This book is about the interrelationship between nature, semiosis, metarepresentation and (self-)consciousness, and the role played by metarepresentation in ...

In this article, I examine the relation between Bateson and Guattari’s ecological thoughts: two thinkers whose ecological ideas at first sight have a lot in common. In order to show the difference between the thoughts of both thinkers, I will take my clue from Guattari’s remark that he parts ways with Bateson on the role of context. Explaining the role of context in both authors will allow me to show how Guattari’s thought implies both an endorsement and a critique of (...) cybernetics, and, specifically, promoting a machinic rather than cybernetic ecology. I will conclude by indicating what is at stake in this distinction. (shrink)

This book focuses on the game-theoretical semantics and epistemic logic of Jaakko Hintikka. Hintikka was a prodigious and esteemed philosopher and logician, and his death in August 2015 was a huge loss to the philosophical community. This book, whose chapters have been in preparation for several years, is dedicated to the work of Jaako Hintikka, and to his memory. This edited volume consists of 23 contributions from leading logicians and philosophers, who discuss themes that span across the entire range of (...) Hintikka’s career. Semantic Representationalism, Logical Dialogues, Knowledge and Epistemic logic are among some of the topics covered in this book's chapters. The book should appeal to students, scholars and teachers who wish to explore the philosophy of Jaako Hintikka. (shrink)

Brouwer's Life, Art and Mysticism is the ideological manifesto of one of the greatest mathematical philosophers of this century. It is a seemingly contradictory declaration of romantic rebellion against rationalism and science by a man who brought constructivist rigor to mathematical and logical practice; the emotional plea of a fanatical environmentalist for a return to `nature', a defiant call to reject the formal trappings of society arising from a deep resentment of authority and of the intellectual and social aspects of (...) the human make-up. (shrink)

Dynamic Epistemic Logic This article tells the story of the rise of dynamic epistemic logic, which began with epistemic logic, the logic of knowledge, in the 1960s. Then, in the late 1980s, came dynamic epistemic logic, the logic of change of knowledge. Much of it was motivated by puzzles and paradoxes. The number … Continue reading Dynamic Epistemic Logic →.

Dynamic Epistemic Logic This article tells the story of the rise of dynamic epistemic logic, which began with epistemic logic, the logic of knowledge, in the 1960s. Then, in the late 1980s, came dynamic epistemic logic, the logic of change of knowledge. Much of it was motivated by puzzles and paradoxes. The number … Continue reading Dynamic Epistemic Logic →.

Propositions are posited to perform a variety of explanatory roles. One important role is being what is designated by a dedicated linguistic expression like a "that"-clause. In this paper, the case that propositions are needed for such a role is bolstered by defending that there are other expressions dedicated to designating propositions. In particular, it is shown that natural language has anaphors for propositions. Complement "so" and the response markers "yes" and "no" are argued to be such expressions.

Jill de Villiers has argued that children's mastery of sentential complements plays a crucial role in enabling them to succeed at false-belief tasks. Josef Perner has disputed that and has argued that mastery of false-belief tasks requires an understanding of the multiplicity of perspectives. This paper attempts to resolve the debate by explicating attributions of desires and beliefs as extensions of the linguistic practices of making commands and assertions, respectively. In terms of these linguistic practices one can explain why desire-talk (...) will precede belief-talk and why even older children will have difficulty attributing incompatible desires. (shrink)

In this essay I present what is, I contend, the free-will problem properly thought through, or at least presented in a form in which it is possible to think about it without being constantly led astray by bad terminology and confused ideas. Bad terminology and confused ideas are not uncommon in current discussions of the problem. The worst such pieces of terminology are "libertarian free will" and "compatibilist free will." The essay consists partly of a defense of the thesis that (...) the use of these phrases by writers on the problem of free will can only generate conceptual confusion and partly of a formulation of the problem that does not make use of them. I contend that this formulation is neutral with respect to the historically important positions on free will (e. g., compatibilism and incompatibilism). (shrink)

As artefacts, the worlds of digital games are designed and developed to fulfil certain expressive, functional, and experiential objectives. During play, players infer these purposes and aspirations from various aspects of their engagement with the gameworld. Influenced by their sociocultural backgrounds, sensitivities, gameplay preferences, and familiarity with game conventions, players construct a subjective interpretation of the intentions with which they believe the digital game in question was created. By analogy with the narratological notion of the implied author, we call the (...) figure to which players ascribe these intentions ‘the implied designer’. In this article, we introduce the notion of the implied designer and present an initial account of how appreciators ascribe meaning to interactive, fictional gameworlds and act within them based on what they perceive to be the designer’s intentions. (shrink)

In this paper, we examine the relationship between Christian religiosity, attitudes towards corporate social responsibility, and CSR behavior of executives. We distinguish four types of CSR attitudes and five types of CSR behavior. Based on empirical research conducted among 473 Dutch executives, we find that CSR attitudes mediate the influence of religiosity on CSR behavior. Intrinsic religiosity positively affects the ethical CSR attitude and negatively affects the financial CSR attitude, whereas extrinsic religiosity stimulates the philanthropic CSR attitude. Financial, ethical, and (...) philanthropic CSR attitudes significantly affect some types of CSR behaviors. However, because religiosity has opposing effects on the three attitudes, the joint mediation effect of the three attitudes is negligible. Furthermore, we find a direct negative influence of intrinsic religiosity on diversity and a direct positive influence on charity. (shrink)

According to the traditional view in the philosophy of logic facts of logic bear normative authority regarding how one ought to reason. Usually this is to mean that the relation of logical consequence between statements has some special relevance for how one’s beliefs should cohere. However, as I will argue in this article, this is just one way in which logic is normative for reasoning. For one thing, belief is not the only kind of mental state involved in reasoning. Besides (...) adopting and revising beliefs, rational agents pose and resolve questions. For another thing, the consequence relation of classical logic can be conservatively extended such that it includes logical relations between questions as well. Therefore, there is an argument to be made that not only the inference of new beliefs from extant beliefs but also the process of raising additional questions falls under the normative authority of logic. Accordingly, a nuanced account of the normativity of logic presents itself, which convincingly deals with problems such as clutter-avoidance and the paradox of the preface. (shrink)

Background Notwithstanding the need to produce evidence-based knowledge on medications for pregnant women, they remain underrepresented in clinical research. Sometimes they are excluded because of their supposed vulnerability, but there are no universally accepted criteria for considering pregnant women as vulnerable. Our aim was to explore whether and if so to what extent pregnant women are vulnerable as research subjects. Method We performed a conceptual and empirical analysis of vulnerability applied to pregnant women. Analysis A conceptual analysis supports Hurst's definition (...) of vulnerability. Consequently, we argue that pregnant women are vulnerable if they encounter an identifiably increased likelihood of incurring additional or greater wrong. According to the literature, this increased likelihood could exist of four alleged features for pregnant women's vulnerability: informed consent, susceptibility to coercion, higher exposure to risk due to lack of knowledge, vulnerability of the fetus. Discussion Testing the features against Hurst's definition demonstrates that they all concern the same issue: pregnant women are only vulnerable because a higher exposure to risk due to lack of scientific knowledge comprises an increased wrong. Research Ethics Committees have a responsibility to protect the vulnerable, but a higher exposure to risk due to lack of scientific knowledge is a much broader issue and also needs to be addressed by other stakeholders. Conclusions The only reason why pregnant women are potentially vulnerable is to the extent that they are increasingly exposed to higher risks due to a lack of scientific knowledge. Accordingly, the discussion can advance to the development of practical strategies to promote fair inclusion of pregnant women in clinical research. (shrink)

In an earlier issue, I argue (2014) that psychology and epistemology should distinguish religious credence from factual belief. These are distinct cognitive attitudes. Levy (2017) rejects this distinction, arguing that both religious and factual “beliefs” are subject to “shifting” on the basis of fluency and “intuitiveness.” Levy’s theory, however, (1) is out of keeping with much research in cognitive science of religion and (2) misrepresents the notion of factual belief employed in my theory. So his claims don’t undermine my distinction. (...) I conclude by suggesting some approaches to empirically testing our views. (shrink)

The notion of cognitive act is of importance for an epistemology that is apt for constructive type theory, and for epistemology in general. Instead of taking knowledge attributions as the primary use of the verb 'to know' that needs to be given an account of, and understanding a first-person knowledge claim as a special case of knowledge attribution, the account of knowledge that is given here understands first-person knowledge claims as the primary use of the verb 'to know'. This means (...) that a cognitive act is an act that counts as cognitive from a first-person point of view. The method of linguistic phenomenology is used to explain or elucidate our epistemic notions. One of the advantages of the theory is that an answer can be given to some of the problems in modern epistemology, such as the Gettier problem. (shrink)

What does it mean to embed the phenomena in an abstract structure? Or to represent them by doing so? The semantic view of theories runs into a severe problem if these notions are construed either naively, in a metaphysical way, or too closely on the pattern of the earlier syntactic view. Constructive empiricism and structural realism will then share those difficulties. The problem will be posed as in Reichenbach's The Theory of Relativity and A Priori Knowledge, and realist reactions will (...) be examined, but they will be argued to dissolve upon scrutiny. (shrink)

Here we explore whether mental training in the form of meditation can help to overcome age-related attentional decline. We compared performance on the attentional blink task between three populations: A group of long-term meditation practitioners within an older population, a control group of age-matched participants and a control group of young participants. Members of both control groups had never practiced meditation. Our results show that long-term meditation practice leads to a reduction of the attentional blink. Meditation practitioners taken from an (...) older population showed a reduction in blink as compared to a control group taken from a younger population, whereas, the control group age-matched to the meditators’ group revealed a blink that was comparatively larger and broader. Our results support the hypothesis that meditation practice can: alter the efficiency with which attentional resources are distributed and help to overcome age-related attentional deficits in the temporal domain. (shrink)

To understand pre-Fregean theories of judgment and proposition, such as those found in Locke and the Port-Royal logic, it is important to distinguish between propositions in the modern sense and propositions in the pre-Fregean sense. By making this distinction it becomes clear that these pre-Fregean theories cannot be meant to solve the propositional attitude problem. Notwithstanding this fact, Locke and Arnauld are able to make a distinction between asserted and unasserted propositions (in their sense). The way Locke makes this distinction (...) turns out to be very different from the way it is made by Arnauld. (shrink)

This paper uses classical logic for a simultaneous description of the syntax and semantics of a fragment of English and it is argued that such an approach to natural language allows procedural aspects of linguistic theory to get a purely declarative formulation. In particular, it will be shown how certain construction rules in Discourse Representation Theory, such as the rule that indefinites create new discourse referents and definites pick up an existing referent, can be formulated declaratively if logic is used (...) as a metalanguage for English. In this case the declarative aspects of a rule are highlighted when we focus on the model theory of the description language while a procedural perspective is obtained when its proof theory is concentrated on. Themes of interest are Discourse Representation Theory, resolution of anaphora, resolution of presuppositions, and underspecification. (shrink)

The medical profession is observing a rising number of calls to action considering the threat that climate change poses to global human health. Theory-led bioethical analyses of the scope and weight of physicians’ normative duty towards climate protection and its conflict with individual patient care are currently scarce. This article offers an analysis of the normative issues at stake by using Korsgaard’s neo-Kantian moral account of practical identities. We begin by showing the case of physicians’ duty to climate protection, before (...) we succinctly introduce Korsgaard’s account. We subsequently show how the duty to climate protection can follow from physicians’ identity of being a healthcare professional. We structure conflicts between individual patient care and climate protection, and show how a transformation in physicians’ professional ethos is possible and what mechanisms could be used for doing so. An important limit of our analysis is that we mainly address the level of individual physicians and their practical identities, leaving out important measures to respond to climate change at the mesolevels and macrolevels of healthcare institutions and systems, respectively. (shrink)

Slow euthanasia or a good palliative intervention?There are many ways in which doctors influence the circumstances and/or the timing of a patient’s death. Some of these are accepted as normal medical practice—for instance, when a disproportional treatment is forgone, others are considered tolerable only under strict conditions or even intolerable, such as non-voluntary active euthanasia. A relatively new phenomenon in the ethical discussion on end-of-life decisions is terminal sedation. Terminal sedation is used in patients with terminal illnesses where normal medical (...) treatments cannot relieve severe symptoms such as pain and agitation, and no option is left but to take away the perception of these symptoms. Often, the decision to start terminal sedation is accompanied by the decision to forgo the provision of artificial nutrition and hydration in these patients. In The Netherlands, terminal sedation was estimated to be applied in 4–10% of all deaths in 2001.1 The combination of these two decisions have made the moral status of terminal sedation the subject of fierce ethical debates. Is it slow euthanasia2,3 or is it a good palliative intervention that should be sharply distinguished from euthanasia?4,5 One of the characteristics of this debate is that it is a very confused one: people disagree about the meaning of the term, the appropriateness of it and, of course, about the conditions under which it would be morally justified. As a matter of fact, these three discussions are deeply connected: as is often the case, a discussion about terms is a discussion about norms in disguise.The first observation to be made is that many seemingly descriptive definitions of terminal sedation contain normative claims. Examples of this are definitions of terminal sedation in which only …. (shrink)