This volume offers a collective critical engagement with the thought of Charles Travis, a leading contemporary philosopher of language and mind, and a scholar of the history of analytical philosophy. Twelve philosophers explore themes in his work, in sections focused on language, thought, and perception; and Travis responds.

In this paper I propose a partition semantics for sentences containing objective predicates that takes into account the phenomenon of occasion-sensitivity associated with so-called Travis cases. The key idea is that the set of worlds in which a sentence is true has a more complex structure as a result of different ways in which it is made true. Different ways may have different capacities to support the attainment of a contextually salient domain goal. I suggest that goal-conduciveness decides whether some (...) utterance of a sentence is accepted as true on a particular occasion at a given world. The utterance will not be accepted as true at a world which belongs to a truth-maker which is less conducive to a contextually salient goal than other truth-makers. Finally, the proposed occasion-sensitive semantics is applied to some cases of disagreement and cancellability. (shrink)

Building on Wittgenstein’s ideas, I defend a brand of pluralism that associates words with conceptual families and appeals to this notion in the course of philosophical problem solving. I argue that certain problems that the received view of conceptual engineering (‘improvement by replacement’) faces can be more easily overcome if we adopt a pluralist perspective. I show that the proposed approach can circumvent the problem of topic discontinuity, whilst also avoiding the threat of trivialisation, since it can easily accommodate both (...) coarse-grained and fine-grained topics. Finally, I argue that my variant of pluralism is compatible with de novo conceptual engineering insofar as it allows that the paradigm associated with a word may shift overtime thus creating an opportunity for new candidate members to join a conceptual family. (shrink)

On the most common interpretation of occasion-sensitivity what varies cross-contextually is the truth-conditional content of representations. Jerry Fodor argues that when extended to mental representation this view has some problematic consequences. In this paper I outline an approach to occasion-sensitivity which circumvents Fodor’s objections but still maintains that the aspect of thought that guides deliberation and action is occasion-sensitive. On the proposed view, what varies cross-contextually are not truth conditions but rather the conditions for accepting a representation as true relative (...) to a practical goal that is pursued on an occasion. I show that although the proposal entails an error theory this theory is not problematic since it is meant to compensate for the over-generating nature of semantic competence, namely, the fact that not all of the representation’s truth-makers are conducive to a given contextually salient goal. (shrink)

Peter Hacker defends an interpretation of the later Wittgenstein's notion of grammar, according to which the inherently general grammatical rules are sufficient for sense-determination. My aim is to show that this interpretation fails to account for an important contextualist shift in Wittgenstein's views on sense-determination. I argue that Hacker attributes to the later Wittgenstein a rule-based, combinatorial account of sense, which Wittgenstein puts forward in the Tractatus. I propose that this is not how we should interpret the later Wittgenstein because (...) he insists that particular circumstances of use play a necessary role in determining the boundary between sense and nonsense. (shrink)

It is a dominant view in the philosophical literature on the later Wittgenstein that Chomsky’s approach to the investigation of natural language stands in stark contrast to Wittgenstein’s, and that their respective conceptions of language and linguistic understanding are irreconcilable. The aim in this paper is to show that this view is largely incorrect and that the two approaches to language and its use are indeed compatible, notwithstanding their distinctive foci of interest. The author argues that there is a signifi (...) cant correspondence in at least five different areas of their work, and that once we pay attention to these there will be lesstemptation to see Wittgenstein and Chomsky as enemies. (shrink)

In this article, I propose an inquisitive approach to semantic underdetermination using the model of issue resolution to describe how occasion meanings are determined in the process of pragmatic enrichment. I appeal to “Travis cases” to motivate the account of semantic underdetermination based on alternative ways for some objectato be F. When interpreting a sentence, we look how to narrow down the space of metalinguistic alternatives and achieve the state where a metalinguistic issue is resolved. I suggest that, in doing (...) this, we primarily rely on contextual domain goals, preferring those alternatives which are conducive to the goal. (shrink)

In his post-Tractatus work on natural language use, Wittgenstein defended the notion of what he dubbed the autonomy of grammar. According to this thought, grammar - or semantics, in a more recent idiom - is essentially autonomous from metaphysical considerations, and is not answerable to the nature of things. The argument has several related incarnations in Wittgenstein?s post-Tractatus writings, and has given rise to a number of important insights, both critical and constructive. In this paper I will argue for a (...) potential connection between Wittgenstein?s autonomy argument and some more recent internalist arguments for the autonomy of semantics. My main motivation for establishing this connection comes from the fact that the later Wittgenstein?s comments on grammar and meaning stand in opposition to some of the core assumptions of semantic externalism. nema. (shrink)

Two Conceptions of Wittgenstein's Contextualism How should we understand Wittgenstein's proposals that "the meaning of a word is its use in the language" and that a name only has a meaning in a language-game? Are they incompatible with occasion-invariant semantics? In this paper I present two leading interpretations of Wittgenstein's contextualism: James Conant's meaning-eliminativism and Charles Travis's meaning-underdetermination. I argue that, even though these two interpretations are very similar, the latter gives a more nuanced account of Wittgenstein's contextualism which does (...) not involve a commitment to the claim that words have no meaning outside immediate contexts of use. (shrink)

What reason does one have to resist oppression? The reasons that most easily come to mind are those having to do with justice—reasons that arise from commitments to human equality and the common good. In this paper, I argue that there are also reasons of love—reasons that arise from personal attachments to specific people, projects, or activities. I defend a distinctive form of resistance that is characteristically undertaken for reasons of love, which I call Quiet Resistance. Contrary to theories that (...) build reasons of justice into the definition of resistance, I argue that we have strong reason to consider Quiet Resistance a genuine form of resistance. Finally, I argue that the reasons in favor of engaging in Quiet Resistance help to explain its distinctive value. In short, when one engages in Quiet Resistance, one’s actions are valuable in large part because they allow one to maintain respect for one’s personal values and meaning in life under oppressive conditions. (shrink)

This article focuses on the follow question: Are human enhancement technologies likely to be justice impairing or justice promoting? We argue that human enhancement technologies may not be inherently just or unjust, but when situated within obtaining social contexts they are likely to exacerbate rather than alleviate social injustices.

Cognitive Mobility, a Macroscopic Investigation of Migration of Scientists between Research Fields Studied by Example of Mathematics. — In history of science, scientific migrations of famous scientists are well-known. Nothing is known, however, about the total of migrations between fields of science, despite the importance of scientific mobility for information transfer and exchange. In the present investigation all migrations between the major 39 subdisciplines of mathematics from 1959 through 1975 are studied in a macroscopic manner. The quantitative importance of migration (...) for the development of mathematical fields is assessed. In an analysis of the relationship between the affinity of fields and mobility between them a „principle of least migration distance” is established. Furthermore, some aspects of a Markov-chain treatment of scientific mobility are discussed. (shrink)

This article starts by noting the general lack of acknowledgment of alternative traditions in the dominant western sustainability discourse in education. After critically analyzing the western human–nature relationship in the context of Enlightenment, modernity and colonial expansion, this article introduces two non-western ecological discourses from Eurasia and Asia, Noöspherism and Neo-Confucianism, which offer clear contrasts to the western sustainability framework. Using theoretical argumentations, the article goes on to examine the cosmological and ontological categories expounded by Vladimir Vernadsky of Russia and (...) Yulgok Yi of Korea, whose philosophical foundations with unique foci on the anthropocosmic and cosmoanthropic types of human–nature relationships could well be alternatives and/or additions to the dominant western discourse. The article concludes with a twofold comparison: between Eurasian and Confucian heritages, and these two with the mainstream western ecological discourse. (shrink)

Despite their centrality and importance to both science and philosophy, relatively little has been written about thought experiments. This volume brings together a series of extremely interesting studies of the history, mechanics, and applications of this important intellectual resource. A distinguished list of philosophers and scientists consider the role of thought experiments in their various disciplines, and argue that an examination of thought experimentation goes to the heart of both science and philosophy.

To what extent can philosophical thought experiments reveal norms? Some ethicists have argued that certain thought experiments reveal that people draw a morally significant distinction between "doing" and "allowing". I examine one such thought experiment in detail and argue that the intuitions it elicits can be explained by "prospect theory", a psychological theory about the way people reason. The extent to which such alternative explanations of the results of thought experiments in philosophy are generally available is an empirical question.

In criminal trials, evidence often involves a degree of uncertainty and decision-making includes moving from the initial presumption of innocence to inference about guilt based on that evidence. The jurors’ ability to combine evidence and make accurate intuitive probabilistic judgments underpins this process. Previous research has shown that errors in probabilistic reasoning can be explained by a misalignment of the evidence presented with the intuitive causal models that people construct. This has been explored in abstract and context-free situations. However, less (...) is known about how people interpret evidence in context-rich situations such as legal cases. The present study examined participants’ intuitive probabilistic reasoning in legal contexts and assessed how people’s causal models underlie the process of belief updating in the light of new evidence. The study assessed whether participants update beliefs in line with Bayesian norms and if errors in belief updating can be explained by the causal structures underpinning the evidence integration process. The study was based on a recent case in England where a couple was accused of intentionally harming their baby but was eventually exonerated because the child’s symptoms were found to be caused by a rare blood disorder. Participants were presented with a range of evidence, one piece at a time, including physical evidence and reports from experts. Participants made probability judgments about the abuse and disorder as causes of the child’s symptoms. Subjective probability judgments were compared against Bayesian norms. The causal models constructed by participants were also elicited. Results showed that overall participants revised their beliefs appropriately in the right direction based on evidence. However, this revision was done without exact Bayesian computation and errors were observed in estimating the weight of evidence. Errors in probabilistic judgments were partly accounted for, by differences in the causal models representing the evidence. Our findings suggest that understanding causal models that guide people’s judgments may help shed light on errors made in evidence integration and potentially identify ways to address accuracy in judgment. (shrink)

The generalized second law of thermodynamics states that entropy always increases when all event horizons are attributed with an entropy proportional to their area. We test the generalized second law by investigating the change in entropy when dust, radiation and black holes cross a cosmological event horizon. We generalize for flat, open and closed Friedmann–Robertson–Walker universes by using numerical calculations to determine the cosmological horizon evolution. In most cases, the loss of entropy from within the cosmological horizon is more than (...) balanced by an increase in cosmological event horizon entropy, maintaining the validity of the generalized second law of thermodynamics. However, an intriguing set of open universe models shows an apparent entropy decrease when black holes disappear over the cosmological event horizon. We anticipate that this apparent violation of the generalized second law will disappear when solutions are available for black holes embedded in arbitrary backgrounds. (shrink)

Currently there is little guidance given to teachers in selecting focal issues for socio-scientific issues -based teaching and learning. As a majority of teachers regularly collaborate with other teachers, understanding what factors influence collaborative SSI-based curriculum design is critical. We invited 18 secondary science teachers to participate in a professional development on SSI-based instruction and curriculum design. Through intentional design, we studied how these teachers formed curriculum design teams and how they selected focal issues for SSI-based curriculum units. We developed (...) substantiative grounded theory to explain these processes. Key findings include how teachers’ tensions and agential moves worked in tandem in the development of a safe and shared place to share discontentment and generate opportunities to form design teams and select issues. Teacher passion and existing resources are factors as influential as considerations for issue relevance. Implications for teacher professional development and research are included. (shrink)

What reasons stand in favor of (or against) violent resistance to oppression? I distinguish two kinds of normative reasons that bear relevantly in such a practical deliberation. I argue that in addition to reasons of impartial morality, victims’ personal projects and relationships may also provide reasons for (or against) violent resistance. Moreover, there is no guarantee that conflicts will not occur between such reasons. Thus, some acts of violent resistance may arise from situations of radical choice in which impartial moral (...) reasons and personal reasons pull the agent in opposite directions. Regardless of what we ultimately think agents facing such decisions ought to do all things considered, recognizing such conflicts is crucial for understanding the circumstances that give rise to violence and for better sympathizing with victims who are pushed to such extreme modes of resistance. (shrink)

In 1951, the eight o’clock nightly news reported on Jean-Paul Sartre for the first time. By the end of the twentieth century, more than 3,500 programs dealing with philosophy and its practitioners—including Bachelard, Badiou, Foucault, Lyotard, and Lévy—had aired on French television. According to Tamara Chaplin, this enduring commitment to bringing the most abstract and least visual of disciplines to the French public challenges our very assumptions about the incompatibility of elite culture and mass media. Indeed, it belies the (...) conviction that television is inevitably anti-intellectual and the quintessential archenemy of the book. Chaplin argues that the history of the televising of philosophy is crucial to understanding the struggle over French national identity in the postwar period. Linking this history to decolonization, modernization, and globalization, _Turning On the Mind _claims that we can understand neither the markedly public role that philosophy came to play in French society during the late twentieth century nor the renewed interest in ethics and political philosophy in the early twenty-first unless we acknowledge the work of television. Throughout, Chaplin insists that we jettison presumptions about the anti-intellectual nature of the visual field, engages critical questions about the survival of national cultures in a globalizing world, and encourages us to rethink philosophy itself, ultimately asserting that the content of the discipline is indivisible from the new media forms in which it has found expression. (shrink)

BackgroundSafeguarding the right to die according to the principles of autonomy and freedom of each person has become more important in the last decade, therefore increasing regulation of Euthanasi...

Interview of Vsevolod Khoma with Professor Tamara Yashchuk within the framework of the research program “Ukrainian Philosophy of the 60s-80s of the 20th Century” of the Student Society of Oral History of Philosophy.

Primate research suggests that affiliation is a highly complex construct. Studies of primate affiliation demonstrate the need to distinguish between various affiliative behaviors, consider relationships as emergent properties of these behaviors, define affiliation in the context of general environmental responsiveness, and address developmental changes in affiliation across the lifespan.

What makes anger an appropriate response to systemic injustice? Let us assume that it cannot merely be its positive effects. That is, sometimes we should be angry even when getting angry is bound to make things worse. What makes such anger appropriate? According to Amia Srinivasan (2017), counterproductive anger is only apt if it passes a necessary condition that I call the Matching Constraint: one’s personal reason for getting angry must match the fact that justifies their anger. When the Matching (...) Constraint is satisfied, anger can be an intrinsically worthwhile way of affectively appreciating injustice. I argue that the Matching Constraint is incorrect. More precisely, I take issue with its status as a necessary condition on apt anger. Anger can be an apt response to injustice even when it fails to be a form of affective appreciation. Often enough, one does not know why they are angry, or one is not angry for the reason that justifies their anger. For all that, it may still be appropriate for them to be angry. After presenting several cases of apt anger that fail the Matching Constraint, I suggest an alternative standard for aptness based on the general function of anger in our psychology. On my view, anger is apt when and because it alerts one, however coarsely or crudely, to threats against one’s values. (shrink)

This paper develops a domination-based practice-dependent approach to justice, according to which it is practices of systemic domination which can be said to ground demands from justice. The domination-based approach developed overcomes the two most important objections levelled to alternative practice-dependent approaches. First, it eschews conservative implications and hence is immune to the status quo objection. Second, it is immune to the redundancy objection, which doubts whether empirical facts and practices can really play an irreducible role in grounding justice. In (...) theorising dominating practices in terms of practices of social power, a domination-based approach makes justice dependent on factual information in three ways: First, the principle of non-domination is indeterminate and can only be spelled out by taking into view particular contexts of domination. Second, the principle of non-domination is conditional on the existence of practices of social power. Third, social power possesses a structural ontology – to know whether A has social power over B we need to turn to social rules distributing agents' higher order status of normative authority towards each other. This explains in what way practices of social power – and of domination – are both factual and normative practices and hence how such practices are non-redundant in grounding justice. (shrink)

Zusammenfassung Ausgehend von modernen religionswissenschaftlichen Diskussionen um ‚religi⃶se Bildung‘ wird im Artikel der Frage nach Medien religi⃶ser Bildung im philosophischen Heidentum der Sp⃤tantike nachgegangen: inwiefern k⃶nnen die zwei neuplatonischen Pythagorasviten als Instrumente religi⃶ser Bildung in einer Zeit verst⃤rkter Konfrontation mit dem Christentum gelesen werden? Die Ergebnisse zeigen die Vielfalt und Individualit⃤t der neuplatonischen Szene auf, die als einer der sch⃤rfer konturierten Bereiche paganer Religiosit⃤t gelten kann: während Porphyrios Pythagoras in seiner Philosophiegeschichte lediglich als einen Philosophen der Vergangenheit festh⃤lt, benutzt ihn (...) Iamblich zur Konkretisierung und Kommunikation einer Lebensform, welche philosophische Bet⃤tigung und traditionelle religi⃶se Praxis miteinander verbindet. (shrink)

La parroquia constituía un componente clave de la identidad en los siglos XVIII y XIX, ya que constituía la unidad de residencia principal y se fraguó como el principal marco de sociabilidad. El estudio de los conflictos por los cambios en las parroquias revela una cosmovisión identitaria densa y estable. De tal forma que pertenecer a un aparroquia no estaba condicionado exclusivamente por factores residenciales y devocionales, sino que la población se basó en múltiples elementos para argumentar y defender el (...) territorio parroquial propio, tales como factores económicos o patrimoniales. (shrink)

In an era before the invention of photography, fine art prints based on famous paintings dominated the eighteenth-century art market, inviting a common comparison between engravers and translators. At a time when writers and scholars placed much value on the closeness of translations to their original texts, such comparisons reflected a subordination of the skills of technical engravers to the assumed genius of painters. However, careful examination of the copy-prints reveals that loyalty to originals was not the primary interest of (...) these visual translators. Instead, these translators saw themselves as active mediators. This essay reconsiders acts of eighteenth-century visual translation to reframe the practice of engraving during the period and to establish a new understanding of the movement from one visual artistic language to another. The case study of Nicolas de Launay, one the most successful engravers in eighteenth-century France, is selected for scrutiny and contextualized within historical debates around translation. The final aim is to illuminate important tensions between the disciplines of painting and engraving, as well as the complex process by which engravers strove to remain simultaneously loyal to the painters, to their audience, and to their own artistic identity. (shrink)

Leading experts and rising stars in the field explore whether cosmopolitanism becomes impossible in the theoretical framework that assumed the absence of a final ground. The questions that the volume addresses refer exactly to the foundational predicament that characterizes cosmopolitanism: How is it possible to think cosmopolitanism after the critique of foundations? Can cosmopolitanism be conceived without an ‘ultimate’ ground? Can we construct theories of cosmopolitanism without some certainties about the entire world or about the cosmos? Should we continue to (...) look for foundations of cosmopolitan rights, norms and values? Alternatively, should we aim towards cosmopolitanism without foundations or towards cosmopolitanism with ‘contingent foundations’? Could cosmopolitanism be the very attempt to come to terms with the failure of ultimate grounds? Written accessibly and contributing to key debates on political philosophy, and social and political thought, this volume advances the concept of post-foundational cosmopolitanism by bridging the polarised approaches to the concept. (shrink)

Historical scholarship often relies on intermittent adjustments rather than radical innovation. Through a close reading of three different universal histories published between 1690 and 1760, this essay argues that the secularization of world history in the age of Enlightenment was an incomplete and often unintended process. Nonetheless, one of the most significant changes in this period was the centering of universal history in Europe, a process that accompanied the desacralization of the story of man. Once human progress was embraced as (...) a universal process, the story of the development of the arts and sciences gradually eclipsed the non-European cultures that had formerly played a central role in the Christian narrative of human history. (shrink)

Non-medical sex selection is premised on the notion that the sexes are not interchangeable. Studies of individuals who undergo sex selection for non-medical reasons, or who have a preference for a son or daughter, show that they assume their child will conform to the stereotypical roles and norms associated with their sex. However, the evidence currently available has not succeeded in showing that the gender traits and inclinations sought are caused by a “male brain” or a “female brain”. Therefore, as (...) far as we know, there is no biological reason why parents cannot have the kind of parenting experience they seek with a child of any sex. Yet gender essentialism, a set of unfounded assumptions about the sexes which pervade society and underpin sexism, prevents parents from realising this freedom. In other words, unfounded assumptions about gender constrain not only a child’s autonomy, but also the parent’s. To date, reproductive autonomy in relation to sex selection has predominantly been regarded merely as the freedom to choose the sex of one’s child. This paper points to at least two interpretations of reproductive autonomy and argues that sex selection, by being premised on gender essentialism and/or the social pressure on parents to ensure their children conform to gender norms, undermines reproductive autonomy on both accounts. (shrink)

Resisting oppression evokes images of picket lines and crowds of protestors demanding large-scale reform. But not all resistance is political or publicly broadcast. Some acts of resistance are done solo, in private, aim to achieve personal goals, and may not even be recognizable as resistance by others. I present a taxonomy of resistance to oppression that distinguishes acts of resistance along four dimensions: their subject, target, scope, and tone. The taxonomy brings to light a range of forms of resistance that (...) differ significantly from political activism and that theories of the morality of resistance should be able to evaluate. (shrink)

This volume will focus on ethical dilemmas created by today's ever-changing technologies and how these issues have affected individuals, companies, and society to include policies, responsibilities, abuses, consequences, whistle-blowing, and other factors in a wide variety of technology areas.