This paper argues that functionalist metasemantic views, such as Conceptual Role Semantics and Interpretivism, face a Euthyphro challenge. The challenge, put roughly, is this: functionalist metasemantic views reverse the order of explanation. According to such views, representational mental states have the contents that they do partly because they play certain roles in our mental lives. According to an intuitive picture of the roles that representational mental states play in our mental lives, however, these states play the roles they do partly (...) because they have the contents that they do. Since explanations—even partial ones—are asymmetric (call this principle ‘the Euthyphro Principle’), we can’t accept both this intuitive picture and a functionalist metasemantics. Hence, we should reject all versions of the latter. This paper can be seen as an attempt to better articulate an intuition that has been suggested in various forms in the literature. The paper proceeds as follows. First, it shows that functionalist metasemantic views imply certain ‘partly because’ claims. Second, it argues for the Euthyphro Principle. Third, it defends the intuitive picture of representational mental states and shows that it implies ‘partly because’ claims that conflict with those made by functionalist metasemantic views. Finally, it considers ways of relaxing the intuitive picture and finds them all wanting. (shrink)

Naive realism in philosophy of perception is the view that (successful) perception involves a direct relation between perceiving subjects and the world. The naive realist says that your perception of a cat on the mat is a worldly relation which is partially constituted by the cat and the mat; a spatio-temporal chunk of the world is presenting itself to you. Recently, Elijah Chudnoff and John Bengson have independently developed an extension of this view to intellectual experiences, or intuitions, for traditionally (...) a priori domains. We argue that this view, which we call ‘Intuitional Naive Realism’ (INR), will not have the epistemic advantages that Chudnoff and Bengson claim that it does. In perception, but not intuition, there is a deeper explanation of what makes it the case that one experience is constituted by the world while another is not. Whether or not INR is true, then, it does no interesting epistemological work for traditionally a priori domains. (shrink)

This article explores attempts at legalization of the practice of euthanasia and assisted suicide. Although in many countries there have been high levels of public support for euthanasia and assisted suicide, in most of them, no legislative activity has taken place concerning these practices, and there is a lack of clarity about what is permitted and what is not. I argue that accurate definition of the relevant concepts and a clear delineation of the territory of the debate would help draw (...) a coherent roadmap for legalization. To this end, I analyze five legal approaches to the legalization euthanasia: maintenance of the status quo, legal defenses, de-prioritization, de-criminalization, and legislation. I conclude with a discussion of the moral and legal implications of the foregoing analysis. (shrink)

El presente artículo recoge un texto inédito hasta la fecha del filósofo español Manuel Sacristán Sacristán (1925-1985) en torno al libro El futuro del Partido Comunista Francés, un ensayo de Waldeck Rochet (1969), entonces secretario general del PCF. En el mismo pueden observarse motivaciones políticas de Sacristán características de su tiempo que parecen prefigurar parte de la caracterización que más adelante realizará en torno al eurocomunismo, donde la firme defensa de los valores democráticos en el marxismo no es incompatible con (...) críticas a determinadas involuciones político-institucionales en el campo de los partidos comunistas europeos de la época. (shrink)

Erotic Counter Education is the educational position of the late Ilan Gur- Ze'ev. In ECE Gur-Ze'ev combines two opposing positions in the philosophy of education, one teleological and anti-utopian, the other teleological and utopian. In light of this unique combination, I ask what mediates between these two poles and suggest that the answer lies in the concept of eros. Following a preliminary presentation of the concept of eros in ECE, I define it as a form of transcendental cognition that distinguishes (...) between ‘what is to be perceived’, conceptual and human, and ‘what is not to be perceived’, divine and absolute. I subsequently show how the ‘nature’ of this conception of eros permits the establishment of a normative meta-theory of education that gains its strength from critical theory and counter education. (shrink)

Esta selección representativa de la obra filosófica de Manuel Sacristán, esta llamada a ser punto de referencia obligado del pensamiento hispánico. Si su autor es conocido sobre todo por su compromiso político y social, como filosofo político por sus interesante y peculiar reflexión en la tradición e Marx, o como profesor y traductor de excepcional categoría, en estos PAPELES surge otra imagen destacadísima suya: la del filosofo del rigor y de la maestra metodológica puestos al servicio de un pensamiento vivo (...) que explora los problemas fundamentales de nuestro tiempo. Los textos contenidos en este volumen, unos inéditos, otros dispersos y en general poco accesibles hasta ahora, documentan más de treinta años del itinerario intelectual y profesional seguido por el autor en el campo de la filosofía. El libro arranca con una sangrienta parodia de la filosofía oficial española de los años 50 y prosigue con trabajos publicados en la inolvidable revista LAYE, una de las primeras brechas significativas en el universo ideológico del franquismo abierta por inspiración de Manuel Sacristán. Dentro de la amplia temática que abarcan los PAPELES destacan como puntos de gravedad: El extenso estudio sobre la primera etapa del pensamiento de Heidegger –el análisis ontológico-existencial- situada, a partir de una “humilde lectura literal” (M.S.), en la mas pura tradición empirista y positivista europea; tres grandes ensayos dedicados a la formal y alas diversas posturas que configuran el marco de discusión sobre esta disciplina, abierto a partir de la Escuela de Viena, sobre ubicación, rendimiento cognoscitivo y fundamentación filosófico-científica de la lógica; dos exposiciones de la historia de la filosofía contemporánea en sus rasgos mas significativos y su génesis dentro del espacio de dos siglos de tradición del pensamiento moderno. Los ensayos más recientes dan cuenta de un giro de extrema necesidad en el pensamiento crítico y responsable de los años 80 a la vista del asalto a las últimas garantías de integridad y supervivencia en y de nuestro planeta. (shrink)

Este artículo plantea una relectura de John Dewey con la intención de analizar y dar algunas respuestas a la actual crisis de la democracia representativa o liberal. Esta crisis guarda relación con procesos globalizadores contradictorios que, de un lado, alimentan una utopía futurista confiada en el progreso tecnológico, y de otro, el regreso “retrotópico”, nostálgico y emocional, a lo tribal. Esta relectura se centra en obras fundamentales de Dewey, pero especialmente Democracia y Educación y otros textos de carácter pedagógico. El (...) artículo desarrolla una serie de argumentos que concluyen en torno a la idea de “democracia creativa”, que Dewey planteó en su madurez, como referencia para una deseable reactivación de la democracia entendida como ideal ético. (shrink)

We propose a modification of the exhaustivity operator from Fox Presupposition and implicature in compositional semantics, Palgrave Macmillan, London, pp 71–120, 2007. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230210752_4) that on top of negating all the Innocently Excludable alternatives affirms all the ‘Innocently Includable’ ones. The main result of supplementing the notion of Innocent Exclusion with that of Innocent Inclusion is that it allows the exhaustivity operator to identify cells in the partition induced by the set of alternatives whenever possible. We argue for this property of (...) ‘cell identification’ based on the simplification of disjunctive antecedents and the effects on free choice that arise as the result of the introduction of universal quantifiers. We further argue for our proposal based on the interaction of only with free choice disjunction. (shrink)

Expressivism, broadly construed, is the view that the function of utterances in a given area of discourse is to give expression to our sentiments or other (non-cognitive) mental states or attitudes, rather than report or describe some range of facts. This view naturally seems an attractive option wherever it is suspected that there may not be a domain of facts for the given discourse to be describing. Familiarly, to avoid commitment to ethical facts, the ethical expressivist suggests that ethical utterances (...) (e.g., “Gratuitous torture is wrong”, “What John did was morally good”) do not serve to ascribe ethical properties to objects, actions, persons, or states of affairs. Instead, they simply function to give voice to certain of our sentiments (or ‘pro/con’ attitudes). Along similar lines, philosophers have entertained versions of expressivism about the aesthetic, the modal, the mental, what is funny, even about theoretical science and knowledge ascriptions. (shrink)

a single life-span. Philosophers, then, do not see more or know more, and they do not see less or know less. They aim to see less detail and more of the abstract. Their details, if you like, are abstractions. Walking on God’s earth as a pedestrian, as a farmer working his fields or as a passer-by, one’s picture of one’s surroundings is every bit as intelligent as that of the pilot riding the sky. The views of the field are radically (...) different, however. One sees only a specific field and in all lively detail: the exact pattern of the land, or even the exact outline of a given leaf, grasshopper, grain of sand even. Acquaintance with minute detail is not without its price: details may stand in the way of conjuring the big picture. It may be difficult to compare whichever field one happens to be in with far off fields, with respect to their size or shape or any other quality. One may wish to inquire if far off fields were already planted, harvested, or even if they exist. A pedestrian may find it hard or even impossible to do so. The pedestrian view contains fine points that the pilot’s map never would, but it does not necessarily contain more information, for it lacks the general context. After all, there are only so many items that one can observe and account for at a single glance, a single map, a single book, a single life-span. (shrink)

Dorit Bar-On develops and defends a novel view of avowals and self-knowledge. Drawing on resources from the philosophy of language, the theory of action, epistemology, and the philosophy of mind, she offers original and systematic answers to many long-standing questions concerning our ability to know our own minds. We are all very good at telling what states of mind we are in at a given moment. When it comes to our own present states of mind, what we say goes; an (...) avowal such as "I'm feeling so anxious" or "I'm thinking about my next trip to Paris," it is typically supposed, tells it like it is. But why is that? Why should what I say about my present mental states carry so much more weight than what others say about them? Why should avowals be more immune to criticism and correction than other claims we make? And if avowals are not based on any evidence or observation, how could they possibly express our knowledge of our own present mental states? Bar-On proposes a Neo-Expressivist view according to which an avowal is an act through which a person directly expresses, rather than merely reports, the very mental condition that the avowal ascribes. She argues that this expressivist idea, coupled with an adequate characterization of expression and a proper separation of the semantics of avowals from their pragmatics and epistemology, explains the special status we assign to avowals. As against many expressivists and their critics, she maintains that such an expressivist explanation is consistent with a non-deflationary view of self-knowledge and a robust realism about mental states. The view that emerges preserves many insights of the most prominent contributors to the subject, while offering a new perspective on our special relationship to our own minds. (shrink)

An argument is presented to the effect that the ability to feel or to experience meaning conditions the ability to mean, and is thus essential to our notion of meaning. The experience of meaning is manifested in the "fine shades" of use and behavior. Theses, so obvious in music, constitute understanding music, which makes music understanding so relevant to understanding language. Applying these notions of understanding, feeling, and experience--as well as their explication in terms of comparisons, internal relation, and mastery (...) of technique--to music, where they are so apt and natural, is fertile both for the philosophy of language and the philosophy of music. (edited). (shrink)

Conceptualizing intelligence in its biological context, as the expression of manifold adaptations, compels a rethinking of measuring this characteristic in humans, relying also on animal studies of analogous skills. Mental manipulation, as an extension of object manipulation, provides a continuous, biologically based concept for studying G as it pertains to individual differences in humans and other species.

Positive events play an essential role in people’s wellbeing. Capitalisation – disclosing such events to others – bolsters such salutary effects. To understand capitalisation-related motivational processes in romantic partners’ daily lives, we adopted Higgins’ motivational perspective; namely, that people’s primary motivation is to feel effective with respect to Value (achieving the desired outcome), Truth (understanding what is true), and Control (managing what happens). We were particularly interested in clarifying how these aspects of effectiveness are reflected in people’s daily positive experiences, (...) their partners’ responses to their disclosure, and the matching between the two. The role of subject’s motivational regulatory mode (assessment vs. locomotion) in these processes was also examined. The results of a diary study of 83 couples showed that assessors (those with motivation to engage in critical evaluation) characterised their positive experiences as high on truth effectiveness but reported greater benefits from partner’s responses focusing on control effectiveness. Locomotors (those with motivation to initiate action) were more likely to characterise their positive experiences as high on control effectiveness, but reported greater benefit from partner’s responses focusing on value effectiveness. Finally, response mismatching, in particular an “under-focused” response (partner’s response effectiveness focus < recipient’s event-related motivational effectiveness focus) was rated as less beneficial. (shrink)

Recent discussions of animal communication and the evolution of language have advocated adopting a ‘pragmatics-first’ approach, according to which “a more productive framework” for primate communication research should be “pragmatics, the field of linguistics that examines the role of context in shaping the meaning of linguistic utterances”. After distinguishing two different conceptions of pragmatics that advocates of the pragmatics-first approach have implicitly relied on, I argue that neither conception adequately serves the purposes of pragmatics-first approaches to the origins of human (...) linguistic communication. My main aim in this paper is to motivate–and begin to articulate–an intermediary conception whose scope is narrower than Carnapian pragmatics but broader than Gricean pragmatics. To do so, I first spell out what I take to be the key insight offered by proponents of the Gricean approach concerning the emergence of linguistic communication, namely, its being communication ‘from a psychological point of view’. I then develop this insight using key elements from the anti-Gricean ‘biosemantic’ account of linguistic communication due to Ruth Millikan, Philosophical Perspectives 9, Ridgeview Publishing, Atascedero CA, 1995, Millikan R Varieties of Meaning. Mass.: The MIT Press, Cambridge, Millikan, Beyond concepts: unicepts, language, and natural information, Oxford University Press, Oxford UK, 2017, and elsewhere). I argue that the intermediary pragmatics-first approach that I propose, which draws on both Gricean and Millikanian resources, would be better equipped to serve the purposes of those who search for potential precursors of human linguistic communication in animal communication. (shrink)

The task of explaining language evolution is often presented by leading theorists in explicitly Gricean terms. After a critical evaluation, I present an alternative, non-Gricean conceptualization of the task. I argue that, while it may be true that nonhuman animals, in contrast to language users, lack the ‘motive to share information’ understood à la Grice, nonhuman animals nevertheless do express states of mind through complex nonlinguistic behavior. On a proper, non-Gricean construal of expressive communication, this means that they show to (...) their designated audience (without intentionally telling)—and their designated audience recognizes (without rationally inferring)—both how things are in the world and how things are with them. Recognizing that our nonhuman predecessors were already proficient—though non-Gricean—sharers of such information would free us to focus on the more tractable problem of explaining how linguistic expressive vehicles came to replace, augment, and transform the nonlinguistic expressive means to which nonhuman animals are consigned. (shrink)

People’s attitudes towards social norms play a crucial role in understanding group behavior. Norm psychology accounts focus on processes of norm internalization that influence people’s norm following attitudes but pay considerably less attention to social identity and group identification processes. Social identity theory in contrast studies group identity but works with a relatively thin and instrumental notion of social norms. We argue that to best understand both sets of phenomena, it is important to integrate the insights of both approaches. Social (...) status, social identity, and social norms are considered separate phenomena in evolutionary accounts. We discuss assumptions and views that support this separation, and suggest an integrated view of our own. We argue that we should be open to the early origins of human social complexity, and conjecture that the longer that the human social world involved multi-level societies the more probable it is that norm psychology and social identity interacted in rich ways. (shrink)

This textbook presents an introduction to the differential geometry of curves and surfaces. This second, revised edition has been expanded to include solutions and applications in cartography. Topics include Euclidean geometry, curve theory, surface theory, curvature concepts, minimal surfaces, Riemann geometry and the Gauss-Bonnet theorem.

This volume is fourth in the series of annuals created under the auspices of The Association for Feminist Ethics and Social Theory. The topics covered herein_from peacekeeping and terrorism, to sex trafficking and women's paid labor, to poverty and religious fundamentalism_are vital to women and to feminist movements throughout the world.

Heyes presents a compelling account of how cultural evolutionary processes shape and create “rules,” or norms, of social behavior. She suggested that normativity depends on implicit, genetically inherited, domain-general processes and explicit, culturally inherited, domain-specific processes. Her approach challenges the nativist point of view and provides supporting evidence that shows how social interactions are responsible for creating mental processes that assist in understanding and behaving according to rules or norms. We agree. In our commentary, we suggest that it is not (...) only that mental processes for grasping norms are recreated in each generation but also that social interactions shape the kinds of social groups that are recognized (for a more extensive discussion, see Kish Bar-On & Lamm, 2023). We highlight evidence showing that accounts of norm psychology thus require a richer notion of human groups. (shrink)

Important aspects of its philosophical basis, and its significance for the foundations of mathematics, appeared in The Foundations of Mathematics (FA, 1884). Six years later, at the beginning of the 1890s, Frege published three articles that mark significant changes in his conception: "Function and Concept" (FC, 1891), "On Sense and Reference" (SR, 1892) and "Concept and Object" (1892). Notable among these changes are: (a) The systematic distinction between the sense and the reference of expressions as two separate ingredients of their (...) meaning. (b) The extension and generalization of the notion of function to include the conception of concepts and relations as functions to truth-values, and the corresponding conception of the two truth-values as objects. These changes were immediately incorporated in the mature, authoritative exposition of his logic in his magnum opus: Basic Laws of Arithmetic (BL), whose first volume appeared in 1893. (shrink)