Minimal Semantics asks what a theory of literal linguistic meaning is for - if you were to be given a working theory of meaning for a language right now, what would you be able to do with it? Emma Borg sets out to defend a formal approach to semantic theorising from a relatively new type of opponent - advocates of what she call 'dual pragmatics'. According to dual pragmatists, rich pragmatic processes play two distinct roles in linguistic comprehension: as (...) well as operating in a post-semantic capacity to determine the implicatures of an utterance, they also operate prior to the determination of truth-conditional content for a sentence. That is to say, they have an integral role to play within what is usually thought of as the semantic realm. Borg believes dual pragmatic accounts constitute the strongest contemporary challenge to standard formal approaches to semantics since they challenge the formal theorist to show not merely that there is some role for formal processes on route to determination of semantic content, but that such processes are sufficient for determining content. Minimal Semantics provides a detailed examination of this school of thought, introducing readers who are unfamiliar with the topic to key ideas like relevance theory and contextualism, and looking in detail at where these accounts diverge from the formal approach. Borg's defence of formal semantics has two main parts: first, she argues that the formal approach is most naturally compatible with an important and well-grounded psychological theory, namely the Fodorian modular picture of the mind. Then she argues that the main arguments adduced by dual pragmatists against formal semantics - concerning apparent contextual intrusions into semantic content - can in fact be countered by a formal theory. The defence holds, however, only if we are sensitive to the proper conditions of success for a semantic theory. Specifically, we should reject a range of onerous constraints on semantic theorizing (e.g., that it answer epistemic or metaphysical questions, or that it explain our communicative skills) and instead adopt a quite minimal picture of semantics. (shrink)

Morality in Sport Sport continues to make its presence known throughout the world as it prospers at all levels. Amazingly, there is no end in sight to the popularity and growth of sport. Essential to sport's continued prosperity, growth, and overall livelihood is the sustenance of a firm moral base. It is the goal and hope of the author that you find this textbook to be a useful guide in helping you maintain and build upon the foundation of moral good (...) that is required for sport to exist now and in the future. The need to make good moral decisions in sport is constant. And, although opportunities to make such decisions in sport are seemingly endless, what is "moral" can be somewhat unclear. Given the various perspectives on morality and the lack of clear-cut distinctions between moral and immoral actions, disagreements regarding moral behavior and sport are likely to always exist. However, having a blatant disregard for good moral behavior in sport is difficult to defend from most any position. (shrink)

Understanding in Epistemology Epistemology is often defined as the theory of knowledge, and talk of propositional knowledge has dominated the bulk of modern literature in epistemology. However, epistemologists have recently started to turn more attention to the epistemic state or states of understanding, asking questions about its nature, relationship … Continue reading Understanding in Epistemology →.

Background Retraction is a mechanism for alerting readers to unreliable material and other problems in the published scientific and scholarly record. Retracted publications generally remain visible and searchable, but the intention of retraction is to mark them as “removed” from the citable record of scholarship. However, in practice, some retracted articles continue to be treated by researchers and the public as valid content as they are often unaware of the retraction. Research over the past decade has identified a number of (...) factors contributing to the unintentional spread of retracted research. The goal of the Reducing the Inadvertent Spread of Retracted Science: Shaping a Research and Implementation Agenda (RISRS) project was to develop an actionable agenda for reducing the inadvertent spread of retracted science. This included identifying how retraction status could be more thoroughly disseminated, and determining what actions are feasible and relevant for particular stakeholders who play a role in the distribution of knowledge. -/- Methods These recommendations were developed as part of a year-long process that included a scoping review of empirical literature and successive rounds of stakeholder consultation, culminating in a three-part online workshop that brought together a diverse body of 65 stakeholders in October–November 2020 to engage in collaborative problem solving and dialogue. Stakeholders held roles such as publishers, editors, researchers, librarians, standards developers, funding program officers, and technologists and worked for institutions such as universities, governmental agencies, funding organizations, publishing houses, libraries, standards organizations, and technology providers. Workshop discussions were seeded by materials derived from stakeholder interviews (N = 47) and short original discussion pieces contributed by stakeholders. The online workshop resulted in a set of recommendations to address the complexities of retracted research throughout the scholarly communications ecosystem. -/- Results The RISRS recommendations are: (1) Develop a systematic cross-industry approach to ensure the public availability of consistent, standardized, interoperable, and timely information about retractions; (2) Recommend a taxonomy of retraction categories/classifications and corresponding retraction metadata that can be adopted by all stakeholders; (3) Develop best practices for coordinating the retraction process to enable timely, fair, unbiased outcomes; and (4) Educate stakeholders about pre- and post-publication stewardship, including retraction and correction of the scholarly record. -/- Conclusions Our stakeholder engagement study led to 4 recommendations to address inadvertent citation of retracted research, and formation of a working group to develop the Communication of Retractions, Removals, and Expressions of Concern (CORREC) Recommended Practice. Further work will be needed to determine how well retractions are currently documented, how retraction of code and datasets impacts related publications, and to identify if retraction metadata (fails to) propagate. Outcomes of all this work should lead to ensuring retracted papers are never cited without awareness of the retraction, and that, in public fora outside of science, retracted papers are not treated as valid scientific outputs. (shrink)

Philosophers often assume that folk hold pain to be a mental state – to be in pain is to have a certain kind of feeling – and they think this state exhibits the classic Cartesian characteristics of privacy, subjectivity, and incorrigibility. However folk also assign pains (non-brain-based) bodily locations: unlike most other mental states, pains are held to exist in arms, feet, etc. This has led some (e.g. Hill 2005) to talk of the ‘paradox of pain’, whereby the folk notion (...) of pain is inherently conflicted. Recently, several authors have rejected the paradox view, arguing instead that folk hold a univocal, bodily view (i.e. pains are properties of various body parts, not of minds). This paper presents six objections to the bodily view of the folk concept of pain. We then outline a direction for future research – the ‘polyeidic approach’ – whereby the folk notion of pain is held to encompass various divergent (potentially conflicting) strands and we suggest that certain problems surrounding the treatment and communication of pain might be usefully be viewed through the lens of the polyeidic approach. (shrink)

In this article, we aim to map out the complexities which characterise debates about the ethics of vaccine distribution, particularly those surrounding the distribution of the COVID-19 vaccine. In doing so, we distinguish three general principles which might be used to distribute goods and two ambiguities in how one might wish to spell them out. We then argue that we can understand actual debates around the COVID-19 vaccine – including those over prioritising vaccinating the most vulnerable – as reflecting disagreements (...) over these principles. Finally, we shift our attention away from traditional discussions of distributive justice, highlighting the importance of concerns about risk imposition, special duties, and social roles in explaining debates over the COVID-19 vaccine. We conclude that the normative complexity this article highlights deepens the need for decision-making bodies to be sensitive to public input. (shrink)

Emma Borg examines the relation between semantics and pragmatics, and assesses recent answers to fundamental questions of how and where to draw the divide between the two. She argues for a minimal account of the interrelation between them--a 'minimal semantics'--which holds that only rule-governed appeals to context can influence semantic content.

Both patients and clinicians frequently report problems around communicating and assessing pain. Patients express dissatisfaction with their doctors and doctors often find exchanges with chronic pain patients difficult and frustrating. This chapter thus asks how we could improve pain communication and thereby enhance outcomes for chronic pain patients. We argue that improving matters will require a better appreciation of the complex meaning of pain terms and of the variability and flexibility in how individuals think about pain. We start by examining (...) the various accounts of the meaning of pain terms that have been suggested within philosophy and suggest that, while each of the accounts captures something important about our use of pain terms, none is completely satisfactory. We propose that pain terms should be viewed as communicating complex meanings, which may change across different communicative contexts, and this in turn suggests that we should view our ordinary thought about pain as similarly complex. We then sketch what a view taking seriously this variability in meaning and thought might look like, which we call the “polyeidic” view. According to this view, individuals tacitly occupy divergent stances across a range of different dimensions of pain, with one agent, for instance, thinking of pain in a much more “bodycentric” kind of way, while another thinks of pain in a much more "mindcentric” way. The polyeidic view attempts to expand the multidimensionality recognised in, e.g., biopsychosocial models in two directions: first, it holds that the standard triumvirate— dividing sensory/cognitive/affective factors— needs to be enriched in order to capture important distinctions within the social and psychological dimensions. Second, the polyeidic view attempts to explain (at least in part) why modulation of experience by these social and psychological factors is possible in the first place. It does so by arguing that because the folk concept of pain is complex, different weightings of the different parts of the concept can modulate pain experience in a variety of ways. Finally, we argue that adopting a polyeidic approach to the meaning of pain would have a range of measurable clinical outcomes. (shrink)

John R. Schneider explores the problem that animal suffering, caused by the inherent nature of Darwinian evolution, poses to belief in theism. Examining the aesthetic aspects of this moral problem, Schneider focuses on the three prevailing approaches to it: that the Fall caused animal suffering in nature (Lapsarian Theodicy), that Darwinian evolution was the only way for God to create an acceptably good and valuable world (Only-Way Theodicy), and that evolution is the source of major, God-justifying beauty (Aesthetic (...) Theodicy). He also uses canonical texts and doctrines from Judaism and Christianity - notably the book of Job, and the doctrines of the incarnation, atonement, and resurrection - to build on insights taken from the non-lapsarian alternative approaches. Schneider thus constructs an original, God-justifying account of God and the evolutionary suffering of animals. His book enables readers to see that the Darwinian configuration of animal suffering unveiled by scientists is not as implausible on Christian theism as commonly supposed. (shrink)

Screen time has become a hot button issue in psychology with researchers fiercely debating its mental effects. If we want to understand the psychological dynamics of technology use, however, a numerical conceptualization of screen time will lead us to gloss over crucial distinctions. To make this point, the present article takes a hermeneutic approach to a negative form of screen time known as ‘phubbing’, which is the practice of snubbing conversational partners in favor of one’s phone. Using interview data, it (...) is demonstrated that whether or not phone use amounts to phubbing, that is, whether or not it tips over and becomes harmful, depends on a host of contextual factors such as relation (who), content (what), purpose (why), timing (when), and communication (how). These findings demonstrate that not all screen time is created equal: what is harmful and inappropriate in one context is benign in another, and vice versa. Simply put, screen time is not a numerical entity whose causal effects we can measure and explain, but a meaningful activity that we must try to understand. (shrink)

This article discusses madness and saintliness in Dostoevsky’s novels and investigates how the madman and the saint discern between good and evil. I first explore the metaphysical, spiritual, and moral universe of Dostoevsky’s characters by drawing on William Desmond’s philosophy of the between. Second, I argue that the madman’s misconstrual of reality can be grasped as an idolatrous, divisive, and parodic imitation of the good. Third, I reflect on disembodied discernment. In some cases, due to the weakness of the moral (...) agent, the good cannot be properly embodied in space and time, even if a person exhibits ethically sound discernment. Fourth, I look at examples of holy discernment and examine how, through love, the genuinely good person is able to transform idolatry into a universal and cosmic sacramentalism. (shrink)

Les recompositions familiales touchent l’ensemble des liens familiaux et des liens intergénérationnels. Or, si l’on observe, tant sur le plan juridique que dans les pratiques des familles conjugales, une acception plus complexe et plus riche de la parentalité, les grands-parents restent souvent méconnus. Comment construisent-ils leurs rapports à leurs « beaux-petits-enfants »? Nous avons examiné la littérature et interrogé des « belles-grands-mères » pour tenter d’y voir plus clair. Quelles représentations le champ social offre-t-il des beaux-grands-parents? Et quelles sont concrètement (...) les conditions et les étapes qui rendent possible une identité « beau-grand-parentale »? (shrink)

This study supports the idea that fields form around issues, and describes the roles of various stakeholders in the structuring, shaping, and legitimating of the emerging field of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR). A model of the institutional history of the CSR field is outlined, of which a key stage is the appearance of CSR rating agencies as the significant players and Institutional Entrepreneurs of the field. We show to which extent the creation and further development of CSR rating agencies, and (...) the activism of other significant stakeholders of the field (typically portrayed as “standard setters” and “regulatory agents”), contribute to the institutionalization of CSR. With this in mind, among various stakeholders that legitimate the field of CSR, we present the efforts of global and local stakeholders such as the European Union, the United Nations, the International Organization for Standardization, and governments and their interactions. We suggest that the different paths of CSR development and institutionalization in France and in the United States depend on the nature of local and global stakeholders’ involvement in this process and their interactions. (shrink)

Scientists, philosophers, and policymakers disagree about how to define microaggression. Here, we offer a taxonomy of existing definitions, clustering around (a) the psychological motives of perpetrators, (b) the experience of victims, and (c) the functional role of microaggression in oppressive social structures. We consider conceptual and epistemic challenges to each and suggest that progress may come from developing novel hybrid accounts of microaggression, combining empirically tractable features with sensitivity to the testimony of victims.

Some demonstrative expressions, those we might term ‘bare demonstratives’, appear without any appended descriptive content (e.g. occurrences of ‘this’ or ‘that’ simpliciter). However, it seems that the majority of demonstrative occurrences do not follow this model. ‘Complex demonstratives’ is the collective term I shall use for phrases formed by adjoining one or more common nouns to a demonstrative expression (e.g. ‘that cat’, ‘this happy man’) and I will call the combination of predicates immediately concatenated with the demonstrative in such phrases (...) the ‘matrix’ of the expression. The question, then, is how we should construe the logical form of such expressions within a semantic theory for our language; and I wish to suggest that some recent answers to this question are, in fact, mistaken. The structure of the paper is as follows: first, I wish to highlight two (often underlying) assumptions about the nature of noun phrases in general, and suggest that, if they are both adopted, they apparently constrain the possible accounts of the logical form of complex demonstratives to just three options. The second and third parts of the paper will be concerned with expanding these options and arguing that none of them are adequate; thus the major part of the paper is concerned with the negative claim that the most obvious moves to make in this area must actually fail on closer inspection. The fourth and final section will then (very briefly) sketch the positive thesis of the paper: that we can deliver a clear and cohesive account of complex demonstratives, armed simply with elements which we will draw from David Kaplan’s theory of demonstratives, but only at the cost of rejecting (or at least refining) one assumption we recognised initially. (shrink)

Applying Fineman’s vulnerability theory, this paper will explore the role of emotions within the legal profession and the specific vulnerabilities that arise from their traditional and contemporary treatment within law. It will consider how the notion of professionalism in law has traditionally disregarded or excluded emotions as irrelevant or even dangerous in a manner which is philosophically and psychologically flawed as well as damaging to mental health and wellbeing. This approach has created longstanding unacknowledged vulnerabilities for the profession as a (...) whole and individual practitioners. It will then explore how the shifting legal services landscape, and the resultant evolution of the profession, has led to a growing contemporary interest in the use of emotional competencies (often characterised as ‘soft skills’ or ‘emotional intelligence’). These are now increasingly exploited as tools to enhance profitability. However, this leads to a dichotomy as, despite their increasing utilisation, emotions are still not fully acknowledged or incorporated within law’s core professional values. This generates further individual and institutional vulnerabilities around mental health and wellbeing which require urgent attention to ensure the health of the contemporary profession. The paper concludes with suggestions for reforms to alleviate these vulnerabilities and promote greater future resilience within law. (shrink)

This chapter explores the concept of knowing as a contested terrain within the education. It takes, as its starting point, the classical philosophical distinction between knowing how, knowing that and the lesser-attended-to notion of knowing by acquaintance. Charting key historical debates pertaining to knowing that and knowing how, the chapter considers the extent to which conceptions of these forms of knowing evident in educational policy and practice are often limited and reductive. The chapter then explores how contemporary work within the (...) philosophy of education has served to challenge too-stringent conceptions of propositional and practical knowledge – often by reference to the Aristotelian conception of phronesis. With a view to building on this literature and taking it in a new direction, the chapter ends by exploring what might need to be at stake in a richer conception of knowledge for education. In connection with this, it offers a sketch of a renewed account of knowing by acquaintance, developed in relation to the phenomenological philosophy of Martin Heidegger. (shrink)

‘Pragmaticist’ positions posit a three-way division within utterance content between: (i) the standing meaning of the sentence, (ii) a somewhat pragmatically enhanced meaning which captures what the speaker explicitly conveys (following Sperber and Wilson 1986, I label this the ‘explicature’), and (iii) further indirectly conveyed propositions which the speaker merely implies. Here I re-examine the notion of an explicature, asking how it is defined and what work explicatures are supposed to do. I argue that explicatures get defined in three different (...) ways and that these distinct definitions can and do pull apart. Thus the notion of an explicature turns out to be ill-defined. (shrink)

This article draws attention to the importance of enchantment in business ethics research. Starting from a Weberian understanding of disenchantment, as a force that arises through modernity and scientific rationality, we show how rationalist business ethics research has become disenchanted as a consequence of the normalization of positivist, quantitative methods of inquiry. Such methods absent the relational and lively nature of business ethics research and detract from the ethical meaning that can be generated through research encounters. To address this issue, (...) we draw on the work of political theorist and philosopher, Jane Bennett, using this to show how interpretive qualitative research creates possibilities for enchantment. We identify three opportunities for reenchanting business ethics research related to: moments of novelty or disruption; deep, meaningful attachments to things studied; and possibilities for embodied, affective encounters. In conclusion, we suggest that business ethics research needs to recognize and reorient scholarship towards an appreciation of the ethical value of interpretive, qualitative research as a source of potential enchantment. (shrink)

Sujetos y subjetividad en la construcción metodológica / Hugo Zemelman / - El magma constitutivo de la historicidad / Emma León / - Trabajo y mundo de vida / Enrique de la Garza Toledo / - Subjetividades emergentes, psiquismo y proyecto colectivo / Lidia Fernández / - Hacia una sociedad del sujeto : democracia y sociedad civil / Carlos Guerra Rodríguez / - Medios de comunicación, gobierno de la población y sujetos / María del Carmen de la Peza C. (...) / - El espacio íntimo en la construcción intersubjetiva / Medardo Tapia Uribe. (shrink)

To investigate possible cognitive factors influencing the cross-cultural incidence of spirit possession concepts and to develop a more refined understanding of the precise contours of 'intuitive mind-body dualism', two studies were conducted that explored adults' intuitions about the relationship between minds and bodies. Specifically, the studies explored how participants reason about the effects of a hypothetical mind-migration across a range of behaviours. Both studies used hypothetical mind-transfer scenarios in which the mind of one person is transferred into the body of (...) another person. Participants were asked to reason about the new post-transfer person's behaviours and aptitudes. In Study 1, participants were provided with a scale on which they indicated their answers; in Study 2, participants responded to open-ended questions. In both studies, the majority of participants reasoned that while the post-transfer person's performance on physical tasks would be similar to the host performance on mental tasks would be similar to the person whose mind has been transferred. Further, participants tended to assume a complete displacement of minds, such that the post-transfer person's performance on mental task items was reasoned to be identical to incoming person's performance normally. The relevance of these findings for explaining the variable incidence and spread of different possession concepts is discussed. (shrink)

We report the results of a cross-cultural investigation of person-body reasoning in the United Kingdom and northern Brazilian Amazon (Marajó Island). The study provides evidence that directly bears upon divergent theoretical claims in cognitive psychology and anthropology, respectively, on the cognitive origins and cross-cultural incidence of mind-body dualism. In a novel reasoning task, we found that participants across the two sample populations parsed a wide range of capacities similarly in terms of the capacities’ perceived anchoring to bodily function. Patterns of (...) reasoning concerning the respective roles of physical and biological properties in sustaining various capacities did vary between sample populations, however. Further, the data challenge prior ad-hoc categorizations in the empirical literature on the developmental origins of and cognitive constraints on psycho-physical reasoning (e.g., in afterlife concepts). We suggest cross-culturally validated categories of “Body Dependent” and “Body Independent” items for future developmental and cross-cultural research in this emerging area. (shrink)

This chapter examines the way the two main philosophies of Heidegger and Derrida, come into critical contact with each other. Derrida represents his own thinking as a development of Heideggerian thought. The chapter discusses Derrida's engagement with Heidegger spanned nearly his entire philosophical career. Derrida's exploration of Heidegger's spiritual idiom, while somewhat unusual, is not unconnected with his other writings on Heidegger. Through tracing Heidegger's spiritual idiom, Derrida seeks to bring out what is at stake in those aspects of Heidegger's (...) thought he finds uncertain or, to put it more bluntly, questionable. In tracing Derrida's reading of Heidegger in Of Spirit, then, one shall in effect be crossing two pathways. One uses the medium of spirit to introduce certain critical questions for Heideggerian philosophy, specifically questions that relate to the political and geo political aspects of Heidegger's work. (shrink)

A standard objection to so-called ‘minimal semantics’ (Borg 2004, 2012, Cappelen and Lepore 2005) is that minimal contents are explanatorily redundant as they play no role in an adequate account of linguistic communication (those making this objection include Levinson 2000, Carston 2002, Recanati 2004). This paper argues that this standard objection is mistaken. Furthermore, I argue that seeing why the objection is mistaken sheds light both on how we should draw the classic Gricean distinction between saying and implicating, and how (...) we should think about the key philosophical notion of assertion. Specifically, it reveals that these ideas are best understood primarily in socio-linguistic terms (resting on the degree of liability a speaker is held to have for linguistically conveyed content). (shrink)