Ecologists are challenged by the need to bridge and synthesize different approaches and theories to obtain a coherent understanding of ecosystems in a changing world. Both food web theory and regime shift theory shine light on mechanisms that confer stability to ecosystems, but from different angles. Empirical food web models are developed to analyze how equilibria in real multi-trophic ecosystems are shaped by species interactions, and often include linear functional response terms for simple estimation of interaction strengths from observations. Models (...) of regime shifts focus on qualitative changes of equilibrium points in a slowly changing environment, and typically include non-linear functional response terms. Currently, it is unclear how the stability of an empirical food web model, expressed as the rate of system recovery after a small perturbation, relates to the vulnerability of the ecosystem to collapse. Here, we conduct structural sensitivity analyses of classical consumer-resource models in equilibrium along an environmental gradient. Specifically, we change non-proportional interaction terms into proportional ones, while maintaining the equilibrium biomass densities and material flux rates, to analyze how alternative model formulations shape the stability properties of the equilibria. The results reveal no consistent relationship between the stability of the original models and the proportionalized versions, even though they describe the same biomass values and material flows. We use these findings to critically discuss whether stability analysis of observed equilibria by empirical food web models can provide insight into regime shift dynamics, and highlight the challenge of bridging alternative modelling approaches in ecology and beyond. (shrink)

This contribution is a gentle introduction to so-called dynamic epistemic logics, that can describe how agents change their knowledge and beliefs. We start with a concise introduction to epistemic logic, through the example of one, two and finally three players holding cards; and, mainly for the purpose of motivating the dynamics, we also very summarily introduce the concepts of general and common knowledge. We then pay ample attention to the logic of public announcements, wherein agents change their knowledge as the (...) result of public announcements. One crucial topic in that setting is that of unsuccessful updates: formulas that become false when announced. The Moore-sentences that were already extensively discussed at the conception of epistemic logic in Hintikka’s ‘Knowledge and Belief’ give rise to such unsuccessful updates. After that, we present a few examples of more complex epistemic updates. Our closing observations are on recent developments that link the ‘standard’ topic of belief revision, as in ‘On the Logic of Theory Change: partial meet contraction and revision functions’, by Alchourron et al. , to the dynamic epistemic logics introduced here. (shrink)

We introduce a graphical framework for Bayesian inference that is sufficiently general to accommodate not just the standard case but also recent proposals for a theory of quantum Bayesian inference wherein one considers density operators rather than probability distributions as representative of degrees of belief. The diagrammatic framework is stated in the graphical language of symmetric monoidal categories and of compact structures and Frobenius structures therein, in which Bayesian inversion boils down to transposition with respect to an appropriate compact structure. (...) We characterize classical Bayesian inference in terms of a graphical property and demonstrate that our approach eliminates some purely conventional elements that appear in common representations thereof, such as whether degrees of belief are represented by probabilities or entropie quantities. We also introduce a quantum-like calculus wherein the Frobenius structure is noncommutative and show that it can accommodate Leifer's calculus of 'conditional density operators'. The notion of conditional independence is also generalized to our graphical setting and we make some preliminary connections to the theory of Bayesian networks. Finally, we demonstrate how to construct a graphical Bayesian calculus within any dagger compact category. (shrink)

The dynamics of single populations up to ecosystems, are often described by one or a set of non-linear ordinary differential equations. In this paper we review the use of bifurcation theory to analyse these non-linear dynamical systems. Bifurcation analysis gives regimes in the parameter space with quantitatively different asymptotic dynamic behaviour of the system. In small-scale systems the underlying models for the populations and their interaction are simple Lotka-Volterra models or more elaborated models with more biological detail. The latter ones (...) are more difficult to analyse, especially when the number of populations is large. Therefore for large-scale systems the Lotka-Volterra equations are still popular despite the limited realism. Various approaches are discussed in which the different time-scale of ecological and evolutionary biological processes are considered together. (shrink)

_De regimine Christiano_, produced at the height of the great conflict of 1296-1303 between Pope Boniface VIII and Philip the Fair of France, is a detailed and rigorous defence of the papacy’s claim to supremacy even in temporal matters.

In Democracy and the Claims of Nature, the leading thinkers in the fields of environmental, political, and social theory come together to discuss the tensions and sympathies of democratic ideals and environmental values. The prominent contributors reflect upon where we stand in our understanding of the relationship between democracy and the claims of nature. Democracy and the Claims of Nature bridges the gap between the often competing ideals of the two fields, leading to a greater understanding of each for the (...) other. (shrink)

Hans van Ditmarsch and Barteld Kooi (2008). Semantic results for ontic and epistemic change. In: G. Bonanno, W. van der Hoek and M. Wooldridge (editors). Logic and the Foundations of Game and Decision Theory (LOFT 7). Texts in Logic and Games 3, pp. 87-117, Amsterdam University Press, Amsterdam.

The most important thing to know about this book is that it is mostly not by Rorty. Twenty pages of this small book were transcribed from an audio recording of a public lecture by Rorty including portions of his discussion with the audience, in Turin, Spain, in 2005. A Spanish translation appeared in 2008, followed by this English version in 2011. Jeffrey W. Robbins wrote a foreword, “Richard Rorty: A Philosophical Guide to Talking About Religion,” (vii–xxii). The introduction at the (...) lecture was by Gianni Vattimo (1–5). Rorty’s section is twenty pages long (7–26). By far the largest portion of the book is the conclusion, by G. Elijah Dann, “Philosophy, Religion, and Religious Belief After Rorty” (27–76, including .. (shrink)

One kind of structuralism holds that mathematics is about structures, conceived as a type of abstract entity. Another denies that it is about any distinctively mathematical entities at all—even abstract structures; rather it gives purely general information about what holds of any collection of entities conforming to the axioms of the theory. Of these, pure structuralism is most plausibly taken to enjoy significant advantages over platonism. But in what appears to be its most plausible—modalised—version, even restricted to elementary arithmetic, it (...) requires defence of a very strong possibility claim: that there could be a completed w-sequence of concrete objects. There are very serious epistemological difficulties in the way of providing the requisite defence. (shrink)

THE PROBLEM OF THE INTERPRETATION OF HAMANN Johann Georg Hamann is an intriguing but poorly known figure in the contemporary intellectual world. Yet this is the man whom Kierkegaard saluted as "Emperor!", whose writings were to have been arranged for publication by none other than Goethe himself, and whom Dilthey numbered among the primordial figures in the rise of modern historical consciousness. There are reasons for the persistence of this general ignorance. Hamann is deep. And, in addition, there is his (...) forbidding style. The readers of Kierkegaard and Dilthey, two other giants who them selves achieved late recognition, have not had to face this kind of imposing obstacle. Not only does Hamann expect his readers to handle themselves in deep water, but to intuit their way between his ideas which bob up like islands with no visible connection between them. Like Kierkegaard too, Hamann has had his troubles with the public. He himself referred to the hope that he would be understood by a "better posterity". In fact only the last few years have seen the printing of some of his more controversial writings, in particular his theories on the nature of human sexuality. (shrink)

The term ur-emotion is proposed to replace basic emotion as a name for the aspects of emotion that underlie perceived similarities of emotion types across cultures and species. The ur- prefix is borrowed from the German on analogy to similar borrowings in textual criticism and musicology. The proposed term ur-emotion is less likely to be interpreted as referring to the entirety of an emotional state than is the term basic emotion. Ur-emotion avoids reductionism by indicating an abstract underlying structure that (...) accounts for similarities between emotions without implying that the differences are unimportant. This article is dedicated to the memory of Bob Solomon, and is framed in terms of his decades-long analysis and critique of the concept of basic emotions. (shrink)

In this third lecture, Quine returns to the mentalistic language accompanying perception and wonders to what extent it is physically defensible and respectable. He explains that even at the level of observation sentences we have a device for ascribing perceptual events. There is a bifurcation between physicalistic and mentalistic talk with basic observation sentences as seen in the difference between ‘It is raining’ and ‘Bob perceives that it is raining’. He explains how the relation of perception between humans and objects (...) can fit his physicalistic framework while remaining very disjointed. What holds its disjointed nature together is a trait of a higher order found in the learning process itself. Each class of perceptual events, be they auditory, visual or otherwise, is a class by which a subject can be taught to name the object in question. (shrink)

In his influential book Truth, Paul Horwich deploys a philosophical method focused on linguistic usage, that is, on the function(s) the concept of truth serves in actual discourse. In doing so Horwich eschews abstract metaphysics, arguing that metaphysical or ontological conceptions of truth rest on basic misconceptions. From this description, one might reasonably expect Horwich's book to have drawn inspiration from, or even embodied philosophical pragmatism of some kind. Unfortunately Horwich relies upon Russell's tired caricature of pragmatism about truth (''p' (...) is true if and only if it is useful to believe p' (Ibid., p. 34, p. 47)), and as a result underestimates the challenge it poses to Minimalism. This paper develops a pragmatist critique of minimalism that focuses on the seemingly central, plausibly constitutive role played by the concept of truth in the speech-act of assertion. The critique suggests that Horwich's Minimalism does not and cannot accomplish its stated goal of explaining all of the facts involving truth. Indeed, the kind of thorough-going deflationism sought by Horwich and others (including pragmatist sympathizer Bob Brandom) is incompatible with an adequate account of assertion, and perhaps other concepts (like belief, judgement and inquiry) as well. (shrink)

If Bob and Joe switched minds, but kept the same bodies, who would be Bob and who would be Joe? If time has no beginnning, how could it have reached now? Conundrums provides a basic, quick introduction to some key problems of philosophy by asking concise questions that evoke classical philosophical problems in a striking manner. It is written in a lively, engaging style and promotes critical thinking skills. This pocketbook is intended for introductory philosophy courses and may be used (...) to generate class discussion or for essay assignments. Topics covered include mind and reality, self and others, God, space and time, and life and death. (shrink)

According to expressivists, normative language expresses desire‐like states of mind. According to noncognitivists, normative beliefs have a desire‐like functional role. What is the relation between these two doctrines? It is widely assumed that expressivism commits you to noncognitivism, and vice versa. This paper opposes that assumption. I advance a view that combines a noncognitivist psychology with a descriptivist semantics for normative language. While this might seem like an ungainly hybrid, I argue that it has important advantages over more familiar metaethical (...) positions. The noncognitivist aspect of the theory captures all of the explanatory benefits standardly associated with expressivism. At the same time, the descriptivist element allows us to avoid the semantic headaches for expressivism. (shrink)

The book, which stepwise develops successively more powerful logical and grammatical systems, covers an unusually broad range of material.

According to a rich tradition in philosophy of action, intentional action requires practical knowledge: someone who acts intentionally knows what they are doing while they are doing it. Piñeros Glasscock argues that an anti-luminosity argument, of the sort developed in Williamson, can be readily adapted to provide a reductio of an epistemic condition on intentional action. This paper undertakes a rescue mission on behalf of an epistemic condition on intentional action. We formulate and defend a version of an epistemic condition (...) that is free from any luminosity commitments. While this version of an epistemic condition escapes reductio, it comes with substantive commitments of its own. In particular, we will see that it forces us to deny the existence of any essentially intentional actions. We go on to argue that this consequence should be embraced. On the resulting picture, intentional action is not luminous. But it still entails practical knowledge. (shrink)

Relativism and expressivism offer two different semantic frameworks for grappling with a similar cluster of issues. What is the difference between these two frameworks? Should they be viewed as rivals? If so, how should we choose between them? This chapter sheds light on these questions. After providing an overview of relativism and expressivism, I discuss three potential choice points: their relation to truth conditional semantics, their pictures of belief and communication, and their explanations of disagreement.

This paper argues that we should assign certainty a central place in epistemology. While epistemic certainty played an important role in the history of epistemology, recent epistemology has tended to dismiss certainty as an unattainable ideal, focusing its attention on knowledge instead. I argue that this is a mistake. Attending to certainty attributions in the wild suggests that much of our everyday knowledge qualifies, in appropriate contexts, as certain. After developing a semantics for certainty ascriptions, I put certainty to explanatory (...) work. Specifically, I argue that by taking certainty as our central epistemic notion, we can shed light on a variety of important topics, including evidence and evidential probability, epistemic modals, and the normative constraints on credence and assertion. (shrink)

Here, Bob Hale and Crispin Wright assemble the key writings that lead to their distinctive neo-Fregean approach to the philosophy of mathematics. In addition to fourteen previously published papers, the volume features a new paper on the Julius Caesar problem; a substantial new introduction mapping out the program and the contributions made to it by the various papers; a section explaining which issues most require further attention; and bibliographies of references and further useful sources. It will be recognized as the (...) most powerful presentation yet of a neo-Fregean program. (shrink)

One attractive feature of process reliabilism is its reductive potential: it promises to explain justification in entirely non-epistemic terms. In this paper, I argue that the phenomenon of epistemic defeat poses a serious challenge for process reliabilism’s reductive ambitions. The standard process reliabilist analysis of defeat is the ‘Alternative Reliable Process Account’ (ARP). According to ARP, whether S’s belief is defeated depends on whether S has certain reliable processes available to her which, if they had been used, would have resulted (...) in S not holding the belief in question. Unfortunately, ARP proves untenable. I show, by way of counterexample, that ARP fails to articulate either necessary or sufficient conditions on defeat. Process reliabilists must either provide an alternative reductive account of defeat or renounce their reductive aspirations. (shrink)

This paper develops a question-sensitive theory of intention. We show that this theory explains some puzzling closure properties of intention. In particular, it can be used to explain why one is rationally required to intend the means to one’s ends, even though one is not rationally required to intend all the foreseen consequences of one’s intended actions. It also explains why rational intention is not always closed under logical implication, and why one can only intend outcomes that one believes to (...) be under one’s control. (shrink)

This essay defends a novel form of virtue epistemology: Modal Virtue Epistemology. It borrows from traditional virtue epistemology the idea that knowledge is a type of skillful performance. But it goes on to understand skillfulness in purely modal terms — that is, in terms of success across a range of counterfactual scenarios. We argue that this approach offers a promising way of synthesizing virtue epistemology with a modal account of knowledge, according to which knowledge is safe belief. In particular, we (...) argue that the modal elements of the view offer important advantages over traditional virtue epistemology, which assigns a central explanatory role to aptness. At the same time, the virtue epistemological elements of the theory reveal new avenues for overcoming obstacles to traditional modal accounts of knowledge. Finally, we highlight the advantages of Modal Virtue Epistemology over alternative syntheses, such as Pritchard's (2012) hybrid approach. (shrink)

Neoliberalization is a distinctive economic, political, and social project that promotes profit-oriented, market-mediated accumulation as the primary axis of societalization. This might suggest that neoliberalism promotes the primacy of the economic but, since its extension and reproduction require continuing state support and, indeed, involve what Weber called political capitalism, one might also argue that it entails a primacy of the political. To address this paradox, my article offers a baseline definition of neoliberalism and identifies four ideal-typical historical forms thereof; relates (...) neoliberalism to the world market, geopolitics and global governance; disambiguates the primacy of the economic; and addresses the role of the political in promoting neoliberalism and handling its contradictions and crisis-tendencies. It illustrates this exercise in critical theory from the North Atlantic Financial Crisis and how its management has strengthened the neoliberal project, enabled its main promoters and beneficiaries to escape the need to learn from their mistakes, and even enabled them to further enrich themselves. (shrink)

The past decade has seen a protracted debate over the semantics of epistemic modals. According to contextualists, epistemic modals quantify over the possibilities compatible with some contextually determined group’s information. Relativists often object that contextualism fails to do justice to the way we assess utterances containing epistemic modals for truth or falsity. However, recent empirical work seems to cast doubt on the relativist’s claim, suggesting that ordinary speakers’ judgments about epistemic modals are more closely in line with contextualism than relativism (...) (Knobe & Yalcin 2014; Khoo 2015). This paper furthers the debate by reporting new empirical research revealing a previously overlooked dimension of speakers’ truth-value judgments concerning epistemic modals. Our results show that these judgments vary systematically with the question under discussion in the conversational context in which the utterance is being assessed. We argue that this ‘QUD effect’ is difficult to explain if contextualism is true, but is readily explained by a suitably flexible form of relativism. (shrink)

We often claim to know what might be—or probably is—the case. Modal knowledge along these lines creates a puzzle for information-sensitive semantics for epistemic modals. This paper develops a solution. We start with the idea that knowledge requires safe belief: a belief amounts to knowledge only if it could not easily have been held falsely. We then develop an interpretation of the modal operator in safety that allows it to non-trivially embed information-sensitive contents. The resulting theory avoids various paradoxes that (...) arise from other accounts of modal knowledge. It also delivers plausible predictions about modal Gettier cases. (shrink)

This volume provides a survey of contemporary philosophy of language. As well as providing a synoptic view of the key issues, figures, concepts and debates, each essay makes new and original contributions to ongoing debate.

One leading approach to justification comes from the reliabilist tradition, which maintains that a belief is justified provided that it is reliably formed. Another comes from the ‘Reasons First’ tradition, which claims that a belief is justified provided that it is based on reasons that support it. These two approaches are typically developed in isolation from each other; this essay motivates and defends a synthesis. On the view proposed here, justification is understood in terms of an agent’s reasons for belief, (...) which are in turn analyzed along reliabilist lines: an agent's reasons for belief are the states that serve as inputs to their reliable processes. I show that this synthesis allows each tradition to profit from the other's explanatory resources. In particular, it enables reliabilists to explain epistemic defeat without abandoning their naturalistic ambitions. I go on to compare my proposed synthesis with other hybrid versions of reliabilism that have been proposed in the literature. (shrink)

This chapter first talks about LEGO modal epistemology. Modal epistemology has the two parts. Some of it is the study of how one knows that some things are contingent and others necessary. The other part of modal epistemology concerns how much one know about what is contingent and necessary. The chapter then talks about what went wrong with the imagination‐based story. Whatever the story about how one knows what he/she can build, it had better be one that factors in his/her (...) background knowledge, since that is what makes the imagination useful. With working knowledge of those little pieces, one can make judgments about what can and can not be done with them. Crucially, there are various ways to make those judgments. The chapter further focuses on a segment of the LEGO community that might seem a bit fussy: purists. (shrink)

This book is an eye-opening account of transnational advocacy, not by environmental and rights groups, but by conservative activists. Mobilizing around diverse issues, these networks challenge progressive foes across borders and within institutions. In these globalized battles, opponents struggle as much to advance their own causes as to destroy their rivals. Deploying exclusionary strategies, negative tactics and dissuasive ideas, they aim both to make and unmake policy. In this work, Clifford Bob chronicles combat over homosexuality and gun control in the (...) UN, the Americas, Europe and elsewhere. He investigates the 'Baptist-burqa' network of conservative believers attacking gay rights, and the global gun coalition blasting efforts to control firearms. Bob draws critical conclusions about norms, activists and institutions, and his broad findings extend beyond the culture wars. They will change how campaigners fight, scholars study policy wars, and all of us think about global politics. (shrink)

Quasi-realists face the challenge of providing a plausible analysis of acknowledgments of moral fallibility. This paper devel...

Uses interviews with persons who have changed from belief to nonbelief or vice versa, and discusses what comfort people receive from religion.

What is it to believe something might be the case? We develop a puzzle that creates difficulties for standard answers to this question. We go on to propose our own solution, which integrates a Bayesian approach to belief with a dynamic semantics for epistemic modals. After showing how our account solves the puzzle, we explore a surprising consequence: virtually all of our beliefs about what might be the case provide counterexamples to the view that rational belief is closed under logical (...) implication. (shrink)