In this paper, new evidence is presented for the assumption that the reason-relation reading of indicative conditionals ('if A, then C') reflects a conventional implicature. In four experiments, it is investigated whether relevance effects found for the probability assessment of indicative conditionals (Skovgaard-Olsen, Singmann, and Klauer, 2016a) can be classified as being produced by a) a conversational implicature, b) a (probabilistic) presupposition failure, or c) a conventional implicature. After considering several alternative hypotheses and the accumulating evidence from other studies (...) as well, we conclude that the evidence is most consistent with the Relevance Effect being the outcome of a conventional implicature. This finding indicates that the reason-relation reading is part of the semantic content of indicative conditionals, albeit not part of their primary truth-conditional content. (shrink)

Suppose that two competing norms, N1 and N2, can be identified such that a given person’s response can be interpreted as correct according to N1 but incorrect according to N2. Which of these two norms, if any, should one use to interpret such a response? In this paper we seek to address this fundamental problem by studying individual variation in the interpretation of conditionals by establishing individual profiles of the participants based on their case judgments and reflective attitudes. To investigate (...) the participants’ reflective attitudes we introduce a new experimental paradigm called the Scorekeeping Task. As a case study, we identify the participants who follow the Suppositional Theory of conditionals (N1) versus Inferentialism (N2) and investigate to what extent internally consistent competence models can be reconstructed for the participants on this basis. After extensive empirical investigations, an apparent reasoning error with and-to-if inferences was found in one of these two groups. The implications of this case study for debates on the proper role of normative considerations in psychology are discussed. (shrink)

It is a common line in democratic theory that citizens must only offer “public” reasons into political discourse. This is a civic obligation that is traditionally taken bypolitical liberals to fall on the citizen as speaker—as an individual who forwards political arguments. I argue here that taking proper account of the epistemic complexity involved in distinguishing public from nonpublic reasons entails robust civic obligations on listeners. Thus, those who accept this obligation for speakers must accept a corresponding civic obligation on (...) listeners—a duty to attempt to identify public reasons within others’ presented arguments, even if those arguments appear nonpublic at first blush. (shrink)

Recent studies indicate that indicative conditionals like "If people wear masks, the spread of Covid-19 will be diminished" require a probabilistic dependency between their antecedents and consequents to be acceptable (Skovgaard-Olsen et al., 2016). But it is easy to make the slip from this claim to the thesis that indicative conditionals are acceptable only if this probabilistic dependency results from a causal relation between antecedent and consequent. According to Pearl (2009), understanding a causal relation involves multiple, hierarchically organized conceptual (...) dimensions: prediction, intervention, and counterfactual dependence. In a series of experiments, we test the hypothesis that these conceptual dimensions are differentially encoded in indicative and counterfactual conditionals. If this hypothesis holds, then there are limits as to how much of a causal relation is captured by indicative conditionals alone. Our results show that the acceptance of indicative and counterfactual conditionals can become dissociated. Furthermore, it is found that the acceptance of both is needed for accepting a causal relation between two co-occurring events. The implications that these findings have for the hypothesis above, and for recent debates at the intersection of the psychology of reasoning and causal judgment, are critically discussed. Our findings are consistent with viewing indicative conditionals as answering predictive queries requiring evidential relevance (even in the absence of direct causal relations). Counterfactual conditionals in contrast target causal relevance, specifically. Finally, we discuss the implications our results have for the yet unsolved question of how reasoners succeed in constructing causal models from verbal descriptions. (shrink)

In this paper, a critical discussion is made of the role of entailments in the so-called New Paradigm of psychology of reasoning based on Bayesian models of rationality (Elqayam & Over, 2013). It is argued that assessments of probabilistic coherence cannot stand on their own, but that they need to be integrated with empirical studies of intuitive entailment judgments. This need is motivated not just by the requirements of probability theory itself, but also by a need to enhance the interdisciplinary (...) integration of the psychology of reasoning with formal semantics in linguistics. The constructive goal of the paper is to introduce a new experimental paradigm, called the Dialogical Entailment task, to supplement current trends in the psychology of reasoning towards investigating knowledge-rich, social reasoning under uncertainty (Oaksford and Chater, 2019). As a case study, this experimental paradigm is applied to reasoning with conditionals and negation operators (e.g. CEM, wide and narrow negation). As part of the investigation, participants’ entailment judgments are evaluated against their probability evaluations to assess participants’ cross-task consistency over two experimental sessions. (shrink)

Deliberative democratic theorists typically use accounts of public reason— that is, constraints on the types of reasons one can invoke in public, political discourse—as a tool to resist political exclusion; at its most basic level, the aim of a theory of public reason is to prevent situations in which powerful majority groups are able to justify policy choices based on reasons that are not even assessable by minority groups. However, I demonstrate here that a type of exclusion I call "conceptual (...) exclusion" complicates this picture. I argue that the possibility of conceptual exclusion creates the potential for public reason constraints to further exclude already marginalized groups— contrary to the standard view—and thus that taking conceptual exclusion seriously requires both a revision of traditional accounts of public reason and a reconceptualization of our civic obligations. (shrink)

More than a decade of research has found strong evidence for P(if A, then C) = P(C|A) (“the Equation”). We argue, however, that this hypothesis provides an overly simplified picture due to its inability to account for relevance. We manipulated relevance in the evaluation of the probability and acceptability of indicative conditionals and found that relevance moderates the effect of P(C|A). This corroborates the Default and Penalty Hypothesis put forward in this paper. Finally, the probability and acceptability of concessive conditionals (...) (“Even if A, then still C”) were investigated and it was found that the Equation provides a better account of concessive conditionals than of indicatives across relevance manipulations. (shrink)

IntroductionCouple violence (CV) affects many, and the consequences of those actions are grave, not only for the individual suffering at the hand of the perpetrator but also for the other persons in the family. Violence often happens among more than just the adults within one family. Even if CV has been thoroughly investigated in the general population very few studies have investigated this objective on a clinical sample, and none of these have included family violence.AimThis article identifies and describes the (...) group of clients that have issues of physical couple and family violence. It analyses a model that can help to discover physical violence and help therapists to assess what actions to take in therapy to prevent further physical violence.MethodologyDescriptive analysis, t-tests, and structural equation modeling (SEM) are used on a sample of clients receiving couple and family therapy (CFT) in Norway (N = 830). Family violence is modeled by the partner’s expectations toward each other, levels of anger, sexual satisfaction, and self-control.ResultsOne-in-five clients experienced physical CV in their current relationship and one-in-four experienced physical family violence. The group of clients who experienced CV differed from those without such experiences in having lower income, more prior experience with psychotherapy, more experience with alcohol abuse in childhood, and far more physical family violence in their current family. Our model predicting physical coupl... (shrink)

In this study we investigate the influence of reason-relation readings of indicative conditionals and ‘and’/‘but’/‘therefore’ sentences on various cognitive assessments. According to the Frege-Grice tradition, a dissociation is expected. Specifically, differences in the reason-relation reading of these sentences should affect participants’ evaluations of their acceptability but not of their truth value. In two experiments we tested this assumption by introducing a relevance manipulation into the truth-table task as well as in other tasks assessing the participants’ acceptability and probability evaluations. Across (...) the two experiments a strong dissociation was found. The reason-relation reading of all four sentences strongly affected their probability and acceptability evaluations, but hardly affected their respective truth evaluations. Implications of this result for recent work on indicative conditionals are discussed. (shrink)

It is a common line in democratic theory that citizens must only offer “public” reasons into political discourse. This is a civic obligation that is traditionally taken bypolitical liberals to fall on the citizen as speaker—as an individual who forwards political arguments. I argue here that taking proper account of the epistemic complexity involved in distinguishing public from nonpublic reasons entails robust civic obligations on listeners. Thus, those who accept this obligation for speakers must accept a corresponding civic obligation on (...) listeners—a duty to attempt to identify public reasons within others’ presented arguments, even if those arguments appear nonpublic at first blush. (shrink)

This paper examines precursors and consequents of perceived relevance of a proposition A for a proposition C. In Experiment 1, we test Spohn's assumption that ∆P = P − P is a good predictor of ratings of perceived relevance and reason relations, and we examine whether it is a better predictor than the difference measure − P). In Experiment 2, we examine the effects of relevance on probabilistic coherence in Cruz, Baratgin, Oaksford, and Over's uncertain “and-to-if” inferences. The results suggest (...) that ∆P predicts perceived relevance and reason relations better than the difference measure and that participants are either less probabilistically coherent in “and-to-if” inferences than initially assumed or that they do not follow P = P. Results are discussed in light of recent results suggesting that the Equation may not hold under conditions of irrelevance or negative relevance. (shrink)

The aim is to motivate theoretically a relevance approach to conditionals in a comparative discussion of the main alternatives. In particular, it will be argued that a relevance approach to conditionals is better motivated than the suppositional theory currently enjoying wide endorsement. In the course of this discussion, an argument will be presented for why failures of the epistemic relevance of the antecedent for the consequent should be counted as genuine semantic defects. Furthermore, strategies for dealing with compositionality and the (...) perceived objective purport of indicative conditionals will be put forward. (shrink)

Ranking theory is a formal epistemology that has been developed in over 600 pages in Spohn's recent book The Laws of Belief, which aims to provide a normative account of the dynamics of beliefs that presents an alternative to current probabilistic approaches. It has long been received in the AI community, but it has not yet found application in experimental psychology. The purpose of this paper is to derive clear, quantitative predictions by exploiting a parallel between ranking theory and a (...) statistical model called logistic regression. This approach is illustrated by the development of a model for the conditional inference task using Spohn's ranking theoretic approach to conditionals. (shrink)

Introduction to special issue of Synthese.

It is widely held that there are important differences between indicative conditionals (e.g. “If the authors are linguists, they have written a linguistics paper”) and subjunctive conditionals (e.g. “If the authors had been linguists, they would have written a linguistics paper”). A central difference is that indicatives and subjunctives convey different stances towards the truth of their antecedents. Indicatives (often) convey neutrality: for example, about whether the authors in question are linguists. Subjunctives (often) convey the falsity of the antecedent: for (...) example, that the authors in question are not linguists. This paper tests prominent accounts of how these different stances are conveyed: whether by presupposition or conversational implicature. Experiment 1 tests the presupposition account by investigating whether the stances project – remain constant – when embedded under operators like negations, possibility modals, and interrogatives, a key characteristic of presuppositions. Experiment 2 tests the conversational-implicature account by investigating whether the stances can be cancelled without producing a contradiction, a key characteristic of implicatures. The results provide evidence that both stances – neutrality about the antecedent in indicatives and the falsity of the antecedent in subjunctives – are conveyed by conversational implicatures. (shrink)

This book examines the complex and varied ways in which fictions relate to the real world, and offers a precise account of how imaginative works of literature can use fictional content to explore matters of universal human interest. While rejecting the traditional view that literature is important for the truths that it imparts, the authors also reject attempts to cut literature off altogether from real human concerns. Their detailed account of fictionality, mimesis, and cognitive value, founded on the methods of (...) analytical philosophy, restores to literature its distinctive status among cultural practices. The authors also explore metaphysical and skeptical views, prevalent in modern thought, according to which the world itself is a kind of fiction, and truth no more than a social construct. They identify different conceptions of fiction in science, logic, epistemology, and make-believe, and thereby challenge the idea that discourse per se is fictional and that different modes of discourse are at root indistinguishable. They offer rigorous analyses of the roles of narrative, imagination, metaphor, and "making" in human thought processes. Both in their methods and in their conclusions, Lamarque and Olsen aim to restore rigor and clarity to debates about the values of literature, and to provide new, philosophically sound foundations for a genuine change of direction in literary theorizing. (shrink)

The main goal of this paper is to investigate what explanatory resources Robert Brandom’s distinction between acknowledged and consequential commitments affords in relation to the problem of logical omniscience. With this distinction the importance of the doxastic perspective under consideration for the relationship between logic and norms of reasoning is emphasized, and it becomes possible to handle a number of problematic cases discussed in the literature without thereby incurring a commitment to revisionism about logic. One such case in particular is (...) the preface paradox, which will receive an extensive treatment. As we shall see, the problem of logical omniscience not only arises within theories based on deductive logic; but also within the recent paradigm shift in psychology of reasoning. So dealing with this problem is important not only for philosophical purposes but also from a psychological perspective. (shrink)

This dissertation is devoted to empirically contrasting the Suppositional Theory of conditionals, which holds that indicative conditionals serve the purpose of engaging in hypothetical thought, and Inferentialism, which holds that indicative conditionals express reason relations. Throughout a series of experiments, probabilistic and truth-conditional variants of Inferentialism are investigated using new stimulus materials, which manipulate previously overlooked relevance conditions. These studies are some of the first published studies to directly investigate the central claims of Inferentialism empirically. In contrast, the Suppositional Theory (...) of conditionals has an impressive track record through more than a decade of intensive testing. The evidence for the Suppositional Theory encompasses three sources. Firstly, direct investigations of the probability of indicative conditionals, which substantiate “the Equation” (P(if A, then C) = P(C|A)). Secondly, the pattern of results known as “the defective truth table” effect, which corroborates the de Finetti truth table. And thirdly, indirect evidence from the uncertain and-to-if inference task. Through four studies each of these sources of evidence are scrutinized anew under the application of novel stimulus materials that factorially combine all permutations of prior and relevance levels of two conjoined sentences. The results indicate that the Equation only holds under positive relevance (P(C|A) – P(C|¬A) > 0) for indicative conditionals. In the case of irrelevance (P(C|A) – P(C|¬A) = 0), or negative relevance (P(C|A) – P(C|¬A) < 0), the strong relationship between P(if A, then C) and P(C|A) is disrupted. This finding suggests that participants tend to view natural language conditionals as defective under irrelevance and negative relevance (Chapter 2). Furthermore, most of the participants turn out only to be probabilistically coherent above chance levels for the uncertain and-to-if inference in the positive relevance condition, when applying the Equation (Chapter 3). Finally, the results on the truth table task indicate that the de Finetti truth table is at most descriptive for about a third of the participants (Chapter 4). Conversely, strong evidence for a probabilistic implementation of Inferentialism could be obtained from assessments of P(if A, then C) across relevance levels (Chapter 2) and the participants’ performance on the uncertain-and-to-if inference task (Chapter 3). Yet the results from the truth table task suggest that these findings could not be extended to truth-conditional Inferentialism (Chapter 4). On the contrary, strong dissociations could be found between the presence of an effect of the reason relation reading on the probability and acceptability evaluations of indicative conditionals (and connate sentences), and the lack of an effect of the reason relation reading on the truth evaluation of the same sentences. A bird’s eye view on these surprising results is taken in the final chapter and it is discussed which perspectives these results open up for future research. (shrink)

In this paper, a novel experimental task is developed for testing the highly influential, but experimentally underexplored, possible worlds account of conditionals (Stalnaker, 1968; Lewis, 1973). In Experiment 1, this new task is used to test both indicative and subjunctive conditionals. For indicative conditionals, five competing truth tables are compared, including the previously untested, multi-dimensional possible worlds semantics of Bradley (2012). In Experiment 2, these results are replicated and it is shown that they cannot be accounted for by an alternative (...) hypothesis proposed by our reviewers. In Experiment 3, individual variation in truth assignments of indicative conditionals is investigated via Bayesian mixture models that classify participants as following one of several competing models. As a novelty of this study, it is found that a possible worlds semantics of Lewis and Stalnaker is capable of accounting for participants’ aggregate truth value assignments in this task. Applied to indicative conditionals, we show across three experiments, that the theory both captures participants’ truth values at the aggregate level (Experiments 1 and 2) and that it makes up the largest subgroup in the analysis of individual variation in our experimental paradigm (Experiment 3). (shrink)

Statements containing epistemic modals (e.g., “by spring 2023 most European countries may have the Covid-19 pandemic under control”) are common expressions of epistemic uncertainty. In this paper, previous published findings (Knobe & Yalcin, 2014; Khoo & Phillips, 2018) on the opposition between Contextualism and Relativism for epistemic modals are re-examined. It is found that these findings contain a substantial degree of individual variation. To investigate whether participants differ in their interpretation of epistemic modals, an experiment with multiple phases and sessions (...) is used to classify participants according to the three semantic theories of Relativism, Contextualism, and Objectivism. Through this study, some of the first empirical evidence for the kind of truth-value shifts postulated by semantic Relativism is presented. It is furthermore found that participants’ disagreement judgments match their truth evaluations and that participants are capable of distinguishing between truth and justification. In a second experimental session, it is investigated whether participants thus classified follow the norm of retraction which Relativism uses to account for argumentation with epistemic modals. Here the results are less favorable for Relativism. In a second experiment, these results are replicated and the normative beliefs of participants concerning the norm of retraction are investigated following work on measuring norms by Bicchieri (2017). Again, it is found that on average participants show no strong preferences concerning the norm of retraction for epistemic modals. Yet, it was found that participants who had committed to Objectivism and had training in logics applied the norm of retraction to might-statements. These results present a substantial challenge to the account of argumentation with epistemic modals presented in MacFarlane (2014), as discussed. Keywords: Epistemic Modals, Relativism, Norm Conflicts, Retraction, Semantics, Truth Conditions, Argumentation. (shrink)

A number of papers have applied the CNI model of moral judgments to investigate deontological and consequentialist response tendencies (Gawronski et al., 2017). A controversy has emerged concerning the methodological assumptions of the CNI model (Baron & Goodwin, 2020, 2021; Gawronski et al. 2020). In this paper, we contribute to this debate by extending the CNI paradigm with a skip option. This allows us to test an invariance assumption that the CNI model shares with prominent process-dissociation models in cognitive and (...) social psychology (Klauer et al., 2015). Like for these models, the present experiments found violations of the invariance assumption for the CNI model. In Experiment 2, we replicate these results and selectively influence the new parameter for the skip option. In addition, structural equation modeling reveals that previous findings for the relationship between gender and the CNI parameters are completely mediated by the association of gender with primary psychopathy. (shrink)

Determining the ethical standards to apply to environmental issues presents a difficult dilemma for many managers. The many stakeholders to whom managers must answer tend to view environmental issues quite differently. Multinational corporations often encounter attitudes toward environmental protection in other countries that are quite different from those found in their domestic market. Corporate policy makers must address the national differences in values when determining ethically acceptable behavior. Using the case of Texaco and its alleged contamination of Ecuador’s Amazon jungle (...) as an example, this paper applies the framework of Integrative Social Contract Theory to address issues of ethical jurisdiction and environmental protection. (shrink)

Recently several papers have reported relevance effects on the cognitive assessments of indicative conditionals, which pose an explanatory challenge to the Suppositional Theory of conditionals advanced by David Over, which is influential in the psychology of reasoning. Some of these results concern the “Equation” (P(if A, then C) = P(C|A)), others the de Finetti truth table, and yet others the uncertain and-to-inference task. The purpose of this chapter is to take a Birdseye view on the debate and investigate some of (...) the open theoretical issues posed by the empirical results. Central among these is whether to count these effects as belonging to pragmatics or semantics. (shrink)

In this paper we compare Leitgeb’s stability theory of belief and Spohn’s ranking-theoretic account of belief. We discuss the two theories as solutions to the lottery paradox. To compare the two theories, we introduce a novel translation between ranking functions and probability functions. We draw some crucial consequences from this translation, in particular a new probabilistic belief notion. Based on this, we explore the logical relation between the two belief theories, showing that models of Leitgeb’s theory correspond to certain models (...) of Spohn’s theory. The reverse is not true. Finally, we discuss how these results raise new questions in belief theory. In particular, we raise the question whether stability is rightly thought of as a property pertaining to belief. (shrink)

Genre theory, as it has developed in the last forty years, has made use of what I call a constitutive concept of genre, a concept that has built into it the assumption that genre plays a central epistemic role in the interpretation of verbal discourse. In this paper I argue that there are theoretical problems with such a concept that have not been recognized and that make it unsuitable as a critical instrument in literary history and literary studies. A fruitful (...) concept of literary genre needs to be pragmatic with only a heuristic and not an epistemic function. As an example, the article looks at the criticism produced in connection with the picaresque novel and in particular at the account given of the origin of the genre, an account that could not have been given if one had employed a constitutive concept of genre. (shrink)

Background Nurse leaders increasingly need effective tools that facilitate the prioritisation of ethics and help staff navigate ethical challenges and prevent moral distress. This study examined experiences with a new digital tool for ethical reflection, tailored to improve the capabilities of both leaders and employees in the context of municipal long-term care. Aim The aim was to explore the experiences of nurse leaders and nurses in using Digital Ethical Reflection as a tool for ethics work in home nursing care. Research (...) design The study employed a qualitative design, incorporating individual and focus group interviews for data collection. Qualitative content analysis was used to analyse the data. Participants and research context The participants comprised six nurse leaders and 13 nurses, representing six home care zones across two Norwegian municipalities. Ethical considerations The study involved informed, voluntary participation and was approved by the Norwegian Agency for Shared Services in Education and Research. Findings Four themes were developed: a constant walk on the edge between engagement and discouragement and lost in translation describe the process, while tuning in to the ethical dimension and navigating ethical uncertainties illuminate the experienced significance of Digital Ethical Reflection. Conclusion Success with Digital Ethical Reflection in home nursing care depends on clear leadership planning, nurses’ understanding of the tool’s purpose, and active use of digital registrations. Support from ethically interested nurses enhances overall engagement. Further research is needed to explore the potential of Digital Ethical Reflection as an additional tool in long-term care ethics work. (shrink)

An organizing theme of the dissertation is the issue of how to make philosophical theories useful for scientific purposes. An argument for the contention is presented that it doesn’t suffice merely to theoretically motivate one’s theories, and make them compatible with existing data, but that philosophers having this aim should ideally contribute to identifying unique and hard to vary predictions of their theories. This methodological recommendation is applied to the ranking-theoretic approach to conditionals, which emphasizes the epistemic relevance and the (...) expression of reason relations as part of the semantics of the natural language conditional. As a first step, this approach is theoretically motivated in a comparative discussion of other alternatives in psychology of reasoning, like the suppositional theory of conditionals, and novel approaches to the problems of compositionality and accounting for the objective purport of indicative conditionals are presented. In a second step, a formal model is formulated, which allows us to derive quantitative predictions from the ranking-theoretic approach, and it is investigated which novel avenues of empirical research that this model opens up for. Finally, a treatment is given of the problem of logical omniscience as it concerns the issue of whether ranking theory (and other similar approaches) makes too idealized assumptions about rationality to allow for interesting applications in psychology of reasoning. Building on the work of Robert Brandom, a novel solution to this problem is presented, which both opens up for new perspectives in psychology of reasoning and appears to be capable of satisfying a range of constraints on bridge principles between logic and norms of reasoning, which would otherwise stand in a tension. (shrink)

It has become increasingly common for philosophers to distinguish between objective and subjective rightness, and there has been much discussion recently about what an adequate theory of subjective rightness looks like. In this article, I propose a new theory of subjective rightness. According to it, an action is subjectively right if and only if it minimizes expected objective wrongness. I explain this theory in detail and argue that it avoids many of the problems that other theories of subjective rightness face. (...) I end by responding to some objections. (shrink)

In this manuscript we study individual variation in the interpretation of conditionals by establishing individual profiles of the participants based on their behavioral responses and reflective attitudes. To investigate the participants’ reflective attitudes we introduce a new experimental paradigm called the Scorekeeping Task, and a Bayesian mixture model tailored to analyze the data. The goal is thereby to identify the participants who follow the Suppositional Theory of conditionals and Inferentialism and to investigate their performance on the uncertain and-to-if inference task.

Habilitation thesis in psychology. The book consists of a collection of reasoning studies. The experimental investigations will take us from people’s reasoning about probabilities, entailments, pragmatic factors, argumentation, and causality to morality. An overarching theme of the book is norm pluralism and individual differences in rationality research.

Since the early 1990s, the extractive industries have increasingly valued corporate social responsibility in the communities where they operate. More recently, these industries have begun to recognize the importance of adapting CSR efforts to unique local contexts rather than applying a one-size-fits-all model. However, firms understand local context to mean culture and treat the physical properties of the host region—topography, geology, hydrology, and climate—as the exclusive purview of mineral geologists and engineers. In this article, we examine the organization of CSR (...) at two industrial-scale gold mines in Guatemala, owned by the same firm, which yielded starkly distinct levels of support among host community residents. We develop the idea of social terrain to convey the way in which the biophysical environment informs local social relations and imbues phenomena with particular social meanings. We argue that firms must account for social terrain in organizing for CSR. The literature struggles to provide guidelines for identifying and understanding stakeholders. Social terrain, we argue, can begin to bridge this gap between theory and practice. (shrink)

Our aim is to explore and develop notions of objectivity that are useful and appropriate for critical realist empirical research. Part I explores the values associated with objectivity, Part II the linkages between objectivity and situated action. The introductory section of Part I explains why it is worthwhile in realist terms to develop the notion of objectivity; that is, develop it as opposed to remaining content with murky hidden notions or connotations that the term ‘objectivity’ brings to mind and that (...) tend to cause confusion in how it is accepted and rejected. This is important as a clarification exercise for social research. In Part II, we argue that the growth of knowledge requires engagement and critical analysis. We develop the idea that if subjects are engaging objectively with reality and its multiple standpoints, then the results will tend to be transformative. Again, our aim is to be of use to practical researchers by providing underlying arguments. Specifically, we argue that objectivity is a bridge between the subjectivities of subjects and the rest of the real world. (shrink)

The essays in this collection are concerned with the philosophical problems that arise in connection with the understanding and evaluation of literature - such problems as the relationship between the work and the author (authorial intention), between the work and the world (reference and truth), the definition of a literary work, and the nature of literary theory itself. Professor Olsen attacks many of the orthodoxies of modern literary theory, in particular the enterprise to build a comprehensive systematic literary theory. (...) His own work is informed by a consistent perspective: the assumption that literature is a social institution governed by conventions, and that answers to problems of interpretation and appreciation can be found only through an analysis of these conventions. This is an important book for scholars and students of literary theory and philosophy, especially for those who see an ever-increasing cross-fertilization between the two disciplines. (shrink)

This is a paperback edition of what has become an important contribution to aesthetics and the theory of literature. The author analyses in detail how the reader responds to literature and how he begins to evaluate it. Mr Olsen characterizes literature as an institution and thus forges links with contemporary philosophy which sees all human action as ordered and defined by social institutions.

Corporate environmental performance has become a key focus of business leaders, policy makers, and scholars alike. Today, scholarship on environmental practice increasingly highlights how various aspects of corporate governance can influence environmental performance. However, the prior literature is inconclusive as to whether ownership by insiders (officers and directors) will have positive or negative environmental effects and whether insider voting control or equity control is more salient to environmental outcomes. This article leverages a unique empirical data set of dual-class firms, where (...) insiders have voting rights disproportionate to their equity rights, to shed light on this question. We find that, on average, dual-class firms underperform their single-class peers on environmental measures and that the discrepancy comes from dual-class firms where insiders have more voting control, relative to their equity stake. While small increases in voting control are associated with improved environmental performance, too much (relative to insiders’ equity stake) worsens firms’ environmental performance. Insider equity control alone has no impact on environmental outcomes. Our findings have important implications for agency theory and environmental scholarship by identifying contingencies on the impact of voting and equity-based incentives. This research casts doubt on the idea that providing insiders with significant voting control will aid environmental performance. (shrink)

In this paper, I motivate and defend the distinction between an objective and a subjective moral sense of “ought.” I begin by looking at the standard way the distinction is motivated, namely by appealing to relatively simple cases where an agent does something she thinks is best, but her action has a tragic outcome. I argue that these cases fail to do the job—the intuitions they elicit can be explained without having to distinguish between different senses of “ought.” However, these (...) cases are on the right track—I argue that more sophisticated versions of the cases provide strong motivation for the distinction. I then discuss two important problems for the distinction: the “which ‘ought’ is more important?” problem, and the “annoying profusion of ‘oughts’” problem. I argue that each of these problems can be solved in several different ways. (shrink)

This article redescribes early modern European defenses of private property in terms of a theoretical project of seeking to establish the true or essential nature of property. Most of the scholarly literature has focused on the historical and normative issues relating to the various accounts of original acquisition around which these defenses were organized. However, in my redescription, these so-called “original acquisition stories” appear as methodological devices for an analytic reduction and resolution of property into its fundamental elements and axioms. (...) Through these stories, property is “created” in the form of the classical liberal paradigm of presumptively exclusive, private ownership of material things. The problem is that this project of “creation” is also a project which arbitrarily excludes or marginalizes other forms and systems of property, and especially usufructuary forms of common property. After critically explicating this early modern project of creation, I go on to argue that the classical liberal paradigm and its problems continue to inform property theory and discourse in the late modern era. (shrink)