The death of Jean Baudrillard in 2007 brought about a resurgence of feminist scholarship on his work. But in all recent feminist scholarship on Baudrillard, save for Victoria Grace’s Baudrillard’s Challenge: A Feminist Reading (2000), feminists focus on Baudrillard’s later theory of simulation, forestalling any reconsideration of his earlier text Seduction (1979). In this article I argue that a theory of seduction facilitates the unveiling of a hitherto unnoticed strain of feminist writing that proposes an ongoing challenge to masculine power (...) and politics. This strategy of seduction is one that can be traced through a history of modern feminism, from Joan Rivière’s concept of ‘womanliness’ in ‘Womanliness as Masquerade’ to Hélène Cixous’s écriture féminine in ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’ to Virginia Woolf’s ‘mulberry tree’ in Three Guineas. (shrink)

Hume’s moral philosophy is a sentiment-based view. Moral judgment is a matter of the passions; certain traits of character count as virtues or vices because of the approval or disapproval they evoke in us, feelings that express concern we have about the social effects of these traits. A sentiment-based approach is attractive, since morality seems fundamentally to involve caring for other people. Sentiment-based views, however, face a real challenge. It is clear that our affections are often particular; we favor certain (...) persons over others. This poses a problem when it comes to determining the proper content of morality. The ties of sentiment would seem to be in tension with the aspirations of morality toward impartiality and universality. (shrink)

Images are objects of work in the laboratory. On its face, this work is achieved through talk Yet the talk attached to these images makes reference to other images, which are drawn from varcous environments. In this article, four such environments are identified: the domain of laboratory practice; the context of invisible physical reactions; the future image as it will appear in publication; and the domain of case precedents and reference scenarios from the field. The work of image analysis brings (...) the outside of the image into it and takes the inside out. Thus it can be seen that images are not just taken, they are designed and made. (shrink)

Encourages Christian teenage girls to explore and discover Truth.

This chapter provides a brief introduction to propositional epistemic logic and its applications to epistemology. No previous exposure to epistemic logic is assumed. Epistemic-logical topics discussed include the language and semantics of basic epistemic logic, multi-agent epistemic logic, combined epistemic-doxastic logic, and a glimpse of dynamic epistemic logic. Epistemological topics discussed include Moore-paradoxical phenomena, the surprise exam paradox, logical omniscience and epistemic closure, formalized theories of knowledge, debates about higher-order knowledge, and issues of knowability raised by Fitch’s paradox. The references (...) and recommended readings provide gateways for further exploration. (shrink)

In this article, we tell a story about incompleteness in modal logic. The story weaves together an article of van Benthem, “Syntactic aspects of modal incompleteness theorems,” and a longstanding open question: whether every normal modal logic can be characterized by a class of completely additive modal algebras, or as we call them, ${\cal V}$-baos. Using a first-order reformulation of the property of complete additivity, we prove that the modal logic that starred in van Benthem’s article resolves the open question (...) in the negative. In addition, for the case of bimodal logic, we show that there is a naturally occurring logic that is incomplete with respect to ${\cal V}$-baos, namely the provability logic $GLB$. We also show that even logics that are unsound with respect to such algebras do not have to be more complex than the classical propositional calculus. On the other hand, we observe that it is undecidable whether a syntactically defined logic is ${\cal V}$-complete. After these results, we generalize the Blok Dichotomy to degrees of ${\cal V}$-incompleteness. In the end, we return to van Benthem’s theme of syntactic aspects of modal incompleteness. (shrink)

While much of semantic theorizing is based on intuitions about logical phenomena associated with linguistic constructions—phenomena such as consistency and entailment—it is rare to see axiomatic treatments of linguistic fragments. Given a fragment interpreted in some class of formally specified models, it is often possible to ask for a characterization of the reasoning patterns validated by the class of models. Axiomatizations provide such a characterization, often in a perspicuous and efficient manner. In this paper, we highlight some of the benefits (...) of providing axiomatizations for the purpose of semantic theorizing. We illustrate some of these benefits using three examples from the study of modality. (shrink)

Epistemic modals have peculiar logical features that are challenging to account for in a broadly classical framework. For instance, while a sentence of the form $$p\wedge \Diamond \lnot p$$ (‘p, but it might be that not p’) appears to be a contradiction, $$\Diamond \lnot p$$ does not entail $$\lnot p$$, which would follow in classical logic. Likewise, the classical laws of distributivity and disjunctive syllogism fail for epistemic modals. Existing attempts to account for these facts generally either under- or over-correct. (...) Some theories predict that $$ p\wedge \Diamond \lnot p$$, a so-called epistemic contradiction, is a contradiction only in an etiolated sense, under a notion of entailment that does not always allow us to replace $$p\wedge \Diamond \lnot p$$ with a contradiction; these theories underpredict the infelicity of embedded epistemic contradictions. Other theories savage classical logic, eliminating not just rules that intuitively fail, like distributivity and disjunctive syllogism, but also rules like non-contradiction, excluded middle, De Morgan’s laws, and disjunction introduction, which intuitively remain valid for epistemic modals. In this paper, we aim for a middle ground, developing a semantics and logic for epistemic modals that makes epistemic contradictions genuine contradictions and that invalidates distributivity and disjunctive syllogism but that otherwise preserves classical laws that intuitively remain valid. We start with an algebraic semantics, based on ortholattices instead of Boolean algebras, and then propose a possibility semantics, based on partial possibilities related by compatibility. Both semantics yield the same consequence relation, which we axiomatize. We then show how to lift an arbitrary possible worlds model for a non-modal language to a possibility model for a language with epistemic modals. The goal throughout is to retain what is desirable about classical logic while accounting for the non-classicality of epistemic vocabulary. (shrink)

Modern scientific medicine is increasingly challenged by complementary and alternative therapies. Reviewing policy options for contemporary healthcare development, the World Health Organization's first global strategy on traditional and alternative medicine, released in May 2002, advocates integration. However, experience in East Asia, the only part of the world where state of the art modern scientific facilities are commonly found alongside thriving traditional practices, reveals that medical integration can take several forms. To clarify the available policy options, this article categorizes those forms, (...) identifying three types of integration (unification, equalization and subjugation), plus one type of non-integration (marginalization). It marks out a zone of balanced healthcare development that cuts across two of the integrationist types, and comprises non-discriminatory state treatment of separate but linked sectors of traditional and modern medicine. The article closes by exploring arguments for and against locating state policy in this zone, and holds that policy should be situated here for medical practices that can meet broadly acceptable professional standards, demonstrate an existing social demand, and generate an adequate supply of medical practitioners, possibly through some state subsidy. (shrink)

Written by a diverse range of scholars, this accessible introductory volume asks: What is implicit bias? How does implicit bias compromise our knowledge of others and social reality? How does implicit bias affect us, as individuals and participants in larger social and political institutions, and what can we do to combat biases? An interdisciplinary enterprise, the volume brings together the philosophical perspective of the humanities with the perspective of the social sciences to develop rich lines of inquiry. Its 12 chapters (...) are written in a non-technical style, using relatable examples that help readers understand what implicit bias is, its significance, and the controversies surrounding it. Each chapter includes discussion questions and additional annotated reading suggestions. And a companion webpage contains teaching resources. The volume is invaluable resource for students―and researchers―seeking to understand criticisms surrounding implicit bias, as well as how one might answer them by adopting a more nuanced understanding of bias and its role in maintaining social injustice. (shrink)

Following a proposal of Humberstone, this paper studies a semantics for modal logic based on partial “possibilities” rather than total “worlds.” There are a number of reasons, philosophical and mathematical, to find this alternative semantics attractive. Here we focus on the construction of possibility models with a finitary flavor. Our main completeness result shows that for a number of standard modal logics, we can build a canonical possibility model, wherein every logically consistent formula is satisfied, by simply taking each individual (...) finite formula (modulo equivalence) to be a possibility, rather than each infinite maximally consistent set of formulas as in the usual canonical world models. Constructing these locally finite canonical models involves solving a problem in general modal logic of independent interest, related to the study of adjoint pairs of modal operators: for a given modal logic L, can we find for every formula phi a formula f(phi) such that for every formula psi, phi -> BOX psi is provable in L if and only if f(phi) -> psi is provable in L? We answer this question for a number of standard modal logics, using model-theoretic arguments with world semantics. This second main result allows us to build for each logic a canonical possibility model out of the lattice of formulas related by provable implication in the logic. (shrink)

Recent ideas about epistemic modals and indicative conditionals in formal semantics have significant overlap with ideas in modal logic and dynamic epistemic logic. The purpose of this paper is to show how greater interaction between formal semantics and dynamic epistemic logic in this area can be of mutual benefit. In one direction, we show how concepts and tools from modal logic and dynamic epistemic logic can be used to give a simple, complete axiomatization of Yalcin's [16] semantic consequence relation for (...) a language with epistemic modals and indicative conditionals. In the other direction, the formal semantics for indicative conditionals due to Kolodny and MacFarlane [9] gives rise to a new dynamic operator that is very natural from the point of view of dynamic epistemic logic, allowing succinct expression of dependence (as in dependence logic) or supervenience statements. We prove decidability for the logic with epistemic modals and Kolodny and MacFarlane's indicative conditional via a full and faithful computable translation from their logic to the modal logic K45. (shrink)

In traditional semantics for classical logic and its extensions, such as modal logic, propositions are interpreted as subsets of a set, as in discrete duality, or as clopen sets of a Stone space, as in topological duality. A point in such a set can be viewed as a "possible world," with the key property of a world being primeness—a world makes a disjunction true only if it makes one of the disjuncts true—which classically implies totality—for each proposition, a world either (...) makes the proposition true or makes its negation true. This chapter surveys a more general approach to logical semantics, known as possibility semantics, which replaces possible worlds with possibly partial "possibilities." In classical possibility semantics, propositions are interpreted as regular open sets of a poset, as in set-theoretic forcing, or as compact regular open sets of an upper Vietoris space, as in the recent theory of "choice-free Stone duality." The elements of these sets, viewed as possibilities, may be partial in the sense of making a disjunction true without settling which disjunct is true. We explain how possibilities may be used in semantics for classical logic and modal logics and generalized to semantics for intuitionistic logics. The goals are to overcome or deepen incompleteness results for traditional semantics, to avoid the nonconstructivity of traditional semantics, and to provide richer structures for the interpretation of new languages. (shrink)

In two of the earliest papers on extending modal logic with propositional quantifiers, R. A. Bull and K. Fine studied a modal logic S5Π extending S5 with axioms and rules for propositional quantification. Surprisingly, there seems to have been no proof in the literature of the completeness of S5Π with respect to its most natural algebraic semantics, with propositional quantifiers interpreted by meets and joins over all elements in a complete Boolean algebra. In this note, we give such a proof. (...) This result raises the question: For which normal modal logics. (shrink)

Empirical science, such as psychology and neuroscience, employ diverse methods to develop data driven models and explanations for complex phenomena. In research on the self, differences in these methods produce different depictions of persons. Research in developmental psychology highlights the role of intuitive beliefs, such as psychological essentialism and intuitive dualism, in individuals’ singular, cohesive, and stable sense of self. On the other hand, research in neuroscience highlights the de-centralized, distributed, multitudes of neural networks in competition making selves, with arguments (...) around whether the interpretation of these data imply that the self is somehow fundamental and special to human functioning. In this paper, I explore these discrepant pictures of the self to advance understanding about personhood. Specifically, I suggest that these divergent pictures of self from psychology and neuroscience have the potential to inform philosophical and theological discussions around personhood by anchoring models of persons in empirical views of persons. Likewise, I explore the opportunity for philosophy and theology to inform and enhance scientific research on the self by critiquing scientific bias and construct development as well as highlighting potential limits in understanding selves with empirical models. (shrink)

If you care about securing knowledge, what is wrong with being biased? Often it is said that we are less accurate and reliable knowers due to implicit biases. Likewise, many people think that biases reflect inaccurate claims about groups, are based on limited experience, and are insensitive to evidence. Chapter 3 investigates objections such as these with the help of two popular metaphors: bias as fog and bias as shortcut. Guiding readers through these metaphors, I argue that they clarify the (...) range of knowledge-related objections to implicit bias. They also suggest that there will be no unifying problem with bias from the perspective of knowledge. That is, they tell us that implicit biases can be wrong in different ways for different reasons. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the metaphors reveal a deep—though perhaps not intractable—disagreement among theorists about whether implicit biases can be good in some cases when it comes to knowledge. (shrink)

The reasoning abilities of large language models (LLMs) are the topic of a growing body of research in artificial intelligence and cognitive science. In this paper, we probe the extent to which a dozen LLMs are able to distinguish logically correct inferences from logically fallacious ones. We focus on inference patterns involving conditionals (e.g., 'If Ann has a queen, then Bob has a jack') and epistemic modals (e.g., 'Ann might have an ace', 'Bob must have a king'). These inference patterns (...) have been of special interest to logicians, philosophers, and linguists, since they plausibly play a central role in human reasoning. Assessing LLMs on these inference patterns is thus highly relevant to the question of how much the reasoning abilities of LLMs match those of humans. Among the LLMs we tested, all but GPT-4 often make basic mistakes with conditionals. Moreover, even GPT-4 displays logically inconsistent judgments across inference patterns involving epistemic modals. (shrink)

Inquisitive logic is a research program seeking to expand the purview of logic beyond declarative sentences to include the logic of questions. To this end, inquisitive propositional logic extends classical propositional logic for declarative sentences with principles governing a new binary connective of inquisitive disjunction, which allows the formation of questions. Recently inquisitive logicians have considered what happens if the logic of declarative sentences is assumed to be intuitionistic rather than classical. In short, what should inquisitive logic be on an (...) intuitionistic base? In this paper, we provide an answer to this question from the perspective of nuclear semantics, an approach to classical and intuitionistic semantics pursued in our previous work. In particular, we show how Beth semantics for intuitionistic logic naturally extends to a semantics for inquisitive intuitionistic logic. In addition, we show how an explicit view of inquisitive intuitionistic logic comes via a translation into propositional lax logic, whose completeness we prove with respect to Beth semantics. (shrink)

This chapter argues that epistemologists should replace a “standard alternatives” picture of knowledge, assumed by many fallibilist theories of knowledge, with a new “multipath” picture of knowledge. The chapter first identifies a problem for the standard picture: fallibilists working with this picture cannot maintain even the most uncontroversial epistemic closure principles without making extreme assumptions about the ability of humans to know empirical truths without empirical investigation. The chapter then shows how the multipath picture, motivated by independent arguments, saves fallibilism (...) from this problem. The multipath picture is based on taking seriously the idea that there can be multiple paths to knowing some propositions about the world. An overlooked consequence of fallibilism is that these multiple paths to knowledge may involve ruling out different sets of alternatives, which should be represented in a fallibilist picture of knowledge. The chapter concludes by considering inductive knowledge and strong epistemic closure from this multipath perspective. (shrink)

In his classic monograph, Social Choice and Individual Values, Arrow introduced the notion of a decisive coalition of voters as part of his mathematical framework for social choice theory. The subsequent literature on Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem has shown the importance for social choice theory of reasoning about coalitions of voters with different grades of decisiveness. The goal of this paper is a fine-grained analysis of reasoning about decisive coalitions, formalizing how the concept of a decisive coalition gives rise to a (...) social choice theoretic language and logic all of its own. We show that given Arrow’s axioms of the Independence of Irrelevant Alternatives and Universal Domain, rationality postulates for social preference correspond to strong axioms about decisive coalitions. We demonstrate this correspondence with results of a kind familiar in economics—representation theorems—as well as results of a kind coming from mathematical logic—completeness theorems. We present a complete logic for reasoning about decisive coalitions, along with formal proofs of Arrow’s and Wilson’s theorems. In addition, we prove the correctness of an algorithm for calculating, given any social rationality postulate of a certain form in the language of binary preference, the corresponding axiom in the language of decisive coalitions. These results suggest for social choice theory new perspectives and tools from logic. (shrink)

Epistemic modals have peculiar logical features that are challenging to account for in a broadly classical framework. For instance, while a sentence of the form ‘p, but it might be that not p’ appears to be a contradiction, 'might not p' does not entail 'not p', which would follow in classical logic. Likewise, the classical laws of distributivity and disjunctive syllogism fail for epistemic modals. Existing attempts to account for these facts generally either under- or over-correct. Some theories predict that (...) 'p and might not p', a so-called epistemic contradiction, is a contradiction only in an etiolated sense, under a notion of entailment that does not allow substitution of logical equivalents; these theories underpredict the infelicity of embedded epistemic contradictions. Other theories savage classical logic, eliminating not just rules that intuitively fail, like distributivity and disjunctive syllogism, but also rules like non-contradiction, excluded middle, De Morgan’s laws, and disjunction introduction, which intuitively remain valid for epistemic modals. In this paper, we aim for a middle ground, developing a semantics and logic for epistemic modals that makes epistemic contradictions genuine contradictions and that invalidates distributivity and disjunctive syllogism but that otherwise preserves classical laws that intuitively remain valid. We start with an algebraic semantics, based on ortholattices instead of Boolean algebras, and then propose a more concrete possibility semantics, based on partial possibilities related by compatibility. Both semantics yield the same consequence relation, which we axiomatize. Then we show how to extend our semantics to explain parallel phenomena involving probabilities and conditionals. The goal throughout is to retain what is desirable about classical logic while accounting for the non-classicality of epistemic vocabulary. (shrink)

There is one sound that will always be loudest in sports. It isn’t the squeak of sneakers or the crunch of helmets; it isn’t the grunts or even the stadium music. It’s the deafening roar of sports fans. For those few among us on the outside, sports fandom—with its war paint and pennants, its pricey cable TV packages and esoteric stats reeled off like code—looks highly irrational, entertainment gone overboard. But as Erin C. Tarver demonstrates in this book, sports (...) fandom has become extraordinarily important to our psyche, a matter of the very essence of who we are. Why in the world, Tarver asks, would anyone care about how well a total stranger can throw a ball, or hit one with a bat, or toss one through a hoop? Because such activities and the massive public events that surround them form some of the most meaningful ritual identity practices we have today. They are a primary way we—as individuals and a collective—decide both who we are who we are not. And as such, they are also one of the key ways that various social structures—such as race and gender hierarchies—are sustained, lending a dark side to the joys of being a sports fan. Drawing on everything from philosophy to sociology to sports history, she offers a profound exploration of the significance of sports in contemporary life, showing us just how high the stakes of the game are. (shrink)

While people’s lives continue to be put at risk by the dearth of organs available for transplantation, we must give urgent consideration to any option that may make up the shortfall. A market in organs from living donors is one such option. The market should be ethically supportable, and have built into it, for example, safeguards against wrongful exploitation. This can be accomplished by establishing a single purchaser system within a confined marketplace.Statistics can be dehumanising. The following numbers, however, have (...) more impact than most: as of 24th November, during 2002 in the United Kingdom, 667 people have donated organs, 2055 people have received transplants, and 5615 people are still awaiting transplants.1 It is difficult to estimate how many people die prematurely for want of donor organs. “In the world as a whole there are an estimated 700 000 patients on dialysis . . . . In India alone 100 000 new patients present with kidney failure each year”2 . Almost “three million Americans suffer from congestive heart failure . . . deaths related to this condition are estimated at 250 000 each year . . . …. (shrink)

In this paper, we explore semantics for comparative epistemic modals that avoid the entailment problems shown to result from Kratzer’s (1991) semantics by Yalcin (2006, 2009, 2010). In contrast to the alternative semantics presented by Yalcin and Lassiter (2010, 2011), based on finitely additive probability measures, we introduce semantics based on qualitatively additive measures, as well as semantics based on purely qualitative orderings, including orderings on propositions derived from orderings on worlds in the tradition of Kratzer (1991). All of these (...) semantics avoid the entailment problems that result from Kratzer’s semantics. Our discussion focuses on methodological issues concerning the choice between different semantics. (shrink)

The pursuit of genetic knowledge has such emotional, social, scientific, and financial importance that it has been compared to the divine quest for the Holy Grail, and to the calamity of opening Pandora's Box. Therefore, it comes as no surprise that the recent announcement of a completed blueprint for the human genome has fueled calls for both increased research and increased precautions. This new era, which holds the potential promise of advances in medicine, agriculture and other areas, also requires the (...) careful investigation of a myriad of issues. Those issues such as informed consent, patenting, privacy, and confidentiality, have been explored in at least some detail. Others, such as equity, mutual respect, empowering education, consensus building, and planning for long-term survival, have not been as fully examined, nor have they been as comprehensively integrated into mainstream thinking. To facilitate this, we need to implement an ethical approach that leads us to ask critical questions about the appropriate use of our new tools. (shrink)

In two of the earliest papers on extending modal logic with propositional quantifiers, R. A. Bull and K. Fine studied a modal logic S5Π extending S5 with axioms and rules for propositional quantification. Surprisingly, there seems to have been no proof in the literature of the completeness of S5Π with respect to its most natural algebraic semantics, with propositional quantifiers interpreted by meets and joins over all elements in a complete Boolean algebra. In this note, we give such a proof. (...) This result raises the question: For which normal modal logics L can one axiomatize the quantified propositional modal logic determined by the complete modal algebras for L? (shrink)

Guided by theories of moral psychology and social identity, one hundred and fifty-three public relations practitioners working in the United States participated in an online experiment that tested...

The widespread use of stimulants among healthy individuals to improve cognition has received growing attention; however, public attitudes toward this practice are not well understood. We determined the effect of framing metaphors and context of use on public opinion toward cognitive enhancement. We recruited 3,727 participants from the United States to complete three surveys using Amazon’s Mechanical Turk between April and July 2017. Participants read vignettes describing an individual using cognitive enhancement, varying framing metaphors (fuel versus steroid), and context of (...) use (athletes versus students versus employees). The main outcome measure was the difference in respondent-assigned level of acceptability of the use of cognitive enhancement by others and by themselves between the contrasting vignettes. Participants were more likely to support the use of cognitive enhancement by others than by themselves and more when the use of enhancement by others was framed with a fuel metaphor than with a steroid metaphor. Metaphoric framing did not affect participants’ attitudes toward their own use. Participants supported the use of enhancement by employees more than by students or athletes. These results are discussed in relation to existing ethical and policy literature. (shrink)

Epistemic modal predicate logic raises conceptual problems not faced in the case of alethic modal predicate logic : Frege’s “Hesperus-Phosphorus” problem—how to make sense of ascribing to agents ignorance of necessarily true identity statements—and the related “Hintikka-Kripke” problem—how to set up a logical system combining epistemic and alethic modalities, as well as others problems, such as Quine’s “Double Vision” problem and problems of self-knowledge. In this paper, we lay out a philosophical approach to epistemic predicate logic, implemented formally in Melvin (...) Fitting’s First-Order Intensional Logic, that we argue solves these and other conceptual problems. Topics covered include: Quine on the “collapse” of modal distinctions; the rigidity of names; belief reports and unarticulated constituents; epistemic roles; counterfactual attitudes; representational vs. interpretational semantics; ignorance of co-reference vs. ignorance of identity; two-dimensional epistemic models; quantification into epistemic contexts; and an approach to multi-agent epistemic logic based on centered worlds and hybrid logic. (shrink)

Epistemic closure has been a central issue in epistemology over the last forty years. According to versions of the relevant alternatives and subjunctivist theories of knowledge, epistemic closure can fail: an agent who knows some propositions can fail to know a logical consequence of those propositions, even if the agent explicitly believes the consequence (having “competently deduced” it from the known propositions). In this sense, the claim that epistemic closure can fail must be distinguished from the fact that agents do (...) not always believe, let alone know, the consequences of what they know—a fact that raises the “problem of logical omniscience” that has been central in epistemic logic. This paper, part I of II, is a study of epistemic closure from the perspective of epistemic logic. First, I introduce models for epistemic logic, based on Lewis’s models for counterfactuals, that correspond closely to the pictures of the relevant alternatives and subjunctivist theories of knowledge in epistemology. Second, I give an exact characterization of the closure properties of knowledge according to these theories, as formalized. Finally, I consider the relation between closure and higher-order knowledge. The philosophical repercussions of these results and results from part II, which prompt a reassessment of the issue of closure in epistemology, are discussed further in companion papers. As a contribution to modal logic, this paper demonstrates an alternative approach to proving modal completeness theorems, without the standard canonical model construction. By “modal decomposition” I obtain completeness and other results for two non-normal modal logics with respect to new semantics. One of these logics, dubbed the logic of ranked relevant alternatives, appears not to have been previously identified in the modal logic literature. More broadly, the paper presents epistemology as a rich area for logical study. (shrink)

We give a theory of epistemic modals in the framework of possibility semantics and axiomatize the corresponding logic, arguing that it aptly characterizes the ways in which reasoning with epistemic modals does, and does not, diverge from classical modal logic.

According to the Principle of the Fixity of the Past (FP), no one can now do anything that would require the past to have unfolded differently than it actually did, for the past is fixed, over and done with. Why might doing something in the future require the past to be different? Because if determinism is true—if the laws of nature and the initial conditions of the Big Bang determined a unique future for our universe—then doing anything other than what (...) you are determined to do would require one of two things: either a miracle, a violation of the actual laws of nature, or a different past, all the way back to the Big Bang or beyond. Which would it be? Those who reject miracles accept a Backtracking Principle (BT), according to which the past would (have to) be different. If this is correct, then it follows by (FP) that you cannot now do anything other than what you are determined to do. The conclusion of this much-discussed argument is that the freedom to do otherwise is incompatible with determinism. In order to break a stalemate between incompatibilists and compatibilists in the debate over (FP), this article presents a new Action-Type Argument for (FP). The aim is to refute Backtracking Compatibilism, the view that (BT) is true and yet the freedom to do otherwise is compatible with determinism. The form of the Action-Type Argument for (FP) also leads to a Simple Argument for incompatibilism, which does not assume (BT). What the Simple Argument does assume is a “governing” view of laws of nature, a view of laws as more than mere regularities that turn out to be exceptionless over all time. Incompatibilism follows. (shrink)

The picture of information acquisition as the elimination of possibilities has proven fruitful in many domains, serving as a foundation for formal models in philosophy, linguistics, computer science, and economics. While the picture appears simple, its formalization in dynamic epistemic logic reveals subtleties: given a valid principle of information dynamics in the language of dynamic epistemic logic, substituting complex epistemic sentences for its atomic sentences may result in an invalid principle. In this article, we explore such failures of uniform substitution. (...) First, we give epistemic examples inspired by Moore, Fitch, and Williamson. Second, we answer affirmatively a question posed by van Benthem: can we effectively decide when every substitution instance of a given dynamic epistemic principle is valid? In technical terms, we prove the decidability of this schematic validity problem for public announcement logic (PAL and PAL-RC) over models for finitely many fully introspective agents, as well as models for infinitely many arbitrary agents. The proof of this result illuminates the reasons for the failure of uniform substitution. (shrink)

Methods in comparative work -- The sense of justice in Rawls -- The sense of justice in the analects -- Two senses of justice -- The contemporary relevance of a sense of justice.

Quantum systems have a holistic structure, which implies that they cannot be divided into parts. In order tocreate (sub)objects like individual substances, molecules, nuclei, etc., in a universal whole, the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen correlations between all the subentities, e.g. all the molecules in a substance, must be suppressed by perceptual and mental processes.Here the particular problems ofGestalt (shape)perception are compared with the attempts toattribute a shape to a quantum mechanical system like a molecule. Gestalt perception and quantum mechanics turn out (on an (...) informal level) to show similar features and problems: holistic aspects, creation of objects, dressing procedures, influence of the observer, classical quantities and structures. The attribute classical of a property or structure means thatholistic correlations to any other quantity do not exist or that these correlations are considered as irrelevant and therefore eliminated (either deliberately and by declaration or in a mental process that is not under rational control). An example of animposed classical structure is the nuclear frame of a molecule. Candidates for classical properties that arenot imposed by the observer could be the charge of a particle or the handedness of a molecule. It is argued here that at least part of a molecule's shape can begenerated automatically by the environment. A molecular shape of this sort arises in addition to Lamb shift-type energy corrections. (shrink)

Theorists of political obligation have long devoted special attention to civil disobedience, establishing its pride of place as an object of philosophical analysis, and as one of a short li...

What role does traditional ecological knowledge play in the lives of smallholder farmers in post-conflict communities as they cope with the destructive impacts of war? In many cases, military weapons, such as unexploded bombs, are left behind in the surrounding landscape, forcing farmers to adapt their livelihood practices to the increased risk of death and injury. We analyze trends in the local production of knowledge in Ratanak Kiri province, Cambodia, an area heavily bombarded by the US Air Force during the (...) Vietnam War. We argue that the system of traditional ecological knowledge has adapted to include basic information on bomb identification, location, and management strategies. This factual approach gives individuals the flexibility to generate their own views on whether they perceive unexploded ordnance as a violent hazard and/or an economic commodity. In a relatively short 50-year time period, the body of knowledge has been quickly accumulated and culturally transmitted to family and neighbors. Our findings suggest that traditional ecological knowledge should not be reduced to a static and ancient form of collective memory. We call for the expansion of the concept of traditional ecological knowledge to include short-term and dynamic processes of knowledge generation. (shrink)

Written by a diverse range of scholars, this accessible introductory volume asks: What is implicit bias? How does implicit bias compromise our knowledge of others and social reality? How does implicit bias affect us, as individuals and participants in larger social and political institutions, and what can we do to combat biases? An interdisciplinary enterprise, the volume brings together the philosophical perspective of the humanities with the perspective of the social sciences to develop rich lines of inquiry. It is written (...) in a non-technical style, using relatable examples that help readers understand what implicit bias is, its significance, and the controversies surrounding it. Each chapter includes discussion questions and additional reading suggestions. A companion webpage contains teaching resources. The volume will be an invaluable resource for students—and researchers—seeking to understand criticisms surrounding implicit bias, as well as how one might answer them by adopting a more nuanced understanding of bias and its role in maintaining social injustice. (shrink)

In this paper, we study three representations of lattices by means of a set with a binary relation of compatibility in the tradition of Ploščica. The standard representations of complete ortholattices and complete perfect Heyting algebras drop out as special cases of the first representation, while the second covers arbitrary complete lattices, as well as complete lattices equipped with a negation we call a protocomplementation. The third topological representation is a variant of that of Craig, Haviar, and Priestley. We then (...) extend each of the three representations to lattices with a multiplicative unary modality; the representing structures, like so-called graph-based frames, add a second relation of accessibility interacting with compatibility. The three representations generalize possibility semantics for classical modal logics to non-classical modal logics, motivated by a recent application of modal orthologic to natural language semantics. (shrink)

With _Relationscapes_, Erin Manning offers a new philosophy of movement challenging the idea that movement is simple displacement in space, knowable only in terms of the actual. Exploring the relation between sensation and thought through the prisms of dance, cinema, art, and new media, Manning argues for the intensity of movement. From this idea of intensity--the incipiency at the heart of movement--Manning develops the concept of preacceleration, which makes palpable how movement creates relational intervals out of which displacements take (...) form. Discussing her theory of incipient movement in terms of dance and relational movement, Manning describes choreographic practices that work to develop with a body in movement rather than simply stabilizing that body into patterns of displacement. She examines the movement-images of Leni Riefenstahl, Étienne-Jules Marey, and Norman McLaren, and explores the dot-paintings of contemporary Australian Aboriginal artists. Turning to language, Manning proposes a theory of prearticulation claiming that language's affective force depends on a concept of thought in motion. _Relationscapes_ takes a "Whiteheadian perspective," recognizing Whitehead's importance and his influence on process philosophers of the late twentieth century--Deleuze and Guattari in particular. It will be of special interest to scholars in new media, philosophy, dance studies, film theory, and art history. (shrink)

Faith in the power and righteousness of retribution has taken over the American criminal justice system. Approaching punishment and responsibility from a philosophical perspective, Limits of Blame takes issue with a criminal justice system that aligns legal criteria of guilt with moral criteria of blameworthiness. Many incarcerated people do not meet the criteria of blameworthiness, even when they are guilty of crimes. The author underscores the problems of exaggerating what criminal guilt indicates, particularly when it is tied to the illusion (...) that we know how long and in what ways criminals should suffer. Our practice of assigning blame has gone beyond a pragmatic need for protection and a moral need to repudiate harmful acts publicly. It represents a desire for retribution that normalizes excessive punishment. Kelly proposes that we abandon our culture of blame and aim at reducing serious crime rather than imposing retribution. Were we to refocus our perspective to fit the relevant moral circumstances and legal criteria, we could endorse a humane, appropriately limited, and more productive approach to criminal justice.--. (shrink)

We propose a new single-winner voting system using ranked ballots: Stable Voting. The motivating principle of Stable Voting is that if a candidate A would win without another candidate B in the election, and A beats B in a head-to-head majority comparison, then A should still win in the election with B included (unless there is another candidate A' who has the same kind of claim to winning, in which case a tiebreaker may choose between such candidates). We call this (...) principle Stability for Winners (with Tiebreaking). Stable Voting satisfies this principle while also having a remarkable ability to avoid tied outcomes in elections even with small numbers of voters. (shrink)

A well-known open problem in epistemic logic is to give a syntactic characterization of the successful formulas. Semantically, a formula is successful if and only if for any pointed model where it is true, it remains true after deleting all points where the formula was false. The classic example of a formula that is not successful in this sense is the “Moore sentence” p ∧ ¬BOXp, read as “p is true but you do not know p.” Not only is the (...) Moore sentence unsuccessful, it is self-refuting, for it never remains true as described. We show that in logics of knowledge and belief for a single agent (extended by S5), Moorean phenomena are the source of all self-refutation; moreover, in logics for an introspective agent (extending KD45), Moorean phenomena are the source of all unsuccessfulness as well. This is a distinctive feature of such logics, for with a non-introspective agent or multiple agents, non-Moorean unsuccessful formulas appear. We also consider how successful and self-refuting formulas relate to the Cartesian and learnable formulas, which have been discussed in connection with Fitch’s “paradox of knowability.” We show that the Cartesian formulas are exactly the formulas that are not eventually self-refuting and that not all learnable formulas are successful. In an appendix, we give syntactic characterizations of the successful and the self-refuting formulas. (shrink)

In his most recent book, Philip Pettit presents and defends a “republican” political philosophy that stems from a tradition that includes Cicero, Machiavelli, James Harrington, Locke, Montesquieu, Rousseau, and Madison. The book provides an interpretation of what is distinctive about republicanism—namely, Pettit claims, its notion of freedom as nondomination. He sketches the history of this notion, and he argues that it entails a unique justification of certain political arrangements and the virtues of citizenship that would make those arrangements possible. Of (...) historical and philosophical interest, he stresses, is the fundamental contrast between freedom as nondomination and slavery. Joseph Priestly, for instance, invoked this contrast in defending the cause of the American Revolution, and in 1769 declared, incredibly, that if the parliament of Great Britain continued to tax the American colonies, “the colonists will be reduced to a state of as complete servitude, as any people of which there is an account in history”. Those opposed to American independence, among them Jeremy Bentham, relied instead on a Hobbesian notion of freedom as noninterference, using it to argue that the colonists were no more interfered with by the British government than were citizens of Britain. Drawing out this contrast, Pettit aims to establish that a republican view of freedom better supports the institutions of a constitutional democracy than does liberalism. His account of the distinguishing characteristics and strengths of republicanism is, however, only partially successful. Neither his case that a republican notion of freedom provides for a more solid defense of democratic institutions and constitutional protections than is available within liberalism, nor his argument that republicanism can better address “private” injustices, is convincing. (shrink)

Following a proposal of Humberstone, this paper studies a semantics for modal logic based on partial “possibilities” rather than total “worlds.” There are a number of reasons, philosophical and mathematical, to find this alternative semantics attractive. Here we focus on the construction of possibility models with a finitary flavor. Our main completeness result shows that for a number of standard modal logics, we can build a canonical possibility model, wherein every logically consistent formula is satisfied, by simply taking each individual (...) finite formula (modulo equivalence) to be a possibility, rather than each infinite maximally consistent set of formulas as in the usual canonical world models. Constructing these locally finite canonical models involves solving a problem in general modal logic of independent interest, related to the study of adjoint pairs of modal operators: for a given modal logic L, can we find for every formula φ a formula f(φ) such that for every formula ψ, φ → []ψ is provable in L if and only if f(φ) → ψ is provable in L? We answer this question for a number of standard modal logics, using model-theoretic arguments with world semantics. This second main result allows us to build for each logic a canonical possibility model out of the lattice of formulas related by provable implication in the logic. (shrink)

The early literature on epistemic logic in philosophy focused on reasoning about the knowledge or belief of a single agent, especially on controversies about "introspection axioms" such as the 4 and 5 axioms. By contrast, the later literature on epistemic logic in computer science and game theory has focused on multi-agent epistemic reasoning, with the single-agent 4 and 5 axioms largely taken for granted. In the relevant multi-agent scenarios, it is often important to reason about what agent A believes about (...) what agent B believes about what agent A believes; but it is rarely important to reason just about what agent A believes about what agent A believes. This raises the question of the extent to which single-agent introspection axioms actually matter for multi-agent epistemic reasoning. In this paper, we formalize and answer this question. To formalize the question, we first define a set of multi-agent formulas that we call agent-alternating formulas, including formulas like Box_a Box_b Box_a p but not formulas like Box_a Box_a p. We then prove, for the case of belief, that if one starts with multi-agent K or KD, then adding both the 4 and 5 axioms (or adding the B axiom) does not allow the derivation of any new agent-alternating formulas—in this sense, introspection axioms do not matter. By contrast, we show that such conservativity results fail for knowledge and multi-agent KT, though they hold with respect to a smaller class of agent-nonrepeating formulas. (shrink)

In this note, I respond to comments by Paul Egré and Xu Zhaoqing on my “Epistemic Closure and Epistemic Logic I: Relevant Alternatives and Subjunctivism” (Journal of Philosophical Logic).