Since its inception, psychoanalysis has been hailed as a revolutionary theory of how the mind works, whilst some of its ideas such as the Oedipus complex have become part of everyday conversation. In Psychoanalysis: A Very Short Introduction, Daniel Pick offers a lucid, lively, and wide-ranging survey of psychoanalysis. This book offers the reader a flavour of what it might be like to enter treatment, and suggests the possible surprises that can await both analyst and patient, as well (...) as the potential benefits. Yet whilst Freud's writings have shaped the way many of us understand dreams, desires, and destructiveness, as well as anxieties, blunders, and guilt, numerous critics have warned of the dangerous methods and time-bound assumptions of psychoanalysis, doubted the efficacy of its drawn-out methods, and dismissed its core claims as pseudo-science. Looking at modern ideas of the self, exploring the nature of unconscious aspects of relationships, and considering how psychoanalysis has evolved, Pick ponders the particular challenges now facing the analytic profession, and shows why psychoanalysis remains an important resource for investigating the mind, its creative functioning and many afflictions.ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable. (shrink)

He discusses the work of such familiar commentators as Clausewitz, Engels, and Treitschke, and examines little-known writings by Proudhon, De Quincey, Ruskin, Valery, and many others, culminating in the extraordinary dialogue between Freud ...

_Psychoanalysis in the Age of Totalitarianism_ provides rich new insights into the history of political thought and clinical knowledge. In these chapters, internationally renowned historians and cultural theorists discuss landmark debates about the uses and abuses of ‘the talking cure’ and map the diverse psychologies and therapeutic practices that have featured in and against tyrannical, modern regimes. These essays show both how the Freudian movement responded to and was transformed by the rise of fascism and communism, the Second World War, (...) and the Cold War, and how powerful new ideas about aggression, destructiveness, control, obedience and psychological freedom were taken up in the investigation of politics. They identify important intersections between clinical debate, political analysis, and theories of minds and groups, and trace influential ideas about totalitarianism that took root in modern culture after 1918, and still resonate in the twenty-first century. At the same time, they suggest how the emergent discourses of ‘totalitarian’ society were permeated by visions of the unconscious. Topics include: the psychoanalytic theorizations of anti-Semitism; the psychological origins and impact of Nazism; the post-war struggle to rebuild liberal democracy; state-funded experiments in mind control in Cold War America; coercive ‘re-education’ programmes in Eastern Europe, and the role of psychoanalysis in the politics of decolonization. A concluding trio of chapters argues, in various ways, for the continuing relevance of psychoanalysis, and of these mid-century debates over the psychology of power, submission and freedom in modern mass society. Psychoanalysis in the Age of Totalitarianism will prove compelling for both specialists and readers with a general interest in modern psychology, politics, culture and society, and in psychoanalysis. The material is relevant for academics and post-graduate students in the human, social and political sciences, the clinical professions, the historical profession and the humanities more widely. (shrink)

This article revisits a forgotten, late project by the social psychologist Stanley Milgram: the ‘cyranoid’ studies he conducted from 1977 to 1984. These investigations, inspired by the play Cyrano de Bergerac, explored how individuals often fail to notice when others do not speak their own thoughts, but instead relay messages from a hidden source. We situate these experiments amidst the intellectual, cultural, and political concerns of late Cold War America, and show how Milgram’s studies pulled together a variety of ideas, (...) anxieties, and interests that were prevalent at that time and have returned in new guises since. In discussing the cyranoid project’s background and afterlife, we argue that its strikingly equivocal quality has lent itself to multiple reinterpretations by historians, psychologists, performers, artists, and others. Our purpose is neither to champion Milgram’s work nor to amplify the critiques already made of his methods. Rather, it is to consider the uncertain, allusive, and elusive aspects of the cyranoid project, and to seek to place that project in context, whilst asking where ‘context’ might end. We show how the experiments’ range of meanings, in different temporal registers, far exceeded the explanatory rubric that Milgram and his intellectual critics provided at that time, and ponder the risk for the historian of making anachronistic or teleological assumptions. In short, we argue, cyranoids invite our open-ended exploration of ‘voices offstage’ in social and psychological relations, and offer a useful tool for thinking about historical context and the nature of historical interpretations. (shrink)

An extended argument that cognitive phenomena—perceiving, imagining, remembering—can be best explained in terms of an interface between contentless and content-involving forms of cognition. -/- Evolving Enactivism argues that cognitive phenomena—perceiving, imagining, remembering—can be best explained in terms of an interface between contentless and content-involving forms of cognition. Building on their earlier book Radicalizing Enactivism, which proposes that there can be forms of cognition without content, Daniel Hutto and Erik Myin demonstrate the unique explanatory advantages of recognizing that only some (...) forms of cognition have content while others—the most elementary ones—do not. They offer an account of the mind in duplex terms, proposing a complex vision of mentality in which these basic contentless forms of cognition interact with content-involving ones. -/- Hutto and Myin argue that the most basic forms of cognition do not, contrary to a currently popular account of cognition, involve picking up and processing information that is then used, reused, stored, and represented in the brain. Rather, basic cognition is contentless—fundamentally interactive, dynamic, and relational. In advancing the case for a radically enactive account of cognition, Hutto and Myin propose crucial adjustments to our concept of cognition and offer theoretical support for their revolutionary rethinking, emphasizing its capacity to explain basic minds in naturalistic terms. They demonstrate the explanatory power of the duplex vision of cognition, showing how it offers powerful means for understanding quintessential cognitive phenomena without introducing scientifically intractable mysteries into the mix. (shrink)

Cross-situational word learning, like any statistical learning problem, involves tracking the regularities in the environment. However, the information that learners pick up from these regularities is dependent on their learning mechanism. This article investigates the role of one type of mechanism in statistical word learning: competition. Competitive mechanisms would allow learners to find the signal in noisy input and would help to explain the speed with which learners succeed in statistical learning tasks. Because cross-situational word learning provides information at (...) multiple scales—both within and across trials/situations—learners could implement competition at either or both of these scales. A series of four experiments demonstrate that cross-situational learning involves competition at both levels of scale, and that these mechanisms interact to support rapid learning. The impact of both of these mechanisms is considered from the perspective of a process-level understanding of cross-situational learning. (shrink)

This paper presents and defends an argument that the continuum hypothesis is false, based on considerations about objective chance and an old theorem due to Banach and Kuratowski. More specifically, I argue that the probabilistic inductive methods standardly used in science presuppose that every proposition about the outcome of a chancy process has a certain chance between 0 and 1. I also argue in favour of the standard view that chances are countably additive. Since it is possible to randomly (...) class='Hi'>pick out a point on a continuum, for instance using a roulette wheel or by flipping a countable infinity of fair coins, it follows, given the axioms of ZFC, that there are many different cardinalities between countable infinity and the cardinality of the continuum. (shrink)

While recent discussions of contextualism have mostly focused on other issues, some influential early statements of the view emphasized the possibility of its providing an alternative to both coherentism and traditional versions of foundationalism. In this essay, I will pick up on this strand of contextualist thought, and argue that contextualist versions of foundationalism promise to solve some problems that their non-contextualist cousins cannot. In particular, I will argue that adopting contextualist versions of foundationalism can let us reconcile Bayesian (...) accounts of belief updating with a version of the holist claim that all beliefs are defeasible. (shrink)

This essay argues that what is central to Christopher Boorse’s biostatistical theory of disease as statistically subnormal part function (BST) are comparisons of the “functional efficiency” of parts and processes and that statistical considerations serve only to pick out a healthy level of functional efficiency. On this interpretation, the distinction between health and pathology is less important than comparisons of functional efficiency, which are entirely independent of statistical considerations. The clarifications or revisions of the BST that this essay offers (...) are friendly amendments that render moot some of the most prominent criticisms of Boorse’s account. (shrink)

Paul Feyerabend once made a remark to the effect that his pragmatic theory of observation can be traced back to proposals put forward by leading Logical Empiricists during the height of the protocol sentence debate. In this paper I want to vindicate the systematic side of Feyerabend’s remark and show that a pragmatic theory of observation can in fact be found in Rudolf Carnap’s writings of 1932. I first proceed to dispel a misunderstanding concerning the term “pragmatic” raised by Thomas (...) Oberdan. Following Morris’ and Carnap’s documented usage, I show that the intended meaning of “pragmatic” refers to a specific semiotic relation between users of a language and their environment describable by empirical means. I reconstruct such a pragmatic theory in terms of a detector model that interprets observation sentences as bodily dispositions indicating physical events in the surroundings of the detector. I then proceed to show how Feyerabend’s later theory of observation picks up central features of Carnap’s account and also shares some of the motivations. I conclude by noting how an empirical theory of observation sentences offers a bootstrapping solution to the “basis problem”. (shrink)

The philosophical literature on scientific explanation in neuroscience has been dominated by the idea of mechanisms. The mechanist philosophers often claim that neuroscience is in the business of finding mechanisms. This view has been challenged in numerous ways by showing that there are other successful and widespread explanatory strategies in neuroscience. However, the empirical evidence for all these claims was hitherto lacking. Empirical evidence about the pervasiveness and uses of various explanatory strategies in neuroscience is particularly needed because examples and (...) case studies that are used to illustrate philosophical claims so far tend to be hand-picked. The risk of confirmation bias is therefore considerable: when looking for white swans, all one finds is that swans are white. The more systematic quantitative and qualitative bibliometric study of a large body of relevant literature that we present in this paper can put such claims into perspective. Using bibliometric tools, we identify the typical linguistic patterns used in the alleged mechanistic, dynamical, and topological explanations in the literature, their preponderance and how they change over time. Our findings show abundant use of mechanistic language, but also the presence of a significant neuroscience literature using topological and dynamical explanatory language, which grows over time and increasingly differentiates from each other and from mechanistic explanations. (shrink)

The view that special science properties are multiply realizable has been attacked in recent years by Shapiro, Bechtel and Mundale, Polger, and others. Focusing on psychological and neuroscientific properties, I argue that these attacks are unsuccessful. By drawing on interspecies physiological comparisons I show that diverse physical mechanisms can converge on common functional properties at multiple levels. This is illustrated with examples from the psychophysics and neuroscience of early vision. This convergence is compatible with the existence of general constraints on (...) the evolution of cognitive systems, and does not involve any ad hoc typing of coarse-grained higher level properties. The mechanisms that realize these common higher level properties are really distinct by the criteria laid down by critics of multiple readability. Finally, I present an account of how such functional properties might constitute special science kinds by playing a central explanatory role in a range of cognitive models. Behavioral science kinds in particular are the functionally defined constituents picked out by our most successful models of the multilevel systems and mechanisms that explain cognitive capacities. (shrink)

One hundred and ninety participants (95 undergraduates and 95 employees) responded to a factorial survey in which a number of case-based organizational allocation tasks were described. Participants were asked to imagine themselves as employees in fictitious organizations and chose among three allocations of employee development schemes invested by the manager in different work groups. The allocations regarded how such investments should be allocated between two parties. Participants chose twice, once picking the fairest and once the best allocation. One between-subjects factor (...) varied whether the parties represented social (i.e., choosing among allocations between two different work groups) or temporal comparisons (i.e., choosing among allocations between the present and the following year). Another between-subjects factor varied whether participants’ in-group was represented by the parties or not. One allocation maximized the outcome to one party, another maximized the joint outcome received by both parties, and a third provided both parties with equal but lower outcomes. It was predicted that equality, although always deficient to both parties, would be the preferred allocation when parties represented social comparisons and when choices were based on fairness. When parties represented temporal comparisons, and when choices were based on preference, maximizing the joint outcome was hypothesized to be the preferred allocation. Results supported these hypotheses. Against what was predicted, whether the in-group was represented by the parties or not did not moderate the results, indicating that participants’ allocation preferences were not affected by self-interest. The main message is that people make sensible distinctions between what they prefer and what they regard as fair. The results were the same for participating students who imagined themselves as being employees and participants who were true employees, suggesting that no serious threats to external validity are committed when university students are used as participants. (shrink)

Joseph Raz’s much discussed service conception of practical authority has recently come under attack from Stephen Darwall, who proposes that we instead adopt a second- personal conception of practical authority.1 We believe that the best place to start understanding practical authority is with a pared back conception of it, as simply a species of normative authority more generally, where this species is picked out merely by the fact that the normative authority in question is authority in relation to action, rather (...) than belief. We do not wish to deny that there might be properties of practical authority (as distinct from the species of authority that is concerned with belief) that are peculiar to it, but, unlike both Raz and Darwall, we do not believe that such features play a role in defining or delimiting practical authority. (shrink)

Drawing heavily on Aristotle, Tabensky attempts to establish ‘an ethic that flows from the very structure of our being’, but he also calls on Davidson’s arguments about the essentially social character of rationality to shore up Aristotle’s claim that we are essentially social beings. This much of his project, I argue is successful. However Tabensky takes this a step further and proposes a pluralist ethic on the grounds that a ‘fully’ or ‘properly’ instantiated account of the ‘ideal’ conditions for rationality (...) requires encountering innumerable other points of view. Firstly, while confronting alternatives is essential to truth-seeking it hardly follows that an unconstrained pluralism represents an ideal condition for this kind of inquiry, since such an approach risks falling into mere clash of perspectives on practical grounds. Secondly, it is unclear how confronting more and more perspectives is supposed to help in enabling us to lead our lives well. In conclusion, picking up on this theme and looking again at Aristotle, I give reasons for questioning that the kind of rational choice involved in leading the good life, for reasons in part highlighted by Tabensky, benefits from analogy with the modes of conceptual rational inquiry in other domains in any case. (shrink)

Philosophical accounts of the semantics of fiction have tended to be problematic in one of two ways: either they have denied that items used in fictional discourse have their plain meaning, introducing complications into otherwise satisfactory accounts of semantics, or they have posited special kinds of entities, introducing complications into otherwise satisfactory accounts of ontology. Accounts that tried to avoid these problems by positing mere possibilia as fictional entities were thought to be hopeless inasmuch as it was thought impossible to (...) pick out unique mere possibilia, and there could be no causal connection to them of the sort that was thought to be necessary for reference. I proposed to try to deal with the first problem by using counterfactuals, which each pick out a relatively small, constrained set of possible worlds, and presumably could so limit the possibilia contained in them to make picking out unique ones possible. I improve on David Lewis' counterfactual semantics for fiction by altering the analysis to make the experience of a hypothetical listener central, rather than the actions of a hypothetical narrator. As for the second, I show bow the causal theory of names can plausibly be expanded to a counterfactual theory of names, which would allow for naming across possible worlds. I conclude that fictional names rigidly designate mere possibilia, which allows for a more normal semantics for fiction than had seemed possible. (shrink)

The current article seeks to describe the intellectual dialogue between Raymond Aron and Max Weber. A Dialogue that is marked essentially by two different stages. The first stage comes from discovery: Aron meets Weber in the 1930s and is strongly attracted by his methodological rigour as for his manner of understanding the political reality. Then, from the 1950s onward, Aron distances himself somewhat from some of Weber's central theses. Particularly, he doesn't believe that a scientist, as such, is able to (...) reach something akin to neutrality. This, however, does not prevent him from recognising in Weber's work a very solid contribution to social sciences, nor does it prevent him from picking many of his teachings. (shrink)

Lycurgus' "Against Leocrates" has long been seen as an anomaly in the oratorical corpus by scholars of ancient rhetoric. Its extensive use of quotations from the poets and of personification are two features regularly picked out as especially odd and inexplicable by critics. This paper argues that these and other features of the speech are central to Lycurgus' attempt to persuade his jury to accept his radically un-Athenian political views. In fact, Lycurgus has rejected Athenian approaches to punishment, prosecution, and (...) politics in favor of Platonic views, which bear the taint of the elite philosophical schools. The quotation and the personification are two techniques that Lycurgus uses to craft a "new prosecutorial voice" that will overcome his audience's objections to his elitist and even Platonic political positions. I contend that the whole speech may be read as a study in how to craft a "voice" or form of oratorical self-presentation that will persuade an audience to accept heterodox political views. (shrink)

Have you ever picked up a self-help book from a bookstore and, although perhaps agreeing with its advice to take responsibility for your life and to treat other people kindly, wondered a little as to where the author's moral certaint as to how to approach the world comes from?

Reprinted in Philosophy of Religion: An Anthology, Wadsworth 2015, 6th edition, eds Michael Rea and Louis Pojman. What is propositional faith? At a first approximation, we might answer that it is the psychological attitude picked out by standard uses of the English locution “S has faith that p,” where p takes declarative sentences as instances, as in “He has faith that they’ll win”. Although correct, this answer is not nearly as informative as we might like. Many people say that there (...) is a more informative answer. They say that, at the very least, propositional faith requires propositional belief. More precisely, they say that faith that p requires belief that p or that it must be partly constituted by belief that p. This view is common enough; call it the Common View. I have two main aims in this paper: (i) to exhibit the falsity of the Common View and the paucity of reasons for it, and (ii) to sketch a more accurate and comprehensive account of what propositional faith is. (shrink)

The rise of cognitive science in the last half-century has been accompanied by a considerable amount of philosophical activity. No other area within analytic philosophy in the second half of that period has attracted more attention or produced more publications. Philosophical work relevant to cognitive science has become a sprawling field (extending beyond analytic philosophy) which no one can fully master, although some try and keep abreast of the philosophical literature and of the essential scientific developments. Due to the particular (...) nature of its subject, it touches on a multitude of distinct special branches in philosophy and in science. It has also become quite a difficult, complicated and technical field, to the point of being nearly impenetrable for philosophers or scientists coming from other fields or traditions. Finally, it is contentious: Cognitive science is far from having reached stability, it is still widely regarded with suspicion, philosophers working within its confine have sharp disagreements amongst themselves, and philosophers standing outside, especially (but not only) of non-analytic persuasion, are often inclined to see both cognitive science and its accompanying philosophy as more or less confused or even deeply flawed. The sensible way to go under the circumstances, or so one might judge, would be to pick a sample of salient topics, in the present case, philosophical discussions of some central foundational issues, in the hope thereby of giving the reader a sense of what the field is about. This however is not the path I propose to take. There are two reasons for choosing another tack. The negative reason is that there is now available a plethora of excellent expositions, of any length one might desire, from one-page summaries to chapter- or volume-length introductions, of central topics in philosophy of mind (which constitutes in turn the core of what most philosophers think of as philosophy of cognitive science: more on this in a moment)1.. (shrink)

In the late 1960s, I created a joke dictionary of philosophers' names that circulated in samizdat form, picking up new entries as it went. The first few editions were on Ditto masters, in those pre-photocopy days. The 7th edition, entitled The Philosophical Lexicon , was the first properly copyrighted version, published for the benefit of the American Philosophical Association in 1978, and the 8th edition (brought out in 1987), is still available from the APA. I continue to receive submissions of (...) further entries, but I doubt that there will ever be a 9th edition. The 8th edition lists two distinct entries for Dick Rorty. (shrink)

Should tobacco be banned? The answer depends largely on two further questions. How much are smokers benefitted by being made to stop, or to not start? And what is the moral cost of their being made to stop by their government, as opposed to stopping due to the influence of policies that fall short of coercion? Grill and Voigt provide one answer to the first question. They argue that the benefits of cessation are high enough to justify a ban on (...) tobacco products.1 I partly agree: I share their view that the harms of tobacco consumption are great enough to justify at least some policies that force (rather than merely encourage) people to not smoke.i But the differences between policies of this sort are large enough that any general conclusion in favour of ‘a ban’ is incomplete.ii By not elaborating on what a ban might come to, Grill and Voigt leave the second question rather unaddressed. Of course, the authors hardly mean to say that anything goes when it comes to forming policies that force people to not smoke. Nevertheless, it is appropriate to build on their defence of the benefits of forced cessation by comparing different sorts of bans, and by comparing bans with other sorts of coercive policies. I will pick up, therefore, where they leave off: granting that a ban's effects on well-being would be overall positive, a principal moral cost of a ban can be measured in terms of its infringement of smokers’ autonomy. Comparisons, then, can be sought in terms of how different policies infringe autonomy in different ways. What exactly might it mean, however, to speak of smokers’ autonomy? According to Grill and Voigt, autonomy should be thought of as a sort of ‘self-direction’ which obtains given ‘the absence of external …. (shrink)

Thomas Reid’s influence on continental and especially on French philosophy at the beginning of the 19th century has to be considered against the background of the crisis of the philosophical project of the moderns. This project, which is intimately related to the rise of the modern scientific world image, has one of its major tenets in the so called “theory of ideas” introduced by Descartes and developed further by Locke. By emphasizing the role of our active faculties in the formulation (...) of judgements, Reid rejects this theory. One of the consequences of this rejection is the distinction Reid makes between sensations, which are passive, and perceptions, which are active. Maine de Biran picks up Reid’s emphasis on our active powers but reinterprets it on the light of his theory of the “primitive fact” that external objects resist our efforts to move them, thus providing a unifying principle for Reid’s “principles of common sense”. (shrink)

A dozen philosophers have recently groped for a formula to pick out coercive offers: when P proposes to give a benefit or withhold a harm for Q’s compliance, when does p’s proposal count as coercive? Five formulae are analyzed here. One account is completely “moralized,” claiming that we can’t pick out coercive offers without first settling questions of rights. Two accounts are completely “non-moral,” using as criterion a baseline of “What would in fact have happened” if P had (...) not wanted Q’s compliance. Finally, two accounts offer “two-baseline” accounts, asking “What should have happened?” and/or “What would have happened otherwise?” four accounts are found quite inadequate; the fifth account (my own earlier formula) is threatened by two odd counter cases. Finally, an alternative to “defining coercion” is sketched. (shrink)

This dissertation argues for a metaethical theory I call "Expressive-Assertivism." Expressive-Assertivism is a distinctive, substantial refinement of dual-use metaethical theories traditionally associated with R. M. Hare, C. L. Stevenson, and, more recently, with David Copp. If true, Expressive-Assertivism clarifies, resolves, or dissolves---without, in turn, raising additional difficulties---a number of philosophical problems, including what Michael Smith calls "The Moral Problem," which many consider to be the central organizing problem in contemporary metaethics. The following are the three most important features of Expressive-Assertivism. (...) ;1. The central tenet. The proper, literal use of an ethical sentence, such as 'Donating to charity is right', is the performance of a direct expressive illocutionary act and a direct assertive illocutionary act. Recognizing that ethical sentences can be used to both directly express a speaker's attitude and directly assert something about the world captures what is intuitively compelling about "expressivist" theories---namely, that there is some strong connection between a speaker's sincere moral utterance and his or her motivations to act---and what is intuitively compelling about "descriptivist" theories---namely, that moral utterances appear to have descriptive or cognitive content and, therefore, are truth-evaluable. The Central Tenet is the feature of Expressive-Assertivism that dissolves The Moral Problem. ;2. The generality principle. The proper, literal use of an ethical sentence directly expresses an attitude, not toward the subject of the sentence, but toward things of a more general kind, namely, things that have the property picked out by the ethical predicate . ;3. The extensionality principle. A speaker directly expresses an attitude toward things that have the property picked out by an ethical predicate whenever that predicate appears in any extensional context. Together, the Extensionality and Generality Principles shield Expressive-Assertivism from many objections to traditional expressivist theories, including "The Embedding Objection," which many consider to be the most difficult problem faced by expressivists. (shrink)

You have the camera, or intend to. You have the desire. Now, you have personalized instruction from PC Magazine "The play of light and color on the human imagination." That's how Daniel and Sally Wiener Grotta define photography. They'll lead you through choosing a digital camera and using all its amazing features, but photography is more than technology. These renowned experts liberally share their knowledge of lighting, settings, focus, file formats, communicating with pictures, and more. Read a little, then (...) go shoot some pictures, study them, and read some more. See what you and that camera can do -- together. Go one-on-one with the pros Choose a camera that fits your needs Understand resolution, compression, pixels, and file formats Use shutter speed, lighting, and depth of field Learn about white balance and color adjustment Organize your shots on the camera Shoot photos for company publications or online auctions Pick up tips for getting great photos Get your pictures out of the camera, easily Edit, print, and e-mail photos. (shrink)

When we pick up a big book like this with big names including Heidegger, Arendt, Benjamin, and Warburg, we want to learn something significant we don't already know by way of reading and reputation. And if we are in rhetoric per se, we are especially eager to see how these people are attached substantially to a field that none of them claimed. Following from these initial expectations, we are then owed a plausible methodology that tends neither toward the wish (...) fulfillment of big rhetoric, nor toward one of the more conventional methods—for example biographic, or dictated by the more familiar scripts of philosophy, politics, and art history—that would render these surprises unlikely because the field would have been... (shrink)

A dozen philosophers have recently groped for a formula to pick out coercive offers: when P proposes to give a benefit or withhold a harm for Q’s compliance, when does p’s proposal count as coercive? Five formulae are analyzed here. One account is completely “moralized,” claiming that we can’t pick out coercive offers without first settling questions of rights. Two accounts are completely “non-moral,” using as criterion a baseline of “What would in fact have happened” if P had (...) not wanted Q’s compliance. Finally, two accounts offer “two-baseline” accounts, asking “What should have happened?” and/or “What would have happened otherwise?” four accounts are found quite inadequate; the fifth account (my own earlier formula) is threatened by two odd counter cases. Finally, an alternative to “defining coercion” is sketched. (shrink)

There's so much more to being a detective than just seeing the clues right in front of your eyes. What makes a detective great is that she can figure out the truth she's not seeing—the hidden explanation behind an otherwise scattered array of facts and appearances. She can puzzle through the observed facts to get at the hidden truth. That's where Veronica Mars excels, and that's what makes her special. Veronica is, of course, no stranger to fieldwork. Being a detective (...) is more than just being a well‐trained bloodhound that can pick up a scent—it's about being able to think, reason, and make good inferences. This chapter talks about deductive and inductive inferences. It analyzes what kind inference Veronica draws when she determines that Beaver is responsible for the crash. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Google Ngram metadata reveal that the English phrase “rhetorical theory” is not that old, appearing on the scene in the latter half of the nineteenth century, and then picking up dramatically with critical and literary theory in the 1960s. How do we square this with familiar arguments that rhetorical theory is much, much older? In this forum contribution I argue that the long view applies to our contemporary rhetorical theory only if we equivocate. Much of what currently falls under (...) the heading “rhetorical theory” has little or nothing to do with the systematic conceptualization of persuasive discourse —general, posthuman, eco-, and materialist rhetorics are the most prominent counterexamples. Instead, around 1900, Gertrude Buck develops what I call the short and sharp view that prevails to this day: rhetorical theory offers reality figured by way of its alternatives. (shrink)

Anybody interested in evolutionary explanations of social phenomena (and every philosopher should be) will learn a lot from Unto Others. In addition to its cornucopia of fascinating empirical findings from biology and psychology, it is chock full of arresting perspectives, ingenious thought experiments, and clear expositions of difficult-indeed, treacherous-concepts that should be in every philosopher's kit. What philosophers will not learn, however, is the status of group selection in current evolutionary theory, because while Sober and Wilson (hereafter S&W) strive intelligently (...) to clarify and unify the issues, some of their efforts muddy the waters instead. This is mainly due to the lingering effects of ancient feuds and score-settling on both sides. So far as I can see, nobody has yet been able to come up with a judicious overview of the whole scene. Evolutionists love to pick a fight. Why propose a friendly amendment when you can claim to overthrow some major edifice of orthodoxy with your revolutionary idea? And what could be more satisfying than resurrecting a derided heresy? Stephen Jay Gould briefly tried to restore Goldschmidt's "hopeful monster" saltationism as part of his campaign for punctuated equilibrium, which was itself not as revolutionary as he claimed (Dennett, 1995); hardly a year goes by without somebody declaring that something they have discovered is, actually, a genuine instance of Lamarckianism. There is usually a grain of truth, or more, in these dramatic claims. Prions really do constitute a major exception to Crick's Central Dogma about the direction of information flow between DNA and proteins.. (shrink)

Sometimes the way to make progress on a topic is to turn your back on it for a few years. At least I hope so, since I have just returned to the Frame Problem after several years of concentrating on other topics. It seems to me that I may have picked up a few odds and ends that shed light on the issues.

When we say that what two people feel for each other is 'true love,' we seem to be doing more than simply clarifying that it is in fact love they feel, as opposed to something else. That is, an experience or relationship might be a genuine or actual instance of love without necessarily being an instance of true love. But what criteria do people use to determine whether something counts as true love? This chapter explores three hypotheses. The first holds (...) that the ordinary concept of true love picks out love that is highly prototypical. The second, that it picks out love that is especially good or valuable. The third, that people distinguish between psychological states that are 'real' or not, and that it picks out love that is real. Two experiments provide evidence against the first hypothesis and in favor of the second and third. Implications for real-life disagreements about love are also discussed. (shrink)

A major challenge in the philosophy of mathematics is to explain how mathematical language can pick out unique structures and acquire determinate content. In recent work, Button and Walsh have introduced a view they call ‘internalism’, according to which mathematical content is explained by internal categoricity results formulated and proven in second-order logic. In this paper, we critically examine the internalist response to the challenge and discuss the philosophical significance of internal categoricity results. Surprisingly, as we argue, while internalism (...) arguably explains how we pick out unique mathematical structures, this does not suffice to account for the determinacy of mathematical discourse. (shrink)

This critical note responds to Guiaşu and Tindale’s “Logical fallacies and invasion biology,” from our perspective as ecologists and philosophers of science engaged in debates about invasion biology and invasive species. We agree that “the level of charges and dismissals” surrounding these debates might be “unhealthy” and that “it will be very difficult for dialogues to move forward unless genuine attempts are made to understand the positions being held and to clarify the terms involved.” Although they raise several important scientific, (...) conceptual, and ethical issues at the foundations of invasion biology, we believe Guiaşu and Tindale’s attempts to clarify the debate were unsuccessful. Like some other critics of the field, they tend to misrepresent invasion biology by cherry-picking and constructing “straw people,” inaccurately portraying invasion biology, and thus failing to elevate the dialogue. In this critique, we clarify areas in the invasion biology literature misrepresented by Guiaşu and Tindale. We attempt to provide a more balanced view of areas of reasonable debate within invasion biology, including disputes about empirical evidence, diverse risk attitudes, and other diverse ethical commitments. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 10.2 (2003) 193-194 [Access article in PDF] A Comment on Christopher Ciocchetti:"The Responsibility of the Psychopathic Offender" Daniel W. Shuman Questions of responsibility for serious harm are complex and potentially divisive. The way in which we frame these questions and the criteria by which we assess answers to them are colored, in part, by the lens though which we view them. I am a (...) law professor whose writings includes issues relating to criminal responsibility of person with mentally disabilities and I come to this commentary from that perspective. For me questions of moral responsibility raise psychological and philosophical, as well as legal, questions.Ciocchetti's (2003) paper addressees the criminal responsibility of the psychopathic offender. Not sure quite what the author meant by this label, I began to try to understand the concept of psychopathic offender by picking up my DSM-IV-TR and found no reference to such a diagnostic category. Absent a handy reference in the DSM, I looked in the paper for some other definition or recognition of the category of psychopathic offender and found no satisfactory grounding in any body of sound research. Left with the author's unsupported assertions that such a category of persons exists and that they behave in ways the author asks me to accept without support, my lawyer instincts cautioned me to proceed carefully. The psychopathic offender the author describes might well exist, but I am not persuaded of that, nor would be my legal colleagues, absent proof.Next, to the author's thesis that "[t]he offender must have the capacities necessary to understand relationships to justify holding that offender responsible" (p. 176) and that because psychopaths lack this capacity they should not be held criminally responsible. Is the author proposing a new test for criminal responsibility? Certainly no test for criminal nonresponsibility based on mental disability (i.e., insanity defense) in Anglo-American jurisprudence, or any other with which I am familiar, makes status (i.e., a diagnostic category) exculpatory for criminal responsibility. Rather, every test addresses the impact of a mental illness or disorder on the cognitive or volitional capacity of the offender at the time of the offense. The author offers no reason to reject the approach taken for the last several hundred years [End Page 193] by Anglo-American jurisprudence. Moreover, to the extent that status or diagnostic category is relevant in the insanity defense in Anglo-American jurisprudence, character or personality disorders (the genus to which I take it that psychopathy belongs) are often specifically excluded from consideration. For example, the Texas Penal Code (Tex. Penal Code Ann. § 8.01 (Vernon 1994)) states that:It is an affirmative defense to prosecution that, at the time of the conduct charged, the actor, as a result of a severe mental disease or defect, did not know that his conduct was wrong. The term "mental disease or defect" does not include an abnormality manifested only by repeated criminal or otherwise antisocial conduct.The federal Insanity Defense Reform Act raises the same issue: The government relies on the legislative history of 18 U.S.C. § 17, which states: "The concept of severity was added to emphasize that non-psychotic behavior disorders or neuroses such as an 'inadequate personality,' 'immature personality,' or a pattern of 'antisocial tendencies' do not constitute the defense.".... The government argues that because Dr. Lorenz would have testified that Salava was not psychotic but suffered from antisocial personality disorder, his testimony was not relevant to either prong of the insanity defense under the statute.... As a general matter, the government's point is well-taken. It seems clear that Congress intended by its inclusion of the modifier "severe" to place certain "disorders" outside the purview of the insanity defense altogether. United States v. Salava, 978 F.2d 320, 323 (7th Cir. 1992) Nowhere in the paper does Chiochetti acknowledge or address these societal judgments of moral responsibility that have already rejected a far more modest version of his proposal in categorically ruling out character or personality disorders from inclusion as... (shrink)

Two fundamental problems in all thought can be identified: One, life and world affirmation and second, life and world negation. Indian approach is characterized as the second and hence it is claimed that moral problems have not been persistently pursued and successfully tackled in India. Points like the advaita concept of liberation, law of karma, the system of social stratification, stages of life and duties associated with them are picked up to show that theIndian system is ethically bankrupt. But along (...) with the science of salvation, the science of statecraft (arthasastra) and four objectives of human life are emphasized. The two functions of knowledge namely, theoretical and practical (arthaparicchiti and phalaprapti) referring to fact and value are recognized and it is held that knowledge of facts lead to the pursuit of values. Value is taken as the ‘object of desire’. The concept of svadharma and ahimsa are basic to it. The ‘ought of ethics’ (Dharma) is foundational to all Indian thought. A comprehensive value system consisting of spiritual, moral, material and social values and the distinction between instrumental and intrinsic values are recognized. Contemporary ethical issues relating to human rights and women, suicide, abortion and the host of problems thrown open by science and biotechnology find proper place in it. (shrink)

This essay deals with Girolamo Fracastoro’s ensouled cosmology. His Homocentrica sive de stellis (1538), an astronomy of concentric spheres, was discussed by the Padua School of Aristotelians. Since the polemics over the immortality of the human soul, which had famously opposed Pomponazzi to Nifo, psychological discussions—including those about heavenly spheres’ souls—raised heated controversies. Fracastoro discussed the foundations of his homocentric planetary theory in a dialogue titled Fracastorius, sive de anima (1555). In a 1531 exchange with Gasparo Contarini, Fracastoro discussed celestial (...) physics, including problems linked to mathematical analysis of physical causation. Contarini expressed his doubts over Fracastoro’s lack of consideration of Aristotelian viewpoints on heavenly souls and intelligences. Fracastoro offered an account of cosmic animation in his later dialogue “On the Soul,” taking a different path than his Paduan teachers. He picked up the Platonic idea of the “world soul,” freely connecting it with Aristotelian views about the ensouled cosmos of concentric spheres, resulting in an eclectic composition of Platonic, Aristotelian, and Averroistic elements. Fracastoro grounded his renewed mathematical astronomy on an understanding of the cosmos as a living whole. His animated homocentric cosmos represented a development of Aristotelian premises and a step beyond this legacy. (shrink)

This paper responds to the commentaries from Stacy Carter and Alan Cribb. We pick up on two main themes in our response. First, we reflect on how the process of setting standards for empirical bioethics research entails drawing boundaries around what research counts as empirical bioethics research, and we discuss whether the standards agreed in the consensus process draw these boundaries correctly. Second, we expand on the discussion in the original paper of the role and significance of the concept (...) of ‘integrating’ empirical methods and ethical argument as a standard for research practice within empirical bioethics. (shrink)

We investigate the hypothesis that our conceptual systems provide two formally distinct ways of representing categories by investigating the manner in which lexical nominals (e.g., tree, picnic table) and phrasal nominals (e.g., black bird, birds that like rice) are interpreted. Four experiments found that lexical nominals may be mapped onto kind representations, whereas phrasal nominals map onto class representations but not kind representations. Experiment 1 found that phrasal nominals, unlike lexical nominals, are mapped onto categories whose members need not be (...) of a single kind. Experiments 2 and 3 found that categories named by lexical nominals enter into both class inclusion and kind hierarchies and thus support both class inclusion (is a) and kind specification (kind of) relations, whereas phrasal nominals map onto class representations which support only class inclusion relations. Experiment 4 showed that the two types of nominals represent hierarchical relations in different ways. Phrasal nominals (e.g., white bear) are mapped onto classes that have criteria of membership in addition to those specified by the class picked out by the head noun of the phrase (e.g., bear). In contrast, lexical nominals (e.g., polar bear) specify one way to meet the criteria specified by the more general kind concept (e.g., bear). Implications for the language–conceptual system interface, representation of hierarchical relations, lexicalization, and theories of conceptual combination are discussed. (shrink)

© Copyright 2015, Mary Ann Liebert, Inc..Signal transducer and activator of transcription factor 3 is hyperactivated in head and neck squamous cell carcinomas. Cumulative evidence indicates that IL-6 production by HNSCC cells and/or stromal cells in the tumor microenvironment activates STAT3 and contributes to tumor progression and drug resistance. A library of 94,491 compounds from the Molecular Library Screening Center Network was screened for the ability to inhibit interleukin-6 -induced pSTAT3 activation. For contractual reasons, the primary high-content screening campaign was (...) conducted over several months in 3 distinct phases; 1,068 primary HCS actives remained after cytotoxic or fluorescent outliers were eliminated. One thousand one hundred eighty-seven compounds were cherry-picked for confirmation; actives identified in the primary HCS and compounds selected by a structural similarity search of the remaining MLSCN library using hits identified in phases I and II of the screen. Actives were confirmed in pSTAT3 IC50 assays, and an IFNγ-induced pSTAT1 activation assay was used to prioritize selective inhibitors of STAT3 activation that would not inhibit STAT1 tumor suppressor functions. Two hundred three concentration-dependent inhibitors of IL-6-induced pSTAT3 activation were identified and 89 of these also produced IC50s against IFN-γ-induced pSTAT1 activation. Forty-nine compounds met our hit criteria: they reproducibly inhibited IL-6-induced pSTAT3 activation by ≥70% at 20 μM; their pSTAT3 activation IC50s were ≤25 μM; they were ≥2-fold selective for pSTAT3 inhibition over pSTAT1 inhibition; a cross target query of PubChem indicated that they were not biologically promiscuous; and they were ≥90% pure. Twenty-six chemically tractable hits that passed filters for nuisance compounds and had acceptable drug-like and ADME-Tox properties by computational evaluation were purchased for characterization. The hit structures were distributed among 5 clusters and 8 singletons. Twenty-four compounds inhibited IL-6-induced pSTAT3 activation with IC50s ≤20 μM and 13 were ≥3-fold selective versus inhibition of pSTAT1 activation. Eighteen hits inhibited the growth of HNSCC cell lines with average IC50s ≤ 20 μM. Four chemical series were progressed into lead optimization: the guanidinoquinazolines, the triazolothiadiazines, the amino alcohols, and an oxazole-piperazine singleton. (shrink)