Concepts are the building blocks of higher-order cognition and consciousness. Building on Conceptual Spaces Theory (CST) and proceeding from the assumption that concepts are inherently dynamic, this paper provides historical context to and significantly elaborates the previously offered Iterative Subdivision Model (ISDM) with the goal of pushing it toward empirical testability. The paper describes how agents in continuous interaction with their environment adopt an intentional orientation, estimate the utility of the concept(s) applicable to action in the current context, engage in (...) practical action, and adopt any new concepts that emerge: a largely pre-intellectual cycle that repeats essentially without interruption over the conceptual agent’s lifetime. This paper elaborates utility optimization by establishing three constraints on concept formation/evaluation – non-redundancy, distinctiveness, and proportionality – embedding them in a quasi-mathematical model intended for development into a formal logic. The notion of a distinctor – a quality dimension of the conceptual space in focus at any given time, used for making what we call a difference distinction – is key. The primary contribution of the revised ISDM is the way it relates concepts to action via utility optimization/actualization and the way it describes the emergence of quality dimensions through trial-by-action (trial and error), something previous presentations of CST have failed to address. (shrink)

The literature on quantum logic emphasizes that the algebraic structures involved with orthodox quantum mechanics are non distributive. In this paper we develop a particular algebraic structure, the quasi-lattice ( $${\mathfrak{I}}$$ -lattice), which can be modeled by an algebraic structure built in quasi-set theory $${\mathfrak{Q}}$$. This structure is non distributive and involve indiscernible elements. Thus we show that in taking into account indiscernibility as a primitive concept, the quasi-lattice that ‘naturally’ arises is non distributive.

Presenting a fascinating analysis of the idea of what can't be said, this book ascertains whether the notion of there being a truth, or a state of affairs, or knowledge that can't be expressed linguistically is a coherent notion. The author distinguishes different senses in which it might be said that something can't be said. The first part looks at the question of whether ineffability is a coherent idea. Part two evaluates two families of arguments regarding whether ineffable states of (...) affairs actually exist: the argument from mysticism and the argument from epistemic boundedness. Part three looks more closely at the relation between mystic and non-mystic stances. In the fourth and final part the author distinguishes five qualitatively different types of ineffability. _Ineffability and Philosophy_ is a significant contribution to this area of research and will be essential reading for philosophers and those researching and studying the philosophy of language. (shrink)

Experiences of absence are common in everyday life, but have received little philosophical attention until recently, when two positions regarding the nature of such experiences surfaced in the literature. According to the Perceptual View, experiences of absence are perceptual in nature. This is denied by the Surprise-Based View, according to which experiences of absence belong together with cases of surprise. In this paper, I show that there is a kind of experience of absence—which I call frustrating absences—that has been overlooked (...) by the Perceptual View and by the Surprise Based-View and that cannot be adequately explained by them. I offer an alternative account to deal with frustrating absences, one according to which experiencing frustrating absences is a matter of subjects having desires for something to be present frustrated by the world. Finally, I argue that there may well be different kinds of experiences of absence. (shrink)

Recently, several researchers and philosophers argued that clinical research trials are not therapy. Their position is based on foundational research ethics documents, such as the Belmont Report, on conceptual analysis, and on the general way clinical trials are conducted. After examining and rejecting these arguments, we claim that good research is consistent with good therapy; that often trials are good therapy; and that a blanket attack on clinical trials as non-therapeutic creates a research misconception. This misconception is potentially harmful because (...) it could weaken trial recruitment, could adversely affect funding for trials, and could overturn needed moral safeguards on therapeutic trials. Our more careful and accurate analysis of the nature of clinical trials can avoid such problems. (shrink)

This special issue brings together contributions from nine scholars who have been working at the frontiers of the comparative study of risk. Most of the papers that follow use a cross-national approach to investigate public attitudes to risk in a broad range of settings including Germany, Sweden, Denmark, England, and the United States. Two of the authors represented here adopt more creative interpretations for carrying out comparative studies that reach considerably beyond conventional methodologies of country-level contrasts. One contributor highlights the (...) temporal dimensions of novel forms of environmental uncertainty and a second selection, grounded in the sociology of language, compares the different objectives that lay people seek to satisfy when they speak about risk. In this sense, this issue provides a farrago of perspectives on the most befitting way to exploit the utility of comparative methodologies.Political scientists interested in the effects of different regulatory regimes and systems of governance have been responsible for most comparative risk research conducted to date. The papers in this issue depart from this tradition and instead draw on insights derived from social theory. There has been over the past decade a dramatic upswelling of interest in risk among theoretically-inclined sociologists and several writers have suggested that a pervasive sense of anxiety is a central feature of the current phase of modernity (e.g., Giddens, 1990; Beck, 1992). This collection represents an initial attempt to situate these recondite impressions in distinct contexts and to scrutinise them from a variety of comparative perspectives. (shrink)

Over the past decade risk society theory has become increasingly prominent within the field of environmental social theory. This perspective contends that conventional political divisions based on class are becoming less salient and are giving way to a politics predicated upon the distribution of risk. There is much in risk society theory, especially its central contention that public anxieties about high consequence-low probability events undermine the legitimacy of science, that has a distinctly German stamp. Through a comparative analysis of how (...) national context has differently shaped science as a public epistemology this paper suggests we should tread carefully in moving to accept the general applicability of this theoretical approach. (shrink)

This book presents a comprehensive and detailed exploration of the relationship between the thought of G.W.F. Hegel and that of John McDowell, the latter of whom is widely considered to be one of the most influential living analytic philosophers. It serves as a point of entry in McDowell’s and Hegel’s philosophy, and a substantial contribution to ongoing debates on perceptual experience and perceptual justification, naturalism, human freedom and action. The chapters gathered in this volume, as well as McDowell’s responses, make (...) it clear that McDowell’s work paves the way for an original reading of Hegel’s texts. His conceptual framework allows for new interpretive possibilities in Hegel’s philosophy which, until now, have remained largely unexplored. Moreover, these interpretations shed light on various aspects of continuity and discontinuity between the philosophies of these two authors, thus defining more clearly their positions on specific issues. In addition, they allow us to see Hegel’s thought as containing a number of conceptual tools that might be useful for advancing McDowell’s own philosophy and contemporary philosophy in general. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Semiotica Jahrgang: 2016 Heft: 213 Seiten: 473-491.

In the town of Odienné, Madou forges his faith in God by performing long sessions of solo zikr after midnight. This article ethnographically explores the theme of light in this Sufi practice of concentration as an experiential form of being. It first describes how the light and darkness of the penumbra of the night co-initiate what I call “the devotional place” of zikr. Following a phenomenological writing, it then describes how, as hours go by, Madou’s concentration navigates towards “yeelen” through (...) the silence of the deep night. In doing so, this article elaborates the “corporeal mind” as synesthetic instants in this journey when the body becomes the mind and the mind faith, as the penumbra becomes silence and silence light. In other words, it explores the sensuous unboundedness of the self that happens in regular and long practice of nocturnal solo zikr. This article therefore offers a corporeal understanding of the light of God among practitioners of prolonged nocturnal solo zikr in West Africa. (shrink)

The study addresses the cyclically temporal aspect of sequence recognition, storage and recall using the Recurrent Oscillatory Self-Organizing Map (ROSOM), first introduced by Kaipainen, Papadopoulos and Karhu (1997). The unique solution of the network is that oscillatory States are assigned to network units, corresponding to their `readiness-to-fire''. The ROSOM is a categorizer, a temporal sequence storage system and a periodicity detector designed for use in an ambiguous cyclically repetitive environment. As its external input, the model accepts a multidimensional stream of (...) environment-describing feature configurations with implicit periodicities. The output of the model is one or a few closed cycles abstracted from such a stream, mapped as trajectories on a two-dimensional sheet with an organization reminiscent of multi-dimensional scaling. The model''s capabilities are explored with a variety of workbench data. (shrink)

Normal 0 21 false false false MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Tabela normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-ansi-language:#0400; mso-fareast-language:#0400; mso-bidi-language:#0400;} Podemos ver na ausência de luz, e ouvir na ausência de som? Em seu livro Seeing Dark Things: The Philosophy of Shadows (2008), Roy Sorensen defende que sim, que podemos ver a escuridão na ausência de luz, e ouvir o silêncio na ausência de som. Neste artigo, defendo que (...) na escuridão nada vemos, no silêncio nada ouvimos, e que experienciar a ausência de luz e som é uma questão afetiva, e não perceptual. (shrink)

In this paper, I present a position that I call erotetic amelioration, according to which we must evaluate and, eventually, improve our answers to questions of the form “What is x?”. My focus will be on cases where x stands for a strongly social kind, such as marriage. Such a position is offered as an alternative to the idea-sometimes called conceptual engineering-according to which we should evaluate and, eventually, seek to improve our concepts. After introducing the idea of erotetic amelioration, (...) I will show how it can be put into work to deal with what I call the topic preservation challenge, and what advantages it has in relation to a similar position available in the literature, namely, Cappelen’s (2018) Austerity Framework. (shrink)

It is widely believed by philosophers that we human beings are capable of stepping back from inclinations to act in a certain way and consider whether we should do so. If we judge that there are enough reasons in favour of following our initial inclination, we are definitely motivated, and, if all goes well, we act. This view of human agency naturally leads to the idea that our actions are self-determined, or controlled by ourselves. Some go one step further to (...) the point of saying that we should extend the fundamental aspects of this view of human agency to the epistemic realm. This we call ‘the control-view”. Here we will make a strong case against the control-view. While we have a substantial control over our practical lives, it is very unlikely that this extends to our epistemic lives. Our discussion will proceed in three stages. We will present two asymmetries between our practical and epistemic lives which are followed by a general argument against the control-view. (shrink)

The rise of the phenomenon of virtue ethics in recent years has increased at a rapid pace. Such an explosion carries with it a number of great possibilities, as well as risks. This volume has been written to contribute a multi-faceted perspective to the current conversation about virtue. Among many other thought-provoking questions, the collection addresses the following: What are the virtues, and how are they enumerated? What are the internal problems among ethicists, and what are the objections and replies (...) to contemporary virtue ethics? Additionally, the practical implications following from the answers to these questions are discussed in new and fascinating research. Fundamental concepts such as teleology and eudaimonism are addressed from both a historical and dialectical approach. This tome will contribute not only to providing further clarity to the current horizons in virtue ethics, but also to the practical conclusion following from the study: to challenge the reader toward a greater pursuit of the virtuous life. (shrink)

But what are functions? Here, 15 leading scholars of philosophy of psychology and philosophy of biology present new essays on functions.