(2013). Heidegger, Wittgenstein and St Paul on the Last Judgement: On the Roots and Significance of ‘The Theoretical Attitude’. British Journal for the History of Philosophy: Vol. 21, No. 1, pp. 143-164. doi: 10.1080/09608788.2012.686980.

Edmund Husserl’s critique of using the natural scientific method to investigate meaningful human experience remains relevant to recent debates in psychology. Discursive Psychology (DP) claims to draw upon phenomenological insights to critique quantitative psychology for studying theoretical concepts rather than the actual practices of the lived social world. In this paper, I will argue that DP overlooks the important distinction that can be made between the theoretical attitude and the natural scientific attitude in Husserlian Phenomenology and hence, once (...) again, loses sight of the meaningfully constituted life-world. In doing so, I will demonstrate the continued relevance of Husserl’s critique of natural science to the discipline of psychology. (shrink)

In the article, I discuss some ideas of the type theoretical grammar of Aarne Ranta and the analysis of the problem of Quine (Ralph and Ortcutt), which Oleg Domanov implemented by means of this theory. There are more similarities than differences in TT grammar with well-known ideas, including “fine grinding” of meanings, counterparts, procedural understanding of – intensions. The main problem, which, in my opinion, exists in the TT grammar, consists in understanding how another agent’s epistemic attitudes can (...) be justified for me. Ranta proceeds from the metaphor of the agent as a calculator, which for the general case is unacceptable. I believe that the interpretation of the epistemic attitudes of another agent must be externalistic, that is, referring not to the agent’s worlds, but to his actions in the actual world: “agent X believes that A” is true when the interpreter sees the behavior of the agent in situations that the interpreter would consider adequate for himself if he believed A and would be “in place” of X. To formalize here, it would take complicated tools which are used for describing actions. I’ve come to the conclusion that an understanding of the type in TT grammar makes it intensional in some extended sense, since the working with the naming relation is already an element of a specific pragmatics. (shrink)

Background: There is a lack of empirical data on lay attitudes toward different sorts of deception in medicine. However, lay attitudes toward deception should be taken into account when we consider whether deception is ever permissible in a medical context. The objective of this study was to examine lay attitudes of U.S. citizens toward different sorts of deception across different medical contexts. Methods: A one-time online survey was administered to U.S. users of the Amazon “Mechanical Turk” website. (...) Participants were asked to answer questions regarding a series of vignettes depicting different sorts of deception in medical care, as well as a question regarding their general attitudes toward truth-telling. Results: Of the 200 respondents, the majority found the use of placebos in different contexts to be acceptable following partial disclosure but found it to be unacceptable if it involved outright lying. Also, 55.5% of respondents supported the use of sham surgery in clinical research, although 55% claimed that it would be unacceptable to deceive patients in this research, even if this would improve the quality of the data from the study. Respondents supported fully informing patients about distressing medical information in different contexts, especially when the patient is suffering from a chronic condition. In addition, 42.5% of respondents believed that it is worse to deceive someone by providing the person with false information than it is to do so by giving the person true information that is likely to lead them to form a false belief, without telling them other important information that shows it to be false. However, 41.5% believed that the two methods of deception were morally equivalent. Conclusions: Respondents believed that some forms of deception were acceptable in some circumstances. While the majority of our respondents opposed outright lying in medical contexts, they were prepared to support partial disclosure and the use of placebos when it is in the patient's interests or when it is what the person would want. These results support the position that physicians should be allowed a greater degree of authority to make a professional judgment about whether deception might be morally warranted by the circumstances, provided that it doesn't involve outright lying. (shrink)

In the late 1970s and early 1980s a number of philosophers, notably Churchland, Field, Stalnaker, Dennett, and Davidson, began to argue that propositional attitude predicates (such as believes that it’s sunny outside) are a species of measure predicate, analogous in important ways to numerical predicates by which we attribute physical magnitudes (such as mass, length, and temperature). Other philosophers, including myself, have subsequently developed the idea in greater detail. In this paper I sketch the general outlines of measurement‐theoretic accounts of (...) propositional attitudes, explaining in the briefest terms the basic idea of such accounts, why some have thought such accounts plausible, how these accounts might go, what their implications might be both for our conception of propositional attitudes and for their role in cognitive scientific theorizing, and where the potential problems with such accounts might lie. (shrink)

Evidence on AI acceptance comes from a diverse field comprising public opinion research and largely experimental studies from various disciplines. Differing theoretical approaches in this research, however, imply heterogeneous ways of studying AI acceptance. The present paper provides a framework for systematizing different uses. It identifies three families of theoretical perspectives informing research on AI acceptance—user acceptance, delegation acceptance, and societal adoption acceptance. These models differ in scope, each has elements specific to them, and the connotation of technology (...) acceptance thus changes when shifting perspective. The discussion points to a need for combining the three perspectives as they have all become relevant for AI. A combined approach serves to systematically relate findings from different studies. And as AI systems affect people in different constellations and no single perspective can accommodate them all, building blocks from several perspectives are needed to comprehensively study how AI is perceived in society. (shrink)

In the literature on doxastic attitudes, the notion ‘belief’ is used in both a coarse-grained and a fine-grained manner. While the coarse-grained notion of ‘belief,’ as the doxastic attitude that expresses any form of assent to its content, is a useful technical concept, the fine-grained notion, which tries to capture the folk notion of ‘belief’ in contrast with other doxastic concepts such as ‘acceptance’ or ‘degrees of confidence,’ is utterly ambiguous. In order to dispel this ambiguity, I introduce first (...) a new framework for describing doxastic attitudes that does not rely on a specific fine-grained primitive notion of ‘belief.’ This framework distinguishes two different doxastic attitudes, i.e. the theoretical and the practical, and explains how various doxastic concepts such as ‘accepting,’ ‘having a degree of confidence’ and the folk notion of ‘belief’ all describe a particular interpretation of one or both of the distinguished doxastic attitudes. Next, by focusing on ongoing debates over the difference between ‘acceptance’ and ‘belief’ on the one hand and between ‘degrees of confidence’ and ‘(plain) belief’ on the other, I argue that much precision can be gained in philosophical analysis by taking a reductionist stance concerning any specific fine-grained and primitive notion of ‘belief.’. (shrink)

De se attitudes seem to play a special role in action and cognition. This raises a challenge to the traditional way in which mental attitudes have been understood. In this chapter, we review the case for thinking that de se attitudes require special theoretical treatment and discuss various ways in which the traditional theory can be modified to accommodate de se attitudes.

This book is an examination of the foundations and applications of the program of truth-theoretic semantics for natural languages introduced in 1967 by Donald Davidson in his classic paper “Truth and Meaning.” This is the second of two books on Donald Davidson’s central philosophical project. The first, Donald Davidson: Meaning, Truth, Language and Reality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), dealt with the basic framework of Davidson’s truth-theoretic approach to providing a meaning theory for a natural language, and then with his (...) development of his general project in the philosophy of language and theory of meaning by way of the analysis of the empirical confirmation of a meaning theory for a speaker, from the stance of the radial interpreter, that is, the interpreter who starts out without any detailed knowledge of the speakers’ meanings or attitudes. This book turns to the development of details of Davidson’s semantic program, specifically, the pursuit of the project of providing a compositional semantic theory for natural languages by making strategic use of an appropriately adapted Tarski-style axiomatic truth theory. Such a theory aims to provide a specification of the truth conditions of any felicitous utterance of a natural language sentence which serves to interpret it, and exhibits in the proof of the theorem that gives the truth conditions the compositional structure of the sentence and how its truth depends on its context of utterance. The book develops the basic framework, applies it to quantifiers, proper names, indexicals, simple and complex demonstratives, quotation, adjectives and adverbs, simple tenses of state and event verbs, temporal adverbs and quantifiers, tense in sentential complements and perfect tenses, opaque contexts, especially indirect discourse and attitude sentences, non-declarative sentences, semantic structure and logical form, and discusses the relation of the framework the metaphysics of truth. (shrink)

In his introductions to the encyclopaedic Philosophy of Nature and to the Lectures on the Philosophy of Nature, Hegel distinguishes between three ‘attitudes’ (Verhaltensweisen, Einstellungen) towards nature—the theoretical, the practical and the philosophical attitude. According to him there is a certain ‘contradiction’ or tension between our theoretical attitude towards nature, which makes it an object of scientific inquiry, and the practical attitude that we assume as living rational beings who intervene in nature and shape it according to (...) our purposes. This article focuses on how exactly to pinpoint that tension and on how it is resolved in what Hegel calls the ‘philosophical’ or ‘comprehending’ attitude towards nature. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to present a new argument against so-called fitting attitude analyses of intrinsic value, according to which, roughly, for something to be intrinsically good is for there to be reasons to want it for its own sake. The argument is indirect. First, I submit that advocates of a fitting-attitude analysis of value should, for the sake of theoretical unity, also endorse a fitting-attitude analysis of a closely related but distinct concept: the concept of intrinsic (...) value for a person, i.e., the concept of welfare. Then I argue directly against fitting-attitude analyses of welfare. This argument, which is the focus of the paper, is based on the idea that whereas whether an event is good or bad for a person doesn’t change over time, the attitudes there is reason to have towards such an event can change over time. Therefore, one cannot explain the former in terms of the latter, as fitting-attitude analyses of welfare attempt to do. (shrink)

Propositional attitude reports are sentences built around clause-embedding psychological verbs, like Kim believes that it's raining or Kim wants it to rain. These interact in many intricate ways with a wide variety of semantically relevant grammatical phenomena, and represent one of the most important topics at the interface of linguistics and philosophy, as their study provides insight into foundational questions about meaning. This book provides a bird's-eye overview of the grammar of propositional attitude reports, synthesizing the key facts, theories, and (...) open problems in their analysis. Couched in the theoretical framework of generative grammar and compositional truth-conditional semantics, it places emphasis on points of intersection between propositional attitude reports and other important topics in semantic and syntactic theory. With discussion points, suggestions for further reading and a useful guide to symbols and conventions, it will be welcomed by students and researchers wishing to explore this fertile area of study. (shrink)

In this paper, I examine the decision-theoretic status of risk attitudes. I start by providing evidence showing that the risk attitude concepts do not play a major role in the axiomatic analysis of the classic models of decision-making under risk. This can be interpreted as reflecting the neutrality of these models between the possible risk attitudes. My central claim, however, is that such neutrality needs to be qualified and the axiomatic relevance of risk attitudes needs to be (...) re-evaluated accordingly. Specifically, I highlight the importance of the conditional variation and the strengthening of risk attitudes, and I explain why they establish the axiomatic significance of the risk attitude concepts. I also present several questions for future research regarding the strengthening of risk attitudes. (shrink)

Within the context of structural theories this paper examines what health professionals say about their clinical service structures. We firstly trace various conceptual perspectives on clinical service structures, discussing multiple theoretical axes. These theories question whether clinical service structures represent either superficial or more profound changes in hospitals. We secondly explore which view is supported though a content analysis of the free text responses of 111 health professionals (44 doctors, 45 nurses and 22 allied health practitioners) about their clinical (...) service structures in a questionnaire survey in two large hospitals that had implemented clinical service structures three years previously. Commentaries unfavourable toward clinical service structures were made by 47.7% of staff, favourable by 24.3%, mixed (both favourable and unfavourable) by 17.1% and non-evaluative statements were made by 10.8%. The most frequent criticisms were inefficient organisation of change (27%), poor management (24.3%), lack of cooperation between staff (15.9%) and failure to empower health practitioners (13.5%). All professions made more negative than positive evaluations of their clinical service structures but the ratio was highest for doctors and lowest for allied health. Ranking of nurses' and allied health staffs' specific evaluations were similar but both differed significantly from doctors.' Unfavourable or negative comments predominated, and change appears more superficial and less profound than advocates of structural contributions hope. Four types of belief systems about clinical service structures are apparent. Some study participants are disposed toward the status quo; others toward restructuring; yet others are team oriented; and a final group is tribally oriented. The implication of this paper for managers is that more work is needed if clinical service structures are to realise the promise of more multi-disciplinarity and less fragmentation across professional groups. For scholars, the implication is that marrying different theoretical frames with empirical data can serve to produce fresh perspectives and perhaps new insights. (shrink)

This study uses the ATBEQ, as published by J.F. Preble and A. Reichel (1988) to measure attitudes towards ethical business attitudes held by final year South African Bachelor of Commerce students at Rhodes University. Three samples of students were assessed over three consecutive years of 1989, 1990 and 1991, and results are compared with samples (1988) of American and Israeli students and a sample (1991) of Western Australian students. A significant difference in attitudes was found to exist (...) between the Israeli and South African samples. A factor analysis of the questionnaire identified eleven factors of which seven are theoretically labelled. A revised version of the ATBEQ is suggested which excludes the poorly performing questions. (shrink)

The past decade has seen an increase in interest relating to the correlates and determinants of attitudes about nonhuman animals, especially attitudes about the use or abuse of animals. However, little research has explicitly addressed individual differences in attitudes about the neglect of animals. The current study employs a factor-analytic approach to explore whether attitudes about animal neglect can be reliably differentiated from attitudes about animal abuse and whether the relationship between attitudes about animal (...) neglect and animal abuse differs as a function of gender. Results indicated that attitudes about abuse and neglect can be reliably differentiated among both men and women. However, the structure of these attitudes appears to differ substantially by sex. This paper discusses theoretical and practical implications of these results. (shrink)

The thesis concerns itself with the selection constraints governing the basic distributional patterns of five complement constructions in English--the bare clause, the that-clause, the interrogative, the concealed question construction and the exclamative complement--across a wide array of knowledge, belief and communication predicates. The relevant distributional phenomena--which predicates are capable of embedding which complement types--have traditionally been captured by stipulative grammatical markings such as subcategorization frames, semantic selection frames and case-theoretic lexical markings. These theoretical tools, even to the extent that (...) they successfully reduplicate the observed phenomena, are of no explanatory value, as they do not derive the different behavioral patterns from some independently established properties of the embedding predicates or their complements. In the thesis, I present an epistemically-based theory, which attempts to derive the relevant distributional phenomena, including those traditionally assumed to reflect hard-core syntactic idiosyncrasies, from a linguistic-epistemic theory of knowledge, belief and communication. ;The theory is based on a lexical-semantic analysis of the embedding predicates, according to which they denote ternary relations between agents, objects of attitude and objects of representation. Thus, to give an example, the predicate think denotes a ternary relation between a thinker, a thought mentally represented by the thinker, and a proposition expressed by the thought and believed by the thinker to be true. This analysis, developed on linguistic grounds for linguistic purposes, echoes some of the recent insights in the philosophy of mind, especially Crimmins . Coupled with a theory of the meanings of the different complement types--partially based on the formal semantic insights of Karttunen , Groenedijk and Stokhof and Ginzburg --this account derives the distributional patterns from simple considerations of semantic compatibility: those predicates which are capable of embedding a certain complement type are exactly those whose lexical semantics is compatible with the semantics of the complement. ;Some of the distributional patterns discussed in the thesis, especially the one involving concealed questions, have traditionally been taken to provide empirical support for the hypothesis of the autonomy of syntactic representations . The analysis presented in this thesis reveals the dramatic extent to which the semantics and the syntax of lexical selection are transparent to each other, and thus implies, at least with respect to the core domain of lexical selection, that the autonomy hypothesis is empirically unjustified. (shrink)

Psychologists and philosophers have not yet resolved what they take implicit attitudes to be; and, some, concerned about limitations in the psychometric evidence, have even challenged the predictive and theoretical value of positing implicit attitudes in explanations for social behavior. In the midst of this debate, prominent stakeholders in science have called for scientific communities to recognize and countenance implicit bias in STEM fields. In this paper, I stake out a stakeholder conception of implicit bias that responds (...) to these challenges in ways that are responsive to the psychometric evidence, while also being resilient to the sorts of disagreements and scientific progress that would not undermine the soundness of this call. Along the way, my account advocates for attributing collective (group-level) implicit attitudes rather than individual-level implicit attitudes. This position raises new puzzles for future research on the relationship (metaphysical, epistemic, and ethical) between collective implicit attitudes and individual-level attitudes. (shrink)

Philosophers discussing forgiveness have usually been split between those who think that forgiveness is typically virtuous, even when the wrongdoer doesn’t repent, and those who think that, for forgiveness to be virtuous, certain pre-conditions must be satisfied. I argue that Darwall’s second-personal account of morality offers significant theoretical support for the latter view. I argue that if, as Darwall claims, reactive attitudes issue a demand, this demand needs to be adequately answered for forgiveness to be warranted. It follows (...) that we should reject the thesis that unconditional forgiveness is appropriate in the absence of repentance. (shrink)

Response-dispositional accounts of value defend a biconditional in which the possession of an evaluative property is said to covary with the disposition to cause a certain response. In contrast, a fitting-attitude account of the same property would claim that it is such as to merit or make fitting that same response. This paper argues that even for secondary qualities, response-dispositional accounts are inadequate; we need to import a normative notion such as appropriateness even into accounts of such descriptive properties as (...) redness. A preliminary conclusion is that the normativity that appears in fitting-attitude accounts of evaluative properties need not have anything to do with the evaluative nature of those properties. It may appear there because evaluative properties—or at least thosefor which fitting-attitude accounts are plausible—really are so much like secondary qualities that it might well be appropriate to think of them as a subclass of secondary qualities. In the second half of the paper I discuss the views of three of the philosophers who have been most influential in discussions of response-featuring accounts of evaluative notions and who explicitly distinguish response-dispositional accounts of value from fittingattitude accounts: John McDowell, Simon Blackburn, and Crispin Wright. I highlight some of the theoretical temptations that can be associated with the assumption that the response-dispositional/fitting-attitude distinction parallels the secondary quality/evaluative property distinction. (shrink)

This thought-provoking book will ask what it is to be human, what to be animal, and what are the natures of the relationships between them. This is accomplished with philosophical and ethical discussions, scientific evidence and dynamic theoretical approaches. Attitudes to Animals will also encourage us to think not only of our relationships to non-human animals, but also of those to other, human, animals. This book provides a foundation that the reader can use to make ethical choices about (...) animals. It will challenge readers to question their current views, attitudes and perspectives on animals, nature and development of the human-animal relationship. Human perspectives on the human-animal relationships reflect what we have learned, together with spoken and unspoken attitudes and assumptions, from our families, societies, media, education and employment. (shrink)

The folk Psychology frames propositional attitudes as fundamental theoretical entities for the construction of a model designed to predict the behavior of a subject. A trivial, such as grasping a pen and writing reveals - something complex - about the behavior. When I take a pen and start writing I do, trivially, because I believe that a certain object in front of me is a pen and who performs a specific function that is, in fact, that of writing. (...) When I believe that the object that stands before me is a pen, I am in relation to "believe" with the propositional content: that in front of me is a pen. Philosophers of the proposition, from Frege onwards, have dedicated their studies to the analysis of what kinds of entities are the propositional attitudes. Jerry Fodor says that now, the proper prediction of the psychology of common sense, can not be questioned and that the propositional attitudes represent the most effective way to describe our behavior. What Fodor says, however, is that propositional attitudes function, but not how they work. Most philosophers interested in the issue, we are dedicated to the search for a theory that can account consistently both a semantics for propositional attitudes, both of these entities that seem to cause the behavior of a rational subject. There are two main paradigms in the theory of the proposition that contributed to the discussion of the propositional attitudes. One is the one that begins with Gottlob Frege, the other with Bertrand Russell. Defenders of Frege argue that the paradigm scrub objects and properties can not be constituents of the propositional content which have a purely conceptual. In other words, the philosophers belonging to the paradigm of Frege, but not all, mean that you can test in a rigorous way the truth conditions of propositional attitudes. Who defends the russellian’s paradigm argues that the propositional content are made by the objects and properties on which propositional attitudes relate. The purpose of this article is not to rebuild - in detail - both paradigms, nor to reconstruct one but, in a sense, my work will be a completely partial objective is to demonstrate how the paradigm is more profitable russell not only to make a coherent semantic theory for propositional attitudes2 but also to predict the behavior of a rational subject thing, completely innovative, given the repeated objections in contemporary literature3. At the end of this paper will be drafted a proposal to build a consistent model to predict the behavior,of a rational agent, based on a referential theory of propositional attitudes. (shrink)

Active reasoning is the kind of reasoning that we do deliberately and consciously. In characterizing the nature of active reasoning and the norms it should obey, the question arises which attitudes we can reason with. Many authors take outright beliefs to be the attitudes we reason with. Others assume that we can reason with both outright beliefs and degrees of belief. Some think that we reason only with degrees of belief. In this paper I approach the question of (...) what kinds of beliefs can participate in reasoning by using the following method: I take the default position to be maximally permissive – that both graded and outright beliefs can participate in reasoning. I then identify some features of active reasoning that appear at first glance to favor a more restrictive position about which types of belief we can reason with. I argue that the arguments based on these features ultimately fail. (shrink)

This research note examines the relationship between public attitudes toward universal basic income and country-level socio-economic conditions in 21 European Countries. Despite abundant theoretical and empirical research on UBI, a comparative analysis of public appetite for UBI has been unavailable due to data limitations. This research note takes advantage of the 2016 European Social Survey to explore the connection between public support for UBI and levels of social protection and economic insecurity.

In the introduction to the special volume, Gilbert Ryle: Intelligence, Practice and Skill, Julia Tanney introduces the contributions of Michael Kremer, Stina Bäckström and Martin Gustafsson, and Will Small, each of which indicates concern about the appropriation of Ryle’s distinction between knowing-how and knowing-that in seminal work in contemporary epistemology. Expressing agreement with the authors that something has gone awry in these borrowings from Ryle, Tanney takes this criticism to a deeper level. She argues that the very notion of content-bearing, (...) causally-efficacious mental states, let alone representational states of knowledge-that or knowledge-how, embodies the very presuppositions that Ryle calls into question in his rejection of classical theories of meaning and his related warning of the type-errors involved in conflating rational and mechanistic explanation. That these mental posits are presupposed, unchallenged, in today’s debates make his arguments against intellectualism particularly difficult to discern. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Attitudes of Play by Gabor CsepregiPaul GaffneyCSEPREGI, Gabor. Attitudes of Play. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2022. 182 pp. Cloth, $120.00; paper, $32.95This delightful and illuminating book presents a thorough account of playfulness, its various manifestations and associations, and its indispensable role in the good life. Reading through the well-documented chapters, one recognizes how many thoughtful people have commented on the meaning of play, and yet, at (...) the same time, one recognizes the necessity for a full-scale, integrated discussion. The inspiration for the study is partly practical, as stated in the prologue: “I noticed that people who approach their daily tasks or [End Page 713] recreational pursuits with an attitude of play seem to lead a happier and fuller life.” But play as attitude also deserves theoretical study because it integrates, enhances, and to some extent opposes the instrumental character of human endeavor and thus reveals something fundamental about the human condition.A moral context is established early. We are told in chapter 1, “The Concept of Attitude,” that, unlike feelings and ideas, we are responsible for the attitudes that we adopt and, therefore, for the actions and emotions that they characteristically structure. An attitude is an authentic, embodied, and concrete engagement with the world, subject to “continual modifications” and so, presumably, not entirely under our control, but still largely a determination of human agency. In chapter 2, “Play as Attitude,” the author makes an important distinction between play as activity and play as attitude, the latter of which has been comparatively neglected. Play as attitude (playfulness) represents a mode of noninstrumentality— a “momentary holiday from work-related occupations”—that can transform almost any experience, at least temporarily. Playfulness thus represents an immediate engagement, a childlike attentiveness, which is precisely what provides its special value. Chapter 3, “Pathic Attitude,” develops this theme. Playfulness is reciprocal; in fact, we might say it is doubly playful: “In all play there is something with which we play and, in turn, plays with us.” An openness to the world, and a delight in its responsiveness, grounds the playful attitude. The experience is discoverable by young children and some animals as well.The following chapters elaborate on this basic outline. Chapter 4, “Ease,” explains how advanced players often lose themselves and “sink into a role,” a peak experience that is typically the product of training and habit. This enviable state would seem to be somewhat elusive, particularly for performers, which suggests that it is something of a moral achievement. The experience recalls what has been called in the philosophy of sport literature “flow performance,” which is, paradoxically, both more intense and yet effortless. Chapter 5, “Risk,” explores the adventurous nature of play, which inevitably involves uncertainty, luck, and risk. An attitude of play embraces, or at least accepts, the vagaries of good and bad luck; it comes with the risk of failure, embarrassment, and even physical injury. This chapter presents an important discussion about the tension between the spirit of playfulness and the ethos of modern sport, which tends increasingly to emphasize proficiency, rationalization, and commercialization. The modern obsession with preparation, perfection, and control leaves little room for a genuinely playful spirit, which ideally should animate sport. Indeed, the occasional experience of feeling lost, which the author, following Caillois, describes as “vertigo,” is an essential component of a full life. In chapter 6, “Humor,” we are told that although some playful activities are serious and demand concentration, they are often accompanied by a good-natured, lighthearted attitude. Humor seems to be inherently playful, a liberal and often irreverent exercise of the [End Page 714] imagination, which allows it to provide solace, inspiration, and transcendence: “Humor, then, is the capacity to see and apprehend things in their complexity, ambivalence, and paradoxical nature.” Chapter 7, “Gratuité,” underscores a major theme of the book—the importance of the useless or gratuitous in a fully meaningful life (gratuité and utilité are French for “useless” and “useful”). The author insightfully suggests that such moments might present themselves in seemingly disparate activities, such as play and liturgy: “Measured by the strict sense of the word, they are purposeless but still full... (shrink)

Propositional attitude verbs, such as think and want, have long held interest for both theoretical linguists and language acquisitionists because their syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic properties display complex interactions that have proven difficult to fully capture from either perspective. This paper explores the granularity with which these verbs’ semantic and pragmatic properties are recoverable from their syntactic distributions, using three behavioral experiments aimed at explicitly quantifying the relationship between these two sets of properties. Experiment 1 gathers a measure of (...) 30 propositional attitude verbs’ syntactic distributions using an acceptability judgment task. Experiments 2a and 2b gather measures of semantic similarity between those same verbs using a generalized semantic discrimination task and an ordinal scale task, respectively. Two kinds of analyses are conducted on the data from these experiments. The first compares both the acceptability judgments and the semantic similarity judgments to previous classifications derived from the syntax and semantics literature. The second kind compares the acceptability judgments to the semantic similarity judgments directly. Through these comparisons, we show that there is quite fine-grained information about propositional attitude verbs’ semantics carried in their syntactic distributions—whether one considers the sorts of discrete qualitative classifications that linguists traditionally work with or the sorts of continuous quantitative classifications that can be derived experimentally. (shrink)

Quel doit être le comportement éthique du juif à l'égard du non-juif ? Et d'abord qui est cet « autre », cet « étranger », comment le définir et comprendre ce qu'il est, aux yeux de Dieu et par rapport au peuple juif ? La Bible contient des lois qui concernent tous les hommes en général, d’autres le peuple d'Israël en particulier, elle énonce des préceptes relatifs à « autrui », au « prochain », aux « étrangers ». Les Sages (...) de l'époque talmudique ont longuement scruté et commenté ces écritures, le plus souvent à propos de cas concrets, par exemple celui-ci : si le taureau d'un juif agresse celui d’un non-juif, le propriétaire du premier doit-il réparation à celui du second comme il le devrait pour un autre juif ? Dans le cours des temps, des Sages ont rendu sur ce cas d'école des arrêts contradictoires et diversement motivés, par suite vraisemblablement de changements dans la situation des communautés juives au sein de populations étrangères. Plus tard, il arrivera que des textes, qui semblaient préconiser un traitement discriminatoire du juif et du non-juif, seront jugés scandaleux par des 1ecteurs chrétiens, au point même d'être expurgés par la censure ecclésiastique des éditions du Talmud. De nos jours encore, les décisions des Sages d’autrefois alimentent la controverse, et l'histoire des taureaux retrouve de l'actualité dans un état d'Israël en butte aux conflits ethniques. Mais la relecture critique du Talmud tend à faire prévaloir une attitude plus universaliste et non discriminatoire, que n'ignoraient pas les temps anciens.What should the ethical comportment of the Jew be toward non-Jews ? To begin with, who is this « other », this « stranger », ; how can you define and understand who is in the eyes of God and in relation to the Jewish people ? The Bible contains laws that concern all men in general, and some that concern the people of Israel in particular. It presents precepts relative to the « other », the « neighbor », and « strangers ». The Sages of the Talmudic period examined and commented on this writings at length, most often concerning concrete cases, for example this one : if a Jew’s bull aggresses that of a non-Jew, does the former owe reparation to the latter, as he does to another Jew ? Throughout the ages, the Sages made rulings on this theoretical case that were contradictory and diversely motivated. This was due, apparently, to changes in the situation of Jewish communities living among foreign populations. Later, it happened that texts, which seemed to recommend a discriminating treatment of the Jew towards non-Jew, were judged scandalous by Christian readers, to extent that ecclesiastical censure expurgated them from editions of the Talmud. Still today, the decisions of past Sages feed the controversy, and the story of the bulls regains actuality in the state of Israel as it struggles with ethnic conflicts. But a critical rereading of the Talmud tends to favor an attitude more universalistic and non-discriminatory, of which ancient times was not ignorant. (shrink)

In a recent article, Giulia Felappi has leveled a challenge for those who believe that propositional attitudes involve relations between subjects and propositions: they must say more about what it is for a given proposition to figure as the content of one’s attitude. This note argues that Felappi’s challenge has already been met by proponents of act-theoretic conceptions of propositions.

A prospective introduction -- The received view -- Troubles with the received view -- Are propositional attitudes relations? -- Foundations of a measurement-theoretic account of the attitudes -- The basic measurement-theoretic account -- Elaboration and explication of the proposed measurement-theoretic account.

People reason not only in beliefs, but also in intentions, preferences, and other attitudes. They form preferences from existing preferences, or intentions from existing beliefs and intentions, and so on. This often involves choosing between rival conclusions. Building on Broome (Rationality through reasoning, Hoboken, Wiley. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118609088, 2013) and Dietrich et al. (J Philos 116:585–614. https://doi.org/10.5840/jphil20191161138, 2019), we present a philosophical and formal analysis of reasoning in attitudes, with or without facing choices in reasoning. We give different accounts of (...) choosing, in terms of a conscious activity or a partly subconscious process. Reasoning in attitudes differs fundamentally from reasoning _about_ attitudes, a form of theoretical reasoning in which one discovers rather than forms attitudes. We show that reasoning in attitudes has standard formal properties (such as monotonicity), but is indeterministic, reflecting choice in reasoning. Like theoretical reasoning, it need not follow logical entailment, but for a more radical reason, namely indeterminism. This makes reasoning in attitudes harder to model logically than theoretical reasoning. But it can be studied abstractly, using indeterministic consequence operators. (shrink)

Plagiarism is one of the most severe academic integrity issues. This study examined students’ knowledge of and attitudes towards plagiarism, tested their ability to recognize plagiarism, and explored the association of study levels and attendance in courses dealing with referencing rules and plagiarism with students’ attitudes and knowledge. A cross-sectional online survey was conducted at the University of Split, comprising the students of all schools and study levels. Overall, results indicate the students were not very familiar with referencing (...) rules and did not perform well on either theoretical questions or practical examples. However, they demonstrated positive attitudes towards plagiarism avoidance as well as towards compliance with academic integrity with respect to the correct use of research publications. Students’ self-reported attendance in courses dealing with referencing rules and plagiarism avoidance was not associated with their knowledge of and attitudes toward plagiarism. These findings are important for a general understanding of students’ attitudes, and the relation of practical and theoretical knowledge of plagiarism. Furthermore, the academic community addresses plagiarism not only as an ethical and regulatory violation but also as a direct consequence of a lack of knowledge, and of academic illiteracy. Study programs should be adjusted and long-term policies developed at all academic levels to promote a positive climate among students towards responsible academic writing. (shrink)

An important objection to sententialist theories of attitude reports is that they cannot accommodate the principle that one cannot know that someone believes that p without knowing what it is that he believes. This paper argues that a parallel problem arises for propositionalist accounts that has gone largely unnoticed, and that, furthermore, the usual resources for the propositionalist do not afford an adequate solution. While non-standard solutions are available for the propositionalist, it turns out that there are parallel solutions that (...) are available for the sententialist. Since the difficulties raised seem to show that the mechanism by which sentential complements serve to inform us about attitudes and about sentence meaning does not depend on their referring to propositions, this casts doubt on whether talk of propositions should retain a significant theoretical role in the enterprise of understanding thought, language and communication. (shrink)

To address the issue of the growing need for measuring populist attitudes, researchers have proposed several instruments with different theoretical backgrounds in conceptualizing the construct. This study aimed to verify the psychometric properties of the recently developed Three-dimensional populist scale by Shultz and her associates. As opposed to scales which define populist attitudes as uni-dimensional constructs, this one is based on the presumption that it is a latent higher-order construct with three distinct first-order dimensions. The convenient sample (...) was comprised of 535 participants, all ethnic Macedonians (53.1% women) from 25 urban (52.6% from the capital city) and 15 rural areas of the country, with average age M = 36.2 (SD = 12.4) and mostly (65%) with completed high school. All participants voluntarily answered the set of selected instruments which included two populist attitudes scales, several other scales the measure related variables and demographic data. The psychometric characteristics of the instrument in this particular cultural context were explored by performing item-analysis, factor analysis and testing the proposed hypotheses generated on the basis of previous relevant research. Results confirmed the three-dimensional structure of the Shultz’s scale with excellent fit indicators, while the Alpha coefficients showed acceptable reliability of the scale and its subscales. The construct dimensions exhibit significant associations with other measures expected to be related to populist attitudes endorsement. It was concluded that the Shultz et al. three-dimensional scale on populist attitudes translated in Macedonian is adequate to be used as a measure of this variable and that its efficacy for predicting electoral choices should be further scrutinized. (shrink)

Research on the intersection of race and gender suggests that, for African Americans, racial inequality is more salient than gender inequality. However, theoretical perspectives on the multiplicative effects of status positions and “outsider within” models suggest that minority group membership can be a catalyst for the development of feminist attitudes. This article examines three issues central to feminism: recognition and critique of gender inequality, egalitarian gender roles, and political activism for the rights of women. The authors found that (...) support for feminist ideology was common for both African American women and men, although the level of support varied depending on the issue and by gender. Factors predicting the endorsement of feminist ideology also varied depending on the issue and by gender. The authors found partial support for the race saliency hypothesis, but there was also evidence of the multiplicative effects of status positions on African Americans' feminist attitudes. (shrink)

_Purpose._ The article presents a descriptive characteristic of the functioning of a person’s attitude to oneself, the formation of self-awareness through a combination of one’s emotional and creative features with the components of attitude toward oneself, which allows one to study in depth the process of formation and development of a mature, adapted personality._ Theoretical basis._ The existing variety of scientific approaches makes it difficult to systematize the aspect under study and prevents the formation of a clear structure of (...) a person’s attitude toward oneself. The study of self-consciousness of the personality remains relevant in connection with a wide range of issues related to the development of knowledge of the mechanisms that act as internal determinants of the individual originality of the personality’s life realization. The theoretical and methodological basis of the study is as follows: the principles of determinism of mental phenomena, the activity concept of self-consciousness, the provision on the regulative function of emotions in activity, the concept of creative activity and ideas about the personality’s creative characteristics. _Originality__._ The author supplemented and expanded knowledge about the phenomenon of self-attitude, the mechanisms of its formation and features of determination based on the systematization of thematic issues; the idea of the determination of attitude toward oneself, in particular, by personal and situational factors, in the context of its functioning in the conditions of activity with creative elements has been further developed._ Conclusions._ Attitude toward oneself, emotional and creative features of the personality have a common problematic aspect with regard to their nature of interaction and the necessity for the expediency of their unification as a subject of interaction with the world. (shrink)

Three thoughts strongly influence recent work on sensory imagination, often without explicit articulation. The image thought says that all mental states involving a mental image are imaginative. The attitude thought says that, if there is a distinctive imaginative attitude, it is a single, monolithic attitude. The function thought says that the functions of sensory imagination are identical or akin to functions of other mental states such as judgment or belief. Taken together, these thoughts create a theoretical context within which (...) eliminativism appears attractive. Eliminativism is the idea that we needn’t refer to a distinctive attitude in order to characterize sensory imagination: the attitudes involved in other states provide all the resources we need. Peter Langland-Hassan’s account of sensory imagination provides an example of such eliminativism. Via close examination of this account, I make manifest the three thoughts and their collective tendency to support eliminativism. I argue that all three are dubious, and that we should reject eliminativism; we need a distinctive imaginative attitude if we are to adequately explicate sensory imagination. (shrink)

In this paper, we present and defend the theoretical framework of an empirical model to describe people’s fundamental moral attitudes (FMAs) to animals, the stratification of FMAs in society and the role of FMAs in judgment on the culling of healthy animals in an animal disease epidemic. We used philosophical animal ethics theories to understand the moral basis of FMA convictions. Moreover, these theories provide us with a moral language for communication between animal ethics, FMAs, and public debates. (...) We defend that FMA is a two-layered concept. The first layer consists of deeply felt convictions about animals. The second layer consists of convictions derived from the first layer to serve as arguments in a debate on animal issues. In a debate, the latter convictions are variable, depending on the animal issue in a specific context, time, and place. This variability facilitates finding common ground in an animal issue between actors with opposing convictions. (shrink)

Hilbert’s program in the philosophy of mathematics comes in two parts. One part is a technical part. To carry out this part of the program one has to prove a certain technical result. The other part of the program is a philosophical part. It is concerned with philosophical questions that are the real aim of the program. To carry out this part one, basically, has to show why the technical part answers the philosophical questions one wanted to have answered. Hilbert (...) probably thought that he had completed the philosophical part of his program, maybe up to a few details. What was left to do was the technical part. To carry it out one, roughly, had to give a precise axiomatization of mathematics and show that it is consistent on purely finitistic grounds. This would come down to giving a relative consistency proof of mathematics in finitist mathematics, or to give a proof-theoretic reduction of mathematics on to finitist mathematics (we will look at these notions in more detail soon). It is widely believed that Gödel’s theorems showed that the technical part of Hilbert’s program could not be carried out. Gödel’s theorems show that the consistency of arithmetic can not even be proven in arithmetic, not to speak of by finitistic means alone. So, the technical part of Hilbert’s program is hopeless, and since Hilbert’s program essentially relied on both the technical and the philosophical part, Hilbert’s program as a whole is hopeless. Justified as this attitude is, it is a bit unfortunate. It is unfortunate because it takes away too much attention from the philosophical part of Hilbert’s program. And this is unfortunate for two reasons. (shrink)

Some intentional attitudes (beliefs, fears, desires, etc.) have a common focus in spite of there being no object at that focus. For example, two beliefs may be about the same witch even when there are no witches, different astronomers had beliefs directed at Vulcan, even though there is no such planet. This relation of having a common focus, whether or not there is an actual concrete object at that focus, is called intentional identity. In the first part of this (...) thesis I develop a new theory of intentional identity, the triangulation theory, and argue that it has significant advantages over the extant theories of intentional identity in the literature. Empty attitudes (attitudes that are not, prima facie, about anything that exists) will serve as useful cases for testing theories of intentional identity. -/- In the second part, I put the theory developed in the first part to work. I use triangulation theoretic tools to shed light on other debates about intentional attitudes. Some issues to which intentional identity are relevant are the debate about the content of intentional attitudes, the issue of whether or not we need to appeal to external constraints on the content of intentional attitudes, how we should understand the agreement and disagreement of attitudes, how we should construe communication and how we ought to solve Kripke’s puzzle about belief. The second part of this thesis also motivates a broadly internalist and individualistic approach to the con-tent of intentional attitudes; it turns out that if we take a closer look at the narrowly construed psychological states of agents we find materials that allow us to make sense of phenomena usually associated with externalist constraints on the content of attitudes (such as causal constraints and eligibility constraints) in a new way. (shrink)

The need for a theoretical grounding of the human-animal relationship is addressed from the perspective of the motivational bases of attitudes toward animals. Building on recent developments in attitude theory, and integrating themes from the historical and cultural background to Western attitudes, a model is developed that proposes three fundamental motivational bases, where responses to animals depend on instrumental self interest, empathylidentification, or people's beliefs and values about the nature and status of animals. Initial empirical studies using (...) the model revealed reduced instrumentality, heightened empathy, and strong commitment to a value perspective endorsing equal status for humans and animals among animal rights supporters. Farmers exhibited an opposite pattern, and supported the dominant status of humans. The urban public evidenced moderate levels of instrumentality and empathy, and a neutral value position with some individuals exhibiting considerable ambivalence . Gender differences on instrumentality and empathy , were less evident for values, and were confined to female and male farmers. Directions for future research are discussed, as is the practical value of this approach. (shrink)

“In the ‘interdisciplinary materialism’ theorized by Max Horkheimer and practiced by the critical-theoretical consortium of the 1930s, the critique of political economy worked both as a more general model for the critique of available knowledge and as the focal point for different disciplinary approaches. In such a constellation, the internal connection between the critical attitude and the critique of political economy also meant that ‘theory’ was the result of ‘critique’, having the critique of political economy as its model. These (...) two claims converge in that ‘theory’ was the same as producing critical diagnoses of the present time, Critical Theory’s most eminent task. Such a characterization of this first figure of Critical Theory allow us to see that the decline of the critique of political economy as a common language for collaboration from the 1940s on gave rise to a long-lasting dispute about its best substitute as the common ground for interdisciplinary research. Until today this dispute over the ‘best theory’ in the critical-theoretical field not only overshadows its most eminent aim but also threatens to blur the very distinction between Critical and Traditional contributions.”. (shrink)

In this paper we adopt a category-theoretic viewpoint in order to analyze the semantics of complementarity for quantum systems. Based on the existence of a pair of adjoint functors between the topos of presheaves of the Boolean kind of structure and the category of the quantum kind of structure, we establish a twofold complementarity scheme which constitutes an instance of the concept of adjunction. It is further argued that the established scheme is inextricably connected with a realistic philosophical attitude, although (...) substantially different from the classical one. (shrink)

This study aims to identify student attitudes to and perceptions of the topical phenomenon of plagiarism at the Faculty of Regional Development and International Studies at Mendel University in Brno, Czech Republic. The paper includes a theoretical framework describing plagiarism, academic ethics and provides a different perspective on plagiarism by many authors. Furthermore, the article presents a semi-structured questionnaire conducted in July 2018 with a sample of 235 respondents. The questionnaire was used in this research to explore students’ (...) personal experiences, recommendations and other information relating to their attitudes to and perceptions of plagiarism. The results indicate that FRDIS students were familiar with the concept of plagiarism but not always able to clearly identify the correct answers. The recommendation for the Faculty, based on the data analysis, is to hold a tutorial on all the important aspects of plagiarism, such as citations, referencing, and common mistakes. This paper concludes that plagiarism can only be eliminated if it is tackled at the prevention phase, not merely through the use of warnings and threats. (shrink)