"Grapples with the legacy of Jerome Wakefield, one of the most influential critics of modern psychiatry and the use of the DSM for psychiatric diagnosis"--.

This article applies the Kantian doctrine of respect for persons to the problem of sweatshops. We argue that multinational enterprises are properly regarded as responsible for the practices of their subcontractors and suppliers. We then argue that multinationalenterprises have the following duties in their off-shore manufacturing facilities: to ensure that local labor laws are followed; to refrain from coercion; to meet minimum safety standards; and to provide a living wage for employees. Finally, we consider and reply to the objection that (...) improving health and safety conditions and providing a living wage will cause greater harm than good. (shrink)

There has recently been much interest in the role of attention in controlling action. The role has been mischaracterized as an element in necessary and sufficient conditions on agential control. In this paper I attempt a new characterization of the role. I argue that we need to understand attentional control in order to fully understand agential control. To fully understand agential control we must understand paradigm exercises of agential control. Three important accounts of agential control—intentional, reflective, and goal-represented control—do not (...) fully explain such exercises. I argue that understanding them requires understanding how deployments of visual attention implement flexible occurrent control, or a capacity to flexibly adjust the degree of control that individuals exercise over their actions. While such deployments of attention are neither necessary nor sufficient for exercising agential control, they constitute an attentional skill for controlling action, understanding which is central to fully understanding agential control. We can appreciate its centrality if we appreciate that this attentional skill for controlling action is plausibly crucial to acting non-negligently. (shrink)

What is a logical constant? The question is addressed in the tradition of Tarski's definition of logical operations as operations which are invariant under permutation. The paper introduces a general setting in which invariance criteria for logical operations can be compared and argues for invariance under potential isomorphism as the most natural characterization of logical operations.

How do individuals guide their activities towards some goal? Harry Frankfurt once identified the task of explaining guidance as the central problem in action theory. An explanation has proved to be elusive, however. In this paper, I show how we can marshal empirical research to make explanatory progress. I contend that human agents have a primitive capacity to guide visual attention, and that this capacity is actually constituted by a sub-individual psychological control-system: the executive system. I thus illustrate how we (...) can explain exercises of individual-level guidance by appeal to its sub-individual constitution. This opens up a new avenue for explicating agency. (shrink)

The standard relation of logical consequence allows for non-standard interpretations of logical constants, as was shown early on by Carnap. But then how can we learn the interpretations of logical constants, if not from the rules which govern their use? Answers in the literature have mostly consisted in devising clever rule formats going beyond the familiar what follows from what. A more conservative answer is possible. We may be able to learn the correct interpretations from the standard rules, because the (...) space of possible interpretations is a priori restricted by universal semantic principles. We show that this is indeed the case. The principles are familiar from modern formal semantics: compositionality, supplemented, for quantifiers, with topic-neutrality. (shrink)

Introduction In ancient rome, legend has it, a plebeian revolt was once quelled when the tribune Menenius Agrippa argued ...

Le Précis de philosophie des sciences vise à présenter, de manière pédagogique, l'état actuel des grandes questions et des grands domaines de la philosophie des sciences. C'est un ouvrage de niveau "intermédiaire", entre les ouvrages d'initiation et les ouvrages de recherche. Il peut être utilisé comme manuel pour des cours de philosophie des sciences au niveau Master, ainsi que dans le cadre de la préparation aux nouvelles épreuves d'épistémologie des CAPES scientifiques. Il a notamment pour vocation de servir de support (...) de cours pour des enseignements en épistémologie et philosophie des sciences de niveau L3, M1 et M2. (shrink)

This study is about Brentano’s criticism of a version of phenomenalism that he calls “mental monism” and which he attributes to positivist philosophers such as Ernst Mach and John Stuart Mill. I am interested in Brentano’s criticism of Mill’s version of mental monism based on the idea of “permanent possibilities of sensation.” Brentano claims that this form of monism is characterized by the identification of the class of physical phenomena with that of mental phenomena, and it commits itself to a (...) form of idealism. Brentano argues instead for a form of indirect or hypothetical realism based on intentional correlations. (shrink)

La théologie a de tous temps eu des problèmes avec l’anthropologie au sens de la définition de ce qu’il faut entendre par « être humain ». Bruno Latour a tenté de développer une « anthropologie des modernes ». Il se pourrait donc que Latour apporte quelques lumières à la théologie, d’autant qu’il s’affichait chrétien et n’a pas rechigné à intégrer à son anthropologie le « mode d’existence religieux ». L’anthropologie de Latour juxtapose 15 modes d’existence qui se croisent selon des (...) modalités qui excluent la possibilité pour l’un d’eux de devenir dominant sous peine de sombrer dans ce qu’il appelle le « fondamentalisme ». Cette exigence pose problème au théologien. Celui-ci affirme, en effet, que notre relation à Dieu représente un fondement pour toute authentique compréhension de soi. L’anthropologie empiriste de Latour est-elle donc compatible avec la théologie et donc informative pour elle? Et à quelles conditions? (shrink)

In this paper, we demonstrate (1) how harnessing stochasticity can be the basis of creative agency; (2) that such harnessing can resolve the apparent conflict between reductionist (micro-level) accounts of behaviour and behaviour as the outcome of rational and value-driven (macro-level) decisions; (3) how neurophysiological processes can instantiate such behaviour; (4) The processes involved depend on three features of living organisms: (a) they are necessarily open systems; (b) micro-level systems therefore nest within higher-level systems; (c) causal interactions must occur across (...) all the boundaries between the levels of organization. The higher levels constrain the dynamics of lower levels. The experimental evidence and theoretical arguments are shown to be consistent with previous research on the neuronal mechanisms of conscious choice, and with the interconnected multi-level processes by which organisms harness stochasticity, whether conscious or unconscious. (shrink)

The standard semantic definition of consequence with respect to a selected set X of symbols, in terms of truth preservation under replacement (Bolzano) or reinterpretation (Tarski) of symbols outside X, yields a function mapping X to a consequence relation ⇒x. We investigate a function going in the other direction, thus extracting the constants of a given consequence relation, and we show that this function (a) retrieves the usual logical constants from the usual logical consequence relations, and (b) is an inverse (...) to—more precisely, forms a Galois connection with—the Bolzano-Tarski function. (shrink)

This paper supersedes an ealier version, entitled "A Non-Standard Semantics for Inexact Knowledge with Introspection", which appeared in the Proceedings of "Rationality and Knowledge". The definition of token semantics, in particular, has been modified, both for the single- and the multi-agent case.

Executive functioning has been said to bear on a range of traditional philosophical topics, such as consciousness, thought, and action. Surprisingly, philosophers have not much engaged with the scientific literature on executive functioning. This lack of engagement may be due to several influential criticisms of that literature by Daniel Dennett, Alan Allport, and others. In this paper I argue that more recent research on executive functioning shows that these criticisms are no longer valid. The paper clears the way to a (...) more fruitful philosophical engagement with findings on the central executive system. (shrink)

We argue for a relevance-guided learning mechanism to account for both innovative reproduction and faithful imitation by focusing on the role of communication in knowledge transmission. Unlike bifocal stance theory, this mechanism does not require a strict divide between instrumental and ritual-like actions, and the goals they respectively fulfill (material vs. social/affiliative), to account for flexibility in action interpretation and reproduction.

The problem of logical constants consists in finding a principled way to draw the line between those expressions of a language that are logical and those that are not. The criterion of invariance under permutation, attributed to Tarski, is probably the most common answer to this problem, at least within the semantic tradition. However, as the received view on the matter, it has recently come under heavy attack. Does this mean that the criterion should be amended, or maybe even that (...) it should be abandoned? I shall review the different types of objections that have been made against invariance as a logicality criterion and distinguish between three kinds of objections, skeptical worries against the very relevance of such a demarcation, intensional warnings against the level at which the criterion operates, and extensional quarrels against the results that are obtained. I shall argue that the first two kinds of objections are at least partly misguided and that the third kind of objection calls for amendment rather than abandonment. (shrink)

Providing a principled characterization of the distinction between logical and non-logical expressions is a longstanding issue in the philosophy of logic. In the Logical Syntax of Language, Carnap proposes a syntactic solution to this problem, which aims at grounding the claim that logic and mathematics are analytic. Roughly speaking, his idea is that logic and mathematics correspond to the largest part of science for which it is possible to completely specify by "syntactic" means which sentences are valid and which are (...) not. Despite a renewed interest in the philosophical benefits of analyticity, both inside and outside of Carnap scholarship, Carnap's definition of logical expressions seems to have drawn too little attention. I shall argue that it is worth a second look. More precisely, my aim will be to defend this idea against some technical problems faced by Carnap's way of implementing it and against Quinean attacks on syntax-based conventionalism. Section 1 presents Carnap's definition in the context of Logical Syntax of Language, that is, how exactly the definition works, and why Carnap needs it. In section 2, I review three challenges that have been raised in the literature, and I propose to revise the definition accordingly. I argue that its modified version is immune to the previous challenges, and, to some extent, immune to new challenges as well. In the last section, I suggest that the definition has a philosophical interest of its own, because standard Quinean objections are not as conclusive as one might think when attention is paid to the fact that Carnap requires complete syntactic specification of validities. (shrink)

The dual character of invariance under transformations and definability by some operations has been used in classical works by, for example, Galois and Klein. Following Tarski, philosophers of logic have claimed that logical notions themselves could be characterized in terms of invariance. In this article, we generalize a correspondence due to Krasner between invariance under groups of permutations and definability in L∞∞ so as to cover the cases that are of interest in the logicality debates, getting McGee’s theorem about quantifiers (...) invariant under all permutations and definability in pure L∞∞ as a particular case. We also prove some optimality results along the way, regarding the kinds of relations which are needed so that every subgroup of the full permutation group is characterizable as a group of automorphisms. (shrink)

Jeffrey conditioning tells an agent how to update her priors so as to grant a given probability to a particular event. Weighted averaging tells an agent how to update her priors on the basis of testimonial evidence, by changing to a weighted arithmetic mean of her priors and another agent’s priors. We show that, in their respective settings, these two seemingly so different updating rules are axiomatized by essentially the same invariance condition. As a by-product, this sheds new light on (...) the question how weighted averaging should be extended to deal with cases when the other agent reveals only parts of her probability distribution. The combination of weighted averaging and Jeffrey conditioning is a comprehensive updating rule to deal with such cases, which is again axiomatized by invariance under embedding. We conclude that, even though one may dislike Jeffrey conditioning or weighted averaging, the two make a natural pair when a policy for partial testimonial evidence is needed. (shrink)

The Social Scientist's Bestiary addresses a number of important theoretical and philosophical issues in the social sciences from the perspective of contemporary philosophy of science. It is intended to guide social scientists - researchers, teachers and students - so that they will not fall victim to the beasts they will encounter in the course of their enquiries. Such beasts include holism, post-positivistic work in the philosophy of science, Kuhnian relativism, the denial of objectivity, hermeneutics and several others, both good and (...) bad. (shrink)

This paper aims to provide a psychologically-informed philosophical account of the phenomenology of episodic remembering. The literature on epistemic or metacognitive feelings has grown considerably in recent years, and there are persuasive reasons, both conceptual and empirical, in favour of the view that the phenomenology of remembering—autonoetic consciousness, as Tulving influentially referred to it, or the feeling of pastness, as we will refer to it here—is an epistemic feeling, but few philosophical treatments of this phenomenology as an epistemic feeling have (...) so far been proposed. Building on insights from the psychological literature, we argue that a form of feeling-based metacognition is involved in episodic remembering and develop an integrated metacognitive feeling-based view that addresses several key aspects of the feeling of pastness, namely, its status as a feeling, its content, and its relationship to the first-order memories the phenomenology of which it provides. (shrink)

Much innovation has taken place in the development of medical schools and licensure exam processes across the African continent. Still, little attention has been paid to education that enables the multidisciplinary, critical thinking needed to understand and help shape the larger social systems in which health care is delivered. Although more than half of medical schools in Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States offer at least one medical humanities course, this is less common in Africa. We report on (...) the “liberal arts approach” to medical curricula undertaken by the University of Global Health Equity beginning in 2019. The first six-month semester of the curriculum, called Foundations in Social Medicine, includes courses in critical thinking and communication, African history and global political economy, medical anthropology and social medicine, psychology and health, gender and social justice, information technology and health, and community-based training. Additionally, an inquiry-based pedagogy with relatively small classes is featured within an overall institutional culture that emphasizes health equity. We identify key competencies for physicians interested in pursuing global health equity and how such competencies relate to liberal arts integration into the African medical school curriculum and pedagogical approach. We conclude with a call for a research agenda that can better evaluate the impact of such innovations on physicians’ education and subsequent practices. (shrink)

Global climate change is one of the most daunting ethical and political challenges confronting humanity in the twenty-first century. The intergenerational and transnational ethical issues raised by climate change have been the focus of a significant body of scholarship. In this new collection of essays, leading scholars engage and respond to first-generation scholarship and argue for new ways of thinking about our ethical obligations to present and future generations. Topics addressed in these essays include moral accountability for energy consumption and (...) emissions, egalitarian and libertarian perspectives on mitigation, justice in relation to cap and trade schemes, the ethics of adaptation and the ethical dimensions of the impact of climate change on nature. (shrink)

Introduction. The rapid dynamics of the present world results in its complication and construction. Reality turns out to be woven from many quote fragments, representing a collage that a person creates and comprehends through the prism of various texts. Constantly transformable forms come to the fore and, as a result, there exists a plurality of meanings. Models of the world are continuously generated, replacing the actual reality with a multi- tude of spectacular simulacra. The search for ways to comprehend reality (...) through the identification of markers of its transformations is noted, and under- standing becomes the basis of ontology and one of the dominants of consciousness in the last quarter of the 20th and first quarter of the 21st centuries. Signs and symbols of subculture, determined by the context of culture and presented by various means, become one of the markers of the social reality transformations. The purpose of the study is to show the markers of the transformation of the total communication society. Methods. Methodological framework is in G. Gadamer’s hermeneutic approach and the provi- sions of M. Halliday’s social semiotics to coding/de- coding the meanings of operators-markers of social transformations. In addition, other methods were used in the work - methods of analogy, analysis and synthesis. Fragments of the study devoted to the study of chanson as a creolized text required the use of a systematic method. Scientific novelty of the research. The authors re- vealed the specificity of the chanson as a creolized text and present understanding of the subculture as a marker of the social reality transformations, which is manifested by sign-symbolic forms of con- tinuously generated creolized texts, thanks to the technique and technologies of communication. Results. Markers of social reality transformations represent them in the format of creolized texts. What is broadcast in them is filled with a person and, consequently, his responsibility for their con- tent is growing. Semiotic methodology based on the synthesis of the intellectual capital of hermeneutics and linguistics makes it possible for us to consider them as a product of human sign-symbolic activity and decode the content. Conclusions. The specificity of human existence is determined by the existence of a person in the lin- guistic aspect of the world around him - the world is given by language, which involves the search for meaning and understanding of the world. Thinking and language are ontologically connected: mean- ing is expressed by linguistic means. Although the nature of the markers of social reality transforma- tions is different, nevertheless, it is presented and framed as a text, the understanding of which is one of the ways to comprehend social reality. (shrink)

Now that complex Agent-Based Models and computer simulations spread over economics and social sciences - as in most sciences of complex systems -, epistemological puzzles (re)emerge. We introduce new epistemological concepts so as to show to what extent authors are right when they focus on some empirical, instrumental or conceptual significance of their model or simulation. By distinguishing between models and simulations, between types of models, between types of computer simulations and between types of empiricity obtained through a simulation, section (...) 2 gives the possibility to understand more precisely - and then to justify - the diversity of the epistemological positions presented in section 1. Our final claim is that careful attention to the multiplicity of the denotational powers of symbols at stake in complex models and computer simulations is necessary to determine, in each case, their proper epistemic status and credibility. (shrink)

De 1683 a 1694, Antoine Arnauld et Nicolas Malebranche, anciens amis et pretres que leur interet pour Descartes, leur reverence pour Augustin et leur commune inquietude face au libertinage semblaient pourtant destiner a s'entendre, polemiquerent violemment. En insistant sur l'aspect philosophique de ces debats, cet ouvrage propose la premiere interpretation d'ensemble de cette celebre confrontation. Y a-t-il de serieuses raisons philosophiques au desaccord entre Arnauld et Malebranche? Leur determination permet-elle d'eclairer certains aspects du malebranchisme? Existe-t-il une philosophie d'Antoine Arnauld et (...) peut-on en preciser les contenus? Ces trois questions centrales conduisent au point de fuite de ce travail: l'impuissance theologique du cartesianisme est-elle congenitale, ou bien peut-on tirer des dividendes theologiques de la philosophie cartesienne sans en faire jouer les structures et en modifier les concepts fondamentaux? (shrink)

Annotation. Against the background of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics. Bradley provides a detailed differentiation between Aristotle's and Aquinas's view on moral principles and the end of man.

Einstein’s theory of Special relativity is founded on an error made by Hendrick Lorentz. It is not necessary to expose the mathematical inconsistencies of special relativity, since the theory collapses by simply exposing the error made by Lorentz. In doing so, it not only causes special relativity to collapse, but also general relativity, and the many theories built upon these two deceptive theories. There are many claims of tests made which supposedly prove SR or GR, such as the eclipse of (...) 1919, the Hafele-Keating experiment, GPS, the orbit of Mercury, and muons. The error of these will also be shown as well as an area of astronomy which has been negatively impacted by SR. The epistemology approach to special relativity: you can know it is a false theory when the theory requires deceiving the student for acceptance and the tests which support the theory can be proven false. (shrink)

Theoria, Volume 87, Issue 1, Page 109-135, February 2021.

Hintikka makes a distinction between two kinds of games: truthconstituting games and truth-seeking games. His well-known game-theoretical semantics for first-order classical logic and its independence-friendly extension belongs to the first class of games. In order to ground Hintikka’s claim that truth-constituting games are genuine verification and falsification games that make explicit the language games underlying the use of logical constants, it would be desirable to establish a substantial link between these two kinds of games. Adapting a result from Thierry Coquand, (...) we propose such a link, based on a slight modification of Hintikka’s games, in which we allow backward playing for ∃loïse. In this new setting, it can be proven that sequent rules for first-order logic, including the cut rule, are admissible, in the sense that for each rule, there exists an algorithm which turns winning strategies for the premisses into a winning strategy for the conclusion. Thus, proofs, as results of truth-seeking games, can be seen. (shrink)

The text of Theaetetus 155b1-2 as recorded in the manuscripts and printed in current editions of the dialogue is marked by a syntactical anomaly (ἀλλά postpositum) and a logical non sequitur (arbitrary transition from a copulative to an existential use of εἷναι and vice versa). Attempts at emendation by Proclus, Stephanus and Campbell have all been unsuccessful. To find the way back to Plato's original text, the reader will have to fight his way through a logical tangle (the result of (...) a double negation) and abandon the modish, but erroneous, belief that there is no difference in ancient Greek between ``complete'' and ``incomplete'' uses of εἷναι. (shrink)

What is a logical constant? In which terms should we characterize the meaning of logical words like “and”, “or”, “implies”? An attractive answer is: in terms of their inferential roles, i.e. in terms of the role they play in building inferences. More precisely, we favor an approach, going back to Dosen and Sambin, in which the inferential role of a logical constant is captured by a double line rule which introduces it as reflecting structural links (for example, multiplicative conjunction reflects (...) comma on the right of the turnstyle). Rule-based characterizations of logical constants are subject to the well known objection of Prior’s fake connective, tonk. We show that some double line rules also give rise to such pseudo logical constants. But then, we are able to find a property of a double line rules which guarantee that it defines a genuine logical constant. Thus we provide an alternative answer to Belnap’s requirement of conservatity in terms of a local requirement on double line rules. (shrink)

Hintikka makes a distinction between two kinds of games: truthconstituting games and truth-seeking games. His well-known game-theoretical semantics for first-order classical logic and its independence-friendly extension belongs to the first class of games. In order to ground Hintikka’s claim that truth-constituting games are genuine verification and falsification games that make explicit the language games underlying the use of logical constants, it would be desirable to establish a substantial link between these two kinds of games. Adapting a result from Thierry Coquand, (...) we propose such a link, based on a slight modification of Hintikka’s games, in which we allow backward playing for ∃loïse. In this new setting, it can be proven that sequent rules for first-order logic, including the cut rule, are admissible, in the sense that for each rule, there exists an algorithm which turns winning strategies for the premisses into a winning strategy for the conclusion. Thus, proofs, as results of truth-seeking games, can be seen. (shrink)

La pensee de Ludwig Wittgenstein est animee, tout au long des annees 1930 et 1940, par une meditation de la question du temps. C'est un de ses aspects les plus mal connus. Ce livre vise a restituer cette meditation dans sa force et sa singularite, afin d'etablir la contribution qu'elle apporte a la tradition qui s'est consacree a cette question majeure de la philosophie. Il montre d'abord comment la tentation d'accorder un privilege au present constitue un element essentiel du projet (...) phenomenologique wittgensteinien de 1929, avant d'explorer le travail critique auquel Wittgenstein soumet ce projet au cours des deux decennies suivantes, et qui le conduit a situer dans un certain rapport a notre langage l'origine de notre facon de penser la temporalite. Une analyse originale du langage ordinaire permet ainsi de reevaluer les theories classiques du temps que proposent la phenomenologie, la philosophie de la psychologie et la philosophie du langage. (shrink)