After discussing the manifest inconveniences of Galilean physicalism for both science and common sense, I propose an alternate, Aristotelian ontology of material things and show how it solves the epistemological problems engendered by the New Science. Read at the annual POH Symposium in Lake Wenatchee, WA, May 2011.

Simon Blackburn; XIII*—How to Refer to Private Experience, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 75, Issue 1, 1 June 1975, Pages 201–214, https://doi.

Francis Dunlop; Public Criteria and Private Experience: a reply to P. McKenzie, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 17, Issue 1, 30 May 2006, Pages 137–1.

Francis Dunlop; Public Criteria and Private Experience: a reply to P. McKenzie, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 17, Issue 1, 30 May 2006, Pages 137–1.

The spinal cord provides an alternative model for nerve tissue grafting experiments. Anatomo-functional correlations are easier to make here than in any other region of the CNS because of a direct implication of spinal cord neurons in sensorimotor activities. Lesions can be easily performed to isolate spinal cord neurons from descending inputs. The anatomy of descending monoaminergic systems is well defined and these systems offer a favourable paradigm for lesion-graft experiments.

Emotions have traditionally been viewed as intrapersonal phenomena. Over the past decades, theory and research have shifted toward a more social perspective that emphasizes the role of emotional ex...

Simon Blackburn; XIII*—How to Refer to Private Experience, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 75, Issue 1, 1 June 1975, Pages 201–214, https://doi.

The paper argues that the common notion that there is a gap between a physical scope, namely, brain processes, and something immaterial such as private experiences is an illusion provoked by the conceptual conflicts of our understanding. In order to overcome this illusion, it is necessary to clarify the foundations and implications of the uses of key concepts in the cognitive field.

In this paper we put forward the thesis that qualia are tropes (or qualitons), and not (universal) properties. Further, we maintain that Wittgenstein hints in this direction. We also find in Wittgenstein elements of an account of language acquisition that takes the presence of qualia as an enabling condition. We conclude by pointing out some difficulties of this view.

The aim of this paper is to analyze the process of risk communication in the context of assisted reproduction in Latvia. The paper is based on a qualitative methodology and two types of data: media analysis and 30 semi-structured interviews (11 patients, 4 egg donors, 15 experts). The study explores a broad definition of risk communication and explores three types of risks: health, psychosocial, and moral. We ask (1), who is involved in risk communication, (2), how risks are discussed using (...) different channels of communication, and (3), what ethical problems arise during this process. In the process of analysis, we identified four types of information channels and two strategies of risk communication used by patients, as well as several ethical problems. In our view, the analysis of risk communication practices is significant to improve patient/physician relationship, as well as better meet patients' needs for comprehensive risk information. (shrink)

Digital transformation has allowed to offer additional services - which complement the main product - both in terms of use, emotional and relationship terms. Focused on a traditionally rational insurance customer offering a value that explores the customer's emotions, from co-creating with the user, allows brand differentiation. Given this idea, this document has three purposes. First, identify the role of expectations and the perceived quality of the customer's digital experience. Secondly, to identify the relationship between experience and satisfaction (...) gained in private insurance web areas. Third, identify the most valued digital attributes by the user. A sample of 4,178 customers registered was analyzed using the partial least squares technique. The model is highly predictive to customer experience and evidence the important relationship between the WOW effect and satisfaction, as well as the weak but doble role that expectations play on insurance digital self-service. The model demonstrates that expectations are only relevant before web consumption, because during the process it is the perceived digital quality, in particular the usefulness, information and technology, that offer a true customer experience. This article offers high academic value because it more accurately defines the determinants of the digital insurance customer experience and its effect on customer satisfaction in digital services. While expectations influence attitude before service, this research reveals that perceived digital quality is what delivers a true customer experience. Strategically, the implications are immediate in the field of business as it shows the importance of co-creation in digital design, not only because of the significant savings in implementation costs but also because it guarantees a greater experience, essential in the loyalty of its customers. This ensures the sustainable growth of the company. (shrink)

This article queries the notion of performance as a sustained act of commemoration, and, thus, implicitly, atonement and forgetting. Laying aside potential considerations of guilt and/or victimisation inherent in the spatio-temporal superimposition of a World War II modality of existence on an affluent, and, by comparison, peaceful part of the world, my investigation focuses on three mutually related areas of performance: the body’s hidden somaticity, the co-becoming of the self and time; and walking as a mnemonic mechanism. Aided by the (...) Japanese philosophers’ Shigenori Nagatomo’s concept of the hidden body and Kitaro Nishida’s theorisation of the relationship between the temporalised and the atemporal, the actual and the virtual, the spatial and the non-spatial as the continuity of discontinuity, I argue against the idea of performance as a cumulative, sedimentary and implicitly restorative poiesispraxis. Instead, I seek to articulate the ways in which the actional, interoceptive and psychogeographic schemes generated by eating and walking intertwine to create complex patterns of individual-collective remembering-forgetting. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:183, IMPRESSIONS AND EXPERIENCES: PUBLIC OR PRIVATE? In his 'Perceptions and Persons' William Davie aims "to determine what perceptions are for Hume." He challenges what I trust that he is right in labelling "The Standard View." His statement of this view is quoted from my Hume's Philosophy of Belief:... Impressions are defined as constituting with ideas the class of 'perceptions of the mind. ' While wine must be (...) (logically) public, the impression of wine like the idea of wine must be (logically) private. Whereas the presence of wine tautologically guarantees the presence of wine, the occurrence of an impression of wine is by no means a sufficient condition of the presence of wine — because an impression of wine, but not of course real wine, may be hallucinatory. Impressions belong to the category of experiences: wine2is cellared in that of physical things. My own purpose now is to defend, against attacks recently launched not only by Davie but also by Donald Livingston, this standard view. Davie contrasts it with "my own view, which is that perceptions are the things that we know, both private and public" (p. 130). He shows no signs of recognizing either how revolutionary his present suggestion is, or how revolutionary Hume himself would have been were any such suggested interpretation correct. For this particular "Standard View" is not one first introduced by me a couple of decades ago, and later misguiding even such usually sound scholars as Terence Penelhum. Instead it seems to have been accepted by almost if not absolutely all earlier writers discussing this part of Hume's philosophy. For instance: if Davie is right, then Thomas Reid must have devoted most of his professional life to the dismembering of a straw man. "Reid," as Livingston remarked in his Introduction to Hume: A Re- 184. evaluation, "took Hume's work to be a reduction to absurdity of a philosophical hypothesis which began in modern times with Descartes.... 'The hypothesis I mean is, that nothing is perceived but what is in the mind which perceives it....'" Again: if Davie is right, then Hume is here breaking from all his immediate predecessors in a revolutionary way, and in a direction which ought to have made the revolution welcome to Reid. Yet Hume himself gives no hint of this radical new beginning. Instead he goes out of his way to note a merely verbal innovation: by his introduction of a new use for the term 'impression' the word 'idea' is restored "to its original sense, from which Mr. Locke had perverted it, in making it stand for all our perceptions" (T2 fn.). The class of Lockean ideas, the class which Hume is thus studiously subdividing into the subclasses of Humean ideas and Humean impressions, contains, surely, nothing but what is logically private? Certainly no other interpretation of Locke's words would seem to be possible. He scarcely could have put the point more clearly or more emphatically than he does in the introductory first chapter of An Essay concerning Human Understanding. He says there that he is going to investigate "those Ideas, Notions, or whatever else you please to call them, which a Man observes, and is conscious to himself he has in his Mind...." Locke also apologizes for his frequent employment of "the Word Idea, " excusing it as necessary "to express whatever is meant by Phantasm, Notion, Species, or whatever it is, which the Mind can be 4 employ'd about in thinking...." Only and precisely in this understanding of the nature of ideas was it possible for Berkeley to open The Principles of Human Knowledge with a single sentence asserting everything which Reid was so correctly concerned to deny: 185, It is evident to any one who takes a survey of the objects of human knowledge, that they are either ideas actually imprinted on the senses, or else such as are perceived by attending to the passions and operations of the mind, or lastly ideas formed by help of memory and imagination, either compounding, dividing, or barely representing those originally perceived in the aforesaid ways. In face of all this, how is it possible to maintain that, for Hume, "perceptions are the things that we know... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:183, IMPRESSIONS AND EXPERIENCES: PUBLIC OR PRIVATE? In his 'Perceptions and Persons' William Davie aims "to determine what perceptions are for Hume." He challenges what I trust that he is right in labelling "The Standard View." His statement of this view is quoted from my Hume's Philosophy of Belief:... Impressions are defined as constituting with ideas the class of 'perceptions of the mind. ' While wine must be (...) (logically) public, the impression of wine like the idea of wine must be (logically) private. Whereas the presence of wine tautologically guarantees the presence of wine, the occurrence of an impression of wine is by no means a sufficient condition of the presence of wine — because an impression of wine, but not of course real wine, may be hallucinatory. Impressions belong to the category of experiences: wine2is cellared in that of physical things. My own purpose now is to defend, against attacks recently launched not only by Davie but also by Donald Livingston, this standard view. Davie contrasts it with "my own view, which is that perceptions are the things that we know, both private and public" (p. 130). He shows no signs of recognizing either how revolutionary his present suggestion is, or how revolutionary Hume himself would have been were any such suggested interpretation correct. For this particular "Standard View" is not one first introduced by me a couple of decades ago, and later misguiding even such usually sound scholars as Terence Penelhum. Instead it seems to have been accepted by almost if not absolutely all earlier writers discussing this part of Hume's philosophy. For instance: if Davie is right, then Thomas Reid must have devoted most of his professional life to the dismembering of a straw man. "Reid," as Livingston remarked in his Introduction to Hume: A Re- 184. evaluation, "took Hume's work to be a reduction to absurdity of a philosophical hypothesis which began in modern times with Descartes.... 'The hypothesis I mean is, that nothing is perceived but what is in the mind which perceives it....'" Again: if Davie is right, then Hume is here breaking from all his immediate predecessors in a revolutionary way, and in a direction which ought to have made the revolution welcome to Reid. Yet Hume himself gives no hint of this radical new beginning. Instead he goes out of his way to note a merely verbal innovation: by his introduction of a new use for the term 'impression' the word 'idea' is restored "to its original sense, from which Mr. Locke had perverted it, in making it stand for all our perceptions" (T2 fn.). The class of Lockean ideas, the class which Hume is thus studiously subdividing into the subclasses of Humean ideas and Humean impressions, contains, surely, nothing but what is logically private? Certainly no other interpretation of Locke's words would seem to be possible. He scarcely could have put the point more clearly or more emphatically than he does in the introductory first chapter of An Essay concerning Human Understanding. He says there that he is going to investigate "those Ideas, Notions, or whatever else you please to call them, which a Man observes, and is conscious to himself he has in his Mind...." Locke also apologizes for his frequent employment of "the Word Idea, " excusing it as necessary "to express whatever is meant by Phantasm, Notion, Species, or whatever it is, which the Mind can be 4 employ'd about in thinking...." Only and precisely in this understanding of the nature of ideas was it possible for Berkeley to open The Principles of Human Knowledge with a single sentence asserting everything which Reid was so correctly concerned to deny: 185, It is evident to any one who takes a survey of the objects of human knowledge, that they are either ideas actually imprinted on the senses, or else such as are perceived by attending to the passions and operations of the mind, or lastly ideas formed by help of memory and imagination, either compounding, dividing, or barely representing those originally perceived in the aforesaid ways. In face of all this, how is it possible to maintain that, for Hume, "perceptions are the things that we know... (shrink)

That every response is also a stimulus has important implications for how we characterize the private experiences of both people and non-human animals. Acting as stimuli, responses, whether covert or overt, change the probability of subsequent responses. Hence, all behavior, covert and overt, is necessarily associative in some sense, and thinking may be characterized as “covert autochaining.” According to this view, animals capable of responding to temporally remote stimuli and to characteristics of their own bodies necessarily engage in some (...) form of associative thinking. This characterization of thinking necessarily presumes that private behavioral events adhere to at least some processes that occur in — and have been extensively studied in — overt behavior. To assume otherwise, as do Daniel Dennett, Robert Nozick, and others, is to be unnecessarily pessimistic both about the robustness of evolutionary processes and about our ability to explain complex human phenomena in rigorous empirical terms. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Defending a Phenomenological–Behavioral Perspective: Culture, Behavior, and ExperienceMarino Pérez-Álvarez (bio), José M. García-Montes (bio), Adolfo J. Cangas (bio), and Louis A. Sass (bio)KeywordsBehavior, contextual phenomenology, culture, experienceWe should like to express our sincere thanks to all the authors for their commentaries on our articles. Given the restrictions of space (a limitation they too had to contend with), we can only respond to a few aspects of their interesting remarks. (...) We shall reply of course on the basis of our own approach—an approach that sets out to integrate culture, behavior, and experience, and that might be termed contextual phenomenology, phenomenological behaviorism, or perhaps most accurately (albeit more awkwardly), the phenomenological–behavioral perspective.In her commentary, Ibáñez-Guerra (2008), referring to the target articles “Phenomenology and behaviorism” (Pérez-Álvarez, Sass, and Cangas 2008) and “The role of superstition in psychopathology” (García-Montes et al. 2008), wonders whether our maintaining of the spirit of Skinner, as well as our recourse to phenomenology, might not themselves represent forms of superstitious behavior. She points out that it is not always a good idea to put new wine in old barrels. For her, the new wine and new barrels would be represented by social constructivism, of which she is reminded by some aspects of our work. But in making her own case, Ibáñez-Guerra (2008) reveals certain common prejudices concerning behaviorism, prejudices that have apparently persisted even after reading our article. Thus, for example, she does not see operant behavior as incorporating intentionality (what, in the target article, is presented in terms of final causality), because she assumes that intentionality would necessarily imply a mentalist and dualist notion involving a supposed internal mental entity that causes behavior. Skinner (1974) himself noted and rejected this very assumption in a passage that clearly distinguishes his own approach from what he calls a “stimulus-response formula”: “Possibly no charge,” he wrote,is more often leveled against behaviorism or a science of behavior than that it cannot deal with purpose or intention. A stimulus-response formula has no answer, but operant behavior is the very field of purpose and [End Page 281] intention. By its nature it is directed toward the future: a person acts in order that something will happen, and the order is temporal.(pp. 55–6)The place Skinner gives to intentionality and purpose is elaborated in our target article.Furthermore, Ibáñez-Guerra (2008) assumes that, on methodological grounds, Skinner rejects all that is not observable, or at least that cannot be operationalized. This, however, is simply incorrect, at least as regards Skinner’s radical behaviorism. As the reader may recall, radical (as opposed to methodological) behaviorism is neither operationalist nor does it reject private or subjective events because of their unobservability. Indeed, Skinner specifically acknowledges that such events are in fact observable—at least for one person: the subject him- or herself. The question for Skinner is to understand how the part of the world that is only observable and experiential for oneself is constructed or formed. In the end, it turns out that radical behaviorism is more radical, in the Aristotelian ontological sense (see Pérez-Alvarez, Sass, and García-Montes 2008), than post-modern constructionism. Indeed, as we remarked, radical behaviorism can still surprise us today. Similarly, phenomenology is starting to be missed in the clinical context (Andreasen 2007). We believe that radical behaviorism and phenomenology, mutually readjusted, are in fact excellent wines for the times we live in—if only we knew how to appreciate them.In their commentary on “Phenomenology and behaviorism: A mutual readjustment,” Fletcher and Hayes (2008) argue that the philosophy and theory of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT)/Relational Frame Theory (RFT) already contain the salutary aspects of phenomenology that we highlight in our target article. Their insistence on reducing the affinities we find between phenomenology and behaviorism to ACT/RFT consists, in our view, in a scientific–technical argument that is more scientistic than strictly philosophical in nature. Their insistence on the scientific–technical argument itself implies an unclarified philosophical assumption. On what grounds do experimental data constitute the last word? Has... (shrink)

The role of private food standards in agriculture is increasingly raising questions of legitimacy, particularly in light of the impacts such standards may have on food producers. While much work has been carried out at a macro policy level for developing countries, there have been relatively few empirical case studies that focus on particular food supply chains, and even fewer studies still of the impact of private standards on developed countries such as Australia. This study seeks to address (...) this imbalance, with a particular focus on examining the impact of private standards on an Australian vegetable supply food system in North Tasmania as well as tracing the impact of perceived and actual power relations among actors. Applying a governance framework and adopting a Foucauldian position we show that private standards are a “technology of power” that have risen out of a crisis discourse in the mid-1990s about on-farm food safety. Private standards have the effect of using knowledge from particular actors to establish truths about good agricultural practice (GAP), however we show that Tasmanian vegetable growers are not docile bodies and are employing alternative knowledge and technologies of power to challenge how GAP is implemented on-farm. (shrink)

The private language arguments exemplify the analogy: private ownership of experience; private knowledge of experience; private ostensive definition; the mereological fallacy; the 'beetle in the box'; and so on. The supposition that Wittgenstein's philosophy is primarily therapeutic obscures the extent to which therapy is only possible if one attains a grasp of the logical geography of the relevant part of the philosophical landscape. The analogy between clarifying and eradicating philosophical confusion and treating a disease (...) is often linked to a related analogy that Wittgenstein drew in five different contexts in the 1930s, namely between his methods in philosophy and the method of treating mental illness by psychoanalysis. The idea of a private language is incoherent precisely because it fails to distinguish imagining a justification for using a word and justifying the use of a word in one's imagination. (shrink)

Lying for a strategic advantage is to be expected in commercial interactions. But would this be more or less obvious when lying could come from either party and question mutually profitable exchange? To explore this, we modify the acquiring-a-company game by letting both, buyer and seller, be privately informed. Specifically, the value of the company for the buyer is known only by the seller; whereas, only the buyer is aware by which proportion the sellers evaluation is lower than that of (...) the buyer. Before bargaining, both parties can reveal what they know via cheap-talk numerical messages. Game theoretically, the pooling equilibrium may or may not allow for trade depending on the commonly known expected evaluation discrepancy. By mutually revealing what one knows, one could boost trade and efficiency. Although strategic misreporting prevails quite generally, it is higher for sellers throughout the experiment. Regarding gender, women misreport less, especially as sellers, and offer higher prices. (shrink)

Some of the methods for data collection in experimental psychology, as well as many of the inferences from observed behavior or image scanning, are based on the implicit premise that language use can be linked, via the meaning of words, to specific subjective states. Wittgenstein’s well known private language argument (PLA), however, calls into question the legitimacy of such inferences. According to a strong interpretation of PLA, all of the elements of a language must be publicly available. Thus the (...) meaning of words is not fixed by reference to our private experiences, and so data from subjective state claims indicates nothing about our subjective experiences. Application of PLA to psychological studies based on descriptions of the experience of orgasm offers support for the strong version of the conclusion of PLA. We show that PLA has deep implications for data collection methods and inferences in experimental psychology. In particular we critique two contemporary research projects in neuroscience: one studying the ability to remember emotionally loaded words and the other studying experience of attraction. Both of these projects attempt to link subjective experiences and thought processes to particular observable brain states. The research methods appeal to (implicit) inferences from linguistic usage to subjective states. Application of PLA will show that such inferences cannot be made because the meaning of a word is not determined by any subjective state of the speaker. (shrink)

A la source de ce livre il y a la conviction que certaines des evolutions les plus negatives des societes contemporaines conferent une actualite nouvelle au concept d'alienation selon la comprehension qu'en ont proposee des penseurs aussi apparemment eloignes l'un de l'autre que Marx et Heidegger: l'alienation comprise comme privation de monde. Nos societes mondialisees sont paradoxalement celles ou s'impose l'experience d'une privation de monde sans precedent. Plusieurs dimensions de cette privation sont analysees ici, notamment l'experience temporelle d'un (...) present eternel, l'epuisement de l'historicite et l'acceleration frenetique des maintenant successifs. Quant au lieu ou se joue originairement la privation de monde, Franck Fischbach soutient la these qu'il s'agit du travail dans la forme salariale qui est la sienne sous le capital et dont le caractere mutilant n'a cesse d'etre amplifie par les plus recentes evolutions. C'est donc aussi d'une transformation du travail que depend la possibilite d'un advenir historique de l'etre de l'homme dans le monde. (shrink)

Since the latest political changes, the FRY faces a choice of a transition strategy and privatization model whithin it. After ten years of transition in East Europen countries, well established patterns in marked oriented reforms and subsequent results are observed and could serve as policy lessons for the FRY. Regarding the significant impact that initial conditions have on efforts and results of transition macroeconomic policy and structural reform implementation, the paper presents the prevailing institutional setting of the Yugoslav economy inherited (...) from the communist regime. Also, the ten years of Yugoslav privatization experience is reported to have weak results due to the poor concept. Debates on privatization, as well on structural reforms and macroeconomic policy, have again become lively in the FRY.Depuis les derniers changements politiques, la République Fédérale de Yougoslavie fait face à un choix de stratégies de transition et de modèles de privatisation. Après dix années de transition dans les pays de l’Europe de l’Est, des schémas bien établis de réformes menant à l’économie de marché et les résultats qui en découlent sont observés et pourraient servir de leçon pour la République Fédérale de Yougoslavie sur le plan politique. Eu égard à l’impact significatif qu’ont les conditions initiales sur les efforts et les résultats de la politique macroéconomique de transition et d’instauration de la réforme structurelle, l’article souligne que l’environnement institutionnel de l’économie yougoslave est un héritage du régime communiste. Aussi, les dix années de privatisation en Yougoslavie ont donné lieu à des résultats peu significatifs, précisément à cause de l’héritage évoqué. Les débats autour de la privatisation, des réformes structurelles et de la politique macroéconomique sont à nouveau d’actualité en République Fédérale de Yougoslavie. (shrink)

It is the ambition of evolutionary psychology to explain how the basic features of human mental life came to be selected because of their contribution to biological survival. Counted among the most basic must be the subjective qualities of conscious sensory experience: the felt redness we experience on looking at a ripe tomato, the felt saltiness on tasting an anchovy, the felt pain on being pricked by a thorn. But, as many theorists acknowledge, with these qualia, the ambition (...) of evolutionary psychology may have met its match. Everyone agrees that a trait can only contribute to an organism's biological survival in so far as it operates in the public domain. Yet almost everyone also agrees that the subjective quality of sensory experience is (at least for all practical purposes) private and without external influence. Then, maybe we must either concede that the subjective quality of sensations cannot after all have been determined by selection (even if this is theoretically depressing) or else demonstrate that the quality of sensations is not as private as it seems to be (even if this is intuitively unconvincing). No. I believe neither of these solutions to the puzzle is in fact the right one. I argue instead that the truth is that the quality of sensations has indeed been shaped by selection in the past, despite the fact that it is today effectively private. And this situation has come about as a result of a remarkable evolutionary progression, whereby the primitive activity of sensing slowly became "privatized" - that is to say, removed from the domain of overt public behavior and transformed into a mental activity that is now, in humans, largely if not exclusively internal to the subject's mind. (shrink)

In this essay I examine the idea that evil is to be understood as a kind of absence or a privation. I put forward two arguments against this idea. The first claims that if evil is an absence it becomes causally powerless, which seems strongly contradicted by experience and revelation. The other argument says that the idea that evil is an absence cannot do justice to the evil of depression. Depression is a set of feelings which are all too (...) real, and so cannot be understood as literally identical with a set of absences. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to restore the interdependent or complementary relationship between self and others against the universalistic one (as I call it) that Kant, for example, once insisted on, by reexamining the concept of so-called private language. I shall consider some views in speech act theory and pragmatics, since there has often been discussion about such a private occurrence as the speaker's sincerity. For example, Jürgen Habermas situates it in the speaker's internal nature as will (...) be seen later. In my opinion, alter ego is an ego because we can empathize (einfühlen) with it, and yet it is alter ego because it has some private experiences which we cannot perfectly comprehend. (shrink)

In sum, major critics of the twentieth century continually insist that poetry's unique value lies in its ability to convey meanings for which there are no public criteria whatsoever. But there are no such meanings, and to praise a poem for conveying them is empty. Again, these critics assume that what we understand by emotion is to be identified simply with an inner experience or state of mind and that this state of mind is what is conveyed by, or (...) gives meaning and definition to, words which are used to refer to our emotional life. The emotions or qualities of emotions supposedly communicated by poetry alone, moreover, are said to elude public language altogether; they can be neither defined nor discussed but only embodied in images. But whatever the status these private experiences have for us, they as yet play no part in our language, even our poetic language, and reference to them certainly contributes nothing to our criticism of poetry. Criticism can play a central role in interpreting and shaping our lives, but it will only be worth writing if its vocabulary has content. If criticism is to become intelligible, it must begin by abandoning the appeal to private knowledge.Frederic K. Hargreaves, Jr. received his doctorate in English from Boston University. (shrink)

Can the experience of Icelandic Vikings eight centuries ago teach us a lesson about the dangers of privatization? Jared Diamond thinks so. In his article Living on the Moon ," published in the May 23, 2002, issue of the New York Review of Books , Diamond portrays the history of Iceland in the Viking period as a nightmarish vision of privatization run amuck.

At present, the task of enforcing UK competition law lies almost exclusively with a public regulator. One of the aims of the Competition Bill which is currently before Parliament is to enable private litigants to seek redress through the courts for harm caused by unlawful anti-competitive conduct. This article considers the appropriate role of private actions in the enforcement of competition law. It is argued that private actions are of both instrumental and intrinsic value: not only can (...) private actions act as a deterrent against harmful behaviour, but they also enable those harmed by unlawful anti-competitive conduct to seek compensation for injury from the perpetrator. But private enforcement suffers from several shortcomings which are not shared by public enforcement. Accordingly, it is argued that although there is a strong case for ‘privatizing competition regulation’, private enforcement should be used to supplement, rather than supplant, public enforcement. This article also explores the problems within a regulatory scheme which combines both private and public enforcement, drawing on the experience of other jurisdictions to shed light on how such ‘aggregation problems’ might best be resolved. Finally, UK competition regulation is examined from an enforcement perspective. It is argued that the UK Competition Bill has the potential to provide a significantly more effective and efficient scheme of regulation. Whether or not this potential is realized will depend on a number of factors, particularly the ability of UK courts to interpret the legislative prohibitions in a coherent, predictable, and transparent manner which is consistent with the economic theory upon which competition regulation is based. (shrink)

Although the proper formulation and assessment of Ludwig Wittgenstein's argument (or arguments) against the possibility of a private language continues to be disputed, the issue has lost none of its urgency. At stake is a broadly Cartesian conception of experiences that is found today in much philosophy of mind.

In reflecting about experience, philosophers are prone to fall into a dualism of conceptual scheme and pre-conceptual given, according to which the most basic judgments of experience are grounded in non-conceptual impingements on subjects of experience. This idea is dubiously coherent: relations of grounding or justification should hold between conceptually structured items. This thought has been widely applied to 'outer' experience; at least some of the Private Language Argument can be read as applying it to (...) 'inner' experience. In this light, Wittgenstein's suggestion that a sensation is 'not a something' seems infelicitous. The main point of this reading of Wittgenstein is in Richard Rorty's Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature', but Rorty locates the point in the context of a subtle materialism, and a 'communitarian' substitute for first-person authority, which seem non-Wittgensteinian. (shrink)

Using microdata from the Wage Structure Survey, we analyse the gender wage gap in the private and public sectors, considering the whole wage distribution. The main contribution is to assume that the decision to work in a sector is a prior process determined endogenously in the model. Thus, the usual Ordinary Least Square estimation is inconsistent, and it is necessary to use alternative techniques. We use quantile regression techniques to calculate how much of the gap is due to differences (...) in returns between men and women and sectors, taking into account the sample selection bias. We find that the size of the gap attributed to different returns varies substantially across the wage distribution. Public sector employees are paid higher wages, on average, than their counterparts in the private sector, and the gap is wider for women. Moreover, the proportion of the gender wage gap explained tends to be greater for workers who are at the bottom of the wage distribution in both sectors. A look at the whole wage distribution reveals that discrimination in the gender wage gap is typically higher at its top than at its bottom, suggesting that glass ceilings are more prevalent than sticky floors for both men and women. (shrink)

cannot understand the language.”[1] This is not intended to cover (easily imaginable) cases of recording one's experiences in a personal code, for such a code, however obscure in fact, could in principle be deciphered. What Wittgenstein had in mind is a language conceived as necessarily comprehensible only to its single originator because the things which define its vocabulary are necessarily inaccessible to others.

In reflecting about experience, philosophers are prone to fall into a dualism of conceptual scheme and pre-conceptual given, according to which the most basic judgments of experience are grounded in non-conceptual impingements on subjects of experience. This idea is dubiously coherent: relations of grounding or justification should hold between conceptually structured items. This thought has been widely applied to 'outer' experience; at least some of the Private Language Argument can be read as applying it to (...) 'inner' experience. In this light, Wittgenstein's suggestion that a sensation is 'not a something' seems infelicitous. The main point of this reading of Wittgenstein is in Richard Rorty's Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature', but Rorty locates the point in the context of a subtle materialism, and a 'communitarian' substitute for first-person authority, which seem non-Wittgensteinian. (shrink)

Augustin est bien connu comme défenseur d’une « théorie privative » du mal. On peut lire, par exemple, dans les Confessions que « le mal n’est que la privation du bien, à la limite du pur néant ». Le problème, cependant, avec les théories privatives du mal est qu’elles ne nous offrent pas, généralement, une explication robuste ni de l’activité du mal, ni de son pouvoir à causer des effets bien réels ; effets desquels l’expérience demande, malgré tout, une explication (...) rationnelle. Or, selon Augustin, la privation seule ne permet pas de rendre compte de toutes les manifestations du mal. L’explication privative du mal est, certes, la plus étudiée par la littérature ; mais elle ne constitue qu’une partie du tableau. Cet article veut souligner quatre moments de l’explication du mal qu’Augustin propose : le mal comme privation ; le mal comme parasite par rapport à l’être ; le mal comme perversion de la volonté ; et finalement, le mal comme conflit d’intérêts. Chacun de ces moments éclaire un type de mal, mais aucun ne permet à lui seul de rendre compte du problème. Pris ensemble, cependant, et gardant leurs différences respectives à l’esprit, la réponse d’Augustin à la question du mal se révèle beaucoup plus sophistiquée et exhaustive qu’on ne voudrait souvent l’admettre lorsqu’on se limite uniquement à la théorie de la privation. | : Augustine is well-known for advocating a ‘privation theory’ of evil. In Confessions, he writes that “evil has no existence except as a privation of good, down to that level which is altogether without being.” The problem with privation theories of evil generally is that they do not provide a robust enough account of the activity and power of evil to cause the very real effects for which experience demands a rational explanation. For Augustine, however, privation alone does not fully account for evil in all of its manifestations. The privation account of evil receives much scholarly treatment, but it is only part of the complete Augustinian picture. This paper outlines four accounts of evil in Augustine : evil as privation, as parasitic on being, as perversion of the will, and as conflict of interest. Each deals with a kind of evil, but none alone provides a complete account. Taken together, however, with their differences in mind, Augustine’s explanation of evil is shown to be much more sophisticated and comprehensive than is often recognised when one limits one’s understanding of Augustine’s conception of evil to the privation theory alone. (shrink)

What is the moral, spiritual, and educative function of philosophy and literature in modern lives? Such a large question is rarely posed by philosophers or literary theorists these days, but one philosopher who has put it at the top of his agenda is Richard Rorty. His general answer is that both literature and philosophy serve distinct ends: the private end of personal fulfilment through the redescription of experiences and the possibility of self-creation, and the public end of expanded horizons (...) of moral imagination and spheres of solidarity. In what follows I will take a closer look at Rorty’s proposal. I begin by situating it as a contribution to philosophical discussions of the ‘problems of modernity’. Second, I draw attention to an important but sometimes neglected thought that underscores Rorty’s proposal: the alliance of philosophy and literature in making sense of modern lives. With this background in place, in the third section I consider the distinctive version of the private/public split that Rorty invokes, which can be regarded as his version of worldmaking in modernity. I argue that Rorty’s version of the distinction has more going for it than some critics have been prepared to grant, and that it at least provides a basis for further reflection on the important question it helps to answer. (shrink)