Classification of the history of science has a long history, and the essays in this Focus section explore that history and its consequences from several different angles. Two of the papers deal with how classifying schemes in bibliography have evolved. A third looks at the way archival organization has changed over the years. Finally, the last essay explores the intersection of human and machine classifying systems. All four contributions look closely at the ramifications of the digital revolution for the way (...) we organize the knowledge of the discipline. (shrink)

Weissenbacher, Stephen P. Weldon, and Tomoko Yoshida.

This long-awaited work by prominent Harvard psychologist Stephen Kosslyn integrates a twenty-year research program on the nature of high-level vision and mental ...

In this foundational work on the theory of linguistic and mental representation, Stephen Schiffer surveys all the leading theories of meaning and content in the philosophy of language and finds them lacking. He concludes that there can be no correct, positive philosophical theory or linguistic or mental representation and, accordingly advocates the deflationary "no-theory theory of meaning and content." Along the way he takes up functionalism, the nature of propositions and their suitability as contents, the language of thought and (...) other sententialist theories of belief, intention based semantics, and related issues in ontology. Stephen Schiffer is Professor of Philosophy at the City University of New York Graduate Center. A Bradford Book. (shrink)

Stephen Darwall expands upon his argument for a second-personal framework for morality, in which morality entails mutual accountability and the authority to address demands. He explores the role of the framework in relation to cultural ideas of respect and honor; the development of "modern" moral philosophy; and interpersonal relations.

[Stephen Yablo] The usual charge against Carnap's internal/external distinction is one of 'guilt by association with analytic/synthetic'. But it can be freed of this association, to become the distinction between statements made within make-believe games and those made outside them-or, rather, a special case of it with some claim to be called the metaphorical/literal distinction. Not even Quine considers figurative speech committal, so this turns the tables somewhat. To determine our ontological commitments, we have to ferret out all traces (...) of nonliterality in our assertions; if there is no sensible project of doing that, there is no sensible project of Quinean ontology. /// [Andre Gallois] I discuss Steve Yablo's defence of Carnap's distinction between internal and external questions. In the first section I set out what I take that distinction, as Carnap draws it, to be, and spell out a central motivation Carnap has for invoking it. In the second section I endorse, and augment, Yablo's response to Quine's arguments against Carnap. In the third section I say why Carnap's application of the distinction between internal and external questions runs into trouble. In the fourth section I spell out what I take to be Yablo's version of Carnap. In the last I say why that version is especially vulnerable to the objection raised in the second. (shrink)

_Bodies for Sale: Ethics and Exploitation in the Human Body Trade _explores the philosophical and practical issues raised by activities such as surrogacy and organ trafficking. Stephen Wilkinson asks what is it that makes some commercial uses of the body controversial, whether the arguments against commercial exploitation stand up, and whether legislation outlawing such practices is really justified. In Part One Wilkinson explains and analyses some of the notoriously slippery concepts used in the body commodification debate, including exploitation, harm (...) and consent. In Part Two he focuses on three controversial issues outlining contemporary regulation and investigating both the moral issues and the arguments for legal prohibition. (shrink)

In this significantly expanded new edition of his acclaimed exploration of the four Alien movies, Stephen Mulhall adds several new chapters on Steven Spielberg’s Mission: Impossible trilogy and Minority Report . The first part of the book discusses the four Alien movies. Mulhall argues that the sexual significance of the aliens themselves, and of Ripley’s resistance to them, takes us deep into the question of what it is to be human. At the heart of the book is a highly (...) original and controversial argument that films themselves can philosophize. Mulhall then applies his interpretative model to another sequence of contemporary Hollywood movies: the Mission: Impossible series. A brand new chapter is devoted to each of the three films in the series, and to other films by the relevant directors that cast light on their individual contribution to it. In this discussion, the nature of television becomes as central a concern as the nature of cinema; and the shift in generic focus from science fiction to thriller also makes room for a detailed reading of Spielberg’s Minority Report . On Film, Second Edition is essential reading for anyone interested in philosophy, film theory and cultural studies, and in the way philosophy can enrich our understanding of cinema. (shrink)

Moral assertions express attitudes, but it is unclear how. This paper examines proposals by David Copp, Stephen Barker, and myself that moral attitudes are expressed as implicature (Grice), and Copp's and Barker's claim that this supports expressivism about moral speech acts. I reject this claim on the ground that implicatures of attitude are more plausibly conversational than conventional. I argue that Copp's and my own relational theory of moral assertions is superior to the indexical theory offered by Barker and (...) Jamie Dreier, and that since the relational theory supports conversational implicatures of attitude, expressive conventions would be redundant. Furthermore, moral expressions of attitude behave like conversational and not conventional implicatures, and there are reasons for doubting that conventions of the suggested kind could exist. (shrink)

This book develops an alternative approach to sentence- and word-meaning, which I dub the speech-act theoretic approach, or STA. Instead of employing the syntactic and semantic forms of modern logic–principally, quantification theory–to construct semantic theories, STA employs speech-act structures. The structures it employs are those postulated by a novel theory of speech-acts. STA develops a compositional semantics in which surface grammar is integrated with semantic interpretation in a way not allowed by standard quantification-based theories. It provides a pragmatic theory of (...) truth, a treatment of logically complex discourse as expressive cognitive states, and a background metaphysics in which the world is a totality of logically simple states of affairs. The book also puts forward an account of how intentional states provide the simple, representational foundation for a superstructure of speech-act structures–a system of thoughts–that far outruns the expressive power of the intentional foundation. In short, it provides an account of cognitive foundations of a language and a naturalistic reduction of semantics through an expressive theory of semantic norms. (shrink)

Let us call dispositional monism the view that all natural properties have their identities fixed purely by their dispositional features, that is, by the patterns of stimulus and response in which they participate. DM implies that natural properties are pure powers: things whose natures are fully identified by their roles in determining the potentialities of events to cause or be caused. As pure powers, properties are meant to lack quiddities in Black's sense. A property possesses a quiddity just in case (...) its identity is fixed by something independent of the causal–nomological roles it may enter into. Paradigmatically, a categorical property is thought of as a property whose identity is fixed by a quiddity .The key question about the viability of DM as a theory of properties is how properties can be pure powers devoid of any quiddity. Bird provides an answer. According to Bird , ‘all there is to a property is a matter of second-order relations to other properties’. The second-order relation is just the relation that a disposition, its stimulus condition, and a manifestation condition bear to each other. Call this relation SR. SR is not causation or physical necessitation. The latter relations are first-order relations between concrete events. SR is a second-order relation. Its possession by properties explains why events featuring those properties can enter into certain first-order relations of causation or necessitation.Bird's thought then is this: the sense in which properties have their identities fixed purely by their causal–nomological roles is that they are relationally constituted, where the relation doing the constituting is SR. 1 This thesis of relational constitution does not imply that natural properties are themselves relations. Nothing prevents the identity …. (shrink)

In The Ethos of a Late-Modern Citizen, Stephen K. White contends that Western democracies face novel challenges demanding our reexamination of the role of citizens. White argues that the intense focus in the past three decades on finding general principles of justice for diversity-rich societies needs to be complemented by an exploration of what sort of ethos would be needed to adequately sustain any such principles. Accessible, pithy, and erudite, The Ethos of a Late-Modern Citizen will appeal to a (...) wide audience. (shrink)

Leslie Stephen (1832–1904) was a writer, philosopher and literary critic whose work was published widely in the nineteenth century. As a young man Stephen was ordained deacon, but he later became agnostic and much of his work reflects his interest in challenging popular religion. This two-volume work, first published in 1876, is no exception: it focuses on the eighteenth-century deist controversy and its effects, as well as the reactions to what Stephen saw as a revolution in thought. (...) Comprehensive and full of detailed analysis, this is an important work in the history of ideas. Volume 2 focuses on eighteenth-century moral philosophy, political philosophy and literature, and on the literary and religious reactions to the revolution in thought. Utilitarianism is discussed at length, as well as the work of thinkers such as Shaftesbury, Mandeville, Burke and Adam Smith. (shrink)

Are all instances of the T-schema assertable? I argue that they are not. The reason is the presence of conventional implicature in a language. Conventional implicature is meant to be a component of the rule-based content that a sentence can have, but it makes no contribution to the sentence's truth-conditions. One might think that a conventional implicature is like a force operator. But it is not, since it can enter into the scope of logical operators. It follows that the semantic (...) content of a sentence is not given simply by its truth-conditional content. So not all instances of the T-schema are assertable in the relevant sense. Consequently, there is a strong case to be made against truth-conditional semantics of the disquotational variety and deflationism about truth. (shrink)

Stephen Moroney's fascinating study examines the frequently neglected topic of the noetic effects of sin, a phenomenon in which sin distorts human thinking. Drawing on the detailed models formulated by John Calvin, Abraham Kuyper, and Emil Brunner, Moroney sets forth a more contemporary model of the subject. He extends beyond all previous views by relating the noetic effects of sin to the complex and unpredictable interaction between the object of knowledge and the knowing subject. Moroney also futher examines some (...) of the implications of the noetic effects of sin for the rationalist theology of Wolfhart Pannenberg and the Reformed epistemology of Alvin Plantinga and Nicholas Wolterstorff. Lastly, Moroney undertakes an interdisciplinary study of what social psychology and Christian theology contribute to our understanding of the noetic effects of sin. An invaluable addition to current conversations on theology and epistemology, The Noetic Effects of Sin will be of interest to scholars of theology, religion, and social psychology. (shrink)

Stephen Mulhall offers a new way of interpreting one of the most famous and contested texts in modern philosophy: remarks on "private language" in Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations. He sheds new light on a central controversy concerning Wittgenstein's early work by showing its relevance to a proper understanding of the later work.

Stephen Mulhall presents the first full philosophical study of the work of Stanley Cavell. Cavell, a leading contemporary American thinker, is best known for his highly influential contributions to the fields of film studies, Shakespearian literary criticism, and the confluence of psychoanalysis and literary theory; Mulhall examines the broad spectrum of his thought, elucidating its essentially philosophical roots and trajectory.

Bryan Caplan’s The Myth of the Rational Voter treats several immensely important and understudied topics—public ignorance of economics, political ideology, and their connection to policy error—from an orthodox economic perspective whose applicability to these topics is overwhelmingly disproven by the available evidence. Moreover, Caplan adds to the traditional and largely irrelevant orthodox economic notion of rational public ignorance the claim that when voters favor counterproductive economic policies, they do so deliberately, i.e., knowingly. This leads him to assume (without any evidence) (...) that “emotion or ideology” explain mass economic error. Straightforward, unchosen mass ignorance of economic principles—neither “rational” nor “irrational,” but simply mistaken—is a more coherent explanation for economic error, and it is backed up by the vast body of public‐opinion research. (shrink)

In virtue of what do the utterances we make mean what they do? What facts about these signs, about us, and about our environment make it the case that they have the meanings they do? According to a tradition stemming from H.P. Grice through David Lewis and Stephen Schiffer it is in virtue of facts about conventions that we participate in as language users that our utterances mean what they do (see Gr'ice 1957, Lewis 1969, 1983, Schiffer 1972, 1982). (...) This view currently enjoys widespread acceptance among philosophers of mind and language. Though most are not particularly interested in the details of such programs, the dominant view seems to be that something of the sort proposed by Grice, Lewis and Schiffer is basically right. Thus, Jerry Fodor, refiecting what I take to be prevalent attitudes in the field, writes. (shrink)

This book is a comprehensive introduction to media ethics and an exploration of how it must change to adapt to today's media revolution. Using an ethical framework for the new 'mixed media' ethics – taking in the global, interactive media produced by both citizens and professionals – Stephen J. A. Ward discusses the ethical issues which occur in both mainstream and non-mainstream media, from newspapers and broadcast to social media users and bloggers. He re-defines traditional conceptions of journalistic truth-seeking, (...) objectivity and minimizing harm, and examines the responsible use of images in an image-saturated public sphere. He also draws the contours of a future media ethics for the 'new mainstream media' and puts forward cosmopolitan principles for a global media ethics. His book will be invaluable for all students of media and for others who are interested in media ethics. (shrink)

Descartes' Meditations is one of the most thoroughly analyzed of all philosophical texts. Nevertheless, central issues in Descartes' thought remain unresolved, particularly the problem of the Cartesian Circle. Most attempts to deal with that problem have weakened the force of Descartes' own doubts or weakened the goals he was seeking. In this book, Stephen I. Wagner gives Descartes' doubts their strongest force and shows how he overcomes those doubts, establishing with metaphysical certainty the existence of a non-deceiving God and (...) the truth of his clear and distinct perceptions. Wagner's innovative and thorough reading of the text clarifies a wide range of other issues that have been left unclear by previous commentaries, including the nature of the cogito discovery and the relationship between Descartes' proofs of God's existence. His book will be of great interest to scholars and upper-level students of Descartes, early modern philosophy and theology. (shrink)

There is a wide-spread belief amongst theorists of mind and language. This is that in order to understand the relation between language, thought, and reality we need a theory of meaning and content, that is, a normative, formal science of meaning, which is an extension and theoretical deepening of folk ideas about meaning. This book argues that this is false, offering an alternative idea: The form of a theory that illuminates the relation of language, thought, and reality is a theory (...) of language agency. In a nutshell, the theory of language agency is a theory of competence, without being a theory of understanding or grasping rules. It is a theory of cognitive structure and language production. This theory distils all there is to say about language, thought, and reality. It does not supplement a theory of truth-conditions or semantic norms. It is not the explanation of how a speaker, qua cognitive system causally embedded in a larger reality, is able to use a language with some pre-existing semantic characterization. There is no pre-existing semantic characterization. Nevertheless, there are facts of meaning, as good as any other facts. The dissolution of the theory of meaning is accompanied by another disappearance. That is the disappearance of metaphysical questions in a number of domains. Once we complete the theory of language agency, then just as theoretical questions about meaning disappear, certain theoretical questions about existence disappear. Having provided a theory of the language agency for talk of meaning, fact, property, relation, and proposition, there is no question left over about what meanings, facts, properties, relations, and propositions are. There is no theory to be given of their natures. This is not because they have primitive irreducible natures. Rather it is because, in a sense to be clarified in this work, they lack natures. I call this approach to language agency Global Expressivism. That is because it generalizes some of the insights brought to the study of value-language by expressivists. However, it removes these insights from the clouding affects of attempting to make expressivism a semantic theory. Expressivism about value fails as a semantic theory of value talk. However, global expressivism can succeed as a theory of all talk because it is not a semantic theory but a theory of language agency, wherein the theory of meaning is replaced by a theory of talk about meaning. (shrink)

In the second edition of An Eye for an Eye? Stephen Nathanson evaluates arguments for and against the death penalty, and ultimately defends an abolitionist position to the controversial practice, including arguments that show how and why the death penalty is inconsistent with respect for life and a commitment to justice. A timely new postscript and an updated bibliography accompany the volume.

Stephen Mulhall presents a series of multiply interrelated essays which explore the idea of selfhood as a matter of non-self-identity: for example, as becoming or self-overcoming, or as being doubled or divided. He draws on Nietzsche, Sartre, and Wittgenstein, but also on works of opera, cinema, and fiction.