Moritz Schulz explores counterfactual thought and language: what would have happened if things had gone a different way. Counterfactual questions may concern large scale derivations or small scale evaluations of minor derivations. A common impression, which receives a thorough defence in the book, is that oftentimes we find it impossible to know what would have happened. However, this does not mean that we are completely at a loss: we are typically capable of evaluating counterfactual questions probabilistically: we can say (...) what would have been likely or unlikely to happen. Schulz describes these probabilistic ways of evaluating counterfactual questions and turns the data into a novel account of the workings of counterfactual thought. (shrink)

Most epistemologists hold that knowledge entails belief. However, proponents of this claim rarely offer a positive argument in support of it. Rather, they tend to treat the view as obvious and assert that there are no convincing counterexamples. We find this strategy to be problematic. We do not find the standard view obvious, and moreover, we think there are cases in which it is intuitively plausible that a subject knows some proposition P without—or at least without determinately—believing that P. Accordingly, (...) we present five plausible examples of knowledge without (determinate) belief, and we present empirical evidence suggesting that our intuitions about these scenarios are not atypical. (shrink)

In this paper an approach to the exhaustive interpretation of answers is developed. It builds on a proposal brought forward by Groenendijk and Stokhof (1984). We will use the close connection between their approach and McCarthy's (1980, 1986) predicate circumscription and describe exhaustive interpretation as an instance of interpretation in minimal models, well-known from work on counterfactuals (see for instance Lewis (1973)). It is shown that by combining this approach with independent developments in semantics/pragmatics one can overcome certain limitations of (...) Groenenedijk and Stokhof's (1984) proposal. In the last part of the paper we will provide a Gricean motivation for exhaustive interpretation building on work of Schulz (to appear) and van Rooij and Schulz (2004). (shrink)

Many philosophers appeal to intuitions to support some philosophical views. However, there is reason to be concerned about this practice as scientific evidence has documented systematic bias in philosophically relevant intuitions as a function of seemingly irrelevant features (e.g., personality). One popular defense used to insulate philosophers from these concerns holds that philosophical expertise eliminates the influence of these extraneous factors. Here, we test this assumption. We present data suggesting that verifiable philosophical expertise in the free will debate-as measured by (...) a reliable and validated test of expert knowledge-does not eliminate the influence of one important extraneous feature (i.e., the heritable personality trait extraversion) on judgments concerning freedom and moral responsibility. These results suggest that, in at least some important cases, the expertise defense fails. Implications for the practice of philosophy, experimental philosophy, and applied ethics are discussed. (shrink)

We propose that children employ specialized cognitive systems that allow them to recover an accurate “causal map” of the world: an abstract, coherent, learned representation of the causal relations among events. This kind of knowledge can be perspicuously understood in terms of the formalism of directed graphical causal models, or “Bayes nets”. Children’s causal learning and inference may involve computations similar to those for learning causal Bayes nets and for predicting with them. Experimental results suggest that 2- to 4-year-old children (...) construct new causal maps and that their learning is consistent with the Bayes net formalism. (shrink)

Recently, Yalcin (Epistemic modals. Mind, 116 , 983–1026, 2007) put forward a novel account of epistemic modals. It is based on the observation that sentences of the form ‘ & Might ’ do not embed under ‘suppose’ and ‘if’. Yalcin concludes that such sentences must be contradictory and develops a notion of informational consequence which validates this idea. I will show that informational consequence is inadequate as an account of the logic of epistemic modals: it cannot deal with reasoning from (...) uncertain premises. Finally, I offer an alternative way of explaining the relevant linguistic data. (shrink)

This book is the first systematic treatment of the philosophy of science underlying evolutionary economics. It does not advocate an evolutionary approach towards economics, but rather assesses the epistemic value of appealing to evolutionary biology in economics more generally. The author divides work in evolutionary economics into three distinct, albeit related, forms: a structural form, an evidential form, and a heuristic form. He then analyzes five examples of work in evolutionary economics falling under these three forms. For the structural form, (...) he examines the parallelism between natural selection and economic decision making, and the parallelism between natural selection and market competition. For the evidential form, he looks at the relationship between animal and human economic decision making, and the evolutionary explanation of diversity in human economic decision making. Finally, for the heuristic form, he focuses on the plausibility of equilibrium modeling in evolutionary ecology and economics. In this way, he shows that linking evolutionary biology and economics can make for a powerful methodological tool that can enable progress in our understanding of various economics questions. Structure, Evidence, and Heuristic will be of interest to scholars and advanced students working in philosophy of science, philosophy of social science, evolutionary biology, and economics. (shrink)

The pressures that led to the evolution of episodic memory have recently seen much discussion, but a fully satisfactory account of them is still lacking. We seek to make progress in this debate by taking a step backward, identifying four possible ways that episodic memory could evolve in relation to simulationist future planning—a similar and seemingly related ability. After distinguishing each of these possibilities, the paper critically discusses existing accounts of the evolution of episodic memory. It then presents a novel (...) argument in favor of the view that episodic memory is a by-product of the evolution of simulationist future planning. The paper ends by showing that this position allows for the maintenance of the traditional view that episodic memory operates on stored memory traces, as well as explaining a number of key features of episodic memory: its being subject to frequent and systematic errors, its neural co-location with the capacity for simulationist future planning, and the potential existence of non-human episodic memory. (shrink)

In their book Unto Others, Sober and Wilson argue that various evolutionary considerations (based on the logic of natural selection) lend support to the truth of psychological altruism. However, recently, Stephen Stich has raised a number of challenges to their reasoning: in particular, he claims that three out of the four evolutionary arguments they give are internally unconvincing, and that the one that is initially plausible fails to take into account recent findings from cognitive science and thus leaves open a (...) number of egoistic responses. These challenges make it necessary to reassess the plausibility of Sober & Wilson’s evolutionary account—which is what I aim to do in this paper. In particular, I try to show that, as a matter of fact, Sober & Wilson’s case remains compelling, as some of Stich’s concerns rest on a confusion, and those that do not are not sufficiently strong to establish all the conclusions he is after. The upshot is that no reason has been given to abandon the view that evolutionary theory has advanced the debate surrounding psychological altruism. (shrink)

Humans are standouts in their propensity to trade. More specially, the kind of trading found in humans—featuring the exchange of many different goods and services with many different others, for the mutual benefit of all the involved parties—far exceeds anything that is found in any other creature. However, a number of important questions about this propensity remain open. First, it is not clear exactly what makes this propensity so different in the human case from that of other animals. Second, it (...) is not clear why other animals did not acquire this propensity to the extent that humans did. Third, it is not clear what explains the fact that the extent to which humans engage in trade is culturally highly variable. The paper argues that at the heart of the human-animal divergence in this propensity is the particular socio-cultural environment in which humans evolved. This has led them to sometimes, but not always, acquire the cognitive technology (writing, algebra, tallying devices, money, etc.) to support a sophisticated disposition and capacity for reciprocal cooperation, and deep and wide concepts of property and exchange value. (shrink)

Finding out why we have beliefs and desires is important for a thorough understanding of the nature of our minds (and those of other animals). It is therefore unsurprising that several accounts have been presented that are meant to answer this question. At least in the philosophical literature, the most widely accepted of these are due to Kim Sterelny and Peter Godfrey-Smith, who argue that beliefs and desires evolved due to their enabling us to be behaviourally flexible in a way (...) that reflexes do not—which, they claim, is beneficial in epistemically complex environments. However, as I try to make clear in this paper, upon closer consideration, this kind of account turns out to be theoretically implausible. In the main, this is because it fails to give due credit to the powers of reflex-driven organisms, which can in fact be just as flexible in their behaviour as ones that are belief/desire-driven. In order to improve on this account, I therefore propose that beliefs and desires evolved, not due to their enabling us to do something completely different from what reflexive organisms can do, but rather due to their enabling us to do the same things better. Specifically, I argue that beliefs and desires evolved for making the generation of behaviour more efficient, since they can simplify the necessary cognitive labour considerably. I end by considering various implications of this account. (shrink)

Background: SNOMED CT is a large terminology system designed to represent all aspects of healthcare. Its current form and content result from decades of bottom-up evolution. Due to SNOMED CT’s formal descriptions, it can be considered an ontology. The Basic Formal Ontology (BFO) is a foundational ontology that proposes a small set of disjoint, hierarchically ordered classes, supported by relations and axioms. In contrast, as a typical top-down endeavor, BFO was designed as a foundational framework for domain ontologies in the (...) natural sciences and related disciplines. Whereas it is mostly assumed that domain ontologies should be created as extensions of foundational ontologies, a post-hoc harmonization of consolidated domain ontologies in use, such as SNOMED CT, is known to be challenging. Methods: We explored the feasibility of harmonizing SNOMED CT with BFO, with a focus on the SNOMED CT Clinical Finding hierarchy. With more than 100,000 classes, it accounts for about one third of SNOMED CT’s content. In particular, we represented typical SNOMED CT finding/disorder concepts using description logics under BFO. Three representational patterns were created and the logical entailments analyzed. Results: Under a first scrutiny, the clinical intuition that diseases, disorders, signs and symptoms form a homogeneous ontological upper-level class appeared incompatible with BFO’s upper-level distinction into continuants and occurrents. The Clinical finding class seemed to be an umbrella for all kinds of entities of clinical interest, such as material entities, processes, states, dispositions, and qualities. This suggests the conclusion that Clinical finding would not be a suitable upper-level class from an BFO perspective. On closer inspection of the taxonomic links within this hierarchy and the implicit meaning derived thereof, it became clear that Clinical finding classes do not characterize the entity (e.g. a fracture, allergy, tumor, pain, hemorrhage, seizure, fever) in a literal sense but rather the condition of a patient having that fracture, allergy, pain etc. This gives sense to the current characteristic of the Clinical Finding hierarchy, in which complex classes are modeled as subclasses of their constituents. Most of these taxonomic links are inferred, as the consequence of the ‘role group’ design pattern, which is ubiquitous in SNOMED CT and has often been subject of controversy regarding its semantics. Conclusion: Our analyses resulted in the proposal of (i) equating SNOMED CT’s ‘role group’ property with the reflexive and transitive BFO relation ‘has occurrent part’; and (ii) reinterpreting Clinical Findings as Clinical Occurrents, i.e. temporally extended entities in an organism, having one or more occurrents as temporal parts that occur in continuants. This re-interpretation was corroborated by a manual analysis of classes under Clinical Finding, as well as the identification of similar modeling patterns in other ontologies. As a result, SNOMED CT does not require any content redesign to establish compatibility with BFO, apart from this re-interpretation, and a suggested re-labeling. Regarding the feasibility of harmonizing terminologies with principled foundational ontologies post-hoc, our results provide support to the assumption that this does not necessarily require major redesign efforts, but rather a careful analysis of the implicit assumptions of terminology curators and users. (shrink)

Several authors have recently argued that the excessive focus on equilibrium models in mainstream economic analysis prevents economists from providing accurate representations of the complex and dynamic nature of real economic systems. In response, this paper argues the following. Many economic systems are the products of deliberate and centralized human design. People can and do build and support structures, such as social institutions, aiming to enhance the predictability of economic systems, and thus to move them toward being equilibrium systems. This (...) provides a reason to think that many economic systems can be represented by equilibrium models. (shrink)

“Logic and Agon” is the text of a lecture given in Rome in 1958 by the German philosopher and mathematician Paul Lorenzen. In this inaugural text are laid the foundations of the dialogic logic, which represents an alternative approach to the question of meaning and logical truth, based on a dynamic formalism. Through the enrichment of the standard approach to logic with original tools, it allows a philosophical explanation of the foundations of the concept of formal validity. Clément Lion (...) proposes an unpublished French translation of this text as well as a presentation, in which he tries to show that the initial ambition of Paul Lorenzen was not so much to propose a new logical formalism as to question in principle any enterprise based on the use of such a formalism. (shrink)

The book series Linguistische Arbeiten (LA) publishes high-quality work in linguistics that addresses current issues in synchrony and diachrony, theoretically or empirically oriented.

Many languages allow for “fake” uses of their past tense marker: the marker: can occur in certain contexts without conveying temporal pastness. Instead it appears to bear a modal meaning. Iatridou :231–270, 2000) has dubbed this phenomenon Fake Tense. Fake Tense is particularly common to conditional constructions. This paper analyzes Fake Tense in English conditional sentences as a certain kind of ambiguity: the past tense morphology can mark the presence of a temporal operator, but it can also signal a specific (...) modal operator. The ambiguity is proposed to be the result of recategorization: the Simple Past develops a second, modal meaning because of structural similarities between the temporal and the modal/epistemic domain. The proposal is spelled out in the generative semantics framework, using the restrictor approach to conditionals Semantics from different points of view, 1979; in: A. von Stechow and D. Wunderlich Semantics: an international handbook of contemporary research, 1991), and building on von Stechows et al.’s recent work on the English tense system The expression of time in language, 2010; Romero and von Stechow, Tense: introduction, 2008). (shrink)

Showing respect is a key value in society today. Readers will learn about its cultural origins, how it applies to rules and laws in our society today, and how democratic societies rely on it to function properly.

ABSTRACT Is uncertainty about preferences rationally possible? And if so, does it matter for rational decision? It is argued that uncertainty about preferences is possible and should play the same role in rational decision-making as uncertainty about worldly facts. The paper develops this hypothesis and defends it against various objections.

While the existence of human cognitive and behavioral diversity is now widely recognized, it is not yet well established how to explain this diversity. In particular, it is still unclear how to determine whether any given instance of human cognitive and behavioral diversity is due to a common psychology that is merely “triggered” differently in different bio-cultural environments, or whether it is due to deeply and fundamentally different psychologies. This paper suggests that, to answer this question, we need to employ (...) subtle theoretical considerations of theory choice—especially the consideration of the complexity-weighted differential predictive successes of the two accounts. To make this clearer, the paper develops a novel analysis of the observed differences in human sharing dispositions. (shrink)

This paper explores the possibility of supplementing the suppositional view of indicative conditionals with a corresponding view of epistemic modals. The most striking feature of the suppositional view consists in its claim that indicative conditionals are to be evaluated by conditional probabilities. On the basis of a natural link between indicative conditionals and epistemic modals, a corresponding thesis about the probabilities of statements governed by epistemic modals can be derived. The paper proceeds by deriving further consequences of this thesis, in (...) particular, the logic of epistemic modals and their logical interaction with indicative conditionals are studied. (shrink)

Why are hard decisions hard? According to the incomparabilists, hard choices are hard because the options cannot be compared. Proponents of parity hold that hard choices are hard because the options can be compared but only in terms of a fourth value relation—parity—in addition to the three standard relations: better, worse, and equally good. Others claim that hard choices are hard because it is vague (or indeterminate) how the options relate in terms of the three standard relations. Lastly, there is (...) the epistemicist. For the epistemicist, hard choices are hard because one is irresolvably ignorant about how the options compare. In the debate about hard choices, epistemicism is often mentioned but rarely defended. The present paper is a contribution to closing this gap. (shrink)

There is a renewed debate about modus ponens. Strikingly, the recent counterexamples in Cantwell, Dreier and MacFarlane and Kolodny are generated by restricted readings of the ‘if’-clause. Moreover, it can be argued on general grounds that the restrictor view of conditionals developed in Kratzer and Lewis leads to counterexamples to modus ponens. This paper provides a careful analysis of modus ponens within the framework of the restrictor view. Despite appearances to the contrary, there is a robust sense in which modus (...) ponens is valid, owing to the fact that conditionals do not only allow for restricted readings but have bare interpretations, too. (shrink)

Economic growth and development remain embedded in the very core of our current international economic system and the so called “material economy”. However, depleting natural resources and environmental degradation, which now threaten the well-being of future generations, has challenged this premise, and placed sustainable development as a necessary objective of business activity and expansion. Environmental impact assessments (EIAs) have emerged as a key tool for governments, businesses, and NGOs to manage the negative impact of their activities on the environment. Businesses (...) in particular play a key role in averting or mitigating current environmental trends given that the economic growth they have stimulated has serious consequences for both the environment and social well-being. However, research on the use of EIAs has been conducted mostly from a governmental perspective producing a clear gap between research development and business (corporate) practice. To bridge this gap in knowledge, we develop a new EIA process tailored to real world business constraints and provide a range of propositions which we hope will stimulate future research efforts toward understanding and guiding how businesses integrate environmental issues into their decision-making processes. (shrink)

This book addresses a seemingly marginal and as yet sparsely discussed policy problem that turns out to open a window into longstanding debates at the very heart of normative ethics, metaethics, and practical rationality more broadly: Should we contact the last uncontacted peoples? Over the course of this book, I will explore grounds for three responses to this question: yes, no, and rejecting the question. First, I aim to show that even though the case of uncontacted people stirs up some (...) hard problems for theories of justice and well-being, they still warrant a presumption in favour of intervention: It seems that we would have similar duties towards uncontacted people as we are regularly taken to have towards contacted people similarly placed – if being contacted would be good for them. And it looks as though it would be, based on considerations of welfare more broadly and reasons of autonomy in particular. Still, intuitively there seems to be a strong presumption against intervention – or so widely accepted policies of non-intervention would suggest. I go on to explore two options for why intervention may be wrong overall: It may turn out to be harmful or impermissibly risky upon closer inspection of contingent circumstances; or it may be that extinguishing uncontacted cultures is bad independently of the interests of those living in them. Two further options challenge the viability of the question: I consider whether the case of uncontacted peoples undermines the very bases of our moral judgments, perhaps instantiating what Bernard Williams sought to capture with the idea of a relativism of distance. Lastly, I address whether the question of one’s self-interest in this matter challenges practical rationality more fundamentally by being a transformative choice or one between incomparable options. (shrink)

During much of the past century, it was widely believed that phonemes--the human speech sounds that constitute words--have no inherent semantic meaning, and that the relationship between a combination of phonemes (a word) and its referent is simply arbitrary. Although recent work has challenged this picture by revealing psychological associations between certain phonemes and particular semantic contents, the precise mechanisms underlying these associations have not been fully elucidated. Here we provide novel evidence that certain phonemes have an inherent, non-arbitrary emotional (...) quality. Moreover, we show that the perceived emotional valence of certain phoneme combinations depends on a specific acoustic feature--namely, the dynamic shift within the phonemes' first two frequency components. These data suggest a phoneme-relevant acoustic property influencing the communication of emotion in humans, and provide further evidence against previously held assumptions regarding the structure of human language. This finding has potential applications for a variety of social, educational, clinical, and marketing contexts. (shrink)

Fassio and Gao (2021) object to a knowledge-based decision theory on the ground that it cannot deal with unsuccessful inquiry. One way for inquiry to fail is not to know what one should know. If one’s inquiry fails in this way, is a subsequent choice in any way wrong when based on one’s limited actual knowledge? This paper discusses two strategies for dealing with this problem. On a first strategy, there is nothing wrong with such a choice (but something went (...) wrong prior to one’s choice). On a second strategy, there is something wrong with one’s choice and a knowledge-based decision theory should require that one’s decisions be based on the knowledge one should have, not merely on the knowledge one actually has. (shrink)

We consider a family of differential algebras of real functions on real euclidean spaces, stable under right composition by affine maps. We prove that under a weak finiteness property, there is an o-minimal expansion of the ordered field of real numbers in which all these functions are definable.

We argue that no attempt of reducing meaning to a systematic set of rules, according to which the role of linguistic expressions is to be normatively defined, can be abstracted from an irreducibly decisional compound. By comparing Lorenzen ’s project of building an Ortho-language and Brandom ’s inferentialist take on meaning, we distinguish two ways of acknowledging this fact, while claiming that Lorenzen ’s take is more genuinely constructive, insofar as choices be thought of as genuine features of constructions. It (...) brings into a new perspective the relation between dialogical constructivism and Brouwer ’s intuitionism. Finally we bring up a philosophical argument for the claim that interaction rules should be indexed on players and on their choices, when providing deontic bases to semantics. (shrink)