic naive method for such tableaux.

ZusammenfassungAktuelle Positionspapiere wie das der Sektion Ethik der Deutschen Interdisziplinären Vereinigung für Intensiv- und Notfallmedizin „Therapiezieländerung und Therapiebegrenzung in der Intensivmedizin“, die „Münchner Leitlinie zu Entscheidungen am Lebensende“ und die Erlanger „Empfehlungen zur Behandlungsbegrenzung auf Intensivstationen“ konzentrieren sich auf die Begründung und Erstellung praxistauglicher Entscheidungspfade. Dabei bleibt kaum Raum für die Darlegung der moraltheoretischen Grundlagen zur formalen Handlungsbewertung einer Indikationsstellung am Lebensende. Der Beitrag will anhand einer intensivmedizinischen Entscheidungssituation zeigen, dass im Falle einer Therapiezieländerung aus Indikationsgründen eine aristotelische Argumentation zentrale (...) Bedeutung erhält. Sie besteht in der begründeten Festlegung eines realistisch erreichbaren Ziels und des dahin führenden Therapiepfades. Klinische Ethikberatung, so das Resultat, kann demnach nicht nur die Bedeutung von inhaltlichen Prinzipien unterstreichen, sondern muss auch ihre Kenntnis der formalen Handlungsbewertung zur Geltung bringen. (shrink)

It is shown for an arbitrary topos that the Law of the Excluded Middle holds in its propositional logic iff it satisfies the limited choice principle that every epimorphism from 2 = 1 ⊕ 1 splits.

List-method directed forgetting is the demonstration that people can intentionally forget previously studied information when they are asked to forget what they have previously learned and remember new information instead. In addition, recent research demonstrated that people can selectively forget when cued to forget only a subset of the previously studied information. Both forms of forgetting are typically observed in recall tests, in which the to-be-forgotten and to-be-remembered information is tested independent of original cuing. Thereby, both LMDF and selective directed (...) forgetting have been studied mostly with unrelated item materials. The present study examined whether LMDF and SDF generalize to prose material. Participants learned three prose passages, which they were cued to remember or forget after the study of each passage. At the time of testing, participants were asked to recall the three prose passages regardless of original cuing. The results showed no significant differences in recall of the three lists as a function of cuing condition. The findings suggest that LMDF and SDF do not occur with prose material. Future research is needed to replicate and extend these findings with complex and meaningful materials before drawing firm conclusions. If the null effect proves to be robust, this would have implications regarding the ecological validity and generalizability of current LMDF and SDF findings. (shrink)

Dr. Northoff's comprehensive comparison of clinical symptoms and neurobiological findings in catatonia with that of Parkinson's disease through integration of various levels of investigation, from neurochemistry up to the subjective experience, is a good example of the new strategies we need to improve our understanding of psychiatric disorders. His multimodal approach, leading to the hypothesis that different pathophysiologies of transcortical “horizontal modulation” and “bottom-up/top-down” – orbitofrontal/basal ganglia – “vertical modulations,” may explain many clinical aspects of catatonia and Parkinson's disease, and (...) thereby fills an important gap in current theories of psychomotor syndromes. However, to analyze more specifically the pathophysiology of catatonia, comparison not only with Parkinson's disease, but also with schizophrenia and anxiety disorders would be helpful. As long as the pathohistological and molecular basis of catatonic syndromes is unknown, theories based mainly on functional considerations remain preliminary. (shrink)

Theories of explanation seek to tell us what distinctively explanatory information is. The most ambitious ones, such as the DN-account, seek to tell us what an explanation is, tout court. Less ambitious ones, such as causal theories, restrict themselves to a particular domain of inquiry. The least ambitious theories constitute outright skepticism, holding that there is no reasonably unified phenomenon to give an account of. On these views, it is impossible to give any theories of explanation at all. I argue (...) that both the less ambitious and outright skeptical varieties are committed to a certain context-sensitivity of our explanatory discourse. And though this discourse is almost certainly context-sensitive in some respects, it does not exhibit the context-sensitivity less than fully ambitious theories are committed to. Therefore, all accounts that seek to restrict themselves in scope, including causal accounts of explanation, fail. (shrink)

This article explores the implications of Bernhard Waldenfels’s responsive phenomenology for the discipline of cultural anthropology or ethnology, insofar as it understands itself as the “science of the culturally Other”. It discusses Waldenfels’s own engagement with ethnology and shows the compatibility of his approach with discussions within the discipline. The intertwining of ownness and alienness that is central to Waldenfels’s account of experience is applied to the problem of culture in ethnology. This leads to an acknowledgement of a domain (...) between cultures, a genuine interculturality, as the fundamental field of ethnological research, which, however, can only be addressed through indirect forms of representation. Such forms are identified in the practice of ethnographic citation, and through a reinterpretation of Horace Miner’s classical satire “Body Ritual among the Nacirema”, thus demonstrating the possibility of a prospective “responsive ethnology”. (shrink)

The paper is sympathetic to the idea that speakers have implicit knowledge of the semantics of sub-sentential elements of language, loosely, of words. Implicit knowledge is knowledge which the subject need not be capable of articulating yet which is a genuine propositional attitude and it is to be contrasted with tacit knowledge which refers to an information-bearing state which, however, is not a genuine propositional attitude. I begin by defending the implicit knowledge conception of speakers' knowledge of the meanings of (...) words from a challenge articulated by Evans and then go on the offensive against positions which attempt to replace the notion of implicit knowledge in semantic theory by that of tacit knowledge. (shrink)

Russell takes his paper ?On denoting? to have achieved the repudiation of the theory of denoting concepts and Frege?s theory of sense, and the invention of the notion of incomplete symbols.This means that Russell attempts to solve the set theoretic and semantic paradoxes without making use of a theory of sense.Instead, his strategy is to revise his logical ontology by arguing that certain symbols should be treated as incomplete.In constructing such arguments Russell, at various points, makes use of epistemological and (...) metaphysical considerations.These arguments do not form themselves into a systemic set of considerations to be used in appraising a logical system.Finally, the vicious circle principle is argued for on the basis of considerations, which are presumed evident, about the nature of propositional functions.The stringency of this principle is a basic problem for the system of Principia mathematica.However, even given the terms of the argument, ?On denoting? does not offer a complete repudiation of the notion of sense.This allows the possibility of retaining some of the insights of Principia mathematica whilst rejecting the stringency of the vicious circle principle.The basis of such a system is the theory of sense. (shrink)