In addition to ethical aspects Citizen Science projects also involve social, economic and—not least—regulatory challenges that arise from their very openness and opportunities for participation. So...

We investigate how the selection of assurance topics and the format of their communication influence the credibility perception of sustainability report readers. This is important because misleading communication may discredit ethical sustainability assurance practices. Based on signaling theory and using an experimental approach, we are the first to examine false credibility signals in the context of sustainability assurance. We find that two variables related to sustainability assurance, reference explicitness and assurance depth, jointly influence the assurance signal and the perceived credibility (...) of a sustainability report. Our findings indicate that readers are not at risk of false signaling but can make incorrect interpretations of the assurance signal and might respond negatively to well-intentioned signals. The main implications of our findings are that firms should refrain from increasing reference explicitness and should select only the most material topics. Taken together, our results provide new insights on the unethical practice of false signaling and provide an example of an incorrect signal interpretation by readers. (shrink)

When we solve problems there are usually a number of different strategies that we can use. It is a hallmark of intelligence that we, as humans, are able to flexibly choose between them. Siegler and...

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Buddhist-Christian Studies 21.1 (2001) 144-147 [Access article in PDF] Book Review Welcoming Flowers from Across the Cleansed Threshold of Hope: An Answer to the Pope's Criticism of Buddhism Welcoming Flowers from Across the Cleansed Threshold of Hope: An Answer to the Pope's Criticism of Buddhism. By Thinley Norbu. New York: Jewel Publishing House, 1997. 93 pp. Welcoming Flowers is a short and tightly written critique of the Buddhism chapter (...) of Pope John Paul II's 1994 best-seller, Crossing the Threshold of Hope. It is a strong, barbed, personal essay from a highly respected Buddhist teacher who expresses shock and dismay that the Pope's actual words about Buddhism that are read as absolute truth by millions of people around the world had "serious, gratuitous misrepresentations of Buddhist doctrine."The book is ostensibly a response to requests from Polish readers and a Polish publishing company to comment on "what the Pope clearly said about Buddhism." The author of Welcoming Flowers, Thinley Norbu, paints himself as a kind of efficient, spiritual cleaning maid who, with tongue in cheek despite his long admiration for the Catholic leader, has to tidy up after the Vicar of Rome: "It is as though the Pope suddenly vomited insolently and uncontrollably in a cathedral, so I hastily had to clean it up, as the Polish people asked me to do."The Pope's negative assessment of Buddhism inspired Thinley Norbu to match [End Page 144] his attack with even more exalted teachings of the Buddha: "I am grateful to the Pope for being like a hit-hitting drumstick that has given me the good opportunity to be like a drum myself, resonating with the sound of profound Dharma. I am grateful to the Pope for yelling with negative words in a valley, letting me return the answer of its transformation into the positive echo of Buddhist hymns."Thinley Norbu in fact uses the Pope's chapter to clarify some basic teachings of Vajrayana Buddhism and how it differs from Mahayana and Hinayana (note: Norbu's term, not this reviewer's) in a concise and instructive manner from the point of view of a practitioner. In this regard,Welcoming Flowers can be considered a kind of introductory, primary source ofTibetan (Nyingma)Vajrayana Buddhist doctrine for those who are unfamiliar with the various schools of Buddhism. The Pope's seriously outdated (reminiscent of Max Weber or early missionaries), limited, and unsympathetic understanding of one school of Buddhism is used by Thinley Norbu as a platform to expound his rich understanding of Buddhist traditions toWestern readers of comparative religion and specifically to Catholics. The book's twenty-nine footnotes can also function as a brief glossary of transliterated TibetanVajrayana Buddhist terms (but without use of diacritical marks for Sanskrit or Pali terms).Thinley Norbu is careful to mitigate his condemnation of the Pope's unwarranted ignorance of Buddhism by sharing the onus with the Pope's not-so-sapient preceptors. He generously suggests that the Pope may not bear all the blame for the chapter's shortcomings in the following paragraph: The misrepresentations of Buddhism in his book may have come from listening to advisors who were unfamiliar with Buddhism, from simply glancing at books at the Hinayana level, or by being shown books by misinformed authors. Perhaps he only looked at negative conceptions about Buddhism written by followers of other doctrines who had malicious intentions, or by idiots who wrote books for money without caring that they were full of mistakes. In any case, the Pope definitely heard about Buddhism from sources that did not know anything about it. It seems... as though he... scooped a few drops of water from an immeasurable ocean with a piece of grass and even misunderstood these few drops (p. 2). Norbu reprimands the Pope for not doing his required homework, a fault that can lead to serious disharmony among religions."Without studying and understanding other doctrines deeply, to say many things about them is not wise," Norbu continues; "it... (shrink)

Signalling games are popular models for studying the evolution of meaning, but typical approaches do not incorporate vagueness as a feature of successful signalling. Complementing recent like-minded models, we describe an aggregate population-level dynamic that describes a process of imitation of successful behaviour under imprecise perception and realization of similar stimuli. Applying this new dynamic to a generalization of Lewis’s signalling games, we show that stochastic imprecision leads to vague, yet by-and-large efficient signal use, and, moreover, that it unifies evolutionary (...) outcomes and helps avoid sub-optimal categorization. The upshot of this is that we see ‘as-if’-generalization at an aggregate level, without agents actually generalizing. _1_ Introduction _2_ Background _2.1_ Sim-max games and conceptual spaces _2.2_ Vagueness in sim-max games and conceptual spaces _2.3_ Vagueness, functional pressure, and transmission biases _3_ Imprecise Imitation _3.1_ Replicator dynamic in behavioural strategies _3.2_ Noise-perturbed conditional imitation _4_ Exploring Imprecise Imitation _4.1_ Setting the stage _4.2_ Simulation set-up _4.3_ Measures of interest _4.4_ Results _5_ Discussion _5.1_ Levels of vagueness _5.2_ Evolutionary benefits of imprecision _5.3_ Related work _6_ Conclusion Appendix. (shrink)

This paper highlights Max Scheler’s contribution to developing a ‘phenomenological’ account of religious transcendence in a way which remains unique among other proponents of that tradition of continental thought. It is argued that even in formulating his own concept of ‘world-openness’ (as precursory to Hussurl’s and Heidegger’s view of the self’s ‘worldliness’) Scheler continues to foster a vision of the human person’s eternality and kinship with the Divine.

Arguing About Language presents a comprehensive selection of key readings on fundamental issues in the philosophy of language. It offers a fresh and exciting introduction to the subject, addressing both perennial problems and emerging topics. Classic readings from Frege, Russell, Kripke, Chomsky, Quine, Grice, Lewis and Davidson appear alongside more recent pieces by philosophers or linguists such as Robyn Carston, Delia Graff Fara, Frank Jackson, Ernie Lepore & Jerry Fodor, Nathan Salmon, Zoltán Szabó, Timothy Williamson and Crispin Wright. Organised (...) into clear sections, readings have been chosen that engage with one another and often take opposing views on the same question, helping students to get to grips with the key areas of debate in the philosophy of language, including: sense and reference definite descriptions linguistic conventions language and behaviour descriptivism and rigidity contextualism vagueness rule-following and normativity fictional discourse. Each article selected is clear, thought-provoking and free from unnecessary jargon. The editors provide lucid introductions to each section in which they give an overview of the debate and outline the arguments of the papers. Arguing About Language is an ideal reader for students looking for a balanced yet up-to-date introduction to the philosophy of language. Darragh Byrne is lecturer in philosophy at the University of Birmingham, UK. Max Kölbel is ICREA Research Professor at the University of Barcelona, Spain. He is the author of Truth without Objectivity (Routledge, 2002) and co-editor of Wittgenstein's Lasting Significance (Routledge, 2004) with Bernhard Weiss, as well as Relative Truth (Oxford, 2008) with Manuel García-Carpintero. (shrink)

This paper focuses on the make-up of different cultures in experimental neurology, neuroanatomy, and clinical psychiatry. These cultures served as important research bases for early regenerative concepts and projects in the area of neurology and psychiatry at the beginning of the 20th century. Nevertheless, the developments in brain research and clinical neurology cannot be regarded to be isolated from broader societal developments, as the discourses on social de- and regeneration, neurasthenia, nerve-weakness and experiences of the brain-injured after WWI show. Societal (...) and cultural developments directly influenced researchers’ conceptualisation, scientific ideas, and even their experimental and clinical orientation. They directly reflect which scientific problems the neuroscientists felt inclined to address and what areas they began to leave aside. Using the concept of socio-technical experiments, it is demonstrated that research methodologies in neuronal de- and regeneration studies were not simply a product of recent advances in the scientific differentiation of somatic neurology or brain-psychiatry. Moreover, they resulted in important interdisciplinary attempts which emerged from great collaborative work including neuroscientists from various areas of investigation in both basic and clinical contexts. (shrink)

The article explores the parallels between the theory of sympathy developed by Max Scheler and the understanding of the foreign I in Russian philosophy. Russian philosophy has been developing the topic of foreign psychic life since the 1880s, and it regards Scheler’s theory as unable to raise above the level of emotional contagion. True sympathy is possible, when the Other is already present to the I, or, according to Nikolay Lossky, there is an original gnoseological difference between “the lived” and (...) “the observed”. Russian philosophy emphasizes the hermeneutical aspect of the problem – the original division and the search for understanding, as does Vasily Rozanov, who also shifted the accent from the general to the individual, particular and even intimate. Semyon Frank pointed out that the feelings of another person will only form a shell of meaningless observation, if not connected to the living knowledge through the human ability to resonate with something transcendent. And Russian philosophy assumes the fact of the original collectiveness of consciousness. This is the impulse given to it by the philosophy of Sergei Trubetskoy and developed in the philosophy of Russian neo-Kantianism, with Ivan Lapshin depicting a creative person, taking up the collective function of experimenting over the psyche to create and expand the map of human feelings. (shrink)

FOUNDATIONALISM IN PHILOSOPHY n his autobiographical work, The Education of Henry Adams, this I brooding and disillusioned offspring of American presidents confronted, at age sixty, his own perplexity concerning the new scientific world-view that was emerging at the end of the century. He noted that the unity of things, long guaranteed morally by the teachings of Christianity and scientifically by the Newtonian world-view, was being challenged by a newer vision of things that found only incomprehensible multiplicity at the root of (...) the world: What happened if one dropped the sounder into the ab yss-let it go-frankly gave up Unity altogether? What was Unity? Why was one to be forced to affirm it? Here every body flatly refused help.... [Adams] got out his Descartes again; dipped into his Hume and Berkeley; wrestled anew with his Kant; pondered solemnly over his Hegel and Scho penhauer and Hartmann; strayed gaily away with his Greeks-all merely to ask what Unity meant, and what happened when one denied it. Apparently one never denied it. Every philosopher, whether sane or insane, naturally af firmed it. I Adams, then approaching with heavy pessimism a new century, felt instinc tively that, were one to attack the notion of unity, the entire edifice of human knowledge would quickly collapse. For understanding requires the unification of apparently different phenomena. (shrink)

This paper continues an earlier investigation into the philosophical tradition of Vienna Indeterminism until the formation of the Vienna Circle in 1929. It focuses in particular on how Philipp Frank and Richard von Mises were able to contemplate genuine indeterminism in physics before the advent of quantum mechanics. On this account, all apparently deterministic laws could well be the macroscopic limit of indeterministic basic laws valid for the single mirco-events. Philosophically Vienna Indeterminism was launched by Mach's redefinition of causality (...) in terms of functional dependencies. This severed the rigid bond between causality and empirical realism characteristic of the Kantian conception and made possible to adjust the ontology according to the needs of a single theory. The debates between Max Planck and Franz Serafin Exner teach that the indeterminism issue was also a struggle about Boltzmann's philosophical legacy between Vienna and Berlin. Quite in line with Mach's firm empiricism, Vienna Indeterminists rejected any final decision between determinism and indeterminism on the metaphysical level. Once the frequency interpretation had won favor, the empiricist stance, moreover, permitted them to consider mass phenomena as generic observational facts coordinated to statistical collectives and to treat them on a par with moving point particles. The only condition imposed on this ontology was the uniqueness of this coordination, a condition that could be viewed as a late heir of Mach's principle of unique determination which had complemented his relational ontology. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Grounding Human Rights in a Pluralist World by Grace Y. Kao, and: Christianity and Human Rights: An Introduction ed. by John Witte, Frank S. AlexanderZachary R. CaloGrounding Human Rights in a Pluralist World Grace Y. Kao Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2011. 239pp. $28.45Christianity and Human Rights: An Introduction Edited By John Witte and Frank S. Alexander New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010. 390pp. $29.38Grace Kao’s (...) Grounding Human Rights in a Pluralistic World and Christianity and Human Rights, edited by John Witte and Frank Alexander, both contribute to the growing and sophisticated literature addressing the relationship between religious traditions and human rights. Kao’s book opens by asking whether “the very idea of human rights [must] be premised upon a religious or metaphysical idea in order to be conceptually intelligible, sufficiently protected, or practically stable over time” (4). Kao proposes that this question has generally been answered in one of two ways: a “maximalist” response that identifies religion as a necessary foundation for human rights, and a “minimalist” response that rejects this turn to religion. A significant portion of the book is devoted to assessing representatives of these two approaches. Chapter 2 includes a discussion of maximalist thinkers Michael Perry, Max Stackhouse, Hans Küng, and Nicholas Wolterstorff. Chapters 3 through 5 consider different forms of minimalism, including that found in the work of John Rawls and Martha Nussbaum.Kao’s organization of the debate into maximalism and minimalism imposes a useful typology over a diverse range of thought while also establishing interesting points of contact and contestation among various thinkers. At the same time, because the analysis occurs at a rather high level of abstraction, it will be most useful to those already familiar with the texts and thinkers discussed. This is not a text for those seeking a summary introduction. Those less familiar will still profit from the book, but perhaps more from the opening and closing chapters than those discussed here. [End Page 187]Following the discussion of maximalism and minimalism, the final chapter of Kao’s book presents a model for moving beyond the “extremes” of these two dominant approaches (8). At its most basic, human rights, Kao argues, must be grounded in a nonreligious moral realism. This “straddling” of the “minimalist-maximalist divide” is, in certain respects, a creative and bold proposal for reshaping debate about religion and human rights. It defends the universality of human rights as being necessarily grounded in objective values but does not narrowly locate these values in religious sources. Yet, while offering some intriguing insights, the themes of this final chapter never quite come together to form a comprehensive theory. Kao’s proposal is more a selective appropriation of insights from others than a totalizing alternative.Because Kao does not fully develop her model, it is difficult to assess the particular rights claims that follow from its premises. This is evident, for instance, in Kao’s discussion of the so-called marginal cases, where it remains unclear what specific principles and methods have been employed to develop normative positions (160–61). This disconnect between theory and application limits the book’s ability to have an impact on core disputes within human rights. The most significant fault lines within the contemporary human rights debate involve the content and expanse of human rights more than their theoretical grounding, and human rights language often serves as a way to legitimize preferred political goods. Kao not only needs to defend her approach to grounding human rights but also to establish how this particular grounding informs the norms of human rights.Witte and Alexander’s edited volume, Christianity and Human Rights, addresses the relationship between religion and human rights from a quite different perspective. Whereas Kao critically assesses religion’s role as a foundation for human rights, the essays in Witte and Alexander’s book largely explore the meaning of human rights from within a Christian framework. The book does not entirely bypass questions about the warranting role of religion as such, but its concern is not to justify the role of Christianity within human rights but to develop “the budding new human rights hermeneutic of... (shrink)

In this paper, I shall defend two main claims. First, Friedman’s famous paper “On the methodology of positive economics” (“F53”) cannot be properly understood without taking into account the influence of three authors who are neither cited nor mentioned in the paper: Max Weber, Frank Knight, and Karl Popper. I shall trace both their substantive influence on F53 and the historical route by which this influence took place. Once one has understood these ingredients, especially Weber’s ideal types, many of (...) F53’s astonishing sentences like “the more significant the theory, the more unrealistic the assumptions”, make good sense. Second, I shall claim that the much-discussed question whether Friedman’s essay espouses an instrumentalist or a realist position, is the wrong question to be asked. I shall illustrate that by a comparison with examples from physics in which also unrealistic assumptions are made. Also there, the question whether these assumptions are indicators of instrumentalism or realism is not appropriate. Cleared from these misunderstandings, F53 presents itself as an interesting and reasonable but much less controversial contribution to the methodology of economics. (shrink)

In this paper, I shall defend two main claims. First, Friedman’s famous paper “On the methodology of positive economics” (“F53”) cannot be properly understood without taking into account the influence of three authors who are neither cited nor mentioned in the paper: Max Weber, Frank Knight, and Karl Popper. I shall trace both their substantive influence on F53 and the historical route by which this influence took place. Once one has understood these ingredients, especially Weber’s ideal types, many of (...) F53’s astonishing sentences like “the more significant the theory, the more unrealistic the assumptions”, make good sense. Second, I shall claim that the much-discussed question whether Friedman’s essay espouses an instrumentalist or a realist position, is the wrong question to be asked. I shall illustrate that by a comparison with examples from physics in which also unrealistic assumptions are made. Also there, the question whether these assumptions are indicators of instrumentalism or realism is not appropriate. Cleared from these misunderstandings, F53 presents itself as an interesting and reasonable but much less controversial contribution to the methodology of economics. (shrink)

Published posthumously in the early 1920's, Max Weber's Economy and Society has since become recognized as one of the greatest sociological treatises of the 20th century, as well as a foundational text of the modern sociological imagination. The first strictly empirical comparison of social structures and normative orders conducted in world-historical depth, this two volume set of Economy and Society—now with new introductory material contextualizing Weber’s work for 21st century audiences—looks at social action, religion, law, bureaucracy, charisma, the city, and (...) the political community. Meant as a broad introduction for an educated general public, in its own way Economy and Society is the most demanding textbook yet written by a sociologist. The precision of its definitions, the complexity of its typologies, and the wealth of its historical content make the work an important challenge to our sociological thought: for the advanced undergraduate who gropes for her sense of society, for the graduate student who must develop his own analytical skills, and for the scholar who must match wits with Weber. (shrink)

An introduction to informal logic, critical thinking and rhetoric utilizing actual public discourse .

Current debates in social ontology are dominated by approaches that view institutions either as rules or as equilibria of strategic games. We argue that these two approaches can be unified within an encompassing theory based on the notion of correlated equilibrium. We show that in a correlated equilibrium each player follows a regulative rule of the form ‘if X then do Y’. We then criticize Searle's claim that constitutive rules of the form ‘X counts as Y in C’ are fundamental (...) building blocks for institutions, showing that such rules can be derived from regulative rules by introducing new institutional terms. Institutional terms are introduced for economy of thought, but are not necessary for the creation of social reality. (shrink)

I explore physics implications of the External Reality Hypothesis (ERH) that there exists an external physical reality completely independent of us humans. I argue that with a sufficiently broad definition of mathematics, it implies the Mathematical Universe Hypothesis (MUH) that our physical world is an abstract mathematical structure. I discuss various implications of the ERH and MUH, ranging from standard physics topics like symmetries, irreducible representations, units, free parameters, randomness and initial conditions to broader issues like consciousness, parallel universes and (...) Gödel incompleteness. I hypothesize that only computable and decidable (in Gödel’s sense) structures exist, which alleviates the cosmological measure problem and may help explain why our physical laws appear so simple. I also comment on the intimate relation between mathematical structures, computations, simulations and physical systems. (shrink)

Since its publication almost 150 years ago, The Idea of a University has had an extraordinary influence on the shaping and goals of higher education. The issues that John Henry Newman raised--the place of religion and moral values in the university setting, the competing claims of liberal and professional education, the character of the academic community, the cultural role of literature, the relation of religion and science--have provoked discussion from Newman's time to our own. This edition of The Idea of (...) a University includes the full text of "University Teaching" and four selections from "University Subjects," together with five essays by leading scholars that explore the background and the present day relevance of Newman's themes. In the essays Martha Garland discusses the character and organization of the early nineteenth-century English universities upon which Newman based much of his vision; Frank M. Turner traces the impact of Newman's influence during the vast expansion of higher education since World War II; George Marsden investigates how the decreasing emphasis on religion has affected higher education; Sara Castro Klaren examines the implications of Newman's views on education and literature for current debates between proponents of a curriculum based on western civilization and one based on multiculturalism; and George Landow considers what the advent of electronic communication will mean to university teaching, research, and community. To aid accessibility, the edition also includes an analytical table of contents, a chronology and biographical sketch of Newman's life, questions for discussion, expanded notes, and a glossary of names, all of which will help make this the standard teaching text for Newman's work. (shrink)

Lectures delivered as the Mary Flexner Lectures, Bryn Mawr College, fall 1965, under the title: The long perspectives.

Lectures delivered as the Mary Flexner Lectures, Bryn Mawr College, fall 1965, under the title: The long perspectives.

This is a comprehensive study of the far-reaching changes that led to a re-shaping of the philosophical discourse in Islam during the sixth/twelfth century. Whereas earlier Western scholars thought that Islam's engagement with the tradition of Greek philosophy ended during that century, more recent analyses suggest its integration into the genre of rationalist Muslim theology (kalam). This book proposes a third view about the fate of philosophy in Islam. It argues that in addition to this integration, Muslim theologians picked up (...) the discourse of philosophy in Islam (falsafa) and began to produce books on philosophy. Written by the same authors, books in these two genres, kalām and philosophy, argue for opposing teachings on the nature of God, the world's creation, and on the afterlife. This study explains the emergence of a new genre of philosophical books called "hikma" that stand opposed to Islamic theology and at the same wishes to complement it. Offering a detailed history of philosophy in Iraq, Iran, and Central Asia during the sixth/twelfth century together with an analysis of the circumstances of practicing philosophy during this time, this study can show how reports of falsafa, written by major Muslim theologians such as al-Ghazali (d. 505/1111), developed step-by-step into critical assessments of philosophy that try to improve philosophical teachings, and eventually become fully fledged philosophical summas in the work of Fakhr al-Din al-Razi (d. 606/1210). The book ends in a discussion of the different methods of kalam and hikma and the coherence and ambiguity of a Muslim post-classical philosopher's œuvre. (shrink)

We enter here upon a history of conversational traffic between the respective departments of philosophy and law in the old academy of liberalism, where lawyers hear much from philosophers, yes-and philosophers hear from lawyers, too, in what has fruitfully been a both-ways exchange. Our philosophical protagonist is John Rawls. This book comprises a study of the rise and workings, within the Rawlsian political-liberal philosophy, of the idea of a country's higher-legal constitution as a public platform for the justification of political (...) coercion. A study of Rawls on constitutionalism can help us, I believe, in scoping out and managing a cluster of constitutional lawyers' debates-interminable ones, it seems, in the constitutional-democratic precincts of our times-that I will catalogue soon below. But conversely, I believe, those seeking the best and truest readings of Rawls might have something to learn from the controversies of the lawyers. My approach to Rawls has accordingly been that of a critically leavened (while no doubt broadly sympathetic) exegesis, while with the legal-discursive materials I take more of a diagnostic turn. My hope is that a treatment of these two discourses in relation to each other will prove an aid to both political-philosophical and legal-practical reflection. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Evolution of the Society for the Advancement of American PhilosophyJames Campbelldespite my increasingly decrepit appearance, I can lay no claim to being one of the founders of SAAP. When I joined the Society in the mid-1970s, it was already a well-functioning organization—if a much smaller one than today. After a few years of attending meetings, I began to submit papers, and I first appeared on the program at (...) our sixth annual meeting at John Carroll University in 1979. (See Fig. 1, the complete program, below.) While I was not one of the founders of SAAP, I did know them all. Presiding at the early meetings were, in the order of their presidencies, such elders as John Lachs, John J. McDermott, Darnell Rucker, James Gouinlock, Beth J. Singer, Peter H. Hare, Sandra B. Rosenthal, Thelma Z. Lavine, Joseph Betz, Charlene Haddock Seigfried, and Andrew J. Reck. Serving in the background at the same time were such patron saints as Justus Buchler, Douglas Greenlee, Abraham Edel, Max Harold Fisch, Elizabeth Flower, Edward H. Madden, David L. Miller, Frank M. Oppenheim, Evelyn Shirk, John E. Smith, and H. S. Thayer. It was a good time to be coming to American Philosophy, under the guidance of a Society that respected the fundamentals of pluralism and "fallibilism."1IThe brief discussion of the evolution of SAAP that I offer here initially emphasizes what the Society has meant to me over nearly five decades.2 As I was entering graduate school in 1974, I was drawn by the American philosophical tradition. It was, as William James writes, my "dumb conviction" that the best answers were to be found in this philosophical direction and not in the others, and that my job was to pursue these answers.3 What I found in this tradition was a refuge from both the analytic style of philosophy then dominant in America, with what I saw as its obsession with truth4 and its [End Page 1] confusion of cleverness with wisdom, and the alternatives of the various continental traditions that, although they pursued wisdom, seemed to me to rely too strongly on the mysterious or the untranslatable. My own sense of the American philosophical tradition at the time was an amalgam of Puritanism, Deism, Transcendentalism, Pragmatism in its various forms, and a large dose of Columbia Naturalism. Through further study and especially through my interactions at SAAP meetings, I became more grounded in these approaches and more open to other strands within the tradition.5 For me, cooperative interaction with others was essential to further understanding. Just as for Josiah Royce, the secret was "the community."6Among the lessons that I drew from the American philosophical tradition were the following. I knew that it was necessary to resist the human tendency to believe that what works for me will work for everyone else. As George Santayana reminds us, all philosophy is "personal."7 Thus, certain thinkers and certain thoughts will benefit from their initial plausibility to us, and other thoughts and thinkers will be initially suspect. To counter this personal prejudice, we need to partake in careful, long-term study. On a related point, Ralph Waldo Emerson urges us to seek insight from others, to accept what he calls "provocation" while not accepting their answers.8 At the same time, we live among these other individuals, marry them, teach their children, and benefit from their contributions to our social existence. In other words, American Philosophy teaches us that people are social creatures—a point which both Emerson and James were wary of, but not blind to—and that our thinking should focus on the world of shared experience. As Benjamin Franklin writes, our efforts in "Philosophy" make sense only when our pursuit of wisdom is related to human well-being.9 This point is so important that we need to wonder how our efforts were ever allowed to narrow and separate from a broad sense of human welfare to focus upon supposedly more important minutiae. With John Dewey, I saw the job of philosophers to be helping individuals to understand and deal with their philosophical "problems" of living.10 And, perhaps more... (shrink)

In this article we report the findings of a randomised control clinical trial that assessed the impact of a Philosophy for Children program and replicated a previous study conducted in Scotland by Topping and Trickey. A Cognitive Abilities Test was administered as a pretest and a posttest to randomly selected experimental groups and control groups. The students in the experimental group engaged in philosophy lessons in a setting of structured, collaborative inquiry in their language arts classes for one hour per (...) week for a number of weeks. The control group received the standard language arts curriculum in that one hour. The study found that the seventh grade students who had experienced the P4C program showed significant gains relative to those in the seventh grade control group at a high level of statistical significance, but the eighth grade students in the experimental group did not show such gains over the eighth grade control group. It was discovered that the seventh grade teachers started the program early in the school year and continued it for a period of 22 to 26 weeks, while the eighth grade teachers started much later and used the program for only 4 to 10 weeks. Our findings suggest that the P4C program must involve students in activities for a significant period of time before the program shows results, but that a meaningful impact on students’ cognitive abilities can be achieved in about 24 weeks of lessons, less than half the time evidenced by the study by Topping and Trickey. (shrink)

Human cognition is unique in the way in which it relies on combinatorial (or compositional) structures. Language provides ample evidence for the existence of combinatorial structures, but they can also be found in visual cognition. To understand the neural basis of human cognition, it is therefore essential to understand how combinatorial structures can be instantiated in neural terms. In his recent book on the foundations of language, Jackendoff described four fundamental problems for a neural instantiation of combinatorial structures: the massiveness (...) of the binding problem, the problem of 2, the problem of variables, and the transformation of combinatorial structures from working memory to long-term memory. This paper aims to show that these problems can be solved by means of neural “blackboard” architectures. For this purpose, a neural blackboard architecture for sentence structure is presented. In this architecture, neural structures that encode for words are temporarily bound in a manner that preserves the structure of the sentence. It is shown that the architecture solves the four problems presented by Jackendoff. The ability of the architecture to instantiate sentence structures is illustrated with examples of sentence complexity observed in human language performance. Similarities exist between the architecture for sentence structure and blackboard architectures for combinatorial structures in visual cognition, derived from the structure of the visual cortex. These architectures are briefly discussed, together with an example of a combinatorial structure in which the blackboard architectures for language and vision are combined. In this way, the architecture for language is grounded in perception. Perspectives and potential developments of the architectures are discussed. Key Words: binding; blackboard architectures; combinatorial structure; compositionality; language; dynamic system; neurocognition; sentence complexity; sentence structure; working memory; variables; vision. (shrink)

This unusually accessible account of recent Anglo-American philosophy focuses on how that philosophy has challenged deeply held notions of subjectivity, mind, and language. The book is designed on a broad canvas in which recent arguments are placed in a historical context. The author then explores such topics as mental content, moral realism, realism and antirealism, and the character of subjectivity. Much of the book is devoted to an investigation of Donald Davidson's philosophy, and there is also a sustained critique of (...) the position of Richard Rorty. A final chapter defends the realist position against objections from postmodern thought. As a rigorous and historically sensitive account of recent philosophy, this book should enjoy a wide readership among philosophers of many different persuasions, literary theorists, and social scientists who have been influenced by postmodern thought. (shrink)

In their contribution ‘Ethics of the algorithmic prediction of goal of care preferences’1 Ferrario et al elaborate a from theory to practice contribution concerning the realisation of artificial intelligence (AI)-based patient preference prediction (PPP) systems. Such systems are intended to help find the treatment that the patient would have chosen in clinical situations—especially in the intensive care or emergency units—where the patient is no longer capable of making that decision herself. The authors identify several challenges that complicate their effective development, (...) application and evaluation—and offer solutions to them. One of these issues is the question of who should ultimately use said systems. While it is undisputed that clinicians should use these AI systems for their decision-making process, there is an ongoing debate about whether next of kin should use them as well. The authors advocate that ‘’access should be provided to both clinicians and loved ones with due explanations and as desired’. We will disagree with this assessment and explain in our commentary why it is important that surrogates provide their own assessments with as little external (AI) influence as possible. Why do next of kin actually participate in the process of preference finding and treatment decision-making? A key reason is that clinicians usually …. (shrink)

This paper investigates the structure of lattices of normal mono- and polymodal subframelogics, i.e., those modal logics whose frames are closed under a certain type of substructures. Nearly all basic modal logics belong to this class. The main lattice theoretic tool applied is the notion of a splitting of a complete lattice which turns out to be connected with the “geometry” and “topology” of frames, with Kripke completeness and with axiomatization problems. We investigate in detail subframe logics containing K4, those (...) containing polymodal Altn and subframe logics which are tense logics. (shrink)