It is sometimes argued that certain sentences of natural language fail to express truth conditional contents. Standard examples include e.g. Tipper is ready and Steel is strong enough. In this paper, we provide a novel analysis of truth conditional meaning using the notion of a question under discussion. This account explains why these types of sentences are not, in fact, semantically underdetermined, provides a principled analysis of the process by which natural language sentences can come to have enriched meanings in (...) context, and shows why various alternative views, e.g. so-called Radical Contextualism, Moderate Contextualism, and Semantic Minimalism, are partially right in their respective analyses of the problem, but also all ultimately wrong. Our analysis achieves this result using a standard truth conditional and compositional semantics and without making any assumptions about enriched logical forms, i.e. logical forms containing phonologically null expressions. (shrink)

Importation in fictional discourse is the phenomenon by which audiences include information in the story over and above what is explicitly stated by the narrator. This paper argues that importation is distinct from generation, the phenomenon by which truth in fiction may outstrip what is made explicit, and draws a distinction between fictional truth and fictional records. The latter comprises the audience’s picture of what is true according to the narrator. The paper argues that importation into fictional records operates according (...) to principles that also govern ordinary conversation. An account of fictional records as a species of common ground information is proposed. Two sources of importation are described in detail, presupposition accommodation and conversational implicatures. It is shown that presuppositions are both mandatorily imported and mandatorily generated. By contrast, conversational implicatures are neither mandatorily imported nor mandatorily generated. The paper distinguishes conversational implicatures from contextual inferences. Both rely on background assumptions, yet conversational implicatures moreover depend on assumptions concerning Gricean cooperation. (shrink)

Evo-Devo exhibits a plurality of scientific “cultures” of practice and theory. When are the cultures acting—individually or collectively—in ways that actually move research forward, empirically, theoretically, and ethically? When do they become imperialistic, in the sense of excluding and subordinating other cultures? This chapter identifies six cultures – three /styles/ (mathematical modeling, mechanism, and history) and three /paradigms/ (adaptationism, structuralism, and cladism). The key assumptions standing behind, under, or within each of these cultures are explored. Characterizing the internal structure of (...) the cultures is necessary for understanding how they collaborate or compete, and how they are fragmented or integrated, in the rich interdisciplinary /trading zone/ (Galison 1997) of Evo-Devo. Evo-Devo is an important example of how science can progress through a radical plurality of perspectives and cultures. (shrink)

Geographic Information Science (GIS) is an interdisciplinary science aiming to detect and visually represent patterns in spatial data. GIS is used by businesses to determine where to open new stores and by conservation biologists to identify field study locations with relatively little anthropogenic influence. Products of GIS include topographic and thematic maps of the Earth’s surface, climate maps, and spatially referenced demographic graphs and charts. In addition to its social, political, and economic importance, GIS is of intrinsic philosophical interest due (...) to its methodological richness and because it is an instructive analogue to other sciences. This chapter works towards a philosophy of GIS and cartography, or PGISC. In particular, it examines practices of classifying geographic space, objects, and relations. By focusing on the use of natural kinds in data modeling and map generalization practices, I show how the making and using of kinds is contextual, fallible, plural, and purposive. (shrink)

Selectionist evolutionary theory has often been faulted for not making novel predictions that are surprising, risky, and correct. I argue that it in fact exhibits the theoretical virtue of predictive capacity in addition to two other virtues: explanatory unification and model fitting. Two case studies show the predictive capacity of selectionist evolutionary theory: parallel evolutionary change in E. coli, and the origin of eukaryotic cells through endosymbiosis.

A map is not its territory. Taking a map too seriously may lead to pernicious reification: map and world are conflated. As one family of cases of such reification, I focus on maps exuding the omphalos syndrome, whereby a centred location on the map is taken to be the world navel of, for instance, an empire. I build on themes from my book _When Maps Become the World_, in which I analogize scientific theories to maps, and develop the tools of (...) assumption archaeology and integration platforms. Here I argue that excavating assumptions helps fill cartographic silences, showing the limitations of perspectives often at war. Furthermore, integrating perspectives permits resisting imperial central or master images. A worthwhile future project would be a repository of world-navel maps, critically annotated with cultural context and imperial information. Mutual understanding may result from such an integration platform, perhaps implemented online or in a museum. (shrink)

As biobank research has become increasingly widespread within biomedical research, study-specific consent to each study, a model derived from research involving traditional interventions on human subjects, has for the sake of feasibility gradually given way to alternative consent models which do not require consent for every new study. Besides broad consent these models include tiered, dynamic, and meta-consent. However, critics have pointed out that it is normally not known at the time of enrolment in what ways samples deposited in a (...) biobank may be used in future research and that, for a consent to be informed, exactly this kind of knowledge is required. Therefore, there is an ongoing debate about the ethical acceptability of going for less than study-specific consent. In light of this debate we address the question of how to best protect participants against relevant risks and violations of autonomy. We apply the central aims of the informed consent process to the unique circumstances of biobank research where samples and data in many cases are stored for long periods of time and reused in subsequent studies. Thereby we are able to formulate a set of criteria focusing both on the risk of informational harm and the potential violation of participants’ values. We compare existing models of consent based on their ability to satisfy the criteria, and we find that the broad consent model offers the best level of protection for participants, although, it suffers from a few important deficiencies with regards to protection against participant value violations and long-term protection of autonomy, if it is applied without qualifications. For this reason, we propose modifications to the current broad consent model, in order to ensure that it provides protection of autonomy and participant values through strong ethical review and continuous communication. We conclude that a modified form of broad consent is ethically superior in biobank research, not only because it is most feasible but primarily because it offers the best available protection against the hazards facing research subjects in this form of research. (shrink)

Maps and mapping raise questions about models and modeling and in science. This chapter archives map discourse in the founding generation of philosophers of science (e.g., Rudolf Carnap, Nelson Goodman, Thomas Kuhn, and Stephen Toulmin) and in the subsequent generation (e.g., Philip Kitcher, Helen Longino, and Bas van Fraassen). In focusing on these two original framing generations of philosophy of science, I intend to remove us from the heat of contemporary discussions of abstraction, representation, and practice of science and thereby (...) see in a more distant and neutral light the many productive ways in which maps can stand in analytically for scientific theories and models. The chapter concludes by complementing the map analogy – i.e., a scientific theory is a map of the world – with a model analogy, viz., a scientific model is a vehicle for understanding. (shrink)

The ocean terrain spanning the globe is vast and complex—far from an immense flat plain of mud. To map these depths accurately and wisely, we must understand how cartographic abstraction and generalization work both in analog cartography and digital GIS. This chapter explores abstraction practices such as selection and exaggeration with respect to mapping the oceans, showing significant continuity in such practices across cartography and contemporary GIS. The role of measurement and abstraction—as well as of political and economic power, and (...) sexual and personal bias—in these sciences is illustrated by the biographies of Marie Tharp and Bruce Heezen, whose mapping of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge precipitated a paradigm shift in geology. (shrink)

In this essay, I undertake a critical phenomenological exposition of the conditions of ethical community as they present themselves in the light of the Anthropocene. I begin by approaching the present human condition by following Arendt in her considerations of what more recently has been termed the Anthropocene. I will take her notion of the process character of action as a lodestar in a so-called anarcheological reading of Aristotle that opens for a thinking of unbounded possibility and unbounded affinity and (...) that shows how Aristotle’s ethics, like so many other ethical and moral theories, is really a project of metaphysical closure in the face of the poignantly sensed, but theoretically marginalized, anarchic apertures of communitary life. To prepare for an ethics capable of perpetually affirming, rather than closing off, these anarchic apertures of the human condition, I bring the insights won in the anarcheological reading of Aristotle into conversation with accounts of the ethical responses presented by the Native American nation of the Crow towards the end of the 19th century, when they – in a sense not-dissimilar to what we now experience in the Anthropocene – faced the end of the world. I conclude by extracting from this some elements for a thinking of ethics at the end of worlds that affirms the unbounded apertures of human community. (shrink)

Denne artikel argumenterer for at når et vidnesbyrds uoprigtighed blokerer tilhørerens videnstilegnelse, kan dette svigt forklares som en form for upålidelighed. Dette motiverer et princip ifølge hvilket det er en nødvendig betingelse for viden via vidnesbyrd at vidnesbyrdet blev givet på en pålidelig basis. Et sådant krav adskiller sig fra andre pålidelighedskrav til viden via vidnesbyrd ved at indføre en snævrere opfattelse af sådan viden.

The goal of the present paper is to construct a formal explication of the pluralistic ignorance explanation of the bystander effect. The social dynamics leading to inaction is presented, decomposed, and modeled using dynamic epistemic logic augmented with ‘transition rules’ able to characterize agent behavior. Three agent types are defined: First Responders who intervene given belief of accident; City Dwellers, capturing ‘apathetic urban residents’ and Hesitators, who observe others when in doubt, basing subsequent decision on social proof. It is shown (...) how groups of the latter may end in a state of pluralistic ignorance leading to inaction. Sequential models for each agent type are specified, and their results compared to empirical studies. It is concluded that only the Hesitator model produces reasonable results. (shrink)

Selectionist evolutionary theory has often been faulted for not making novel predictions that are surprising, risky, and correct. I argue that it in fact exhibits the theoretical virtue of predictive capacity in addition to two other virtues: explanatory unification and model fitting. Two case studies show the predictive capacity of selectionist evolutionary theory: parallel evolutionary change in E. coli, and the origin of eukaryotic cells through endosymbiosis.

The naturalized metaphysics promoted by Ladyman and Ross, among others, is often described as (neo)-Quinean metaphysics. This association with Quine's naturalism can, however, give a misleading impression of the aims and commitments of this kind of naturalized metaphysics. Contrary to Quine, these naturalized metaphysicians endorse metaphysical realism and offer wholesale arguments in favor of the epistemic standing of science-based metaphysics. Accordingly, this naturalized metaphysics comes closer to Roy Wood Sellars's evolutionary naturalism, especially since the theory of evolution is central to (...) the criticism that naturalized metaphysics levels at nonnaturalized metaphysics. The paper argues that Sellars's naturalism is furthermore helpful (1) for explicating the naturalism of naturalized metaphysics, (2) for theorizing a more general naturalist basis for naturalized metaphysics, and (3) for suggesting where naturalized metaphysics is perhaps not naturalist enough, especially when it comes to considering the implications of the theory of evolution for its positive program. (shrink)

Andreas Stokke presents a comprehensive study of lying and insincere language use. He investigates how lying relates to other forms of insincerity and explores the kinds of attitudes that go with insincere uses of language. -/- Part I develops an account of insincerity as a linguistic phenomenon. Stokke provides a detailed theory of the distinction between lying and speaking insincerely, and accounts for the relationship between lying and deceiving. A novel framework of assertion underpins the analysis of various (...) kinds of insincere speech, including false implicature and forms of misleading with presuppositions, prosodic focus, and semantic incompleteness. -/- Part II sets out the relationship between what is communicated and the speaker's attitudes. Stokke develops the view of insincerity as a shallow phenomenon that is dependent on conscious attitudes rather than deeper motivations. The various of ways of speaking while being indifferent toward what one communicates are covered, and the phenomenon of 'bullshitting' is distinguished from lying and other forms of insincerity. Finally, an account of insincere uses of interrogative, imperative, and exclamative utterances is also given. (shrink)

This article examines the prosody and sequential organisation of repeats in French talk-in-interaction. Repeats in French are used for initiating repair, as well as for registering receipt. I show for two sequential contexts – after first pair parts and after second pair parts – that the action import of the repeat depends on its prosodic design; prosody allows participants to differentiate between repair-initiating and receipt-registering repeats. While questioning repeats make a response conditionally relevant, registering repeats do not – however, they (...) do not preclude a response either. Registering repeats are sometimes responded to with confirmation tokens, and sometimes not; when produced, such responses are a contingent possibility rather than an expectable second pair part. In the selection and design of confirmation tokens, participants distinguish between solicited and volunteered confirmations. The article relates these findings to prior research on repetition and sequence organisation in French and also in English, Russian and Finnish. (shrink)

The paper argues that the correct definition of lying is that to lie is to assert something one believes to be false, where assertion is understood in terms of the notion of the common ground of a conversation. It is shown that this definition makes the right predictions for a number of cases involving irony, joking, and false implicature. In addition, the proposed account does not assume that intending to deceive is a necessary condition on lying, and hence counts so-called (...) bald-faced lies as lies. (shrink)

Current debate and policy surrounding the use of genetic editing in humans often relies on a binary distinction between therapy and human enhancement. In this paper, we argue that this dichotomy fails to take into account perhaps the most significant potential uses of CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing in humans. We argue that genetic treatment of sporadic Alzheimer’s disease, breast- and ovarian-cancer causing BRCA1/2 mutations and the introduction of HIV resistance in humans should be considered within a new category of genetic protection (...) treatments. We find that if this category is not introduced, life-altering research might be unnecessarily limited by current or future policy. Otherwise ad hoc decisions might be made, which introduce a risk of unforeseen moral costs, and might overlook or fail to address some important opportunities. (shrink)

This letter addresses the editorial decision to publish the article, “Research on group differences in intelligence: A defense of free inquiry” (Cofnas, 2020). Our letter points out several critical problems with Cofnas's article, which we believe should have either disqualified the manuscript upon submission or been addressed during the review process and resulted in substantial revisions.

Seit fast 200 Jahren wird Clausewitz gelesen und interpretiert. Rasmus Beckmann erschließt seine Kriegstheorie den modernen Sozialwissenschaften. Dabei wird deutlich, dass sich Clausewitz keineswegs auf zwischenstaatliche Kriege beschränkt hat. Auch die asymmetrischen Kriege kann man durch seine Theorie besser analysieren und verstehen. Dies zeigt der Autor am Beispiel des Afghanistankrieges.

The Hare Psychopathy Checklist (PCL; Hare, Neumann, & Mokros 2018) scales are among the most widely used forensic assessment tools. Their perceived utility rests partly on their ability to assess stable personality traits indicative of a lack of conscience, which then facilitates behavioral predictions useful in forensic decisions. In this systematic review, we evaluate the empirical evidence behind 3 fundamental justifications for using the PCL scales in forensics, namely, that they are empirically predictive of (1) criminal behavior, (2) treatment outcomes, (...) and (3) a lack of conscience. We found the PCL scales can predict criminal behavior to a statistically significant degree, though with important limitations. We found no evidence of PCL psychopathy being predictive of treatment and rehabilitation outcomes. We found no evidence of PCL psychopathy being predictive of a lack of conscience. These findings disprove widespread beliefs about PCL psychopathy among forensic practitioners and questions the current and future role of the PCL scales in forensic settings. (shrink)

Threshold models and their dynamics may be used to model the spread of ‘behaviors’ in social networks. Regarding such from a modal logical perspective, it is shown how standard update mechanisms may be emulated using action models – graphs encoding agents’ decision rules. A small class of action models capturing the possible sets of decision rules suitable for threshold models is identified, and shown to include models characterizing best-response dynamics of both coordination and anti-coordination games played on graphs. We conclude (...) with further aspects of the action model approach to threshold dynamics, including broader applicability and logical aspects. Hereby, new links between social network theory, game theory and dynamic ‘epistemic’ logic are drawn. (shrink)

Naturalized metaphysics questions the epistemic legitimacy of the traditional methods of metaphysics and proposes that a metaphysics motivated by science will do better. The veracity of these two core commitments of naturalized metaphysics have been much debated over to last two decades. Instead of continuing this debate, this thesis investigates from a methodological perspective what follows if one takes these two claims for granted. The thesis argues (1) that, despite claims to the contrary, naturalized metaphysics has no resources with which (...) to answer the concerns that the logical positivists had about metaphysics; (2) that naturalized metaphysics – contrary to what might be expected – is hospitable to certain kinds of resistance to science from metaphysicians; (3) that naturalized metaphysics cannot both be a genuine exercise in metaphysics and inherit the epistemic legitimacy of science; and (4) that even the naturalized metaphysics of fundamental science could have consequences for social ontology. In addition to these concrete interventions, the thesis gives a comprehensive account of the foundational claims of naturalized metaphysics including how they relate to those of other naturalisms and other recent trends in metametaphysics such as neo-Carnapian metaphysics. (shrink)

This essay argues that the distinction between lying and misleading while not lying is sensitive to discourse structure. It shows that whether an utterance is a lie or is merely misleading sometimes depends on the topic of conversation, represented by so-called questions under discussion. It argues that to mislead is to disrupt the pursuit of the goal of inquiry—that is, to discover how things are. Lying is seen as a special case requiring assertion of disbelieved information, where assertion is characterized (...) as a mode of contributing information to a discourse that is sensitive to the state of the discourse itself. The resulting account is applied to a number of ways of exploiting the lying-misleading distinction, involving conversational implicature, incompleteness, presuppositions, and prosodic focus. The essay shows that assertion, and hence lying, is preserved from subquestion to superquestion under a strict entailment relation between questions, and it discusses ways of lying and misleading in relation to multiple questions. (shrink)

G. A. Cohen argues that egalitarians should compensate for expensive tastes or for the fact that they are expensive. Ronald Dworkin, by contrast, regards most expensive tastes as unworthy of compensation — only if a person disidentifies with his own such tastes (i.e. wishes he did not have them) is compensation appropriate. Dworkinians appeal, inter alia, to the so-called ‘first-person’ or ‘continuity’ test. According to the continuity test, an appropriate standard of interpersonal comparison reflects people's own assessment of their relative (...) standing: Person A can only legitimately demand compensation from person B if he regards himself as worse off, all things considered, than B. The typical bearer of expensive tastes does not regard herself as being worse off than others with less expensive tastes. Hence, in the typical case, pace Cohen, compensation for expensive tastes is inappropriate. The article scrutinizes this rationale for not compensating for expensive tastes. Especially, we try to bolster the continuity test by relating it to Dworkin's distinction between integrated and detached values, pointing out that an argument for the continuity test can be built on the assumption that equality has integrated value. In brief, the point is that a metric of equality should be assessed, partly, in virtue of its consequences for related ideals. One of these is the kind of justificatory community promoted by the continuity test. We defend this view against an objection to the effect that equality is a detached value. We conclude that the continuity test constitutes a strong foothold for the resourcist egalitarian reluctance to compensate people for their expensive tastes. (shrink)

Hintikka’s Knowledge and Belief from 1962 is considered the seminal treatise on epistemic logic. It provides the nuts and bolts of what is now a flourishing paradigm of significance to philosophy, economics, mathematics and theoretical computer science—in theory as well as practice. And in theory and for practice epistemic logic has been extensively articulated, refined and developed especially with respect to capturing the dynamics of reasoning about knowledge. But although the robust narrative about Hintikka’s epistemic logic is rather static, the (...) leap to dynamic epistemic logic is right there back in 1962 as this paper will show. (shrink)

A number of authors have argued that the fact that certain indexicals depend for their reference-determination on the speaker’s referential intentions demonstrates the inadequacy of associating such expressions with functions from contexts to referents (characters). By distinguishing between different uses to which the notion of context is put in these argument, I show that this line of argument fails. In the course of doing so, I develop a way of incorporating the role played by intentions into a character-based semantics for (...) indexicals and I argue that the framework I prefer is superior to an alternative which has been proposed by others. (shrink)

Background Seven wards from three Norwegian mental health care institutions participated in a study in which regular ethics reflection groups focusing on coercion had been implemented and evaluated. This article presents a thematic overview of the ethical challenges identified based on a systematic qualitative analyses of 161 ethics reflection groups and some general observations on these ethical challenges. Results The ethical challenges are divided into four main thematic categories: formal coercion, informal coercion, uncertainty related to the Norwegian legislation on coercion (...) and professional role and identity. Some ethical challenges did not fit into these categories. Only 36% of the ethical challenges were related to the use of formal coercion or the interpretation of the health law. Conclusion Even within coercion regulated by law, weighing different moral values remains important to reflect upon the appropriateness of the possible use of coercion. (shrink)

Abstract:This paper examines how second home users perceive their own and aggregate impacts on the environment, while also exploring the justifications they give for such impacts. We combine findings from two Norwegian studies. We find that second home users tend to perceive their own use as less environmentally detrimental than the average use. Positive perceptions about own impacts can partially be explained by the standard of second homes and number of years with access to it. Negative perceptions of aggregate impacts (...) can likewise partially be explained by standard and years with access. Interviewees often justify impacts by relating to popular arguments presented in media and literature. Taking point of departure in a second home perspective, these findings are new to research, but support previous research from tourism studies. Our findings highlight the importance of narratives surrounding second home use and their ability to affect peoples’ perceptions about the environmental friendliness of second homes. (shrink)

This paper argues for an account of insincerity in speech according to which an utterance is insincere if and only if it communicates something that does not correspond to the speaker's conscious attitudes. Two main topics are addressed: the relation between insincerity and the saying-meaning distinction, and the mental attitude underlying insincere speech. The account is applied to both assertoric and non-assertoric utterances of declarative sentences, and to utterances of non-declarative sentences. It is shown how the account gives the right (...) results for a range of cases. (shrink)

This paper is about some of the ways in which people sometimes speak while be- ing indifferent toward what they say. We argue that what Harry Frankfurt called ‘bullshitting’ is a mode of speech marked by indifference toward inquiry, the coop- erative project of reaching truth in discourse. On this view bullshitting is character- ized by indifference toward the project of advancing inquiry by making progress on specific subinquiries, represented by so-called questions under discussion. This ac- count preserves the central (...) insight of Frankfurt’s influential analysis of bullshitting in seeing the characteristic of bullshitting as indifference toward truth and falsity. Yet we show that speaking with indifference toward truth is a wider phenomenon than the one Frankfurt identified. The account offered in this paper thereby agrees with various critics of Frankfurt who argue that bullshitting is compatible with not being indifferent toward the truth-value of one’s assertions. Further, we argue that, while bullshitting and lying are not mutually exclusive, most lies are not instances of bullshitting. The account thereby avoids the problem that Frankfurt’s view ulti- mately is insufficient to adequately distinguish bullshitting and lying. (shrink)

The last decade has seen an increasing number of references to quantum mechanics in the humanities and social sciences. This development has in particular been driven by Karen Barad’s agential realism: a theoretical framework that, based on Niels Bohr’s interpretation of quantum mechanics, aims to inform social theorizing. In dealing with notions such as agency, power, and embodiment as well as the relation between the material and the discursive level, the influence of agential realism in fields such as feminist science (...) studies and posthumanism has been profound. However, no one has hitherto paused to assess agential realism’s proclaimed quantum mechanical origin including its relation to the writings of Niels Bohr. This is the task taken up here. We find that many of the implications that agential realism allegedly derives from a Bohrian interpretation of quantum mechanics dissent from Bohr’s own views and are in conflict with those of other interpretations of quantum mechanics. Agential realism is at best consistent with quantum mechanics and consequently, it does not capture what quantum mechanics in any strict sense implies for social science or any other domain of inquiry. Agential realism may be interesting and thought provoking from the perspective of social theorizing, but it is neither sanctioned by quantum mechanics nor by Bohr’s authority. This conclusion not only holds for agential realism in particular, it also serves as a general warning against the other attempts to use quantum mechanics in social theorizing. (shrink)

This article discusses recent work on lying and its relation to deceiving and misleading. Two new developments in this area are considered: first, the acknowledgment of the phenomenon of lying without the intent to deceive , and second, recent work on the distinction between lying and merely misleading. Both are discussed in relation to topics in philosophy of language, the epistemology of testimony, and ethics. Critical surveys of recent theories are offered and challenges and open questions for further research are (...) indicated. (shrink)

This paper defends a version of the realist view that fictional characters exist. It argues for an instance of abstract realist views, according to which fictional characters are roles, constituted by sets of properties. It is argued that fictional names denote individual concepts, functions from worlds to individuals. It is shown that a dynamic framework for understanding the evolution of discourse information can be used to understand how roles are created and develop along with story content. Taking fictional names to (...) denote individual concepts provides accounts of a number of uses of fictional names. These include non-fictional uses, fictional uses, metafictional uses, interfictional uses, counterfictional uses, and negative existentials. It is argued that this account is not open to objections that have been raised in the literature. (shrink)

Distance, it is often argued, is the only coherent and empirically adequate world-making relation that can glue together the elements of the world. This paper offers entanglement as an alternative world-making relation. Entanglement is interesting since it is consistent even with quantum gravity theories that do not feature space at the fundamental level. The paper thereby defends the metaphysical salience of such non-spatial theories. An account of distance is the predominant problem of empirical adequacy facing entanglement as a world-making relation. (...) A resolution of this obstacle utilizes insights from the Ryu–Takayanagi formula and Susskind and Maldacena’s related ER = EPR conjecture. Together these indicate how distance can be recovered from entanglement and thus carves the way for entanglement fundamentalism. (shrink)

Building on a phenomenological analysis of the Tunisian Revolution, this article puts forward the concept of critical experience as a type of experience in which the very experiential structures prove subversive of otherwise established orders (e.g. political, ethical, technological, epistemological etc.). In order to trace the anarchic, but generative impulses of such critical experience, the article develops a variation of the phenomenological reduction called an anarcheological reduction. In the anarcheological reduction, registers of critical experience are accessed in which the aforementioned (...) anarchic impulses elicit a constitutive quasi-transcendental structuring of fields of possible experience. In order to describe the always singular, contingent trajectories along which such quasi-transcendental structuring takes place, the term generative vector is introduced. The article concludes by specifying how the quasi-transcendental registers accessed in the anarcheological reduction are different from other quasi-transcendental registers and accordingly suggesting this type of reduction as a valuable methodological supplement in critical phenomenology. (shrink)

Responding to parts of Sorensen, it is argued that the connectives therefore and but do not contribute conventional implicatures, but are rather to be treated as presupposition triggers. Their special contributions are therefore not asserted, but presupposed. Hence, given the generic assumption that one lies only if one makes an assertion, one cannot lie with arguments in the way Sorensen proposes. Yet, since conventional implicatures are asserted, one can lie with conventional implicatures. Moreover, since conventional implicatures may be asserted by (...) non-declarative utterances, one can lie by uttering non-declaratives carrying conventional implicatures. (shrink)

The pre-modern world was one of gross inequalities and abject poverty. Yet, over the last two hundred years, social investments have unlocked the productive capacity and imagination of billions (Li...

Blandt de værker, der er overleveret under Platons navn, er den forholdsvis ukendte Theages. Det er en ganske kort dialog, som ikke desto mindre behandler et kernespørgsmål i Platons forfatterskab: Hvordan opnår man visdom? Den har tydelige referencer til en række kendte passager i Platons værk, fx iForsvarstalen, Symposion, Staten og Theaitetos. Desuden viser den nogle af de berømteste sider af Platons Sokrates: Hans guddommelige tegn, hans særlige ironi, hans forhold til sofisterne og til de mennesker, der vil følge ham. (...) Dialogen er både filosofisk og litterært vanskelig at fortolke og er ofte blevet anset for uægte. Den platoniske dialog Theages giver en oversættelse af dialogen, gennemgår dens forskningshistorie og fortolker den gennem en omhyggelig læsning og en diskussion af dens vigtigste temaer. Bogen viser, hvordan de sidste århundreders forskning direkte eller indirekte har været afhængig af spørgsmålet om ægthed. I modsætning hertil argumenterer forfatteren for, at den rette forståelse af dialogen bedst findes på baggrund af Platons samlede værk, uafhængigt af forfatterspørgsmålet. Således giver bogen også et overblik over den nyere Platon-forskning og en indføring i en række væsentlige temaer hos Platon. (shrink)

This thesis is on information dynamics modeled using *dynamic epistemic logic*. It takes the simple perspective of identifying models with maps, which under a suitable topology may be analyzed as *topological dynamical systems*. It is composed of an introduction and six papers. The introduction situates DEL in the field of formal epistemology, exemplifies its use and summarizes the main contributions of the papers.Paper I models the information dynamics of the *bystander effect* from social psychology. It shows how augmenting the standard (...) machinery of DEL with a decision making framework yields mathematically self-contained models of dynamic processes, a prerequisite for rigid model comparison.Paper II extrapolates from Paper I's construction, showing how the augmentation and its natural peers may be construed as maps. It argues that under the restriction of dynamics produced by DEL dynamical systems still falls a collection rich enough to be of interest. Paper III compares the approach of Paper II with *extensional protocols*, the main alternative augmentation to DEL. It concludes that both have benefits, depending on application. In favor of the DEL dynamical systems, it shows that extensional protocols designed to mimic simple, DEL dynamical systems require infinite representations. Paper IV focuses on *topological dynamical systems*. It argues that the *Stone topology* is a natural topology for investigating logical dynamics as, in it, *logical convergence* coinsides with topological convergence. It investigates the recurrent behavior of the maps of Papers II and III, providing novel insigths on their long-term behavior, thus providing a proof of concept for the approach.Paper V lays the background for Paper IV, starting from the construction of metrics generalizing the Hamming distance to infinite strings, inducing the Stone topology. It shows that the Stone topology is unique in making logical and topological convergens coinside, making it the natural topology for logical dynamics. It further includes a metric-based proof that the hitherto analyzed maps are continuous with respect to the Stone topology. Paper VI presents two characterization theorems for the existence of *reduction laws*, a common tool in obtaining complete dynamic logics. In the compact case, continuity in the Stone topology characterizes existence, while a strengthening is required in the non-compact case. The results allow the recasting of many logical dynamics of contemporary interest as topological dynamical systems. (shrink)

In this paper, we argue that what is often discussed under the umbrella of `spacetime emergence' in the philosophy of quantum gravity in fact consists of a plethora of distinct and even highly different problems. We therefore advocate to cast such debates more specifically in terms of the emergent spatiotemporal aspects, as is already done in the physics literature. We first show how ambiguous the notion of spacetime is already in general relativity. We then argue against three ways to reject (...) our call for specificity: the many distinct philosophical problems relating to the emergence of the various spatiotemporal aspects do not suggest any singular, overarching, or exceptional problem of spacetime emergence. We also discuss how the objections are reflected by five conceptions of spacetime. Next, we observe that different spatiotemporal aspects are emergent in the different quantum gravity approaches, whereby investigating emergence in quantum gravity collectively is problematic. Finally, we illustrate how philosophical inquiries that employ notions of spacetime emergence are aided by conducting the investigation at the level of specific spatiotemporal aspects. (shrink)