Thick terms and concepts, such as honesty and cruelty, are at the heart of a variety of debates in philosophy of language and metaethics. Central to these debates is the question of how the descriptive and evaluative components of thick concepts are related and whether they can be separated from each other. So far, no empirical data on how thick terms are used in ordinary language has been collected to inform these debates. In this paper, we present the first empirical (...) study, designed to investigate whether the evaluative component of thick concepts is communicated as part of the semantic meaning or by means of conversational implicatures. While neither the semantic nor the pragmatic view can fully account for the use of thick terms in ordinary language, our results do favour the semanticist interpretation: the evaluation of a thick concept is only slightly easier to cancel than semantically entailed content. We further discovered a polarity effect, demonstrating that how easily an evaluation can be cancelled depends on whether the thick term is of positive or negative polarity. (shrink)

Is it tautological to call an action "wrongful discrimination?" Some philosophers and political theorists answer this question in the affirmative and claim that the term "discrimination" is intrinsically evaluative. Others agree that "discrimination" usually conveys the action’s moral wrongness but claim that the term can be used in a purely descriptive way. In this paper, we present two corpus studies and two experiments designed to test whether the folk concept of discrimination is evaluative. We demonstrate that the term has undergone (...) a historical development and is nowadays no longer used purely descriptively. Further, we show that this evaluation cannot be cancelled without yielding a contradiction. We conclude that the descriptive use of "discriminatory" is a thing of the past. (shrink)

What is the connection between causation and responsibility? Is there a best way to theorize philosophically about causation? Which factors determine and influence what we judge to be the cause of something? Bringing together interdisciplinary research from experimental philosophy, traditional philosophy and psychology, this collection showcases the most recent developments and approaches to questions about causation. Chapters discuss the diverse theoretical ramifications of empirical findings in experimental philosophy of causation, providing a comprehensive survey of key issues such as the perception (...) and learning of causal relations, omission, normative considerations, mechanism, voluntariness and legal theories of causation. With novel contributions from both experts and rising stars, Advances in Experimental Philosophy of Causation demonstrates the value of empirical work and opens new domains of inquiry at the cutting edge of the field. (shrink)

Current research on construction of the female body focuses on non-Hispanic women in the United States. The idealized Latina body, however, is rapidly becoming commodified and objectified in global popular culture. Using standardized and open-ended surveys and group and individual interviews, the author examines the negotiation of sociocultural ideals and body image by adolescents at the intersection of gender, race, and beauty. These young women hold racist beauty ideals but are flexible when judging the appearance of real-life women. They perceive (...) two competing or complementary prototypes of beauty, one white and one Latina. This study fills a gap in the literature on beauty and the body by examining a non-U.S. sample that does not fit into the usual Black-white dichotomy of race. (shrink)

This paper is a contribution to the study of equality-free logic, that is, first-order logic without equality. We mainly devote ourselves to the study of algebraic characterizations of its relation of elementary equivalence by providing some Keisler-Shelah type ultrapower theorems and an Ehrenfeucht-Fraïssé type theorem. We also give characterizations of elementary classes in equality-free logic. As a by-product we characterize the sentences that are logically equivalent to an equality-free one.

I present a notion of invariance under arbitrary surjective mappings for operators on a relational finite type hierarchy generalizing the so-called Tarski-Sher criterion for logicality and I characterize the invariant operators as definable in a fragment of the first-order language. These results are compared with those obtained by Feferman and it is argued that further clarification of the notion of invariance is needed if one wants to use it to characterize logicality.

This paper presents an example of a supersimple nonlow theory and characterizes its independence relation.

Este artículo examina la moralidad de la interrupción del embarazo por razones médicas a la luz de la propuesta legislativa presentada en el año 2010 por los senadores Matthei y Rossi . Con esta finalidad, el autor distingue entre las patologías que afectan a la madre y aquellas que afectan al feto. A su vez, en el último caso se distinguen dos significados de la inviabilidad fetal: uno restringido y otro amplio. A juicio del autor, cada caso exige un análisis (...) moral diferente cuya solución no es homogénea. This article examines the morality of the interruption of pregnancy for medical reasons in light of the legislative proposal in 2010 by Senators Matthei and Rossi . To this end, the author distinguishes between diseases affecting the mother and those that affect the fetus. In turn, in the latter case the two meanings are distinguished fetus was not viable: restricted one and one broad. To the author, each case requires a different moral analysis whose solution is not homogeneous. (shrink)

What are the main features that influence our attribution of moral responsibility? It is widely accepted that there are various factors which strongly influence our moral judgments, such as the agent’s intentions, the consequences of the action, the causal involvement of the agent, and the agent’s freedom and ability to do otherwise. In this paper, we argue that this picture is incomplete: We argue that social roles are an additional key factor that is radically underestimated in the extant literature. We (...) will present an experiment to support this claim. (shrink)

En este artículo, el autor desarrolla el problema de la tolerancia en una sociedad multicultural según el planteamiento de Karl-Otto Apel y el punto de vista de la ética del discurso. En este sentido, parte explicando que el problema actual de la tolerancia consiste en el desafío de abrir un espacio a las diferentes formas de vida socio cultural. Así, expone las contradicciones de la versión de tolerancia negativa en el liberalismo y las insuficiencias de la crítica comunitarista. Luego, se (...) presenta la propuesta de fundamentación ético-discursiva de lo que el filósofo alemán llama como ‘tolerancia afirmativa'. Se concluye con algunas consideraciones valorativas: primero, para cuestionar la necesidad de la tolerancia afirmativa en un régimen constitucional, y segundo, para postular que la fundamentación ético-discursiva de la tolerancia encuentra su derivación más coherente en la categoría del respeto. In this article the author develops the problem of tolerance in a multicultural society according to Karl-Otto Apel's position and the point of view of the ethics of discourse. The author explains that the challenge of opening a space to different forms of socio-cultural life is the current problem of tolerance. This way, he exposes the contradictions of the negative tolerance in liberalism and the communitarian critical insufficiencies. Therefore, he presents the proposal of ethical-discursive basis about what the German philosopher has called ‘affirmative tolerance'. This study concludes with some value considerations which are meant to question the necessity of affirmative tolerance in a constitutional regime, in first place, and to postulate, in second place, that the ethical-discursive basis of tolerance finds a more coherent derivation in the category of respect. (shrink)

La atención en la obra rortiana a la retórica como tal es mínima, por no decir nula. No hay en Rorty una Filosofía de la Retórica en el sentido objetivo del genitivo. Sin embargo, al romper explícitamente «el espejo de la naturaleza», Rorty está rompiendo implícitamente aquello que posibilitaba el divorcio entre la filosofía y la retórica. De hecho, el propósito de este ensayo es explicitar ese implícito presentando la filosofía rortiana como una Filosofía de la Retórica en el sentido (...) subjetivo del genitivo, es decir, como una Retórica de la Filosofía o una Retórica filosófica. (shrink)

Se ensaya una filosofía de la risa en el doble sentido del genitivo. El objetivo es el habitual en la historia del pensamiento. La opinión común es la de considerar el humor como lo otro del pensamiento. Paradigmáticamente la filosofía, como metafísica, sería la posición intelectual agelasta por antonomasia: el grado cero del humor. Sin embargo, interpretado el genitivo en sentido subjetivo, la risa se muestra como pensamiento y el pensamiento como continuación de la risa mediante el cerebro como músculo (...) cigomático. Pensar y reír amplían la realidad. El sentido del humor revela ser quizá el sentido filosófico genuino. (shrink)

It has recently been argued that normative considerations play an important role in causal cognition. For instance, when an agent violates a moral rule and thereby produces a negative outcome, she will be judged to be much more of a cause of the outcome, compared to someone who performed the same action but did not violate a norm. While there is a substantial amount of evidence reporting these effects, it is still a matter of debate how this evidence is to (...) be interpreted. In this paper, we engage with the three most influential classes of explanations, namely, (a) the Norm‐Sensitive Cognitive Process View, (b) the Normative Concept View, and (c) the Pragmatics View. We will outline how these theories explain the empirical results and in what ways they differ. We conclude with a reflection on how well these strategies do overall and what questions they still leave unanswered. (shrink)

Moral philosophers draw an important distinction between two kinds of moral responsibility. An agent can be directly morally responsible, or they can be derivatively morally responsible. Direct moral responsibility, so many believe, presupposes that the agent could have behaved differently. However, in some situations, we hold agents responsible even though they could not have behaved differently, such as when they recklessly cause an accident or do not take adequate precautions to avoid harmful consequences. Moral philosophers typically argue that what we (...) ascribe in these cases is derivative moral responsibility. In this paper, I apply this conceptual distinction to the experimental debate about so-called folk-compatibilism. I argue that experimental philosophers have failed to consider this distinction when designing experiments and interpreting their results. I demonstrate that while compatibilism requires judgments of direct moral responsibility, participants in some of the most influential studies ascribed derivative moral responsibility. For this reason, these studies do not speak in favour of compatibilism at all. (shrink)

How evaluative are legal texts? Do legal scholars and jurists speak a more descriptive or perhaps a more evaluative language? In this paper, we present the results of a corpus study in which we examined the use of evaluative language in both the legal domain as well as public discourse. For this purpose, we created two corpora. Our legal professional corpus is based on court opinions from the U.S. Courts of Appeals. We compared this professional corpus to a public corpus, (...) which is based on blog discussions on the internet forum Reddit. While many linguistic phenomena can give insights into evaluativity, we investigated the use of a wide selection of evaluative adjectives (more specifically, thick adjectives) to gain a more comprehensive picture of the degree of evaluativity in the legal domain. Our analysis shows that legal professionals use thick terms less evaluatively than laypeople, which suggests that legal texts are less evaluative than ordinary discussions. This result, more generally, supports the philosophical idea that thick concepts may vary in their evaluative intensity. (shrink)

Imagine you and your friend Pierre agreed on meeting each other at a café, but he does not show up. What is the difference between a friend’s not showing up meeting? and any other person not coming? In some sense, all people who did not come show the same kind of behaviour, but most people would be willing to say that the absence of a friend who you expected to see is different in kind. In this paper, I will spell (...) out this difference by investigating laypeople’s conceptualisation of absences of actions in four experiments. In languages such as German, French, Italian, or Polish, people consider a friend’s not coming an omission. Any other person’s not coming, in contrast, is not considered an omission at all, but just a mere nothing. This use of the term omission differs from the usage in English, where ‘omission’ refers to all kinds of absences. In addition, ‘omission’ is not even an everyday term, but invented by philosophers for the sake of philosophical investigation. In other languages, ‘omission’ is part of an everyday vocabulary. Finally, I will discuss how this folk concept of omission could be made fruitful for philosophical questions. (shrink)

Se propone una reflexión sobre técnica y valores, particularmente sobre el valor de la técnica. Primero, en el sentido de la técnica como valor, un valor superlativo, puesto que permite lo más valioso para nuestra especie, su supervivencia. El proceso de realización de este valor produce, a su vez, el artefacto en que consiste la naturaleza humana. Ahora bien, el precio de ese valor técnico es asimismo superlativo, puesto que el vaciamiento técnico de la naturaleza comporta que la especie carezca (...) de valor natural: no hay valores naturales. Los valores hay que crearlos. He aquí el valor de la técnica en el sentido ahora del valor como técnica: valorar es asimismo una operación técnica. Los propios valores aparecen como técnicas, en cuanto tales contingentes y plurales, que no obedecen a ningún fundamento natural, sino a la decisión «insuficientemente» racional de emplearlas. Sin embargo, tal intrínseca artificialidad hace a los valores aún más valiosos. (shrink)

As well as Vico was the first and most persistent to understand myth as a contemporary phenomenon that, far of being in conflict with reason, is originally the instrument for escaping the loneliness of man against the mutism of a meaningless nature, Hans Blumenberg has been in our age who has spoken most forcefully for the rationality of mythical thought, doing it with arguments that the author finds very similar to Vico¿s ones. "Absolutism of reality", "absolute metaphor" and "principle of (...) insufficient reason", the three main elements, according to this reading, of Blumenberg¿s work, share with Vico the same metaphorical sensibility. (shrink)

Acts that are considered undesirable standardly violate our expectations. In contrast, acts that count as morally desirable can either meet our expectations or exceed them. The zone in which an act can be morally desirable yet not exceed our expectations is what we call the zone of moral indifference, and it has so far been neglected. In this paper, we show that people can use positive terms in a deflated manner to refer to actions in the zone of moral indifference, (...) whereas negative terms cannot be so interpreted. (shrink)

I) Metaphysics of evidence, which most conspicuous expression is the Cartesian mathesis universalis, looks for the urgent and necessary, the fundament or foundation of things, which is regarded as independent of the form and accesible whithout asumptions to knowledge: rhetoric is the dispensable qualitas of philosophy. II) Vico¿s way of thinking, in opposition to that view, could be considered as its retorsion: by reveling its hidden presuppositions, refuses them. III) Vico¿s tropology, by proposing the tropical univocity, makes a rhetoric philosophy (...) and a philosophical rhetoric: rhetoric is the indispensable quidditas of philosophy. I) La metafísica de la evidencia, cuya más conspicua expresión es la mathesis universalis cartesiana, busca lo apremiante y necesario, el fundamento o fondo de las cosas, el cual se entiende independiente de la forma y alcanzable por un pensamiento sin supuestos: la retórica es la prescindible qualitas de la filosofía. II) La de Vico, por contra, puede considerarse como una retorsión de esa postura filosófica: al contribuir a desvelar sus supuestos ocultos, los niega. III) La tropología viquiana, al proponer la univocidad de los tropos, hace de la filosofía retórica y de la retórica filosofía: la retórica es la imprescindible quidditas de la filosofía . (shrink)

A Bibliographical and Critical Study of: New Vico Studies, XII, 1994; G. Vico, The Art of Rhetoric, G.A. Pinton & A.W. Shippee trans. - eds., Rodopi, Amsterdam - Atlanta, 1996.

The omission effect, first described by Spranca and colleagues, has since been extensively studied and repeatedly confirmed. All else being equal, most people judge it to be morally worse to actively bring about a negative event than to passively allow that event to happen. In this paper, we provide new experimental data that challenges previous studies of the omission effect both methodologically and philosophically. We argue that previous studies have failed to control for the equivalence of rules that are violated (...) by actions and omissions. Once equivalent norms are introduced, our results show that the omission effect is eliminated, even if the negative outcome of the behavior is foreseen and intended by the agent. We show that the omission effect does not constitute a basic, moral disposition but occurs exclusively in complex moral situations. Building on these empirical results, we cast doubt onto two influential explanations of the omission effect, the Causal Relevance Hypothesis and the Overgeneralization Hypothesis, and provide a novel explanation of the phenomenon. Furthermore, we discuss various ramifications of the interplay between our understanding of omissions and legal systems. (shrink)

The doxastic zoo contains many animals: belief, acceptance, belief in, belief that, certainty, conjecture, guess, conviction, denial, disbelief in, disbelief that, judgment, commitment, etc. It also contains belief’s “strange bedfellows”: credences, partial beliefs, tacit beliefs, subdoxastic states, creedal feelings, feelings of knowing, in-between believings, pathological beliefs, phobias, aliefs, delusions, biases, besires. How to order the zoo? I propose to distinguish doxastic attitudes from non-doxastic epistemic attitudes. The criterion is the existence of correctness conditions. Most bedfellows do not have such normative (...) conditions. So they should not be allowed in the Doxastic Club. (shrink)

"I know of no religious writer more pertinent to our time."—T. S. Eliot, Introduction to Pensees Intended to prove that religion is not contrary to reason, Pascal's Pensees rank among the liveliest and most eloquent defenses of Christianity. Motivated by the seventeenth-century view of the supremacy of human reason, Pascal (1623–1662) had intended to write an ambitious apologia for Christianity in which he argued the inability of reason to address metaphysical problems. His untimely death prevented the work's completion, but the (...) fragments published posthumously in 1670 as Pensees remain a vital part of religious and philosophical literature. W. F. Trotter translation. Introduction by T. S. Eliot. (shrink)

Deceptive implicatures are a subtle communicative device for leading someone into a false belief. However, it is widely accepted that deceiving by means of deceptive implicature does not amount to lying. In this paper, we put this claim to the empirical test and present evidence that the traditional definition of lying might be too narrow to capture the folk concept of lying. Four hundred participants were presented with fourteen vignettes containing utterances that communicate conversational implicatures which the speaker believes to (...) be false. We further collected several potential proxy measures of lying, to get a better understanding of when a deceptive implicature is considered a case of lying. The results indicate that most implicatures (ten out of fourteen) were evaluated as lies and that lie ratings were closely tracked by the degree to which speakers were considered to have committed themselves to the truth of the content conveyed by their deceptive implicatures. (shrink)

O intuito primordial de nosso texto é investigar o estatuto da linguagem cotidiana no interior da construção do projeto existencial de cada ser-aí em Ser e tempo. Para alcançarmos esse intuito, nós nos dedicaremos, inicialmente, a uma análise da concepção heideggeriana do impessoal presente nessa obra. Por intermédio desta análise, o que buscamos conquistar é, antes de mais nada, uma compreensão adequada do lugar do discurso na constituição do espaço impessoal de existência. Juntamente com a apreensão desse lugar, teremos a (...) possibilidade de visualizar em que medida o impessoal não se mostra apenas como uma espécie de entrave à concretização do próprio em Ser e tempo, mas também como manancial significativo para todas as possibilidades existenciais do ser-aí.The fundamental intention of our text is to investigate the status of daily language in the interior of the construction of the existential project of each being-there in Being and Time. In order to fulfill this intention, the text initially dedicates itself to an analysis of the heideggerian concept of the impersonal in the referred to work. As intermediary to this analysis, we seek to show is above all an adequate comprehension of the place of discourse in the constitution of the impersonal space of existence. Together with this, we have the possibility of visualizing to what degree the impersonal does not show itself only as a species of impediment to the concretization of the personal in Being and Time, but also as a significant source of all the existential possibilities of being-there. (shrink)

Anger and disgust may have distinct roles in sexual morality; here, we tested hypotheses regarding the distinct foci, appraisals, and motivations of anger and disgust within the context of sexual offenses. We conducted four experiments in which we manipulated whether mutual consent (Studies 1–3) or desire (Study 4) was present or absent within a counter-normative sexual act. We found that anger is focused on the injustice of non-consensual sexual acts, and the transgressor of the injustice (Studies 1 and 3). Furthermore, (...) the sexual nature of the act was not critical for the elicitation of anger—as anger also responded to unjust acts of violence (Study 3). By contrast, we hypothesised and found that disgust is focused on whether or not a person voluntarily engaged in, desired or consented to a counter-normative sexual act (Studies 2–4). Appraisals of abnormality and degradation were the primary appraisals of disgust, and the sexual nature of the act was a critical elicitor of disgust (Study 3). A final study ruled out victimisation as the mechanism of the effect of consent on disgust and indicated that the consenter's sexual desire was the mechanism (Study 4). Our results reveal that anger and disgust have differential roles in consent-related sexual offenses due to the distinct appraisals and foci of these emotions. (shrink)

Cognitive developmental evidence is sometimes conscripted to support ''naturalized epistemology'' arguments to the effect that a general epistemic stance leads children to build theory-like accounts of underlying properties of kinds. A review of the evidence suggests that what prompts conceptual acquisition is not a general epistemic stance but a series of category-specific intuitive principles that constitute an evolved ''natural metaphysics''. This consists in a system of categories and category-specific inferential processes founded on definite biases in prototype formation. Evidence for this (...) system provides a better understanding of the limited ''plasticity'' of ontological commitments as well as a computationally plausible account of their initial state, avoiding ambiguities about innateness. This may provide a starting point for a ''naturalized epistemology'' that takes into account evolved properties of human conceptual structures. (shrink)