I focus on an overlooked aspect of the challenge of irrelevant influences. The challenge is often framed in terms of whether recognizing the presence of irrelevant factors in the pedigree of a belief provides a defeater. I argue that the epistemic significance of irrelevant factors goes beyond their status as defeaters. I focus on what I call gray cases, where learning about such factors causes epistemic worry without justifying giving up the belief. I argue that in gray cases, the subject (...) finds a commendatory epistemic practical reason to engage in an activity intended to assuage that epistemic worry. (shrink)

According to Millianism, the semantic content of a proper name is its semantic referent. Many names, however, lack semantic referent; hence, so-called ‘empty’ names. Empty names raise various problems for Millianism. T.C. Ryckman, Fred Adams, Garry Fuller, Robert Stecker, Kenneth Taylor, and Nicole Wyatt, among others, have defended Millianism against these problems by appeal to pragmatics . I introduce Millianism and the problems raised by empty names for the view, then examine Pragmatic Millianism , its strength, its varieties, and why (...) the previous arguments against PM do not succeed. I then provide my argument against PM: the view oversimplifies the complex phenomenon of association between names and descriptions. I discuss an objection to my argument and rebut that. Finally, I try to draw an outline of a positive view. (shrink)

I present a puzzle regarding the norms of disagreement and inquiry. The puzzle mainly concerns a special type of peer disagreement that I call “mild disagreement”, in which the parties to the disagreement believe a proposition but with different degrees of confidence. The puzzle is best formulated as an inconsistent triad: (NJ1) The state of mild disagreement provides the involved parties with no epistemic reason to drop their belief regarding the disputed judgment. (NJ2) The state of mild disagreement provides a (...) practical reason for the involved parties to launch an inquiry into the disputed judgment. (NJ3) If the state of disagreement provides a reason to launch an inquiry into the disputed judgment, the involved parties have a reason to drop their belief regarding the disputed judgment. After discussing some possible responses to the puzzle, I offer my own solution, which involves introducing a new take on how to understand inquiry. This new take on the nature of inquiry can provide us with an alternative to the influential account recently defended by Jane Friedman. (shrink)

We argue that the debate about the normativity of belief thesis has been hampered by the slogan, ‘belief aims at truth’. We show that the slogan provides no content to the normativity of belief. The slogan encourages formulations of the norm as a prescriptive norm. There are well-known problems with such formulations. We provide a new formulation of the thesis as a prohibitive norm. This captures the key intuition most normativists about belief want to endorse.

According to many philosophers, the notion of belief is constitutively normative ; Shah ; Shah and Velleman (); Gibbard (); Wedgwood ). In a series of widely discussed papers, Terence Horgan and Mark Timmons have developed an ingenious ‘Moral Twin Earth’ argument against ‘Cornell Realist’ metaethical views which hold that moral terms have synthetic natural definitions in the manner of natural kind terms. In this paper we shall suggest that an adaptation of the Moral Twin Earth argument to the doxastic (...) case – Doxastic Twin Earth – provides new evidence for the normativity of belief. (shrink)

According to Burge, it is not possible to commit brute errors in the process of critical reasoning. This thesis lies at the heart of Burge’s influential theory of self-knowledge. By appealing to a version of the slow-switching argument, this paper contends that Burge’s view is not compatible with his commitment to externalism about mental content. In particular, it is argued that accepting externalism opens up the possibility of brute errors in the process of critical reasoning.

After introducing Millianism and touching on two problems raised by genuinely empty names for Millianism (section I), I provide a brief exposition of the Gappy Proposition View (GPV) and of how different versions of this view can reply to the problems in question (section II). In the following sections I develop my reasons against the GPV. First, I will try to argue that apparently promising arguments for the claim that gappy propositions are propositions are not successful (section III). Then, I (...) will develop two arguments against GPs via demonstrating two odd consequences of the GPV: (a) that there can be an atomic proposition which contains other propositions that are not the semantic contents of any part of the .. (shrink)

Following Darcy’s concession in 1901, Britain began oil exploration in the southwest of Iran. In 1908, economic oil was discovered, and the Anglo- Persian Oil Company (APOC) was established. This company from its establishment was under the influence of the British Government, to extend that, Britain became its major shareholder in 1917 which continued until the nationalization of Iran’s oil in 1951. In the meantime, the concession and following agreements prepared an almost autonomous status for the company. Generally, Iran had (...) never been a British colony, however; this status had evidence of colonialism and let the company build the artificial environment in Iran’s southwestern, based on its attitudes and values, as well as hierarchical structure, racial-class segregation, and closed society, which experts consider it as a type of social engineering. According to this, the building formed by the company could manifest the upstream ideas, specifically in towns that were completely shaped by it. Therefore, Masjed Soleyman and Abadan, the two main company towns of the British-owned Anglo-Persian Oil Company, which were quite isolated from other parts of Iran, could be suitable platforms for displaying the company’s attitudes and values. Therefore, this research by interpretive-historical methodology, based on both primary and secondary sources from desk research and archival research, investigates the manifestation of the company’s attitudes and values in its quiet a half-century (1901-1951) building in Masjed Soleyman and Abadan, in five periods. These periods were shaped based on the most important happens including periods of exploration (1901-1908), formation (1908-1917), primary development (1917-1933), secondary development (1933-1939), and leading to the nationalization of oil (1939- 1951). In the first period, there is no evidence of architecture or urbanism, in the second and third periods, architecture, specifically bungalows appeared company values and in the fourth and fifth periods, urbanism especially, garden cities represented company values. (shrink)

I study definability and types in the linear fragment of continuous logic. Linear variants of several definability theorems such as Beth, Svenonus and Herbrand are proved. At the end, a partial study of the theories of probability algebras, probability algebras with an aperiodic automorphism and AL-spaces is given.

We develop a model theoretic framework for studying algebraic structures equipped with a measure. The real line is used as a value space and its usual arithmetical operations as connectives. Integration is used as a quantifier. We extend some basic results of pure model theory to this context and characterize measurable sets in terms of zero-sets of formulas.

This paper takes the form of a ‘performative’ dialogue, a recounting of scenes, which alternate, in the mode of a cinematic montage, with academic analysis of the interfaces between boxing, art, and space. In his book Body and Soul: Notebooks on an Apprentice Boxer, sociologist Loïc Wacquant mixes three genres: analytic sociology, depictive ethnography, and short story. He argues that he used this unorthodox methodology ‘to make the reader simultaneously feel and understand how boxers are “gripped” by their craft and (...) viscerally tied to it’. Similarly, in this paper, the overlapping voices of its two authors engage in both performative, creative and intellectual ways with the critiques and social rituals surrounding boxing, ultimately finding that an understanding of boxing as an epistemological encounter gives rise to interesting ways to think through the relationships between art and urban space itself. The paper ranges widely over each author’s personal experience of boxing, analyses of specific artworks both ancient and modern, and an analysis of the psychogeography of urban space, and in particular, Johannesburg. The form of the paper, as it incorporates narrative experience and analytic mode, can be seen as a text that re-enacts the ‘performance’ of boxing and art-making in which the traditional opposition between the two is integrated, if not suspended. (shrink)

A generic analysis of research article abstracts can cover issues of different types; among them are linguistic features. An integral part of linguistic features of research article abstracts is interactive metadiscourse usage that can assist to make the text persuasive and unfolding to a discourse community. The main principle behind applying interactive metadiscourse is the view of writing as socially engaging; specifically, it indicates the ways writers project themselves into their arguments to declare their attitudes and commitments to the readers. (...) This study aimed to explore how interactive metadiscourse markers are deployed by research article abstract writers belonging to different disciplinary communities within the soft sciences, while trying to reach the audience by creating a well-organized discourse. Hyland’s interpersonal model of metadiscourse was adopted to analyze 60 research article abstracts written in Applied Linguistics and Economics. Based on the results, there were marked variations found across the two disciplines in terms of interactive metadiscourse markers. (shrink)

We study the relations of being substructure and elementary substructure between Kripke models of intuitionistic predicate logic with the same arbitrary frame. We prove analogues of Tarski's test and Löwenheim-Skolem's theorems as determined by our definitions. The relations between corresponding worlds of two Kripke models [MATHEMATICAL SCRIPT CAPITAL K] ⪯ [MATHEMATICAL SCRIPT CAPITAL K]′ are studied.

In social systems or spaces, distance between the centre and the periphery breeds epistemic injustice. There are growing accounts of epistemic injustice in health-related fields, as in the article by Pratt and de Vries.1 The title of the article asks: ‘Where is knowledge from the global South?’ Like me, you may answer by saying: ‘Knowledge from the global South is in the global South’. That answer says a lot about how we right epistemic injustice done to actors in the global (...) South or the periphery, including in health ethics. Pratt and de Vries identified four sets of actors (individuals, institutions, journals and funders) responsible for righting epistemic injustice. For three of the four sets of actors, they recognised the need for—or the possibility of—symmetry between global North and global South. Except journals. They did not seriously consider that journals are either present in or could belong to the global South; to the periphery. Platforms for knowledge exchange, circulation, cultivation and curation—such as journals, conferences, publishers, blogs, archives, seminars, books and the media, social or traditional—are neither physically nor epistemically neutral. They are situated. The BBC cannot do for Nigeria or Australia what it does for Britain; neither can the BMJ. Many of us take our position at the centre or periphery as neutral, natural, necessary or permanent. But the African American writer Toni Morrison proved the opposite with her career: ‘I stood at the border, stood at the edge and claimed it as central. l claimed it as central, and let the rest of the world move over to where I was.’2 Although physically in the USA, Toni Morrison was writing …. (shrink)

The normativity of mental content thesis appears to have been the most influential in contemporary philosophy of mind. Paul Boghossian (2003, 2005) has developed an argument for the normativity of mental content on the basis of two premises, i.e. firstly, the normativity of the notion of belief and secondly, the priority of the notion of belief to the notion of desire. In his recent article Alexander Miller (2008) has criticised Boghossian’s argument for the normativity of mental content. To make the (...) objection against the normativity of content, Miller has argued that the second premise of Boghossian’s argument is since belief and desire are conceptually interdependent. My purpose in this paper is to show that content normativity thesis prevails Miller's attack. In order to establish the claim I will argue that content is normative even if belief and desire are conceptually interdependent. (shrink)

Kripke uses a fictional skeptical character in order to review and refuses “cognitive meaning” theory. According to this theory, the propositions which contain reference to the meaning show the state of mind of belief which is a correct state of mind. In order to challenge this theory, Kripke uses another theory which is known as “Normativity of meaning” in philosophic literature. According to the latter theory, meaning of a word limits its application in a normative way; for example, if I (...) use ‘table’, I mean table, then I should use this word for the things which are really table. On the other hand, in meta-ethics, there is a famous argument named “motivational introversion argument”, presented by Michael Smith, whose purpose is to reject “moral cognitivism”, the sentences which include references to moral concepts in an action show state of mind of belief which is a correct state of mind. The following article is going to discuss the possibility of the developing of Michael Smith’s motivational introversion argument into the sphere of meaning. In other words, this paper is a comparative study of fields of meta-ethics and philosophy of language, i.e. it examines whether there can be an argument similar to Michael Smith’s so that one can come to reject meaningful cognitivism. (shrink)

Discovering the differences between the various systems of modal logics was one of the advantages of inventing Kripke semantics. One of the most obvious examples is interpreting the necessity of provability in provability logic. According to Boolos in The Logic of Provability, by discovering this logic, we can say that the understanding of new issues in the field of argument was opened. In this paper, with a formal approach and with a descriptive-analytical and comparative method, the axiomatic propositional systems of (...) the GL, Grz, and H, and their possible world semantics based on Kripke semantics are studied, as well as the sequent calculus of GL (in Peano arithmetic) and GLS (in the standard model) were introduced. Finally, the meta-theorems of soundness, consistency, and completeness of the GL were interpreted and proved. (shrink)

The current study aims to explain the fundamentals of religious pluralism in Wittgenstein later philosophy and Gadamer philosophical hermeneutics, specifically regarding culture. It, then, proposes the approach more suitable for the Islamic context. Having fulfilled such an objective, pluralism, concerning religious rituals, becomes accepted and cultural and religious interaction is realized without any relativism conclusion. Wittgenstein’s pluralism results in pure relativism. That is to say, in order to understand the rules of the language game and life style he mentions, one (...) needs to be placed inside. However, it is a dialectical model that Gadamer philosophical hermeneutics leads to. Dialogue gives opportunity to cultural interaction and convergence, developing the religious culture. The latter is of more proximity to Islamic resources such as the Quran, proposing a religious culture transcending cultural, historical, and social limitations. All in all, the two significant features of Gadamer’s which Wittgenstein ignores are first, the interaction of religious pluralism encouraging the development of religious culture and second, reciprocal relation between culture and religion based on hermeneutics circle. (shrink)

The Second Khordad Movement was a democratic social movement in contemporary Iran. Investigation of this movement revealed two images, of flourish and of decline, as the movement was first generally successful until early 2000 and thereafter began to regress from the spring of that year onwards. The purpose of this article is to provide a comprehensive framework in which to examine the reasons behind the movement's failure and regression. To this end, the study utilizes the literature on social movements, especially (...) the political process model, and attempts to explain the initial success and subsequent decline of the movement based on elements such as political opportunity, framing processes, mobilizing structures, and the repertoire of collective action.Export citation Request permission. (shrink)

We define an ultraproduct of metric structures based on a maximal probability charge and prove a variant of Łoś theorem for linear metric formulas. We also consider iterated ultraproducts.

The ultraproduct construction is generalized to p‐ultramean constructions () by replacing ultrafilters with finitely additive measures. These constructions correspond to the linear fragments of continuous logic and are very close to the constructions in real analysis. A powermean variant of the Keisler‐Shelah isomorphism theorem is proved for. It is then proved that ‐sentences (and their approximations) are exactly those sentences of continuous logic which are preserved by such constructions. Some other applications are also given.

Linear continuous logic is the fragment of continuous logic obtained by restricting connectives to addition and scalar multiplications. Most results in the full continuous logic have a counterpart in this fragment. In particular a linear form of the compactness theorem holds. We prove this variant and use it to deduce some basic preservation theorems.

Islamism and Post-Islamism analyzes political thought in Iran since 1979. Seyed Javad Miri engages with one of the seminal thinkers in contemporary Iranian politics, Allama Jafari, on key relevant concepts.

Neo-Russellianism, which incorporates both Millianism (with regard to proper names) and the thesis of singular Russellian propositions, has widely been defended after the publication of Kripke's Naming and Necessity. The view, however, encounters various problems regarding empty names, names that do not have semantic referents. Nathan Salmon and Scott Soames have defended neo-Russellianism against such problems in a novel way; to account for various intuitions of competent and rational speakers regarding utterances of sentences containing empty names, Salmon and Soames appeal (...) neither to entities similar to Fregean senses, e.g. propositional guises or modes of presentation, nor to Gricean implicatures. In this paper, however, I argue that their view slips into neo-Meinongianism; it is committed to nonexistent objects, assigns various properties to them, and allows quantifiers range over such entities. This, I conclude, makes Salmon and Soames' view less appealing, if not implausible. (shrink)

Dans ces "bulles" de pensées, traversées par un fourmillement de références à l'histoire culturelle et à la philosophie classique, Pascale Seys porte un regard "dézoomé", tantôt grave, tantôt léger, sur nos façons d'agir et de penser. -- Provided by publisher.

Dans ces "bulles" de pensées, traversées par un fourmillement de références à l'histoire culturelle et à la philosophie classique, Pascale Seys porte un regard "dézoomé", tantôt grave, tantôt léger, sur nos façons d'agir et de penser. Prenant le pouls d'un monde pressé, elle nous invite à réfléchir au temps qui passe, à l'ambiguïté du bonheur et aux affres du désir, à la splendeur du cosmos, aux vertus du retard, des voyages et de la poésie, autant de mythologies de notre quotidien (...) qui nécessitent, pour être considérées pour ce qu'elles sont, de "déplacer l'éléphant".0. (shrink)

Here I shall focus on Suhrawardi’s use and conception of ‘fiṭrī’, translated as ‘innate’ by Hossein Ziai (1990), Hossein Ziai and John Walbridge (Suhrawardi 1999), and Mehdi Aminrazavi (1997, 2003),1 and will try to make some points in passing regarding Cartesian innate ideas in relation to Suhrawardi’s fiṭrīāt. I will try to explain my understanding of Suhrawardi’s i‛tibārāt ‛aqliyya (beings of reason) and their relationship to fiṭrīāt. As a relevant issue, I will touch on Suhrawardi’s distinction between objective and intellectual (...) attributes. Considering Platonic forms as the godparents of Suhrawardi’s ‘innate’ ideas, I will end by justifying this question: Is Suhrawardi a Platonist?Let’s begin with Descartes. .. (shrink)

In aesthetics/philosophy of art, Fichte did not produce works as great as Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment or Hegel’s Lectures on Aesthetics. As a result, it was long believed that he had no role to play in the aesthetics of German idealism. Nevertheless, there are a few works in which we can identify the materials for developing an innovative philosophy of art. In this article, it is argued that Fichte takes two fundamental steps in aesthetics: 1) by transferring (...) the weight of the discussion of aesthetics to the philosophy of artistic creation, he makes, as it were, a Copernican revolution in aesthetics and thus transforms the aesthetics of taste into a philosophy of art based on the creative spirit; 2) he raises the status of aesthetics (in fact, the aesthetic sense) to the level of “a (or the) condition for the possibility of philosophy.”. (shrink)

A value space is a topological algebra equipped with a non-empty family of continuous quantifiers . We will describe first-order logic on the basis of . Operations of are used as connectives and its relations are used to define statements. We prove under some normality conditions on the value space that any theory in the new setting can be represented by a classical first-order theory.

In this paper, some basic properties of automorphisms of first order languages and some examples are presented. In particular, an omitting types theorem is proved.

We prove some preservation theorems concerning inductive and model-complete theories in the framework of semi-classical logic introduced in [1].

Avicenna introduces the primary propositions as the most fundamental principles of knowledge. However, as far as we are aware, Avicenna’s primaries have not yet been independently studied. Nor do Avicenna scholars agree on how to characterize them in the language of contemporary philosophy. It is well-known that the primaries are indemonstrable; nonetheless, it is not clear what the genealogy of the primaries is, how, epistemologically speaking, they can be distinguished from other principles, what their phenomenology is, what the cause of (...) the assent to them is, how to explain the relationship between the ‘innate [nature] of the intellect’ and the primaries and, finally, back to their indemonstrability, in what sense they are ‘indemonstrable’. We will try to fill this gap. As a corollary, we will explain why Gutas’s view [Gutas, Dimitri.... (shrink)

My dissertation concerns post Kripkean debates which locate normativity not as a feature of linguistic meaning but as applicable to mental content. My aim is to identify a clear sense in which the thesis is plausible and to defend the thesis against recent criticisms. In order to do this, I will consider the two main premises that the normativity thesis is based upon, namely, (a) that belief is conceptually priority to desire and (b) that belief is a normative concept. Most (...) criticisms of the normativity thesis in the literature argue against the latter premise, namely, the normativity of belief thesis. I first argue that recent objections against the priority of belief to desire do not undermine the normativity thesis in the case of mental content. I then concentrate on the normativity of belief to defend the thesis. I will consider the logic of the normativity of belief thesis and suggest viable formulations of the thesis. I will also defuse recent objections against the normativity of belief thesis and I establish a new argument for the thesis. (shrink)

Beyond Death: The Mystical Teachings of ʿAyn al-Quḍāt al-Hamadhānī. By Firoozeh Papan-Matin. Islamic History and Civilization, vol. 75. Leiden: Brill, 2010. Pp. x + 242. $150.

« Un désert qui monologue », ainsi se définissait Violette Leduc, cette femme que trop ont refusé d'écouter, cet auteur que trop peu de ses contemporains ont comprise. Vingt-sept ans après son décès, Carlo Jansiti lui rend, avec la biographie qu'il vient de publier, un hommage posthume, sobre mais poignant. Il redonne du relief à une forte personnalité et à une figure attachante, qui scandalisa ses contemporains par sa marginalité et son originalité, et fut souvent mal jugée par eux. L...

ABSTRACT: Taine aspired to place his philosophical project in the synthesis of the two major theoretical tendencies of the nineteenth century: positivism, on the one hand, giving preference to the English tradition, and German metaphysics, mostly Hegelianism, on the other. What does this attempt mean in the field of aesthetics? Taine based his interpretation of the production of art on a series of objective laws, following the naturalist method, as he clearly stated at the École des Beaux-Arts de Paris where (...) he taught for several years from January 1864. (shrink)

This article, through a comparative study, aims at defining and analysing the concept of hope in the Quran versus psychology. The study defines common and differential grounds in the area, and suggests a proper approach for establishing and boosting hope in people based on the Quran’s lessons. One of the noticeable results of this study is that many of the techniques for creation and improvement of hope are already present in the Quran, and that there are many shared grounds between (...) findings of civilisations and the Divine teachings. It was found that both psychology and the Quran both view hope as a rewarded patience along with action to achieve one’s goal, and both fields concur that knowing one’s goal and obstacles can preserve hope in man. Some differences were also found. In contrast to psychology, hope in the Quran is based on the goal behind human creation and in line with its perfection, whose sole basis would be faith in God. Also, in psychology the techniques proposed for hope improvement are individual for the most part, whereas the Quran aims at proposing behavioural approaches in societal scale in addition to individual solutions. (shrink)

Moral contextualism about “ought”-sentences is a semantic thesis that takes the content of moral “ought” to be a function of contextually relevant parameters. I aim to provide a theory of OUGHT-judgments at the level of thought that supplements the contextualist understanding of moral “ought”-sentences. To this aim, I suggest understanding the concept of ought as an indexical concept for which a phenomenological profile plays an extension-fixing role. Then, I will argue how my suggested view can provide a theory of OUGHT-judgments (...) that is in harmony with moral contextualism. (shrink)

Millianism is the view that the semantic content of a proper name is its semantic referent. Empty names, names with no semantic referents, raise various problems for Millianism. To solve these problems, many have appealed to pragmatics, thus ‘Pragmatic Millianism’. Pragmatic Millianism employs the relation of association between names and descriptions as well as some pragmatic processes to substitute empty names with descriptions associated with. The resultant content should account for the intuitions raised by utterances of sentences containing empty names. (...) Here, I will try to argue against this picture: Names are associated with descriptions of different kinds in a number of ways. The complex nature of this relation is overlooked by Pragmatic Millianism. Neither the relation of association nor the pragmatic processes responsible for substituting a description or a cluster of descriptions for an empty name guarantee the fullness of what is pragmatically imparted. The moral is this: Regarding empty names, Pragmatic Millianism should be avoided. (shrink)