Education is so strongly emphasized in the Chinese culture that academic success is widely regarded as the only indicator of success, while too much physical activity is often discouraged because it drains energy and affects academic concentration. This study investigated the relations among academic achievement, self?esteem, school conduct and physical activity level. The participants were 333 Chinese pre?adolescents (aged 8?12) in Hong Kong. Examination results and conduct grades were obtained from the school records. Global self?esteem was measured with the Physical (...) self?description questionnaire (PSDQ), while physical activity patterns of the children were assessed with the Physical activity questionnaire for children (PAQ?C). Results showed that high academic achievers consistently attained better school conduct marks. However, physical activity level was quite an independent entity that was related neither to academic achievement nor school conduct. Furthermore, regression analyses showed that only academically high?achieving boys and physically active boys had higher self?esteem. (shrink)

A short intellectual biography of Kit Fine, provided by himself.

It is argued that there are three main forms of necessity --the metaphysical, the natural and the normative--and that none of them is reducible to the others or to any other form of necessity. In arguing for a distinctive form of natural necessity, it is necessary to refute a version of the doctrine of scientific essentialism; and in arguing for a distinctive form of normative necessity, it is necessary to refute certain traditional and contemporary versions of ethical naturalism.

Our aim in this paper is to extend the semantics for the kind of logic of ground developed in (deRosset and Fine, 2023). In that paper, we very briefly suggested a way of treating universal and existential quantification over a fixed domain of objects. Here we explore some options for extending the treatment to allow for a variable domain of objects.

This paper is concerned with the semantics for the logics of ground that derive from a slight variant GG of the logic of (Fine, 2012) that have already been developed in (deRosset and Fine, 2023). Our aim is to outline that semantics and to provide a comparison with two related semantics for ground, given in (Correia, 2017) and (Kraemer, 2018). This comparison highlights the strengths and difficulties of these different approaches.

Kit Fine; XIV*—Ontological Dependence, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 95, Issue 1, 1 June 1995, Pages 269–290, https://doi.org/10.1093/aristote.

This chapter explains the basic framework of truthmaker or 'exact' semantics, an approach to semantics that has recently received a growing amount of interest, and discusses a number of different applications within philosophy and linguistics. The idea of truthmaking is the idea of something on the side of the world ‐ a fact, perhaps, or a state of affairs ‐ verifying, or making true, something on the side of language or thought ‐ a statement, perhaps, or a proposition. The chapter (...) focuses on the ultimate truthmakers, on what in the world ultimately makes something true, and the question of how the truthmakers make the statements of our language true is of no great concern. It also focuses on the immediate truthmakers, and the question of how they make the statements of the language true will be of greatest concern. (shrink)

Introducing a new and ambitious position in the field, Kit Fine’s _Semantic Relationism_ is a major contribution to the philosophy of language. Written by one of today’s most respected philosophers Argues for a fundamentally new approach to the study of representation in language and thought Proposes that there may be representational relationships between expressions or elements of thought that are not grounded in the intrinsic representational features of the expressions or elements themselves Forms part of the prestigious new _Blackwell/Brown Lectures (...) in Philosophy_ series, based on an ongoing series of lectures by today’s leading philosophers. (shrink)

A number of philosophers have recently become receptive to the idea that, in addition to scientific or causal explanation, there may be a distinctive kind of metaphysical explanation, in which explanans and explanandum are connected, not through some sort of causal mechanism, but through some constitutive form of determination. I myself have long been sympathetic to this idea of constitutive determination or ‘ontological ground’; and it is the aim of the present paper to help put the idea on a firmer (...) footing - to explain how it is to be understood, how it relates to other ideas, and how it might be of use in philosophy. (shrink)

This paper distinguishes two kinds of realist issue -- the issue of whether the propositions of a given domain are factual and the issue of whether they are fundamental. It criticizes previous accounts of what these issues come to and suggests that they are to be understood in terms of a basic metaphysical concept of reality. This leaves open the question of how such issues are to be resolved; and it is argued that this may be done through consideration of (...) what grounds the facts of a given domain, when fundamentality is in question, and what grounds our engagement with the putative facts, when factuality is in question. (shrink)

This paper deals with the truth-Conditions and the logic for vague languages. The use of supervaluations and of classical logic is defended; and other approaches are criticized. The truth-Conditions are extended to a language that contains a definitely-Operator and that is subject to higher order vagueness.

I provide a truthmaker semantics for Angell’s system of analytic implication and establish completeness.

“Mathematical objects are not exactly of our own making, but we actually have to do something to get them. There’s something out there which we prod, but there’s the prodding that’s also required. Numbers are not exactly out there or in us, but somehow in between.”.

This book is collection of the the author’s previously published papers on the philosophy of modality and tense and it also includes three unpublished papers. The author provides an exposition and defence of certain positions for which he is well-known: the intelligibility of modality de re; the primitiveness of the modal; and the primacy of the actual over the possible. He also argues for some less familiar positions: the existence of distinctive forms of natural and normative necessity, not reducible to (...) any form of metaphysical necessity; the need to make a distinction between the worldly and unworldly, analogous to the distinction between the tensed and the tenseless; and the viability of a nonstandard form of realism about tense, which recognizes the tensed character of reality without conceding there is any privileged standpoint from which it is to be viewed. (shrink)

As behavioural economics reveals, human decision-making deviates from neoclassical assumptions about human behaviour and people (often) fail to make the ‘right’ welfare-enhancing choice. The purpose of Sunstein and Thaler’s concept of ‘nudge’ is to improve individual welfare. To provide normative justification, they argue that the only relevant normative criterion is whether the individual is ‘better off as judged by themselves’, so that the direction in which people are to be nudged is defined by their own preferences. In light of behavioural (...) findings, however, people’s choices do not provide a sound basis for eliciting preferences and thus for assessing welfare. In this paper, I aim to challenge Sunstein and Thaler’s normative view, arguing that it is unreasonable to rely on conventional welfare economics, particularly considering the given context. Sunstein and Thaler depend on an approach of ‘preference purification’ which assumes informed, latent, and true preferences: As a result they face crucial methodological, epistemological, and practical objections, and cannot show how their approach enhances individual welfare. By building on the concepts of R. Sugden and C. Schubert, I develop an alternative normative framework for behavioural public policy, based on a contractualist perspective in which people may consent to collective choice rules in order to align future behaviour with values, to achieve particular goals or to preserve personal integrity. Individual consent and citizens’ participation and deliberation are crucial to this approach. This contractualist approach may provide a normative justification for behavioural public policy, and help to reconcile behavioural and normative economics. (shrink)

Kit Pedler, the scientist who co-created the ?DoomwatchOCO television series to warn us of the dangers of technology, presents his vision of a totally different way of being in the world. Mankind, Pedler believes, stands at a critical point in history and has to reassess its relationship and the web of interactions that make up the total life-form of the planet. Pedler calls this life-form Gaia, after the Greek earth mother goddess, a being whose sole concern is the survival of (...) the planet itself. Mankind is provoking the wrath of the life-form by its high technology, accelerating entropy and production of planetary disorder. Can we halt the technological Behemoth and live in harmony with the planet again? Kit Pedler says ?yes, we can, indeed, that we have no choice but to do soOCO. He outlines highly practical ways every individual can change his or her way of life to reduce our personal entropy debt. Do we need to eat factory-farm beef rather than, the sun-product, grain? Must be build homes from steel and concrete rather than, the renewable earth-product, timber? Is there an alternative to expensive, and ecologically destructive, drugs? From experiments with his own lifestyle Kit Pedler comes to some profoundly optimistic conclusions. He demonstrates how low-entropy living can have unexpected rewards, from restoring our respect for the creatures with which we share the earth, greater independence and freedom through learning abandoned skills and, above all, by the recovery of a lost vision, once possessed by our forefathers, which enables us to see and feel in ways forgotten by industrial man. The Quest for Gaia is an exhilarating and optimistic book, and a challenge to capture a rewarding and sustainable future for ourselves and our earth. It is a blueprint for the Age of Gaia.". (shrink)

This article addresses a still unsolved puzzle in private law regarding the proper explanation of cases in which courts make substantial awards of damages to claimants whose rights have been infringed, but who appear to have suffered no factual loss in consequence of the infringement. The paradigm examples tend to involve awards of ‘user’, license fee or ‘hypothetical bargain’ damages in cases involving interference with property rights. It suggests that existing explanations of such cases are all unsatisfactory in one or (...) another respect and posits a new and potentially more powerful explanatory thesis, drawing on Hohfeld. Such awards, it argues, compensate right-holders for the loss of legal powers associated with their primary claim-rights—in particular, the loss of powers they are accorded by the law to ‘prevent’ the infringement of certain types of primary claim right ex ante. Legal powers are thus to be regarded as assets or amenities, the loss of which is amenable to monetary compensation. (shrink)

I propose a new semantics for intuitionistic logic, which is a cross between the construction-oriented semantics of Brouwer-Heyting-Kolmogorov and the condition-oriented semantics of Kripke. The new semantics shows how there might be a common semantical underpinning for intuitionistic and classical logic and how intuitionistic logic might thereby be tied to a realist conception of the relationship between language and the world.

In this article, we analyzed the effect of various factors on moral judgment and ethical attitudes of working persons. It was found that the effect of various socio-demographic factors on ethical attitudes varied between the two different categories of ethical issues under study, issues which involve explicit violation of laws vis-à-vis issues which involved social concerns. Our results did not support the implication of Callahan’s hypothesis that males are more sensitive to rule-based ethical issues while women are to issues involving (...) social concerns; it was found that females have a lower acceptability of unethical behaviors related to both categories of issues in Hong Kong, whereas gender effect was not statistically significant in Mainland China. University education also had no significant effect on ethical attitudes. Religion played an important role in affecting ethical attitudes, however, its effect varied with different types of religions; Christianity was found to be most favorable to higher ethical standards, but people of traditional Chinese religion had a higher acceptability of unethical behaviors involving social concerns compared to people with no religion. Our finding also indicated that employees in state-owned enterprises, private employees, employees in foreign-investment firms, and employers in Mainland China all had a higher acceptability of unethical law-breaking behaviors compared to workers in collectives, throwing doubt on the validity of convergence theory in Mainland China. (shrink)

I discuss Yablo’s approach to truthmaker semantics and compare it with my own, with special focus on the idea of a proposition being true of or being restricted to some subject-matter, the idea of propositional containment, and the development of an ‘incremental’ semantics for the conditional. I conclude with some remarks on the relationship between truth-maker approach and the standard possible worlds approach to semantics.

It is my aim in this paper to show that the contemporary assimilation of essence to modality is fundamentally misguided and that, as a consequence, the corresponding conception of metaphysics should be given up. It is not my view that the modal account fails to capture anything which might reasonably be called a concept of essence. My point, rather, is that the notion of essence which is of central importance to the metaphysics of identity is not to be understood in (...) modal terms or even to be regarded as extensionally equivalent to a modal notion. The one notion is, if I am right, a highly refined version of the other; it is like a sieve which performs a similar function but with a much finer mesh. (shrink)

What happens once the rogue rides off into the sunset? This cross-genre essay considers the figure of the rogue’s decline and gradual dismemberment in the face of the pressures of the world. Beginning with the “rogue” digits and other body parts lost by the men who surrounded him in his youth—especially his grandfather—Dobson considers the costs of labour and poverty in rural environments. For him, the rogue is one who falls somehow outside of cultural, social, and political norms—the one who (...) has decided to step outside of the establishment, outside of the corrupt élites and their highfalutin ways. To do so comes at a cost. Turning to the life of writer George Ryga and to the poetry and fiction of Patrick Lane, this essay examines the real, physical, material, and social costs of transgression across multiple works linked to rural environments in Alberta and British Columbia. The essay shows the ways in which very real forms of violence discipline the rogue, pushing the rogue back into submission or out of mind, back into the shadowy past from whence the rogue first came. Resisting nostalgia while evincing sympathy, this essay delves into what is at stake for one who would become a rogue. (shrink)

Kit Fine develops a Fregean theory of abstraction, and suggests that it may yield a new philosophical foundation for mathematics, one that can account for both our reference to various mathematical objects and our knowledge of various mathematical truths. The Limits ofion breaks new ground both technically and philosophically.

Confucian ethics as applied to the study of business ethics often relate to the micro consideration of personal ethics and the character of a virtuous person. Actually, Confucius and his school have much to say about the morals of the public administration and the market institutions in a more macro level. While Weber emphasizes the role of culture on the development of the economy, and Marx the determining influence of the material base on ideology, we see an interaction between culture (...) – specifically Confucian business ethics – and the economy. In this paper, we are going to study this interaction in several crucial stages of development of Confucianism. The paper concludes by postulating the relevance of Confucian business ethics to the global knowledge economy. (shrink)

The theory of embodiment is used in providing an account of the identity of acts and in providing solutions to various puzzles concerning acts.

An exact truthmaker for A is a state which, as well as guaranteeing A’s truth, is wholly relevant to it. States with parts irrelevant to whether A is true do not count as exact truthmakers for A. Giving semantics in this way produces a very unusual consequence relation, on which conjunctions do not entail their conjuncts. This feature makes the resulting logic highly unusual. In this paper, we set out formal semantics for exact truthmaking and characterise the resulting notion of (...) entailment, showing that it is compact and decidable. We then investigate the effect of various restrictions on the semantics. We also formulate a sequent-style proof system for exact entailment and give soundness and completeness results. (shrink)