Consensus about a classification is defined as agreement on a set of classes and their relations for us in forming beliefs. While most research on scientific consensus has focused on consensus about a belief as a mark of truth, we highlight the importance of consensus in justifying shared classificatory language. What sort of consensus, if any, is the best basis for communicating and reasoning with scientific classifications? We describe an often-overlooked coordinative role for consensus that leverage agreement on how to (...) disagree such that actors involved can still achieve one or more shared aims even when they do not agree on shared beliefs or categories. Looking forward, we suggest that investigating structures and methods for coordinative consensus provides an important new direction for research on the epistemic foundations of knowledge organization. (shrink)

A well-ingrained and recommended engineering practice in safety-critical software systems is to separate safety concerns from other aspects of the system. Along these lines, there have been calls for operating systems that implement ethical controls in an ethical layer separate from, and not amenable to tampering by, developers and modules in higher-level intelligence or cognition layers. There have been no implementations that demonstrate such a marshalling of ethical principles into an ethical layer. To address this, we present three different tracks (...) for implementing such systems, and offer a prototype implementation of the third track. We end by addressing objections to our approach. (shrink)

And in this book the distinguished scholar Amartya Sen offers a powerful critique of the theory of social justice that, in its grip on social and political ...

It is widely acknowledged that categories play significant roles in the appreciation of artworks. This paper argues that the correct categories of artworks are institutionally established through social processes. Section 1 examines the candidates for determining correct categories and proposes that this question should shift the focus from category membership to appreciative behaviour associated with categories. Section 2 draws on Francesco Guala’s theory of institutions to show that categories of artworks are established as rules-in-equilibrium. Section 3 reviews the explanatory benefits (...) of this institutional theory of the correct category. [Winner of the 2022 Debates in Aesthetics Essay Prize]. (shrink)

In this volume, Peter Burke, a prominent "Western" historian, offers ten hypotheses that attempt to constitute specifically "Western Historical Thinking".

Esta obra contribuye al homenaje que la Universitat de València rindió al profesor Amartya Kumar Sen con motivo de su investidura como Doctor Honoris Causa. La cuidada selección de artículos preparada por el profesor Casas Pardo, precedida de un estudio introductorio sobre su obra, recoge las aportaciones más importantes, originales y creativas del Dr. Sen a la economía, la ética y al pensamiento social en general.

This doctoral dissertation is on the semantics of propositional attitude ascriptions. To be more precise, it is mainly concerned with various kinds of analyses of singular propositional attitude ascriptions. These are sentences of the general form 'X Øs that a is F', where 'X' can be replaced by the name of the person who is in the particular mental state, 'Ø' can be replaced by a propositional attitude verb, like 'believe', 'doubt', 'hope', 'desire', etc., 'a' can be replaced by the (...) name of the individual/object about whom/which the particular attitude is held, and 'F' can be replaced by the name of the property that the individual/object is said to have. The dissertation takes belief to be a paradigmatic example of a propositional attitude, and, thus, focuses mainly on the semantics of ascriptions of beliefs. The thesis it defends is that while a correct analysis of belief ascriptions in general involves a relation between the believer and the proposition which is believed, a semantic distinction still needs to be made between de re and de dicto beliefs. This distinction can be made by distinguishing between two different kinds of propositions -- Russellian propositions corresponding to de re beliefs, and Fregean propositions corresponding to de dicto beliefs. This approach is motivated by arguing that the recent proposals of the 'hybrid' type concerning the semantics of belief reports, advocated by such philosophers as Schiffer, Crimmins, Richard, etc., fail. These proposals fail because of overgeneralisation, and, therefore, fail to capture the de re/de dicto distinction. Therefore, if the de re/de dicto distinction is genuine, and the propositions occurring within these two kinds of reports are essentially different, then a single account of belief ascriptions cannot be given. We need two different semantical accounts to capture the distinction. A de re report is best understood by a semantics of the broadly Russellian variety, while a de dicto belief report is best understood by a semantics of the Fregean variety. (shrink)

Gary Becker and others have done important work to broaden the content of self interest, but have not departed from seeing rationality in terms of the exclusive pursuit of self-interest. One reason why committed behavior is important is that a person can have good reason to pursue objectives other than self interest maximization (no matter how broadly it is construed). Indeed, one can also follow rules of behavior that go beyond the pursuit of one's own goals, even if the goals (...) include non-self-interested concerns. By living in a society, one develops possible reasons for considering other people's goals as well, which takes one beyond an exclusive concentration on one's own goals, not to mention the single-minded pursuit of one's own self interest. The recognition of other people's goals may be a part of rational thought. If rational behavior may depart from the relentless pursuit of one's own goals, commitment has to be important in a theory of rationality. Furthermore, seeing the role of commitment in human behavior can have explanatory importance in allowing us to understand behavior patterns that are hard to fit into the narrow format of contemporary rational choice theory. Commitment is, thus, important both for practical reason and for causal explanation. (shrink)

I am embarrassed at being placed in the dizzying company of one of the truly great thinkers in the world. The similarities between Mill's ideas and mine partly reflect, of course, his influence on my thinking. But I also discuss some difficulties in taking Mill's whole theory without modification, since there are internal tensions within it. In a paper I published in 1967, I tried to discuss how Mill's willingness to hold on to some contrary positions depended on the nature (...) of his empirical reading of the world. I draw on that diagnosis in commenting on some of the articles here. There are some serious issues of misinterpretation in one of the articles, which I try to clarify. I also comment on Arrow's interpretation of what is involved in the idea of autonomy and on his own way of assessing freedom, and acknowledge the seriousness of the questions he raises about the value of freedom in normative political philosophy. (shrink)

Colloquially, episodic memory is described as “the memory of personally experienced events”. Even though episodic memory has been studied in psychology and neuroscience for about six decades, there is still great uncertainty as to what episodic memory is. Here we ask how episodic memory should be characterized in order to be validated as a natural kind. We propose to conceive of episodic memory as a knowledge-like state that is identified with an experientially based mnemonic representation of an episode that allows (...) for a mnemonic simulation thereof. We call our analysis the Sequence Analysis of Episodic Memory since episodes will be analyzed in terms of sequences of events. Our philosophical analysis of episodic memory is driven and supported by experimental results from psychology and neuroscience. We discuss selected experimental results that provide exemplary evidence for uniform causal mechanisms underlying the properties of episodic memory and argue that episodic memory is a natural kind. The argumentation proceeds along three cornerstones: First, psychological evidence suggests that a violation of any of the proposed conditions for episodic memory amounts to a deficiency of episodic memory and no form of memory or cognitive process but episodic memory fulfills them. Second, empirical results support a claim that the principal anatomical substrate of episodic memory is the hippocampus. Finally, we can pin down causal mechanisms onto neural activities in the hippocampus to explain the psychological states and processes constituting episodic memory. (shrink)

In an interesting letter to Anna George, the daughter of Henry George, Bernard Shaw wrote: “Your father found me a literary dilettante and militant rationalist in religion, and a barren rascal at that. By turning my mind to economics he made a man of me”. I am not able to determine what making a man of Bernard Shaw would exactly consist of, but it is clear that the kind of moral and social problems with which Shaw was deeply concerned could (...) not be sensibly pursued without examining their economic aspects. For example, the claims of property rights, which some would defend and some would dispute, are not just matters of basic moral belief that could not possibly be influenced one way or the other by any empirical arguments. They call for sensitive moral analysis responsive to empirical realities, including economic ones. (shrink)

We live in a world in which the idea of human rights is persistently invoked. However, despite the tremendous appeal of the idea of human rights, it is also seen by many as lacking in foundation. I have argued, particularly in my book The Idea of Justice, that human rights are best seen as articulations of commitments in social ethics, comparable to — but very different from — accepting utilitarian reasoning. Like other ethical tenets, human rights can, of course, be (...) disputed, but the claim is that they will survive open and informed scrutiny.This view contrasts with seeing human rights in primarily legal terms, either as consequences of humane legislation, or as precursors of legal rights, or as pointing towards what should ideally be legal rights. Human rights may well be reflected in legislation, may inspire legislation, and may even serve, in many circumstances, as ideals that demand legislative attention. However, these are ‘further facts’— not the defining characteristics of human rights. (shrink)

This book develops some of the most important themes of Sen's works over the last decade. He argues in a rich and subtle approach that we should be concerned with people's capabilities rather than their resources or welfare.

Enthält: "Historisches Denken als Trauerarbeit - Jacob Burckhardts Antwort auf eine Frage unserer Zeit" (S. 73-95).

Commodities and Capabilities presents a set of inter-related theses concerning the foundations of welfare economics, and in particular about the assessment of personal well-being and advantage. The argument presented focuses on the capability to function, i.e. what a person can do or can be, questioning in the process the more standard emphasis on opulence or on utility. In fact, a person's motivation behind choice is treated here as a parametric variable which may or may not coincide with the pursuit of (...) self-interest. Given the large number of practical problems arising from the roles and limitations of different concepts of interest and the judgement of advantage and well-being, this scholarly investigation is both of theoretical interest and practical import. (shrink)

Aphoristic work on the fundamentals of Nyaya philosophy with classical Sanskrit commentaries; critical edition with exhaustive introduction.

Die in diesem Band vereinigten Beiträge stellen einen interdisziplinären Zusammenhang her, der eine komplexe Perspektive auf das Thema "Geschichtsbewusstsein" eröffnet. Es geht hier um das Ensemble mentaler Operationen, die das Geschichtsbewusstsein als zentrales Phänomen menschlicher Subjektivität ausmachen. Im Mittelpunkt stehen seine kulturellen Funktionen zur Orientierung der menschlichen Lebenspraxis. Psychologische, linguistische und geschichtliche Analysen verbinden sich mit theoretischen Entwürfen, die die Leistung der Zeitdeutung und Identitätsbildung umfassend explizieren. Die theoretischen Analysen des Bewusstseins von Geschichte stehen jedoch nicht allein, sondern werden auf (...) konkrete Phänomene und auf systematisch angelegte empirische Untersuchungen bezogen. (shrink)

This paper addresses the doubts voiced by Wigner about the physical relevance of the concept of geometrical points by exploiting some facts known to all but honored by none: Almost all real numbers are transcendental; the explicit representation of any one will require an infinite amount of physical resources. An instrument devised to measure a continuous real variable will need a continuum of internal states to achieve perfect resolution. Consequently, a laboratory instrument for measuring a continuous variable in a finite (...) time can report only a finite number of values, each of which is constrained to be a rational number. It does not matter whether the variable is classical or quantum-mechanical. Now, in von Neumann’s measurement theory (von Neumann, Mathematical Foundations of Quantum Mechanics, Princeton University Press, Princeton, [1955]), an operator A with a continuous spectrum—which has no eigenvectors—cannot be measured, but it can be approximated by operators with discrete spectra which are measurable. The measurable approximant F(A) is not canonically determined; it has to be chosen by the experimentalist. It is argued that this operator can always be chosen in such a way that Sewell’s results (Sewell in Rep. Math. Phys. 56: 271, [2005]; Sewell, Lecture given at the J.T. Lewis Memorial Conference, Dublin, [2005]) on the measurement of a hermitian operator on a finite-dimensional vector space (described in Sect. 3.2) constitute an adequate resolution of the measurement problem in this theory. From this follows our major conclusion, which is that the notion of a geometrical point is as meaningful in nonrelativistic quantum mechanics as it is in classical physics. It is necessary to be sensitive to the fact that there is a gap between theoretical and experimental physics, which reveals itself tellingly as an error inherent in the measurement of a continuous variable. (shrink)

We propose that rapid eye movement (REM) and slow-wave sleep contribute differently to the formation of episodic memories. REM sleep is important for building up invariant object representations that eventually recur to gamma-band oscillations in the neocortex. In contrast, slow-wave sleep is more directly involved in the consolidation of episodic memories through replay of sequential neural activity in hippocampal place cells.

This book develops some of the most important themes of Sen's works over the last decade. He argues in a rich and subtle approach that we should be concerned with people's capabilities rather than their resources or welfare.

Based on the 1972 Radcliffe Lectures, this book presents a systematic treatment of the conceptual framework as well as the practical problems of measurement of inequality.

This paper is about three distinct but interrelated problems: (1) the role 0f rights in moral theory, (2) thc characterization 0f agent relative values and their admissibility in consequ<—:ncc—bascd evaluation, and ( 3) the nature 0f moral evaluation 0f states 0f aihirs.

One approach to the analysis of ethical dilemmas in medical practice uses the “four principles plus scope” approach. These principles are: respect for autonomy, beneficence, non-maleficence and justice, along with concern for their scope of application. However, conflicts between the different principles are commonplace in psychiatric practice, especially in forensic psychiatry, where duties to patients often conflict with duties to third parties such as the public. This article seeks to highlight some of the specific ethical dilemmas encountered in forensic psychiatry: (...) the excessive use of segregation for the protection of others, the ethics of using mechanical restraint when clinically beneficial and the use of physical treatment without consent. We argue that justice, as a principle, should be paramount in forensic psychiatry, and that there is a need for a more specific code of ethics to cover specialised areas of medicine like forensic psychiatry. This code should specify that in cases of conflict between different principles, justice should gain precedence over the other principles. (shrink)

This series aims at bridging the gap between historical theory and the study of historical memory as well as western and non-western concepts, for which this ...

Without denying the importance of the postmodernist approach to the narrative form and rhetorical strategies of historiography, the author, one of Germany's ...

Contributed articles presented in an international conference on self-knowledge and agency, organized and held at Centre for Philosophy, School of Social Sciences, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi in January 2007.