Care work may be connected with emotional and psychological exhaustion but also gratification, reward, and self-empowerment. Caregivers experience both positive and negative emotional states in caring situations, and further studies on the rewarding and energizing aspects of care may help us to broaden our understanding of how we can reduce the degree of burden while increasing the sense of satisfaction. This article shows how the focus on emotion is a necessary step to show the ambivalences and the grey areas connected (...) with the concept of care as well as to challenge the not fully explored assumption that care is often associated with burden and stress and viewed as a result of circumstances. It reports the findings of a micro-situated study of daily care activities among 80 caregivers. Care is seen as a strategic site to grasp deeper insights into the interactional mechanisms through which the emotional dynamics revolving around care produce unanticipated outcomes in terms of symbolic and practical productivity. (shrink)

The rapid dynamics of COVID-19 calls for quick and effective tracking of virus transmission chains and early detection of outbreaks, especially in the “phase 2” of the pandemic, when lockdown and other restriction measures are progressively withdrawn, in order to avoid or minimize contagion resurgence. For this purpose, contact-tracing apps are being proposed for large scale adoption by many countries. A centralized approach, where data sensed by the app are all sent to a nation-wide server, raises concerns about citizens’ privacy (...) and needlessly strong digital surveillance, thus alerting us to the need to minimize personal data collection and avoiding location tracking. We advocate the conceptual advantage of a decentralized approach, where both contact and location data are collected exclusively in individual citizens’ “personal data stores”, to be shared separately and selectively, voluntarily, only when the citizen has tested positive for COVID-19, and with a privacy preserving level of granularity. This approach better protects the personal sphere of citizens and affords multiple benefits: it allows for detailed information gathering for infected people in a privacy-preserving fashion; and, in turn this enables both contact tracing, and, the early detection of outbreak hotspots on more finely-granulated geographic scale. The decentralized approach is also scalable to large populations, in that only the data of positive patients need be handled at a central level. Our recommendation is two-fold. First to extend existing decentralized architectures with a light touch, in order to manage the collection of location data locally on the device, and allow the user to share spatio-temporal aggregates—if and when they want and for specific aims—with health authorities, for instance. Second, we favour a longer-term pursuit of realizing a Personal Data Store vision, giving users the opportunity to contribute to collective good in the measure they want, enhancing self-awareness, and cultivating collective efforts for rebuilding society. (shrink)

In a recent paper, Thomas Szanto develops an account of hatred, according to which the target of this attitude, paradigmatically, is a representative of a group or a class. On this account, hatred overgeneralises its target, has a blurred affective focus, is co-constituted by an outgroup/ingroup distinction, and is accompanied by a commitment for the subject to stick to the hostile attitude. While this description captures an important form of hatred, this paper claims that it does not do justice to (...) the paradigmatic cases of this attitude. The paper puts forward a “singularist” view of hatred, the core idea of which is that, in its simpler form, hatred is to aversively target the other qua this individual person, where the adverb “aversively” expresses the subject’s desire for the target to be annihilated. The conclusion develops some general considerations on the distinction between paradigmatic and marginal instances of an attitude by highlighting its importance for the study of affective phenomena. (shrink)

Gauss’s quadratic reciprocity theorem is among the most important results in the history of number theory. It’s also among the most mysterious: since its discovery in the late 18th century, mathematicians have regarded reciprocity as a deeply surprising fact in need of explanation. Intriguingly, though, there’s little agreement on how the theorem is best explained. Two quite different kinds of proof are most often praised as explanatory: an elementary argument that gives the theorem an intuitive geometric interpretation, due to Gauss (...) and Eisenstein, and a sophisticated proof using algebraic number theory, due to Hilbert. Philosophers have yet to look carefully at such explanatory disagreements in mathematics. I do so here. According to the view I defend, there are two important explanatory virtues—depth and transparency—which different proofs (and other potential explanations) possess to different degrees. Although not mutually exclusive in principle, the packages of features associated with the two stand in some tension with one another, so that very deep explanations are rarely transparent, and vice versa. After developing the theory of depth and transparency and applying it to the case of quadratic reciprocity, I draw some morals about the nature of mathematical explanation. (shrink)

The Aristotelian view of universals, according to which each universal generically depends for its existence on its instantiations, has recently come under attack by a series of ground-theoretic arguments. The last such arguments, presented by Raven, promises to offer several significant improvements over its predecessors, such as avoiding commitment to the transitivity of ground and offering new reasons for the metaphysical priority of universals over their instantiations. In this paper, we argue that Raven's argument does not effectively avoid said commitment (...) and that Raven's new reasons fail. Moreover, we present a novel ground-theoretic interpretation of the Aristotelian view, referred to as strong immanence, and introduce a new argument against the Aristotelian view, intended to sidestep any commitment to the transitivity of ground. (shrink)

Until recently, an almost perfect parallelism seemed to hold between theories of identity through time and across possible worlds,as every account in the temporal case(endurantism,perdurantism, exdurantism) was mirrored by a twin account in the modal case (trans-world identity, identity-via-parts, identity-via-counterparts). Nevertheless, in the recent literature, this parallelism has been broken because of the implementation in the debate of the relation of location. In particular, endurantism has been subject to a more in-depth analysis, and different versions of it, corresponding to different (...) ways an entity can be located in time, emerged. In this article, we provide a precise map of the conceptions at stake, complete the debate by introducing a version of endurantism not yet considered in the debate — we call transcendentism — and show that it allows us to provide an effective interpretation of the relation of trans-world identity and an intuitive solution in the temporal case. (shrink)

ABSTRACT ‘We’ is said in many ways. This paper investigates Kurt Stavenhagen’s neglected account of different kinds of ‘we’, which is maintained to be one of the most sophisticated within classical phenomenology. The paper starts by elaborating on the phenomenological distinction between mass, society, and community by claiming that individuals partake in episodes of experiential sharing only within communities. Stavenhagen conceptualizes experiential sharing as a meshing of conscious experiences infused by a feeling of us-ness. The remainder of the paper focuses (...) on Stavenhagen’s distinction of various senses of us: when individual share preferences, have mutual respect, or emotionally evaluate the world according to a cultural tradition, they elicit a sense of us of different kind and, thus, form communities of different kind. Within phenomenology, Stavenhagen should be credited with the merit of having unearthed the aggregative, we-generating force of preferences, of respect, and of (certain) emotions. (shrink)

Precision medicine promises to develop diagnoses and treatments that take individual variability into account. According to most specialists, turning this promise into reality will require adapting the established framework of clinical research ethics, and paying more attention to participants’ attitudes towards sharing genotypic, phenotypic, lifestyle data and health records, and ultimately to their desire to be engaged as active partners in medical research.Notions such as participation, engagement and partnership have been introduced in bioethics debates concerning genetics and large-scale biobanking to (...) broaden the focus of discussion beyond individual choice and individuals’ moral interests. The uptake of those concepts in precision medicine is to be welcomed. However, as data and medical information from research participants in precision medicine cohorts will be collected on an individual basis, translating a participatory approach in this emerging area may prove cumbersome. Therefore, drawing on Joseph Raz’s perfectionism, we propose a principle of respect for autonomous agents that, we reckon, can address many of the concerns driving recent scholarship on partnership and public participation, while avoiding some of the limitations these concept have in the context of precision medicine. Our approach offers a normative clarification to how becoming partners in precision is compatible with retaining autonomy.Realigning the value of autonomy with ideals of direct engagement, we show, can provide adequate normative orientation to precision medicine; it can do justice to the idea of moral pluralism by stressing the value of moral self-determination: and, finally, it can reconcile the notion of autonomy with other more communitarian values such as participation and solidarity. (shrink)

Translated from the 1989 Italian edition, Ferrara (sociology, U. of Rome) intertwines an exploration of the ethical and social thought of 17th-century French philosopher Rousseau, with an analysis of contemporary culture through those ...

Some computational phenomena rely essentially on pragmatic considerations, and seem to undermine the independence of the specification from the implementation. These include software development, deviant uses, esoteric languages and recent data-driven applications. To account for them, the interaction between pragmatics, epistemology and ontology in computational artefacts seems essential, indicating the need to recover the role of the language metaphor. We propose a User Levels (ULs) structure as a pragmatic complement to the Levels of Abstraction (LoAs)-based structure defining the ontology and (...) epistemology of computational artefacts. ULs identify a flexible hierarchy in which users bear their own semantic and normative requirements, possibly competing with the logical specification. We formulate a notion of computational act intended in its pragmatic sense, alongside pragmatic versions of implementation and correctness. (shrink)

In this paper, I present an emerging explanatory framework about ageing and care. In particular, I focus on how, in contrast to most classical accounts of ageing, biomedicine today construes the ageing process as a modifiable trajectory. This framing turns ageing from a stage of inexorable decline into the focus of preventive strategies, harnessing the functional plasticity of the ageing organism. I illustrate this shift by focusing on studies of the demographic dynamics in human population, observations of ageing as an (...) intraspecifically heterogenous phenotype, and the experimental manipulation of longevity, in both model organisms and humans. I suggest that such an explanatory framework about ageing creates the epistemological conditions for the rise of a peculiar form of prevention that does not aim to address a specific condition. Rather it seeks to stall the age-related accumulation of molecular damage and functional deficits, boosting individual resilience against age-related decline. I call this preventive paradigm “ground-state prevention.” While new, ground-state prevention bears conceptual resemblance to forms of medical wisdom prominent in classic Galenic medicine, as well as in the Renaissance period. (shrink)

This text is an integrated and comprehensive account of theories of justice and judgement in contemporary political and moral philosophy. It offers a critical examination of judgement and normative validity in the recent works of Rawls, Habermas, Ackerman, Michaleman, and Dworkin. Ferrara demonstrates how the understanding of justice and normative validity, since the linguistic turn in philosophy, is defined in terms of reflective judgement. This demonstration comprises of an historical overview of the judgement model in contemporary political philosophy that focuses (...) on Rawls on ` justice as fairness' and Habermas on the discourse theory of law and the public sphere. The discussion then examines situated judgement; the work of Ackerman on the function of the constitution; and Michaelman on deliberative democracy. Justice and Judgement concludes with an exhaustive and exacting discussion of universalism and contemporary liberalism; and the judgement view of justice. The key themes of this examination are the good; equal respect; and reflexive judgement. (shrink)

This article examines recent theories of democratic citizenship as well as the institutional separation of religion and politics in light of shortcomings with the traditional secularization thesis. Due to the fact that juridical norms and forms of consciousness develop at a more rapid pace than religious ones, received accounts of both democratic equality and toleration need to be reconceptualized. Questions concerning the legitimacy and neutrality of religious reasoning in democratic politics, as pursued in the work of Rawls and Habermas, also (...) need to be informed by further reflection on the confessional context and other empirical features of post-secular societies. Comparing the politics of same-sex marriage in Canada and Italy helps to illustrate this point. (shrink)

I defend the ethical fittingness theory (EFT), the thesis that whenever it is legitimate ethically to evaluate a representational artwork for the perspective it embodies, such evaluation systematically bears on the work's artistic value. EFT is a form of radical moralism, claiming that the systematic relationship between the selected type of ethical evaluation and artistic evaluation always obtains, for works of any kind. The argument for EFT spells out the implications of ethically judging an artwork for its perspective, where such (...) an ethical evaluation is understood as an assessment of how well the work's ethical perspective fits extra-fictional reality—how appropriate, correct, or true the perspective is. The argument shows that the ethical legitimacy of judging a work for its perspective ipso facto proves the judgment's art-critical relevance. Hence, the argument effectively amounts to a reductio ad absurdum of theories that admit the legitimacy of ethically judging artworks this way, but deny or qualify the judgment's relevance to artistic merit. Since EFT is stated conditionally, the argument need not indicate how often artworks are subject to this type of ethical evaluation. Nonetheless, I make a case for the relevance of EFT to actual art criticism and contemporary philosophical debate. (shrink)

Il saggio si propone di approfondire due tendenze tipiche della musica contemporanea: la prima è il Minimalismo, movimento rappresentato da musicisti come La Monte Young, Philip Glass and Steve Reich, la seconda è la rave music (come la techno), caratteristica della popular culture nell’era postmoderna. Attraverso il pensiero di Adorno, e a partire dalla sua analisi dialettica del dualismo Schönberg-Stravinskij, il saggio propone una comprensione filosofica di concetti come “ripetizione” e “trascendenza”; l’assenza dello “sviluppo” in gran parte della produzione musicale (...) degli ultimi decenni, nella popular music quanto nella musica colta, dimostra una dispersione del soggetto e dell’individuo, smarrito all’interno di un “eterno ritorno” della struttura ritmica che può essere ricompreso nei termini di un “eterno ritorno dell’identico” e non nei termini di un “eterno ritorno della possibilità”; in quest’ottica, a venire sacrificata è anche la dimensione della trascendenza, che non a caso viene ricercata spesso nell’esotismo dei culti orientali o nel consumo di sostanze stupefacenti. L’insistenza nel Minimalismo della ripetizione come unica ed estrema categoria di riferimento e norma estetica, produrrà infatti nel corso degli ultimi anni una dicotomia apparentemente contraddittoria, ma che invece esprime la medesima matrice logica: da un lato l’invasamento edonistico del beat elettronico della musica dance elettronica, dall’altro la proposta commerciale della produzione industriale della musica pop. Non è un caso che proprio il Minimalismo sia sfociato in entrambe queste due tendenze, mostrandosi come la cifra comune originaria, traducendosi nella musica rave o nella musica rock. (shrink)

Robert Kane’s libertarian theory of freedom is frequently attacked in the free will literature by the “luck objection”. Alfred Mele’s articulation of the objection is a very influential formulation as it captures the spirit of Kane’s critics and their complaint with Kane’s view. Mele argues that without a contrastive explanation that highlights aspects of the agent their free choices are reducible to luck. I argue that the lack of a contrastive explanation does not establish that there is no explanation for (...) self-forming actions. Building on the explanation that Kane offers in his rebuttal, I claim that there are neglected dimensions to Kane’s view that, when put together, mitigate the force of the objection. These elements are value experiments, teleological intelligibility and liberium arbitrium voluntatis. I claim that through adopting a narrative view of the self, we can place value experiments in a broader teleological framework that allows us to see self-forming choices are not just a matter of luck. (shrink)

PurposeThe purpose of this study to shed light on the importance of social media hosted content related to socially-motivated discussions. Moving from the field of communication for development, the research leverages social media as a powerful tool for collecting and analyse peer-to-peer communication towards the conceptualization of eVoices of Unheard. The deep understanding of these conversation can generate recommendations for organizations and governments designing and providing interventions fostering local socio-economic development.Design/methodology/approachThe study presents a large-scale analysis of social media interactions on (...) the topic “#favela” to generate insights into a social network structure, narrative contents and meaning generated.FindingsStructurally, the analysed networks are comparable with those presented in current academic literature; automatic text analysis confirmed the promise of the inner value of communication for development opening the floor to conceptualization of the “eVoices of unheard”, which is the collective and conscious use of social media to mediate community discussions about tangible and intangible issues related to socio-economic development.Originality/valueFramed within the rise of interactive communication for development this research show that social media an support the notion of voice proposed by Couldry moving from process towards value thereby understanding intangible issues related with socio-economic development. (shrink)

Political Representation: A Historical and Conceptual investigation into Its Polysemy The aim of this study is to value the complexity of theoretical formulations that different traditions and authors have provided on the problem of political representation. This is achieved by relying on a text that has pioneered this kind of investigation: Hasso Hofmann s Repräsentation: Studien zur Wort- und Begriffsgeschichte von der Antike bis ins 19. Jahrhundert. Hofmann s book, originally published in German in 1974, has not received due attention (...) in the contemporary debate on representation and is scarcely known in the non-German academic environment. However, its unique methodological and conceptual outlook on representation has much to contribute to the current debate on this topic. Hofmann s main objective is to draw a history and theory of representation that values the polysemy of the Latin word repraesentatio from Antiquity until the 19th century. To achieve this goal, Hofmann analyses the diverse meanings that have been attached to the word representation throughout its history, from its inception in the Latin world onwards. To prove the relevance of this approach for the contemporary debate, I apply Hofmann s semantic-conceptual map of representation to the study of political representation in such diverse authors as Marsilius of Padua, Carl Schmitt, Thomas Hobbes, Ernst Kantorowicz as well as contemporary authors such as Bernard Manin, Nadia Urbinati, Frank Ankersmit, John Dryzek and others. In so doing, I show that the answer to the question: what makes representation a political notion? is far from univocal. Moreover, I argue that Hofmann s interpretive lens provides an alternative approach to what is still considered the classical study of political representation in the Anglophone world: Hanna Pitkin s The Concept of Representation. By critically comparing Pitkin and Hofmann s approaches to the problem of political representation, my aim is to demonstrate that Pitkin s normative perspective should be revised. Pitkin argues, first, that it is possible to pinpoint a general meaning of the concept of representation as making present again and, second, that there is a general concept of political representation that is identified with substantive acting for and in which all aesthetic meanings of representation are excluded. In contrast to this approach, Hofmann stresses the polysemyc character of representation, and the impossibility of narrowing down a general meaning of the concept. Drawing on Hofmann, one can argue that the semantic richness of political representation is just as broad as that of the word representation itself and that what makes representation political varies from epoch to epoch, from author to author. As a result, the common way to look at political representation nowadays, i.e. as democratic representation, is far from the only one but constitutes, rather, just one of the numerous ways to look at this concept over time. Using Hofmann s perspective for the study of political representation also helps us show that the aesthetic meanings of representation are always and intrinsically bound up with political representation in all the authors who have theorized this concept. In contrast to Pitkin, one could argue that any meaningful concept of political representation must also include the aesthetic and symbolic meanings of representation. Accordingly, it is impossible to think of political representation without accounting for its symbolic dimension as Darstellung. (shrink)

Riassunto: La geomanzia, una disciplina divinatoria importata dal mondo arabo, prosperò nel medioevo latino. Di fronte a tale popolarità traduttori e autori di trattati geomantici, filosofi, teologi e letterati si interrogarono sulla sua validità, sulle sue implicazioni filosofiche e sulla visione del mondo che essa presupponeva. Il presente contributo esamina questo dibattito. In particolare, si ricostruisce lo statuto epistemologico della geomanzia nei suoi rapporti con l’astrologia. Il problema della scientificità della geomanzia viene discusso anche nel contesto dell’azione della causalità celeste (...) sul mondo sublunare. Sono esaminati i ruoli del geomante e dell’interrogante ed è analizzato il concetto di intentio, che rimanda ad un’analisi psicologica peculiare della geomanzia. Caratterizza la geomanzia anche una dimensione rituale fatta di prescrizioni preliminari e di invocazioni da rivolgere alla divinità. Quanto detto impedisce di ridurre la geomanzia ad una semplice tecnica divinatoria; essa appare piuttosto una forma di sapienza rivelata solo al geomante esperto e moralmente degno, che attinge così la conoscenza di eventi futuri e cose nascoste. Da questa breve ricostruzione emerge l’articolata natura della geomanzia, contraddistinta, nella sua originaria versione araba, da una marcata impronta religiosa e da uno stretto, benché ambiguo, nesso con la profezia Islamica.: Geomancy, a divinatory discipline imported from the Arab world, flourished in the Latin Middle Ages. In the attempt to explain the popularity of geomancy, translators and authors of geomantic writings, philosophers, theologians, and other scholars addressed such issues as its validity, its philosophical implications, and the worldview it presupposed. This paper explores this debate, delineating the epistemological status of geomancy in relation to astrology. The problem of the scientificity of geomacy will be discussed with regard to the celestial influences on the sublunary world. In addition, the different roles played by both the geomancer and the consultant are examined. Attention will be paid to the concept of intentio, which implies a psychological analysis peculiar to geomancy. Geomancy is also characterized by ritual elements such as both preliminary prescriptions and invocations of God, meaning that it is not an ordinary divinatory technique, but a form of wisdom revealed only to experienced and upright geomancers, who can thus obtain knowledge of future events and hidden things. From this analysis emerges the complex nature of geomancy, whose original Arabic version had a prominent religious character and a close, albeit ambiguous, link with Islamic prophecy. (shrink)

What has been called the new mechanistic philosophy conceives of mechanisms as the main providers of biological explanation. We draw on the characterization of the p53 gene in molecular oncology, to show that explaining a biological phenomenon implies instead a dynamic interaction between the mechanistic level—rendered at the appropriate degree of ontological resolution—and far more general explanatory tools that perform a fundamental epistemic role in the provision of biological explanations. We call such tools “explanatory frameworks”. They are called frameworks to (...) stress their higher level of generality with respect to bare mechanisms; on the other hand, they are called explanatory because, as we show in this paper, their importance in explaining biological phenomena is not secondary with respect to mechanisms. We illustrate how explanatory frameworks establish selective and local criteria of causal relevance that drive the search for, characterisation and usage of biological mechanisms. Furthermore, we show that explanatory frameworks allow for changes of scientific perspective on the causal relevance of mechanisms going beyond the account provided by the new mechanistic philosophy. (shrink)

With the publication of Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns (1981) and of his essays “A Reply to my Critics” (1982), “Diskursethik — Notizen zu einem Bugründungsprogramm” (1983), “Moralbewusstsein und kommunikatives Handeln” (1983), and “Über Moralität und Sitdichkeit — Was macht eine Lebensform ‘rational’?” (1984), Habermas has considerably developed and systematized his views on ethics. Up to Communication and the Evolution of Society (1979), ethics had been of interest to Habermas mainly insofar as certain concepts related to it — such as the (...) ideal speech situation, communicative action, presuppositions of argumentation, etc. — were crucial for the purpose of grounding a universalistic point of view in philosophy and in social theory. (shrink)

The American Journal of Bioethics, Volume 12, Issue 10, Page 20-22, October 2012.

In the global world, momentous migratory tides have produced hyper-pluralism on the domestic scale, bringing citizens with radically different conceptions of life, justice and the good to coexist side by side. Conjectural arguments about the acceptance of pluralism, the next best to public reason when shared premises are too thin, may not succeed in convincing all constituencies. What resources, then, can liberal democracy mobilize? The multivariate democratic polity is the original answer to this question, based on an interpretation of Rawls (...) which revisits Political Liberalism in the light of The Law of Peoples . The unscrutinized assumption is highlighted, often read into Rawls’s Political Liberalism , that a polity moves homogeneously and all of a piece from religious conflict to modus vivendi, constitutional consensus and finally to overlapping consensus. Drawing on The Law of Peoples , a different picture can be obtained. (shrink)

The investigation of how humans perceive and respond to emotional signals conveyed by the human body has been for a long time secondary compared with the investigation of facial expressions and emotional scenes recognition. The aims of this behavioral study were to assess the ability to process emotional body postures and to test whether motor response is mainly driven by the emotional content of the picture or if it is influenced by motor resonance. Emotional body postures and scenes (IAPS) divided (...) into three clusters (fear, happiness, and neutral) were shown to 25 healthy subjects (13 males, mean age ± SD: 22.3 ± 1.8 years) in a three-alternative forced choice task. Subjects were asked to recognize the emotional content of the pictures by pressing one of three keys as fast as possible in order to estimate response times (RTs). The rating of valence and arousal was also performed. We found shorter RTs for fearful body postures as compared with happy and neutral postures. In contrast, no differences across emotional categories were found for the IAPS stimuli. Analysis on valence and arousal and the subsequent item analysis showed an excellent reliability of the two sets of images used in the experiment. Our results show that fearful body postures are rapidly recognized and processed, probably thanks to the automatic activation of a series of central nervous system structures orchestrating the defensive threat reactions, strengthening and supporting previous neurophysiological and behavioral findings in body language processing. (shrink)

Together with the volume “Inquiries in philosophical pragmatics: Theoretical developments,” this book collects selected contributions to the conference Pragmasophia II held in Lisbon in 2018. The eleven essays of this volume focus on how a linguistic structure or expression manifests a pragmatic phenomenon, and are ordered considering their relationship with the specificity of the context. The first three papers, devoted to the topics of prototype-based generalizations, scalar implicatures, and temporal ordering, propose new insights into pragmatic phenomena considering linguistic behavior independent (...) of the social activity in which it is placed. In the last papers, the analytical and empirical goal becomes predominant. Here, the theoretical advances are considered as instruments for analyzing specific texts, such as marketplace interactions, courtroom speech, schizophrenic discourse, narratives of literary texts for children or deception in movies. In between, three papers devoted to emotive or loaded words bridge the passage from more theoretical to more empirical and context-oriented works. (shrink)

Together with the volume “Inquiries in philosophical pragmatics: Linguistic and theoretical issues,” this book collects selected contributions to the conference Pragmasophia II held in Lisbon in 2018. This first volume intends to contribute to the dialogue between philosophers and linguists, trying to broaden the boundaries of this discipline defined by the crucial notions of context and verbal action. To this purpose, the contributions are collected in an order that reflects the core and the frontiers of pragmatics, the former constituted by (...) the classical and more philosophical topics as quantifiers, semantic intentions and semantics, and common knowledge, and the latter exploring areas such as the relationship between pragmatics and other fields, such as argumentation and discourse analysis. Between these two poles of theoretical developments, we can find new theoretical challenges to some basic pragmatic problems, such as pure indexicals, deferred reference, polysemy, explicatures and indirect reports. (shrink)

An appropriate characterization of property types is an important topic for measurement science. On the basis of a set-theoretic model of evaluation and measurement processes, the paper introduces the operative concept of property evaluation type, and discusses how property types are related to, and in fact can be derived from, property evaluation types, by finally analyzing the consequences of these distinctions for the concepts of ‘property’ used in the International Vocabulary of Metrology – Basic and General Concepts and Associated Terms (...) (VIM3). (shrink)