The analysis of armed opposition groups is heavily tainted by gross categorizations and labeling. Using vague terms that reduce the objectives of such groups to a uniform binary of secessionist or reformist defies their ideational complexity, undermining the effort to gain a nuanced and in-depth understanding of their actual motives. A closer look into the Ogaden National Liberation Front in Ethiopia reveals the type of complexity we might expect to find in armed opposition groups’ objectives, and thus the problem with (...) superficially labeling them to make for easy comparative analyses. (shrink)

According to the normativists, dispositionalist theories of meaning fail because meaning is normative, not descriptive. One way to understand this notion of normativity is in terms of semantic correctness conditions. Anti-normativists typically accept that meaning implies semantic correctness but deny that this in turn implies that meaning is normative. Jeffrey Kaplan has recently argued that while semantic correctness may not imply full-blown normativity, semantic correctness is not descriptive either. I contend that Kaplan's argument has two main problems. First, his focus (...) on dispositionalism leaves it open for other descriptive facts to provide the basis of semantic correctness conditions. Second, he fails to show that the problems of dispositionalism are connected to semantic correctness in a way that demonstrates problems with descriptive theories of meaning. (shrink)

The aim of the article is to define the relationship between the meaning included in an utterance and its formal shape. The author based his discussion on the study of natural communication. The notion of meaning is in the article associated with that which in communicational grammar is referred to as cognitive configuration. It is expressed through texts, but texts indicate the meaning a sender intends to send in only a conventional manner. The author stressed the mechanism of the emergence (...) of meaning in the process of paraphrasing utterances and its consequences for the practice of translation. He included the notion of discoursive meaning assuming that every discourse has specific individual self-organisation rules without considering which communication within it would not be possible. (shrink)

Drawing on the original conception of Kant’s synthetic a priori and the relevant related developments in philosophy, this book presents a reconstruction of the intellectual history of the conception of quantity and offers an entirely ...

Inspired by the Catholic theologian Hans Küng, this book searches for a model for global ethics by analysing the contemporary philosophical discussion.

The standard of care in the United States favors stabilizing any adult who arrives in an emergency department after a failed suicide attempt, even if he appears decisionally capacitated and refuses life-sustaining treatment. I challenge this ubiquitous practice. Emergency clinicians generally have a moral obligation to err on the side of stabilizing even suicide attempters who refuse such interventions. This obligation reflects the fact that it is typically infeasible to determine these patients’ level of decisional capacitation—among other relevant information—in this (...) unique setting. Nevertheless, I argue, stabilizing suicide attempters over their objection sometimes violates a basic yet insufficiently appreciated right of theirs—the right against bodily invasion. In such cases, it is at least prima facie wrong to stabilize a patient who wants to die even if they lack a contrary advance directive or medical order and suffer from no terminal physical illness. (shrink)

Quantification, understood in the widest possible sense, is a phenomenon of fundamental interest for logic and linguistics and at the same time a phenomenon whose exegesis presents notorious problems in both of these disciplines. The general point to be made in the present essay is this: that there is a lack of understanding of the real nature of quantification, both in natural language and in logic itself, and that this is a direct consequence of a serious defect in Morris’s division (...) of semiotics into three autonomous branches of syntax, semantics, and pragmatics, the study of each of which is supposed to proceed independently of the study of any other. The aim of this paper is thus twofold: on the one hand to show that the real exegesis of quantification may be attained only under a certain interpretation of semiotics as such; and on the other hand to show that the very fact of the attainability of this authentic explanation of the nature of quantification gives grounds to speak of the necessity of reassessing certain notions on which logic, linguistics, and semiotics are currently based. (shrink)

The provability problem in intuitionistic propositional second-order logic with existential quantifier and implication (∃,→) is proved to be undecidable in presence of free type variables (constants). This contrasts with the result that inutitionistic propositional second-order logic with existential quantifier, conjunction and negation is decidable.

This volume sets out to discuss the role of norms and normativity in both language and linguistics from a multiplicity of perspectives. These concepts are centrally important to the philosophy and methodology of linguistics, and their role and nature need to be investigated in detail. The chapters address a range of issues from general questions about ontology, epistemology and methodology to aspects of particular subfields (such as semantics and historical linguistics) or phenomena (such as construal and code-switching). The volume aims (...) to further our understanding of language and linguistics as well as to encourage further discussion on the metatheory of linguistics. Due to the fundamental nature of the issues under discussion, this volume will be of interest to all linguists regardless of their background or fields of expertise and to philosophers concerned with language or other normative domains. (shrink)

European Journal of Philosophy, EarlyView.

I defend a novel account of the wrong of subjecting people to non-consensual sterilization (NCS), particularly in the context of the state-sponsored eugenics programmes once prevalent in the United States. What makes the eugenic practice of NCS distinctively wrong, I claim, is its dehumanizing core: the fact that it is tantamount to treating people as nonhuman animals, thereby expressing the degrading social meaning that they have the value of animals. The practice of NCS is prima facie seriously wrong partly, but (...) crucially, on these grounds. I consider and reject accounts of the wrong of NCS that make no reference to its animalizing character, such as that it violates victims’ (procreative) autonomy, amounts to treating them merely as a means, inflicts psychological harm on them, or constitutes an affront to their human dignity. My discussion suggests that the critical vocabulary of bioethics should be expanded beyond talk of rights-violations, benefits and harms, and equal treatment—and that the language of dehumanization is indispensable to bioethicists. (shrink)

Humanism is the view that people treat others inhumanely when we fail to see them as human beings, so that our treatment of them will tend to be more humane when we (fully) see their humanity. Recently, humanist views have been criticized on the grounds that the perpetrators of inhumanity regard their victims as human and treat them inhumanely partly for this reason. I argue that the two most common objections to humanist views (and their relatives) are unpersuasive: not only (...) does the evidence marshalled against these views fail to actually disprove them, it could threaten them only if some questionable assumptions were granted. By providing necessary conceptual ground-clearing and routing common lines of attack, I hope to determine what it would take for a humanist project to succeed, paving the way for a full defense of humanism that fulfills its explanatory ambitions. (shrink)

Inspired by the Catholic theologian Hans Küng, this book searches for a model for global ethics by analysing the contemporary philosophical discussion. It demonstrates that the Western model is unable to reckon with exclusivism and difference and presents an alternative model.

I extend my account of social invisibility and interpersonal recognition by applying it to one form of racism: racial alienation—the failure to emotionally identify with members of another racial group on the basis of their race. I argue that leading views of racism in the analytic tradition threaten to contravene the conviction that racial alienation involves a misrecognition of the other group’s humanity. The pitfall is best avoided by developing a conception of interpersonal awareness that is informed by Wittgenstein’s remarks (...) on other minds, particularly his point that our awareness of others as humanly minded consists in ‘an attitude towards a soul’ rather than in an 'opinion' that she has a soul. (shrink)

I argue that we get an account of social invisibility that best fits our practice of moral complaint if we reject orthodoxy and accept a quite different view of what it is to see another person as a person. On my view, seeing a person as a person is inseparable from caring about her in person-specific ways—hence from a disposition to a range of interpersonal emotional responses to her point of view. Thus, a person’s humanity is invisible to us, according (...) to this picture, when we are unreceptive to her power to influence our attitudes and will through her own attitudes and will. (shrink)

I resolve a tension between two prominent strands of feminist social critique. On the first, the domination of women consists largely in their objectification, and the objectifying character of such domination primarily explains why it is wrong. On the second, some salient forms of domination have a distinctively intersubjective dimension that makes them crucially unlike our standard modes of relating to objects. Yet in that case, how could characterizing these acts as objectifying capture why they are wrong? Focusing on domination (...) that seeks recognition from the subordinate, I argue that each strand contains half the truth, weaving these together. The first is correct to point out that that the concept of objectification is necessary for capturing the wrong of recognition-seeking domination, and that acts can be objectifying and ‘subjectifying’ all at once. The second strand is right to insist that domination of this sort has an irreducibly subjectifying character in light of which the concept of objectification is insufficient for clarifying its wrongness. The general lesson is that an account of the wrong of recognition- seeking domination is adequate only if it does justice to both its objectifying and subjectifying aspects. (shrink)

On Inhumanity: Dehumanization and How to Resist It. BY LIVINGSTONE SMITHDAVID.

Table of Contents: -/- Panu Raatikainen: Varieties of Ideal Language Philosophy. Jani Sinokki: Descartes on Language: How Signification Leads to Direct Reference. Matti Eklund: Carnapian Frameworks Revisited. Joseph Almog & Andrea Bianchi: The Semantics of Common Nouns and the Nature of Semantics. Gabriel Sandu: The Fallacies of the New Theory of Reference: Some Afterthoughts. Genoveva Martí: Experimental Results on Kind Terms: A Critical Reflection. Michael Devitt: Type Specimens and Reference. Jussi Haukioja: Conceptual Engineering for Externalists. Panu Raatikainen: Fictional Names Revisited. (...) Teemu Tauriainen: Indeterminism about Discourse Domains. Anandi Hattiagandi: Is Logic Normative? Jaakko Reinikainen: Constitutive Rules and Internal Criticism of Assertion. Aleksi Honkasalo: What Could and What Should Be Said? On Semantic Correctness and Semantic Prescriptions. Pasi Valtonen: Rearticulated Psychological View of Generics and Worldly Truthmakers. Joonas Pennanen: The Dual Character of Essentially Contested Concepts. Teemu Toppinen & Vilma Venesmaa: Unified Metasemantics for Expressivists. (shrink)