Although discriminative deep neural networks are currently dominant in cognitive modeling, we suggest that capacity-limited, generative models are a promising avenue for future work. Generative models tend to learn both local and global features of stimuli and, when properly constrained, can learn componential representations and response biases found in people's behaviors.

How do Dutch people let each other know that they disagree? What do they say when they want to resolve their difference of opinion by way of an argumentative discussion? In what way do they convey that they are convinced by each other’s argumentation? How do they criticize each other’s argumentative moves? Which words and expressions do they use in these endeavors? By answering these questions this short essay provides a brief inventory of the language of argumentation in Dutch.

Normative pragmatics can bridge the differences between dialectical and rhetorical theories in a way that saves the central insights of both. Normative pragmatics calls attention to how the manifest strategic design of a message produces interpretive effects and interactional consequences. Argumentative analysis of messages should begin with the manifest persuasive rationale they communicate. But not all persuasive inducements should be treated as arguments. Arguments express with a special pragmatic force propositions where those propositions stand in particular inferential relations to one (...) another. Normative pragmatics provides a framework within which varieties of propositional inference and pragmatic force may be kept straight. Normative pragmatics conceptualizes argumentative effectiveness in a way that integrates notions of rhetorical strategy and rhetorical situation with dialectical norms and procedures for reasonable deliberation. Strategic effectiveness should be seen in terms of maximizing the chances that claims and arguments will be reasonably evaluated, whether or not they are accepted. Procedural rationality should be seen in terms of adjustment to the demands of concrete circumstances. Two types of adjustment are illustrated: rhetorical strategies for framing the conditions for dialectical deliberation and rhetorical strategies for making do with limitations to dialectical deliberation. (shrink)

Speech act theory seems to provide a promising avenue for the analysis of the functional organization of argument. The theory, however, might be taken to suggest that arguments are a homogenous class of speech act with a specifiable illocutionary force and a single set of felicity conditions. This suggestion confuses the analysis of the meaning of speech act verbs with the analysis of the pragmatic structure of actual language use. Suggesting that arguments are conveyed through a homogeneous class of linguistic (...) action overlooks the way in which the context of activity and the form of expression organize the argumentative functions performed in using language. An alternative speech act analysis would treat folk terminology as a heuristic entry point into the development of a technical analysis of the myriad argumentative functions and structures to be found in natural language use. This would lead to a thorough-going pragmatic analysis of the rational and functional design of speech acts in argumentation. (shrink)

Non-cognitive gadgets are fancy tools shaped to meet specific, local needs. Cecilia Heyes defines cognitive gadgets as dedicated psychological mechanisms created through social interactions and culturally, not genetically, inherited by humans. She has boldly proposed that many human cognitive mechanisms are gadgets. If true, these claims would have far-reaching implications for our scientific understanding of human social cognition. Here we assess Heyes’s cognitive gadget approach as it applies to mindreading. We do not think that the evidence supports Heyes’s thought-provoking thesis (...) that human children are taught to read minds the way they are taught to read words. We highlight a potential circularity lurking behind this analogy, and we explain why we are unpersuaded by Heyes’s anti-mentalistic proposal for handling data inconsistent with the gadget view, which others take to be evidence for mindreading in human infancy. We conclude that while human minds may well be filled with gadgets, mindreading is unlikely to be one of them. (shrink)

Digressions in argumentative discussion are a kind of failure of relevance. Examination of what actual cases look like reveals several properties of argumentative relevance: (1) The informational relevance of propositions to the truth value of a conclusion should be distinguished from the pragmatic relevance of argumentative acts to the task of resolving a disagreement. (2) Pragmatic irrelevance is a collaborative phenomenon. It does not just short-circuit reasoning; it encourages a failure to take up the demands of an argumentative task. (3) (...) Pragmatic irrelevance can occur not simply by the absence of a connection between what is said and some standpoint in dispute, but also by the presence of a connection between what is said and a competing use of the information. (4) Pragmatic relevance must be accomplished through communicative action. (shrink)

Argumentation occurs through and as communicative activity. Communication is organized by pragmatic principles of expression and interpretation. Grice’s theory of conversational implicature provides a model for how people use rational principles to manage the ways in which they reason to representations of arguments, and not just reason from those representations. These principles are systematic biases that make possible reasonable decision-making and intersubjective understandings in the first place; but they also make possible all manner of errors and abuses. Much of what (...) is problematic in argumentation involves the ways in which the pragmatic principles of communication are exploited and the difficulties audiences and interlocutors have detecting and managing these abuses. (shrink)

The traditional concepts of rhetorical strategy and argumentative fallacy cannot be readily reconciled. Doing so requires escaping the following argument: All argumentation involves rhetorical strategies. All rhetorical strategies are violations of logical or dialectical ideals. All violations of logical or dialectical ideals are fallacies. Normative pragmatics provides a perspective in which rhetorical strategies can be seen to have the potential for constructive contributions to argumentation and in which fallacies are not simply violations of ideals. One kind of constructive contribution, framing (...) moves, is illustrated with the case of Lyndon Johnson’s 1964 TV campaign commercial known as the Daisy ad. (shrink)

A platitude that took hold with Kuhn is that there can be several equally good ways of balancing theoretical virtues for theory choice. Okasha recently modelled theory choice using technical apparatus from the domain of social choice: famously, Arrow showed that no method of social choice can jointly satisfy four desiderata, and each of the desiderata in social choice has an analogue in theory choice. Okasha suggested that one can avoid the Arrow analogue for theory choice by employing a strategy (...) used by Sen in social choice, namely, to enhance the information made available to the choice algorithms. I argue here that, despite Okasha’s claims to the contrary, the information-enhancing strategy is not compelling in the domain of theory choice. (shrink)

This article critically interrogates contemporary forms of addiction medicine that are portrayed by policy-makers as providing a ‘rational’ or politically neutral approach to dealing with drug use and related social problems. In particular, it examines the historical origins of the biological facts that are today understood to provide a foundation for contemporary understandings of addiction as a ‘disease of the brain’. Drawing upon classic and contemporary work on ‘styles of thought’, it documents how, in the period between the mid-1960s and (...) the mid-1970s, such facts emerged in relation to new neurobiological styles of explaining and managing social problems associated with drug abuse, and an alliance between a relatively marginal group of researchers and American policy-makers who were launching the ‘War on Drugs’. Beyond illustrating the political and material conditions necessary for the rise of addiction neuroscience, the article highlights the productivity of neurobiological thought styles, by focusing on the new biological objects, treatments and hopes that have emerged within the field of addiction studies over the last several decades. (shrink)

In an important and widely cited paper, Zerilli, Knott, Maclaurin, and Gavaghan (2019) argue that opaque AI decision makers are at least as transparent as human decision makers and therefore the concern that opaque AI is not sufficiently transparent is mistaken. I argue that the concern about opaque AI should not be understood as the concern that such AI fails to be transparent in a way that humans are transparent. Rather, the concern is that the way in which opaque AI (...) is opaque is very different than the way in which humans are opaque. What matters is the degree to which the opaque processes of a class of decision makers are stable, uniform, and safe. The degree to which such processes have these features in humans is higher than the degree to which such processes have these features in opaque AI. And therefore we should require AI to be more transparent than humans. (shrink)

The tradition descending from Frege and Russell has typically treated theories of meaning either as theories of meanings, or as theories of truth conditions. However, propositions of the classical sort don't exist, and truth conditions can't provide all the information required by a theory of meaning. In this book, one of the world's leading philosophers of language offers a way out of this dilemma. Traditionally conceived, propositions are denizens of a "third realm" beyond mind and matter, "grasped" by mysterious Platonic (...) intuition. As conceived here, they are cognitive-event types in which agents predicate properties and relations of things--in using language, in perception, and in nonlinguistic thought. Because of this, one's acquaintance with, and knowledge of, propositions is acquaintance with, and knowledge of, events of one's cognitive life. This view also solves the problem of "the unity of the proposition" by explaining how propositions can be genuinely representational, and therefore bearers of truth. The problem, in the traditional conception, is that sentences, utterances, and mental states are representational because of the relations they bear to inherently representational Platonic complexes of universals and particulars. Since we have no way of understanding how such structures can be representational, independent of interpretations placed on them by agents, the problem is unsolvable when so conceived. However, when propositions are taken to be cognitive-event types, the order of explanation is reversed and a natural solution emerges. Propositions are representational because they are constitutively related to inherently representational cognitive acts. Strikingly original, What Is Meaning? is a major advance. (shrink)

Objective interpretations of probability are usually discussed in two varieties: frequency and propensity accounts. But there is a third, neglected possibility, namely, probabilities as deriving from ranges in suitably structured initial state spaces. Roughly, the probability of an event is the proportion of initial states that lead to this event in the space of all possible initial states, provided that this proportion is approximately the same in any not too small interval of the initial state space. This idea can also (...) be expressed by saying that in the types of situations that give rise to probabilistic phenomena we may expect to find an initial state space such that any "reasonable" density function over this space leads to the same probabilities for the possible outcomes. This "method of arbitrary functions" was introduced by Poincaré, studied and extended by Hopf and more recently by Eduardo Engel, Jan von Plato and Michael Strevens. The natural-range, or method-of-arbitrary-functions approach to probabilities is usually treated as an explanation for the occurrence of probabilistic patterns, whereas I examine its prospects for an objective interpretation of probability, in the sense of providing truth conditions for probability statements that do not depend on our state of mind or information. The main objection to such a proposal is that it is circular, i.e. presupposes the concept of probability, because a measure on the initial state has to be introduced, and density functions over the space are considered. I try to argue that this objection can be successfully met. (shrink)

This paper develops and explores a new framework for theorizing about the measurement and aggregation of well-being. It is a qualitative variation on the framework of social welfare functionals developed by Amartya Sen. In Sen’s framework, a social or overall betterness ordering is assigned to each profile of real-valued utility functions. In the qualitative framework developed here, numerical utilities are replaced by the properties they are supposed to represent. This makes it possible to characterize the measurability and interpersonal comparability of (...) well-being directly, without the use of invariance conditions, and to distinguish between real changes in well-being and merely representational changes in the unit of measurement. The qualitative framework is shown to have important implications for a range of issues in axiology and social choice theory, including the characterization of welfarism, axiomatic derivations of utilitarianism, the meaningfulness of prioritarianism, the informational requirements of variable-population ethics, the impossibility theorems of Arrow and others, and the metaphysics of value. (shrink)

Perceptual experiences justify beliefs. A perceptual experience of a dog justifies the belief that there is a dog present. But there is much evidence that perceptual states can occur without being conscious, as in experiments involving masked priming. Do unconscious perceptual states provide justification as well? The answer depends on one’s theory of justification. While most varieties of externalism seem compatible with unconscious perceptual justification, several theories have recently afforded to consciousness a special role in perceptual justification. We argue that (...) such views face a dilemma: either consciousness should be understood in functionalist terms, in which case our best current theories of consciousness do not seem to imbue consciousness with any special epistemic features, or it should not, in which case it is mysterious why only conscious states are justificatory. We conclude that unconscious perceptual justification is quite plausible. (shrink)

David Rosenthal explains conscious mentality in terms of two independent, though complementary, theories—the higher-order thought (“HOT”) theory of consciousness and quality-space theory (“QST”) about mental qualities. It is natural to understand this combination of views as constituting a kind of representationalism about experience—that is, a version of the view that an experience’s conscious character is identical with certain of its representational properties. At times, however, Rosenthal seems to resist this characterization of his view. We explore here whether and to what (...) extent it makes sense to construe Rosenthal’s views as representationalist. Our goal is not merely terminological—discerning how best to use the expression ‘representationalism’. Rather, we argue that understanding Rosenthal’s account as a kind of representationalism permits us not only to make sense of broader debates within the philosophy of mind, but also to extend and clarify aspects of the view itself. (shrink)

An original interpretation of Merleau-Ponty on subjectivity, drawing from and challenging both the continental and analytic traditions.

In the middle of the twentieth century a dispute erupted between the chief architect of Logical Empiricism, Rudolf Carnap, and Logical Empiricism’s chief reformer, Willard van Orman Quine -- who was attempting to save what he took to be its main insights by recasting them in a more acceptable form. Though both eschewed metaphysics of the traditional apriori sort, and both were intent on making the investigation of science the center of philosophy, they disagreed about how to do so. Part (...) of the disagreement involved the nature of ontological disputes. The central documents in the debate are: (i) Quine’s 1948 article, “On What There Is,” which tells us how to discern ontological.. (shrink)

This paper compares two alternative explanations of pragmatic encroachment on knowledge (i.e., the claim that whether an agent knows that p can depend on pragmatic factors). After reviewing the evidence for such pragmatic encroachment, we ask how it is best explained, assuming it obtains. Several authors have recently argued that the best explanation is provided by a particular account of belief, which we call pragmatic credal reductivism. On this view, what it is for an agent to believe a proposition is (...) for her credence in this proposition to be above a certain threshold, a threshold that varies depending on pragmatic factors. We show that while this account of belief can provide an elegant explanation of pragmatic encroachment on knowledge, it is not alone in doing so, for an alternative account of belief, which we call the reasoning disposition account, can do so as well. And the latter account, we argue, is far more plausible than pragmatic credal reductivism, since it accords far better with a number of claims about belief that are very hard to deny. (shrink)

Concepts. Health ; Disease ; Death -- Models and kinds. Causation and kinds ; Holism and reductionism ; Controversial diseases -- Evidence and inference. Evidence in medicine ; Objectivity and the social structure of science ; Inference ; Effectiveness, skepticism, and alternatives ; Diagnosis and screening -- Values and policy. Psychiatry: care or control? ; Policy ; Public health.

According to what Birch (2022) calls the theory-heavy approach to investigating nonhuman-animal consciousness, we select one of the well-developed theories of consciousness currently debated within contemporary cognitive science and investigate whether animals exhibit the neural structures or cognitive abilities posited by that theory as sufficient for consciousness. Birch argues, however, that this approach is in general problematic because it faces what he dubs the dilemma of demandingness—roughly, that we cannot use theories that are based on the human case to assess (...) consciousness in nonhuman animals and vice versa. We argue here that, though this dilemma may problematize the application of many current accounts of consciousness to nonhuman animals, it does not challenge the use of standard versions of the higher-order thought theory (“HOTT”) of consciousness, according to which a creature is in a conscious mental state just in case it is aware of being in that state via a suitable higher-order thought (“HOT”). We show this in two ways. First, we argue that, unlike many extant theories of consciousness, HOTT is typically motivated by a commonsense, and more importantly, neutral condition on consciousness that applies to humans and animals alike. Second, we offer new empirical and theoretical reasons to think that many nonhuman animals possess the relevant HOTs necessary for consciousness. Considering these issues not only reveals the explanatory power of HOTT and some of its advantages over rival accounts, but also enables us to further extend and clarify the theory. (shrink)

It is widely believed that Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca’s theory of argumentation is vulnerable to the charge of relativism. This paper provides a more charitable interpretation of Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca’s normative views, one that properly considers the historical trajectory of their work and a wider range of texts than existing interpretations. It is argued that their views are better characterized as a form of “contrastivism about arguments” than any kind relativism. This more accurate depiction contributes to ongoing efforts to revive interest (...) in Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca’s work as well as build bridges with trends in contemporary argumentation theory. (shrink)

Das Verhältniss des Thomas von Aquino zum Judenthum und zur jüdischen Litteratur.--Eine bisher unbekannte dem Bachja ibn Pakuda zugeeignete Schrift.--Die philosophischen und ethischen Anschauungen in Abraham bar Chijja's Hegjon ha-Nefesch.--Ueber Abraham bar Chijja's "Buch der Enthüllung".--Die Familie Schemtob in ihren Beziehungen zur Philosophie.--Die Stellung des Simon ben Zemach Duran in der Geschichte der jüdischen Religionsphilosophie.--Die philosophischen Lehren des Isaak ben Salomon Israeli.

_An original interpretation of Merleau-Ponty on subjectivity, drawing from and challenging both the continental and analytic traditions._.

Medicalisation is a social phenomenon in which conditions that were once under legal, religious, personal or other jurisdictions are brought into the domain of medical authority. Low sexual desire in females has been medicalised, pathologised as a disease, and intervened upon with a range of pharmaceuticals. There are two polarised positions on the medicalisation of low female sexual desire: I call these the mainstream view and the critical view. I assess the central arguments for both positions. Dividing the two positions (...) are opposing models of the aetiology of low female sexual desire. I conclude by suggesting that the balance of arguments supports a modest defence of the critical view regarding the medicalisation of low female sexual desire. (shrink)

Science and the originality of life -- Christian facticity -- Grasping life as a topic -- Ruinance -- The retrieval of history -- Facticity and ontology -- Factical speaking -- Rhetoric -- Sophistry.

For anyone approaching the Encheiridion of Epictetus for the first time, this book provides a comprehensive guide to understanding a complex philosophical text. Including a full translation and clear explanatory commentaries, Epictetus's 'Encheiridion' introduces readers to a hugely influential work of Stoic philosophy. Scott Aikin and William O. Stephens unravel the core themes of Stoic ethics found within this ancient handbook. Focusing on the core themes of self-control, seeing things as they are, living according to nature, owning one's roles (...) and fulfilling the responsibilities that those roles entail, the authors elucidate the extremely challenging ideas in Epictetus's brisk chapters. Divided into five distinct parts, this book provides readers with: -/- - A new translation of the Encheiridion by William O. Stephens. - A new introduction to ancient Stoicism, its system of concepts, and the ancient figures who shaped it. - A fresh treatment of the notorious and counter-intuitive 'Stoic paradoxes'. - An accessible overview of the origin and historical context of the Encheiridion. - Detailed commentaries on each chapter of the Encheiridion that clarify its recurring themes and highlight their interconnections. - Careful attention to the presentation of the arguments embedded in Epictetus's aphoristic style. - A thoughtful discussion of serious criticisms of Epictetus's Stoicism and replies to these objections. -/- Written with clarity and authority, Epictetus's 'Encheiridion' provides a foundation from which readers can understand this important text and engage with the fundamental questions of Stoic philosophy and ethics. This guide will aid teachers of Epictetus, students encountering Stoicism for the first time, and readers seeking a greater understanding of Stoic ethics. (shrink)

Matteo Ricci (1552-1610) was an Italian Jesuit and one of the first Christian missionaries to China in the modern era. He was a genuine polymath—a translator, cartographer, mathematician, astronomer, and musician. Above all, Ricci was a missionary for the gospel. As we briefly examine his 1603 seminal work, The True Meaning of the Lord of Heaven, our hope is that we, as evangelical educators, will perceive some of the deeper principles necessary for our own missionary work among unreached people.

D. M. Armstrong famously claims that deterministic laws of nature are contingent relations between universals and that his account can also be straightforwardly extended to irreducibly probabilistic laws of nature. For the most part, philosophers have neglected to scrutinize Armstrong’s account of probabilistic laws. This is surprising precisely because his own claims about probabilistic laws make it unclear just what he takes them to be. We offer three interpretations of what Armstrong-style probabilistic laws are, and argue that all three interpretations (...) are incompatible either with some feature of Armstrong’s broader metaphysics or with essential features of his account of laws (or both). (shrink)

Medical scientists employ ‘quality assessment tools’ (QATs) to measure the quality of evidence from clinical studies, especially randomized controlled trials (RCTs). These tools are designed to take into account various methodological details of clinical studies, including randomization, blinding, and other features of studies deemed relevant to minimizing bias and error. There are now dozens available. The various QATs on offer differ widely from each other, and second-order empirical studies show that QATs have low inter-rater reliability and low inter-tool reliability. This (...) is an instance of a more general problem I call the underdetermination of evidential significance. Disagreements about the strength of a particular piece of evidence can be due to different—but in principle equally good—weightings of the fine-grained methodological features which constitute QATs. (shrink)

"A gem of enlightenment.... One rejoices in Bronowski's dedication to the identity of acts of creativity and of imagination, whether in Blake or Yeats or Einstein or Heisenberg."--Kirkus Reviews "According to Bronowski, our account of the world is dictated by our biology: how we perceive, imagine, symbolize, etc. He proposes to explain how we receive and translate our experience of the world so that we achieve knowledge. He examines the mechanisms of our perception; the origin and nature of natural language; (...) formal systems and scientific discourse; and how science, as a systematic attempt to establish closed systems one after another, progresses by exploring its own errors and new but unforeseen connections.... A delightful look at the inquiring mind."--Library Journal "Eminently enjoyable to read, with a good story or 'bon mot' on every page."--Nature "A well-written and brilliantly presented defense of the scientific enterprise which could be especially valuable to scientists and to teachers of science at all levels."--AAAS Science Books & Films Contents 1. The Mind as an Instrument for Understanding 2. The Evolution and Power of Symbolic Language 3. Knowledge as Algorithm and as Metaphor 4. The Laws of Nature and the Nature of Laws 5. Error, Progress, and the Concept of Time 6. Law and Individual Responsibility. (shrink)

Can we describe certain sonic experiences as “homely,” even when they take place outside of a traditional home-space? While phenomenological accounts of home abound, with writers detailing a rich spectrum of the felt characteristics of the homely including safety, familiarity, and affective “warmth,” there is a scarcity of research into sonic experience that engages with such literatures. With specific interest in the experience of embodied space, I account here for what might be termed feelings of “sonic homeliness” as they emerge (...) during headphone listening. After forming a conceptual model of homeliness that draws from phenomenological philosophy, I investigate its applicability to experiences of headphone listening. Through analysis of primary interview data, I consider how headphones may be said to territorialize space for listeners, analyzing how sonic “boundaries” are experienced in relation to the body, as well as how some listeners describe their experiences as interiorized, comforting, and “wombic.”. (shrink)

Albert Einstein's bold assertion of the form-invariance of the equation of a spherical light wave with respect to inertial frames of reference became, in the space of six years, the preferred foundation of his theory of relativity. Early on, however, Einstein's universal light-sphere invariance was challenged on epistemological grounds by Henri Poincaré, who promoted an alternative demonstration of the foundations of relativity theory based on the notion of a light-ellipsoid. Drawing in part on archival sources, this paper shows how an (...) informal, international group of physicists, mathematicians, and engineers, including Einstein, Paul Langevin, Poincaré, Hermann Minkowski, Ebenezer Cunningham, Harry Bateman, Otto Berg, Max Planck, Max Laue, A. A. Robb, and Ludwig Silberstein, employed figures of light during the formative years of relativity theory in their discovery of the salient features of the relativistic worldview. (shrink)

Handbook entry on "Synthesis," surveying the roles played by synthesis in Husserl, important precursors in the history of philosophy, and the legacy of the term in Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty.

Canada has followed the pattern of Benelux nations by legislating sufferingSuffering as the pivotal eligibilityEligibilitycriterionCriterion for euthanasiaEuthanasia/assisted death without requiring terminal prognosis as is needed in most permissive jurisdictions. This chapter will explore the relationship between sufferingSuffering and Medical Assistance in Dying (MAID) and the ways in which sufferingSuffering is understood in the Supreme Court of Canada, the federal Criminal Code legislation and by health care assessors. Based on this analysis, we will argue that the resulting sufferingSufferingeligibilityEligibilitycriterionCriterion leaves the law (...) open to unintended forms of interpretation, thus instituting perhaps the most unbounded and risk-prone form of assisted death in the world. A review of the literature on sufferingSuffering, the wish to dieWish to die, and reasons for MAIDReasons for MAID requests found sufferingSuffering of severe illness to be frequently associated with unstable mental health, social, and existentialExistential variables that are often amenable to therapy or remediation. While sufferingSuffering remains a powerful motivating force to seek opportunities to relieve distress, its use as an eligibilityEligibilitycriterionCriterion for MAID has significant ambiguity in its’ characterization of ‘enduring’ and ‘irremediable’ and thus fails to protect against abuse for the vulnerable. (shrink)

Business ethics, corporate social responsibility, corporate citizenship, values-driven management, corporate governance, and ethical leadership are necessary ...

This study renders the complex corpus of the Guodian texts into a more easily manageable form, incorporating the past several years of scholarly activity on these texts and providing them with a comprehensive introduction along with a complete and well-annotated translation into English.