One way to evaluate and compare rival but potentially incompatible theories that account for the same set of observations is coherence. In this paper we take the quantitative notion of theory coherence as proposed by [Kwok, et.al. 98] and broaden its foundations. The generalisation will give a measure of the efficacy of a sub–theory as against single theory components. This also gives rise to notions of dependencies and couplings to account for how theory components interact with each other. Secondly we (...) wish to capture the fact that not all components within a theory are of equal importance. To do this we assign weights to theory components. This framework is applied to game theory and the performance of a coherentist player is investigated within the iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma. (shrink)

This article examines two questions about scientists’ search for knowledge. First, which search strategies generate discoveries effectively? Second, is it advantageous to diversify search strategies? We argue pace Weisberg and Muldoon, “Epistemic Landscapes and the Division of Cognitive Labor”, that, on the first question, a search strategy that deliberately seeks novel research approaches need not be optimal. On the second question, we argue they have not shown epistemic reasons exist for the division of cognitive labor, identifying the errors that led (...) to their conclusions. Furthermore, we generalize the epistemic landscape model, showing that one should be skeptical about the benefits of social learning in epistemically complex environments. (shrink)

Many philosophers believe that there is a fundamental distinction between knowing that something is the case and knowing how to do something. According to Gilbert Ryle, to whom the insight is credited, knowledge-how is an ability, which is in turn a complex of dispositions. Knowledge-that, on the other hand, is not an ability, or anything similar. Rather, knowledge-that is a relation between a thinker and a true proposition.

Ontological nihilism is the radical-sounding thesis that there is nothing at all. This chapter first discusses how the most plausible forms of this thesis aim to be slightly less radical than they sound and what they will have to do in order to succeed in their less radical ambitions. In particular, they will have to paraphrase sentences of best science into ontologically innocent counterparts. The chapter then points out the defects in two less plausible strategies, before going on to argue (...) that strategies that look more promising, including one based on Quine's predicate-functor language, face the same defects. (shrink)

Wisdom, long a topic of interest to moral philosophers, is increasingly the focus of social science research. Philosophers have historically been concerned to develop a rationally defensible account of the nature of wisdom and its role in the moral life, often inspired in various ways by virtue theoretical accounts of practical wisdom (phronesis). Wisdom scientists seek to, among other things, define wisdom and its components so that we can measure them. Are the measures used by wisdom scientists actually measuring what (...) philosophers have in mind when they discuss practical wisdom? I argue that they are not. Contemporary measures of wisdom and its components may pick out some necessary prerequisites of practical wisdom, but they do not measure a philosophically plausible practical wisdom or its components. After explaining the argument and defending it against objections, I consider its implications. Should wisdom scientists ignore the philosophical conception of practical wisdom in favor of other conceptions, revise their methods to try to measure it, or continue the interdisciplinary study of practical wisdom without expecting to measure it? I make a preliminary argument for the third option. (shrink)

Amodel for inventing newsignals is introduced in the context of sender–receiver games with reinforcement learning. If the invention parameter is set to zero, it reduces to basic Roth–Erev learning applied to acts rather than strategies, as in Argiento et al. (Stoch. Process. Appl. 119:373–390, 2009). If every act is uniformly reinforced in every state it reduces to the Chinese Restaurant Process—also known as the Hoppe–Pólya urn—applied to each act. The dynamics can move players from one signaling game to another during (...) the learning process. Invention helps agents avoid pooling and partial pooling equilibria. (shrink)

Over the past few decades, significant advances have been made in public engagement with, and the democratization of, science and technology. Despite notable successes, such developments have often struggled to enhance public trust, avert crises of expertise and democracy, and build more socially responsive and responsible science and innovation. A central reason for this is that mainstream approaches to public engagement harbor what we call “residual realist” assumptions about participation and publics. Recent coproductionist accounts in science and technology studies offer (...) an alternative way of seeing participation as coproduced, relational, diverse, and emergent but have been somewhat reluctant to articulate what this means in practice. In this paper, we make this move by setting out a new framework of interrelating paths and associated criteria for remaking public participation with science and democracy in more experimental, reflexive, anticipatory, and responsible ways. This framework comprises four paths to: forge reflexive participatory practices that attend to their framings, emergence, uncertainties, and effects; ecologize participation through attending to the interrelations between diverse public engagements in wider systems; catalyze practices of anticipatory reflection to bring about responsible democratic innovations; and reconstitute participation as constitutive of systems of technoscience and democracy. (shrink)

Our new issue brings unlikely philosophers into dialogue (for example, Adorno and Krishnamurti) for the first time as well as reconsiders some of the most important figures (for example, Nietzsche...

Practical wisdom (hereafter simply ‘wisdom’), which is the understanding required to make reliably good decisions about how we ought to live, is something we all have reason to care about. The importance of wisdom gives rise to questions about its nature: what kind of state is wisdom, how can we develop it, and what is a wise person like? These questions about the nature of wisdom give rise to further questions about proper methods for studying wisdom. Is the study of (...) wisdom the proper subject of philosophy or psychology? How, exactly, can we determine what wisdom is and how we can get it? In this chapter, we give an overview of some prominent philosophical answers to these questions. We begin by distinguishing practical wisdom from theoretical wisdom and wisdom as epistemic humility. Once we have a clearer sense of the target, we address questions of method and argue that producing a plausible and complete account of wisdom will require the tools of both philosophy and empirical psychology. We also discuss the implications this has for prominent wisdom research methods in empirical psychology. We then survey prominent philosophical accounts of the nature of wisdom and end with reflections on the prospects for further interdisciplinary research. (shrink)

Fragmentary utterances such as short answers and subsentential XPs without linguistic antecedents are proposed to have fully sentential syntactic structures, subject to ellipsis. Ellipsis in these cases is preceded by A-movement of the fragment to a clause-peripheral position; the combination of movement and ellipsis accounts for a wide range of connectivity and anti-connectivity effects in these structures. Fragment answers furthermore shed light on the nature of islands, and contrast with sluicing in triggering island effects; this is shown to follow from (...) an articulated syntax and the PF theory of islands. Fragments without linguistic antecedents are argued to be compatible with an ellipsis analysis, and do not support direct interpretation approaches to these phenomena. (shrink)

Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) poses an increasing threat to patient care and population health and there is a growing need for novel therapies to tackle AMR. Bacteriophage (phage) therapy is a re-emerging antimicrobial strategy with the potential to transform how bacterial infections are treated in patients and populations. Currently, in the UK, phages can be used as unlicensed medicinal products on a ‘named-patient’ basis. We make an ethical case for why it is crucially important for the UK to invest in Good (...) Manufacturing Practice (GMP) for both ongoing unlicensed and future licensed phage therapy. Access to phages produced to GMP (GMP phages) will ensure effective patient care and better outcomes as well as health systems benefits. The UK also has the potential to become a global leader in the timely and cost-efficient manufacturing and supply of a therapy that meets internationally recognised standards. (shrink)

Given the significance of Nicholas of Cusa’s ecclesiastical career, it is no surprise that a good deal of academic attention on Nicholas has focused on his role in the history of the church. Nevertheless, it would also be fair to say that a good deal of the attention that is focused on the life and thought of Nicholas of Cusa is the legacy of prior generations of scholars who saw in his theoretical work an opportunity to define the most salient (...) features of transformations in the habits of thinking leading from the Middle Ages into the epoch of modernity. Thus, although contemporary scholars have not been able to achieve any clear consensus on the question of whether Nicholas belongs to the Middle Ages or to modernity, the field of Cusanus studies has become much more attentive to the possibility that the uniqueness and significance of Nicholas’s vision is a function of his ability to synthesize and redeploy a variety of strands in the Catholic intellectual tradition—strands that are as apt to involve practical matters of canon law and church reform as they are to hinge on a unique and richly developed mystical theology. Given the flourishing of the attention devoted to Nicholas in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, the choices about which texts to include in this article were difficult ones. The rationale for this article’s predominant focus on scholarship of the late 20th and early 21st centuries is that, insofar as the recent studies listed here enter into the debates that have been shaped by their predecessors, the sources mentioned here will point readers to the prior work in the field not acknowledged here. (shrink)

Winning essay of the American Society for Aesthetics' inaugural Peter Kivy Prize. Extends Kivy's notion of sonic picturing through engagement with recent work in philosophy of perception. Argues that sonic pictures are more widespread and more aesthetically and artistically important than even Kivy envisioned. Topics discussed include: the nature of sonic pictures; the nature of sounds; what we can (and more importantly, cannot) conclude from musical listening; sonic pictures in film; beatboxing as an art of sonic picturing; and cover songs (...) as sonic pictures. To be published in the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism. (shrink)

Understanding how research participants, and by extension, the wider community, perceive and evaluate the risks of research interventions is of paramount importance. The current study (Dawson et al...

An important disagreement in contemporary debates about free will hinges on whether an agent must have alternative possibilities to be morally responsible. Many assume that notions of alternative possibilities are ubiquitous and reflected in everyday intuitions about moral responsibility: if one lacks alternatives, then one cannot be morally responsible. We explore this issue empirically. In two studies, we find evidence that folk judgments about moral responsibility call into question two popular principles that require some form of alternative possibilities for moral (...) responsibility. Survey participants given scenarios involving agents that fail to satisfy these principles nonetheless found these agents to be morally responsible, blameworthy, deserving of blame, and at fault for morally bad actions and consequences. We defend our interpretation of this evidence against objections and explore some implications of these findings for the free will debate. (shrink)

Business and Society Review, Volume 127, Issue S1, Page 283-298, Spring 2022.

I formulate and defend a version of the many universes (or multiverse) reply to the atheistic argument from evil. Specifically, I argue that (i) if we know that any argument from evil (be it a logical or evidential argument) is sound, then we know that God would be (or at least probably would be) unjustified in actualizing our universe. I then argue that (ii) there might be a multiverse and (iii) if so, then we do not know that God would (...) be (or at least probably would be) unjustified in actualizing our universe. It follows that we cannot know that the atheistic argument from evil is sound, in which case we cannot be certain that the argument succeeds, and so it is rational to refuse to reject theism because of such arguments. (shrink)

Informed consent is normally understood as something that a patient gives prior to a medical intervention that can render it morally permissible. Whether or not it must be given prior to the intervention is debated. Some have argued that subsequent consent—that is, consent given after a medical intervention—can also render an otherwise impermissible act permissible. If so, then a patient may give her consent to an intervention that has already been performed and thereby justify a physician’s act retroactively. The purpose (...) of this paper is to argue that even if subsequent consent can render an otherwise impermissible act permissible, doctors are still blameworthy if they rely on it when prior consent could be given, because they would be banking on the justification of their interventions. Since doctors can only guess if patients will consent after the fact, they would be placing their patients at unreasonable risk of being disrespected as persons. (shrink)

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)

If chances are propensities, what reason do we have to expect them to be probabilities? I will offer a new answer to this question. It comes in two parts. First, I will defend an accuracy-centred account of what it is for a causal system to have precise propensities in the first place. Second, I will prove that, given some pretty weak assumptions about the nature of comparative causal dispositions, and some fairly standard assumptions about reasonable measures of inaccuracy, propensities must (...) be probabilities. (shrink)

ABSTRACTIn this paper, I explain why I disagree with David Pilgrim’s claim that critical realists should deny any ‘natal male’ claim to womanhood. Specifically, Pilgrim and I have different definitions of the transitive and intransitive dimensions of reality. In my version – which I believe is in the spirit of the Bhaskarian version – the transitive dimension embraces everything that is currently being affected by human praxis. This allows for an intersectional view of gender in which it is perfectly possible (...) for the same human, in different contexts, to be an ontological woman, an ontological trans woman ; and an ontological person with a prostate gland, some might say a man. In the same way, it is perfectly possible for a room to contain 17 people for the purposes of setting out tea cups, but 18 people for the purposes of providing lecture hand-outs. For the purposes of everyday life, and even, I argue, for the fight against sexism, trans women have the same claim to being women as cis women. (shrink)

Puts Schelling in conversation with twentieth-century continental philosophy.

This essay discusses five main topoi in the Divine Comedy through which teachers might encourage students to explore the question of the Divine Comedy’s treatment of philosophy. These topoi are: (1) The Divine Comedy’s representations in Inferno of noble pagans who are allegorically or historically associated with philosophy or natural reason; (2) its treatment of the relationship between faith and reason and that relationship’s consequences for the text’s understanding of the respective authoritativeness of theology and philosophy; (3) representations in the (...) Divine Comedy that relate to the question of the practical value of philosophical (not to mention theological) speculation; (4) the text’s treatment of the respective merits of practical and contemplative activities; and (5) its implicit defense of philosophy’s authority with respect to ethical and political questions. (shrink)

The term ‘ellipsis’ can be used to refer to a variety of phenomena: syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic. In this article, I discuss the recent comprehensive survey by Stainton 2006 of these kinds of ellipsis with respect to the analysis of nonsententials and try to show that despite his trenchant criticisms and insightful proposal, some of the criticisms can be evaded and the insights incorporated into a semantic ellipsis analysis, making a ‘divide-and-conquer’ strategy to the properties of nonsententials feasible after all. (...) -/- Editor's comment: To find the contribution, please go to item 16 of the URL, which contains the full text. Professor Merchant has permitted this. (shrink)

Drawing primarily upon Dante’s three major philosophical treatises (De vulgari eloquentia, Convivio, and Monarchia), this essay explores how Dante’s ethico-political philosophy operates within the crucial tension between the phenomenology of time as the condition for the possibility of human moral development and yet also as, metaphysically speaking, the privation and imitation of eternity. I begin by showing that, in the De vulgari eloquentia, Dante’s understanding of the poetic and rhetorical function of the illustrious vernacular is tied to his political philosophy (...) in a way that depends upon a rich but ultimately unresolved tension between (a) the demand that only an atemporal, unchanging vernacular would be suitable for the tasks of universal monarchy and (b) the recognition that only a temporal, localized, and changing illustrious vernacular could possibly bring about the existence of the universal monarchy. In the second half of the essay, I will turn to Dante’s treatment of the providential grounding for the independence of spiritual and temporal authority in Convivio and Monarchia. I will argue that Dante’s understanding of divine providence provides common justification for the temporal and spiritual authorities whose independence he otherwise insists upon. Finally, drawing on the letter to Cangrande della Scala (the authorship of which is disputed), I will discuss how, for Dante, the providential ground for the legitimacy of temporal authority can only be discerned through the allegorical interpretation of history itself. In light of my discussion of these themes in Dante’s political philosophy and its dependence on his understanding of divine providence, I will conclude with a brief reflection on how Dante’s understanding of divine providence might help us better appreciate important aspects of the neglected legacy of Renaissance humanism in the history of early modern philosophy. (shrink)

This paper explores Nicholas of Cusa’s framing of the De pace fidei as a dialogue taking place incaelo rationis. On the one hand, this framing allows Nicholas of Cusa to argue that all religious rites presuppose the truth of a single, unified faith and so temporally manifest divine logos in a way accommodated to the historically unique conventions of different political communities. On the other hand, at the end of the De pace fidei, the interlocutors in the heavenly dialogue are (...) enjoined to return to earth and lead their countrymen in a gradual conversion to the acceptance of rites which would explicitly acknowledge the metaphysically presupposed transcendent unity of all true faiths. In light of these two aspects of the literary framing of the De pace fidei, the question that motivates this paper concerns the extent to which the understanding of history subtending Cusanus’ temporal political aims is consistent with the understanding of history grounded in his metaphysical presupposition that there is una religio in omni diversitate rituum. In addressing this question, I shall argue that the literary strategy of the De pace fidei sacrifices Nicholas of Cusa’s apologetic doctrinal aims insofar as the text creates an allegorical space in which the tension between its literal and figurative dimensions assigns to its readers the task of choosing their own orientations to the significance of history as a foundation for future action. (shrink)

"The Federalist" is commonly read as an exemplar of political realism. However, alongside Publius' arguments against the enthusiastic imagination --its tendency to inflame the passions, betray the intellect, and subvert political authority--are formative appeals to the imagination 's role in reconstituting the public authority shaken during the postrevolutionary years. This essay explores three central aspects of Publius' restorative appeal to the imagination : the appeal to the public veneration required for sustaining political authority across time; the strategies for shifting citizen (...) loyalty from the state and local level to that of a newly energized federal government; and the rhetorical elicitation of the public's imagination in aestheticized portrayals of Providential nationality. These aspects of Publius' argument make up the core of "The Federalist's aesthetics of rule. In each instance, Publius invokes the imagination as a heteronomic support to navigate familiar dilemmas of democratic self-authorization. (shrink)

One of the most startling, and hence theoretically challenging, properties of wh-movement in Sluicing is that it can move wh-phrases out of islands, an important observation which goes back to Ross (1969). Equally challenging is the fact that similar wh-movement out of VP Ellipsis sites remains for the most part illicit. Briefly put, it seems that for a wide range of cases, deletion of an IP containing an island voids the effect of that island for wh-movement, while deletion of a (...) VP containing an island does not. This chapter investigates one aspect of this puzzling dichotomy with respect to island repair, and attempts to show that an interesting and partly novel range of data follow if island deviancies come about due to illicit traces of intermediate movement, working in tandem with a constraint on ellipsis operative in structures that host wh-movement. I will argue that a wide range of islands are indeed active at PF, but not in the way that this claim has usually been understood thus far. Instead of the island node itself being responsible for the degradation in acceptability, I will show that the data support the idea that it is the traces of wh-movement outside the island itself which trigger a PF-crash. I begin with some relevant Background on Sluicing, given in section 6.1, before taking up the Sluicing data in section 6.2 and the VP Ellipsis facts in section 6.3. (shrink)

Although Nicholas of Cusa occasionally discussed how the universe must be understood as the unfolding of the absolutely infinite in time, he left open questions about any distinction between natural time and historical time, how either notion of time might depend upon the nature of divine providence, and how his understanding of divine providence relates to other traditional philosophical views. From texts in which Cusanus discussed these questions, this paper will attempt to make explicit how Cusanus understood divine providence. The (...) paper will also discuss how Nicholas of Cusa’s view of the question of providence might shed light on Renaissance philosophy’s contribution in the historical transition in Western philosophy from an overtly theological or eschatological understanding of historical time to a secularized or naturalized philosophy of history. (shrink)

Although one would not wish to classify Copernicus’ own intentions as belonging to the late-medieval and Renaissance tradition of nominalist philosophy, if we are to turn our consideration to what was responsible for the eventual success of the Copernican Revolution, we must also attend to other features of the dialectical context in relation to which the views of Copernicus and his followers were articulated, interpreted, and evaluated. Accordingly, this paper discusses the significance of the erosion of the Aristotelian prohibition against (...) metabasis to the eventual success of the Copernican Revolution. (shrink)

This article discusses how Nicholas of Cusa’s speculative philosophy harbors an ecumenical spirit that is deeply entwined and in tension with his commitment to incarnational mystical theology. On the basis of my discussion of this tension, I intend to show that Nicholas understands “faith” as a poietic activity whose legitimacy is rooted less in the independent veracity of the beliefs in question than in the potential of particular religious conventions to aid intellectual processes of self-interpretation. In undertaking this analysis, the (...) paper will use Nicholas of Cusa’s De pace fidei—whose overt intention is to show that all forms of religious practice presuppose the same universal faith—as an interpretive lens to explore implications of the philosophical anthropology that Nicholas offers in treatises such as De ludo globi and De venatione sapientiae. Thus, I will argue that Nicholas’ appreciation of the inevitability of religious diversity in the temporal world funds the consistently favored view in his speculative works that “faith” is a virtue only insofar as its adherent genuinely remains in search of understanding and that, consequently, religious beliefs should function as nothing more than tools for creative activity, interpretation, and inquiry. (shrink)

With respect to the issue of the future of Cusanus research, the paper seeks to motivate questions about the degree to which dominant concerns of modern philosophy exhibit an often unacknowledged relationship to those of Renaissance philosophy and theology. Although the author has no wish to “modernize” Nicholas of Cusa, he contends that Cusanus research may be uniquely capable of providing insights into the question of the extent to which dominant habits of modern philosophy are significantly constituted by major commitments (...) of medieval and Renaissance philosophy and theology. (shrink)

In the midst of the De pace fidei’s imagined heavenly conference on the theme of the possibility of religious harmony, Nicholas of Cusa has Saint Peter acknowledge to the Persian interlocutor that it will be difficult to bring Jews to the acceptance of Christ’s divine nature because they refuse to accept the implicit meaning of their own history of revelation. What is peculiar about this line in the dialogue is not merely that it flies in the face of what Cusanus (...) scholars tend to regard as an ecumenical spirit in Nicholas’ call to interreligious dialogue and mutual toleration. Rather, the statement reveals a peculiar hermeneutic principle at work in Nicholas’ understanding of the tension between truth and doctrine and the way that this tension informs human practice. Accordingly, by grappling with Nicholas’ portrayal of an imagined failure of Jews to practice interpretation correctly, I hope to shed light on Nicholas’ philosophy of religion in a way that neither ignores his anti-Judaism nor reduces the significance of his views to one of its most unpleasant manifestations. (shrink)

This article considers the emergence of world environmental history as a rapidly growing but undertheorized research field. Taking as its central problematic the gap between the fertile theorizations of environmentally-oriented social scientists and the empirically rich studies of world environmental historians, the article argues for a synthesis of theory and history in the study of longue dureesocio-ecological change. This argument proceeds in three steps. First, I offer an ecological reading of Immanuel Wallerstein's The Modern World-System. Wallerstein's handling of the ecological (...) dimensions of the transition from feudalism to capitalism is suggestive of a new approach to world environmental history. Second, I contend that Wallerstein's theoretical insights may be effectively complemented by drawing on Marxist notions of value and above all the concept of “metabolic rift,” which emphasize the importance of productive processes and regional divisions of labor within the modern world-system. Finally, I develop these theoretical discussions in a short environmental history of the two great “commodity frontiers” of early capitalism – the sugar plantation and the silver mining complex. (shrink)

These 14 essays bring Schelling in tune with such luminaries as Heidegger, Derrida, Bataille, Foucault, Deleuze, Levinas, and Irigaray and situate him squarely in the centre of current themes.

Elided VPs and their antecedent VPs can mismatch in voice, with passive VPs being elided under apparent identity with active antecedent VPs, and vice versa. Such voice mismatches are not allowed in any other kind of ellipsis, such as sluicing and other clausal ellipses. These latter facts indicate that the identity relation in ellipsis is sensitive to syntactic form, not merely to semantic form. The VP-ellipsis facts fall into place if the head that determines voice is external to the phrase (...) being elided, here argued to be v P; such an account can only be framed in approaches that allow for the separation of syntactic features from the heads on which they are morphologically realized. Alternatives to this syntactic, articulated view of ellipsis and voice either undergenerate or overgenerate. (shrink)

I aim in this paper to provide defense of one way to look at what should be regulated in the market place. In particular, I discuss what should be tolerated and argue against corporate welfare. I begin by endorsing John Stuart Mill’s harm principle as a normative principle of toleration. I call strict commitment to the harm principle when considering the regulatory structure of markets market libertarianism and oppose that to promotionism, the view that endorses government interference to promote business (...) interests. I next discuss the widespread use of promotionist policies, arguing against them and for market libertarianism. I also consider problems for my view, recognizing that one of my responses may leave some thinking the paper is a reductio of the market libertarian view because of the sort of slow-growth state it endorses. Others will recognize it as a view promoted by some of the U.S. founding fathers and find it attractive in its own right. (shrink)

In the Bayesian framework, a language learner should seek a grammar that explains observed data well and is also a priori probable. This paper proposes such a measure of prior probability. Indeed it develops a full statistical framework for lexicalized syntax. The learner's job is to discover the system of probabilistic transformations (often called lexical redundancy rules) that underlies the patterns of regular and irregular syntactic constructions listed in the lexicon. Specifically, the learner discovers what transformations apply in the language, (...) how often they apply, and in what contexts. It considers simpler systems of transformations to be more probable a priori. Experiments show that the learned transformations are more effective than previous statistical models at predicting the probabilities of lexical entries, especially those for which the learner had no direct evidence. (shrink)

The task of this paper is to provide what is necessary for a conceptual analysis of toleration such that one would have a clear definition of this central liberal tenet. First, notions related to but different from toleration are discussed; this provides guidance by introducing the likely definitional conditions of toleration. Next, those conditions are explicated and defended. Putting the conditions together, we can say an agent tolerates when she intentionally and on principle refrains from interfering with an opposed other (...) (or their behavior, etc.), though she believes she has the power to interfere. This definition is neither normatively loaded nor sufficient for moral or political theory. Readers may also prefer a definition made with some subset of the conditions rather than all. (shrink)

1. Introduction: Kairopolitics: The Politics of Realtime -- 2. Thought-Time: Immediacy and Live Theory -- 3. Control-Time: Immediacy and Constant Capitalism -- 4. Conclusion: Defense-Time: Immediacy and Realtime Resistance.

ABSTRACTDavid Pilgrim is, in his words, ‘not at all hostile’ to transgender people. Nevertheless, in my opinion, his position allows him to provide a veneer of philosophical acceptability to transphobic arguments: such as that, if a person can choose their gender, they should be able to choose their age. In stripping away the veneer, I demonstrate that Bhaskar's version of the transitive and intransitive dimensions resolves the supposed conundrum. I also take issue with the idea that sex is biological and (...) gender is a social construct, i.e. that there is a duality between object and subject. I argue that this duality does more harm than good in the fight for equality since it gives philosophical resources to those who would bully LGBTIQ, allowing them to blame their victims. I use my understanding of gender to arrive at a compassionate resolution of the restroom debate, in which everyone's wellbeing is considered. I also warn that the debate may have been commandeered by men to achieve a transphobic agenda and that all women are likely to pay a high price because of it. Furthermore, an unexpected result of my analysis is that Judith Butler's position is, in significant ways and contrary to the opinion of some critical realists, similar to the Bhaskarian critical realist position. (shrink)