For a novice this book is a mathematically-oriented introduction to modal logic, the discipline within mathematical logic studying mathematical models of reasoning which involve various kinds of modal operators. It starts with very fundamental concepts and gradually proceeds to the front line of current research, introducing in full details the modern semantic and algebraic apparatus and covering practically all classical results in the field. It contains both numerous exercises and open problems, and presupposes only minimal knowledge in mathematics. A specialist (...) can use the book as a source of references. Results and methods of many directions in propositional modal logic, from completeness and duality to algorithmic problems, are collected and systematically presented in one volume. (shrink)

The rule-following debate, in its concern with the metaphysics and epistemology of linguistic meaning and mental content, goes to the heart of the most fundamental questions of contemporary philosophy of mind and language. This volume gathers together the most important contributions to the topic, including papers by Simon Blackburn, Paul Boghossian, Graeme Forbes, Warren Goldfarb, Paul Horwich, John McDowell, Colin McGinn, Ruth Millikan, Philip Pettit, George Wilson, and José Zalabardo. This debate has centred on Saul Kripke's reading of the rule-following (...) sections in Wittgenstein and his consequent posing of a "sceptical paradox" that threatens our every day notions of linguistic meaning and mental content. These essays are attempts to respond to this challenge and represent some of the most important work in contemporary theory of meaning. They examine the notion of meaning; whether it is possible to find a suitable meaning-constituting fact from our previous behaviour or mental histories; objections to, and defenses of, dispositional accounts of meaning; the plausibility of non-factualism about meaning; our attempts to develop non-reductionist accounts of meaning; and the sources of the normativity which attaches to meaning, such as the linguistic practice of the community or the dispositions of the individual. With an introductory essay and a comprehensive guide to further reading the book is an excellent resource for courses in philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, Wittgenstein, and metaphysics, as well as for all philosophers, linguists, and cognitive scientists with interests in these areas. Contributors include Simon Blackburn, Paul Boghossian, Graeme Forbes, Warren Goldfarb, Paul Horwich, John McDowell, Colin McGinn, Alexander Miller, Ruth Garrett Millikan, Philip Pettit, George. M. Wilson, Crispin Wright, and José L. Zalabardo. (shrink)

One powerful argument for dualism is provided by Chalmers: the ‘zombie’ or conceivability argument. This paper aims to establish that if one adopts the ‘Powerful Qualities’ account of properties developed by Martin and Heil, this argument can be resisted at the first premise: the claim that zombies are conceivable is, by the lights of Chalmers’ own account of conceivability, false. The Powerful Qualities account is outlined. Chalmers’ argument, and several distinctions which underlie it, are explained. It is argued that to (...) make sense of the claim that zombies are conceivable, some account of properties must be given. The paper’s central claim is presented and defended from potential responses: given the Powerful Qualities view, zombies are in fact inconceivable. Finally, an error theory is presented, which offers an explanation of why so many have taken the conceivability of zombies to be unproblematic, and the view is briefly contrasted with Russellian monism. (shrink)

Laws of nature take center stage in philosophy of science. Laws are usually believed to stand in a tight conceptual relation to many important key concepts such as causation, explanation, confirmation, determinism, counterfactuals etc. Traditionally, philosophers of science have focused on physical laws, which were taken to be at least true, universal statements that support counterfactual claims. But, although this claim about laws might be true with respect to physics, laws in the special sciences (such as biology, psychology, economics etc.) (...) appear to have—maybe not surprisingly—different features than the laws of physics. Special science laws—for instance, the economic law “Under the condition of perfect competition, an increase of demand of a commodity leads to an increase of price, given that the quantity of the supplied commodity remains constant” and, in biology, Mendel's Laws—are usually taken to “have exceptions”, to be “non-universal” or “to be ceteris paribus laws”. How and whether the laws of physics and the laws of the special sciences differ is one of the crucial questions motivating the debate on ceteris paribus laws. Another major, controversial question concerns the determination of the precise meaning of “ceteris paribus”. Philosophers have attempted to explicate the meaning of ceteris paribus clauses in different ways. The question of meaning is connected to the problem of empirical content, i.e., the question whether ceteris paribus laws have non-trivial and empirically testable content. Since many philosophers have argued that ceteris paribus laws lack empirically testable content, this problem constitutes a major challenge to a theory of ceteris paribus laws. (shrink)

I defend my view that scientific progress is constituted by the accumulation of knowledge against a challenge from Rowbottom in favour of the semantic view that it is only truth that is relevant to progress.Keywords: Scientific progress; Knowledge; Aim of inquiry; Darrell Rowbottom.

In this article I raise a new problem for quantum mechanics, which I call the control problem. Like the measurement problem, the control problem places a fundamental constraint on quantum theories. The characteristic feature of the problem is its focus on state preparation. In particular, whereas the measurement problem turns on a premise about the completeness of the quantum state (‘no hidden variables’), the control problem turns on a premise about our ability to prepare or control quantum states. After raising (...) the problem, I discuss some applications. I suggest that it provides a useful new lens through which to view existing theories or interpretations, in part because it draws attention to aspects of those theories that the measurement problem does not (such as the role of conditional and relative states). I suggest that it also helps clarify the physical significance of the well-known no-go result—the no-cloning theorem—on which it is based. (shrink)

As the USA contends with another surge in COVID-19 cases, hospitals may soon need to answer the unresolved question of who lives and dies when ventilator demand exceeds supply. Although most triage policies in the USA have seemingly converged on the use of clinical need and benefit as primary criteria for prioritisation, significant differences exist between institutions in how to assign priority to patients with identical medical prognoses: the so-called ‘tie-breaker’ situations. In particular, one’s status as a frontline healthcare worker (...) has been a proposed criterion for prioritisation in the event of a tie. This article outlines two major grounds for reconsidering HCW prioritisation. The first recognises trust as an indispensable element of clinical care and mistrust as a hindrance to any public health strategy against the virus, thus raising concerns about the outward appearance of favouritism. The second considers the ways in which proponents of HCW prioritisation deviate from the very ‘ethics frameworks’ that often preface triage policies and serve to guide resource allocation—a rhetorical strategy that may undermine the very ethical foundations on which triage policies stand. By appealing to trust and consistency, we re-examine existing arguments in favour of HCW prioritisation and provide a more tenable justification for adjudicating on tie-breaker events during crisis standards of care. (shrink)

The usual, comparative, conception of inference to the best explanation (IBE) takes it to be ampliative. In this paper I propose a conception of IBE ('Holmesian inference') that takes it to be a species of eliminative induction and hence not ampliative. This avoids several problems for comparative IBE (for example, how could it be reliable enough to generate knowledge?). My account of Holmesian inference raises the suspicion that it could never be applied, on the grounds that scientific hypotheses are inevitably (...) underdetermined by the evidence (i.e. are inevitably ampliative). I argue that this concern may be resisted by acknowledging, as Timothy Williamson has shown, that all knowledge is evidence. The latter suggests an approach to resisting scepticism different from those (e.g. the reliabilist approach) that embrace fallibilism. (shrink)

This paper is a survey of results concerning embeddings of intuitionistic propositional logic and its extensions into various classical modal systems.

To understand the future of informed consent, we should pay attention to two ethical-legal sources in addition to the revised Common Rule. Physicians acting as investigators and patients serving as research subjects bring to that relationship a long history regarding consent to treatment, and everyone dealing with research ethics needs to be aware of the Nuremberg Code and other human-rights documents. These three streams make separate and distinctly different contributions to informed consent doctrine.

Despite the ever-changing field of artificial intelligence (AI) and its preponderance of pre-print articles, Cohen offers a timely, nuanced, and self-aware overview of ChatGPT and the world of Larg...

_Laruelle_ is one of the first books in English to undertake in an extended critical survey of the work of the idiosyncratic French thinker François Laruelle, the promulgator of non-standard philosophy. Laruelle, who was born in 1937, has recently gained widespread recognition, and Alexander R. Galloway suggests that readers may benefit from colliding Laruelle’s concept of the One with its binary counterpart, the Zero, to explore more fully the relationship between philosophy and the digital. In _Laruelle_, Galloway argues that (...) the digital is a philosophical concept and not simply a technical one, employing a detailed analysis of Laruelle to build this case while referencing other thinkers in the French and Continental traditions, including Alain Badiou, Gilles Deleuze, Martin Heidegger, and Immanuel Kant. In order to explain clearly Laruelle’s concepts such as the philosophical decision and the principle of sufficient philosophy, Galloway lays a broad foundation with his discussions of “the One” as it has developed in continental philosophy, the standard model of philosophy, and how philosophers view “the digital.” Digital machines dominate today’s world, while so-called digital thinking—that is, binary thinking such as presence and absence or self and world—is often synonymous with what it means to think at all. In examining Laruelle and digitality together, Galloway shows how Laruelle remains a profoundly non-digital thinker—perhaps the only non-digital thinker today—and engages in an extensive discussion on the interconnections between media, philosophy, and technology. (shrink)

This paper is a survey of results concerning the disjunction property, Halldén-completeness, and other related properties of intermediate prepositional logics and normal modal logics containing S4.

Always connect—that is the imperative of today’s media. But what about those moments when media cease to function properly, when messages go beyond the sender and receiver to become excluded from the world of communication itself—those messages that state: “There will be no more messages”? In this book, Alexander R. Galloway, Eugene Thacker, and McKenzie Wark turn our usual understanding of media and mediation on its head by arguing that these moments reveal the ways the impossibility of communication is (...) integral to communication itself—instances they call excommunication. In three linked essays, _Excommunication_ pursues this elusive topic by looking at mediation in the face of banishment, exclusion, and heresy, and by contemplating the possibilities of communication with the great beyond. First, Galloway proposes an original theory of mediation based on classical literature and philosophy, using Hermes, Iris, and the Furies to map out three of the most prevalent modes of mediation today—mediation as exchange, as illumination, and as network. Then, Thacker goes boldly beyond Galloway’s classification scheme by examining the concept of excommunication through the secret link between the modern horror genre and medieval mysticism. Charting a trajectory of examples from H. P. Lovecraft to Meister Eckhart, Thacker explores those instances when one communicates or connects with the inaccessible, dubbing such modes of mediation “haunted” or “weird” to underscore their inaccessibility. Finally, Wark evokes the poetics of the infuriated swarm as a queer politics of heresy that deviates from both media theory and the traditional left. He posits a critical theory that celebrates heresy and that is distinct from those that now venerate Saint Paul. Reexamining commonplace definitions of media, mediation, and communication, _Excommunication_ offers a glimpse into the realm of the nonhuman to find a theory of mediation adequate to our present condition. (shrink)

One recently popular way to characterise strong emergence is to say that emergent entities possess novel causal powers. However, there is little agreement concerning the nature of powers. One controversy involves whether powers are single- or multi-track; that is, whether each power has only one manifestation type, or whether a single power can be directed towards a number of distinct manifestations. Another concerns how powers operate: whether a lone power manifests when triggered by the presence of a suitable stimulus, or (...) whether powers operate mutually such that several powers must ‘work together’ to bring about a particular manifestation. This paper examines how these distinctions—which can be cross-combined to frame four distinct accounts of the nature of powers—bear on the debate between emergentists and reductionists. (shrink)

This book explores a range of traditional and contemporary metaphysical themes that figure in the writings of E. J. Lowe, whose powerful and influential work was still developing at the time of his death in 2015. Leading philosophers present new essays on topics to do with ontology, necessity, existence, and mental causation.

Emergent properties are intended to be genuine, natural higher level causally efficacious properties irreducible to physical ones. At the same time they are somehow dependent on or 'emergent from' complexes of physical properties, so that the doctrine of emergent properties is not supposed to be returned to dualism. The doctrine faces two challenges: (i) to explain precisely how it is that such properties emerge - what is emergence; (ii) to explain how they sidestep the exclusion problem - how it is (...) that there is room for these properties to be causally efficacious, given the causal completeness of the physical. In this paper I explain how functional properties can meet both challenges. (shrink)

The article shows that Kuhn's concept of incommensurability emphasizes mainly the objective dimension of communication. To the thesis about the incommensurability of the meanings of scientific concepts in competing paradigms, we oppose the idea of a three-dimensional space of communicative dimensions. We supplement the objective dimension of communication, within which the environmental evolutionary selection of the best knowledge is carried out, with equal social and temporal horizons.

Many potential therapeutic agents are discarded before they are tested in humans. These are not quack medications. They are drugs and other interventions that have been developed by responsible scientists in respectable companies or universities and are often backed up by publications in peer-reviewed journals. These possible treatments might ease suffering and prolong the lives of innumerable patients, yet they have been put aside. In this paper, we outline a novel mechanism—the Plutocratic Proposal—to revive such neglected research and fund early (...) phase clinical trials. The central idea of the Proposal is that any patient who rescues a potential therapeutic agent from neglect by funding early phase clinical trials should be offered a place on the trial. (shrink)

Influenced by the logical positivism of Moritz, and by Russell and Ramsey, Maslow's interpretation is that Wittgenstein's basic philosophy is a kind of Kantian phenomenology. In this, the first critical study of the Tractatus by an American philosopher, Maslow examines Wittgenstein's solipsism and mysticism, neglected areas of his philosophy.

[Alan Weir] This paper addresses the problem of how to account for objective content-for the distinction between how we actually apply terms and the conditions in which we ought to apply them-from within a naturalistic framework. Though behaviourist or dispositionalist approaches are generally held to be unsuccessful in naturalising objective content or 'normativity', I attempt to restore the credibility of such approaches by sketching a behaviouristic programme for explicating objective content. /// [Alexander Miller] Paul Boghossian (1989, 1990) has argued, (...) on grounds concerning the holistic nature of belief fixation, that there are principled reasons for thinking that 'optimal conditions' versions of reductive dispositionalism about content cannot hope to satisfy a condition of extensional accuracy. I discern three separable strands of argument in Boghossian's work-the circularity objection, the open-endedness objection, and the certification objection-and argue that each of these objections fails. My conclusion is that for all that Boghossian has shown, 'optimal conditions' versions of reductive dispositionalism have to be assessed on a case-by-case basis. (shrink)

Norwegian School of Economics and Business Administration and Chr. Michelsen Institute, Norway, bertil.tungodden{at}nhh.no ' + u + '@' + d + ' '//--> Liberal egalitarian theories of justice argue that inequalities arising from non-responsibility factors should be eliminated, but that inequalities arising from responsibility factors should be accepted. This article discusses how the fairness argument for redistribution within a liberal egalitarian framework is affected by a relocation of the cut between responsibility and non-responsibility factors. The article also discusses the claim (...) that equalization of some non-responsibility factors will reduce the ideal level of redistribution. Key Words: responsibility • liberal egalitarianism • redistribution. (shrink)

The article is devoted to social problems of modern science (as it were interpreted Max Weber) considered in the context of the system-communicative approach by N. Luhmann. In contrast to the modern work of art, the modern science, as M. Weber believes, is associated with the fundamental unattainability of “true being”, and, as a result, with the transitory character of any scientific achievement. The specialty of modern science, as Weber noted, is determinated, on the one hand by its self-understanding, due (...) to the “peculiarity of the current moment”, and, on the other, by its transformation into a kind of blind spot of scientific observation. As a result, Weber formulated the main problem of the meaning of modern science: he wondered why any scientist needs a science under (1) external alienation and (2) inaccessibility of a scientific object? Moreover, the category of truth not just acquires its special value, but also sets a special meaning to the purpose of scientific communication, that becomes an object but not a property of scientific search. The main content of the article is the study of the Weberian concepts of the external (science as a profession) and internal (science as vocation) social factors of modern science as they were interpreted by E. von Kahler, G. Rickert, M. Scheller, K. Loewit. The authors discuss their attempts to modernize the fundamental Weberian distinction of truth/value as a principle of inclusion in the scientific community, that was formulated as a response to the “Weber’s challenge”. The authors argue that von Kahler criticized the Weberian concept for the incompatibility of the spatial and temporal discreteness of science within the “organic understanding” of the unity of the world. At the same time Scheler and Rickert payed special attention to the problem of subject specification of science. K. Levit discussed the possibility of Weber’s substitution of objectivity as a key distinction of modern knowledge with some opposite attribute. In the final part, the authors summarize the inconsistency of predictions about the further internal differentiation of scientific disciplines and the rejection of research motive for “genuine being”. (shrink)

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the "public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be (...) preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

Those inquiring into the nature of mind have long been interested in the foundations of mathematics, and conversely this branch of knowledge is distinctive in that our access to it is purely through thought. A better understanding of mathematical thought should clarify the conceptual foundations of mathematics, and a deeper grasp of the latter should in turn illuminate the powers of mind through which mathematics is made available to us. The link between conceptions of mind and of mathematics has been (...) a central theme running through the great competing philosophies of mathematics of the twentieth century, though each has refashioned the connection and its import in distinctive ways. The present collection will be of interest to students of both mathematics and of mind. Contents include: "Introduction" by Alexander George; "What is Mathematics About?" by Michael Dummett; "The Advantages of Honest Toil over Theft" by George Boolos; "The Law of Excluded Middle and the Axiom of Choice" by W.W. Tait; "Mechanical Procedures and Mathematical Experience" by Wilfried Sieg; "Mathematical Intuition and Objectivity" by Daniel Isaacson; "Intuition and Number" by Charles Parsons; and "Hilbert's Axiomatic Method and the Laws of Thought" by Michael Hallett. (shrink)

An overview of the concept of Strong Emergence, and a summary of the papers within the special issue.

In welcher Hinsicht können körperlich-leibliche Erfahrungen als Teil sozialer Aktivitäten verstanden werden und wie kann man sie sozialwissenschaftlich untersuchen? Unter Rückgriff auf den klassischen Pragmatismus, insbesondere John Dewey, und soziologische Praxistheorien leistet Alexander Antony einen Beitrag zur Beantwortung dieser Fragen. Er entwickelt eine Soziologie leiblicher Praxis, welche Sozialtheorie, methodologische Reflexion und die Erforschung der Produktion ge- und erlebter Körperlichkeit miteinander verschränkt. Empirisch widmet sich das Buch aus einer diskursanalytischen und ethnographischen Perspektive der Praktik der Atemarbeit, einem,,ganzheitlichen" Therapie- und Selbsterfahrungsangebot. (...) Die Atemarbeit zielt darauf, eine bewusst erlebte leibliche Selbstbezüglichkeit zu etablieren, um derart körperliches, psychisches und seelisch-spirituelles Wohlbefinden zu befördern. Auf unterschiedlichen Analyseebenen spürt der Autor der Frage nach, wie individuelles leibliches Erleben und die diskursive und soziomaterielle Produktion von Erfahrungssituationen zusammenspielen. Die zentrale Einsicht: Sozialität geht buchstäblich unter die Haut. Der Autor Alexander Antony ist wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter am Institut für Soziologie der Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg. (shrink)

Violent video games (VVGs) are a source of serious and continuing controversy. They are not unique in this respect, though. Other entertainment products have been criticized on moral grounds, from pornography to heavy metal, horror films, and Harry Potter books. Some of these controversies have fizzled out over time and have come to be viewed as cases of moral panic. Others, including moral objections to VVGs, have persisted. The aim of this paper is to determine which, if any, of the (...) concerns raised about VVGs are legitimate. We argue that common moral objections to VVGs are unsuccessful, but that a plausible critique can be developed that captures the insights of these objections while avoiding their pitfalls. Our view suggests that the moral badness of a game depends on how well its internal logic expresses or encourages the players’ objectionable attitudes. This allows us to recognize that some games are morally worse than others—and that it can be morally wrong to design and play some VVGs—but that the moral badness of these games is not necessarily dependent on how violent they are. (shrink)

The scaling of body parts is central to the evolution of morphology and shape. Most traits scale proportionally with each other and body size such that larger adults are essentially magnified versions of smaller ones. This pattern is so ubiquitous that departures from it – disproportionate scaling between trait and body size – pique interest because it can generate dramatically exaggerated traits. These extreme morphologies are frequently hypothesized to result from sexual selection and their study has a long history, with (...) several hypotheses seeking to explain their evolution. Despite this effort, surprisingly little progress has been made in demonstrating the forms of selection that produce different scaling patterns or in identifying the mechanisms that underlie the expression and evolution of scaling relationships. Here we review recent insights regarding the proximate mechanisms that regulate and integrate trait growth and that offer a new framework for studying the evolution of morphological scaling. (shrink)