We give some information about the action of Aut on M, where M is a countable arithmetically saturated model of Peano Arithmetic. We concentrate on analogues of moving gaps and covering gaps inside M.

Essays discuss the evolution of consciousness, self-knowledge, aesthetics, religious ecstasy, ghosts, and dreams.

The increasingly lively controversy over scientific realism has become one of the principal themes of recent philosophy. 1 In watching this controversy unfold in the rather technical way currently in vogue, it has seemed to me that it would be useful to view these contemporary disputes against the background of such older epistemological issues as fallibilism, scepticism, relativism, and the traditional realism/idealism debate. This, then, is the object of the present book, which will recon sider the newer concerns about scientific (...) realism in the context of these older philosophical themes. Historically, realism concerns itself with the real existence of things that do not "meet the eye" - with suprasensible entities that lie beyond the reach of human perception. In medieval times, discussions about realism focused upon universals. Recognizing that there are physical objects such as cats and triangular objects and red tomatoes, the medievels debated whether such "abstract objects" as cathood and triangularity and redness also exist by way of having a reality indepen dent of the concretely real things that exhibit them. Three fundamen tally different positions were defended: (1) Nominalism. Abstracta have no independent existence as such: they only "exist" in and through the objects that exhibit them. Only particulars (individual substances) exist. Abstract "objects" are existents in name only, mere thought fictions by whose means we address concrete particular things. (2) Realism. Abstracta have an independent existence as such. (shrink)

This volume is about abstract objects and the ways we refer to them in natural language. Asher develops a semantical and metaphysical analysis of these entities in two stages. The first reflects the rich ontology of abstract objects necessitated by the forms of language in which we think and speak. A second level of analysis maps the ontology of natural language metaphysics onto a sparser domain--a more systematic realm of abstract objects that are fully analyzed. This second level reflects the (...) commitments of real metaphysics. The models for these commitments assign truth conditions to natural language discourse. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR. (shrink)

Transformative learning is a compelling approach to learning that is becoming increasingly popular in a diverse range of educational settings and encounters. This book reconceptualises transformative learning through an investigation of the learning process and outcomes of International Service-Learning, a pedagogical approach that blends student learning with community engagement overseas and the development of a more just society. Drawing upon key philosophers and theorists, Bamber offers an integrated, multi-dimensional approach, linking transformative learning to the development of the authentic self, (...) and analysing the aesthetic, moral and relational dimensions of ISL in an increasingly globalized world. Chapters explore rich empirical data to provide a timely framework and ethical ecology of transformative learning, detailing the challenges facing the approach, and how it can be embedded at the levels of practice, institutional ethos and partnership. Transformative Learning through International Service-Learning will appeal to academics, researchers, teachers, instructors and leaders in the fields of service-learning, international education, character education and in adult learning and education. It will also be of interest to practitioners working in international education, development education, volunteering, service-learning and community engagement. (shrink)

Contending that only a normative theory of rationality can be adequate to the complexities of the subject, this book explains and defends the view that rationality consists of the intelligent pursuit of appropriate objectives. Rescher considers the mechanics, rationale, and rewards of reason, and argues that social scientists who want to present a theory of rationality while avoiding the vexing complexities of normative deliberations must amend their perspective of the rational enterprise.

In mainstream analytic epistemology, Reformed theology has made its presence prominently felt in Reformed epistemology, the view of religious belief according to which religious beliefs can be properly basic and warranted when formed by the proper functioning of the sensus divinitatis, an inborn capacity or faculty for belief in God that can be prompted to generate certain religious beliefs when presented with things (e.g., certain majestic aspects of creation). A major competitor to Reformed epistemology is Wittgensteinian quasi-fideism, a position drawn (...) from the epistemology of Wittgenstein’s On Certainty, according to which some foundational religious commitments are not properly basic beliefs but some kind of apodictic, unshakeable certainties that form part of the structure of one’s rationality and worldview. I argue that the Reformed tradition has contained elements of quasi-fideism at least as far back as Calvin’s account of faith from the Institutes of the Christian Religion, book 3, chapter 2. (shrink)

An assertion of high conditional probability or, more briefly, an HCP assertion is a statement of the type: The conditional probability of B given A is close to one. The goal of this paper is to construct logics of HCP assertions whose conclusions are highly likely to be correct rather than certain to be correct. Such logics would allow useful conclusions to be drawn when the premises are not strong enough to allow conclusions to be reached with certainty. This goal (...) is achieved by taking Adams' (1966) logic, changing its intended application from conditionals to HCP assertions, and then weakening its criterion for entailment. According to the weakened entailment criterion, called the Criterion of Near Surety and which may be loosely interpreted as a Bayesian criterion, a conclusion is entailed if and only if nearly every model of the premises is a model of the conclusion. The resulting logic, called NSL, is nonmonotonic. Entailment in this logic, although not as strict as entailment in Adams' logic, is more strict than entailment in the propositional logic of material conditionals. Next, NSL was modified by requiring that each HCP assertion be scaled; this means that to each HCP assertion was associated a bound on the deviation from 1 of the conditional probability that is the subject of the assertion. Scaling of HCP assertions is useful for breaking entailment deadlocks. For example, it it is known that the conditional probabilities of C given A and of - C given B are both close to one but the bound on the former's deviation from 1 is much smaller than the latter's, then it may be concluded that in all likelihood the conditional probability of C given A ∧ B is close to one. The resulting logic, called NSL-S, is also nonmonotonic. Despite great differences in their definitions of entailment, entailment in NSL is equivalent to Lehmann and Magidor's rational closure and, disregarding minor differences concerning which premise sets are considered consistent, entailment in NSL-S is equivalent to entailment in Goldszmidt and Pearl's System-Z⁺. Bacchus, Grove, Halpern, and Koller proposed two methods of developing a predicate calculus based on the Criterion of Near Surety. In their randomstructures method, which assumed a prior distribution similar to that of NSL, it appears possible to define an entailment relation equivalent to that of NSL. In their random-worlds method, which assumed a prior distribution dramatically different from that of NSL, it is known that the entailment relation is different from that of NSL. (shrink)

To protect the welfare and rights of participants in research and to facilitate research that will be of benefit, as well as protect them against litigation, universities and research-funding agencies in Australia adopted the National Statement on Ethical Conduct in Research Involving Humans (NHMRC 1999).1 In many other countries there are similar statements. However, the ways in which such statements are often implemented by Human Research Ethics Committees (HRECs) 2 are in conflict with an important stream of industrial sociological research. (...) This stream seeks to deconstruct workplaces and de-layer management rhetoric to understand the realities and complexities of the social relations of production. There is a pluralist basis for much industrial sociology that challenges the unitarist view of the workplace as essentially harmonious. While views of workplaces as being conflictual and exploitative have to be tempered with an understanding of the accommodative and cooperative nature of workplace relations, there is nevertheless a general recognition of acts of resistance, as well as those of cooperation. The way in which the National Statement is typically implemented in Australia means that many HRECs require written, informed consent, which in the first instance will usually be that of management. An unintended consequence is a research focus on consensus, which is at best one-sided and at worst seriously misleading. It is unlikely that managerial consent will be granted unless there is a ‘good news story’ guaranteed. This article explores the ways in which HRECs may influence workplace research. The publication of the revised National Statement provides a valuable opportunity not to be missed by HRECs to implement more effective and efficient practices which would not have the unintended consequences of the earlier version. This would deserve the support of researchers in industrial sociology and other branches of the social sciences. (shrink)

This book argues for the need to put into practice a profound and comprehensive intellectual revolution, affecting to a greater or lesser extent all branches of scientific and technological research, scholarship and education. This intellectual revolution differs, however, from the now familiar kind of scientific revolution described by Kuhn. It does not primarily involve a radical change in what we take to be knowledge about some aspect of the world, a change of paradigm. Rather it involves a radical change in (...) the fundamental, overall intellectual aims and methods of inquiry. At present inquiry is devoted to the enhancement of knowledge. This needs to be transformed into a kind of rational inquiry having as its basic aim to enhance personal and social wisdom. This new kind of inquiry gives intellectual priority to the personal and social problems we encounter in our lives as we strive to realize what is desirable and of value – problems of knowledge and technology being intellectually subordinate and secondary. For this new kind of inquiry, it is what we do and what we are that ultimately matters: our knowledge is but an aspect of our life and being. (shrink)

Global citizenship education (GCE) within schools in England is increasingly being reoriented to address a statutory duty to promote fundamental British values (FBV). This multi-method study investigates the influence of critical GCE within initial teacher education in reshaping awareness, understanding and disposition towards FBV amongst beginning teachers. Findings highlight a tension between growing confidence and understanding of how to implement the FBV agenda and the development of autonomous dispositions of the kind demanded for the practice of critical GCE. Four teacher (...) orientations towards FBV are developed and explored, demonstrating the role of practice-based learning for the cultivation of critical dispositions. (shrink)

Re-working the Gramscian idea of the ‘organic’ intellectual from the cultural-political sphere to Higher Education (HE), suggests the need to develop critical and questioning ‘counter hegemonic’ ideas and behaviour in community education students. Connecting this reworking to the Habermasian theory of communicative action, suggests that these students also need to learn how to be constructive in developing such knowledge. Working towards critical and constructive capacities is particularly relevant for students who learn through acting in practice settings where general principles and (...) purposes acquired in the academy need to be interpreted in response to the unique demands of specific situations. From a Gramscian perspective, enabling students to develop the qualities of organic intellectuals means that lecturers have a duty to teach critical knowledges which the student will be unfamiliar with and unlikely to possess. If teaching is not to become simply didactic, however, there is also a need to acknowledge Habermas’s contention that all knowledge is contingent. This does not mean that knowledge is merely relative, subjective, or essentially interest serving, as some postmodernists would have it. In Habermasian terms, knowledge is developed through a rigorous process of contesting validity claims according to procedures appropriate to discipline areas. In these procedures, contestation occurs to the point where there is general agreement about the best current understanding, until such time as this is overtaken by ideas with a better claim. The danger is that over commitment to contestation in the classroom undermines subject knowledge and ultimately the authority of the educator. Speaking Habermas to Gramsci, and vice versa, helps socially and politically committed educators to construct a space in which didactic and discursive moments purposefully alternate. (shrink)

How can we think about things in the outside world? There is still no widely accepted theory of how mental representations get their meaning. In light of pioneering research, Nicholas Shea develops a naturalistic account of the nature of mental representation with a firm focus on the subpersonal representations that pervade the cognitive sciences.

The uncanny is the weird, the strange, the mysterious, a mingling of the familiar and the unfamiliar. Even Freud, patron of the uncanny, had trouble defining it. Yet the uncanny is everywhere in contemporary culture. In this elegant book, Nicholas Royle takes the reader across literature, film, philosophy, and psychoanalysis as he marks the trace of the uncanny in the modern world. Not an introduction in the usual sense, Nicholas Royle's book is a geography of the uncanny as (...) it manifests itself - and disturbs our thinking - in a range of disciplines. (shrink)

A clearly written, authoritative introduction to Taylor's work.

This ambitious book seeks to conceptualise ‘learning as development’ as a foundational approach to international development. It does so by synthesising interdisciplinary perspectives on learning w...

Nicholas Rescher presents a critical reaction against two currently influential tendencies of thought. On the one hand, he rejects the facile relativism that pervades contemporary social and academic life. On the other hand, he opposes the rationalism inherent in neo-contractarian theory--both in the idealized communicative-contract version promoted in continental European political philosophy by J;urgen Habermas, and in the idealized social contract version of the theory of political justice promoted in the Anglo-American context by John Rawls. Against such tendencies, Rescher's (...) pluralist approach takes a more realistic and pragmatic line, eschewing the convenient recourse of idealization in cognitive and practical matters. Instead of a utopianism that looks to a uniquely perfect order that would prevail under ideal conditions, he advocates incremental improvements within the framework of arrangements that none of us will deem perfect but that all of us "can live with." Such an approach replaces the yearning for an unattainable consensus with the institution of pragmatic arrangements in which the community will acquiesce--not through agreeing on their optimality, but through a shared recognition among the dissonant parties that the available options are even worse. (shrink)

This is the first modern interpretation of Leibniz's comprehensive critique of Locke, the New Essays on Human Understanding. Arguing that the New Essays is controlled by the overriding purpose of refuting Locke's alleged materialism, Jolley establishes the metaphysical and theological motivation of the work on the basis of unpublished correspondence and manuscript material. He also shows the relevance of Leibniz's views to contemporary debates over innate ideas, personal identity, and natural kinds.

This is a book about the meanings of words and how they can combine to form larger meaningful units, as well as how they can fail to combine when the ...

How is consciousness possible? What biological purpose does it serve? And why do we value it so highly? In Soul Dust, the psychologist Nicholas Humphrey, a leading figure in consciousness research, proposes a startling new theory. Consciousness, he argues, is nothing less than a magical-mystery show that we stage for ourselves inside our own heads. This self-made show lights up the world for us and makes us feel special and transcendent. Thus consciousness paves the way for spirituality, and allows (...) us, as human beings, to reap the rewards, and anxieties, of living in what Humphrey calls the "soul niche." Tightly argued, intellectually gripping, and a joy to read, Soul Dust provides answers to the deepest questions. It shows how the problem of consciousness merges with questions that obsess us all--how life should be lived and the fear of death. Resting firmly on neuroscience and evolutionary theory, and drawing a wealth of insights from philosophy and literature..."--Jacket. (shrink)

Can findings from psychology and cognitive neuroscience about the neural mechanisms involved in decision-making can tell us anything useful about the commonly-understood mental phenomenon of making voluntary choices? Two philosophical objections are considered. First, that the neural data is subpersonal, and so cannot enter into illuminating explanations of personal level phenomena like voluntary action. Secondly, that mental properties are multiply realized in the brain in such a way as to make them insusceptible to neuroscientific study. The paper argues that both (...) objections would be weakened by the discovery of empirical generalisations connecting subpersonal properties with the personal level. It gives three case studies that furnish evidence to that effect. It argues that the existence of such interrelations are consistent with a plausible construal of the personal-subpersonal distinction. Furthermore, there is no reason to suppose that the notion subpersonal representation relied on in cognitive neuroscience illicitly imports personal-level phenomena like consciousness or normativity, or is otherwise explanatorily problematic. (shrink)

Authors De Marco and colleagues have presented a new model on the concept of invasiveness, redefining both its technical definition and practical implementation.1 While the authors raise valid critiques regarding the discrepancy in definitions, I cannot help but wonder about the purpose of redefining terms for which little confusion, if any, exists? This commentary seeks to scrutinise the rationale supporting the new model in the absence of significant clinical confusion and to explore the implications for clinical practice. Initially, one may (...) notice there is no mention of clinical relevancy, confusion among patients or whether the discrepancy in terms is causing miscommunication. It seems reasonable that some clinical confusion may exist, but so too does a similar imbalance of terms when speaking technically across the specialties; take depression and its definition as a primary example. While I certainly agree with the illustration of non-invasive prenatal testing being compared with venous blood draws as a disparity in terminology, little evidence suggests confusion concerning the nosology.2 The medical community, including both physicians and patients, recognises that the terminology is specifically used within the …. (shrink)

From Knowledge to Wisdom argues that there is an urgent need, for both intellectual and humanitarian reasons, to bring about a revolution in science and the humanities. The outcome would be a kind of academic inquiry rationally devoted to helping humanity learn how to create a better world. Instead of giving priority to solving problems of knowledge, as at present, academia would devote itself to helping us solve our immense, current global problems – climate change, war, poverty, population growth, pollution... (...) of sea, earth and air, destruction of natural habitats and rapid extinction of species, injustice, tyranny, proliferation of armaments, conventional, chemical, biological and nuclear, depletion of natural resources. The basic intellectual aim of inquiry would be to seek and promote wisdom – wisdom being the capacity to realize what is of value in life for oneself and others, thus including knowledge and technological know-how, but much else besides. This second edition has been revised throughout, has additional material, a new introduction and three new chapters. (shrink)

This chapter provides an introduction to higher-order metaphysics as well as to the contributions to this volume. We discuss five topics, corresponding to the five parts of this volume, and summarize the contributions to each part. First, we motivate the usefulness of higher-order quantification in metaphysics using a number of examples, and discuss the question of how such quantifiers should be interpreted. We provide a brief introduction to the most common forms of higher-order logics used in metaphysics, and indicate a (...) number of questions which can be raised in such systems using logical vocabulary alone. Using a further example, we return to applications of higher-order logics in metaphysics. We also mention key developments in the history of higher-order logic as it pertains to metaphysics. Finally, we mention certain arguments which have been raised against the use of higher-order logic, and some ways of responding to them. (shrink)

In this entertaining and provocative introduction, Royle offers lucid explanations of various key ideas, including deconstruction, undecidability, iterability, differance, aporia, the pharmakon, the supplement, a new enlightenment, and the democracy to come. He also gives attention, however, to a range of less obvious key ideas of Derrida, such as earthquakes, animals and animality, ghosts, monstrosity, the poematic, drugs, gifts, secrets, war, and mourning. Derrida is seen as an extraordinarily inventive thinker, as well as a brilliantly imaginative and often very funny (...) writer. Other critical introductions tend to highlight the specifically philosophical nature and genealogy of his work. Royle's book proceeds in a new and different way, in particular by focusing on the crucial but strange place of literature in Derrida's writings. He thus provides an appreciation and understanding based on detailed reference to Derrida's texts, interwoven with close readings of such writers as Shakespeare, Coleridge, P.B. Shelley, Poe, Emily Brontë, Franz Kafka and Elizabeth Bowen. In doing so, he explores Derrida's consistent view that deconstruction is "a coming-to-terms with literature". He emphasizes the ways in which "literature", for Derrida, is indissociably bound up with other concerns, such as philosophy and psychoanalysis, politics and ethics, responsibility and justice, law and democracy. (shrink)

The concept of an "idea" played a central role in 17th-century theories of mind and knowledge, but philosophers were divided over the nature of ideas. This book examines an important, but little-known, debate on this question in the work of Leibniz, Malebranche, and Descartes. Looking closely at the issues involved, as well as the particular context in which the debate took place, Jolley demonstrates that the debate has serious implications for a number of major topics in 17th-century philosophy.

I take pseudoscience to be a pretence at science. Pretences are innumerable, limited only by our imagination and credulity. As Stove points out, ‘numerology is actually quite as different from astrology as astrology is from astronomy’ (Stove 1991, 187). We are sure that ‘something has gone appallingly wrong’ (Stove 1991, 180) and yet ‘thoughts…can go wrong in a multiplicity of ways, none of which anyone yet understands’ (Stove 1991, 190). Often all we can do is give a careful description of (...) a way of pretending, a motivation for pretence, a source of pretension. In this chapter I attempt the latter. We will be concerned with the relation of conviction to rational belief. I shall be suggesting that the question of whether an enquiry is a pretence at science can be, in part, a question over the role of conviction in rational belief, and that the answer is to be found in the philosophical problem of the role of values in rational belief. (shrink)

This volume sets out to reverse the neglect.

: In the epistemology of the late Wittgenstein, a central place is given to the notion of the hinge: an arational commitment that provides a foundation of some sort for the rest of our beliefs. Quasi-fideism is an approach to the epistemology of religion that argues that religious belief is on an epistemic par with other sorts of belief inasmuch as religious and non-religious beliefs all rely on hinges. I consider in this paper what it takes to find the appropriate (...) hinge for a quasi-fideist approach to the epistemology of religion. (shrink)

This chapter outlines improvements and developments made to aim-oriented empiricism since "From Knowledge to Wisdom" was first published in 1984. It argues that aim-oriented empiricism enables us to solve three fundamental problems in the philosophy of science: the problems of induction and verisimilitude, and the problem of what it means to say of a physical theory that it is unified.

We discuss the rational role of highly inattentive experiences, and argue that they can provide rational support for beliefs.

The aim of this paper is to provide a detailed characterisation of some ways in which our preferences reflect our reasons. I will argue that practical reasons can be characterised along two dimensions that influence our preferences: their balance and their weight. This is analogous to a similar characterisation of the way in which probabilities reflect the balance and weight of evidence in epistemology. In this paper, I will illustrate the distinction between the balance and weight of reasons, and show (...) how this is crucial for an adequate account of preference and choice. The upshot is a more complete picture of a particular kind of decision, labelled by Isaac Levi and, more recently, Ruth Chang as ‘hard choices’. These are choices in which one option is better than another in some ways, the other is better than the first in some ways, but neither seems better overall. The distinction between the balance and weight of reasons presents a new way of understanding how hard choices vary by degree and what it is that makes them so hard. (shrink)

This book advocates a radical shift of concern in philosophical, historical, and sociological studies of the sciences, and explores the consequences of such a shift. The historically-oriented first part of the work deals with the ways in which ranges of questions become real and cease to be real for communities of inquirers. The more philosophically-oriented second part of the work introduces the notion of absolute reality of questions, and addresses doubt about the claims of the sciences to have accumulated absolutely (...) real questions. It is argued that recent studies in the sociology and social history of the science pose strong challenges to the sciences by revealing how appeals to authority, vested interests, and rhetorical and aesthetic sensibilities play substantial roles in the practices of the sciences. The final chapter defends the pragmatic stance of the work, and of its companion, The Fortunes of Inquiry, and draws morals about the roles of criticism and reflection in the philosophy of science and in the sciences themselves. (shrink)

Block’s well-known distinction between phenomenal consciousness and access consciousness has generated a large philosophical literature about putative conceptual connections between the two. The scientific literature about whether they come apart in any actual cases is rather smaller. Empirical evidence gathered to date has not settled the issue. Some put this down to a fundamental methodological obstacle to the empirical study of the relation between phenomenal consciousness and access consciousness. Block (2007) has drawn attention to the methodological puzzle and attempted to (...) answer it. While the evidence Block points to is relevant and important, this paper puts forward a more systematic framework for addressing the puzzle. To give it a label, the approach is to study phenomenal consciousness as a natural kind. The approach allows consciousness studies to move beyond the initial means of identifying instances of the kind, like verbal report, and to find its underlying nature. It is wellrecognised that facts about an underlying kind may allow identification of instances of the kind that do not match the initial means of identification (cp. non-liquid samples of water). This paper shows that the same method can be deployed to investigate phenomenal consciousness independently of access consciousness. (shrink)

The authors explore the history of experiments in economics, provide examples of different types of experiments and show that the growing use of experimental methods is transforming economics into an empirical science.