Wittgenstein's conception of logical and conceptual truth is often thought to rival that of the logical positivists. This paper argues that there are important respects in which these conceptions complement each other. Analyticity, in the positivists' sense, coincides, not with Wittgenstein's notion of a grammatical proposition, but rather with his notion of a tautology. Grammatical propositions can usually be construed as analyticity postulates in Carnap's sense of the term. This account of grammatical and analytic propositions will be illustrated by appeal (...) to logical, conceptual and arithmetic truths. Its consequences for an analysis of corresponding modal notions will be indicated. (shrink)

The positivists defined analyticity as truth in virtue of meaning alone and advocated the view that the notion of analyticity so defined is co-extensive with both the notion of an a priori truth an...

Many contemporary metaphysicians believe that the existence of a contingent object such as Socrates metaphysically explains the existence of the corresponding set {Socrates}. This paper argues that this belief is mistaken. The argument proposed takes the form of a dilemma. The expression “{Socrates}” is a shorthand either for the expression “the set that contains all and only those objects that are identical to Socrates” or for the expression “the set that contains Socrates and nothing else”. However, Socrates' existence does not (...) explain the existence of the set that contains all and only those objects that are identical to Socrates, because there is such a set no matter whether or not Socrates exists. And although Socrates' existence does explain that of the set that contains Socrates and nothing else, this explanation is a conceptual rather than a metaphysical one. Both these claims rely on a deflationary account of the use of set theoretic vocabulary that is explained, though not properly justified, in the paper. (shrink)

Fine bases his influential conception of essence on a particular account of definitions. And he complements it with a specific account of analyticity. I will argue that Fine's conception of relative analyticity confuses the idea of a sentence's being true in virtue of a term's definition with the idea of a sentence's being true in virtue of a term's meaning. His idea that correct definitions specify essential properties of meanings is mistaken. The correctness of definitions can only be assessed by (...) reference to the actual usage of the terms involved. The resulting conception of definitions leads to a deflationary interpretation of claims about essences. (shrink)

Diversity scholars have emphasized the critical role of corporate leaders for ensuring the success of diversity strategic initiatives in organizations. This study reports on business school leaders’ attributions regarding the causes for and solutions to the low representation of U.S. faculty of color in business schools. Results indicatethat leaders with greater awareness of racial issues rated an inhospitable organizational culture as a more important cause and cultural change and recruitment as more important solutions to faculty of color under-representation than did (...) less racially aware respondents. Aware leaders also rated individual minority-group member responsibility for performance a less important solution than did less racially aware respondents. Implications are discussed. (shrink)

This paper explores the relationship between psychological contract violations (PCVs) related to diversity climate and professional employee outcomes. We found that for our sample of US professionals of color including US-born African Americans, Hispanics, Asians, and Native Americans, employee perceptions of breach in diversity promise fulfillment (DPF), after controlling for more general organizational promise fulfillment (OPF), led to lower reported organizational commitment (OC) and higher turnover intentions (TI). Interactional justice partially mediated the relationship between DPF and outcomes. Procedural justice and (...) DPF interacted to influence OC of employees of color. For respondents who perceived a lack of DPF, moderate racial awareness was associated with greater PCV. We discuss the implications of the findings and provide directions for future research. (shrink)

According to Hume’s principle, a sentence of the form ⌜The number of Fs = the number of Gs⌝ is true if and only if the Fs are bijectively correlatable to the Gs. Neo-Fregeans maintain that this principle provides an implicit definition of the notion of cardinal number that vindicates a platonist construal of such numerical equations. Based on a clarification of the explanatory status of Hume’s principle, I will provide an argument in favour of a nominalist construal of numerical equations. (...) The neo-Fregean objections to such a construal will be examined and rejected. And the implications of the nominalist construal for the use of numerals and for the understanding of ontological questions for the existence of numbers will be spelled out. (shrink)

In a notorious passage from his Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein writes that one can state of the standard metre neither that it is one metre long, nor that it is not one metre long. While many commentators have rejected this claim, it has been commonly assumed that Wittgenstein himself endorsed it. In a recently published article, Thomas Müller not only provides a novel argument against Wittgenstein's claim about the standard metre but also claims that Wittgenstein did not actually endorse that claim. (...) In this paper, I argue that Müller's exegetical thesis is false and that his novel argument against Wittgenstein's claim about the standard metre is unsound. (shrink)

Luca Barlassina and Fabio del Prete argue that the past has changed by appealing to a sentence whose truth value changes after the time to which it refers. We consider various interpretations of the sentence at issue and show that there is no interpretation under which their argument goes through. We suggest a possible source of the confusion and consider what implications the discussion may have for the analysis of tense.

This study examined the relative effect of diversity climate dimensions captured by two measures: Mor Barak et al.’s (Journal of Applied Behavioral Science, 34:82–104, 1998 ) diversity climate scale and Chrobot-Mason’s (Journal of Managerial Psychology 18:22–45, 2003 ) diversity promise fulfillment scale on professional employee of color outcomes: organizational commitment (OC) and turnover intentions. We hypothesized that the two scales would measure different aspects of diversity climate. We further hypothesized that the different climate dimensions would interactively affect the employee of (...) color outcomes. Third, we predicted that diversity climate would mediate between diversity promise fulfillment and employee of color outcomes. Finally, we hypothesized that organizational commitment would mediate the interactive effect of diversity climate dimensions on turnover intentions. Results indicated that the diversity scales each predicted unique variance in employee outcomes and that the climate dimensions interactively influenced professional of color organizational commitment and turnover intentions. We also found that the diversity climate dimension, as measured by the Mor Barak scale, mediated between diversity promise fulfillment and the outcomes. Finally, we found complete mediated moderation between the interaction of the two climate measures and turnover intentions by organizational commitment. Implications are discussed. (shrink)

Ludwig Wittgenstein acknowledges that the Augustinian picture also informed his earlier conception of language. The Augustinian identification of the meaning of a word with the word's referent is accepted only with a further restriction. In the Tractatus, Wittgenstein distinguishes between simple objects and the thereof composed complex objects. This chapter provides a systematic reconstruction of Wittgenstein's sometimes opaque remarks on ostensive definitions and his critique of the Augustinian picture of language. It then addresses the doctrines about names and naming endorsed (...) in the Tractatus. According to the later Wittgenstein the simple ostensive definition of a word, consisting in the utterance of the word accompanied by a pointing gesture, does not unambiguously determine the use of the word. Wittgenstein's arguments can be complemented by the observation that having the same sample is not necessary for two terms to be equivalent either. (shrink)

By defining God as a maximally great being Plantinga is able to devise an ontological argument which validly infers from the possibility of there being a God that there necessarily is a God. In this article I shall argue that Plantinga’s argument is not only question-begging, as several critics have complained, but circular in the strongest sense of the term. Based on reflections on the relation between the notions of coherence and possibility, I shall defend two arguments, previously proposed by (...) Tooley and Guleserian, against the existence of a maximally great being. The article concludes with some critical remarks on Plantinga’s rationale for conceiving God as such a being. (shrink)

O texto discute algumas perspectivas educacionais em torno do ensino da filosofia, partindo do caráter eminentemente pedagógico da filosofia e filosófico da educação.

Beeing sofar a part of mathematics Geography was drafted by Bernard Varenius in 1650 as full-geography which contents mathematical, physical and even human geography. Whereas the «Geographia Generalis» has been published in England for several times its influence in continental Europe seems to have been marginal. Therefore Varenius cannot be considered as founder of modern geography. The relation of general and special geography is discussed und a lot of mistakes and absurdities in Varenius' work is exposed.

In Confucianism as Religion: Controversies and Consequences, Yong Chen takes an interesting approach to the subject of Confucian religiosity: he concentrates on analyzing the intellectual and academic debate about the question of whether Confucianism is a religion and highlights its cultural as well as socio-political implications for contemporary China, assuming that this debate coincided with a transition from the predominance of Confucian paradigms to those of modernity. Without this paradigmatic shift, argues Chen, the past and ongoing controversy about Confucian religiosity (...) could not be fully appreciated.To verify his assumption, the author first examines the Chinese reception of the Western concept of... (shrink)

Galileo’s last publication, his Discorsi e dimostrazioni matematiche intorno a due nuove scienze attenenti alla mecanica & i movimenti locali (1638), is widely considered to be one of the most influential contributions of early modern science to the emergence of classical physics. As the title of Galileo’s book indicates, he himself claimed to have established “two new sciences,” including a new science of motion which, from the perspective of classical physics, indeed turned the Aristotelean theory of motion, which had prevailed (...) for hundreds of years, into an obscure medieval relic. (shrink)

Inhalt des Aufsatzes ist eine kritische Untersuchung der von Künne in seinem Buch Abstrakte Gegenstände vorgeschlagenen Definition der Unterscheidung zwischen singulären und generellen Termen. Zunächst wird aufgezeigt, dass Künnes Formulierung seiner Definition dahingehend unklar ist, dass sie sowohl eine satzrelative als auch eine kategorische Deutung der fraglichen Unterscheidung zulässt. Im Hauptteil des Aufsatzes soll dann gezeigt werden, dass Künnes Definition in beiden Deutungen inadäquat ist. Schließlich wird eine alternative Definition der Unterscheidung zwischen singulären und generellen Termen vorgeschlagen, welche zwar mit (...) Künnes intuitiven Beispielen entsprechender Terme in Einklang steht, sich jedoch nur schwerlich in Künnes begriffliche Gesamtarchitektur integrieren ließe. (shrink)

The paper provides an interpretation of Wittgenstein’s claim that a mathematical proof must be surveyable. It will be argued that this claim specifies a precondition for the applicability of the word ‘proof’. Accordingly, the latter is applicable to a proof-pattern only if we can come to agree by mere observation whether or not the pattern possesses the relevant structural features. The claim is problematic. It does not imply any questionable finitist doctrine. But it cannot be said to articulate a feature (...) of our actual usage of the word ‘proof’. The claim can be dissociated, however, from two tenable doctrines of Wittgenstein, namely that proofs can be used as paradigms for corresponding proof concepts and that a proof is not an experiment. (shrink)

Bevor die präsentationstheoretischen Verhältnisse der spinozistischen Philosophie analysiert werden, sei ein schematischer Überblick über deren Konzeption vorangestellt. Folgt man der Reihenfolge der Definitionen des ersten Teils der Ethik, hat man mit der Bestimmung der Substanz zu beginnen.

Bevor die präsentationstheoretischen Verhältnisse der spinozistischen Philosophie analysiert werden, sei ein schematischer Überblick über deren Konzeption vorangestellt. Folgt man der Reihenfolge der Definitionen des ersten Teils der Ethik, hat man mit der Bestimmung der Substanz zu beginnen.

Quine tries to combine truth conditional semantics with linguistic behaviourism. To this end, he identifies the truth conditions of a sentence with the conditions that prompt speakers to assign truth or falsity to the sentence. The first problem with this conception is that truth conditions determine not when truth-value assignments are made, but when they are correct. This fact vitiates Quine’s account of observation sentences (section 2). A second difficulty pertains only to theoretical sentences. The correctness of truth-value assignments to (...) such sentences depends not on current experiences, but on what can be experienced on other occasions. This observation militates against Quine’s general verification holism and against his account of predications (section 3 and 4). Combining truth conditional semantics and linguistic behaviourism is possible, though, if both these lessons are taken into account (section 5). (shrink)

Which is more important, tragedy or treatise? This question, which was posed as early as in antiquity, cannot easily be answered since tragedy has reflective passages on existential issues, just as philosophy uses tragedy for argumentation or takes the dramatic form itself. This is particularly evident in the work of the ‘philosophus scaenicus’ Euripides, in Plato, whose understanding of tragedy as expressed in the Symposium and the Laws is discussed here, and with Cicero and Seneca, who were both authors of (...) treatises and verses of tragedy. They constitute the focus of this volume, which also examines the function of the poetry quotations in Chrysippus and finally the significance of tragedy for Hannah Arendt’s political analysis. With contributions by Sandra Erker, Susanna Fischer, Thomas Gärtner, Andreas Heil, Argyri Karanasiou, Giovanni Panno, Robert C. Pirro, Tobias Riedl and Petra Schierl. (shrink)

Stakeholder theory has received greater scholarly and practitioner attention as organizations consider the interests of various groups affected by corporate operations, including employees. This study investigates two dimensions of psychological climate, specifically perceived pay equity and diversity climate, for one such stakeholder group: racioethnic minority professionals. We examined the main effect of U.S. professionals’ of color pay equity perceptions, and the influence of perceived internal and external pay equity on turnover intentions. We also investigated the interactive effect of perceptions of (...) pay equity and diversity climate on turnover intentions. Results indicated that pay equity perceptions were negatively associated with turnover intentions. Our findings showed that perceptions of internal pay equity influenced turnover intentions but perceptions of external equity did not. Further, perceptions of pay equity and the diversity climate interactively influenced turnover intentions. Participants who reported an unfavorable diversity climate and a low perceived pay equity were most likely to report turnover intentions. Simple slope analysis for moderate pay equity also was significant. When perceived pay equity was high, favorability of the diversity climate did not affect turnover intentions. The findings have useful practical implications. When pay was perceived as equitable, participants appeared to pay less attention to the diversity climate. Employee pay equity perceptions may be malleable; sharing information with employees about pay levels during performance reviews may enhance perceptions of pay equity. The findings suggest that, consistent with stakeholder theory, organizations should attend to perceptions of both pay equity and diversity climate when striving to minimize the turnover intentions of professionals of color. (shrink)

Research on privacy practices in digital environments has oftentimes discovered a paradoxical relationship between users’ discursive appraisal of privacy and their actual practices: the “privacy paradox.” The emergence of this paradox prompts us to conduct ethnography of a health and fitness platform in order to flesh out the structural mechanisms generating this paradox. We provide an ethnographic analysis of surveillance capitalism in action that relates front-end practices empirically to the data economy’s back-end operations to show how this material-semiotic setup elicits (...) users’ desire to become self-determined subjects in a way that makes them amenable as objects of behavioral engineering. We combine different ethnographic methods and materials to specify how different types of values are produced and translated on the investigated platform. The latter offers users the values of self-mastery and social visibility. However, the data generated in this process serve to translate these values into the value of economic amenability and thereupon ultimately into economic profit. What gets lost in translation, though, is the front-end promise of self-mastery. It is these structural mechanisms that generate the privacy paradox in the first place. (shrink)

School psychologists are asked to systematically evaluate the effects of their work to ensure quality standards. Given the different types of methods applied to different users of school psychology measuring the effects of school psychological services is a complex task. Thus, the focus of our scoping review was to systematically investigate the state of past research on the measurement of the effects of school psychological services published between 1998 and 2018 in eight major school psychological journals. Of the 5,048 peer-reviewed (...) articles published within this period, 623 were coded by two independent raters as explicitly refering to school psychology or counseling in the school context in their titles or abstracts. However, only 22 included definitions of effects of school psychological services or described outcomes used to evaluate school psychological services based on full text screening. These findings revealed that measurement of the effects of school psychological services has not been a focus of research despite its' relevance in guidelines of school psychological practice. (shrink)

This paper reports the results of a qualitative analysis of female entrepreneurs'' accounts of their role in their organizations using Relational Theory as the analytical frame. Content analysis of focus group comments indicated that the women used a relational approach in working with employees and clients. Relational skills included preserving, mutual empowering, achieving, and creating team. Findings demonstrate that Relational Theory is a useful frame for identifying and explicating women entrepreneurs'' interactive style in their own businesses. Implications and future directions (...) for research are discussed. (shrink)

Ratio, Volume 35, Issue 2, Page 151-154, June 2022.

Ratio, Volume 35, Issue 2, Page 151-154, June 2022.