This book is a critical discussion of the principle of compositionality, the thesis that the meaning of a complex expression is fully determined by the meanings of its constituents and its structure. The aim of this book is to clarify what is meant by this principle, to show that its traditional justification is insufficient, and to discuss some of the problems that have to be addressed before a new attempt can be made to justify it.

Philosophers of embodied and situated cognition have provided convincing explanations of what objects do in affective processes (e.g., in emotion regulation). They have often used the concept of 'affective affordance' to account for the affective role of objects but it is not clear how this concept relates to other concepts of affordance, in particular those used in empirical works in cognitive science. We start to fill this gap by providing a new definition of affective affordances and we suggest a possible (...) way to test this novel theoretical construct through a kinematic analysis of hand movements. (shrink)

This article examines the methodology of a core branch of contemporary political theory or philosophy: “analytic” political theory. After distinguishing political theory from related fields, such as political science, moral philosophy, and legal theory, the article discusses the analysis of political concepts. It then turns to the notions of principles and theories, as distinct from concepts, and reviews the methods of assessing such principles and theories (e.g., the reflective-equilibrium method), for the purpose of justifying or criticizing them. Finally, it looks (...) at a recent debate on how abstract and idealized political theory should be, and assesses the significance of disagreement in political theory. The discussion is carried out from an angle inspired by the philosophy of science. (shrink)

Gerade heute, wo sich die Aufmerksamkeit der führenden Philosophen, Logiker und Mathematiker erneut auf die Grundlagen der systematisch-deduktiven Mathematik richtet, ist dieses Buch von zeitnaher und tiefer Bedeutung.

Concerns about philosophical methodology have emerged as a central issue in contemporary philosophical discussions. In this volume, Tamar Gendler draws together fourteen essays that together illuminate this topic. Three intertwined themes connect the essays. First, each of the chapters focuses, in one way or another, on how we engage with subject matter that we take to be imaginary. This theme is explored in a wide range of cases, including scientific thought experiments, early childhood pretense, thought experiments concerning personal identity, fictional (...) emotions, self-deception, Gettier and fake barn cases, the relation of belief to other attitudes, and the connection between conceivability and possibility. Second, each of the chapters explores, in one way or another, the implications of this for how thought experiments and appeals to intuition can serve as mechanisms for supporting or refuting scientific or philosophical claims. Third, each of the chapters self-consciously exhibits a particular philosophical methodology: that of drawing both on empirical findings from contemporary psychology, and on classic texts in the philosophical tradition By exploring and exhibiting the fruitfulness of these interactions, Gendler promotes the value of engaging in such cross-disciplinary conversations to illuminate philosophical questions. (shrink)

In our everyday interaction with the environment, we often perceive objects and spaces as opportunities to feel, maintain, enhance, and change our affective states and processes. The concept of affective affordance was coined to accommodate this aspect of ordinary perception and the many ways in which we rely on the material environment to regulate our emo- tions. One natural way to think of affective affordances in emotion regulation is to interpret them as tools for regulating felt affective states. We argue (...) that this way of conceiving of affective affordances is too restrictive. By analyzing the role of expressive properties of objects and spaces in emotion regulation, we show that our environment does not need to elicit felt affective states to regulate our emotions. Thus, we revise the concept of affective affordance to accommodate these cases. This revised concept explains more with less. Hence, it should be preferred in wide-reaching philosophical projects that aim to explain human affectivity as a situated phenomenon. (shrink)

According to the contemporary consensus, when reaching in the lexicon grammar looks for items like nouns, verbs, and prepositions while logic sees items like predicates, connectives, and quantifiers. In fact, there doesn’t seem to be a single lexical category contemporary grammar and logic both make use of. I hope to show that while a perfect match between the lexical categories of grammar and logic is impossible there can be a substantial overlap. I propose semantic definitions for all the major parts (...) of speech . I argue that the differences among these categories can be captured in terms of distinctions recognized in logic. (shrink)

We design new languages, by and large, in order to bypass complexities and limitations within the languages we already have. But when we are concerned with language itself we should guard against projecting the simple and powerful syntax and semantics we have concocted back into the sentences we encounter. For some of the features of English, French, or Ancient Greek we routinely abstract away from in the process of formalization might be linguistic universals – the very features that set human (...) languages apart from all the other conceivable ones. How similar natural languages really are to formal ones is an empirical question for linguistics. (shrink)

Sometimes subjects have sufficient internal and external resources to retrieve information stored in memory, in particular information that carries socially charged content. Yet, they fail to do so: they forget it. These cases pose an explanatory challenge to common explanations of forgetting in cognitive science. In this paper, I take this challenge and develop a new explanation of these cases. According to this explanation, these cases are best explained as cases of norm-induced forgetting: cases in which forgetting is caused by (...) social norms in a relevant sense. These cases draw attention to the normative aspects of the mechanisms of forgetting. This is an important but neglected aspect of cases of everyday forgetting, in particular of those characterized by a social dimension. By investigating some ways in which the psychology of social norms is causally relevant in the mechanisms of retrieval failure, I begin to fill this gap. (shrink)

The story of the Ship of Theseus is one of the most venerable conundrums in philosophy. Some philosophers consider it a genuine puzzle. Others deny that it is so. It is, therefore, an open question whether there is or there is not a puzzle in the Ship of Theseus story. So, arguably, it makes sense to test empirically whether people perceive the case as a puzzle. Recently, David Rose, Edouard Machery, Stephen Stich and forty-two other researchers from different countries have (...) undertaken that task. We argue that their tests do not provide any evidence that bears on the question as to whether the Ship of Theseus case is a genuine puzzle. In our discussion we address also what should be taken into account if one wishes to test the puzzling, or not puzzling, status of the Ship of Theseus story. (shrink)

A classical theoretical frame to interpret motor reactions to emotional stimuli is that such stimuli, particularly those threat-related, are processed preferentially, i.e., they are capable of capturing and grabbing attention automatically. Research has recently challenged this view, showing that the task relevance of emotional stimuli is crucial to having a reliable behavioral effect. Such evidence indicated that emotional facial expressions do not automatically influence motor responses in healthy young adults, but they do so only when intrinsically pertinent to the ongoing (...) subject’s goals. Given the theoretical relevance of these findings, it is essential to assess their generalizability to different, socially relevant emotional stimuli such as emotional body postures. To address this issue, we compared the performance of 36 right-handed participants in two different versions of a Go/No-go task. In the Emotional Discrimination task, participants were required to withhold their responses at the display of emotional body postures and to move at the presentation of neutral postures. Differently, in the control task, the same images were shown, but participants had to respond according to the color of the actor/actress’ t-shirt, disregarding the emotional content. Results showed that participants made more commission errors for happy than fearful body postures in the Emotional Discrimination task. However, this difference disappeared in the control task. Such evidence indicates that, like facial emotion, emotional body expressions do not influence motor control automatically, but only when they are task-relevant. (shrink)

En Sutton 2012, Catherine Sutton presenta una nueva e interesante solución al mayor problema al que se enfrenta el co-ubicacionismo : el problema de la fundamentación. Sin embargo, si es correcto rechazar la tesis defendida por Sutton según la cual los trozos o pedazos de materia están extrínsecamente compuestos,entonces su respuesta al problema de la fundamentación resulta incompleta. Además, es difícil ver cómo podría completarse.

A physical theory is a partially interpreted axiomatic formal system, where L is a formal language with some logical, mathematical and physical axioms, and with some derivation rules, and the semantics S is a relationship between the formulas of L and some states of affairs in the physical world. In our ordinary discourse, the formal system L is regarded as an abstract object or structure, the semantics S as something which involves the mental/conceptual realm. This view is of course incompatible (...) with physicalism. How can physical theory be accommodated in a purely physical ontology? The aim of this paper is to outline an account for meaning and truth of physical theory, within the philosophical framework spanned by three doctrines: physicalism, empiricism, and the formalist philosophy of mathematics. (shrink)

Imagine a sculptor who molds a lump of clay to create a statue. Hylomorphism claims that the statue and the lump of clay are two different colocated objects that have different forms, even though they share the same matter. Recently, there has been some discussion on the requirements of consistency for hylomorphist theories. In this paper, we focus on an argument presented by Maegan Fairchild, according to which a minimal version of hylomorphism is inconsistent. We argue that the argument is (...) unsound or, at best, it just points to a well-known problem for hylmorphist theories. Additionally, we explore some general consequences of this fact. (shrink)

The story of quantum probability theory and quantum logic begins with von Neumann’s recognition1, that quantum mechanics can be regarded as a kind of “probability theory”, if the subspace lattice L of the system’s Hilbert space H plays the role of event algebra and the ‘tr’-s play the role of probability distributions over these events. This idea had been completed in the Gleason theorem 2.

If physicalism is true, everything is physical. In other words, everything supervenes on, or is necessitated by, the physical. Accordingly, if there are logical/mathematical facts, they must be necessitated by the physical facts of the world. The aim of this paper is to clarify what logical/mathematical facts actually are and how these facts can be accommodated in a purely physical world.

According to colocationism, two different material objects can be colocated during their entire careers. The typical example is that of a statue and the lump of clay out of which it is made, both of which start to exist and cease to exist at exactly the same time. One of the main problems for colocationism is the grounding problem. Recently, several attractive colocationist answers to the problem have been formulated. In this paper I analyse the proposals by Kit Fine, Kathrin (...) Koslicki, Noël Saenz and Catherine Sutton and conclude that all of them have problematic, unsatisfactory consequences, and this constitutes a strong reason against them. That, in turn, shows, I think, the difficulty of finding a satisfactory colocationist answer to the grounding problem, which continues to be a fundamental difficulty for the position. (shrink)

This article is a brief formulation of a radical thesis. We start with the formalist doctrine that mathematical objects have no meanings; we have marks and rules governing how these marks can be combined. That's all. Then I go further by arguing that the signs of a formal system of mathematics should be considered as physical objects, and the formal operations as physical processes. The rules of the formal operations are or can be expressed in terms of the laws of (...) physics governing these processes. In accordance with the physicalist understanding of mind, this is true even if the operations in question are executed in the head. A truth obtained through (mathematical) reasoning is, therefore, an observed outcome of a neuro-physiological (or other physical) experiment. Consequently, deduction is nothing but a particular case of induction. (shrink)

A fictionalist attitude towards an area of discourse encourages us to assent to certain sentences of that discourse without believing that they are true. Prima facie, this amounts to a suggestion that we should also assent to sentences of the form 'S but I don't believe that S'. Traditional versions of fictionalism have an answer to this challenge, but I argue that the answer is unavailable for a currently popular type of fictionalism. This is bad news for fictionalism in general (...) because the currently popular variety is the one that deals best with the Quine-Putnam indispensability argument. (shrink)

Semantic and pragmatic theories tend to deal with context-change in two radically opposing ways. Some view it as theoretically irrelevant, interpreting each sentence relative to the context as it happens to be at the moment of its utterance. Others view it as theoretically fundamental, proposing to view context-change as the very subject-matter of the theory of interpretation. Robert Stalnaker’s book Context steers a middle course between the extremes–to keep the semantics mostly static while letting the pragmatics go mostly dynamic. Within (...) his framework, context-change matters because interpretation is sometimes prospective, relying not on the context as it is at the time of utterance but on the context as it is anticipated to be somewhat later. This paper critically examines how Stalnaker makes use of prospective interpretation in accounting for accommodation and in capturing the insights of expressivism. (shrink)

A traditional argument based on Leibniz’s Law concludes that, for example, a statue and the piece of marble of which it is made are two different objects. This is because they have different properties: the statue can survive the loss of some of its parts but the piece of marble cannot. Lynne Rudder Baker adds that the piece of marble constitutes the statue. In this paper I focus on what I think is the most powerful objection to Baker’s account of (...) the constitution relation, which has to do with her notion of circumstances. I present the objection following Derk Pereboom’s formulation and, afterwards, I analyse Baker’s answers to the criticism. I conclude that they make her overall project less attractive. Finally, I propose a new answer to the criticism. This will suppose a new formulation of the constitution relation, albeit done in the spirit of Baker’s account. (shrink)

In Imagination and Convention, Ernest Lepore and Matthew Stone claim that there are no conversational implicatures. They argue that the scope of the conventional is wider and the scope of communication narrower than followers of Grice tend to assume, and so, there is simply no room for the sort of indirect communication based on reasoning about intentions conversational implicatures are supposed to exemplify. This way they seek to rehabilitate the old Lockean model of linguistic communication. I argue that while the (...) book is successful in undermining a number of Gricean analyses, the core cases of conversational implicature resist recasting in terms of disambiguation or creative interpretation. Granting that linguistic communication relies more heavily on conventions and that interpretation is more frequently open-ended than it is usually thought cannot save the Lockean model. (shrink)

(ed. Tamar Szabo Gendler, Susanna Siegel and Steven M. Cahn) Oxford, 2007.

On the basis of what I call physico-formalist philosophy of mathematics, I will develop an amended account of the Kantian–Reichenbachian conception of constitutive a priori. It will be shown that the features attributed to a real object are not possessed by the object as a “thing-in-itself”; they require a physical theory by means of which these features are constituted. It will be seen that the existence of such a physical theory implies that a physical object can possess a property only (...) if other contingently existing physical objects exist; therefore, the intrinsic–extrinsic distinction is flawed. (shrink)

This unique textbook introduces linguists to key issues in the philosophy of language. Accessible to students who have taken only a single course in linguistics, yet sophisticated enough to be used at the graduate level, the book provides an overview of the central issues in philosophy of language, a key topic in educating the next generation of researchers in semantics and pragmatics. Thoroughly grounded in contemporary linguistic theory, the book focus on the core foundational and philosophical issues in semantics and (...) pragmatics, richly illustrated with historical case studies to show how linguistic questions are related to philosophical problems in areas such as metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics. Students are introduced in Part I to the issues at the core of semantics, including compositionality, reference and intentionality. Part II looks at pragmatics: context, conversational update, implicature and speech acts; whilst Part III discusses foundational questions about meaning. The book will encourage future collaboration and development between philosophy of language and linguistics. (shrink)

Three studies examined how members of a national group react to in-group wrongdoings. We expected that perceived in-group moral superiority would lead to unwillingness to repair the aggression. We also expected that internal-focused emotions such as group-based guilt and group-based shame would predict specific, misdeed-related reparative intentions but not general approach motivation toward the victim groups. In Study 1, facing the in-group’s recent aggression, participants who believed that the Hungarians have been more moral throughout their history than members of other (...) nations, used more exonerating cognitions, experienced less in-group critical emotions and showed less willingness to provide reparations for the members of the victim group. Study 2 and Study 3 confirmed most findings of Study 1. Perceived in-group moral superiority directly or indirectly reduced willingness to provide either general or specific reparations, while internally focused in-group critical emotions predicted specific misdeed-related reparative intentions but not general approach motivation. The role of emotional attachment to the in-group is considered. (shrink)

In the last few years there has been an explosion of philosophical interest in perception; after decades of neglect, it is now one of the most fertile areas for new work. Perceptual Experience presents new work by fifteen of the world's leading philosophers. All papers are written specially for this volume, and they cover a broad range of topics to do with sensation and representation, consciousness and awareness, and the connections between perception and knowledge and between perception and action. This (...) will be the book on the philosophy of perception, a fascinating resource for philosophers and psychologists. (shrink)

De nombreuses recherches contemporaines affirment que les idées centrales de l’énactivisme et de l’‘Esprit Étendu’ ont une origine pragmatiste. La théorie du signe de Peirce ainsi que sa sémiotique cognitive, le concept énactiviste de sense-making et l’externalisme cognitif de l’‘Esprit Étendu’ partagent des aspects théoriques fondamentaux. En raison de ces points communs je suggère que le pragmatisme et la sémiotique de Peirce peuvent offrir des perspectives intéressantes pour mieux comprendre le débat entre l’énactivisme et l’‘Esprit Étendu’. Je prends en examen (...) un point sur lequel les deux théories sont en désaccord : le rôle des représentations dans les processus cognitifs. Je suggère qu’une perspective sur les représentations inspirée par le concept peircéen de signe peut offrir la base théorique pour une intégration de ces deux positions contemporaines. (shrink)

Ion channels mediate ion flux across biological membranes and regulate important organellar and cellular tasks. A recent study revealed the presence of four new proteins, the MIM complex (composed by Mim1 and Mim2), Ayr1, OMC7, and OMC8, that are able to form ion‐conducting channels in the outer mitochondria membrane (OMM). These findings strongly indicate that the OMM is endowed with many solute‐specific channels, in addition to porins and known channels mediating protein import into mitochondria. These solute‐specific channels provide essential pathways (...) for the controlled transport of ions and metabolites and may thus add a further layer of specificity to the regulation of mitochondrial function at the organelle‐cytosol and/or inter‐organellar interface. Future studies will be required to fully understand the way(s) of regulation of these new channels and to integrate them into signaling pathways within the cells. (shrink)

Let us consider a statue and the piece of clay out of which it is made, and let us suppose that they start to exist and cease to exist at exactly the same time. According to colocationism, the statue and the piece of clay are two different objects: they have different properties and, according to Leibniz’s Law, the same object cannot have different properties. One of the most difficult questions for colocationism is that of the grounding problem : given that (...) the statue and the piece of clay share many of their properties, what is it that grounds the fact that they have different sortal properties? Recently, Catherine Sutton has offered a very interesting answer to the question. However, as I will argue, it cannot be applied to all cases of colocated objects and therefore, it is not an adequate solution to the grounding problem. The main objective of this paper is to present a new solution to the grounding problem that integrates some of Sutton’s theses, but that allows us to give a complete answer to the question. To do this, the notion of a process of coming into existence will be crucial. After presenting the new proposal, I will compare it with the proposals by Kit Fine and Noël Saenz. (shrink)

Let us consider a statue and the piece of clay out of which it is made, and let us suppose that they start to exist and cease to exist at exactly the same time. According to colocationism, the statue and the piece of clay are two different objects: they have different properties and, according to Leibniz’s Law, the same object cannot have different properties. One of the most difficult questions for colocationism is that of the grounding problem: given that the (...) statue and the piece of clay share many of their properties, what is it that grounds the fact that they have different sortal properties? Recently, Catherine Sutton has offered a very interesting answer to the question. However, as I will argue, it cannot be applied to all cases of colocated objects and therefore, it is not an adequate solution to the grounding problem. The main objective of this paper is to present a new solution to the grounding problem that integrates some of Sutton’s theses, but that allows us to give a complete answer to the question. To do this, the notion of a process of coming into existence will be crucial. After presenting the new proposal, I will compare it with the proposals by Kit Fine and Noël Saenz. (shrink)

Thomas Sattig has argued recently that constitutionalism renders determinism about the actual world false, just in virtue of ordinary facts about ordinary middle-sized material objects. However, it seems that, if determinism about the actual world is false, this should be so for reasons of physics rather than in virtue of ordinary facts about ordinary objects. This is the problem of cheap indeterminism. Sattig also claims, however, that constitutionalists can solve this problem if they abandon an attractive and promising solution to (...) the classical grounding problem affecting their view. In this paper I argue that, against his claims, constitutionalists can solve the problem of cheap indeterminism and the grounding problem simultaneously. (shrink)

Traditionally, constitutionalists have offered just one notion of constitution to analyse the relation that an object, such as a statue or a chain, bears to the object/s from which it is made: let us say, a piece of marble in the first case or a piece of metal in the second. Robert Wilson proposes to differentiate two notions of constitution and, in this way, to offer constitutionalists a more varied range of metaphysical tools. To justify the introduction of the difference, (...) he presents several phenomena and problems, the explanation of which would justify the distinction he makes. In this paper I argue that Wilson’s proposal would not increase the explanatory power of a theory of constitution as it has traditionally been understood, only its complexity. Increasing the complexity without increasing the explanatory power of a theory, I defend, goes against one, at least prima facie, basic theoretical virtue: parsimony. In my argumentation I crucially use, for the case of Wilson’s first three arguments, the existence of principles of existence−persistence, which constitutionalists, Wilson among them, usually accept. In arguing against Wilson’s fourth argument I use a slightly modified version of Lynne Rudder Baker’s theory of constitution. (shrink)

In the current debate on how ordinary objects persist through time, more than one philosopher has endorsed the following two theses: stage theory and diachronic universalism. In this paper, I would like to offer a solution to the problem that Balashov poses to the joint acceptance of these theses. I will also offer a number of reasons why, even if it is not necessary to undermine Balashov’s counterexamples, stage theorists can, without making their theory less appealing, reject Balashov’s understanding of (...) sorts, which plays a crucial role in his criticisms of stage universalism. (shrink)

I argue that standard definitions of quantifiers are inadequate and offer a new one. The new definition categorizes expressions as quantifiers in accordance with our pre-theoretical judgments, it is broadly applicable to both formal and natural languages, and it eschews unnecessary theoretical commitments about the details of the syntax and semantics of these expressions.

Num espaço acadêmico dominado por formalismos textuales, a arte constitui se numa revolução, assim a presente expressão artística se ergue como uma forma de diálogo entre o que pode ser entendido como fazer ciência e o lugar que as artes cênicas e performáticas podem gerar quando são colocadas em jogo no corpo de uma mulher que faz perguntas incômodas, que faz uso de um discurso que poderia parecer ininteligível e que qual borboleta, faz uma metamorfose que até chega a gerar (...) surpresa e espanto nela mesma e no público. (shrink)