Horton and Gerrig outlined a memory-based processing model of conversational common ground that provided a description of how speakers could both strategically and automatically gain access to information about others through domain-general memory processes acting over ordinary memory traces. In this article, we revisit this account, reviewing empirical findings that address aspects of this memory-based model. In doing so, we also take the opportunity to clarify what we believe this approach implies about the cognitive psychology of common ground, and (...) just as important, what it does not imply. We also highlight related areas of research demonstrating how general cognitive processes can constrain access to relevant knowledge in ways that shape both language production and comprehension. (shrink)

With Slowing Metaphor Down: Elaborating Deliberate Metaphor Theory (henceforth SMD), Gerard J. Steen has given us a remarkable book, teeming with insights about metaphor use. The volume provides a...

In narrative contexts, people often find themselves mentally rooting for “bad guys.” These circumstances lead to questions about how Sunstein's moral heuristics function during narrative experiences. In particular, must people undertake explicit moral analysis for the heuristics to apply?

Empirical analyses have provided some important constraints for computational theories of metaphor. Three such constraints relate to (1) the similar processing time for literal and metaphorical language, (2) the time‐limited processing of many metaphors, and (3) the dissociation of metaphor comprehension and appreciation. Indurkhya's (1986, 1987) model is discussed with respect to these issues.

Clark and Fischer (C&F) discuss how people interact with social robots in the context of a general analysis of interaction with characters. I suggest that a consideration of aesthetic illusion would add nuance to this analysis. In addition, I illustrate how people's experiences with other depictions of characters require adjustments to C&F's claims.

Juslin & Vll's (J&V's) discussions of evaluative conditioning and episodic memory focus on circumstances in which music becomes associated with arbitrary life events. However, analyses of film music suggest that viewers experience consistent pairings between types of music and types of narrative content. Researchers have demonstrated that the emotional content of film music has a major impact on viewers' emotional experiences of a narrative.

_What does it mean when a radical understanding of National Socialism is inextricably embedded in the work of the twentieth century’s most important philosopher?_ Martin Heidegger’s sympathies for the conservative revolution and National Socialism have long been well known. As the rector of the University of Freiburg in the early 1930s, he worked hard to reshape the university in accordance with National Socialist policies. He also engaged in an all-out struggle to become the movement’s philosophical preceptor, “to lead the leader.” (...) Yet for years, Heidegger’s defenders have tried to separate his political beliefs from his philosophical doctrines. They argued, in effect, that he was good at philosophy but bad at politics. But with the 2014 publication of Heidegger’s _Black Notebooks_, it has become clear that he embraced a far more radical vision of the conservative revolution than previously suspected. His dissatisfaction with National Socialism, it turns out, was mainly that it did not go far enough. The notebooks show that far from being separated from Nazism, Heidegger’s philosophy was suffused with it. In this book Richard Wolin explores what the notebooks mean for our understanding of arguably the most important philosopher of the twentieth century, and of his ideas—and why his legacy remains radically compromised. (shrink)

A substantial balance of evidence favours the view that human souls have libertarian free will, that is the freedom to choose between alternative actions, despite all causal influences acting on them. Free will thus entails soul indeterminism, which entails brain indeterminism. There is no reason to suppose that the same laws govern the behaviour of the brain as govern any other physical system, since the brain is different from any other physical system in being in causal interaction with a soul. (...) In any case, its indeterminism may be ensured by Quantum indeterminism. The main evidence for soul indeterminism is, however, the fact that human counter‐suggestibility would be compatible with determinism only on the assumption of an a priori very unlikely mechanism for the production of beliefs. New Appendices E, F, and G discuss the relevance to this topic of different interpretations of Quantum Theory, of Gödel's Theorem and of Libet's experiments. (shrink)

Introduction: The Anarchist -- The Minister: 1756-93 -- The Philosopher: 1793 -- The Activist: 1794-95 -- The Husband: 1796-99 -- The Educator: 1800-09 -- The Father:1810-19 -- The Pensioner:1819-36 -- The Legacy.

First-order Gödel logics are a family of finite- or infinite-valued logics where the sets of truth values V are closed subsets of [0,1] containing both 0 and 1. Different such sets V in general determine different Gödel logics GV (sets of those formulas which evaluate to 1 in every interpretation into V). It is shown that GV is axiomatizable iff V is finite, V is uncountable with 0 isolated in V, or every neighborhood of 0 in V is uncountable. Complete (...) axiomatizations for each of these cases are given. The r.e. prenex, negation-free, and existential fragments of all first-order Gödel logics are also characterized. (shrink)

Hilbert’s program was an ambitious and wide-ranging project in the philosophy and foundations of mathematics. In order to “dispose of the foundational questions in mathematics once and for all,” Hilbert proposed a two-pronged approach in 1921: first, classical mathematics should be formalized in axiomatic systems; second, using only restricted, “finitary” means, one should give proofs of the consistency of these axiomatic systems. Although Gödel’s incompleteness theorems show that the program as originally conceived cannot be carried out, it had many partial (...) successes, and generated important advances in logical theory and metatheory, both at the time and since. The article discusses the historical background and development of Hilbert’s program, its philosophical underpinnings and consequences, and its subsequent development and influences since the 1930s. (shrink)

’Ethical codes of conduct are superficial and distracting answers to the question of how to promote ethical behaviour in corporate life.’The author is Principal Lecturer in the Department of Business Studies at Manchester Metropolitan University.

The relationship between business and society changes over time, and periodically there is a ‘legitimization crisis’. The paper will briefly explore some important questions about company legitimacy: why is company legitimacy important; why do legitimacy crises occur; and finally, are we in a crisis at the moment, and if so how can it be solved? The legal institutionalization of business firms prescribes narrow accountabilities and limited responsibilities: the challenge for business in the new millennium is to open these up and (...) to broaden our understanding of the social significance of business activity without destroying its wealth creating processes. This will require a rethinking of the relationship to the shareholder and a new definition of the relationship with stakeholders. (shrink)

In this essay we aim to present some considerations regarding a minimal but concrete notion of agency and goal-directed behavior that are useful for characterizing biological systems at different scales. These considerations are a particular perspective, bringing together concepts from dynamical systems, combinatorial problem-solving, and connectionist learning with an emphasis on the relationship between parts and wholes. This perspective affords some ways to think about agents that are concrete and quantifiable, and relevant to some important biological issues. Instead of advocating (...) for a strict definition of minimally agential characteristics, we focus on how (even for a modest notion of agency) the agency of a system can be more than the sum of the agency of its parts. We quantify this in terms of the problem-solving competency of a system with respect to resolution of the frustrations between its parts. This requires goal-directed behavior in the sense of delayed gratification, i.e., taking dynamical trajectories that forego short-term gains (or sustain short-term stress or frustration) in favor of long-term gains. In order for this competency to belong to the system (rather than to its parts or given by its construction or design), it can involve distributed systemic knowledge that is acquired through experience, i.e., changes in the organization of the relationships among its parts (without presupposing a system-level reward function for such changes). This conception of agency helps us think about the ways in which cells, organisms, and perhaps other biological scales, can be agential (i.e., more agential than their parts) in a quantifiable sense, without denying that the behavior of the whole depends on the behaviors of the parts in their current organization. (shrink)

What is God? What does it mean to believe in God? What happens to God after the death of God? This book examines “the death of God” from a philosophical standpoint. It focuses on monotheism, polytheism, and nature, and it discusses the renewed importance of spirituality—and the “spiritual but not religious”—in response to the death of God. In recent years, religious belief has been in decline, but secularism cannot satisfy our spiritual needs. We are now living in a “post-secular” age (...) in which the relationship between philosophy, spirituality, and religion must be re-examined. As an exploratory essay, this book engages the reader at a profound level, and considers a variety of modern thinkers, including Nietzsche, Hegel, Freud, Levinas, Assmann, and Buber. It offers a sustained meditation on the origin of God, the death of God, and the future of “God” as a guiding ideal. (shrink)

From Concept to Objectivity uncovers the nature and authority of conceptual determination by critically thinking through neglected arguments in Hegel's Science of Logic pivotal for understanding reason and its role in philosophy. Winfield clarifies the logical problems of presuppositionlessness and determinacy that prepare the way for conceiving the concept, examines how universality, particularity, and individuality are determined, investigates how judgment and syllogism are exhaustively differentiated, and, on that basis, explores how objectivity can be categorized without casting thought in irrevocable opposition (...) to reality. Winfield's book will be of interest to readers of Hegel, as well as anyone wondering how thought can be objective. (shrink)

Paul Grice is widely seen as a champion of the view that communication is an exercise in rational coordination through acts of speaker meaning. Since Grice, a central question has been “[h]ow much of this coordination derives from interlocutors’ specific knowledge of one another as people? How much exploits their knowledge of language itself?” Grice is seen as emphasizing the explanatory centrality of “interlocutors’ specific knowledge.” This picture overlooks Grice’s 1968 article “Utterer’s Meaning, Sentence Meaning, and Word Meaning,” in which (...) he explains communication through the utterance of sentences (and words and phrases) by appealing to an internalized syntax and semantics. This appears to put Grice squarely on the “knowledge of language itself” side of the explanation of communication. Is Grice right? Does an appeal to internalized syntax and semantics play a premier role in explaining communication through the utterance of sentences? If it does, what explanatory role is left for “interlocutors’ specific knowledge of one another”? I outline Grice’s position in “Utterer’s Meaning, Sentence Meaning, and Word Meaning” and compare it to Stephen Schiffer’s position in his 2015 article “Meaning and Formal Semantics in Generative Grammar,” which also assigns a central role in explaining communication to an internalized syntax and semantics. I then turn to what explanatory role remains for “interlocutors’ specific knowledge of one another.” I turn to Schiffer’s account of speaker meaning in his 1972 book Meaning, where he defines speaker meaning in terms of common knowledge (the recursive belief state of knowing, knowing we know, knowing we know we know, and so on). I show how to incorporate a common-knowledge-based account of speaker meaning into Schiffer’s 2015 appeal to an internalized syntax and semantics, and then I show how to use the resulting account to assign a substantive explanatory role “interlocutors’ specific knowledge of one another.”. (shrink)

Some of the most important developments of symbolic logic took place in the 1920s. Foremost among them are the distinction between syntax and semantics and the formulation of questions of completeness and decidability of logical systems. David Hilbert and his students played a very important part in these developments. Their contributions can be traced to unpublished lecture notes and other manuscripts by Hilbert and Bernays dating to the period 1917-1923. The aim of this paper is to describe these results, focussing (...) primarily on propositional logic, and to put them in their historical context. It is argued that truth-value semantics, syntactic ("Post-") and semantic completeness, decidability, and other results were first obtained by Hilbert and Bernays in 1918, and that Bernays's role in their discovery and the subsequent development of mathematical logic is much greater than has so far been acknowledged. (shrink)

After a brief, personal reflection on Aron Gurwitsch's life and his many influences on my career, I devote this lecture to some of the central themes of a phenomenology of medicine. Its core is the clinical encounter, which displays a certain structure I term the asymmetry of power and vulnerability —a complex contextual imbalance characterized by multiple points of view, hence points for reflective entrance. These are then interpreted phenomenologically in terms of epoché and reduction, evidence, reflection, and other related (...) themes. I conclude with a suggestion about "the fundamental method" of phenomenology, free fantasy variation. (shrink)

In accounts of the western Christian religious tradition over the last century, the existence of a positive connection between mysticism and social action has generally been denied or largely dismissed by scholars as an epiphenomenon resulting from the heightened compassion flowing out of the culminating experience of union with God. Relying on the philosophical analysis of western religious mysticism by William Ernest Hocking and more recent writers, I propose that the connection between mystical experience and social action is not only (...) a necessary one but manifests a reciprocal individual and social process by which communities recover, refine, and renew their primary ethical and religious goals and the appropriate means of achieving them. Although motivated by love, the mystic's calling, development, and subsequent activity constitute structurally integral phases of a social process involving a withdrawal from the world, a systematic re-evaluation of the beliefs, goals, and values of the originating society, and the mystic's return to the world intent on and equipped to contribute significantly to social reform. This dialectical process can be interpreted in traditional and indeed equivalent ‘Catholic’ categories of contemplation and action and more ‘Protestant’ concepts of mysticism and prophecy. (shrink)

After a brief flirtation with logicism around 1917, David Hilbertproposed his own program in the foundations of mathematics in 1920 and developed it, in concert with collaborators such as Paul Bernays andWilhelm Ackermann, throughout the 1920s. The two technical pillars of the project were the development of axiomatic systems for everstronger and more comprehensive areas of mathematics, and finitisticproofs of consistency of these systems. Early advances in these areaswere made by Hilbert (and Bernays) in a series of lecture courses atthe (...) University of Göttingen between 1917 and 1923, and notably in Ackermann's dissertation of 1924. The main innovation was theinvention of the -calculus, on which Hilbert's axiom systemswere based, and the development of the -substitution methodas a basis for consistency proofs. The paper traces the developmentof the ``simultaneous development of logic and mathematics'' throughthe -notation and provides an analysis of Ackermann'sconsistency proofs for primitive recursive arithmetic and for thefirst comprehensive mathematical system, the latter using thesubstitution method. It is striking that these proofs use transfiniteinduction not dissimilar to that used in Gentzen's later consistencyproof as well as non-primitive recursive definitions, and that thesemethods were accepted as finitistic at the time. (shrink)

Social cognition differs from general cognition in its focus on understanding, perceiving, and interpreting social information. However, we argue that the significance of domain‐general processes for controlling cognition has been historically undervalued in social cognition and social neuroscience research. We suggest much of social cognition can be characterized as specialized feature representations supported by domain‐general cognitive control systems. To test this proposal, we develop a comprehensive working model, based on an interactive activation and competition architecture and applied to the control (...) of action. As such, we label the model “ICON” (interactive activation and competition model for the control of action). We used the ICON model to simulate human performance across various laboratory tasks. Our simulations emphasize that many laboratory‐based social tasks do not require socially specific control systems, such as those that are argued to rely on neural networks associated with theory‐of‐mind. Moreover, our model clarifies that perceived disruptions in social cognition, even in what appears to be disruption to the control of social cognition, can stem from deficits in social representation instead. We advocate for a “default stance” in social cognition, where control is usually general, but representation is specific. This study underscores the importance of integrating social cognition within the broader realm of domain‐general control processing, offering a unified perspective on task processing. (shrink)

Philosophy and literature enjoy a close, complex relationship. Elucidating the connections between these two fields, this book examines the ways philosophy deploys literary means to advance its practice, particularly as a way of life that extends beyond literary forms and words into physical deeds, nonlinguistic expression, and subjective moods and feelings.

Isaac Newton was born on 25 December 1642 in the hamlet of Colsterworth, Lincolnshire, about six miles south of Grantham. The posthumous and only son of Isaac Newton, père, he found himself deposited with grandparents at the age of three when his mother married a second time; he remained with the grandparents for eight years until the death of his stepfather. After successfully resisting his mother's intention that he manage the considerable estate she had inherited from the two husbands, Newton (...) graduated from the grammar school in Grantham and enrolled in Trinity College, Cambridge, in June 1661. Trinity was Newton's home for the following 35 years. He received his B.A. in 1665 and his M.A. three years later. Meanwhile he had been elected to a fellowship in the college, and in 1669, upon the resignation of Isaac Barrow, he was appointed Lucasian Professor of Mathematics. Newton did not strain himself with teaching. During his nearly 30 years as a fellow of Trinity he tutored only three students, all of them wealthy fellow commoners; he formed no perceptible bond with any of them. As Lucasian Professor, he lectured once a week during one term each year, at least early in his tenure. There is testimony that frequently no one attended the lectures, and even later, when he was famous and a connection with him was potentially valuable, only two men claimed to have heard them. He ceased to lecture altogether after 1687, and may have stopped before that. (shrink)

Capone and Bucca offer a socio-pragmatic analysis of President Trump’s utterance, ‘I hope you will let Flynn go’ to show that Trump illicitly tried to persuade Comey to drop the investigation of Flynn. I do not dispute that claim. Instead, I offer an overview of their argument—with one potential point of disagreement. Capone and Bucca assume, As pragmatic investigators typically do, that speakers have determinate intentions and reason in complex ways about how to realize those intentions. I suggest that speakers (...) may not have determinate intentions and may not engage in the complex types of reasoning pragmatics typically attributes to them. I do not suggest that this point undercuts Capone and Bucca’s claims; rather, it suggests that their emphasis on a normative component in pragmatic analysis is correct, and suggests that a focus on the normative component supports their claims. (shrink)