To determine what the speaker in a cooperative dialog meant with his assertion, on top of what he explicitly said, it is crucial that we assume that the assertion he gave was optimal. In determining optimal assertions we assume that dialogs are embedded in decision problems (van Rooij 2003) and use backwards induction for calculating them (Benz 2006). In this paper, we show that in terms of our framework we can account for several types of implicatures in a uniform (...) way, suggesting that there is no need for an independent linguistic theory of generalized implicatures. In the final section, we show how we can embed our theory in the framework of signaling games, and how it relates with other game theoretic analyses of implicatures. (shrink)

To determine what the speaker in a cooperative dialog meant with his assertion, on top of what he explicitly said, it is crucial that we assume that the assertion he gave was optimal. In determining optimal assertions we assume that dialogs are embedded in decision problems (van Rooij 2003) and use backwards induction for calculating them (Benz 2006). In this paper, we show that in terms of our framework we can account for several types of implicatures in a uniform (...) way, suggesting that there is no need for an independent linguistic theory of generalized implicatures. In the final section, we show how we can embed our theory in the framework of signaling games, and how it relates with other game theoretic analyses of implicatures. (shrink)

The past decade has been marked by a series of global crises, presenting an opportunity to reevaluate the relationship between science and politics. The biological sciences are instrumental in understanding natural phenomena and informing policy decisions. However, scholars argue that current scientific expertise often fails to account for entire populations and long-term impacts, hindering efforts to address issues such as biodiversity loss, global warming, and pandemics. This article explores the structural challenges of integrating an evolutionary perspective, historically opposed to functional (...) determinants of health and disease, into current biological science practices. Using data on Swiss biology professors from 1957, 1980, and 2000, we examine the structural power dynamics that have led to the division between these competing epistemologies, and how this division has influenced resource allocation and career trajectories. Our analysis suggests that this cleavage presents a significant obstacle to achieving fruitful reconciliations, and that increased academicization and internationalization may benefit functional biologists at the expense of evolutionary biologists. While evolutionary biologists have gained symbolic recognition in recent years, this has not translated into valuable expertise in the political domain. (shrink)

This article provides an empirically based, interdisciplinary approach to the following two questions: Do animals possess behavioral and cognitive characteristics such as culture, language, and a theory of mind? And if so, what are the implications, when long-standing criteria used to justify differences in moral consideration between humans and animals are no longer considered indisputable? One basic implication is that the psychological needs of captive animals should be adequately catered for. However, for species such as great apes and dolphins with (...) whom we share major characteristics of personhood, welfare considerations alone may not suffice, and consideration of basic rights may be morally warranted—as for humans. Although characteristics supporting the status of personhood are present to differing degrees among the diverse array of animal species, this is a barrier to moral consideration only if anthropocentric, exclusive, and monolithic viewpoints about the necessary prerequisites for personhood are applied. We examine the flaws inherent within such positions and argue for inalienable species-appropriate rights. (shrink)

It has been argued that some animals are moral subjects, that is, beings who are capable of behaving on the basis of moral motivations. In this paper, we do not challenge this claim. Instead, we presuppose its plausibility in order to explore what ethical consequences follow from it. Using the capabilities approach, we argue that beings who are moral subjects are entitled to enjoy positive opportunities for the flourishing of their moral capabilities, and that the thwarting of these capabilities entails (...) a harm that cannot be fully explained in terms of hedonistic welfare. We explore the implications of this idea for the assessment of current practices involving animals. (shrink)

In this article, we compare two fixed-point constructions of common knowledge in sequential coordination problems. The first one corresponds to the standard maximal fixed-point construction of common knowledge in a possible worlds framework; the second construction provides an even larger fixed-point and involves iterated epistemic updates. We call the first fixed-point the maximal fixed-point, and the second the update fixed-point. Both fixed-points define a set of sequential actions that solve the coordination problem such that success is mutually guaranteed. The main (...) application intended is the study of signalling games as introduced by [15]. We introduce a non-probabilistic version of these games as multi-agent signalling games. We use them for modelling prototypical accommodation phenomena following [16]. We show especially that accommodation, which involves presupposition violation, is only licensed due to the existence of the super large update fixed-point, whereas the literal language use without presupposition violations can be characterized by the maximal fixed-point. (shrink)

Two classes of account have been proposed to explain the memory processes subserving the processing of reflexive-antecedent dependencies. Structure-based accounts assume that the retrieval of the antecedent is guided by syntactic tree-configurational information without considering other kinds of information such as gender marking in the case of English reflexives. By contrast, unconstrained cue-based retrieval assumes that all available information is used for retrieving the antecedent. Similarity-based interference effects from structurally illicit distractors which match a non-structural retrieval cue have been interpreted (...) as evidence favoring the unconstrained cue-based retrieval account since cue-based retrieval interference from structurally illicit distractors is incompatible with the structure-based account. However, it has been argued that the observed effects do not necessarily reflect interference occurring at the moment of retrieval but might equally well be accounted for by interference occurring already at the stage of encoding or maintaining the antecedent in memory, in which case they cannot be taken as evidence against the structure-based account. We present three experiments (self-paced reading and eye-tracking) on German reflexives and Swedish reflexive and pronominal possessives in which we pit the predictions of encoding interference and cue-based retrieval interference against each other. We could not find any indication that encoding interference affects the processing ease of the reflexive-antecedent dependency formation. Thus, there is no evidence that encoding interference might be the explanation for the interference effects observed in previous work. We therefore conclude that invoking encoding interference may not be a plausible way to reconcile interference effects with a structure-based account of reflexive processing. (shrink)

Inhalt: - Systemtheorie und klassische Philosophie - Systemtheorie und transklassische Philosophie - Materiale, metatheoretische und ideologische Aspekte der Systemtheorie.

African (Bantu) philosophy conceptualizes morality through ubuntu, which emphasizes the role of community in producing moral agents. This community is characterized by practices that respond to and value interdependence, such as care, cooperation, and respect for elders and ancestral knowledge. While there have been attributions of morality to nonhuman animals in the interdisciplinary animal morality debate, this debate has focused on Western concepts. We argue that the ubuntu conception of morality as a communal practice applies to some nonhuman animals. African (...) elephant communities are highly cooperative and structured around elders; they alloparent, protect their communities, mourn their dead, and pass on cultural knowledge between generations. Identifying these as important moral practices, ubuntu provides a theoretical framework to expand our ethical concern for elephants to their communities. In practice, this will deepen our understanding of the wrongness of atrocities like culling for population management or trophy hunting. (shrink)

Many nonhuman animals have the emotional capacities to form caring relationships that matter to them, and for their immediate welfare. Drawing from care ethics, we argue that these relationships also matter as objectively valuable states of affairs. They are part of what is good in this world. However, the value of care is precarious in human-animal interactions. Be it in farming, research, wildlife ‘management’, zoos, or pet-keeping, the prevention, disruption, manipulation, and instrumentalization of care in animals by humans is ubiquitous. (...) We criticize a narrow conception of welfare that, in practice, tends to overlook non-experiential forms of harm that occur when we interfere with caring animals. Additionally, we point out wrongs against caring animals that are not just unaccounted for but denied by even an expansive welfare perspective: The instrumentalization of care and caring animals in systems of use can occur as a harmless wrong that an approach purely focused on welfare may, in fact, condone. We should therefore adopt an ethical perspective that goes beyond welfare in our dealings with caring animals. (shrink)

The portrayal of animals in the media is often criticised for instrumentalising, objectifying and anthropomorphising animals :53–79, 1997; Lerner and Kalof in Sociol Q 40:565–586, 1999; Stewart and Cole in Int J Multidiscip Res 12:457–476, 2009). Although we agree with this criticism, we also identify the need for a more substantiated approach to the moral significance of instrumentalisation, objectification and anthropomorphism. Thus, we propose a new framework which is able to address the morally relevant aspects of animal portrayal in the (...) media. We closely examine the normative messages communicated by an unusual TV commercial in which an anthropomorphised piglet advertises organic beef. This serves as a case example to relate the philosophical and ethical concepts of objectification and anthropomorphism to each other and show how they can be applied. We conclude that the commercial conveys a message of animal instrumentalisation as being normatively correct within the constraint of good animal welfare. The depicted form of instrumentalisation is, nonetheless, associated with harm for the animals and thus, needs to overcome cognitive dissonance. To achieve this, animals are directly objectified by a trivialised and de-individualised portrayal. Moreover, animals are indirectly objectified even when they are anthropomorphised as they are granted significance only through being human-like. Thus, objectification and anthropomorphism are not opposing terms in our proposed framework. In addition, objectification, together with the reference to the dominant ideology, and combined with humorous anthropomorphism weakens scrutiny of these normative messages by the viewers. This eventually augments a decrease of moral concern for farmed animals in advertisement employing such portrayals. (shrink)

Many nonhuman animals have the emotional capacities to form caring relationships that matter to them, and for their immediate welfare. Drawing from care ethics, we argue that these relationships also matter as objectively valuable states of affairs. They are part of what is good in this world. However, the value of care is precarious in human-animal interactions. Be it in farming, research, wildlife ‘management’, zoos, or pet-keeping, the prevention, disruption, manipulation, and instrumentalization of care in animals by humans is ubiquitous. (...) We criticize a narrow conception of welfare that, in practice, tends to overlook non-experiential forms of harm that occur when we interfere with caring animals. Additionally, we point out wrongs against caring animals that are not just unaccounted for but denied by even an expansive welfare perspective: The instrumentalization of care and caring animals in systems of use can occur as a harmless wrong that an approach purely focused on welfare may, in fact, condone. We should therefore adopt an ethical perspective that goes beyond welfare in our dealings with caring animals. (shrink)

In this paper we are going to show that error coping strategies play an essential role in linguistic pragmatics. We study the effect of noisy speaker strategies within a framework of signalling games with feedback loop. We distinguish between cases in which errors occur in message selection and cases in which they occur in signal selection. The first type of errors affects the content of an utterance, and the second type its linguistic expression. The general communication model is inspired by (...) the Shannon–Weaver communication model. We test the model by a number of benchmark examples, including examples of relevance implicatures, quantity implicatures, and presupposition accommodation. (shrink)

Previous research on scalar implicature has primarily relied on meta-linguistic judgment tasks and found varying rates of such inferences depending on the nature of the task and contextual manipulations. This paper introduces a novel interactive paradigm involving both a production and a comprehension side and a precise conversational goal. The main research question is what is reliably communicated by some in this communicative setting, both when the quantifier occurs in unembedded and embedded positions. Our new paradigm involves an action-based task (...) from which participants’ interpretation of utterances can be inferred. It incorporates a game-theoretic design, thereby including a precise model to predict participants’ behaviour in the experimental context. Our study shows that embedded and unembedded implicatures are reliably communicated by some. We propose two cognitive principles that describe what can be left unsaid. In our experimental context, a production strategy based on these principles is more efficient than a strategy based on literal descriptions. (shrink)

Economics and psychology are both sciences of human behaviour. This paper gives a survey of their interaction. First, the changing relationship between the two sciences is discussed: while economics was once imperialistic, it has become a science inspired by psychological insights. In order to illustrate this, recent developments and evidence for three major areas are presented: bounded rationality, non-selfish behaviour, and the economics of happiness.

Humans interact with animals in numerous ways and on numerous levels. We are indeed living in an “animal”s world,’ in the sense that our lives are very much intertwined with the lives of animals. This also means that animals, like those dogs we commonly refer to as our pets, are living in a “human’s world” in the sense that it is us, not them, who, to a large degree, define and manage the interactions we have with them. In this sense, (...) the human-animal relationship is nothing we should romanticize: it comes with clear power relations and thus with a set of responsibilities on the side of those who exercise this power. This holds, despite the fact that we like to think about our dogs as human’s best friend. Dogs have been part of human societies for longer than any other domestic species. Like no other species they exemplify the role of companion animals. Relationships with pet dogs are both very widespread and very intense, often leading to strong attachments between owners or caregivers and animals and to a treatment of these dogs as family members or even children. But how does this relationship look from the dogs’ perspective? How do they perceive the humans they engage with? What responsibilities and duties arise from the kind of mutual understanding, attachment, and the supposedly “special” bonds we form with them? Are there ethical implications, maybe even ethical implications beyond animal welfare? The past decades have seen an upsurge of research from comparative cognition on pet dogs’ cognitive and social skills, especially in comparison with and reference to humans. We will therefore set our discussion about the nature and ethical dimensions of the human–dog relationship against the background of the current empirical knowledge on dog (social) cognition. This allows us to analyze the human–dog relationship by applying an interdisciplinary approach that starts from the perspective of the dog to ultimately inform the perspective of humans. It is our aim to thereby identify ethical dimensions of the human–dog relationship that have been overlooked so far. (shrink)

Welches ist die Bedeutung des Humanismus für die soziologische Erkenntnisbildung? Seit der Entstehung der Soziologie wurde diese Frage immer wieder aufgeworfen – um bald darauf wieder zu verschwinden. Und damit blieb auch der eigentliche Gegenstand dieser Frage bis heute verborgen: die Bestimmung der Kultur der Soziologie. Denn die soziologische Erkenntnisbildung, das Erstehenlassen der Wirklichkeit des menschlichen Zusammenlebens in Begriffen, ist eine „kulturelle Tätigkeit“. Am gegenwärtigen Zustand der Soziologie zeigt sich dieser Mangel besonders deutlich, droht das Streben nach soziologischer Erkenntnis sich (...) doch im Niemandsland zwischen „multiparadigmatischen“ Verlegenheitslösungen, Hyperrealitäten methodischer und statistischer Codes und technokratischem Dienstleistungswissen buchstäblich zu verlieren. – Vor diesem Hintergrund versammelt der Band grundlegende Untersuchungen des Vehältnisses von Humanismus und Soziologie. Dabei kommen so unterschiedliche Strömungen wie die Kritische Theorie, Rational Choice und der Poststrukturalismus, so unterschiedliche Autoren wie Karl Mannheim, Talcott Parsons, Leo Strauss und Alfred Weber zur Sprache. Auf diese Weise ermöglicht der Band einen neuen Blick auf die Soziologie, insbesondere auf deren geisteswissenschaftliche Dimension. (shrink)

In _Cognitive Kin, Moral Strangers?_, Judith Benz-Schwarzburg investigates whether non-human animals share complex socio-cognitive abilities like culture, language and theory of mind with humans. She questions our supposedly human uniqueness and explores how cognitive kinship matters for animal ethics.

In this paper several problems are raised concerning Ian Barbour's four ways of interrelating science and religion—Conflict, Independence, Dialogue, and Integration—as put forward in such publications as his highly influential Religion in an Age of Science (1990) and widely adopted by other writers in this field. The authors argue that this taxonomy is not very useful or analytically helpful, especially to historians seeking to understand past engagements between science and religion.

We are going to explain partial blocking as the result of diachronic processes based on what we will call associative learning. Especially, we argue that the task posed by partial blocking phenomena is to explain their emergence from unambiguous and fully expressive languages. This contrasts with approaches that presuppose underspecified semantic meanings or ineffability like Bidirectional Optimality Theory (Bi–OT) and some game theoretic explanations. We introduce a formal framework based on learning, speaker’s preferences and pure semantics for describing diachronic strengthening (...) of meaning. Moreover, we show how the diachronic development of systems of semantically co–extensive forms can be described in terms of a complete system of diachronic laws. (shrink)

1. Die Grundlage des Verständnisses der Reinkarnation, wie sie hier vorliegt, ist nicht die hinduistische Seelenwanderungslehre oder gar die buddhistische Karma-Lehre, sondern die christliche Auffassung und Bewertung des menschlichen Personseins, eine Auffassung, hinter der letzthin der Gedanke vom Menschen als der imago dei, dem Bild Gottes, steht. Deshalb spielt auch die indische Lehre von der Wanderung einer Seele durch Tier- und Menschenleiber so gut wie gar keine Rolle; wichtig erscheint nur die Idee einer wiederholten Inkarnation menschlichen Person-Seins. 2. Die Grundlage (...) des Verständnisses der Reinkarnation, wie sie hier vorliegt, ist nicht die Auffassung der Reinkarnation als eines Fluches oder Verhängnisses, sondern als eines Weges der Vervollkommnung, als einer höheren und vollständigeren Entfaltung der imago dei. 3. Christliches Erbe an dieser Deutung ist auch die Blickrichtung nach vorwärts, nach dem Endziel der Vollkommenheit hin, und nicht die Blickrichtung nach rückwärts, der lähmende Blick auf den Kreislauf der Geburten. Dementsprechend ist diese Idee der Reinkamation verbunden mit dem Gedanken der aktiven Entwicklung der menschlichen Persönlichkeit. Die Vollendung und Vervollkommnung des Menschen erscheint nicht als ein überirdisches Gnadengeschenk, das dem Menschen als ein Fremdes übergestülpt wird, sondern als das Ergebnis einer Reifung auf dem Weg des Leidens, der Erfahrung, der Überwindung, auf dem Weg einer immer neuen Erprobung der menschlichen Freiheit. 4. In dieser Auffassung ist ohne Zweifel ein Protest gegen den Mechanismus der Prädestinationslehre, die die Erreichung des Zieles der menschlichen Persönlichkeit völlig unabhängig von dem Verhalten dieser Persönlichkeit selber macht und den Menschen lediglich als das Objekt eines göttlichen Ratschlusses versteht, der sich über die Bemühungen dieses Objekts selbst vollständig hinwegsetzt; ebenso maßgeblich ist der Protest gegen die Lehre von der ewigen Verdammnis, die letzthin den Teufel zum eigentlichen Gewinner der Heilsgeschichte macht. 5. Das Grundanliegen der so verstandenen Reinkarnationslehre ist die Bemühung um eine tiefere Einsicht in das Woher und Wohin des Menschen und in die Kontinuität innerhalb des menschlichen Personseins und seiner Entwicklung vor der Geburt und nach dem Tode. Diese Bemühung setzt gerade an den Punkten ein, an denen die dogmatische christliche Auffassung von den letzten Dingen viele Fragen offen läßt. Ich erwähne nur zwei dieser Punkte: a) Die Veränderung des Geschichtsbildes. Die christliche Endzeiterwartung ist in der ältesten Kirche bestimmt durch die Naherwartung des Endes, durch die Erwartung, daß das Kommen des Menschensohnes, die allgemeine Auferstehung der Toten, das Gericht, der Anbruch des Gottesreiches unmittelbar bevorstehen. Angesichts einer solchen Naherwartung kann natürlich ein solcher Gedanke wie die Idee der Reinkarnation gar nicht aufkommen. Die Verzögerung der Parousie, die Tatsache, daß die Erfüllung der Endzeiterwartungen inzwischen fast zweitausend Jahre auf sich warten läßt, hat eine ganz neue Problematik auch für die Beurteilung der Entwicklung des Menschen nach dem Tode mit sich gebracht. Die römisch-katholische Kirche hat die Lehre vom Fegefeuer entwickelt und dadurch dem Sünder die Chance offengelassen, auch nach dem Tod seinen Heilsstand zu verbessern. Die Reformation hat diese Lehre abgelehnt, hat aber ihrerseits nichts getan, um die Lehre von den letzten Dingen im Hinblick auf unser verändertes Geschichtsbewußtsein weiterzuentwickeln. Nie wurde so viel von Eschatologie gesprochen wie heute, und nie wurde die Frage nach den letzten Dingen vom Standpunkt unseres heutigen Geschichtsbewußtseins her so wenig konkret durchdacht. b) Die altchristliche Endzeiterwartung ist ganz geozentrisch orientiert. Unsere Erde erscheint als Hauptgegenstand des göttlichen Heilswillens, als der eigentliche zentrale Ort der Heilsgeschichte; die Schöpfung und Erlösung des Menschen dieser Erde erscheinen als das zentrale Anliegen des göttlichen Schöpfungs- und Heilswillens. Das neue Weltbild aber beruht auf der Erkenntnis einer Pluralität von Welten. Die Reinkarnationslehre, von der wir hier sprachen, ist ein Versuch, die innere Einheit dieses größeren, aus einer Pluralität von Welten bestehenden Universums vom Menschen, d. h. von der Reinkarnation her, zu verstehen. 6. Auch als Theologen sollten wir zugeben, daß im Hinblick auf unser heutiges Geschichtsbewußtsein und auf unser heutiges kosmisches Bewußtsein zwar nicht die Lösung, die durch die Reinkarnationslehre gegeben ist, aber das Anliegen selbst berechtigt ist. Eine Neubesinnung auf ein christliches Verständnis der letzten Dinge wird sich einer Beschäftigung mit diesem Anliegen nicht entziehen können. (shrink)

Am Ende der von Georg Bernardt SJ verfassten Dramen Theophilus Cilix (1621) und Tundalus redivivus (1622) tritt Faustus auf, dessen Verdammnis jeweils der Rettung des Protagonisten gegenübergestellt wird. Im Vergleich mit der Historia von D. Johann Fausten (1587) lassen die Differenzen in Hinsicht auf Büß Verständnis und Willensfreiheit eine kontroverstheologische Polemik erkennen.