Through numbers of studies on the formation of equivalence relations and causal induction, it is known that human beings tend to consider conditional statements ``if p then q " as biconditional statements ``if and only if p then q ": we call the tendency to perceive ``if p then q " as ``if q then p " the ``symmetry bias". On the other hand, many studies on children's word learning have pointed out that children tend to expect each object has (...) only one label. This is so-called the ``mutual exclusivity bias". This bias implies. (shrink)

Going beyond the theory/practice and discourse/matter divides -- Learning and becoming in an onto-epistemology -- The tool of pedagogical documentation -- An intra-active pedagogy and its dual movements -- Transgressing binary practices in early childhood teacher education -- The hybrid-writing-process: going beyond the theory/practice divide in academic writing -- An ethics of immanence and potentialities for early childhood education.

In this paper, using Mark Schroeder’s (2008a) expressivist semantic framework for normative language as a case study, I will identify difficulties that even an expressivist semantic theory capable of addressing the Frege-Geach problem will encounter in handling the logical possibility of moral dilemmas. To this end, I will draw on a classical puzzle formulated by McConnell (1978) that the logical possibility of moral dilemmas conflicts with some of the prima facie plausible axioms of the standard deontic logic, which include obligation (...) implies permission. On the tentative assumption that proponents of ethical expressivism should be generally committed to securing the logical possibility of moral dilemmas in their semantic theories, I will explore whether and how expressivists can successfully invalidate obligation implies permission within the framework developed by Schroeder. The case study eventually reveals that this can indeed be a hard task for expressivists. Generalizing from the case study, I will suggest that the source of the difficulty ultimately lies in the mentalist assumption of the expressivist semantic project that the logico-semantic relations exhibited by normative sentences should be modeled in terms of the psychological attitudes that speakers express by uttering them. My final goal will be to show that the difficulty expressivists face in dealing with the logical possibility of moral dilemmas is a reflection of the more general problem that their commitment to the mentalist assumption prevents them from flexibly adopting or dropping axioms in their semantic theories to get the right technical results. (shrink)

9th and 10th Nov. 2013 at Kyoto University. Organizers: Takeshi Sato and Shunsuke Sugimoto.

ブッダとは誰か?仏教とは何か?3・11の震災後の言葉を探して仏教に問いかける―仏教と真剣に向き合う僧侶、研究者との対話を通して、仏教の「新しいいま」が見えてくる。.

In this paper, using Mark Schroeder’s (2008a) expressivist semantic framework for normative language as a case study, I will identify difficulties that even an expressivist semantic theory capable of addressing the Frege-Geach problem will encounter in handling the logical possibility of moral dilemmas. To this end, I will draw on a classical puzzle formulated by McConnell (1978) that the logical possibility of moral dilemmas conflicts with some of the prima facie plausible axioms of the standard deontic logic, which include obligation (...) implies permission. On the tentative assumption that proponents of ethical expressivism should be generally committed to securing the logical possibility of moral dilemmas in their semantic theories, I will explore whether and how expressivists can successfully invalidate obligation implies permission within the framework developed by Schroeder. The case study eventually reveals that this can indeed be a hard task for expressivists. Generalizing from the case study, I will suggest that the source of the difficulty ultimately lies in the mentalist assumption of the expressivist semantic project that the logico-semantic relations exhibited by normative sentences should be modeled in terms of the psychological attitudes that speakers express by uttering them. My final goal will be to show that the difficulty expressivists face in dealing with the logical possibility of moral dilemmas is a reflection of the more general problem that their commitment to the mentalist assumption prevents them from flexibly adopting or dropping axioms in their semantic theories to get the right technical results. (shrink)

One influential positive argument for moral realism is the Explanatory Indispensability Argument. A crucial premise of this argument is the explanatory relevance of moral properties. On this premise, moral properties, such as wrongness, rightness, courage, and cowardice, are explanatorily indispensable to some empirical phenomena. Although there has been a lively debate on this premise, one crucial challenge to this thesis, what I call the Scientific Standard Challenge, has not been properly discussed. After explaining this challenge and a related concern, I (...) argue that in response to this central challenge, the proponents of the argument should take what I call the localist turn to defend the explanatory indispensability of moral properties. The localist turn encourages the defenders of moral explanations to be more sensitive to the nature of each moral explanation. For instance, some moral explanations are explanations of social matters, so the standards they need to meet are provided by relevant branches of the social sciences. On the other hand, some other moral explanations are about our psychology, so the theoretical standards those explanations need to meet should come from psychology. I illustrate how this localist project can be conducted in the case of the moral explanation that appeals to injustice. I argue that the field of comparative politics provides the theoretical standards moral explanations of institutional change need to meet. I shall then illustrate how a sophisticated moral explanation can meet those theoretical standards and how this moral explanation can be strong evidence of injustice’s explanatory indispensability. (shrink)

Lonely hearts advertisements (LHA) published in Japan were examined in a comparative study on sexually dimorphic mate preference. I analyzed 944 LHA written by Japanese (730 by males and 214 by females) seeking short-term relationships and 780 LHA (577 by males and 203 by females) seeking long-term relationships. Some universal patterns of mate preference were confirmed and others were not. Female advertisers in both categories sought more traits than they offered; they also sought more traits than male advertisers. Males tended (...) to offer their financial and social status, and females tended to seek those traits. More females requested family commitment than males. While there was no sex difference in offering and seeking physical appearance and health, females tended to request photographs of their potential mates. Males were more likely than females to be willing to accept children from previous relationships, although there was no significant difference in refusing such children. More females seeking long-term mates requested family commitment than females seeking short-term mates. In both males and females, more advertisers seeking long-term mates offered family commitment than advertisers seeking short-term mates. Some predictions for contingent preference were also examined. One prediction confirmed was that females offering physical appearance and health sought more traits than those not doing so. However, males offering financial and social status did not make higher demands than those who did not, which does not support one prediction. (shrink)

In this essay we critically evaluate the progress that has been made in solving the problem of meaning in artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics. We remain skeptical about solutions based on deep neural networks and cognitive robotics, which in our opinion do not fundamentally address the problem. We agree with the enactive approach to cognitive science that things appear as intrinsically meaningful for living beings because of their precarious existence as adaptive autopoietic individuals. But this approach inherits the problem of (...) failing to account for how meaning as such could make a difference for an agent’s behavior. In a nutshell, if life and mind are identified with physically deterministic phenomena, then there is no conceptual room for meaning to play a role in its own right. We argue that this impotence of meaning can be addressed by revising the concept of nature such that the macroscopic scale of the living can be characterized by physical indeterminacy. We consider the implications of this revision of the mind-body relationship for synthetic approaches. (shrink)

Detection of genuine altruists could be a solution to the problem of subtle cheating. Brown et al. (Evol Psychol 1:42–69, 2003) found that humans could detect altruists using nonverbal cues. However, their experiments can be improved upon in several ways, and further investigation is needed to determine whether altruist-detection abilities are human universals. In our experiment, we used video clips of natural conversations as the stimulus. We asked a sample of Japanese undergraduates to rate their own level of altruism and (...) then to estimate the videotaped targets’ altruism using the same scale. The perceivers were able to estimate the targets’ altruism levels accurately. Perceivers’ altruism score did not affect their ability to discriminate between altruists and non-altruists. Perceivers’ impressions of the altruist and non-altruist targets were also found to be different. Coding of nonverbal behavior of the targets revealed that altruists exhibited more “felt smiles” than non-altruists, which also supports the results of the previous study. (shrink)

進化論・国家有機体説から生命主義・歴史への回帰まで、デモクラシーと煩悶の時代における「国体」の地平.

Abstract“The wrongness of Albert's action causally explains why Jane judged that his action was wrong”. This type of causal moral explanation has been extensively discussed in the recent metaethical literature. This paper motivates the following claims about this type of moral explanation. First, a typical defence of this type of moral explanation suggested in the literature does not work because it predicts inaccurate modal information. Second, focusing on different aspects of the ways moral judgements are generated provides better chances for (...) the defender of this type of moral explanation. Third, the strategy mentioned in the previous point leads us to the following alternative evaluative explanation: The property of being a harmful action explains a recognisable pattern of moral judgements observed in the relevant empirical studies. One crucial implication the paper alludes to is a localist approach to the debates concerning moral realism: We should consider each moral property's ontological genuineness separately, referring to specific empirical findings that are particularly relevant to the target moral property in question. Such a localist approach can provide solid resources for realists to respond to various anti‐realist challenges, such as an influential evolutionary debunking argument. (shrink)

The logic CD is an intermediate logic which exactly corresponds to the Kripke models with constant domains. It is known that the logic CD has a Gentzen-type formulation called LD and rules are replaced by the corresponding intuitionistic rules) and that the cut-elimination theorem does not hold for LD. In this paper we present a modification of LD and prove the cut-elimination theorem for it. Moreover we prove a “weak” version of cut-elimination theorem for LD, saying that all “cuts” except (...) some special forms can be eliminated from a proof in LD. From these cut-elimination theorems we obtain some corollaries on syntactical properties of CD: fragments collapsing into intuitionistic logic. Harrop disjunction and existence properties, and a fact on the number of logical symbols in the axiom of CD. (shrink)

The present contribution shows that a Hilbert-style axiomatization for dynamic logic of relation changers is complete for the standard Kripke semantics not by a well-known rewriting technique but by the idea of an auxiliary semantics studied by van Benthem and Wang et al. A key insight of our auxiliary semantics for dynamic logic of relation changers can be described as: “relation changers are bounded morphisms.” Moreover, we demonstrate that this semantic insight can be used to provide a modular cut-free labelled (...) sequent calculus for the logic in the sense that our calculus can be regarded as a natural expansion of a labelled sequent calculus of iteration-free propositional dynamic logic. (shrink)

We establish the “contraction-elimination theorem” which means that if a sequent Γ A is provable in the implicational fragment of the Gentzen's sequent calculus LK and if it satisfies a certain condition on the number of the occurrences of propositional variables, then it is provable without the right contraction rule. By this theorem, we get the following.1. If an implicational formula A is a theorem of classical logic and is not a theorem of intuitionistic logic, then there is a propositional (...) variable which occurs at least once positively and at least twice negatively in A → a) → a).2. If an implicational formula A is a theorem of intuitionistic logic and is not a theorem of BCK-logic, then there is a propositional variable which occurs at least twice positively and at least once negatively in A → a → b).We prove the contraction-elimination theorem by a fully syntactical method, which has some analogy with Gentzen's cut-elimination. (shrink)

The most famous chapter of Montesquieu’s _ The Spirit of the Laws _ (1748), Book XI, Chapter 6, 'On the constitution of England,' was an important i nspiration to the creators of modern constitutions, to which they often referred. However, as a result of scholarly focus on the political institutions discussed in this book, Montesquieu’s economic analysis has been woefully neglected. In order to correct this scholarly imbalance, this paper will elucidate the essential significance of Montesquieu’s comparison between the constitution (...) of modern England and that of ancient Rome in Book XI of _ The Spirit of the Laws _ ; inextricable relationship between military and political institutions on the one hand, and the transfer and distribution of wealth on the other. To argue this point, this paper will focus on Montesquieu’s other writings in the same year and shortly after the publication of _ The Spirit of the Laws _ : the revised edition in 1748 of _ The Considerations on the Causes of the Greatness of t... _. (shrink)

Let ℸ be the set of Gödel numbers Gn of function symbols f such that PRA ⊢ and let γ be the function such that equation imageWe prove: The r. e. set ℸ is m-complete; the function γ is not primitive recursive in any class of functions {f1, f2, ⃛} so long as each fi has a recursive upper bound. This implies that γ is not primitive recursive in ℸ although it is recursive in ℸ.

This article explores the possibilities of considering how ‘matter and meaning are mutually constituted’ in the production of knowledge (Barad, 2007: 152) through presenting a diffractive analysis of a piece of interview data with a six-year-old boy in a preschool class. Inspired by Donna Haraway’s (1997) and Karen Barad’s (2007) theorising, I understand diffractive analysis as an embodied engagement with the materiality of research data: a becoming-with the data as researcher. Understanding the body as a space of transit, a series (...) of open-ended systems in interaction with the material-discursive ‘environment’, diffractive analyses constitute transcorporeal engagements with data. Stacy Alaimo’s (2010) theorisation of the transcorporeal is put to work diffractively with Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s (1987) thinking on the process of becoming minor or minoritarian. This implies a reconceptualisation of the very act of thinking as a transcorporeal process of engagement, going beyond the idea of reflexivity and interpretation as inner mental activities taking place in the mind of the researcher understood as separated from the data. Through my example, I argue that diffractive analysis can make visible new kinds of material-discursive realities that can have transformative and political consequences. (shrink)

This article theorizes and exemplifies reconceptualized teaching practices, both in early childhood education (ECE) and in a couple of programs within the new Swedish Teacher Education (since 2001). These programs are tightly knit to the last 12 years of reconceptualized early childhood education practices in and around Stockholm, built on deconstructive, co‐constructive, and re‐constructive principles, inspired by poststructural and feminist poststructural theories. The aim is foremost to work towards a dissolution and/or transgression of the modernist theory‐practice binary that dominates ECE (...) and teacher education practices, where theory is meant to be applied to practice. Student teachers, as well as pre‐school teachers, use what I have conceptualized as deconstructive talks, as a possibility of making visible the dominant discourses of childhood, identity, learning, play, and gender in the performed and documented teaching practices. In teacher education, students’ narratives are also deconstructed. The aim is to transgress teaching‐as‐usual; i.e. dominant and normative ways of thinking and acting in teaching and learning situations. I will suggest an ethics of ‘resistance’, affirmation and becoming, inspired by Derridean deconstructionist thinking, as a professional attitude and reflexive mode for teachers, teacher students and teacher educators. (shrink)