The idea that our conscious decisions determine our actions has been challenged by a report suggesting that the brain starts to prepare for a movement before the person concerned has consciously decided to move . Libet et al. claimed that their results show that our actions are not consciously initiated. The current article describes two experiments in which we attempted to replicate Libet et al.'s comparison of participants' movement-related brain activity with the reported times of their decisions to move and (...) also the reported times of their decisions of which hand to move. We also looked at the distribution of participants' reports over time to evaluate an alternative explanation of Libet et al.'s results. Although the Readiness Potential was usually present before all of the decisions to move, consistent with the findings of Keller and Heckhausen and Libet et al. , we found that many reported decision times were before the onset of the Lateralized Readiness Potential, which measures hand-specific movement preparation. The latter finding is consistent with the conclusion that the LRP always started after the conscious decision to move. We conclude that even though activity related to movement anticipation may be present before a conscious decision to move, the cortical preparation necessary for the movement to happen immediately may not start until after the conscious decision to move. (shrink)

We consider two formalizations of the notion of irrelevance as a rationality principle within the framework of (Carnapian) Inductive Logic: Johnson's Sufficientness Principle, JSP, which is classically important because it leads to Carnap's influential Continuum of Inductive Methods and the recently proposed Weak Irrelevance Principle, WIP. We give a complete characterization of the language invariant probability functions satisfying WIP which generalizes the Nix-Paris Continuum. We argue that the derivation of two very disparate families of inductive methods from alternative perceptions of (...) 'irrelevance' is an indication that this notion is imperfectly understood at present. (shrink)

The logical consequence relations η▹η provide a very attractive way of inferring new facts from inconsistent knowledge bases without compromising standards of credibility. In this short note we provide proof theories and completeness theorems for these consequence relations which may have some applicability in small examples.

This paper argues that certain central tenets of the traditional theory of the just war cannot be correct. It then advances an alternative account grounded in the same considerations of justice that govern self-defense at the individual level. The implications of this account are unorthodox. It implies that, with few exceptions, combatants who fight for an unjust cause act impermissibly when they attack enemy combatants, and that combatants who fight in a just war may, in certain circumstances, legitimately target noncombatants (...) who bear a significant degree of moral responsibility for a wrong, when the prevention or rectification of that wrong constitutes a just cause for war. (shrink)

Psychologism in logic is the doctrine that the semantic content of logical terms is in some way a feature of human psychology. We consider the historically influential version of the doctrine, Psychological Individualism, and the many counter-arguments to it. We then propose and assess various modifications to the doctrine that might allow it to avoid the classical objections. We call these Psychological Descriptivism, Teleological Cognitive Architecture, and Ideal Cognizers. These characterizations give some order to the wide range of modern views (...) that are seen as psychologistic because of one or another feature. Although these can avoid some of the classic objections to psychologism, some still hold. (shrink)

It is sometimes suggested that if a moral theory implies that infanticide can sometimes be permissible, that is sufficient to discredit the theory. I argue in this article that the common-sense belief that infanticide is wrong, and perhaps even worse than the killing of an adult, is challenged not so much by theoretical considerations as by common-sense beliefs about abortion, the killing of non-human animals, and so on. Because there are no intrinsic differences between premature infants and viable fetuses, it (...) is difficult to accept that an abortion performed after the point of viability can be permissible while denying that infanticide can be permissible for a comparably important reason. This and other challenges to the consistency of our intuitions exert pressure on us either to accept the occasional permissibility of infanticide or to reject liberal beliefs about abortion. (shrink)

J. E. Malpas discusses and develops the ideas of Donald Davidson, influential in contemporary thinking on the nature of understanding and meaning, and of truth and knowledge. He provides an account of Davidson's holistic and hermeneutical conception of linguistic interpretation, and, more generally, of the mind. Outlining its Quinean origins and the elements basic to Davidson's Radical Interpretation, J. E. Malpas' book goes on to elaborate this holism and to examine the indeterminacy of interpretation and the principle of charity. The (...) metaphysical and epistemological consequences of Davidson's approach are considered, particularly in relation to scepticism and relativism, the realist/anti-realist debate, and the problem of truth. Parallels are drawn between the Davidsonian emphasis on the centrality of the notion of truth and Heidegger's notion of truth as aletheia, as the book looks to structuralist, hermeneutical and phenomenological sources to illuminate Davidson's position. (shrink)

This essay explores problems of consistency among commonsense beliefs about the comparative moral status of animals, fetuses, and human beings congenitally endowed with cognitive capacities and potential no higher than those of higher animals. The possibility of genetic cognitive enhancement exacerbates some of these problems, but also offers new resources for understanding the basis of our moral status as inviolable.

This chapter is concerned with the necessity constraint on defensive harming. It first considers whether a defensive option that would cause more harm than some other equally effective option is ruled out as causing unnecessary harm. The chapter argues that it is not. It defends the view, nonetheless, that there is a sense of “necessary” and a sense of “proportionate” such that defensive liability is itself limited to necessary and proportionate harm. The remainder of the chapter defends the view that (...) necessity, effectiveness, and proportionality are all “internal” to liability—that is, that one cannot be liable to suffer harm that is unnecessary ineffective or disproportionate. (shrink)

The main objection to human embryonic stem cell research is that it involves killing human embryos, which are essentially beings of the same sort that you and I are. This objection presupposes that we once existed as early embryos and that we had the same moral status then that we have now. This essay challenges both those presuppositions, but focuses primarily on the first. I argue first that these presuppositions are incompatible with widely accepted beliefs about both assisted conception and (...) monozygotic twinning. I then argue that we never existed as embryos. If this last claim is right, killing an embryo does not kill someone like you or me but merely prevents one of us from existing. (shrink)

In the course of commenting on the third chapter of Frances Kamm’s Ethics for Enemies, this article proposes an analysis of the notion of a just cause for war, according to which there is a just cause only when those whom it is necessary to attack as a means of achieving some aim are potentially morally liable to be attacked. The remainder of the article then discusses issues of proportionality, particularly in relation to several distinct forms of moral justification for (...) harming or killing people. Among the central questions addressed is what the conditions are in which good effects of a war that are independent of the achievement of the just cause may count in determining whether the war would be proportionate. (shrink)

However much one may wish for nonviolent solutions to the problems of unjust and unrestrained human violence that Glover explores in Humanity, some of those problems at present require violent responses. One cannot read his account of the Clinton administration’s campaign to sabotage efforts to stop the massacre in Rwanda in 1994 – a campaign motivated by fear that American involvement would cost American lives and therefore votes – without concluding that Glover himself believes that military intervention was morally required (...) in that case. Military intervention in another state that is intended to stop one group within that state from brutally persecuting or violating the human rights of members of another group is now known as “humanitarian intervention.” Those against whom the intervention is directed are almost always the government and its supporters, though this is not a necessary feature of humanitarian intervention. It is, however, a conceptual condition of humanitarian intervention that it does not occur at the request or with the consent of the government. The use of force within another state with the consent of the government counts as assistance rather than intervention. The principal reason that humanitarian intervention is contentious is that it seems to violate the target state’s sovereign right to control its own domestic affairs. Because humanitarian intervention is a response to human rights violations within the target state, it is regarded as altogether different from wars of defense against aggression. Indeed, since aggression is normally understood to be war against a state that.. (shrink)

Many people who believe that abortion may often be justified by appeal to the pregnant woman’s interests also believe that a woman’s infliction of significant but nonlethal injury on her fetus can seldom be justified by appeal to her interests. Yet the second of these beliefs can seem to cast doubt on the first. For the view that the infliction of prenatal injury is seriously morally objectionable may seem to presuppose a view about the status of the fetus that challenges (...) the permissibility of abortion. The fear of being interpreted as implicitly endorsing such a view has thus led some defenders of abortion to be reluctant for tactical reasons to condemn the infliction of prenatal injury. In this they are encouraged by those who exploit the issue of prenatal injury in their campaign against abortion. When, for example, the House and Senate in 2004 passed legislation recognizing two victims of an assault against a pregnant woman, many viewed this as a tactic in a larger strategy to restrict access to abortion. This tactic is potentially effective. For people may find it compelling to infer that, if injuring a fetus is seriously objectionable, abortion must be even more objectionable, since killing is normally more seriously objectionable than merely injuring. (shrink)

Bering's analysis is inadequate because it fails to consider past and present adult soul beliefs and the psychological functions they serve. We suggest that a valid folk psychology of souls must consider features of adult soul beliefs, the unique problem engendered by awareness of death, and terror management findings, in addition to cognitive inclinations toward dualistic and teleological thinking.

A connection between things and properties is required to hold things and properties together. Exemplification is such a connection. Exemplification is usually considered primitive, and therefore analysis of exemplification is nearly absent from the literature. I maintain that exemplification might not be primitive; and in giving a description of exemplification, I point out a new problem having to do with the issue of how things are tied to properties.

This paper sets out an account of hermeneutics as essentially ‘topological’ in character at the same time as it also argues that hermeneutics has a key role to play in making clear the nature of the topological. At the centre of the argument is the idea that place and understanding are intimately connected, that this is what determines the interconnection between topology and hermeneutics, and that this also implies an intimate belonging-together of place and thinking, of place and experience, of (...) place and the very possibility of appearance, of presence, of being. (shrink)

Some of the questions Professor Miller addresses are concerned with proportionality, a notion whose complexities are only beginning to be appreciated. My modest ambition in this comment is to try to sharpen these questions and provide some assistance in thinking about them.

Four experiments examined how accurately participants can report the times of their own decisions. Within an auditory reaction time task, participants reported the time at which the tone was presented, they decided on the response, or the response key was pressed. Decision time reports were checked for plausibility against the actual RTs, and we compared the effects of experimental manipulations on these two measures to see whether the reported decision times showed appropriate effects. In addition, we estimated the amount of (...) error associated with individual decision time reports by checking how often participants’ decision time reports were implausibly early or late , and by using several quantitative models. Overall, the results suggest that decision time reports are not very accurate but they may be usable for some purposes. (shrink)

Embodied approaches to cognition see abstract thought and language as grounded in interactions between mind, body, and world. A particularly important challenge for embodied approaches to cognition is mathematics, perhaps the most abstract domain of human knowledge. Conceptual metaphor theory, a branch of cognitive linguistics, describes how abstract mathematical concepts are grounded in concrete physical representations. In this paper, we consider the implications of this research for the metaphysics and epistemology of mathematics. In the case of metaphysics, we argue that (...) embodied mathematics is neutral in the sense of being compatible with all existing accounts of what mathematical entities really are. However, embodied mathematics may be able to revive an older position known as psychologism and overcome the difficulties it faces. In the case of epistemology, we argue that the evidence collected in the embodied mathematics literature is inconclusive: It does not show that abstract mathematical thinking is constituted by metaphor; it may simply show that abstract thinking is facilitated by metaphor. Our arguments suggest that closer interaction between the philosophy and cognitive science of mathematics could yield a more precise, empirically informed account of what mathematics is and how we come to have knowledge of it. (shrink)

Without complete and accurate status information, a project manager’s ability to monitor progress, allocate resources effectively, and detect and respond to problems is greatly diminished, and this can lead to impaired project performance. Many different factors can contribute to intentional misreporting of status information by project members to the project manager. In this study, the impact of organizational ethical climate was assessed through the analysis of responses from 228 project members drawn from a variety of ongoing information systems projects. Our (...) results revealed that project members who perceived their organization to be one in which rules are followed strictly tended to misreport less, while those operating in an environment dominated by personal self-interest tended to misreport more. Somewhat surprisingly, the existence of a caring, team-spirited environment did not appear to have an impact on misreporting behaviors. Implications for researchers and project managers are discussed. (shrink)

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Philosophical Books 46, no. 1 (2005): 1-3.

Recent philosophy has seen the idea of the transcendental, first introduced in its modern form in the work of Kant, take on a new prominence. Bringing together an international range of younger philosophers and established thinkers, this volume opens up the idea of the transcendental, examining it not merely as a mode of argument, but as naming a particular problematic and a philosophical style. With contributions engaging with both analytic and continental approaches, this book will be of essential interest to (...) philosophers and philosophy students interested in the idea of the transcendental and the part that it plays in modern and contemporary philosophy. (shrink)

This book, originally published in 1989 discusses an issue central to all philosophical argument – the relation between persuasion and truth. The techniques of persuasion are indirect and not always fully transparent. Whether philosophers and theoreticians are for or against the use of rhetoric, they engage in rhetorical practice none the less. Focusing on Plato, Descartes, Kant, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche and Wittgenstein, this book uncovers philosophical rhetoric at work and reminds us of the rhetorical arena in which philosophical writings are produced (...) and considered. (shrink)

Walter Sinnott-Armstrong and Franklin Miller have presented an account of why killing is wrong that implies it can be permissible to kill certain human beings in order to use their organs for transplantation.1 Since I am going to criticise their arguments, I will begin by applauding their willingness to defend an unpopular position and by registering my agreement with their substantive conclusion about organ procurement. The criticisms I will offer are intended to be friendly in spirit; but they are also, (...) of course, meant to be effective.Sinnott-Armstrong and Miller argue that the wrongness of killing is reducible to the wrongness of disabling, in particular, the wrongness of totally disabling. ‘The rule against disabling,’ they write, ‘fully explains all that is bad and wrong with… killing.’1One might think that their view is just a slight modification of the familiar view that the wrongness of killing is reducible to the wrongness of harming. According to this view, killing is normally gravely wrong because it inflicts on its victim a particularly grievous harm by depriving him of all the good that his future life would otherwise have contained. If the authors' view were just a restatement of this harm-based account of the wrongness of killing, one might conclude that their emphasis on disability is needlessly provocative. But in fact their view is quite different. This is because disabling is only one form of harming. On might seriously harm a person—for example, by causing him to experience mild chronic pain for the remainder of his life—without in any way disabling him. He would retain all his abilities but would be less comfortable while exercising them. Because there are thus forms of harming that are not instances of disabling, a rule …. (shrink)