John Searle’s Chinese Room Argument purports to demonstrate that syntax is not sufficient for semantics, and, hence, because computation cannot yield understanding, the computational theory of mind, which equates the mind to an information processing system based on formal computations, fails. In this paper, we use the CRA, and the debate that emerged from it, to develop a philosophical critique of recent advances in robotics and neuroscience. We describe results from a body of work that contributes to blurring the divide (...) between biological and artificial systems; so-called animats, autonomous robots that are controlled by biological neural tissue and what may be described as remote-controlled rodents, living animals endowed with augmented abilities provided by external controllers. We argue that, even though at first sight, these chimeric systems may seem to escape the CRA, on closer analysis, they do not. We conclude by discussing the role of the body–brain dynamics in the processes that give rise to genuine understanding of the world, in line with recent proposals from enactive cognitive science. (shrink)

Human trafficking is associated with a variety of adverse health and mental health consequences, which should be accurately addressed and documented in electronic health records.

Bishop's Lemma is a centrepiece in the development of constructive analysis. We show that its proof requires some form of the axiom of choice; and that the completeness requirement in Bishop's Lemma can be weakened and that there is a vast class of non‐complete spaces that Bishop's Lemma applies to.

What is it like to live with the label “Disability?” NIB editorial staff and narrative symposium editors, Jeffery Bishop and Naomi Sunderland developed a call for stories, which was sent to several list serves, shared with the 1000 Voices Project community and posted on Narrative Inquiry in Bioethics ’ website. The request for personal stories from people who identify with the label “disabled” asked them to: consider how the label “disability” interacts with other aspects of their life in health (...) care settings; does the term “disability” reflect their actual embodied experiences of impairment or does it fail to do justice to their particular experience of impairment; describe the kind of experiences that are possible because of the impairment(s); discuss how the label has affected their “authentic voice”; and many other concepts about what effects the label has on their lives. These authors share deeply personal experiences that will help readers understand their world, challenges, and joys. Thirteen stories are found in the print version of the journal and an additional five supplemental stories are published online only through Project MUSE. The stories are complemented by four commentary articles by Elizabeth R. Schiltz; Lorna Hallahan; Nicole Matthews, Kathleen Ellem, and Lesley Chenoweth; and Jeffery Bishop, Rachelle Barina, and Devan Stahl. These scholars come from the disciplines of law, social work, media studies, medicine, and bioethics from Australia and the United States. Together, the symposium’s storytellers and commentators offer striking and informative insights into the everydayness of living with disabilities. (shrink)

Recent theological treatments of political economy have tended to ignore the early-modern origins from which the capital market system arose. An effort is made here to trace a specific conceptual development from the theodicies of G. W. Leibniz and Bishop William King to the economic theory of David Hume and Adam Smith, a development that implies certain theological transmutations. Both the theodicist and economist claim, for different reasons, that nature itself is capable of redeeming evils. Two theoretical shifts contributed (...) to this development: rational optimism and conjectural historiography. Scrutinizing the mechanistic backdrop for this historical narrative discloses acute theological compromises. (shrink)

This article identifies the context of Augustine's theology of grace. His disappointing experiences as a priest and young bishop impacted his theological notions of gratia, especially as they would mature during the Pelagian crisis. Using Cyprian as an authority, Augustine argued against the Donatist idea of grace solely through membership in the 'pure' church and sacramental grace only via ministers free from ecclesial-sin (traditio). Instead, Augustine argued that all grace is solely through God and that all humanity and the (...) earthly Church was a mixed body of the fallen and blessed and in need of divine grace. (shrink)

Catholic theologians after Trent saw the Protestant teaching about the remnants of original sin in the justified as one of the ‘chief ’ errors of Protestant soteriology. Martin Luther, John Calvin, Martin Chemnitz, and many Protestant theologians believed that a view of concupiscence as sinful, strictly speaking, did away with any reliance on good works. This conviction also clarified the Christian’s dependence on the imputed righteousness of Christ. Catholic theologians condemned this position as detracting from the work of Christ who (...) takes away the sins of the world. The rejection of this teaching—and the affirmation of Trent’s statement that original sin is taken away and that the justified at baptism is without stain or ‘immaculate’ before God—is essential for understanding Catholic opposition to Protestant soteriology. Two Spanish Dominican Thomists, Domingo de Soto and Bartolomé de Medina, rejected the Protestant teaching on imputation in part because of its connection with the view on the remnants of original sin in the justified. Adrian and Peter van Walenburch, brothers who served as auxiliary bishops of Cologne in the second half of the seventeenth century, argued that the Protestants of their time now agreed with the Catholic Church on a number of soteriological points. They also drew upon some of their post–Tridentine predecessors to offer a Catholic account of the imputation of Christ’s righteousness. Nonetheless, the issue of sin in the justified remained a point of serious controversy. (shrink)

This chapter contains section titled: Further Reading Notes.

This article identifies the context of Augustine's theology of grace. His disappointing experiences as a priest and young bishop impacted his theological notions of gratia, especially as they would mature during the Pelagian crisis. Using Cyprian as an authority, Augustine argued against the Donatist idea of grace solely through membership in the 'pure' church and sacramental grace only via ministers free from ecclesial-sin (traditio). Instead, Augustine argued that all grace is solely through God and that all humanity and the (...) earthly Church was a mixed body of the fallen and blessed and in need of divine grace. (shrink)

This paper provides a Bishop-style constructive analysis of the contrapositive of the statement that a continuous homomorphism of R onto a compact abelian group is periodic. It is shown that, subject to a weak locatedness hypothesis, if G is a complete (metric) abelian group that is the range of a continuous isomorphism from R, then G is noncompact. A special case occurs when G satisfies a certain local path-connectedness condition at 0. A number of results about one-one and injective (...) mappings are proved en route to the main theorem. A Brouwerian example shows that some of our results are the best possible in a constructive framework. (shrink)

It is shown within Bishop's constructive mathematics that, under one extra, classically automatic, hypothesis, a continuous homomorphism from R onto a compact metric abelian group is periodic, but that the existence of the minimum value of the period is not derivable.

In protecting the spiritual domain of the Church, Augustine began by bypassing State involvement, but as his willingness for coercion increased over time, he would often require the intervention of the secular domain, resulting often enough in their mutual benefit. The article assess and re-states the peculiar circumstances and how those impacted the development of the bishop of Hippo’s schema for religious coercion and ask whether this explanation suffices to clarify this enigmatic part of the life of Augustine.

Laffin, Josephine The archbishop of Adelaide, it must be acknowledged, did not play a prominent role at Vatican II. Matthew Beovich never gave a speech in the aula, the Council 'hall' inside St Peter's Basilica, nor did he prepare a written submission. At first glance, his seemingly minimal participation reinforces the damning judgment of Patrick O'Farrell that members of the Australian hierarchy were 'frequently uncomprehending and even resistant to the spirit of change'. With this from the doyen of Catholic (...) historians in Australia in the late twentieth century, it is not surprising that Ian Breward concluded in his survey of Australian religious history: 'Most Australian bishops were bemused observers of a process which shattered their convictions about the uniformity of the Roman Catholic Church. Australian contributions to Council debates were few. The pragmatism and traditionalism of the Australian Church stood nakedly exposed'. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Did Jesus Rise from the Dead? Historical and Theological Reflections by Matthew LeveringBrant PitreDid Jesus Rise from the Dead? Historical and Theological Reflections by Matthew Levering (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 272 pp.In his book Did Jesus Rise from the Dead? Historical and Theological Reflections, Matthew Levering writes "to make the case" that there is "good reason" to believe in the bodily resurrection of Jesus (...) (1). In this self-described work of "theological apologetics" (211), Levering argues from a threefold foundation for the credibility of Jesus's resurrection: (1) "the New Testament evidence," considered from the perspective of historical investigation; (2) the "sheer strangeness" of the apostolic claim that [End Page 1347] Jesus was "resurrected" and not just resuscitated or exalted into heaven as an immortal soul; (3) and the intrinsic credibility of the "supreme love" revealed through his death and resurrection (2–4). As this threefold foundation makes clear, Levering draws together both "historical and theological reasons for believing that Jesus' Resurrection happened" (4).In chapter 1, Levering contends that, while "faith does not stand or fall upon the results of historical research, those who insist that the truth of Jesus' Resurrection has nothing to do with the domain of historical investigation are mistaken" (30). To this end, he offers a survey of three figures: (1) the Belgian Dominican theologian Edward Schillebeeckx; (2) the American Protestant biblical scholar Dale C. Allison Jr.; and (3) the Anglican bishop and biblical theologian N. T. Wright. Levering exposes the serious flaws of contemporary attempts to reduce the resurrection claims of early Christians to hallucinations or visions of someone who has recently died. In particular, Levering finds compelling Wright's argument that the bodily resurrection of Jesus provides "the best historical explanation" of the early Christian claim that what first-century Jews expected to happen to everyone at the end of time had in fact happened to only one person—Jesus of Nazareth—in the middle of time. From a strictly historical point of view, claims that the disciples were merely moved by grace to a new experience Jesus being "alive" or that they simply experienced hallucinatory visions of Jesus after his death fail to explain the "radical change of eschatology" that took place in the early Church (56).In chapter 2, Levering explores the question of whether "the Church's mediation is truly effective in enabling us to share in the apostolic communion with the risen Jesus" (63). He first offers a sympathetic overview of the Protestant biblical scholar Richard Bauckham's book Jesus and the Eyewitnesses (2003; 2nd ed., 2017), in which he claims that the Gospels rest largely on "eyewitness testimony" (87–88). According to Levering, Bauckham's historical arguments show that "the ongoing presence of eyewitnesses provides a reason for not being skeptical about the major events of Jesus' life as reported by the Gospels, including his Resurrection" (89). At the same time, Levering insists that eyewitness memory is only one "mode of historical remembrance" utilized by the Church; in addition, Jesus also "willed that the historical remembrance of his Resurrection be an ecclesial reality" (90)—that is, a liturgical act of "remembrance" that takes place above all in the Eucharistic liturgy.In chapter 3, Levering aims to shed light on "the role of the Old Testament in aiding the discernment of the historical credibility of Jesus's Resurrection" (91). This chapter presents a stark contrast to contemporary [End Page 1348] studies of the resurrection that begin (and end) with the New Testament data. In it, Levering surveys the work of three contemporary scholars—Dale Allison, N. T. Wright, and the Jewish scholar Jon Levenson—and puts them in conversation with Thomas Aquinas's thirteenth-century commentary on the account of Jesus's resurrection in John 20–21. As this chapter amply demonstrates, it is "precisely in the scriptural history that the Creator God has guided, that we come to know that given such a God and such a history, Jesus' Resurrection is believable" (112). According to Levering, "the entire Old Testament" (113) is a necessary prolegomenon for understanding what it even means to say that Jesus has been raised in the first... (shrink)

In this essay, it is demonstrated that the inception of the English Bible tradition began with the oral–aural Bible in Old English translated from Latin incipient texts and emerged through a continuous tradition of revision and retranslation in interaction with contemporary social reality. Each subsequent translation achieved a more complex state by adapting to the emergence of incipient text knowledge (rediscovery of Hebrew and Greek texts), emergence of the (meaning-making) knowledge of the incipient languages (Latin, Hebrew and Greek), language change (...) (Old, Middle and Modern English), mode of communication (hearing-dominant and text-dominant), style (literal or word-for-word) and products (oral-aural Bible, handwritten manuscript Bible and printed Bible). Historical sources indicate that there were translations of portions of the English Bible since 700 CE as handwritten manuscript Bibles in Old and Middle English and in print in Modern English – even before the retranslation associated with Tyndale (1526) and despite ecclesiastical opposition since 1408. This version and its revisions (1530–1531, 1534) are followed by subsequent revisions (Coverdale Bible, Matthew’s Bible, Great Bible, Geneva Bible and Bishop’s Bible). The next revision was the King James Version (1611), which replaced all its predecessors, and which was never replaced for the next four centuries – not even by its revisions.Contribution: Contrary to the fragmentation caused by ordering individual English Bibles either by period (e.g. 20th century) or according to their features (e.g. literal), it is demonstrated that the history of English Bible translation emerged rather as a translation complex, and its history must be understood in this way. (shrink)

Resources the virtue of humility as an essential divine attribute through the works of Augustine, Barth, and Katherine Sonderegger.

Using medical advances to enhance human athletic, aesthetic, and cognitive performance, rather than to treat disease, has been controversial. Little is known about physicians? experiences, views, and attitudes in this regard. We surveyed a national sample of physicians to determine how often they prescribe enhancements, their views on using medicine for enhancement, and whether they would be willing to prescribe a series of potential interventions that might be considered enhancements. We find that many physicians occasionally prescribe enhancements, but doctors hold (...) nuanced and ambiguous views of these issues. Most express concerns about the potential effects of enhancements on social equity, yet many also believe specific enhancements that are safe and effective should be available but not covered by insurance. These apparently contradictory views might reflect inherent tensions between the values of equity and liberty, which could make crafting coherent social policies on medical enhancements challenging. [Supplementary materials are available for this article. Go to the publisher's online edition of American Journal of Bioethics for the following free supplemental resource(s): An additional table (Table 5) referred to on p. 5]. (shrink)

In this paper we discuss the question whether God intends that sin occur. We clarify the question, consider some of the answers given in the Christian tradition, and give a careful commentary on a few especially telling passages from the Christian Scriptures. We consider two philosophically informed interpretative strategies, one derived from the work of Frances Kamm, the other from Reformed scholasticism, against our interpretation of these passages. While we concede that in other passages such interpretations may allow a way (...) of escaping our argument, we conclude that in the case of the telling passages we have selected there is simply no comparably plausible alternative interpretation. (shrink)

Ideal theory has been extensively contested on the grounds that it is ideology: namely, that it performs the distorting social role of reifying and enforcing unjust features of the status quo. Indeed, a growing number of philosophers adopt a nonideal methodology—which dispenses with ideal theory—because of this ideology critique. I argue, however, that such philosophers are confused about the ultimate dialectical upshot of this critique even if it succeeds. I do so by constructing a parallel—equally plausible—ideology critique of nonideal methodology; (...) specifically, I argue that capitalist and managerial social attitudes have commodified people’s conception of justice and induced suspicion of ideal theory, which is not construed as having direct practical value. Consequently, nonideal methodology performs the distorting role of reifying and enforcing the hegemonies of capitalism and managerialism. Ideal theory and nonideal methodology are, therefore, in symmetrically bad positions. (shrink)

Recent arguments over whether certain public health interventions should be mandatory raise questions about what counts as a "mandate." A mandate is not the same as a mere recommendation or the standard of practice. At minimum, a mandate should require an active opt-out and there should be some penalty for refusing to abide by it. Over-loose use of the term "mandate" and the easing of opt-out provisions could eventually pose a risk to the gains that truly mandatory public health interventions, (...) such as childhood vaccines, have provided over the last 50 years. Already, confusion about what counts as a mandate, and about what criteria should be used to determine when a public health intervention should be implemented as a mandate, has led to some inappropriate public policy decisions. For instance, by any reasonable criteria, the yearly influenza vaccine should be mandatory for health care workers. To enforce this mandate, those who refuse vaccination should be required to sign a waiver, and patients - especially those at high risk from flu - should be informed when they receive care from unvaccinated practitioners. (shrink)

This article argues that the quantitative and quasi-experimental approach to evaluating public participation exercises is deficient in at least two respects. First, casting participants in instrumental terms excludes that participants have an experience and that this may be dramatic and emotional. If people are to be invited, even obliged, to participate, then this experience should be considered in event evaluation. Second, current evaluation frameworks tend not to be sensitive to what actually happened in terms of the actions of participants and (...) how these influenced the proceedings and outcome, thus ignoring that such events are fora where positions, values, decisions, and so forth are constructed and constrained rather than simply reported. This article considers the possible contribution of dramaturgical, discourse and conversation analytic, and ethnographic and phenomenological approaches to evaluating participation exercises and illustrates their potential with data gathered during the U.K. “GM Nation?” public debate. (shrink)

Throughout the bulk of the Reformed Tradition’s history within both Europe and the United States, most scholars have dismissed pastor and theologian Moïse Amyraut as a seventeenth century French heretic whose actions and theology led to the demise of the Huguenots in France. However, upon further introspection into Amyraut’s claims as being closer to Calvin (soteriologically) than his Genevan successors, one finds uncanny parallels in the scriptural commentaries and biblical insight into the expiation of Christ between Calvin and Amyraut. By (...) comparing key scriptural passages concerning the atonement, this article demonstrates that Reformed theologian Moïse Amyraut in fact propagated a universal atonement theory which parallels Calvin’s, both men ascribing to biblical faithfulness, a (humanistic) theological method, and similar hermeneutic. As such, both Calvin and Amyraut scripturally contend that God desires and provided the means for the salvation of the whole world. Further, the article demonstrates that Calvin’s successor, Theodore de Beza, could not in fact make the same claims as Amyraut, this article demonstrating that Beza went beyond Calvin’s scriptural approach to Christ’s expiation. Therefore, this article supports a more centrist approach from within and outside the Reformed tradition by demonstrating that Calvin and Amyraut concentrically held to God’s gracious provision in Christ for the saving of the whole world, for those who would believe in Christ for salvation. (shrink)

Animals are commonplace in genomic research, yet to date there has been little direct interrogation of the position, role and construction of animals in the otherwise flourishing social science of genomics. Following a brief discussion of this omission, I go on to suggest that there is much of interest for the social sciences and the humanities in this field of science. I show that animal genomics not only updates and extends established debates about the use of animals in science and (...) society, but also raises novel issues and promotes new ways of thinking about what animals are, and the social and biological relationships between animals and humans. Organising the science of interest into six themes (sameness, difference and classification; crossing boundaries; the maintenance of borders; farmyard supermodels; laboratory supermodels; knowing, relating and looking at animals), for each I review some of the science that is being done, some of the conceptual issues that are raised, and some of the social science that is or could be done. I conclude by briefly considering the development of socially responsive policies for animal genomics. (shrink)

There is an old saw in health policy that everyone wants health care that is good, fast, and cheap — but it’s impossible to have more than two of these at one time.A similar bit of folk wisdom seems intuitively true for the development and testing of new pharmaceutical products. The public is in a bind. We want breakthrough drugs, and fast. But we also want these drugs to be affordable, thoroughly tested, safe, and effective. It seems we can’t have (...) it all.In this paper, we will not claim that one can have it all — but that we can do far better than we are at present. First, we review extensive data on contemporary problems in the design, conduct, and analysis of industry-sponsored clinical trials. Finding major issues that have been solidly documented over more than a decade, we provide many examples of the multifarious ways in which industry-funded trials have been manipulated to raise the likelihood of producing industry-friendly results. (shrink)

One less obvious impact of legal bilingualism in a postcolonial jurisdiction like Hong Kong is an increasing trend of unrepresented litigants. Since their lack of legal knowledge often places them at a disadvantage and poses numerous problems in court, the government has established the resource centre for unrepresented litigants to offer them information about legal procedure. This paper evaluates the usefulness of the Chinese official reference materials at the centre in equipping laymen for civil litigation. As a first point of (...) contact between unrepresented litigants and the law, these leaflets have a direct impact on the users’ understanding of litigation procedures and their courtroom performance. This paper argues that the leaflets suffer from two major problems: incomprehensibility of language and lack of structure. Problems involved in include inconsistency in terminology, problematic translation, and language complexity arising from the use of odd collocation, unusual words, difficult legal terminology and confusing parts of speech; whereas in , information is found to be scattered and disorganised. To improve readability, the paper suggests using plain language, and providing checklists of documents, and a legal glossary. Cross-jurisdiction practices will be examined to show how unrepresented litigants’ access to justice may be facilitated. (shrink)

Barker and Smart have argued that dispositional monism is just as susceptible to the ultimate regress problem as Armstrong’s contingent necessitation view of laws. In this response, I consider what implications this conclusion has for the dispositional essentialist project more generally. I argue that it is the monistic aspect of dispositional monism, rather than the dispositional essentialist aspect, which is the source of the problem raised by Barker and Smart. I then outline a version of dispositional essentialism which avoids the (...) ultimate problem by avoiding the commitment to monism. Despite the article by Barker and Smart, it is not time to give up on the dispositionalist project yet. (shrink)

What are species? Are they objective features of the world? If so, what sort of features are they? Do everyday intuitions that species are real stand up to philosophical and scientific scrutiny? Two rival accounts of species' reality have dominated the discussion: that species are natural kinds defined by essential properties and that species are individuals. Unfortunately, neither account fully accommodates biological practice. In Are Species Real?, Slater presents a novel approach to this question aimed at accommodating the attractions to (...) both realism and antirealism about species. (shrink)

Those who advocate a “historicist” outlook on moral responsibility often hold that people who unwillingly acquire corrupt dispositions are not blameworthy for the wrong actions that issue from these dispositions; this contention is frequently supported by thought experiments involving instances of forced psychological manipulation that seem to call responsibility into question. I argue against this historicist perspective and in favor of the conclusion that the process by which a person acquires values and dispositions is largely irrelevant to moral responsibility. While (...) the thought experiments introduced by historicists raise perplexing questions about personal identity and involve clear instances of moral wrongs done to the manipulated subjects, neither of these considerations bear on the question of moral responsibility. Rather, questions about moral responsibility in manipulation cases should be answered, I argue, by considering whether a manipulated agent is capable of expressing through her actions the objectionable attitudes that make blame appropriate in normal cases of wrongdoing. (shrink)

What do mathematicians mean when they use terms such as ‘deep’, ‘elegant’, and ‘beautiful’? By applying empirical methods developed by social psychologists, we demonstrate that mathematicians' appraisals of proofs vary on four dimensions: aesthetics, intricacy, utility, and precision. We pay particular attention to mathematical beauty and show that, contrary to the classical view, beauty and simplicity are almost entirely unrelated in mathematics.

This paper argues that attempts to apply Alasdair MacIntyre’s positive moral theory to business ethics are problematic, due to the cognitive closure of MacIntyre’s concept of a practice. I begin by outlining the notion of a practice, before turning to Moore’s attempt to provide a MacIntyrean account of corporate governance. I argue that Moore’s attempt is mismatched with MacIntyre’s account of moral education. Because the notion of practices resists general application I go on to argue that a negative application, which (...) focuses on regulation, is more plausible. Large-scale regulation, usually thought antithetical to MacIntyre’s advocacy of small-scale politics, has the potential to facilitate practice-based work and reveals that MacIntyre’s own work can be used against his pessimism about the modern order. Furthermore, the conception of regulation I defend can show us how management is more amenable to ethical understanding than MacIntyre’s work is often taken to imply. (shrink)

Should we remain neutral between our interests and those of future generations? Or are we ethically permitted or even required to depart from neutrality and engage in some measure of intergenerational discounting? This Article addresses the problem of intergenerational discounting by drawing on two different intellectual traditions: the social welfare function (“SWF”) tradition in welfare economics, and scholarship on “prioritarianism” in moral philosophy. Unlike utilitarians, prioritarians are sensitive to the distribution of well-being. They give greater weight to well-being changes affecting (...) worse-off individuals. Prioritarianism can be captured, formally, through an SWF which sums a concave transformation of individual utility, rather than simply summing unweighted utilities in utilitarian fashion. The Article considers the appropriate structure of a prioritarian SWF in intergenerational cases. The simplest case involves a fixed and finite intertemporal population. In that case, I argue, policymakers can and should maintain full neutrality between present and future generations. No discount factor should be attached to the utility of future individuals. Neutrality becomes trickier when we depart from this simple case, meaning: (1) “non-identity” problems, where current choices change the identity of future individuals; (2) population-size variation, where current choices affect not merely the identity of future individuals, but the size of the world’s future population (this case raises the specter of what Derek Parfit terms “the repugnant conclusion,” i.e., that dramatic reductions in the average level of individual well-being might be compensated for by increases in population size); or (3) an infinite population. The Article grapples with the difficult question of outfitting a prioritarian SWF to handle non-identity problems, population-size variation, and infinite populations. It tentatively suggests that a measure of neutrality can be maintained even in these cases. (shrink)

Pragmatism has enjoyed a considerable revival in the latter part of the twentieth century, but what precisely constitutes pragmatism remains a matter of dispute. In reconstructing the pragmatic tradition in political philosophy, Matthew Festenstein rejects the idea that it is a single, cohesive doctrine. His incisive analysis brings out the commonalities and shared concerns among contemporary pragmatists while making clear their differences in how they would resolve those concerns. His study begins with the work of John Dewey and the (...) moral and psychological conceptions that shaped his philosophy. Here Festenstein lays out the major philosophic issues with which first Dewey, and then his heirs, would grapple. The book's second part traces how Dewey's approach has been differently developed, especially in the work of three contemporary pragmatic thinkers: Richard Rorty, Jurgen Habermas, and Hilary Putnam. This first full-length critical study of the relationship between the pragmatist tradition and political philosophy fills a significant gap in contemporary thought. (shrink)

In the processing of subject-verb agreement, non-subject plural nouns following a singular subject sometimes “attract” the agreement with the verb, despite not being grammatically licensed to do so. This phenomenon generates agreement errors in production and an increased tendency to fail to notice such errors in comprehension, thereby providing a window into the representation of grammatical number in working memory during sentence processing. Research in this topic, however, is primarily done in related languages with similar agreement systems. In order to (...) increase the cross-linguistic coverage of the processing of agreement, we conducted a self-paced reading study in Modern Standard Arabic. We report robust agreement attraction errors in relative clauses, a configuration not particularly conducive to the generation of such errors for all possible lexicalizations. In particular, we examined the speed with which readers retrieve a subject controller for both grammatical and ungrammatical agreeing verbs in sentences where verbs are preceded by two NPs, one of which is a local non-subject NP that can act as a distractor for the successful resolution of subject-verb agreement. Our results suggest that the frequency of errors is modulated by the kind of plural formation strategy used on the attractor noun: nouns which form plurals by suffixation condition high rates of attraction, whereas nouns which form their plurals by internal vowel change (ablaut) generate lower rates of errors and reading-time attraction effects of smaller magnitudes. Furthermore, we show some evidence that these agreement attraction effects are mostly contained in the right tail of reaction time distributions. We also present modeling data in the ACT-R framework which supports a view of these ablauting patterns wherein they are differentially specified for number and evaluate the consequences of possible representations for theories of grammar and parsing. (shrink)

It is common to talk about options, where an option is a course of action an agent can take. A course of action, in turn, is that which can be the object of intention. It has not often been noticed in the literature, though, that there are two ways to understand what makes something an option: first, an option just is some course of action physically open (or, to be maximally liberal, logically open) to an agent; second, an option just (...) is some course of action that the agent either in fact deliberates about taking or is psychologically capable of deliberating about taking. At any given time, there are far more courses of action open to an agent than the agent can or does deliberate about taking. What determines which courses of action an agent deliberates about as an option, and why do so many other courses of action remain out of deliberative view? I argue that while values, ends, the demands of both means-end coherence and consistency of beliefs contribute to the determination of which courses of action an agent sees as options, they cannot be the whole story. I argue that another mechanism, which I call the practical imagination, is primarily responsible for which courses of action an agent sees as options. Drawing upon both recent work in developmental and social psychology and a strain of philosophical argument that has attempted to show how human beings have a practical understanding of themselves that is mediated by what we can call a narrative identity, I argue that the norms governing the construction of a narrative identity are among the most important, albeit not the only, norms governing the practical imagination and that, just as we should look to the norms of practical reason to explain and critically reflect on practical deliberation, we should look to the norms of practical imagination to explain and critically reflect on the process by which an agent comes to see some course of action as an option. (shrink)

According to cognitive non-naturalism, normative judgments are standard beliefs that purport to be about non-natural properties. An influential plurality of normative theorists, including non-naturalist realists, error theorists and skeptics, share this view. But it is mistaken. For it predicts an epistemic profile for normative judgments that they do not have. In particular, they are not disposed to extinguish in light of accepted evidence that the any non-natural properties are absent, and they are not disposed to come into existence in light (...) of accepted evidence for any non-natural property. So normative judgments might be beliefs, and there might be non-natural properties, but normative judgments are not beliefs about non-natural properties. (shrink)

Colin Ward is not necessarily a gift for the biographer. As Sophie Scott-Brown’s engaging study reminds us, one of his defining characteristics was a thoroughgoing humility, and one consequence of...

I respond here to an argument in David Shoemaker’s recent essay, “Attributability, Answerability, and Accountability: Toward a Wider Theory of Moral Responsibility.” Shoemaker finds that “Scanlonian” approaches to moral blame err insofar as they do not include a capacity to respond to moral considerations among the conditions on blameworthiness. Shoemaker argues that wrongdoers must be able to respond to moral reasons for their behavior to express the disrespect to which blaming attitudes like resentment respond. I offer reasons for rejecting this (...) argument. (shrink)