According to the causal-historical theory of reference, natural kind terms refer in virtue of complicated causal relations the speakers have to their environment. A common objection to the theory is that purely causal relations are insufficient to fix reference in a determinate fashion. The so-called hybrid view holds that what is also needed for successful fixing are true descriptions associated in the mind of the speaker with the referent. The main claim of this paper is that the objection fails: reference (...) fixing of natural kind terms can be purely causal. The main argument draws inspiration from recent theoretical advances made in metaphysics of kinds by Marion Godman, Antonella Mallozzi, and David Papineau. The main claim is that their notion of super-explanatory properties may explain how reference of many kind terms can be fixed purely causally. (shrink)

A recent proposal by Quill Kukla and Mark Lance holds that surface appearances notwithstanding, gender ascriptions are closer to normative performatives than descriptions. As speech acts, they share more in common with pronouncing a marriage than a neutral description of a person, albeit this is not commonly recognized. This paper argues that the proposal faces a consistency problem. In order to affect social reality qua their illocutionary force, gender ascriptions must on average succeed. However, according to the authors most actual (...) second- and third person gender ascriptions in fact violate the success conditions of the speech act type, which include respect for the individual’s first-person gender ascriptions. Their main claim thus becomes that gender roles can be instituted as a series of misfires, though it is left open how this is possible. (shrink)

The main question of metasemantics, or foundational semantics, is why an expression token has the meaning (semantic value) that it in fact has. In his reading of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s later work, Saul Kripke presented a skeptical challenge that threatened to make the foundational question unanswerable. My first contention in this paper is that the skeptical challenge indeed poses an insoluble paradox, but only for a certain kind of metasemantic theory, against which the challenge effectively works as a reductio ad absurdum (...) argument. My second contention is that as a result of rejecting the theory which entails a paradoxical outcome, we will see that the foundational question essentially involves a temporal dimension. After arguing that the skeptical challenge gives us a strong reason to adopt a historical view of meaning, I shall further argue against certain authors who claim that meanings not only have histories but futures as well, or that the meaning of a word may change retroactively in time as a consequence of counterfactual change in its future use. The major aim of the paper is thus to bring together the arguably interrelated debates about the skeptical challenge and temporal externalism in philosophy of language. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Is meaning essentially normative, and what does claiming that amount to? One popular interpretation is that in virtue of their nature meanings are capable of guiding subjects in their applications of concepts, for meaning is constituted by norms. However, the guidance view has been met with criticism to the effect that if semantic norms constitute facts about meaning, then they cannot simultaneously guide subjects in their applications. In response, some normativist authors have proposed that the key sense of ‘normative’ (...) in the claim that meaning is essentially normative is not ‘guidance’ but ‘assessment’. In this paper, I shall argue that switching from guidance to assessment offers no respite from the anti-normativist argument that normativity in the sense of prescriptivity emerges not from meaning as such but from the attitudes of subjects insofar as the normativist is unable to offer a plausible account of what makes assessment appropriate. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to critically examine the concept of semantic objectivity inherent in Robert Brandom`s works, most importantly Making It Explicit. Concerning Brandom`s theoretical aims, I shall argue that there is some discrepancy between his formal and informal characterisations of the criteria by which his account is to be judged as adequate. After expounding on the discrepancy, I shall propose to reconstruct a mostly implicit line of argument in MIE, highlighted by the more recent developments of Brandom`s (...) work, which I think suffices to smooth it over. (shrink)

Artikkeli käsittelee Saul Kripken Ludwig Wittgensteinin myöhemmistä töistä koostamaa merkityskeptistä haastetta, erityisesti niin kutsuttua äärellisyyden ongelmaa. Pääargumentti on, että skeptisen haasteen pääasiallinen vastaaja, semanttinen dispositionalismi, ei uusimmistakaan yrityksistä huolimatta ole kyennyt ratkaisemaan äärettömyyden ongelmaa. Ratkaistakseen ongelman dispositionalistin tulisi selittää, kuinka on mahdollista, että äärellinen puhuja voisi omata disposition käyttää jotain termiä äärettömässä määrässä tapauksia määrätyllä tavalla. Monet dispositionalistit esittävät, että ratkaisu löytyy niin kutsutuista ceteris paribus -ehdoista, joita vastaan Martin Kusch on argumentoinut. Jatkan Kuschin kritiikkiä ja osoitan ceteris paribus -strategian (...) keskeiset ongelmat, minkä lisäksi vastaan myös kahteen näistä ehdoista riippumattomaan dispositionalistiseen strategiaan. (shrink)

As the title suggests, this paper is something of a leftover – or perhaps a new branch – to my "Meaning in Time: on temporal externalism and Kripkenstein’s skeptical challenge". In that work I essayed to portray my understanding of the sceptical challenge uncovered by Saul Kripke’s reading of Wittgenstein’s later works in a nutshell as to its nature and resolution. Here, my task is to dig a little deeper into the key phrase of the earlier paper, namely the claim (...) that meanings, facts grounding meaning facts, and ascriptions of meaning have an important historical dimension to them. In particular, I explore the ideas that (i) the problem of finitude is fundamentally a logical and not a metaphysical problem and (ii) Devitt's development of Kripke's causal-historical theory of reference implies a natural explanation for how at least the meanings of some terms can have a historical dimension. (shrink)

Timothy Williamson famously argued that assertion is constituted either by the knowledge rule or some similar epistemic rule. If true, the proposal has important implications for criticism of assertions. If assertions are analogical to other rule-constituted kinds like games, we can criticize assertions either on external or internal grounds, depending on whether the criticism draws from the necessary norms of assertion or some contingent ones. More recently, authors like Goldberg and MacFarlane have argued against other theories of assertion on the (...) grounds that they cannot explain the possibility of internal criticism for assertions. This paper raises methodological problems with these arguments. The main idea is to show that alternative, non-normative accounts of assertion can also explain the apparent differences in grounds of criticism without assuming that assertion is necessarily governed by some epistemic norm. (shrink)

This is a work in the philosophy of language and metasemantics. Its purpose is to help answer the question about how words acquire their meanings. The work is divided into two parts. The purpose of Part One is to defend the claim that, despite numerous attempts, the so-called Kripkenstein’s sceptical challenge, and especially the problem of finitude, has not been offered a successful straight solution. The purpose of Part Two is to critically examine Robert Brandom’s philosophy, which can be treated (...) as an answer to the sceptical challenge in my interpretation. My main claim is that although Brandom’s so-called normativist approach does provide a principled solution to the sceptical challenge, the proposal faces a host of other problems in the light of which I reject it. -/- What is Kripkenstein’s sceptical challenge? The name 'Kripkenstein' is an abbreviation used in the literature for Saul Kripke’s reading of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s later works, published in 1982. In the long essay, Kripke presents (that Wittgenstein presented) a sceptical challenge that demands an explanation of how any word can have a determinate meaning. The challenge is usually thought to consist of three interrelated problems: (1) the problem of finitude, (2) the problem of error, and (3) the problem of normativity. Following Martin Kusch, I view the problem of finitude as the most important one. According to the problem, briefly, since any actual subject is a finite being, i.e. capable of exhibiting only finite expressions of linguistic signs, it will always be possible to ask whether, in a given context, she is following a rule S1 or rule S2 that corresponds to the meaning of the sign. For example, supposing that the sign in question is '+', it can be asked whether the subject in a given context has followed the addition rule or an alternative quaddition rule, according to which any addition problem exceeding certain arbitrary cardinality results in five. According to the hypothesis, the actual use of '+' by any speaker is compatible with both rules. Since any speaker has only finite dispositions to the mathematical conduct, there will always be some limit after which there is no fact of the matter, according to the sceptic, which rule the subject will have turned out to have followed. Hence, it is indeterminate whether any actual subject has ever calculated according to the addition rule or the quaddition rule. -/- From my view, despite the work of Kripke and Kusch, the problem of finitude has not been taken as seriously as it ought to have been. This in turn has significant consequences for the metasemantic theory concerning the origin and nature of meaning. In particular, I claim that the way how the meaning of words is determined must be understood as temporal in nature. Moreover, I claim that Kripke’s causal-historical account of reference can work as a non-straight solution to the challenge that explains how at least the meanings of some words can be temporally determined. -/- One central aim of Brandom’s philosophy is to give a straight answer to the problem of finitude by providing an answer to the problem of normativity. However, I claim that Brandom’s version of the 'normativity of meaning' hypothesis cannot work as he intends. The key issues are difficult to summarise, but to put it succinctly, the crucial problem concerns Brandom’s ambition to give an answer to a version of Agrippa’s trilemma, or how a chain of justifications can end in anything else than (i) premises that have already been used, (ii) a primitive premise, or an (iii) infinitude of premises. My claim is that Brandom’s resolution to the trilemma is not sound. (shrink)

Edmund Husserl’s eidetic phenomenology seeks a priori knowledge of essences and eidetic laws pertaining to conscious experience and its objects. Husserl believes that such eidetic knowledge has a higher epistemic status than the inherently fallible empirical knowledge, but a closer reading of his work shows that even eidetic claims are subject to error and open to modification. In this article, I develop a self-correcting account of Husserl’s method of eidetic variation, arguing that eidetic variation plays a critical role in both (...) challenging and improving upon the eidetic results in phenomenology. More specifically, I argue that the self-correcting account of eidetic variation 1) is consistent with Husserl’s own formulations of his eidetic methodology and epistemic principles; 2) captures the dual epistemic function of eidetic variation as means for both testing and intuitively validating eidetic claims; and 3) offers methodological support for contemporary attempts to integrate eidetic variation with non-eidetic methods and resources. To substantiate these claims, I first contrast the self-correcting account with the falsificationist interpretations of eidetic variation. Then, I turn to three applications of eidetic variation in order to examine how eidetic phenomenology could draw from real-life deviations, artificial variations, and critical–historical reflection. The goal is to lay the methodological groundwork for a self-correcting and integrative account of eidetic variation and illustrate its usefulness in research practice. (shrink)

Collective bargaining is the main vehicle for labour worldwide to negotiate wages, benefits, retirement policies, training and other terms of working with management in both the public and private sectors. Labour economists have long been active in modelling the relations between collective bargaining agreements, labour markets and social welfare conditions. This book presents a theoretical model of unions which offers a unified treatment of the centralisation of bargaining, the credibility of labour contracts, the unionisation of labour markets and the relative (...) bargaining power of the union. Tapio Palokangas develops the microfoundations of bargaining and examines collective bargaining interacting with public policy, investment and growth, and international trade and specialisation. In conclusion Professor Palokangas challenges the commonly held view that collective bargaining has a negative impact on economics welfare, and argues that with the existence of market failure, collective bargaining can be welfare enhancing. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThe distinction between minimal self and narrative self has gained ground in recent discussions of selfhood. In this article, this distinction is reassessed by analysing Zahavi and Gallagher’s account of selfhood and supplementing it with Husserl’s concept of person. I argue that Zahavi and Gallagher offer two compatible and complementary notions of self. Nevertheless, the relationship between minimal self and narrative self requires further clarification. Especially the embeddedness of self, the interplay between passivity and activity, and the problems of uniqueness (...) and persistence are better understood with Husserl’s analysis of person and its central concepts of position-taking, habitualities, and overall style. The embeddedness of self is elucidated by outlining how person is related to its environment, to other people, and to its past. This relational notion of self is both passively constituted and actively shaped: person mediates between minimal self characterized by perspectival ownership... (shrink)

In this paper I suggest an answer to the question of what Frege means when he says that his logical system, the Begrijfsschrift, is like the language Leibniz sketched, a lingua characteristica, and not merely a logical calculus. According to the nineteenth century studies, Leibniz's lingua characteristica was supposed to be a language with which the truths of science and the constitution of its concepts could be accurately expressed. I argue that this is exactly what the Begriffsschrift is: it is (...) a language, since, unlike calculi, its sentential expressions express truths, and it is a characteristic language, since the meaning of its complex expressions depend only on the meanings of their constituents and on the way they are put together. In fact it is in itself already a science composed in accordance with the Classical Model of Science. What makes the Begrijfsschrift so special is that Frege is able to accomplish these goals with using only grammatical or syncategorematic terms and so has a medium with which he can try to show analyticity of the theorems of arithmetic. (shrink)

In this paper I suggest an answer to the question of what Frege means when he says that his logical system, the Begriffsschrift, is like the language Leibniz sketched, a lingua characteristica, and not merely a logical calculus. According to the nineteenth century studies, Leibniz’s lingua characteristica was supposed to be a language with which the truths of science and the constitution of its concepts could be accurately expressed. I argue that this is exactly what the Begriffsschrift is: it is (...) a language, since, unlike calculi, its sentential expressions express truths, and it is a characteristic language, since the meaning of its complex expressions depend only on the meanings of their constituents and on the way they are put together. In fact it is in itself already a science composed in accordance with the Classical Model of Science. What makes the Begriffsschrift so special is that Frege is able to accomplish these goals with using only grammatical or syncategorematic terms and so has a medium with which he can try to show analyticity of the theorems of arithmetic. (shrink)

In this paper I suggest an answer to the question of what Frege means when he says that his logical system, the Begriffsschrift, is like the language Leibniz sketched, a lingua characteristica, and not merely a logical calculus. According to the nineteenth century studies, Leibniz’s lingua characteristica was supposed to be a language with which the truths of science and the constitution of its concepts could be accurately expressed. I argue that this is exactly what the Begriffsschrift is: it is (...) a language, since, unlike calculi, its sentential expressions express truths, and it is a characteristic language, since the meaning of its complex expressions depend only on the meanings of their constituents and on the way they are put together. In fact it is in itself already a science composed in accordance with the Classical Model of Science. What makes the Begriffsschrift so special is that Frege is able to accomplish these goals with using only grammatical or syncategorematic terms and so has a medium with which he can try to show analyticity of the theorems of arithmetic. (shrink)

Death is an unavoidable fact of human life, which cannot be totally ignored in education. Children reflect on death and raise questions that deserve serious answers. If an educator completely evades the issue, children will seek other conversation partners. It is possible to find arguments both from secular and religious sources, which alleviate the anguish that death awakens in the mind of a child.

During research for my artistic project involving human fat/oil I discovered a wide range of historic reference of its use. The extraction and use of human oil has not only been present in myths and magical rituals but also practically used for medicinal healing and skincare. Allegedly hunted down by Peruvian Pishtacos, who then sold it to the cosmetic industry, it was also extracted for use in pain relief or healing of adherent scars, as well as an ingredient for use (...) in black magic. Human oil was sought as a lucrative product for centuries until early 1900. The proposal of my project HUMANOIL is a follow-up from my previous work where biofuel was made from my own fat. HUMANOIL will involve rendering human oil, the last oil produced, from my body, sought to offer anointing, white magic or pure skincare – your choice. (shrink)

Integrating corporate social responsibility (CSR) into a for-profit organization’s business activities is fraught with tensions. This paper reports a case study of a construction company, exploring how different tensions emerged to challenge company-level aspirations for strategic CSR integration. The study identifies three types of persistent CSR tensions and four management practices, discussing how the management practices led the organization to navigate CSR tensions in both active and defensive ways. Furthermore, the study explicates why the case company succeeded in integrating CSR (...) into formal business strategy and shared attitudes but struggled with CSR integration in the domain of day-to-day operations. The paper contributes to the CSR literature by developing a tension-centric perspective on CSR development. It highlights the necessity of tension navigation at both the organizational and the action levels, the key role of active (as opposed to defensive) navigation of CSR tensions, and the importance of alignment between organizational and action levels in navigating tensions for sustaining strategic focus on CSR over time. (shrink)

While various strategic business issues related to product design have been explored by academicians and practitioners, one issue has largely been ignored: how do financial markets assess and evaluate companies’ product design? The purpose of this article is to examine this issue, especially when it comes to the assessments and evaluations made by the most essential actors of contemporary financial markets: investment analysts and institutional investors. I develop propositions concerning the product design-related evaluative schemes and heuristics used by the financial (...) market actors in evaluating companies as investment opportunities. I illustrate my propositions with examples from, e.g., the mobile phone industry as well as with interview excerpts from interviews with investment analysts and institutional investors. Propositions are provided both for assessments of companies’ individual end products (‘design as the end product’ perspective) and for assessments of companies’ design capabilities (‘design as a capability’ perspective). In essence, the propositions highlight that the evaluative schemes used by financial market actors are partly rational, yet involve biases and are likely to lead to overvaluation and undervaluation of certain kinds of product designs by certain kinds of companies. Thus, even from the perspective of profit-maximization, many of the evaluative schemes of the financial market actors are, at most, quasi-rational. Moreover, the evaluative schemes of the financial market actors may motivate company managers to pursue certain kinds of product design rather than others—and may even lead to self-reinforcing (vicious or virtuous) circles of certain kinds of product designs being advocated. (shrink)

Comparisons of rival explanations or theories often involve vague appeals to explanatory power. In this paper, we dissect this metaphor by distinguishing between different dimensions of the goodness of an explanation: non-sensitivity, cognitive salience, precision, factual accuracy and degree of integration. These dimensions are partially independent and often come into conflict. Our main contribution is to go beyond simple stipulation or description by explicating why these factors are taken to be explanatory virtues. We accomplish this by using the contrastive-counterfactual approach (...) to explanation and the view of understanding as an inferential ability. By combining these perspectives, we show how the explanatory power of an explanation in a given dimension can be assessed by showing the range of answers it provides to what-if-things-had-been-different questions and the theoretical and pragmatic importance of these questions. Our account also explains intuitions linking explanation to unification or to exhibition of a mechanism. (shrink)

Attachment theory proposes that the activation of the attachment system enacts emotion regulation (ER) to maintain security or cope with insecurity. However, the effects of ER on attachment states and their bidirectional influences remain poorly understood. In this ecological momentary assessment study, we examined the dynamics between attachment and ER. We hypothesised that attachment states and ER influence each other through time. Specifically, we hypothesised bidirectional short-term cycles between state attachment security and reappraisal, state attachment anxiety and rumination, and state (...) attachment avoidance and suppression. We also tested how trait attachment is related to state attachment and ER. One hundred twenty-two participants (Mage = 26.4) completed the Experiences in Close Relationship–Revised and reported state attachment and ER seven times daily for seven days. The results were only partly consistent with our cycle hypotheses yet revealed a cycle between low state attachment security and rumination that was attenuated by reappraisal. Moreover, rumination and suppression predicted increased insecure states, and reappraisal predicted increased secure and insecure states. Finally, trait attachment showed associations with state attachment and ER. Our study suggests regulatory dynamics between attachment and ER and opens important questions about their functional relationship in maintaining attachment-related behavioural patterns and emotional well-being. (shrink)

It is far from clear what is meant by logic or what should be meant by it. It is nevertheless reasonable to identify logic as the study of inferences and inferential relations. The obvious practical use of logic is in any case to help us to reason well, to draw good inferences. And the typical form the theory of any part of logic seems to be a set of rules of inference. This answer already introduces some structure into a discussion (...) of the nature of logic, for in an inference we can distinguish the input called a premise or premises from the output known as the conclusion. The transition from a premise or a number of premises to the conclusion is governed by a rule of inference. If the inference is in accordance with the appropriate rule, it is called valid. Rules of inference are often thought of as the alpha and omega of logic. Conceiving of logic as the study of inference is nevertheless only the first approximation to the title question, in that it prompts more questions than it answers. It is not clear what counts as an inference or what a theory of such inferences might look like. What are the rules of inference based on? Where do we find them? The ultimate end. (shrink)

I argue that non-epistemic values are necessarily embedded in the measure of evidential strength of contrastive evidence. When evidence is contrastive, evidence is stronger the more it favours a hypothesis over a set of plausible, mutually exclusive alternative hypotheses. In such a contrastive epistemic setting, evidence has an effect not only on a particular hypothesis, but on the whole probability distribution over the set of alternative hypotheses. A natural way of analysing the incremental impact of new evidence on a set (...) of alternative hypotheses is in terms of uncertainty or ‘entropy’ reduction. There is no unique single measure of uncertainty/entropy, however, and, consequently, no single unique measure of uncertainty reduction. Finally, I argue that the ‘right’ measure of entropy reduction, and hence of evidential strength, depends on the pragmatic context and non-epistemic values. (shrink)

In his Naming and Necessity, Saul Kripke puts forth a series of arguments against theories of proper names he calls Frege-Russell theories. As the title reveals, Kripke takes Gottlob Frege's theory of sense and Bedeutung to be a good representative of these theories. In this essay, I characterize how Frege might have answered Kripke. I agree with Kripke that presumably Frege thought that the sense of a proper name is the same as some definite description. I, however, question his assumption (...) that Frege's theory of proper names was a theory of meaning as he uses the term. I go even further and suggest that it is not so obvious that Frege thought, at least always, that the role of the concept of sense in his theory is a semantic concept at all. This constitutes the heart of my reconstruction of Frege's answer. I argue that this, together with Frege's conception of natural languages, would have allowed him to hold that the sense of a proper name may sometimes be the same as the sense of an indefinite or even a wrong description. This makes Frege's theory immune to Kripke's counter-arguments. (shrink)

The following analysis shows how developments in epistemic logic can play a nontrivial role in cognitive neuroscience. We argue that the striking correspondence between two modes of identification, as distinguished in the epistemic context, and two cognitive systems distinguished by neuroscientific investigation of the visual system (the "where" and "what" systems) is not coincidental, and that it can play a clarificatory role at the most fundamental levels of neuroscientific theory.

This chapter begins with a discussion of Kant's theory of judgment-forms. It argues that it is not true in Kant's logic that assertoric or apodeictic judgments imply problematic ones, in the manner in which necessity and truth imply possibility in even the weakest systems of modern modal logic. The chapter then discusses theories of judgment-form after Kant, the theory of quantification, Frege's Begriffsschrift, C. I. Lewis and the beginnings of modern modal logic, the proof-theoretic approach to modal logic, possible world (...) semantics, correspondence theory, and modality and quantification. (shrink)

The organisation of mammalian mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) is more complex than usually assumed. Despite often being depicted as a simple circle, the topology of mtDNA can vary from supercoiled monomeric circles over catenanes and oligomers to complex multimeric networks. Replication of mtDNA is also not clear cut. Two different mechanisms of replication have been found in cultured cells and in most tissues: a strand‐asynchronous mode involving temporary RNA coverage of one strand, and a strand‐coupled mode rather resembling conventional nuclear DNA (...) replication. In addition, a recombination‐initiated replication mechanism is likely to be associated with the multimeric mtDNA networks found in human heart. Although an insight into the general principles and key factors of mtDNA organisation and maintenance has been gained over the last few years, there are many open questions regarding replication initiation, termination and physiological factors determining mtDNA organisation and replication mode. However, common themes in mtDNA maintenance across eukaryotic kingdoms can provide valuable lessons for future work. (shrink)

This book describes and analyzes the levels of experience that long-distance running produces. It looks at the kinds of experiences caused by long-distance running, the dimensions contained in these experiences, and their effects on the subjective life-world and well-being of an individual. Taking a philosophical approach, the analysis presented in this book is founded on Maurice Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of the body and Martin Heidegger's fundamental ontology. Running is a versatile form of physical exercise which does not reveal all of its (...) dimensions at once. These dimensions escape the eye and are not revealed to the runner conceptually, but rather as sensations and emotions. Instead of concentrating on conceptual analysis, this book explores the emotions and experiences and examines the meaning that running has in runners' lives. Using the participative method, in which the author is both the research subject and the researcher, the book contributes to the philosophy of physical exercise. The research made by Koski is exceptional, and not only because of the topic itself, which also is out of the ordinary. Koski has been fortunate to discover a topic which offers immensely great opportunities to explore and present basic human philosophical themes in a new, fascinating conceptual environment. Emeritus Prof. Lauri Routila I don't know of anyone who has done this in English, certainly not to your depth. -- This project in unique, wonderful, and important Amby Burfoot. (shrink)

We claim that the process of theoretical model refinement in economics is best characterised as robustness analysis: the systematic examination of the robustness of modelling results with respect to particular modelling assumptions. We argue that this practise has epistemic value by extending William Wimsatt's account of robustness analysis as triangulation via independent means of determination. For economists robustness analysis is a crucial methodological strategy because their models are often based on idealisations and abstractions, and it is usually difficult to tell (...) which idealisations are truly harmful. (shrink)

The basic ideas of game-theoretical semantics are implicit in logicians' and mathematicians' folklore but used only sporadically (e.g., game quantifiers, back-and-forth methods, partly ordered quantifiers). the general suggestions of this approach for natural languages are emphasized: the univocity of "is," the failure of compositionality, a reconstruction of aristotelian categories, limitations of generative grammars, unity of sentence and discourse semantics, a new treatment of tenses and other temporal notions, etc.