Recent work in relevance-theoretic pragmatics develops the idea that understanding verbal utterances involves processes of ad hoc concept construction. The resulting concepts may be narrower or looser than the lexical concepts which provide the input to the process. Two of the many issues that arise are considered in this paper: (a) the applicability of the idea to the understanding of metaphor, and (b) the extent to which lexical forms are appropriately thought of as encoding concepts.

Situation theorists such as Jon Barwise, John Etchemendy, and John Perry have advanced the hypothesis that linguistic and mental representations are ‘situated' in the sense that they are true or false only relative to partial situations. François Recanati has done an important task in reviving and in many respects deepening situation theory. In this chapter, I explore some aspects of Recanati's own account. I focus on situated mental representations, and stress the connection between them and ad hoc or temporary (...) class='Hi'>concepts. (shrink)

Ad hoc concepts are highly-context dependent representations humans construct to deal with novel or uncommon situations and to interpret linguistic stimuli in communication. In the last decades, such concepts have been investigated both in experimental cognitive psychology and within pragmatics by proponents of so-called relevance theory. These two research lines have however proceeded in parallel, proposing two unconnected strategies to account for the construction and use of ad hoc concepts. The present work explores the relations between these (...) two approaches and the possibility of merging them into a unique account of the internal structure of ad hoc representations and of the key processes involved in their constructions. To this purpose, we first present an integrated two-level account of the construction of ad hoc representations from lexical concepts; then, we show how our account can be embedded in a conceptual space framework that allows for a natural, geometrical interpretation of the main steps in such a construction process. After discussing in detail two main examples of the construction of ad hoc concepts within conceptual spaces, we conclude with some remarks on possible extensions of our approach. (shrink)

Our utterances are typically if not always "situated," in the sense that they are true or false relative to unarticulated parameters of the extra-linguistic context. The problem is to explain how these parameters are determined, given that nothing in the uttered sentences indicates them. It is tempting to claim that they must be determined at the level of thought or intention. However, as many philosophers have observed, thoughts themselves are no less situated than utterances. Unarticulated parameters need not be mentally (...) represented. In this paper, I try to make precise the notion of representation at stake here. In one sense of 'representation', something is represented if it is inferentially relevant. In another, less demanding sense, something is represented if it is relevant to the construction of a context-sensitive, ad hoc concept. Ad hoc concepts act as "proxies" for cognitively more demanding representations. They "imitate" the latter's epistemic and pragmatic roles while being inferentially less sophisticated. Thus, there are two senses in which a thought can be said to be situated: (1) its truth-value is relative to a non-represented contextual parameter, (2) its truth-value is not itself relative, but it involves a context-sensitive, ad hoc concept. (shrink)

In relevance-theoretic pragmatics thelower-levelorfirst-order explicatureis a propositional form resulting from a series of inferential developments of the logical form. It amounts to the message the speaker communicates explicitly. Thehigher-levelorsecond-order explicatureis a description of the speech act that the speaker performs, her affective attitude towards what she says or her epistemic stance to the communicated information. Information about the speaker’s affective attitude or epistemic stance need not solely be represented in the latter, though. It could be included as beliefs in the (...) mental files of pragmatically adjusted conceptual representations featuring in lower-level explicatures. Those beliefs would originate as lexical pragmatic processes operate and their representation would be triggered by elements like evaluative morphemes, expressive expletives, insulting terms and evidential participles. Although they may be true or false in their own right, such beliefs would not affect the truth-conditional content of the expressed proposition. (shrink)

I propose that an account of metaphor understanding which covers the full range of cases has to allow for two routes or modes of processing. One is a process of rapid, local, on-line concept construction that applies quite generally to the recovery of word meaning in utterance comprehension. The other requires a greater focus on the literal meaning of sentences or texts, which is metarepresented as a whole and subjected to more global, reflective pragmatic inference. The questions whether metaphors convey (...) a propositional content and what role imagistic representation plays receive somewhat different answers depending on the processing route. (shrink)

Ad hoc concepts feature prominently in lexical pragmatics. A speaker can use a word or phrase to communicate an ad hoc concept that is different from the lexically encoded concept and the hearer can construct the intended ad hoc concept pragmatically during utterance comprehension. I argue that some philosophical concepts have origins as ad hoc concepts, and such concepts pose a challenge for experimental philosophy regarding these concepts. To illustrate this, I consider philosophers’ ‘what-it’s-like’-concepts (...) and experimental philosophy of consciousness. (shrink)

How do we construct ad hoc concepts, especially those characterised by emergent properties? A reasonable hypothesis, suggested both in psychology and in pragmatics , is that some sort of inferential processing must be involved. I argue that this inferential processing can be accounted for in associative terms. My argument is based on the notion of inference as associative pattern completion based on schemata, with schemata being conceived in turn as patterns of concepts and their relationships. The possible role (...) of conscious attention in inferential processes of this sort is also addressed. (shrink)

Recently, Casasanto and Lupyan (2015) have proposed an appealing and daring thesis: there are no context-independent concepts—that is, all concepts are ad hoc concepts. They argue that the seeming stability of concepts is merely due to commonalities across their different instantiations but that, in fact, there is nothing invariant in them. In their view, concepts only exist when they are instantiated for categorizing, communicating, drawing inferences, etc., and those instantiations are produced on the fly from (...) a set of contextual cues. However, the main weakness of Casasanto and Lupyan’s framework is that it lacks a proposal for articulating it within a theory on the structure of concepts. My aim is to show that the ad hoc cognition framework can be characterized by means of a prototype theory of concepts developed in terms of a conceptual similarity space. (shrink)

All of us, including scientists, make judgments about what is true or false, probable or improbable. And in the process, we frequently appeal to concepts such as evidential support or explanation. Bayesian philosophers of science have given illuminating formal accounts of these concepts. This paper aims to follow in their footsteps, providing a novel formal account of various additional concepts: the likelihood-prior trade-off, successful accommodation of evidence, ad hocness, and, finally, consilience—sometimes also called “unification”. Using these accounts, (...) I also provide a new Bayesian analysis of how someone such as Charles Darwin hypothetically could have reasoned in favor of evolution over special creationism. Lastly, I explore how these accounts relate to other topics and accounts in philosophy, and I chart out some areas for further research. (shrink)

What does it mean for a hypothesis to be ad hoc? One prominent account has it that ad hoc hypotheses have no independent empirical support. Others have viewed ad hoc judgements as subjective. Here I critically review both of these views and defend my own Coherentist Conception of Ad hocness by working out its conceptual and descriptive attractions.

Relevance Theory makes one of the strongest defenses of the thesis of local linguistic underdetermination. According to this thesis, the intuitive concept expressed by a lexical item in the utterance of a sentence is an ad hoc concept. Ad hoc concepts result from a linguistically free pragmatic process. The postulation of ad hoc concepts is due to the fact that the sort of cognitive organization they introduce is held as necessary to satisfy the demands that, for this Theory, (...) imposes the understanding of intuitive concepts. Here I propose that our cognitive system can satisfy these demands without tolerating propositions basically determined by ad hoc concepts. I also suggest that the information provided by ad hoc concepts is dispensable for the understanding of intuitive concepts. Finally, I propose a local lexical position according to which, the intuitive concept expressed by a lexical item is the concept lexically associated with that item. (shrink)

What is wrong with ad hoc hypotheses? Ever since Popper’s falsificationist account of adhocness, there has been a lively philosophical discussion about what constitutes adhocness in scientific explanation, and what, if anything, distinguishes legitimate auxiliary hypotheses from illicit ad hoc ones. This paper draws upon distinct examples from pseudoscience to provide us with a clearer view as to what is troubling about ad hoc hypotheses. In contrast with other philosophical proposals, our approach retains the colloquial, derogative meaning of adhocness, and (...) calls attention to the way in which the context of a theoretical move bears on the charge of adhocness. We also discuss the role of motivations implicit in the concept of adhocness, and the way ad hoc moves draw on theory-internal rationalizations. (shrink)

I introduce a thin concept of ad hoc identity -- distinct from metaphysical accounts of either relative identity or absolute identity -- and an equally thin account of concepts and their content. According to the latter minimalist view of concepts, the content of a concept has behavioral consequences, and so content can be bounded if not determined by appeal to linguistic and psychological evidence. In the case of counting practices, this evidence suggests that the number concept depends on (...) a notion of identity at least as strong as ad hoc identity. In the context of nonrelativistic QM in particular, all of the counting procedures appealed to in the existing literature on nonindividuality are shown to involve ad hoc identity. I then show that Goyal Complementarity and the associated derivation of a strong symmetrization principle in QM can be understood in terms ad hoc identity. Specifically, persistence and non-persistence models of quantum processes are seen to be complementary in the sense that they involve two relations of ad hoc identity that occasionally overlap in empirically meaningful ways. Finally, I attempt to draw out consequences for theories of nonindividuality from the above conceptual analysis. The upshot is that counting and definite cardinality are incompatible with nonindividuality, and that none of the counting procedures cited for quantum phenomena offer positive support for an interpretation in terms of nonindividuals. (shrink)

Science is increasingly becoming automated. Tasks yet to be fully automated include the conjecturing, modifying, extending and testing of hypotheses. At present scientists have an array of methods to help them carry out those tasks. These range from the well-articulated, formal and unexceptional rules to the semi-articulated and variously understood rules-of-thumb and intuitive hunches. If we are to hand over at least some of the aforementioned tasks to machines, we need to clarify, refine and make formal, not to mention computable, (...) even the more obscure of the methods scientists successfully employ in their inquiries. The focus of this essay is one such less-than-transparent methodological rule. I am here referring to the rule that ad hoc hypotheses ought to be spurned. This essay begins with a brief examination of some notable conceptions of ad hoc-ness in the philosophical literature. It is pointed out that there is a general problem afflicting most such conceptions, namely the intuitive judgments that are supposed to motivate them are not universally shared. Instead of getting bogged down in what ad hoc-ness exactly means, I shift the focus of the analysis to one undesirable feature often present in alleged cases of ad hoc-ness. I call this feature the ‘monstrousness’ of a hypothesis. A fully articulated formal account of this feature is presented by specifying what it is about the internal constitution of a hypothesis that makes it monstrous. Using this account, a monstrousness measure is then proposed and somewhat sketchily compared with the minimum description length approach. (shrink)

It has been shown that the concept of ad hocness is ambiguous when applied to natural science. Here, it is established that a similar ambiguity is present also when the concept is applied in a philosophical debate. Neil Tennant’s proposal for solving Fitch’s paradox has been accused for being ad hoc several times, and he has presented several defenses. In this paper, it is established that ad hocness is never defined, although each author uses different notions of the concept. And (...) we see that no reason to adopt a certain notion is offered. (shrink)

I offer an account of ad hocness that explains why the adoption of an ad hoc auxiliary is accompanied by the disconfirmation of a hypothesis H. H must be conjoined with an auxiliary a′, which is improbable antecedently given H, while ~H does not have this disability. This account renders it unnecessary to require, for identifying ad hocness, that either a′ or H have a posterior probability less than or equal to 0.5; there are also other reasons for abandoning that (...) condition. I distinguish between formal ad hocness, which is bad in the probabilistic sense that it results in disconfirmation of H, and argumentative ad hocness, which actually involves bad reasoning on the part of a subject. The latter is what I call “not counting the cost.” This distinction allows us to see why the 0.5 condition appeared attractive in the first place. The concept of not counting the cost also has implications for other areas of research, including both a Bayesian concept of unfalsifiability and the classic epistemological question of the problem of the external world. (shrink)

Recently, Casasanto and Lupyan (2015) have asserted that there are no context-independent concepts: all concepts are constructed ad hoc when they are instantiated. My aim is to show that the ad hoc cognition framework can be characterized by a similarity-based theory of concepts, and that two different notions of concept should be distinguished —which may be identified with two distinct stages of their life cycle (storage and instantiation). This approach brings together virtues from opposing views: (a) invariantist: (...) stored concepts are stable enough to collect new information; (b) contextualist: instantiated concepts are context-dependent, what explains our adaptive ability to changing environments. (shrink)

Principle of equality of arms is part of fair trial concept, which encompasses several guarantees linked to the defence opportunities during the criminal procedure. The accused person is entitled to a fair trial. Balance of rights between the parties is bedrock for procedural fairness and the judge has to perform his competence in providing all necessary preconditions as for the trial to be fair. There are differences between interpretation and implementation of equality of arms in the jurisprudence of European court (...) on human rights and international criminal courts. Decisions of ECtHR are much more similar with domestic understanding of equality of arms as reasonable opportunity of the defence to present the case without disadvantages vis-à-vis the prosecutor, due to inherent inequity between the parties. When analyzing proceeding before the ad hoc Tribunals, there is “more liberal interpretation” of this principle, which allowed the Prosecutor to invoke equality of arms, as well. ICTY Trial Chamber in Aleksovski case concluded that application of the concept of a fair trial in favor of both parties is understandable because the Prosecution acts on behalf of and in the interests of the international community, including the interests of the victims of the offence charged and also has held that it is difficult to see how a trial could ever be considered to be fair where the accused is favored at the expense of the Prosecution. This interpretation has been justified with dependence of the international Tribunals on state cooperation and due to the fact that international criminal courts have no autonomous enforcement agencies at their disposal. Fortunately, ICC Statute considered equality of arms as solely afforded to the defence, or to the Prosecutor on the behalf of accused. (shrink)

In this article I analyse object labelling image macro internet memes as multimodal metaphors, taking the Distracted Boyfriend meme as a case study. Object labelling memes are multimodal texts in which users add labels to a stock photograph to convey messages that are often humorous or satirical in nature. Using the relevance-theoretic account of metaphor, I argue that object labelling memes are multimodal metaphors which are interpreted using the same processes as verbal metaphors. The labelling of the image guides the (...) viewer in the construction of ad hoc concepts, and it is these ad hoc concepts that contribute to the overall meaning that is communicated. The analysis in this article is rooted in the relevance-theoretic claim that pragmatic interpretive processes are triggered by all and any ostensive acts of communication. I also draw heavily on Deirdre Wilson’s work on lexical pragmatics to show how this plays out in the case of a multimodal digital text. Memes, like verbal metaphors, do not require a special theory or framework. They can be understood as ostensive stimuli which trigger the search for an optimally relevant interpretation. (shrink)

In this article I analyse object labelling image macro internet memes as multimodal metaphors, taking the Distracted Boyfriend meme as a case study. Object labelling memes are multimodal texts in which users add labels to a stock photograph to convey messages that are often humorous or satirical in nature. Using the relevance-theoretic account of metaphor, I argue that object labelling memes are multimodal metaphors which are interpreted using the same processes as verbal metaphors. The labelling of the image guides the (...) viewer in the construction of ad hoc concepts, and it is these ad hoc concepts that contribute to the overall meaning that is communicated. The analysis in this article is rooted in the relevance-theoretic claim that pragmatic interpretive processes are triggered by all and any ostensive acts of communication. I also draw heavily on Deirdre Wilson’s work on lexical pragmatics to show how this plays out in the case of a multimodal digital text. Memes, like verbal metaphors, do not require a special theory or framework. They can be understood as ostensive stimuli which trigger the search for an optimally relevant interpretation. (shrink)

Invariantists argue that the notion of concept in psychology should be reserved for knowledge that is retrieved in a context-insensitive manner. Contextualists argue that concepts are to be understood in terms of context-sensitive ad hoc constructions. I review the central empirical evidence for and against both views and show that their conclusions are based on a common mischaracterization of both theories. When the difference between contextualism and invariantism is properly understood, it becomes apparent that the way the question of (...) stability is currently investigated will not lead to a consensus. Instead of focusing directly on stability, we should turn our attention to other desiderata on a theory of concepts. In particular, I show that invariantism, but not contextualism, fails to account for compositionality and abstract concepts. (shrink)

Although we have gained great insight into the variety of cultural influences on emotion concept prototypes from a plethora of studies examining such cross-cultural effects, there has been relatively little academic focus on the nature of emotion concept prototypes within a cultural perspective. Our discussion of the nature of emotion concept prototypes centres on essentialist versus non-essentialist principles. We argue that at a general, decontextualised level, essentialist and non-essentialist principles predict similarity in the structure of emotion concept prototypes. We further (...) argue that context is central in assessments of the nature of emotion concept prototypes from a cultural perspective. Rather than asking how emotion concept prototypes differ as a consequence of how certain influences might vary from one culture to another, a key question is whether emotion concept prototypes vary in different contexts within and between cultures and what this might inform us about the nature of emotion concept prototypes. (shrink)

This article aims tt providing some conceptual tools for dealing adequately with relevance in argumentative discourse. For this purpose, argumentative relevance is defined as a functional interactional relation between certain elements in the discourse. In addition to the distinction between interpretive and evaluative relevance that can be traced in the literature, analytic relevance is introduced as an intermediary concept. In order to classify the various problems of relevance arising in interpreting, analyzing and evaluating argumentative discourse, a taxonomy is proposed in (...) which the concept of relevance is differentiated along three co-ordinate dimensions: object, domain and aspect. With the help of this taxonomy, it can be shown that the problems of evaluative relevance with which the standard approach to fallacies cannot satisfactory deal can be more systematically approached within a pragma-dialectical framework. This is demonstrated for the argumentum and hominem, which is erroneously treated as a homogenous type of relevance fallacy in logico-centric analyses, so that cases where this is not justified must be treated as ad hoc exceptions. (shrink)

In the West, the Estate Rights originated in the eleventh century, whereas in Lithuania they started to evolve only after the Wallachian Land Reform in 1557. The then state conventional rules and manners were gradually transformed into registered Country – seat rights. In the present rather concise paper an attempt has been made to present a picture of the development of Country – seat rights as a relatively independent law system and define its concept. The author has attempted to prove (...) that the rules of behaviour, introduced and observed in estates should be recognised as legal regulations for the following three reasons: (1) the publicly recognised exclusive Land property right and the right of the ownership of the people living on this land; (2) the rights were publicly registered in the Land, Castle (City) Law or Court books or in the books of the Tribunal. Thus they acquired official status; (3) the above-mentioned established estate rules were to be legally and obligatorily executed. Their realisation was guaranteed either with the help of the local power apparatus or, if needed, state compulsory measures could be applied. The Estate Rights in Lithuania in the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries comprised the following legal acts: (1) the act of inventory; (2) urban regulations and directions; (3) privileges granted to the owners by the rulers and special ordinances for the realisation of the given privileges; (4) the so-called “release papers/cards” (horty wolnosci) ; (5) the verdicts of the local Courts of Law; (6) the ownership of different objects on the estate ( the estate lands, mills, pubs, tar boiling pits, etc., including the people who could not act freely, rent treaties, foundations, wills with foundation forms legally included, by applying which the estates realised their constitutive cultural initiatives. The Estate Rights were defined as a system embracing the relations of obligatory conduct designed by the estate owner or his authorised institutions or officials. They were meant to maintain the order within the estate, to guarantee and realise the norms of different cultural initiatives as well. Being mostly ad hoc in their form, the Estate Regulations served both the private and public interest. The Estate Rights in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries in Lithuania were practiced alongside with other existing legal systems, i.e. the Statute Law, Towns and Canon laws, etc. They all reflected the autonomous state of different law subjects and regulated their relations emerging within. At the same time, the estate rules emphasised their relationship with the Statute Law and importance of legality when formulating their own local regulations. The author presumes that the historical mission of the Estate Rules was more important than the Statute Law for the following two reasons: (1) the estate rules regulated the conduct of the majority of the population (in 1971, 64% of the population lived on estates) and (2) estate rules were carried into effect more consistently and accurately. It was guaranteed by a huge number of estate administration personnel who had the right to immediately apply the local force apparatus measures in respect of the violator. The Statute Law was applied to a rather limited layer of the population (the nobility amounted to only 5 or 6% of the country’s population) . Due to the widespread lawlessness of the nobility and the weak administrative power the State Law was seldom applied. Thanks to its daily labor and obedience, the majority of the population absorbed the destructive effect of the nobility on the state. (shrink)

Recent scholarship has gone a long way toward placing Locke in his intellectual and historical context, and thus in coming to see the respect in which his work has a previously unacknowledged conceptual unity. There remains, however, some difficulty in reconciling the style, purpose and content of his two major works. The Essay Concerning Human Understanding is usually read as primarily concerned with issues in epistemology and philosophy of science, while the Two Treatises of Government is regarded as less systematically (...) rigorous, or at worst ad hoc political analysis. These two sides of Locke thus remain virtually unrelated fields of specialization among interpreters. ;My dissertation is a contribution to the project of understanding Locke's work as a connected whole; without attributing to him an attitude of scientific reductionism, I argue that the account which Locke gives of personal property in the Second Treatise bears an important relation to his account of qualities and personal identity in the Essay. Specifically, I try to make plausible the claim that there is in Locke a direct analogy between the property of a human person, on one hand, and the properties of a natural substance on the other. I suggest that Locke's methodological atomism in science and epistemology parallels his qualifiedly individualistic political theory, and thus that his claims about private property can be understood in terms of a broader philosophical context than is usually supposed. ;As part of a larger project concerning the genealogy of the concept of property and the relation between metaphysics and morality, I expect this work to have useful implications regarding much of contemporary moral and political theory. Given the historical influence of Locke's political work, a careful analysis of it in terms of its epistemological and scientific grounding should contribute to a rethinking of much twentieth century work on property and justice. (shrink)

It is traditionally thought that metaphorical utterances constitute a special— nonliteral—kind of departure from lexical constraints on meaning. Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson have been forcefully arguing against this: according to them, relevance theory’s comprehension/interpretation procedure for metaphorical utterances does not require details specifi c to metaphor (or nonliteral discourse); instead, the same type of comprehension procedure as that in place for literal utterances covers metaphors as well. One of Sperber and Wilson’s central reasons for holding this is that metaphorical (...) utterances occupy one end of a continuum that includes literal, loose and hyperbolic utterances with no sharp boundaries in between them. Call this the continuum argument about interpreting metaphors. My aim is to show that this continuum argument doesn’t work. For if it were to work, it would have an unwanted consequence: it could be converted into a continuum argument about interpreting linguistic errors, including slips of the tongue, of which malaprops are a special case. In particular, based on the premise that the literal–loose–metaphorical continuum extends to malaprops also, we could conclude that the relevance-theoretic comprehension procedure for malaprops does not require details specifi c to linguistic errors, that is, details beyond those already in place for interpreting literal utterances. Given that we have good reason to reject this conclusion, we also have good reason to rethink the conclusion of the continuum argument about interpreting metaphors and consider what additional (metaphor-specifi c) details—about the role of constraints due to what is lexically encoded by the words used—might be added to relevance-theoretic comprehension procedures. (shrink)

This article aims tt providing some conceptual tools for dealing adequately with relevance in argumentative discourse. For this purpose, argumentative relevance is defined as a functional interactional relation between certain elements in the discourse. In addition to the distinction between interpretive and evaluative relevance that can be traced in the literature, analytic relevance is introduced as an intermediary concept. In order to classify the various problems of relevance arising in interpreting, analyzing and evaluating argumentative discourse, a taxonomy is proposed in (...) which the concept of relevance is differentiated along three co-ordinate dimensions: object, domain and aspect. With the help of this taxonomy, it can be shown that the problems of evaluative relevance with which the standard approach to fallacies cannot satisfactory deal can be more systematically approached within a pragma-dialectical framework. This is demonstrated for the argumentum and hominem, which is erroneously treated as a homogenous type of relevance fallacy in logico-centric analyses, so that cases where this is not justified must be treated as ad hoc exceptions. (shrink)

Since the introduction of the concept of brain death by the Ad Hoc Committee of the Harvard Medical School to Examine the Definition of Brain Death in 1968, the validity of this concept has been challenged by medical scientists, as well as by legal, philosophical, and religious scholars. In light of increased criticism of the concept of brain death, Stephen Napier, a staff ethicist at the National Catholic Bioethics Center, set out to prove that the whole-brain death criterion serves as (...) good evidence for death in the Catholic bioethical framework, on the grounds that when whole-brain death has occurred the soul has already departed from the body. Opponents have argued that (1) brain death does not disrupt the somatic integrative unity and coordinated biological functioning of a living organism and (2) clinical tests outlined in the practice guidelines for determining brain death lack sufficient power to exclude persisting function and fail to detect elements of the brain that, although currently functionless, may retain potential for recovery under conditions of optimal medical care. It is therefore possible that heart-beating organ procurement from patients with impaired consciousness is de facto a concealed practice of active euthanasia and physician-assisted death, both of which, either concealed or overt, the Catholic Church opposes. (shrink)

The Phenomenal Concept Strategy is a popular strategy used to support physicalism in the realm of conscious experience. This Strategy accounts for dualist intuitions but uses the ways in which we think about our experiences to explain these intuitions in a physicalist framework, without any appeal to ontological dualism. In this paper, I will raise two issues related to the currently available versions of the Phenomenal Concept Strategy. First, most of the theories belonging to the Phenomenal Concept Strategy posit that (...) phenomenal concepts are exceptional and sui generis concepts, and these theories can be shown to be largely ad hoc. Second, these theories may explain the existence of anti-physicalist intuitions, but they do not explain their persistence. My aim is to put forward a new theory of phenomenal concepts that can rise up to these challenges to the Phenomenal Concept Strategy. In my view, phenomenal concepts are not independent and sui generis concepts. On the contrary, they are closely related to our other epistemic concepts, especially our concepts of “justification”. Thinking about an experience means thinking about a specific kind of justification – an unjustified justification, or, in other words, an “ultimate seeming”. I will show why this explains the existence and the persistence of antiphysicalist intuitions in a non-ad hoc way. (shrink)

Resumen: El objetivo de este trabajo es el análisis de los hispanismos e indigenismos que emplea el austríaco Karl Ritter von Scherzer en la descripción de un mercado local costarricense y se enmarca dentro de las investigaciones de incorporación de términos americanos en las lenguas europeas. El procedimiento utilizado para ello en este paper consiste en un gradiente creado mediante distintas metodologías de análisis filológicas, traductológicas y culturales. Los resultados arrojan indicios acerca de la domesticación o extranjerización de esas voces, (...) así como ponen de relieve que el viajero-científico es más que un mediador intercultural: es un traductor de tradiciones y conceptos.: The aim of this piece of work is to analyse the Hispanic and Indigenous words that are to be found in a German description of a market in Cartago written by Karl Ritter von Scherzer. In order to do that an ad hoc gradient will be applied. This analysis will show that there are some words that are either domesticated or foreignized, so as the traveller-scientist is more than an intercultural intermediary: he is a translator of traditions and concepts. (shrink)

Expressive adjectives or expressive expletives have been argued to voice the speaker’s attitude towards the referent of the noun with which they co-occur, even though the attitude may be felt to be expressed about the referent of another sentential constituent or the state of affairs alluded to in the sentence where they are inserted. A previous pragmatic approach suggests that this is possible because these expletives perform an individual speech act, while a syntactic approach posits a feature whose detachment from (...) a particular constituent enables the speaker’s attitude to target the referent of another sentential constituent or even on the entire proposition expressed. This paper proposes an alternative relevance-theoretic account of the interpretation of utterances containing expressive expletives, which considers pragmatic factors and the cognitive processes in comprehension. It is grounded in contributions on the output of lexical pragmatic processes and the role of paralinguistic clues in utterance comprehension. (shrink)

Why should Gordon Kaufman's mid-career theological method be of renewed interest to contemporary theists? Two distinguishing characteristics of the West today are its increasing religious pluralism and the growing numbers of theists who rely on hybrid approaches to construct concepts of God. Kaufman's method is well suited to this current state of affairs because it is open to diverse religious and theological perspectives and to perspectives from science and secular humanism. It also militates against the weaknesses inherent to hybrid (...) approaches—ad hoc constructs of God unable to motivate their holders to overcome human self-centeredness and so to contribute to the well-being and fulfillment of others. It achieves this by providing checks to reduce the risk of producing human-writ-large God-constructs. Lastly, Kaufman's method provides criteria to help theists identify humane and humanizing experiences, relationships, concepts, images, and texts (i.e., the basic material from which God-constructs are fashioned) from the plethora of options available, whether religious, cultural, or secular. (shrink)

The conventional historical account of the concept of brain death credits developments and discoveries of the twentieth century with its inception, emphasizing the role of technological developments and professional conferences, notably the 1968 Ad Hoc Committee of the Harvard Medical School to Examine the Definition of Brain Death. This essay argues that the French physician Eugène Bouchut anticipated the concept of brain death as early as 1846. Correspondence with Bouchut’s understanding of brain death and one important contemporary concept of brain (...) death is established then contrasted with current trends of defining death as the death of the brain. The philosophical factors that influenced Bouchut and the later developments of concepts of brain death are considered, with special reference to mechanistic philosophy and vitalism. (shrink)

Materialism/physicalism that generally dominates in the contemporary analytic philosophy is challenged by fairly powerful anti-materialist arguments, notably the zombie argument (most influentially defended by David Chalmers) and the knowledge argument (the most widely discussed version of which was advanced and defended by Frank Jackson). These arguments highlight the explanatory gap from the physical (which, if materialism is true, should constitute everything that exists, including consciousness) to phenomenal mental states, the principal impossibility to explain the latter by the former, and from (...) this conclude that phenomenal consciousness is not physical, and so materialism is false. Materialist philosophers attempt to neutralize these arguments in several ways, the most influential of which is the strategy of phenomenal concepts. This article analyzes the main points of this debate with a focus on the knowledge argument, examines and responds to the main objections to the knowledge argument — that it should be mistaken because the alternative is epiphenomenalism, which is unacceptable; that no new knowledge but only new capacities and/or acquaintance are involved; that the knowledge is the same but in different forms; that the knowledge argument affects only type physicalism but not token physicalism. The case is made that psychophysical identities assumed by a posteriori physicalism are unexplainable in principle, and the postulation of brute unexplainable psychophysical identities glossed over by the strategy of phenomenal concepts amounts to dogmatic commitment (motivated by scientism) to a view despite its apparent falsity and its unintelligibility (the impossibility to explain how it can be true), made less unpalatable by offering an ad hoc theory about the mindbrain arrangement that makes us unable to see how the view can be true. As opposed to this, the position of the supporters of the knowledge argument and the zombie argument can be seen as guided by the principle of rational trust in obviousness and our capacities of judgement. (shrink)

According to some views, natural language suffers from underdeterminacy, but thought doesn’t. According to the underdeterminacy claim, sentence types underdetermine the truth-conditions of sentence tokens. In particular, the semantics of a predicate type seems to underdetermine the satisfaction conditions of its tokens. By contrast, mental representation-types are supposed to determine the truth-conditions of its tokens. In this paper I critically examine these mixed views. First, I argue that the arguments supporting the indispensability of including in one’s theory mental representations that (...) are free of the underdeterminacy exhibited by natural language are not sound. As a result, the possibility that mental representation-types are as underdetermined as natural language sentence-types has not been ruled out. Second, I argue that Carston’s ad hoc concept-types are as underdetermined as word-types. I finish by arguing that mental representations are also underdetermined in a second sense—mental representation-tokens only determine a partial function from possible worlds to truth-values. (shrink)

Popper's account of refutation is the linchpin of his famous view that the method of science is the method of conjecture and refutation. This thesis critically examines his account of refutation, and in particular the practice he deprecates as avoiding a refutation. I try to explain how he comes to hold the views that he does about these matters; how he seeks to make them plausible; how he has influenced others to accept his mistakes, and how some of the ideas (...) or responses to Popper of such people are thus similarly mistaken. I draw some distinctions necessary to the provision of an adequate account of the so-called practice of avoiding a refutation, and try to rid the debate about this practice of at least one red herring. I analyse one case of 'avoiding' a refutation in detail to show how the rationality of scientific practice eludes both Popper and many of his commentators. Popper's skepticism about contingent knowledge prevents him from providing an acceptable account of contingent refutation, and so his method is really the method of conjecture and conjecture. He cannot do without the concepts of knowledge and refutation, however, if his account of science is to be plausible or persuasive, and so he equivocates between, amongst other things, refutation as disproof and refutation as the weaker notion of discorroboration. I criticise David Stove's account of this matter, in particular to show how he misses this point. An additional advantage Popper would secure from this equivocation is that if refutations were mere discorroborations they would be easier to achieve, and hence more common in science, than is the case. On Popper's weak notion of refutation, it would be possible to refute true theories since corroboration does not entail truth. There are two other related doctrines Popper holds about refutation which, if accepted, make some refutations seem easier to obtain than is the case. I call these doctrines 'Strong Popperian Falsificationism' (SPF) and 'Weak Popperian Falsificationism' (WPF). SPF is the false doctrine that if a prediction from some theory is refuted then that theory is refuted. Popper does not always endorse SPF. In particular, when confronted with a counterexample to it, he retreats to WPF, which is the false doctrine that if a prediction from some theory is refuted then that theory is prima facie refuted. WPF , or even SPF, can seem plausible if one has in mind predictions derived from theories in strong or conclusive tests of those theories, which I suggest Popper characteristically does. v Popper is disposed to describe any such case of predictive failure which does not lead to the refutation of the theory concerned as one in which that refutation has been avoided. To reinforce his portrayal of the refutation, or the attempted refutation, of major scientific theories as the rational core of scientific practice, Popper treats the so-called practice of avoiding a refutation as untypical of science, and much so-called avoidance he dismisses as unscientific or pseudo-scientific. I argue that his notion of avoiding a refutation is incoherent. Popper is further driven to believe that such avoidance is possible, however, because he conflates sentences with propositions and propositions with propositional beliefs. Also, he wishes to avoid being saddled with the relativisim that is a consequence of his weak account of refutation as discorroboration. Popper believes that ad hoc hypotheses are the most important of the unscientific means of avoiding a refutation. I argue that his account of such hypotheses is also incoherent, and that several hypotheses thought to be ad hoc in his sense are not. Such hypotheses appear to be so largely because of Popper's use of rhetoric and partly because these hypotheses are unacceptable for other reasons. I conclude that to know that a hypothesis is ad hoc in Popper's sense does not illuminate scientific practice. Popper has also attempted to explicate ad hocness in terms of some undesirable, or allegedly undesirable, properties of hypotheses or the explanations they would provide. The first such property is circularity, which is undesirable; the second such property is reduction in empirical content, which is not. In the former case I argue that non-circularity is clearly preferable to non-ad hocness as a criterion for a satisfactory explanation or explanans, as the case may be, and in the latter case that Popper is barking up the wrong tree. Some cases of so-called avoidance are obviously not unscientific. The discovery of Neptune from a prediction based on the reasonable belief that there were residual perturbations in the motion of Uranus is an important case in point, and one that is much discussed in the literature. The manifest failure of astronomers to account for Uranus's motion did not lead to the refutation of Newton's law of gravitiation, yet significant scientific progress obviously did result. Retreating to WPF, Popper claims that Newton's law was prima facie refuted. In general, astronomers have never shared this view, and they are correct in not doing so. I argue that the law of gravitation would have been prima facie refuted only if there had been good reason at the time to believe as false what is true, namely, that an unknown trans-Uranian planet was the cause of those Uranian residuals. Knowledge of the trans-Uranian region was then so slight that it was merely a convenient assumption, one which there was little reason to believe was false, that the known influences on Uranus's motion were the only such influences. I conclude that in believing vi or supposing that it was this assumption that was false, rather than the law of gravitation, Leverrier and Adams, the co-predictors of Neptune, were acting rationally and intelligently. Popper's commentators offer a variety of accounts of the alleged practice of avoiding a refutation, and of this case in particular. I analyse a sample of their accounts to show how common is the acceptance of some of Popper's basic mistakes, even amongst those who claim to reject his falsificationism, and to display the effects on their accounts of this acceptance of his mistakes. Many commentators recognize that anomalies are typically dealt with by changes in the boundary conditions or in other of the auxiliary propositions employed. Where many still go wrong, however, is in retaining the presupposition of WPF which encouraged Popper to hold the contradictory view about anomalies in the first place. Thus Imre Lakatos and others, for example, have developed a 'siege mentality' about major scientific theories; they see them as under continual threat of refutation from anomalies, and so come to believe that dogmatism is essential in science if such theories are to survive as they do. I examine various such doomed attempts to reconcile Popper with the history of science. It is a common failure in this literature to conflate or to fail to see the need to distinguish a belief from a supposition, and an epistemic reason from a pragmatic reason. I argue that only if one does draw these distinctions can one give an adequate account of how anomalies are rationally dealt with in science. The other important strand in Popper's thinking about 'avoidance' of refutation which has seriously misled some of his commentators is his unfounded belief in the dangers of ad hoc hypotheses. I examine the accounts that a sample of such commentators provide of the trans-Uranian planet hypotheses of Leverrier and Adams. These commentators imply or assert what Popper only hints at, namely, that there is something fishy about this hypothesis. I provide a further defence of the rationality of entertaining this hypothesis at the time. I conclude with a few remarks about Popper's dilemma in respect of scientific practice and his long standing emphasis on refutations. (shrink)

I argue that the conception of reflective equilibrium that is generally accepted in contemporary philosophy is defective and should be replaced with a conception of fruitful reflective disequilibrium which prohibits ad hoc manoeuvres, encourages new approaches, and eschews all justification in favour of continuous improvement. I suggest how the conception of fruitful disequilibrium can be applied more effectively to moral enquiry, to encourage genuine progress in moral knowledge, if we make moral theory empirically testable by adopting a meta-ethical postulate which (...) is independently plausible. (shrink)

Several authors have argued that, assuming we have apriori knowledge of our own thought-contents, semantic externalism implies that we can know apriori contingent facts about the empirical world. After presenting the argument, I shall respond by resisting the premise that an externalist can know apriori: If s/he has the concept water, then water exists. In particular, Boghossian's Dry Earth example suggests that such thought-experiments do not provide such apriori knowledge. Boghossian himself rejects the Dry Earth experiment, however, since it would (...) imply that externalism is true of empty concepts as well as non-empty concepts. Yet in this paper I respond by defending empty-concept externalism, from criticisms suggested by Boghossian and Brown, and recently developed further by Besson. My contention is that an externalist can give a non-ad hoc descriptivist account of empty concepts. Accordingly, apriori self-knowledge does not enable an externalist to know contingent features of the external world. (shrink)

In this paper, we discuss Lepore and Stone’s account of metaphor which is based on three of Davidson’s proposals: (i) the rejection of metaphorical meanings; (ii) the rejection of metaphors as conveying metaphorical propositional contents; and (iii) the defence of analogy as the key mechanism for understanding metaphors. Lepore and Stone defend these proposals because the non-sceptic strategy on metaphorical meanings, characterized in general by the negation of (i) and (ii), fails to come to grips with neither the power of (...) metaphor nor the explanatory resources of traditional pragmatic theories. In this paper we show not only how our non-sceptic account of metaphorical meaning as a variety of ad hoc concept eliminates these diffi culties but also how it can solve two related difficulties that appear in Lepore and Stone’s account. One of them is that Lepore and Stone’s account involves the possibility of interpreting all metaphorical utterances literally (metaphors only have one meaning, the ordinary meaning) as a criterion of metaphorical identification; the other is that their proposal is not suited for explaining how speakers can agree or disagree when they use metaphorical utterances. (shrink)

A sign of Sartre’s belated "coming of age" in professional, English-speaking philosophical circles is the recent shift from exposition to dialogue as analytic authors regard his contribution to current Anglo-American philosophical discussion. One of the interests, not to say obsessions, of analysis has been the philosophy of mind. The literature is vast, and alternative positions have been charted in detail. It is a virtue of Professor Morris’ book that she has mastered a respectable portion of the analytic terrain. Her treatment (...) of Sartre is limited to the writings up to and including Being and Nothingness. The statement of the question is analytic, the response Sartrean. Her assessment of the exchange is that "the concept of a person to be found in Sartre’s early work is not only intelligible but significant. He has led us away from some of the idle considerations in much contemporary analytic discussion of persons qua perceivers and has offered important and probably correct solutions to some of the most pressing and central problems connected with persons considered as moral agents". Thus the standard criteria for reidentification of persons, viz., memory, character, and bodily continuity, are viewed in terms of accountability, thereby underscoring Sartre’s "new criterion of personal identity," fundamental project or ideal self. Crucial to her general thesis is the ambiguity of the "I" for Sartre. The term denotes the body-subject of conscious relations and possessor of physical properties, on the one hand, and a free unification of acts and experiences over time, on the other, like a melody synthesizing individual notes—a standard simile in nonsubstantial theories of the self. She argues that both aspects of the "I" are required to resolve the matter of accountability as we understand it. The question of other minds is raised in the context of Sartre’s claim that "there is nothing behind the body. The body is wholly ‘psychic'." This problematic assertion not only makes his concept of shame-consciousness appear less ad hoc but helps warrant, as well, her claim that he is leaning toward a physicalism "broad enough to include the intentional properties of consciousness". An indication that analysis may be heading in the same direction is taken as an added sign of Sartre’s relevance. (shrink)

In this paper we adopt the hypothesis that languages are mechanisms for interaction, and that grammars encode the means by which such interaction may take place, by use of procedures that construct representations of meaning from strings of words uttered in context, and conversely strings of words are built up from representations of content in interaction with context. In a review of the systemic use of ellipsis in dialogue and associated split-utterance phenomena, we show how, in Dynamic Syntax, words give (...) rise to a range of procedures for the building of representations of the content of some utterance, which both speakers and hearers use. We then extend the discussion to take account of adjuncts, showing how they contribute to content construction both in single utterances and across speakers. The same mechanisms are then shown to underlie the building of inferential extensions of meaning in context, giving rise to the creation of the ad hoc concepts expressed by phrases or single words in relation to the utterance context and ultimately to the creation of metaphorical uses of language. (shrink)

This study on the Speech Act of Promising builds on an article by Egner which claims that in many African Societies a promise is most often made not to be committed to its content but to be polite and save one's own or the addressee's face. While Egner opts for a Speech Act Theory approach to explain the phenomenon and comes to the conclusion that the speech act of promising may occur minus commitment, thus refuting the standard SAT claim, I (...) have opted to treat the issue within Relevance Theory and claim that a true speech act of promising cannot be without commitment since it is a performative and institutional speech act which has to be committed by its very nature. I have rather explained that the concept PROMISE can be used as an ad hoc concept PROMISE* which conveys a speech act of "saying that" and which is a broadened version of the encoded concept to make commitment optional and include issues of politeness and face saving. While Egner claims that a committed speech act can be determined by linguistic indication most of the time I claim that the intended interpretation falls out naturally from the relevance theoretic comprehension procedure which is: "Follow the path of least effort in determining cognitive effects and stop when your expectation of relevance is fulfilled". Unlike Egner I claim that at the root of using non-committed promises as a face saving device are shame oriented cultures that need these kinds of mechanisms for politeness more than guilt oriented cultures. (shrink)

Appeals to the public interest in law are commonplace, but typically made without clarifying what the public interest is and how it can be determined. In law, this has led to ad hoc applications of the public interest and, consequently, to “judicial idiosyncrasy,” posing a threat to legal certainty. This paper aims to remedy these problems by providing much‐needed conceptual clarification. It proposes that something is in the public interest if it increases the opportunities of the members of the public (...) to pursue and realize the (permissible) ends they all share qua equal members of the public. (shrink)

In line with recent interest in weak and often not fully determinate effects of communication permeating relevance-theoretic research, I contribute a discussion on two possible sources of speaker-intended indeterminacy within explicit import of an utterance: one residing in an intentionally underspecified location of an ad hoc concept between literal or non-literal (e.g. metaphorical or hyperbolic) interpretation, and the other lying in the higher-level explicature of an utterance, and being related to propositional attitude (e.g. pretence, reporting, dissociation) or speech-act description (e.g. (...) complementing, reproaching). In both cases, the speaker leaves a certain amount of indeterminacy concerning the degree of her commitment to the content communicated, by not indicating where precisely the concept or the attitude is to be located on the literalness-metaphor continuum or on the continuum of various propositional attitudes/speech-act descriptions, respectively. Using a number of illustrative examples drawn from television discourse, I try to show that this kind of intended indeterminacy gives rise to communicative effects of a non-propositional kind. Additionally, the analyses presented here support the deflationary view of figurative uses of language, on which they form continua with non-figurative utterances. (shrink)

Rationality - as opposed to 'ad-hoc' - and asymptotics - to emphasize the fact that perturbative methods are at the core of the theory - are the two main concepts associated with the Rational Asymptotic Modeling (RAM) approach in fluid dynamics when the goal is to specifically provide useful models accessible to numerical simulation via high-speed computing. This approach has contributed to a fresh understanding of Newtonian fluid flow problems and has opened up new avenues for tackling real fluid (...) flow phenomena, which are known to lead to very difficult mathematical and numerical problems irrespective of turbulence. With the present scientific autobiography the author guides the reader through his somewhat non-traditional career; first discovering fluid mechanics, and then devoting more than fifty years to intense work in the field. Using both personal and general historical contexts, this account will be of benefit to anyone interested in the early and contemporary developments of an important branch of theoretical and computational fluid mechanics. (shrink)

The creation of ad hoc international penal tribunals and of a permanent international penal court symbolizes the will to extend penal law from the national state to international relations, thus giving rise to the concept of a punitive intervention. This contribution seeks to establish whether this extension of penal law to international relations should be strictly modeled on national penal law or whether it should follow a paradigm of its own. This could well be the same paradigm, which some authors (...) have suggested for the national level, i. e. the paradigm of reconstructive justice. Though it does not radically exclude the penal dimension of justice, reconstructive justice nevertheless relativizes this dimension, thus leaving room for a more constructive reaction to crime. (shrink)