Gegen den Vorwurf, die sprachanalytische Philosophie sei einzelsprachlich relativ oder provinziell, haben sich die sprachanalytischen Philosophen mit mindestens vier Argumenten erfolgreich gewehrt: Den Vertretern der philosophischen Grammatik geht es zwar um die einzelsprachliche Grammatik bestimmter Ausdrücke; aber um eben diese Grammatik muß es ihnen auch gehen, da philosophische Probleme aus dem Getäuschtsein durch die Grammatik entstehen. Nicht nur die Problemlösung, sondern auch die Problemstellung ist provinziell. Den Vertretern der linguistischen Phänomenologie geht es um die Unterscheidung und Ordnung von Phänomenen. Weil (...) sie dabei die Sprache und ihre Distinktionen bloß als heuristisches Mittel gebrauchen, haben ihre Aussagen die gleiche Reichweite wie die Ergebnisse einer mundan-phänomenologischen Analyse. Den Vertretern der informalen Logik geht es um die Logik bestimmter Begriffe und Propositionen. Die Explikation der Logik dieser Begriffe und Propositionen hat Gültigkeit für den gesamten Bereich, in dem eben diese Begriffe und Propositionen 'verbalisierbar' sind. Den Vertretern der Sprechakttheorie schließlich geht es um die Regeln, denen Sprechakte gehorchen. Die Analyse dieser Regeln gilt für alle diejenigen Sprachen bzw. Gesellschaften, in denen es die Institution des betreffenden Sprechakts gibt. (shrink)

Sprachanalytische Philosophen tun, wenn sie Sätze formulieren, vielerlei: Sie beschreiben, charakterisieren, erläutern, stellen fest, sprechen Empfehlungen aus. Diese Äußerungen sind keine „empirischen Aussagen“ (Aussagen etwa von Art der Aussagen des deskriptiven Linguisten). Sie sind dementsprechend nicht „empirisch wahr“, sondern — im günstigen Falle — hinlänglich detailliert, plausibel usf. Von ihnen eine empirische Verifikation zu verlangen ist verfehlt.

Among the most important aesthetic concepts – especially in the 18th century – are those of the beautiful and the sublime. Yet, in the various aesthetic theories these two concepts are employed in conjunction with one another in very different ways. There is one system in which the beautiful is the fundamental aesthetic value and the sublime i. e. the great – including grandeur and dignity – is only one of a number of defining characteristics of the beautiful. There is (...) another system in which the sublime is the highest degree of the beautiful i. e. of the extraordinary precious. The most influential systems are dichotomous classifications of the respective aesthetic qualities. These classifications themselves exhibit differences: The beautiful and the sublime oppose each other as loveliness creating affection on the one hand, and the astonishing-sublime creating a shudder on the other, but which in some cases can be blended with the beautiful. Alternatively, the concepts of the beautiful and the sublime are disjunctive in a way that they exclude each other: The beautiful is limited and gives positive pleasure; the sublime is unlimited, it depresses and uplifts the viewer at the same time and therefore gives a negative pleasure. – The concepts of the beautiful and the sublime are obviously characterized according to the system in which they appear. (shrink)

Mit der Äußerung von "Das ist schön / gut" kann man ganz verschiedene Dinge tun: Man kann einstufen, sein Gefallen kundgeben, eine positive stilkritische Bewertung vollziehen, einen beglückenden Eindruck wiedergeben, ein lobendes Urteil aussprechen. Die Teilnehmer an der Diskussion über die Struktur des ästhetischen Werturteils haben sich einseitig an dieser oder jener Wertäußerung orientiert. Die Diskussion ist deshalb in eine Sackgasse geraten.

Mit der Äußerung von "Das ist schön / gut" kann man ganz verschiedene Dinge tun: Man kann einstufen, sein Gefallen kundgeben, eine positive stilkritische Bewertung vollziehen, einen beglückenden Eindruck wiedergeben, ein lobendes Urteil aussprechen. Die Teilnehmer an der Diskussion über die Struktur des ästhetischen Werturteils haben sich einseitig an dieser oder jener Wertäußerung orientiert. Die Diskussion ist deshalb in eine Sackgasse geraten.

The word "understand" has various meanings which can be specified according to a certain aspect of the language or the act of speaking itself: One can understand a sentence; one can understand what someone is doing by saying something, etc. Hence, "understand" is a systematic ambiguous word. The philosophers who define the notion of understanding draw their attention to either the one or the other meaning of the word. Hence, they define this notion only partially. Consequently, they often talk past (...) one another in case of a controversy. But in fact the different definitions of the notion of understanding are not in actual competition with one another. There are many 'language games' one can play with the word "understand". - Corresponding to this 'liberal' conception, Continental and Anglo-Saxon philosophy can be brought into contact with one another: The followers of the hermeneutics and of the "geisteswissenschaftliche Psychologie" have provided definitions of the notion of understanding which should by all means be taken into account. The followers of the linguistic philosophy have found methods by which the differences between the definitions can be made clearer. (shrink)

Plato's dialogues frequently criticize traditional Greek myth, yet Plato also integrates myth with his writing. Daniel S. Werner confronts this paradox through an in-depth analysis of the Phaedrus, Plato's most mythical dialogue. Werner argues that the myths of the Phaedrus serve several complex functions: they bring nonphilosophers into the philosophical life; they offer a starting point for philosophical inquiry; they unify the dialogue as a literary and dramatic whole; they draw attention to the limits of language and the (...) limits of knowledge; and they allow Plato to co-opt cultural authority as a way of defining and legitimating the practice of philosophy. Platonic myth, as a species of traditional tale, is thus both distinct from philosophical dialectic and similar to it. Ultimately, the most powerful effect of Platonic myth is the way in which it leads readers to participate in Plato's dialogues and to engage in a process of self-examination. (shrink)

Affective congruency effects in the evaluation task can be explained by either spreading of activation or response competition. Eliminating effects of response compatibility by using other tasks (semantic categorisation, naming task) typically also eliminates affective congruency effects. However, there is no need for processing the affective information of the stimuli in these tasks either, which could be necessary for an affectively mediated spreading of activation (Spruyt et al., 2007, 2009, 2012). We introduced a new task to further test this hypothesis. (...) The valent/neutral-categorisation task does not confound affective congruency with response compatibility, but still requires a processing of the stimuli's valence. No affective congruency effect was obtained with this task in two experiments, disfavouring a conditional spreading activation account. On the other hand, a significant priming effect was found for associated word pairs in Experiment 1, providing evidence for the sensitivity of the task to detect spreading activation processes. (shrink)

This collection broadens the scientific discussion of modularity by bringing together experts from a variety of disciplines, including artificial life, ...

This is Werner S. Pluhar's translation of Immanuel Kant's Critique of Judgment (Kritik der Urtheilskraft) for Hackett Publications (Indianapolis, Indiana). ISBN 9780872200258 (paperback).

This collection honors William James - arguably the most famous American philosopher - as an eminent scholar and the father of pragmatism. Moreover, it examines the impact of pragmatism on various disciplines in the U.S., Canada, and Europe, engaging in a discourse that breaks new ground and advances new perspectives in theoretical debates that still seem to be largely dominated by European traditions. As with James's work itself, whose interdisciplinary character has inspired work especially in philosophy, psychology and physiology, this (...) book is also characterized by interdisciplinarity and transnational dialogue. Scholars from the fields of philosophy, literary and cultural studies, social science, and religious studies innovatively explore pragmatism's importance, potential, and current relevance. (shrink)

Philosophers of science traditionally have ignored the details of scientific research, and the result has often been theories that lack relevance either to science or to philosophy in general. In this volume, leading philosophers of biology discuss the limitations of this tradition and the advantages of the "naturalistic turn"—the idea that the study of science is itself a scientific enterprise and should be conducted accordingly. This innovative book presents candid, informal debates among scholars who examine the benefits and problems of (...) studying science in the same way that scientists study the natural world. Callebaut achieves the effect of face-to-face engagement through separate interviews with participants. Contributors include William Bechtel, Robert Brandon, Richard M. Burian, Donald T. Campbell, Patricia Churchland, Jon Elster, Ronald N. Giere, David L. Hull, Philip Kitcher, Karin Knorr Cetina, Bruno Latour, Richard Levins, Richard C. Lewontin, Elisabeth Lloyd, Helen Longino, Thomas Nickles, Henry C. Plotkin, Robert J. Richards, Alexander Rosenberg, Michael Ruse, Dudley Shapere, Elliott Sober, Ryan Tweney, and William Wimsatt. "Why can't we have both theoretical ecology and natural histories, lovingly done?"—Philip Kitcher "Don't underestimate the arrogance of philosophers!"—Elisabeth Lloyd. (shrink)

The Information Artifact Ontology (IAO) was created to serve as a domain‐neutral resource for the representation of types of information content entities (ICEs) such as documents, data‐bases, and digital im‐ages. We identify a series of problems with the current version of the IAO and suggest solutions designed to advance our understanding of the relations between ICEs and associated cognitive representations in the minds of human subjects. This requires embedding IAO in a larger framework of ontologies, including most importantly the Mental (...) Func‐tioning Ontology (MFO). It also requires a careful treatment of the aboutness relations between ICEs and associated cognitive representa‐tions and their targets in reality, which implies in turn a new treatment of the relation of truthmaking. (shrink)

Big data biology—bioinformatics, computational biology, systems biology (including ‘omics’), and synthetic biology—raises a number of issues for the philosophy of science. This article deals with several such: Is data-intensive biology a new kind of science, presumably post-reductionistic? To what extent is big data biology data-driven? Can data ‘speak for themselves?’ I discuss these issues by way of a reflection on Carl Woese’s worry that “a society that permits biology to become an engineering discipline, that allows that science to slip into (...) the role of changing the living world without trying to understand it, is a danger to itself.” And I argue that scientific perspectivism, a philosophical stance represented prominently by Giere, Van Fraassen, and Wimsatt, according to which science cannot as a matter of principle transcend our human perspective, provides the best resources currently at our disposal to tackle many of the philosophical issues implied in the modeling of complex, multilevel/multiscale phenomena. (shrink)

There are many things that philosophy of biology might be. But, given the existence of a professional philosophy of biology that is arguably a progressive research program and, as such, unrivaled, it makes sense to define philosophy of biology more narrowly than the totality of intersecting concerns biologists and philosophers (let alone other scholars) might have. The reasons for the success of the “new” philosophy of biology remain poorly understood. I reflect on what Dutch and Flemish, and, more generally, European (...) philosophers of biology could do to improve the situation of their discipline locally, regionally, and internationally, paying particular attention to the lessons to be learned from the “Science Wars.”. (shrink)

The goal of referent tracking is to create an ever-growing pool of data relating to the entities existing in concrete spatiotemporal reality. In the context of Electronic Healthcare Records (EHRs) the relevant concrete entities are not only particular patients but also their parts, diseases, therapies, lesions, and so forth, insofar as these are salient to diagnosis and treatment. Within a referent tracking system, all such entities are referred to directly and explicitly, something which cannot be achieved when familiar concept-based systems (...) are used in what is called “clinical coding”. In this paper we describe the components of a referent tracking system in an informal way and we outline the procedures that would have to be followed by healthcare personnel in using such a system. We argue that the referent tracking paradigm can be introduced with only minor – though nevertheless ontologically important – technical changes to existing EHR infrastructures, but that it will require a radically different mindset on the part of those involved in clinical coding and terminology development from that which has prevailed hitherto. (shrink)

We performed a qualitative analysis of the Thesaurus in order to assess its conformity with principles of good practice in terminology and ontology design. We used both the on-line browsable version of the Thesaurus and its OWL-representation (version 04.08b, released on August 2, 2004), measuring each in light of the requirements put forward in relevant ISO terminology standards and in light of ontological principles advanced in the recent literature. Version 04.08b of the NCI Thesaurus suffers from the same broad range (...) of problems that have been observed in other biomedical terminologies. For its further development, we recommend the use of a more principled approach that allows the Thesaurus to be tested not just for internal consistency but also for its degree of correspondence to that part of reality which it is designed to represent. (shrink)

INTRODUCTION WERNER ABRAHAM, LACI MARÁCZ, SJAAK DE MEY & WIM SCHERPENISSE University of Groningen The Groningen Conference on Topic, ...

This article explores Adorno’s negative dialectics as a critical social theory of economic objectivity. It rejects the conventional view that Adorno does not offer a critique of the economic forms of capitalist society. The article holds that negative dialectics is a dialectics of the social world in the form of the economic object, one that is governed by the movement of economic quantities, that is, real economic abstractions. Negative dialectics refuses to accept the constituted economic categories as categories of economic (...) nature. Instead, the article argues, it amounts to a conceptualized social praxis [ begriffene Praxis] of the capitalistically constituted social relations, which manifest themselves in the form of seemingly independent economic categories. Economic nature is a socially constituted nature, which entails the class antagonism in its concept. The article concludes that for negative dialectics the explanation of real economic abstractions lies in the understanding of the class-divided nature of human practice. (shrink)

While classifications of mental disorders have existed for over one hundred years, it still remains unspecified what terms such as 'mental disorder', 'disease' and 'illness' might actually denote. While ontologies have been called in aid to address this shortfall since the GALEN project of the early 1990s, most attempts thus far have sought to provide a formal description of the structure of some pre-existing terminology or classification, rather than of the corresponding structures and processes on the side of the patient. (...) We here present a view of mental disease that is based on ontological realism and which follows the principles embodied in Basic Formal Ontology and in the application of BFO in the Ontology of General Medical Science. We analyzed statements about what counts as a mental disease provided in the research agenda for the DSM-V, and in Pies' model. The results were used to assess whether the representational units of BFO and OGMS were adequate as foundations for a formal representation of the entities in reality that these statements attempt to describe. We then analyzed the representational units specific to mental disease and provided corresponding definitions. Our key contributions lie in the identification of confusions and conflations in the existing terminology of mental disease and in providing what we believe is a framework for the sort of clear and unambiguous reference to entities on the side of the patient that is needed in order to avoid these confusions in the future. (shrink)