Linear Syntax makes a case for a critical reassessment of the wide-spread view that syntax can be reduced to tree structures. It argues that a crucial part of the description of German clausal syntax should instead be based on concepts that are defined in terms of linear order. By connecting the descriptive tools of modern phrase-structure grammar with traditional descriptive scholarship, Andreas Kathol offers a new perspective on many long-standing problems in syntactic theory.

This article explores how neutralisation can explain people's lack of commitment to buying Fair Trade products, even when they identify FT as an ethical concern. It examines the theoretical tenets of neutralisation theory and critically assesses its applicability to the purchase of FT products. Exploratory research provides illustrative examples of neutralisation techniques being used in the FT consumer context. A conceptual framework and research propositions delineate the role of neutralisation in explaining the attitude-behaviour discrepancies evident in relation to consumers' FT (...) purchase behaviour, providing direction for further research that will generate new knowledge of consumers' FT purchase behaviour and other aspects of ethical consumer behaviour. (shrink)

Despite the reasonable explanatory power of existing models of consumers’ ethical decision making, a large part of the process remains unexplained. This article draws on previous research and proposes an integrated model that includes measures of the theory of planned behavior, personal norms, self-identity, neutralization, past experience, and attitudinal ambivalence. We postulate and test a variety of direct and moderating effects in the context of a large scale survey study in London, UK. Overall, the resulting model represents an empirically robust (...) and holistic attempt to identify the most important determinants of consumers’ support for the fair-trade movement. Implications and avenues for further research are discussed. (shrink)

The tenets of critical and social realism are well supported in the literature. However, researchers following a realist paradigm have concerns about the lack of methodical guidance for qualitative...

Cognitive science is experiencing a pragmatic turn away from the traditional representation-centered framework toward a view that focuses on understanding cognition as "enactive." This enactive view holds that cognition does not produce models of the world but rather subserves action as it is grounded in sensorimotor skills. In this volume, experts from cognitive science, neuroscience, psychology, robotics, and philosophy of mind assess the foundations and implications of a novel action-oriented view of cognition. Their contributions and supporting experimental evidence show that (...) an enactive approach to cognitive science enables strong conceptual advances, and the chapters explore key concepts for this new model of cognition. The contributors discuss the implications of an enactive approach for cognitive development; action-oriented models of cognitive processing; action-oriented understandings of consciousness and experience; and the accompanying paradigm shifts in the fields of philosophy, brain science, robotics, and psychology. ContributorsMoshe Bar, Lawrence W. Barsalov, Olaf Blanke, Jeannette Bohg, Martin V. Butz, Peter F. Dominey, Andreas K. Engel, Judith M. Ford, Karl J. Friston, Chris D. Frith, Shaun Gallagher, Antonia Hamilton, Tobias Heed, Cecilia Heyes, Elisabeth Hill, Matej Hoffmann, Jakob Hohwy, Bernhard Hommel, Atsushi Iriki, Pierre Jacob, Henrik Jörntell, Jürgen Jost, James Kilner, Günther Knoblich, Peter König, Danica Kragic, Miriam Kyselo, Alexander Maye, Marek McGann, Richard Menary, Thomas Metzinger, Ezequiel Morsella, Saskia Nagel, Kevin J. O'Regan, Pierre-Yves Oudeyer, Giovanni Pezzulo, Tony J. Prescott, Wolfgang Prinz, Friedemann Pulvermüller, Robert Rupert, Marti Sanchez-Fibla, Andrew Schwartz, Anil K. Seth, Vicky Southgate, Antonella Tramacere, John K. Tsotsos, Paul F. M. J. Verschure, Gabriella Vigliocco, Gottfried Vosgerau. (shrink)

It is often assumed that we are only blameworthy for that over which we have control. In recent years, however, several philosophers have argued that we can be blameworthy for occurrences that appear to be outside our control, such as attitudes, beliefs and omissions. This has prompted the question of why control should be a condition on blameworthiness. This paper aims at defending the control condition by developing a new conception of blameworthiness: To be blameworthy, I argue, is most fundamentally (...) to deserve to feel guilty. Being blamed by someone else is not necessarily harmful to the wrongdoer. The blame might not be expressed, or the wrongdoer might not care. But to blame oneself necessarily involves suffering. This conception of blameworthiness explains why the control condition should obtain: We are morally blameworthy for A only if A was under our control because to be blameworthy is to deserve to feel guilty, to feel guilty is to suffer, and one deserves to suffer for A only if A was under one’s control. (shrink)

Traditionally, the manufacturer/operator of a machine is held (morally and legally) responsible for the consequences of its operation. Autonomous, learning machines, based on neural networks, genetic algorithms and agent architectures, create a new situation, where the manufacturer/operator of the machine is in principle not capable of predicting the future machine behaviour any more, and thus cannot be held morally responsible or liable for it. The society must decide between not using this kind of machine any more (which is not a (...) realistic option), or facing a responsibility gap, which cannot be bridged by traditional concepts of responsibility ascription. (shrink)

This paper extends scholarship on multi-stakeholder initiatives (MSIs) in the context of corporate social responsibility in three ways. First, I outline a framework to analyze the strength of couplings between actors participating in MSIs. Characterizing an MSI as consisting of numerous local networks that are embedded in a wider global network, I argue that tighter couplings (within local networks) and looser couplings (between local networks) coexist. Second, I suggest that this coexistence of couplings enables MSIs to generate policy outcomes which (...) address the conditions of a transnational regulatory context. I argue that MSIs’ way of organizing enables them to cope with three challenges: the stability, flexibility, and legitimacy of governance. Reflecting on these challenges, the article identifies a number of problems related to MSIs’ role in transnational governance. Third, I discuss the UN Global Compact as an illustrative case and examine problems and opportunities related to its stability, flexibility, and legitimacy. (shrink)

It is sometimes argued that certain sentences of natural language fail to express truth conditional contents. Standard examples include e.g. Tipper is ready and Steel is strong enough. In this paper, we provide a novel analysis of truth conditional meaning using the notion of a question under discussion. This account explains why these types of sentences are not, in fact, semantically underdetermined, provides a principled analysis of the process by which natural language sentences can come to have enriched meanings in (...) context, and shows why various alternative views, e.g. so-called Radical Contextualism, Moderate Contextualism, and Semantic Minimalism, are partially right in their respective analyses of the problem, but also all ultimately wrong. Our analysis achieves this result using a standard truth conditional and compositional semantics and without making any assumptions about enriched logical forms, i.e. logical forms containing phonologically null expressions. (shrink)

Introspection presents our phenomenal states in a manner otherwise than physical. This observation is often thought to amount to an argument against physicalism: if introspection presents phenomenal states as they essentially are, then phenomenal states cannot be physical states, for we are not introspectively aware of phenomenal states as physical states. In this article, I examine whether this argument threatens a posteriori physicalism. I argue that as along as proponents of a posteriori physicalism maintain that phenomenal concepts present the nature (...) of their referents in a partial and incomplete manner, a posteriori physicalism is safe. (shrink)

The aim of this editorial introduction is twofold. First, Sects. 1–8 offer a critical introduction to the metaphysical character of physicalism. In those sections, I present and evaluate different ways in which proponents of physicalism have made explicit the metaphysical dependence that is said to hold between the non-physical and the physical. Some of these accounts are found to be problematic; others are shown to be somewhat more promising. In the end, some important lessons are drawn and different options for (...) physicalists are presented. Second, in Sect.9, the six papers that comprise the special issue are introduced and summarized. (shrink)

This essay argues that the distinction between lying and misleading while not lying is sensitive to discourse structure. It shows that whether an utterance is a lie or is merely misleading sometimes depends on the topic of conversation, represented by so-called questions under discussion. It argues that to mislead is to disrupt the pursuit of the goal of inquiry—that is, to discover how things are. Lying is seen as a special case requiring assertion of disbelieved information, where assertion is characterized (...) as a mode of contributing information to a discourse that is sensitive to the state of the discourse itself. The resulting account is applied to a number of ways of exploiting the lying-misleading distinction, involving conversational implicature, incompleteness, presuppositions, and prosodic focus. The essay shows that assertion, and hence lying, is preserved from subquestion to superquestion under a strict entailment relation between questions, and it discusses ways of lying and misleading in relation to multiple questions. (shrink)

Predictive processing models of cognition are promising an elegant way to unite action, perception, and learning. However, in the current formulations, they are species-unspecific and have very little particularly human about them. I propose to examine how, in this framework, humans can be able to massively interact and to build shared worlds that are both material and symbolic.

This paper seeks to bring John Dewey’s pragmatist philosophy of democratic education and the public into dialogue with Ernesto Laclau’s theory of populism. Recognizing populism as an integral aspect of democracy, rather than as its antithesis, the purpose of this paper is to provide a theoretical account of populism as being of educational relevance in two respects. First, it argues that the populist logic specifies a set of formal elements by which democratic education could operate as a collective enterprise. Second, (...) it asserts that the notion of populism supplements any congenial understanding of democratic education by bringing political demands, conflicts and affects to the fore. Finally, the paper discusses the risks and possibilities inherent in visualizing populism as an educational modus. (shrink)

Als Wissenschaftslogik bezeichnet Carnap jene Disziplin, welche die Nachfolge der traditionellen Philosophie im 20. Jahrhundert antreten sollte. Den zentralen Bezugspunkt von Carnaps wissenschaftslogischen Arbeiten bildet die von Frege und Russell entwickelte mathematische Logik. Dies gilt auch für die Zweistufenkonzeption, mit der Carnap ein allgemeines Schema zur Analyse der Bedeutung von Begriffen nichtmathematischer Theorien entwirft. Dabei wird die Abhängigkeit der begrifflichen Bedeutung von den Aussagen der jeweiligen Theorie explizit anerkannt, was eine Überwindung der Dogmen des Empirismus innerhalb des Logischen Empirismus einschlieβt. (...) Allerdings geht Carnap in seinen Arbeiten zur Semantik formaler Sprachen auf die spezifischen Eigenschaften von theoretischen Termen nicht ein, so daβ die Überwindung der Dogmen des Empirismus unvollständig bleibt. Darauf gründet sich die wesentliche Aufgabe der vorliegenden Untersuchung, welche darin besteht, die Deutung von theoretischen Termen durch Postulate im Rahmen der mathematischen Logik exakt zu beschreiben. (shrink)

The all-affected principle is a widely accepted solution to the problem of constituting the demos. Despite its popularity, a basic question in relation to the principle has not received much attention: why does the fact that an individual is affected by a certain decision ground a right to inclusion in democratic decision-making about that matter? An answer to this question must include a reason that explains why an affected individual should be included because she is affected. We identify three such (...) reasons in the literature – to wit, interest protection, self-government and welfare – and show why they all fail. We then propose two alternative reasons, equal relations and fairness, and show why they are also deficient. Surprisingly, the all-affected principle then appears groundless, which supports withholding belief in the all-affected principle or(/and) investing future research in identifying the thus-far unidentified reason why being affected grounds a claim to inclusion. (shrink)

Upon discovering that certain beliefs we hold are contingent on arbitrary features of our background, we often feel uneasy. I defend the proposal that if such cases ofcontingency anxietyinvolve defeaters, this is because of the epistemic significance of disagreement. I note two hurdles to our accepting thisDisagreement Hypothesis. Firstly, some cases of contingency anxiety apparently involve no disagreement. Secondly, the proposal may seem to make our awareness of the influence of arbitrary background factors irrelevant in determining whether to revise our (...) beliefs. I show that each of these problems can be successfully accommodated by theDisagreement Hypothesis. (shrink)

Cognitive functions like perception, memory, language, or consciousness are based on highly parallel and distributed information processing by the brain. One of the major unresolved questions is how information can be integrated and how coherent representational states can be established in the distributed neuronal systems subserving these functions. It has been suggested that this so-called ''binding problem'' may be solved in the temporal domain. The hypothesis is that synchronization of neuronal discharges can serve for the integration of distributed neurons into (...) cell assemblies and that this process may underlie the selection of perceptually and behaviorally relevant information. As we intend to show here, this temporal binding hypothesis has implications for the search of the neural correlate of consciousness. We review experimental results, mainly obtained in the visual system, which support the notion of temporal binding. In particular, we discuss recent experiments on the neural mechanisms of binocular rivalry which suggest that appropriate synchronization among cortical neurons may be one of the necessary conditions for the buildup of perceptual states and awareness of sensory stimuli. (shrink)

The essay argues that boredom is an affective state that monitors and regulates our behavior. Boredom informs us when we are out of tune with our interests and motivates us to engage in situations that are perceived by us as fulfilling or meaningful. Boredom is thus important. It promotes our interests by trying to keep us in touch with what we care about. And it safeguards us from emotional traps and long-term dullness. -/- .

Do non-human animals have an interest in sociopolitical freedom? Cochrane has recently taken up this important yet largely neglected quest ion. He argues that animal freedom is not a relevant moral concern in itself, because animals have a merely instrumental but not an intrinsic interest in freedom (Cochrane 2009a, 2012). This paper will argue that even if animals have a merely instrumental interest in freedom, animal freedom should nonetheless be an important goal for our relationships with animals. Drawing on recent (...) work on the value of freedom, it will be argued that freedom is non-specifically instrumentally valuable. Accordingly, freedom is a means to other goods, but often it is not possible to identify those goods in advance or aim for them directly. Some of the reasons that make freedom non-specifically valuable for human relationships, it will be argued, also apply to relationships between humans and animals. Amongst other implications, it will be shown how this argument provides a response to those who fear that stricter animal protection policies might undermine people’s freedom: A concern for freedom actually requires stricter protection policies rather than speak against them. (shrink)

Despite the impressive progress that has been made on both the empirical and conceptual fronts of boredom research, there is one facet of boredom that has received remarkably little attention. This is boredom's relationship to morality. The aim of this article is to explore the moral dimensions of boredom and to argue that boredom is a morally relevant personality trait. The presence of trait boredom hinders our capacity to flourish and in doing so hurts our prospects for a moral life. (...) -/- . (shrink)

Mutational robustness facilitates evolutionary innovations. Gene duplications are unique kinds of mutations, in that they generally increase such robustness. The frequent association of gene duplications in regulatory networks with evolutionary innovation is thus a special case of a general mechanism linking innovation to robustness. The potential power of this mechanism to promote evolutionary innovations on large time scales is illustrated here with several examples. These include the role of gene duplications in the vertebrate radiation, flowering plant evolution and heart development, (...) which encompass some of the most striking innovations in the evolution of life. BioEssays 30:367–373, 2008. © 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

What are the metaphysical commitments which best 'make sense' of our scientific practice? In this book, Andreas Hüttemann provides a minimal metaphysics for scientific practice, i.e. a metaphysics that refrains from postulating any structure that is explanatorily irrelevant. Hüttemann closely analyses paradigmatic aspects of scientific practice, such as prediction, explanation and manipulation, to consider the questions whether and what metaphysical presuppositions best account for these practices. He looks at the role which scientific generalisation play in predicting, testing, and explaining (...) the behaviour of systems. He also develops a theory of causation in terms of quasi-inertial processes and interfering factors, and he proposes an account of reductive practices that makes minimal metaphysical assumptions. His book will be valuable for scholars and advanced students working in both philosophy of science and metaphysics. (shrink)

This paper argues for an account of fictional force, the central characteristic of the kind of non-assertoric speech act that authors of fictions are engaged in. A distinction is drawn between what is true in a fiction and the _fictional record_ comprising what the audience has been told. The papers argues that to utter a sentence with fictional force is to intend that its content be added to a fictional record. It is shown that this view accounts for phenomena such (...) as conversational implicatures in fictional discourse. Moreover, the view is seen to provide an attractive way of distinguishing fictional utterances from assertoric utterances. As a consequence, this account of fictional force offers a satisfactory way of distinguishing fiction from lying. (shrink)

What is the relationship between republicanism and relational egalitarianism? According to Andreas Schmidt, republicanism, in particular Pettit’s theory of republicanism, is able to capture some relations as objectionable which relational egalitarianism cannot, to wit, relations of mutual domination. This shows that relational egalitarianism is inadequate. In this paper, I explore the relationship between republicanism and relational egalitarianism and argue, first, that Schmidt is wrong. Relational egalitarianism, on a plausible understanding, does object to relations of mutual domination. I then argue (...) that relational egalitarianism, unlike republicanism, is able to capture why some relationships involving racism are objectionable. I end the paper by arguing that we should not see the views as competitors: republicanism, on a plausible understanding, provides a necessary condition of what it means to relate as equals, whereas relational egalitarianism provides necessary and jointly sufficient conditions of what it means to relate as equals. (shrink)

We classify the phase transition thresholds from provability to unprovability for certain Friedman-style miniaturizations of Kruskal's Theorem and Higman's Lemma. In addition we prove a new and unexpected phase transition result for ε0. Motivated by renormalization and universality issues from statistical physics we finally state a universality hypothesis.

The United Nations Global Compact – which is a Global Public Policy Network advocating 10 universal principles in the areas of human rights, labor standards, environmental protection, and anticorruption – has turned into the world's largest corporate responsibility initiative. Although the Global Compact is often characterized as a promising way to address global governance gaps, it remains largely unclear why this is the case. To address this problem, we discuss to what extent the initiative represents an institutional solution to exercise (...) global governance. We suggest that new governance modes, which have arisen in the context of globalization, often adopt a multiactor, multilevel, and network-based approach. We then analyze how far the Global Compact's institutional design reflects this multiactor, multilevel, and network-based steering mode. Drawing on this discussion, we offer suggestions regarding how the initiative can be further developed. (shrink)

Dieses Kapitel gibt einen Überblick über philosophische Debatten zum Umgang mit menschlicher Mobilität über nationalstaatliche Grenzen. Dabei wird zum einen auf die Diskussion über ein staatliches Recht auf Ausschluss bzw. ein individuelles Recht auf Einwanderung eingegangen, zum anderen wird die Frage beleuchtet, wer aufgrund einer besonderen Bedrohungslage im Herkunftsland einen Anspruch auf Aufnahme hat und wie Pflichten zur Aufnahme von Geflüchteten unter den Staaten zu verteilen sind.

This paper assesses the ‘power-induced failure of reciprocity’ account of exploitation in the domain of trade. I argue that its proponents face a dilemma. Either the cost variable of reciprocity is understood to include opportunity costs. Then, the account implausibly implies that those with more valuable outside options should get a larger part of the overall benefits of cooperation. Or the cost variable is understood to exclude opportunity costs. Then, the account has awkward implications in cases where direct costs and (...) opportunity costs are substitutable. To evade this dilemma, the account could be amended to include a hypothetical baseline that equalizes opportunity costs. But then, the account ceases to be isolationist. Whether a cooperative interaction counts as exploitative is no longer independent of moral considerations about distributions outside the domain of trade. (shrink)

In der 1970 gegr ndeten Reihe erscheinen Arbeiten, die philosophiehistorische Studien mit einem systematischen Ansatz oder systematische Studien mit philosophiehistorischen Rekonstruktionen verbinden. Neben deutschsprachigen werden auch englischsprachige Monographien ver ffentlicht. Gr ndungsherausgeber sind: Erhard Scheibe (Herausgeber bis 1991), G nther Patzig (bis 1999) und Wolfgang Wieland (bis 2003). Von 1990 bis 2007 wurde die Reihe von J rgen Mittelstra mitherausgegeben.

In this paper, I investigate whether the intuitions that make connexive logics seem plausible might lie in pragmatic phenomena, rather than the semantics of conditional statements. I conclude that pragmatics indeed underwrites these intuitions, at least for indicative statements. Whether this has any effect on logic choice (and what that effect might be), however, heavily depends on one’s semantic theory of conditionals and on how one chooses to logically treat pragmatic failures.

Is it a stronger interference with people's freedom to withdraw options they currently have than to withhold similar options they do not have? Drawing on recent theorizing about sociopolitical freedom, this article identifies considerations that often make this the case for public policy. However, when applied to tobacco control, these considerations are shown to give us at best only very weak freedom-based reason to prioritize the status quo. This supports a popular argument for so-called “endgame” tobacco control measures: If we (...) believe that cigarettes would and should be withheld from entering markets in hypothetical scenarios in which they do not yet exist, then we also have reason to seek their abolition in situations, such as ours, in which cigarettes do exist—if necessary by banning their sale. The same considerations are then used to disarm objections that have recently been raised to using nudges in public policy. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This paper demonstrates that the presuppositions triggered by the 1st and 2nd persons behave differently in important ways from those triggered by the 3rd person and the genders. While the 1st and 2nd persons trigger indexical presuppositions, the 3rd person and the genders do not. I show that the presuppositions triggered by the 1st and 2nd persons are not susceptible to presupposition failure of the kind familiar from ordinary presuppositions. Such failures occur for the 3rd person and the genders. (...) Moreover, the presuppositions triggered by the 1st and 2nd persons do not exhibit the projection behavior of ordinary presuppositions. The 3rd person and the genders do. I sketch a semantics in which the relevant difference is between presuppositions that impose constraints on functions from contexts to intensions and presuppositions that impose constraints on intensions. (shrink)

In this paper, I set out to defend the claim that a central principle in democratic theory, the all-subjected principle, applies not only when one is subject to a rule by a state but also when one is subject to a rule by a ‘non-state’ unit. I argue that self-government is the value underlying the all-subjected principle that explains why a subjected individual should be included because she is subjected. Given this, it is unfounded to limit the principle to the (...) state, as subjection which threatens self-government occurs in non-state units such as corporations and families. This means that following the all-subjected principle surprisingly implies that we ought to have family and workplace democracy. (shrink)

This paper draws attention to Foucault’s genealogy of critique. In a series of inquiries, Foucault traced the origins and trajectories of critical practices from the ancient tradition of parrhesia to the enlightenment and the (neo)liberal critique of the state. The paper will elucidate the insights of this history and argue that Foucault’s turn to the genealogy of critique also changed the valence of his theoretical assumptions. Foucault developed a more affirmative practice of genealogy that not only discredits truth claims by (...) tracing them back to their inglorious origins. Rather, he presents a politics of truth as a complex interaction of (governmental) power-knowledge and critique that questions the power effects of truth and rationality. This genealogy of critique contributes to current problematizations of critique by thinkers like Boltanski, Latour and Rancière in highlighting the role of epistemological and technical critique of social rationalization and political reason. (shrink)

This article focuses on problematizing the harmonisation of higher education in Europe today. The overall aim is to analyse the construction of the European citizen and the rationality of governing related to such a construction. The specific focus will be on the rules and standards of reason in higher education reforms which inscribe continuums of values that exclude as they include. Who is and who is not constructed as a European citizen? Documents on the Bologna process produced in Europe and (...) in Sweden are analysed drawing on the Foucauldian notion of governmentality, showing a neoliberal rationality of governing. The European citizen needs to become flexible, autonomous and self‐regulating as a way of facing the threats of the constantly changing future. The technique of diversity is a condition of possibility for constructing such a citizen and for harmonising higher education in Europe. Further, the current power relations in the discourse define what is and what is not European, thus constructing ‘the other’, the one who is excluded. (shrink)

This note shows that the permutation instructions presented by Zardini (2011) for eliminating cuts on universally quantified formulas in the sequent calculus for the noncontractive theory of truth IKTωare inadequate. To that purpose the note presents a derivation in the sequent calculus for IKTωending with an application of cut on a universally quantified formula which the permutation instructions cannot deal with. The counterexample is of the kind that leaves open the question whether cut can be shown to be eliminable in (...) the sequent calculus for IKTωwith an alternative strategy. (shrink)