The past two decades have been a time of heightened interest in the moral aspects of the practice of medicine. This interest has been reflected in medical education by the establishment of medical humanities programs in both preclinical and clinical education in many medical schools. It has also been reflected in the literature with a dramatic increase in journal articles on medical ethics as well as the development of medical ethics in textbooks. A number of journals have developed that (...) are specifically devoted to medical ethics, including The Journal of Medical Ethics, The Journal of Medicine and Philosophy, The Journal of Medical Humanities, Theoretical Medicine, Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics, just to name a few. The literature includes both theoretical foundations and conceptual analyses of particular issues as well as practical advice and general suggestions for how to implement programs in medical humanities. (shrink)

This study investigates the three major educational philosophies behind the medical humanities programs in the United States. It summarizes the characteristics of the Cultural Transmission Approach, the Affective Developmental Approach, and the Cognitive Developmental Approach. A questionnaire was sent to 415 teachers of medical humanities asking for their perceptions of the amount of time and effort devoted by their programs to these three philosophical approaches. The 234 responses constituted a 54.6% return. The approximately 80:20 gender ratio of males (...) to females and other demographic data on age and educational background were consistent with other studies of the field of medical humanities.Reflections on the results in Table II indicate that some changes need to take place in the teaching of the medical humanities if the perceived ideal is to be achieved. In order for the current teachers of the medical humanities to think that the appropriate philosophies behind the teaching of the medical humanities are being implemented as they should be, much less time and effort need to be devoted to the Cultural Transmission Approach. With no other published reports on the educational philosophies behind the medical humanities programs, this study created a new knowledge base about this relatively young and rapidly emerging field. (shrink)

The enormous growth in medical humanities programs during the past decade has resulted in an extensive literature concerning the content of the discipline and the issues that have been addressed. Comparatively little attention, however, has been devoted to the structure of the discipline of medical humanities concerning the process or the theoretical aspects of the pedagogy of teaching the discipline. This report explicitly addresses the pedagogical aspects of the discipline by comparing and contrasting two different basic approaches to the (...) discipline referred to as the classical humanities approach and the humanistic psychology approach which roughly approximate the cognitive and affective approaches respectively. These two approaches are compared and contrasted in terms of their goals, objectives, methods of implementation, philosophical assumptions and evaluational techniques. (shrink)

We study the structure of families of theories in the language of arithmetic extended to allow these families to refer to one another and to themselves. If a theory contains schemata expressing its own truth and expressing a specific Turing index for itself, and contains some other mild axioms, then that theory is untrue. We exhibit some families of true self-referential theories that barely avoid this forbidden pattern.

Since Kant, theorists of human consciousness have often made the claim that man's cognitive or theoretical forms of consciousness are rooted in practical forms of consciousness or in one or another form of practice . Although the ancestry of this view can be traced to Rousseau and Kant, it is among the post-Kantian idealists that it first comes to full expression. I examine the emergence of this theme in the first formulations of post-Kantian idealism: the Jena texts of Johann Gottlieb (...) Fichte. ;The first task in understanding Fichte's "primacy of practice" thesis is to understand the general character of his philosophical project. Traditionally, Fichte's philosophy has been thought of as marking the repudiation of Kant's "critical" project in favor of a program of "speculative metaphysics." On this reading, the core of Fichte's thought is a quasi-theological view of the universe as the product of a self-constituting absolute ego. One of my central claims is that this metaphysical reading of Fichte is fundamentally mistaken. Examining Fichte's philosophical aims in their original context , I show that Fichte's central philosophical concern is not a metaphysical but a transcendental issue: the "referentiality" or "objectivity" of consciousness. How, Fichte wants to know, do we come to think of our conscious states as referring to something that we take to exist independently of them? ;At the heart of Fichte's account of referentiality, I argue, is his rejection of naturalistic accounts of subjectivity. If we treat the subject as a natural object in a network of causal relations, he claims, then referentiality remains inexplicable. The first Wissenschaftslehre is then intended to provide an alternative to such naturalism: an account of referentiality that centers on the notion of a self-relating, self-determining subject. It is in this context that the primacy of practice thesis emerges: Any account of theoretical consciousness requires an appeal to an account of human beings as agents. (shrink)

This thesis focuses on expressively rich languages that can formalise talk about probability. These languages have sentences that say something about probabilities of probabilities, but also sentences that say something about the probability of themselves. For example: (π): “The probability of the sentence labelled π is not greater than 1/2.” Such sentences lead to philosophical and technical challenges; but can be useful. For example they bear a close connection to situations where ones confidence in something can affect whether it is (...) the case or not. The motivating interpretation of probability as an agent's degrees of belief will be focused on throughout the thesis. -/- This thesis aims to answer two questions relevant to such frameworks, which correspond to the two parts of the thesis: “How can one develop a formal semantics for this framework?” and “What rational constraints are there on an agent once such expressive frameworks are considered?”. (shrink)

Are there ‘self-referential’ propositions? That is, propositions that say of themselves that they have a certain property, such as that of being false. There can seem reason to doubt that there are. At the same time, there are a number of reasons why it matters. For suppose that there are indeed no such propositions. One might then hope that while paradoxes such as the Liar show that many plausible principles about sentences must be given up, no such fate will befall (...) principles about propositions. But the existence of self-referential propositions would dash such hopes. Further, the existence of such propositions would also seem to challenge the widespread claim that Liar sentences fail to express propositions. The aim of this paper is thus to settle the question–at least given an assumption. In particular, I argue that if propositions are structured, then self-referential propositions exist. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to examine a special subgroup of emotion: self-referential emo- tions such as shame, pride and guilt. Self-referential emotions are usually conceptualized as (i) essentially involving the subject herself and as (ii) having complex conditions such as the capacity to represent others’ thoughts. I will show that rather than depending on a fully fledged ‘theory of mind’ and an explicit language-based self-representation, (i) pre-forms of self-referential emotions appear at early developmental stages already exhib- iting their (...) characteristic structure of the intentional object of the emotion being identical with or intricately related to the subject experiencing the emotional state and that (ii) they precede and substantially contribute to the development of more complex representations and to the development of a self-concept, to social interaction and to ways of understand- ing of other minds. (shrink)

Recent developments in social theory, and especially in movement research, have deepened our understanding of the self-instituting and self-transformative capabilities of society. However, as the case of Alain Touraine's notion of historicity shows, there is a real danger that social praxis is being reduced to the function of self-thematization and self-programming, enshrining society in a self-referential circle. Ideas of self-transcendence and the non-identity of society with itself cannot be adequately accounted for as long as full scope is not given to (...) the interpretive dimension of human articulation. Moreover, the human ability of self-reflexivity and critique and the recognition of self-transformative faculties are often and principally denied to those societies which do not fit into the framework of modernity, thus subverting claims of universality. Against this Johann Arnason has suggested a return to an anthropology of the social subject which, over and above the constituting faculties, foregrounds the hermeneutical ability of (self-)distantiation and broadens the reference of human action and interpretation, or, rather, transcends the idea of a specific referent: constitutive of the human condition is the opening towards other possibilities, the opening towards the world. What seems required is an interactional approach towards society and culture which takes difference as constitutional, for society as well as social theory, and not as something which can be relegated to a secondary level of complicating conditions. (shrink)

Following the phenomenology that is revealed by the emergent structure of consciousness, the path will lead to the acknowledgement of consciousness having a self-referential aspect. By following phenomenological clues, properties of self-reference will be revealed. The two most prominent properties of self-reference will be shown to be inclusion and transcendence that will be shown to be found everywhere in the phenomenology of consciousness. Also, self-reference will turn out to be unformalizable, this imposing limits on what a theory of consciousness can (...) ever achieve. The unformalizability of self-reference would be shown to be because self-reference: is itself, includes itself, and transcendes itself, all at the same time. Nevertheless, unformalizability will be shown to be an essential feature needed to bring essences into existence. (shrink)

Episodic memory has a distinctive phenomenology. One way to capture what is distinctive about it is by using the notion of mental time travel: When we remember some fact episodically, we mentally travel to the moment at which we experienced it in the past. This way of distinguishing episodic memory from semantic memory calls for an explanation of what the experience of mental time travel is. In this paper, I suggest that a certain view about the content of memories can (...) shed some light on the experience of mental time travel. This is the view that, when a subject remembers some fact episodically, their memory represents itself as coming from a perception of that fact. I propose that the experience of mental time travel in memory is the experience of representing one of the elements in this complex content, namely, the past perceptual experience of the remembered fact. In defence of this proposal, I offer two considerations. Firstly, the proposal is consistent with the idea that memories enjoy a temporal phenomenology (specifically, a feeling of pastness). Secondly, the proposal is consistent with the possibility that some of our other cognitive capacities might yield an experience of mental time travel which can be oriented towards the future. I argue that the received conception of mental time travel is in tension with those two ideas. (shrink)

The Gödel–Artemov framework offered a formalization of the Brouwer–Heyting–Kolmogorov semantics of intuitionistic logic via classical proofs. In this framework, the intuitionistic propositional logic IPC is embedded in the modal logic S4, S4 is realized in the Logic of Proofs LP, and LP has a provability interpretation in Peano Arithmetic. Self-referential LP-formulas of the type ‘t is a proof of a formula ϕ containing t itself’ are permitted in the realization of S4 in LP, and if such formulas are indeed involved, (...) it is then necessary to use fixed-point arithmetical methods to explain intuitionistic logic via provability. The natural question of whether self-referentiality can be avoided in realization of S4 was answered negatively by Kuznets who provided an S4-theorem that cannot be realized without using directly self-referential LP-formulas. This paper studies the question of whether IPC can be embedded in S4 and then realized in LP without using self-referential formulas. We consider a general class of Gödel-style modal embeddings of IPC in S4 and by extending Kuznetsʼ method, show that there are IPC-theorems such that, under each such embedding, are mapped to S4-theorems that cannot be realized in LP without using directly self-referential formulas. Interestingly, all double-negations of tautologies that are not IPC-theorems, like ¬¬, are shown to require direct self-referentiality. Another example is found in IPC→, the purely implicational fragment of IPC. This suggests that the BHK semantics of intuitionistic logic is intrinsically self-referential. (shrink)

I suggest two valid and sound arguments refuting physicalism, whether it is reductive or supervenience physicalism. The first argument is a self-referential one that is not involved with any self-referential inconsistency. The second argument demonstrates that physicalism is inescapably involved with self-referential inconsistency. Both arguments show that arguments and propositions (to be distinguished from sentences) are not physical existents. They are rather mental existents that are not reducible to any physical existent and do not supervene on anything physical. From these (...) two arguments, it clearly follows that any physicalist argument or proposition, as a mental existent, is self-refuting. (AN PHL2326365) Subjects: EXISTENTS; INCONSISTENCY; METAPHYSICS; MIND; PHYSICALISM; SELF-REFERENCE. (shrink)

The paper discusses the strengths and weaknesses of arguments of proper self-reference, arguments of self-application and arguments of iterative application. A formalization of the underlying logical structure of these arguments helps to identify the implicit premises on which these arguments rest. If the premises are plausible, the conclusions reached by these arguments must be taken seriously. In particular, all the types of argument discussed, when sound, show that certain theories that purport to be universally applicable are not tenable. The argumentative (...) power of such arguments then depends on how devastating it is for the theories in question to give up their claim of universal applicability. (shrink)

Glas's rich article makes several useful points about both anxiety and enactivism, and about how enactivism can help to conceptualize anxiety in a suitably complex way. I agree that we need to characterize anxiety as an embedded, context-sensitive and temporally evolving phenomenon with layered symptoms. As Glas points out, the enactive approach has useful conceptual tools for doing so, because of its incorporation of the theoretical apparatus of dynamical systems theory. I am sympathetic with most of what Glas says about (...) this point, so I shall not dwell on it any further.I want to focus instead on Glas's discussion of self-referentiality, which I found interesting and valuable but also in need of further... (shrink)

One way speakers can refer to themselves in conversation is with a stressed first-person pronoun accompanied by a movement of the hand to or toward the chest. This can be produced alone or in tandem with a reference and gesture to another person. Close analysis of several instances of self-referential gesture demonstrates that this form of self-reference is designed to achieve interactional work beyond simple reference, specifically relational disaggregation and self-referential extraction.

Contrary to the early media semioticians' claim that semiotics is a metalanguage of the media and the media are a metalanguage of reality, the present paper gives evidence of how the media represent a world that is itself highly mediated. It is argued that media representations involve self-referential loops in which communication turns out to be communication about communication, reports are reports about reports, and mediations are mediations of mediations. Self-reference in the media is interpreted as a symptom of postmodernity (...) with its tendency towards historical self-reflection in scenarios in which even catastrophic current events are being interpreted as mere media events or even déjà-vu scenarios in a culture in which everything seems to have been said and shown before. (shrink)

베르그손이 『의식에 직접 주어진 것들에 관한 시론』에서 발견하고 규정한 변화로서의 지속은 『물질과 기억』을 거치면서 과거의 보존으로 그리고 『창조적 진화』로 가면서 자기에 의한 자기 창조로 계속적으로 재규정되는 과정을 볼 수 있다. 이 세 가지 특징은 이미 첫 저서에서 그 맹아를 볼 수 있고 상당히 일관된 논리로 서술되고 있다. 우리는 이를 ‘자기지시성’(autoréférentialité)이라는 개념으로부터 재구성해 보고 이를 통해 지속의 개념이 점차 명료화되는 동시에 확장되는 과정을 살펴보고자 한다. 이를 위해 우리는 변화에 대한 『시론』의 분석에서 자기지시적 운동의 세 측면을 구분하고 이것이 새로운 규정으로 이어지는 실마리를 (...) 드러낸 후에 『물질과 기억』의 분석에서 물질적 현재로의 열림이라는 계기와 더불어 자기지시성이 창조적 의미로 확장되는 실마리를 살펴본다. (shrink)

This is a paper about The Causal Self-Referential Theory of Perception. According to The Causal Self-Referential Theory as developed by above all John Searle and David Woodruff Smith, perceptual content is satisfied by an object only if the object in question has caused the perceptual experience. I argue initially that Searle's account cannot explain the distinction between hallucination and illusion since it requires that the state of affairs that is presented in the perceptual experience must exist in order for the (...) perception to be veridical. Smith's account is interestingly different in that the descriptive content, i.e. the content that presents the perceptual object as having certain properties, does not determine the object of the experience. His account consequently does not require that the state of affairs that is presented in perception exists in order for the perception to have an object. Smith argues instead that perceptual reference is determined by a specific kind of demonstrative content. In this paper it is argued that Smith's account of demonstrative content is too indeterminate and in certain circumstances prescribes the wrong object. It is subsequently argued that the theory of demonstrative content can be modified so as to avoid these consequences. This modification involves deriving the conditions of satisfaction of seeing an object from the conditions of satisfaction of seeing the shape of the object, where the shape of the object is conceived of as a particularized property, what is also called a ‘trope’. (shrink)

The proof of the Second Incompleteness Theorem consists essentially of proving the uniqueness and explicit definability of the sentence asserting its own unprovability. This turns out to be a rather general phenomenon: Every instance of self-reference describable in the modal logic of the standard proof predicate obeys a similar uniqueness and explicit definability law. The efficient determination of the explicit definitions of formulae satisfying a given instance of self-reference reduces to a simple algebraic problem-that of solving the corresponding fixed-point equation (...) in the modal logic. We survey techniques for the efficient calculation of such fixed-points. (shrink)

The model of self-referential truth presented in this paper, named Revision-theoretic supervaluation, aims to incorporate the philosophical insights of Gupta and Belnap’s Revision Theory of Truth into the formal framework of Kripkean fixed-point semantics. In Kripke-style theories the final set of grounded true sentences can be reached from below along a strictly increasing sequence of sets of grounded true sentences: in this sense, each stage of the construction can be viewed as an improvement on the previous ones. I want to (...) do something similar replacing the Kripkean sets of grounded true sentences with revision-theoretic sets of stable true sentences. This can be done by defining a monotone operator through a variant of van Fraassen’s supervaluation scheme which is simply based on ω-length iterations of the Tarskian operator. Clearly, all virtues of Kripke-style theories are preserved, and we can also prove that the resulting set of “grounded” true sentences shares some nice features with the sets of stable true sentences which are provided by the usual ways of formalising revision. What is expected is that a clearer philosophical content could be associated to this way of doing revision; hopefully, a content directly linked with the insights underlying finite revision processes. (shrink)

In C. S. Peirce, as well as in the work of many biosemioticians, the semiotic object is sometimes described as a physical “object” with material properties and sometimes described as an “ideal object” or mental representation. I argue that to the extent that we can avoid these types of characterizations we will have a more scientific definition of sign use and will be able to better integrate the various fields that interact with biosemiotics. In an effort to end Cartesian dualism (...) in semiotics, which has been the main obstacle to a scientific biosemiotics, I present an argument that the “semiotic object” is always ultimately the objective of self-affirmation (of habits, physical or mental) and/or self-preservation. Therefore, I propose a new model for the sign triad: response-sign-objective. With this new model it is clear, as I will show, that self-mistaking (not self-negation as others have proposed) makes learning, creativity and purposeful action possible via signs. I define an “interpretation” as a response to something as if it were a sign, but whose semiotic objective does not, in fact, exist. If the response-as-interpretation turns out to be beneficial for the system after all, there is biopoiesis. When the response is not “interpretive,” but self-confirming in the usual way, there is biosemiosis. While the conditions conducive to fruitful misinterpretation (e.g., accidental similarity of non-signs to signs and/or contiguity of non-signs to self-sustaining processes) might be artificially enhanced, according to this theory, the outcomes would be, by nature, more or less uncontrollable and unpredictable. Nevertheless, biosemiotics could be instrumental in the manipulation and/or artificial creation of purposeful systems insofar as it can describe a formula for the conditions under which new objectives and novel purposeful behavior may emerge, however unpredictably. (shrink)

Graham Priest has argued that Yablo’s paradox involves a kind of ‘hidden’ circularity, since it involves a predicate whose satisfaction conditions can only be given in terms of that very predicate. Even if we accept Priest’s claim that Yablo’s paradox is self-referential in this sense—that the satisfaction conditions for the sentences making up the paradox involve a circular predicate—it turns out that there are paradoxical variations of Yablo’s paradox that are not circular in this sense, since they involve satisfaction conditions (...) that are not recursively specifiable, and hence not recognizable in the sense required for Priest’s argument. In this paper I provide a general recipe for constructing infinitely many such noncircular Yabloesque paradoxes, and conclude by drawing some more general lessons regarding our ability to identify conditions that are necessary and sufficient for paradoxically more generally. (shrink)

Graham Priest has argued that Yablo’s paradox involves a kind of ‘hidden’ circularity, since it involves a predicate whose satisfaction conditions can only be given in terms of that very predicate. Even if we accept Priest’s claim that Yablo’s paradox is self-referential in this sense—that the satisfaction conditions for the sentences making up the paradox involve a circular predicate—it turns out that there are paradoxical variations of Yablo’s paradox that are not circular in this sense, since they involve satisfaction conditions (...) that are not recursively specifiable, and hence not recognizable in the sense required for Priest’s argument. In this paper I provide a general recipe for constructing infinitely many such noncircular Yabloesque paradoxes, and conclude by drawing some more general lessons regarding our ability to identify conditions that are necessary and sufficient for paradoxically more generally. (shrink)

In his paper, “On paradox without self-reference”, Neil Tennant proposed the conjecture for self-referential paradoxes that any derivation formalizing self-referential paradoxes only generates a looping reduction sequence. According to him, the derivation of the Liar paradox in natural deduction initiates a looping reduction sequence and the derivation of the Yablo's paradox generates a spiral reduction. The present paper proposes the counterexample to Tennant's conjecture for self-referential paradoxes. We shall show that there is a derivation of the Liar paradox which generates (...) a spiraling reduction procedure. Since the Liar paradox is a self-referential paradox, the result is a counterexample to his conjecture. Tennant has believed that classical reductio has no essential role to formalize paradoxes. As our counterexample applies the rule of classical reductio, he may reject the counterexample. In this sense, it will be briefly argued that classical reductio and his rules for the liar sentence share some inferential role. If classical reductio should not be used in paradoxical reasoning, neither should be his rules for the liar sentence. (shrink)

In his paper, “On paradox without self-reference”, Neil Tennant proposed the conjecture for self-referential paradoxes that any derivation formalizing self-referential paradoxes only generates a looping reduction sequence. According to him, the derivation of the Liar paradox in natural deduction initiates a looping reduction sequence and the derivation of the Yablo's paradox generates a spiral reduction. The present paper proposes the counterexample to Tennant's conjecture for self-referential paradoxes. We shall show that there is a derivation of the Liar paradox which generates (...) a spiraling reduction procedure. Since the Liar paradox is a self-referential paradox, the result is a counterexample to his conjecture. Tennant has believed that classical reductio has no essential role to formalize paradoxes. As our counterexample applies the rule of classical reductio, he may reject the counterexample. In this sense, it will be briefly argued that classical reductio and his rules for the liar sentence share some inferential role. If classical reductio should not be used in paradoxical reasoning, neither should be his rules for the liar sentence. (shrink)

Augustine was undeniably a dogmatic thinker, but he also had an “aporetic side” which makes him more relevant to Christian philosophers today than isgenerally recognized. Augustine’s first experience of reading philosophy came from Cicero’s Hortensius, from which Augustine gained an appreciation for philosophical scepticism which he never lost. Thus, in all of his works and in all periods of his life, Augustine’s characteristic way of doing philosophy is aporetic, rather than either systematic or speculative. Paradoxically, Augustine’s faith in the truth (...) of Holy Scripture and Church Doctrine gave him a freedom to explore theological and philosophical conundra and, if he could not resolve them, admit frankly that he could not do so. Like Socrates, Augustine was wise partly because he admitted to being puzzled about things that others took for granted. Some of the perplexities which occupied him are: (a) the nature of time; (b) whether it is possible to show someone (without using words) what walking is if one is already walking; (c) whether one is responsible for what one does in one’s dreams; (d) whether one can think about sadness or pleasure by having an image of it in one’s mind, but without experiencing any sadness or pleasure in the thought, and (e) (perhaps most famously, in the Confessions) how one can want something that he does not believe to be good. (shrink)

Augustine was undeniably a dogmatic thinker, but he also had an “aporetic side” which makes him more relevant to Christian philosophers today than isgenerally recognized. Augustine’s first experience of reading philosophy came from Cicero’s Hortensius, from which Augustine gained an appreciation for philosophical scepticism which he never lost. Thus, in all of his works and in all periods of his life, Augustine’s characteristic way of doing philosophy is aporetic, rather than either systematic or speculative. Paradoxically, Augustine’s faith in the truth (...) of Holy Scripture and Church Doctrine gave him a freedom to explore theological and philosophical conundra and, if he could not resolve them, admit frankly that he could not do so. Like Socrates, Augustine was wise partly because he admitted to being puzzled about things that others took for granted. Some of the perplexities which occupied him are: (a) the nature of time; (b) whether it is possible to show someone (without using words) what walking is if one is already walking; (c) whether one is responsible for what one does in one’s dreams; (d) whether one can think about sadness or pleasure by having an image of it in one’s mind, but without experiencing any sadness or pleasure in the thought, and (e) (perhaps most famously, in the Confessions) how one can want something that he does not believe to be good. (shrink)

We present a semantics for a language that includes sentences that can talk about their own probabilities. This semantics applies a fixed point construction to possible world style structures. One feature of the construction is that some sentences only have their probability given as a range of values. We develop a corresponding axiomatic theory and show by a canonical model construction that it is complete in the presence of the ω-rule. By considering this semantics we argue that principles such as (...) introspection, which lead to paradoxical contradictions if naively formulated, should be expressed by using a truth predicate to do the job of quotation and disquotation and observe that in the case of introspection the principle is then consistent. (shrink)

Following F. William Lawvere, we show that many self-referential paradoxes, incompleteness theorems and fixed point theorems fall out of the same simple scheme. We demonstrate these similarities by showing how this simple scheme encompasses the semantic paradoxes, and how they arise as diagonal arguments and fixed point theorems in logic, computability theory, complexity theory and formal language theory.