Although the historian confronts the question of what is not known in the same terms as does any other researcher no matter his or her discipline, the conditions of the debate are different for the historian because of the problematic nature of the science of history. While practically all the other sciences, including the social sciences, struggle against ignorance by seeking to discover and establish laws that will govern the facts, history must always face, in spite of its ever more (...) sophisticated techniques, the contingency of its materials, which are fundamentally human. The materials of history can not—in spite of what some have asserted—be contained within any single, all-encompassing mode of reasoning that would allow for the creation of constitutive abstract models. In spite of this reality the historian persists, like Sisyphus, in organizing knowledge. Man apparently has no choice but to believe that his activities have some logical basis. The historian therefore collates facts in order to develop cognitive and interpretive structures that will be durable. What gives the discipline of history its epistemological originality is the painfully central role it accords to the question, “What do we not know?” Man wants to know, believes he knows. The ignorance of historians thus seems especially upsetting when applied to our own century. How could the methodological progress of the science of history, along with the professionalization of the historian's craft, have led to an actual increase of uncertainty concerning a period so close to us in time? Today's man-in-the-street—endowed only with his memory, which seems so rich in “truths”—finds it hard to believe that any event or structure of the twentieth century could remain unknown. Limiting our inquiry to the twentieth century is not, however, justified solely by the practical consideration of trying to gain a better grasp of our times. Indeed in this brief article devoted to the relationship between ignorance and the history and historiography of the twentieth century, we will not attempt to inventory all the events, persons, mentalities or economic facts which historical knowledge has until now been incapable of explaining. Unlike the other sciences, whose struggle against ignorance is accomplished by a gradual process of nibbling at the margins of the unknown, the discipline of history must always keep in mind that the masses of granite that form the foundation of History are in fact but a body of statements that can only aspire to the status of truth. The aim of our inquiry— without of course claiming to be exhaustive—will therefore be to identify the nature of the obstacles that lie in the historian's path. These problems are of three kinds. The first concerns access to knowledge, and is tied—although not exclusively—to problems of the techniques of historical research. The second concerns the difficulties related to conceptualization and therefore to the uses of knowledge. There can be no knowing without know-how. Finally, the third pertains to the lack of permeability between history and the other human and social sciences, which creates for the historian the challenge of interdisciplinary exchange. (shrink)

Emphatic claims of a “microbiome revolution” aside, the study of the gut microbiota and its role in organismal development and evolution is a central feature of so-called postgenomics; namely, a conceptual and/or practical turn in contemporary life sciences, which departs from genetic determinism and reductionism to explore holism, emergentism and complexity in biological knowledge-production. This paper analyses the making of postgenomic knowledge about developmental symbiosis in Drosophila melanogaster by a specific group of microbiome scientists. Drawing from both practical philosophy of (...) science and Science and Technology Studies, the paper documents epistemological questions of artefactuality and representativeness of model organisms as they emerge in the day-to-day labour producing and being produced by the “microbiome revolution." Specifically, the paper builds on all the written and editorial exchanges involved in the troubled publication of a research paper studying the symbiotic role of the microbiota in the flies’ development. These written materials permit us to delimit the network of justifications, evidence, standards of knowledge-production, trust in the tools and research designs that make up the conditions of possibility of a postgenomic fact. More than reframing the organism as a radically novel multiplicity of reactive genomes, we conclude, doing postgenomic research on the microbiota and symbiosis means producing a story that deviates from the scripts embedded into the sociotechnical experimental systems of post-Human Genome Project life sciences. (shrink)

Continued confinement of those most vulnerable to COVID-19—e.g., the elderly, those with chronic diseases and other risk factors—is presented as an uncontroversial measure when planning exit strategies from lockdown measures. Policies for deconfinement assume that these persons will remain confined even when others will not. This, however, could last quite a long time, and for some this could mean that they will remain in confinement for the rest of their lives.In a policy brief on ethical, legal, and social issues of (...) transition strategies, the Swiss national COVID-19 science task force stated that:Specific interventions should target the risks associated with isolation... (shrink)

The idea of classical recapture has played a prominent role for non-classical logicians. In the specific case of non-classical theories of truth, although we know that it is not possible to retain classical logic for every statement involving the truth predicate, it is clear that for many such statements this is in principle feasible, and even desirable. What is not entirely obvious or well-known is how far this idea can be pushed. Can the non-classical theorist retain classical logic for every (...) non-paradoxical statement? If not, is she forced to settle for a very weak form of Classical Recapture, or are there robust versions of classical recapture available to her? These are the main questions that I will address in this paper. As a test case I will consider a paracomplete account of the truth-theoretic paradoxes and I will argue for two claims. First, that it is not possible to retain the law of excluded middle for every non-paradoxical statement. Secondly, that there are no robust versions of classical recapture available to the paracomplete logician. (shrink)

Gödei's Theorem seems to me to prove that Mechanism is false, that is, that minds cannot be explained as machines. So also has it seemed to many other people: almost every mathematical logician I have put the matter to has confessed to similar thoughts, but has felt reluctant to commit himself definitely until he could see the whole argument set out, with all objections fully stated and properly met. This I attempt to do.

Algorithms, or rather algorithmic actions, are seen as problematic because they are inscrutable, automatic, and subsumed in the flow of daily practices. Yet, they are also seen to be playing an important role in organizing opportunities, enacting certain categories, and doing what David Lyon calls “social sorting.” Thus, there is a general concern that this increasingly prevalent mode of ordering and organizing should be governed more explicitly. Some have argued for more transparency and openness, others have argued for more democratic (...) or value-centered design of such actors. In this article, we argue that governing practices—of, and through algorithmic actors—are best understood in terms of what Foucault calls governmentality. Governmentality allows us to consider the performative nature of these governing practices. They allow us to show how practice becomes problematized, how calculative practices are enacted as technologies of governance, how such calculative practices produce domains of knowledge and expertise, and finally, how such domains of knowledge become internalized in order to enact self-governing subjects. In other words, it allows us to show the mutually constitutive nature of problems, domains of knowledge, and subjectivities enacted through governing practices. In order to demonstrate this, we present attempts to govern academic writing with a specific focus on the algorithmic action of Turnitin. (shrink)

My object is Aristotle's discussion of principle of non-contradiction in the first stretch of Metaphysics IV.4. My main focus rests on the connections between Aristotle's discussion of the principle and some key notions of his (explicit or implied) semantics.

The field of language evolution has recently made Gricean pragmatics central to its task, particularly within comparative studies between human and non-human primate communication. The standard model of Gricean communication requires a set of complex cognitive abilities, such as belief attribution and understanding nested higher-order mental states. On this model, non-human primate communication is then of a radically different kind to ours. Moreover, the cognitive demands in the standard view are also too high for human infants, who nevertheless do engage (...) in communication. In this paper I critically assess the standard view and contrast it with an alternative, minimal model of Gricean communication recently advanced by Richard Moore. I then raise two objections to the minimal model. The upshot is that this model is conceptually unstable and fails to constitute a suitable alternative as a middle ground between full-fledged human communication and simpler forms of non-human animal communication. (shrink)

Non‐classical logicians do not typically reject classically valid logical principles across the board. In fact, they sometimes suggest that their preferred logic recovers classical reasoning in most circumstances. This idea has come to be known in the literature as ‘classical recapture’. Recently, classical logicians have raised various doubts about it. The main problem is said to be that no rigorous explanation has been given of how is it exactly that classical logic can be recovered. The goal of the paper is (...) to address this problem. First, I discuss a number of different ways to characterize the idea of classical recapture and I examine how far it can be pushed. Secondly, I argue that a palatable form of classical recapture is given by the thought that classical logic can be retained for statements that are grounded (in Kripke’s sense). To substantiate this view I provide a formal fixed‐point semantics for a language containing a predicate standing for the concept of groundedness and I address a couple of objections that have been deployed against the claim that classical recapture can aid the non‐classical logician’s cause. (shrink)

Proclus, head of the Philosophy School at Athens for fifty years, was one of the leading philosophical figures in Late Antiquity. Lucas Siorvanes here introduces Proclus to English-language readers, discussing his metaphysics and theory of knowledge and focusing in particular on his Neo-Platonism. Proclus lived in the turbulent fifth century A.D., a time of struggles among Christians, Jews, and pagans, the invasion of Attila the Hun, the fall of the Western Roman Empire, and the rise of the Eastern Roman (...) Empire in Byzantium. While Late Antiquity has been regarded as a time of superstition and forbiddingly complex philosophies, recent scholarship has shown it to be full of cultural and intellectual vigor. During Proclus's tenure as head of the Philosophy School, he systematized Neo-Platonism as the summit of ancient Greek thought, brought it to its peak of influence, and became responsible for the form in which it was transmitted to the Byzantine, Western European, and Islamic civilizations. Siorvanes's extensive original research presents Proclus as much more than just a metaphysician. He surveys all of Proclus's philosophical interests—including religion, physics, astronomy, mathematics, and poetry—revealing the philosopher's central concern with the problems of being and knowledge and relating the ideas of Proclus to those of such other major thinkers as Plato, Aristotle, and Ptolemy. To help the newcomer, Siorvanes supplies more than 200 quotations from Proclus's works. He also traces the impact of Proclus's Neo-Platonism across cultures, religions, and centuries, in such diverse areas as Christian and Islamic theologies, Renaissance art, Kepler's astronomy, Romantic poetry, Emerson's thought, modern philosophy and science, and current popular phrases. (shrink)

El propósito de este artículo es analizar el concepto de mentira moderna u organizada en la obra de Hannah Arendt. Con agudeza, Arendt pone de relieve una experiencia particular del Mundo Moderno, aquella en la que una comunidad puede falsear deliberadamente realidades conocidas por todos y tener la mentira como principio político. Esta comprensión pone al concepto en un registro diferente del tradicional de los arcana dominationis. Nuestro argumento intenta clarificar analíticamente el concepto, señalar su pertinencia y vincularlo a una (...) idea de auto-institución de las sociedades entendidas como colectividades históricamente activas. (shrink)

Platón procura establecer en el Fedro una estrecha vinculación entre la poesía y el ámbito eidético propio del saber filosófico, o al que accede el filósofo mediante una ejercitada captación sinóptico-dialéctica. Tal tipo de poesía filosófica aparece ilustrada a la perfección en la propia palinodia socrática, la cual erige a Sócrates – y en última instancia a Platón – como paradigma de filósofo poeta, palinodia que ha sido obligada a pronunciarse “con ciertos términos poéticos”. Partiendo de esa palinodia como modelo, (...) Platón se propone abordar el tema del éros con discursos filosóficos que se nutran de términos poéticos, o sea, a través de una explícita mixtura de elementos filosóficos y poéticos, cuyo ejemplo más claro es el Fedro en su conjunto, o, en términos más generales, el género dialógico platónico en tanto este pone en escena una interacción entre los registros filosófico y poético. Teniendo en cuenta esta relación de compatibilidad que Platón establece en el Fedro entre su paradigma poético-filosófico y el de tipo tradicional – paradigmas que en los libros II, III y X de la República aparecían claramente en tensión –, en este artículo me interesa apoyar tal relación en la anécdota del sueño relatada por Sócrates al comienzo del Fedón, en la cual el filósofo confiesa ante Simmias y Cebes haber compuesto desde su encierro en la cárcel – ya que anteriormente jamás lo había hecho – poemas basados en la versificación o musicalización de las fábulas de Esopo y un himno a Apolo. (shrink)

Este artigo é um 'ancestral' de vários argumentos que desenvolvi depois em múltiplos outros artigos. Defendo que a teoria da ciência dos Segundos Analíticos não é incompatível com as ciências naturais tais como desenvolvidos nos tratados científicos de Aristóteles.

While not ignored, the question of the role of mothers in the schema of political rule in Hobbes is not often taken up. Distinct from his contemporaries, Hobbes acknowledges only minimal differences between men and women, and argues that, because maternal protection and nourishment are necessary for its survival, the mother dominates the infant in the state of nature. How to explain that the mother loses this power of domination in the social or political order? Hobbes does not explicitly say. (...) However, some possibilities can be extracted from his texts. -/- Here, I will attempt to explain the loss of maternal power by examining Hobbes's discourse on the different modes of dominion and political rule in "De Cive" and "Leviathan." I will concentrate on their differences, drawing from Yves Charles Zarka's reading of them. Then I will approach the question of the mother and her position in the hierarchy of servitude in each of these texts, appealing to Carole Pateman's analyses as well as Zarka's. Finally, I will present what role the mother's dominion over her children plays in Hobbes's schema. (shrink)

This work introduces a much needed vision of Nietzschean thought and the relevance of interdisciplinary studies that combine philosophy with literary studies and psychology with religious and visual/media studies to our present circumstance, where a dangerous visual culture, through its support of the limitlessness of money, is harming our relationship with nature and with one another.

Information and communication technology is changing many aspects ofhuman endeavour and existence. This is beyond dispute for most. Whatare contested are the social and ethical implications of thesechanges. Possible sources of these disputes are the multiple ways inwhich one can conceptualize and interpret the informationtechnology/society interrelationship. Each of these ways ofconceptualization and interpretation enables one to see theinformation technology/society relationship differently and thereforeconstrue its social and ethical implications in a different manner. Atthe center of this technology/society interrelationship we find manycomplex (...) questions about the nature of the human, the technical,agency, autonomy, freedom and much more. This is indeed a vastintellectual landscape, which can obviously not be explored here inits fullness. This entry is about just one particular perspective onthis landscape. It is primarily concerned with the phenomenologicalapproach to interpreting information technology and its social andethical implications. It should be noted from the start that there isnot a unified phenomenological tradition or approach to informationtechnology in particular, or other phenomena more generally. Thephenomenological tradition consists of many different approaches thatshare certain characteristics but not all. We may however suggest, with Don Ihde,that they all accept that “phenomenology investigates theconditions of what makes things appear as such [as that which we takethem to be].” Differently stated, phenomenology suggests thatthere is a co-constitutive relationship between us and the phenomenawe encounter in our engagement with the world. In this sensephenomenologists would suggest that to understand thetechnology/society relationship we need to reveal how theyco-constitute each other—i.e. draw on each other for theirongoing meaning and sense. We will elaborate more precisely what thismeans in section 2 below. However, in order to understand the distinctiveness of thephenomenological approach other possible ways of interpreting thistechnology/society relationship will also be outlined brieflybelow., It can be said that information technology has become in a very realsense ubiquitous. Most everyday technologies such as elevators,automobiles, microwaves, watches, and so forth depend onmicroprocessors for their ongoing operation. Most organizations andinstitutions have become reliant on their information technologyinfrastructure to a lesser or greater degree. Indeed informationtechnology is seen by many as a cost-efficient way to solve amultitude of problems facing our complex contemporary society. One canalmost say that information technology has become construed as thedefault technology for solving a whole raft of technical and socialproblems such as health provision, security, governance, etc. Onecould also argue that it has become synonymous with society’sview of modernization and progress. For most it seems obvious thatinformation technology has made it possible for humans to continue toconstruct increasingly complex systems of coordination and socialordering—systems without which contemporary society would not beable to exist in its present form. To say the least, we, ascontemporary human beings, have our manner of being made possiblethrough a rather comprehensive entanglement with information andcommunication technology. Indeed, the economic, organizational andsocial benefit of information technology is not widely disputed. Thedispute is more often about the way information technology is changingor transforming the social domain, and in particular, the ethicaldomain. This dispute is largely centered around different ways ofconceptualizing and interpreting the nature of our entanglement withinformation technology. This debate is not merely an academic debateabout different and competing theoretical ‘models.’Rather, these different ways of conceptualizing it is central to ourunderstanding of how we go about managing our increasingly entangledrelationship with information technology. (shrink)

This paper is an attempt to present disclosive ethics as a framework for computer and information ethics – in line with the suggestions by Brey, but also in quite a different manner. The potential of such an approach is demonstrated through a disclosive analysis of facial recognition systems. The paper argues that the politics of information technology is a particularly powerful politics since information technology is an opaque technology – i.e. relatively closed to scrutiny. It presents the design of technology (...) as a process of closure in which design and use decisions become black-boxed and progressively enclosed in increasingly complex socio-technical networks. It further argues for a disclosive ethics that aims to disclose the nondisclosure of politics by claiming a place for ethics in every actual operation of power – as manifested in actual design and use decisions and practices. It also proposes that disclosive ethics would aim to trace and disclose the intentional and emerging enclosure of politics from the very minute technical detail through to social practices and complex social-technical networks. The paper then proceeds to do a disclosive analysis of facial recognition systems. This analysis discloses that seemingly trivial biases in recognition rates of FRSs can emerge as very significant political acts when these systems become used in practice. (shrink)

Tradução de Die Aktualität Schopenhauers, de Max Horkheimer, artigo publicado em 1961 no Schopenhauer-Jahrbuch da Schopenhauer-Gesellschaft.

While courtroom examinations are often recognized as a distinct speech-exchange system, little is known about how participants do an examination beyond its unique turn-taking system. This article attempts to shed some light on this issue by studying the question design during the direct examination in an American criminal court case using Conversation Analysis. It shows that attorneys use different question forms compared to casual conversation: declaratives are far less prevalent and questions are often designed as requests for action. In addition, (...) attorneys make use of forms that are not found in other types of interaction, such as the tag correct. The way in which attorneys design their questions additionally shows that the rules of the courtroom have procedural consequences for how the interaction is done. But these rules have to be enacted, and it is in their violation that participants bring about categories such as leading questions. (shrink)

This article is about our relationship with things; about the abundant material geographies that surround us and constitute the very possibility for us to be the beings that we are. More specifically, it is about the question of the possibility of an ethical encounter with things (qua things). We argue, with the science and technology studies tradition (and Latour in particular), that we are the beings that we are through our entanglements with things, we are thoroughly hybrid beings, cyborgs through (...) and through – we have never been otherwise. With Heidegger we propose that a human-centred ethics of hybrids will fail to open a space for an ethical encounter with things since all beings in the sociomaterial network – humans and non-human alike – end up circulating as objects, enframed as ‘standing reserve’, things-for-the-purposes-of the network. We suggest that what is needed is an ethos beyond ethics, or the overcoming of an ethics – which is based on the will to power – towards an ethos of letting be. We elaborate such a possibility with the help of Heidegger, in particular with reference to the work of Graham Harman and his notion of ‘tool-being’. From this we propose, very tentatively, an ethos that has as its ground a poetic dwelling with things, a way of being that lets being be (Gelassenheit). We show how such a poetic dwelling, or ethos of Gelassenheit, may constitute the impossible possibility of a very otherwise way of being with things – an ethos of a ‘community of those who have nothing in common’ as suggested by Alphonso Lingis. (shrink)

The traditional answer is: they must be atelic. But as we will see, this notion is imprecise. We will improve on it, without rejecting it. (Basically we’ll end up with temporally vs. spatially telic.).

Genetic explanation of complex human behavior presents an excellent test case for pluralism. Although philosophers agree that successful scientific investigation of behavior is pluralistic, there remains disagreement regarding integration and elimination—is the plurality of approaches here to stay, or merely a waystation on the road to monism? In this paper we introduce an issue taken very seriously by scientists yet mostly ignored by philosophers—the missing heritability problem—and assess its implications for disagreement among pluralists. We argue that the missing heritability problem, (...) which isn’t going anywhere any time soon, implies that pluralism in behavior genetics is both practically ineliminative and theoretically non-integrative. (shrink)

The assumption that coercion is largely responsible for our legal systems’ efficacy is a common one. I argue that this assumption is false. But I do so indirectly, by objecting to a thesis I call “(Compliance)”, which holds that most citizens comply with most legal mandates most of the time at least partly in virtue of being motivated by legal systems’ threats of sanctions and other unwelcome consequences. The relationship between (Compliance) and the efficacy of legal systems is explained in (...) section 1. There I also show that (Compliance) must be rejected for it relies on unsubstantiated empirical assumptions. In section 2, I claim that an alternative, and more refined, formulation of (Compliance) also lacks adequate support. I conclude with a few general remarks about the centrality of coercion in our thought and talk about legal systems. (shrink)

European Journal of Philosophy, EarlyView.

Public participation in scientific research has gained prominence in many scientific fields, but the theory of participatory research is still limited. In this paper, we suggest that the divergence of values and goals between academic researchers and public participants in research is key to analyzing the different forms this research takes. We examine two existing characterizations of participatory research: one in terms of public participants' role in the research, the other in terms of the virtues of the research. In our (...) view, each of these captures an important feature of participatory research but is, on its own, limited in what features it takes into account. We introduce an expanded conception of norms of collaboration that extends to both academic researchers and public participants. We suggest that satisfying these norms requires consideration of the two groups' possibly divergent values and goals, and that a broad characterization of participatory research that starts from participants' values and goals can motivate both public participants’ role in the research and the virtues of the research. The resulting framework clarifies the similarities and differences among participatory projects and can help guide the responsible design of such projects. (shrink)

This paper is about the phenomenon of encoding, more specifically about the encoded extension of agency. The question of code most often emerges from contemporary concerns about the way digital encoding is seen to be transforming our lives in fundamental ways, yet seems to operate ‘under the surface’ as it were. In this essay I suggest that the performative outcomes of digital encoding are best understood within a more general horizon of the phenomenon of encoding – that is to say (...) as norm- or rule-governed material enactments accepted (or taken for granted) as the necessary conditions for becoming. Encoded material enactments translate/extend agency, but never exactly. I argue that such encoded extensions are insecure, come at a cost and are performative. To illustrate this I present a brief discussion of some specific historical transitions in the encoding of human agency: from speech to writing, to mechanical writing, and finally to electronic writing. In each of these translations I aim to show that agency is translated/extended in ways that have many unexpected performative outcomes. Specifically, through a discussion of the digital encoding of writing, as reuse, I want to suggest the proposition that all agency is always borrowed (or ‘plagiarized’) – i.e. it is never originally human. As encoded beings we are never authors, we are rather more or less skilful reusers. To extend agency we have to submit to the demands of encoding and kidnap that encoding simultaneously – enabling constraints in Butler’s language. Our originality, if there is any, is in our skill at kidnapping the code and turning it into an extension of our agency, that is to say, our skill at resignification – to be original we need to be skilful ‘parasites’, as suggested by Serres. (shrink)

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) aspirations by companies have been identified as a motivating factor for active employee participation in CSR implementation. However, a failure to practise what one preaches can backfire and lead to attribution of hypocrisy. Drawing on a qualitative study of an award-winning sustainability pioneer in the cosmetics sector, we explore the role of moral judgement in how and when employees interpret word–deed misalignment in CSR implementation as hypocritical. First, our case reveals that high CSR aspirations by companies (...) raise employees’ moral expectations. Second, we develop a framework that explains variations in employees’ hypocrisy interpretations based on consequentialist and deontological forms of moral judgement. Our research advances a contextual view of hypocrisy, not as an objective characteristic of an organisation, but as an outcome of interpretative processes of perceived motives and results in CSR implementation. Our framework thereby explains why even highly committed organisations may face accusations of hypocrisy. (shrink)

According to the doxastic wrongs thesis, holding certain beliefs about others can be morally wrongful. Beliefs which take the form of stereotypes based on race and gender and which turn out to be false and are negatively valenced are prime candidates for the charge of doxastic wronging: it is no coincidence that most of the cases discussed in the literature involve false beliefs. My aim in this paper is to show that the thesis of doxastic wrongs does not turn on (...) the truth-value or valence of beliefs. (shrink)

This chapter has two main sections. In the first section I briefly sketch Immanuel Kant’s moral theory as laid out in his Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (1785). I explain Kant’s claim that morality must be grounded on what he calls a categorical imperative and examine his three formulations of this categorical imperative. In the second section I explain the distinction between “deontological” and “teleological” ethical theories. Kantian ethics is often presented as the paradigm example of a deontological ethical (...) theory, but I question whether Kant’s ethics should be understood as purely deontological. (shrink)

Event concepts are unstructured atomic concepts that apply to event types. A paradigm example of such an event type would be that of diaper changing, and so a putative example of an atomic event concept would be DADDY'S-CHANGING-MY-DIAPER.1 I will defend two claims about such concepts. First, the conceptual claim that it is in principle possible to possess a concept such as DADDY'S-CHANGING-MY-DIAPER without possessing the concept DIAPER. Second, the empirical claim that we actually possess such concepts and that they (...) play an important role in our cognitive lives. The argument for the empirical claim has the form of an inference to the best explanation and is aimed at those who are already willing to attribute concepts and beliefs to infants and nonhuman animals. Many animals and prelinguistic infants seem capable of re-identifying event-types in the world, and they seem to store information about things happening at particular times and places. My account offers a plausible model of how such organisms are able to do this without attributing linguistically structured mental states to them. And although language allows adults to form linguistically structured mental representations of the world, there is no good reason to think that such structured representations necessarily replace the unstructured ones. There is also no good reason for a philosopher who is willing to explain the behavior of an organism by appealing to atomic concepts of individuals or kinds to not use a similar form of explanation when explaining the organism's capacity to recognize events. -/- We can form empirical concepts of individuals, kinds, properties, event-types, and states of affairs, among other things, and I assume that such concepts function like what François Recanati calls ‘mental files’ or what Ruth Millikan calls ‘substance concepts’ (Recanati 2012; Millikan 1999, 2000, 2017). To possess such a concept one must have a reliable capacity to re-identify the object in question, but this capacity of re-identification does not fix the reference of the concept. Such concepts allow us to collect and utilize useful information about things that we re-encounter in our environment. We can distinguish between a perception-action system and a perception-belief system, and I will argue that empirical concepts, including atomic event concepts, can play a role in both systems. The perception-action system involves the application of concepts in the service of (often skilled) action. We can think of the concept as a mental file containing motor-plans that can be activated once the individual recognizes that they are in a certain situation. In this way, recognizing something (whether an object or an event) as a token of a type, plays a role in guiding immediate action. The perception-belief system, in contrast, allows for the formation of beliefs that can play a role in deliberation and planning and in the formation of expectations. I distinguish between two particular types of belief which I call where-beliefs and when-beliefs, and I argue that we can model the formation of such perceptual beliefs in nonlinguistic animals and human infants in terms of the formation of a link between an empirical concept and a position on a cognitive map. According to the account offered, seemingly complex beliefs, such as a baby's belief that Daddy changed her diaper in the kitchen earlier, will not be linguistically structured. If we think that prelinguistic infants possess such concepts and are able to form such beliefs, it is likely that adults do too. The ability to form such beliefs does not require the capacity for public language, and we can model them in nonlinguistic terms; thus, we have no good reason to think of such beliefs as propositional attitudes. Of course, we can use sentences to refer to such beliefs, and thus it is possible to think of such beliefs as somehow relations to propositions. But it is not clear to me what is gained by this as we have a perfectly good way to think about the structure of such beliefs that does not involve any appeal to language. (shrink)

Norm theory (Kahneman & Miller, 1986) described a tendency for people to associate stronger regret with a negative outcome when it is a result of an exception (abnormal behavior) compared to when it is a result of routine (normal behavior). In two pre-registered studies, we conducted a replication and extension of three classic experiments on past behavior exception/routine contrasts (N = 684). We successfully replicated Kahneman and Miller’s (1986) experiments with the classic hitchhiker-scenario (Part 1) and car accident-scenario (Part 2). (...) In both cases, participants examined negative outcomes and tended to indicate a protagonist who deviated from own past behavior as more regretful than another who followed routine. Pre-registered extensions also showed effects for ratings of social norms, negative affect, and perceived luck. We did not find support for the Miller and McFarland (1986) experiment robbery scenario (Part 3) using a compensation measure, in that compensation to a victim of a robbery was not significantly different comparing exceptional and routine circumstances. However, a pre-registered extension showed that robbery under exceptional circumstances was regretted more than robbery under routine circumstances. We discuss implications for current and future research. (shrink)

This is a book of political theory about personal autonomy: its nature, its importance, and its problems. Swaine offers solutions for the defects of personal autonomy, arguing for ethical autonomy, a kind of self-rule that is modified by moral character.

John Danaher and Sven Nyholm have argued that automation, especially of the sort powered by artificial intelligence, poses a threat to meaningful work by diminishing the chances for meaning-conferring workplace achievement, what they call “achievement gaps”. In this paper, I argue that Danaher and Nyholm’s achievement gap thesis suffers from an ambiguity. The weak version of the thesis holds that automation may result in the appearance of achievement gaps, whereas the strong version holds that automation may result on balance loss (...) in possibilities for workplace achievements, i.e., in the appearance of an overall gappier work landscape. Against the strong version of the achievement gap thesis, I characterize situations where automation may result in boons to meaning-conferring workplace achievements: the appearance of what I call achievement spread and achievement swaps. Nevertheless, Danaher and Nyholm are right to worry about some uses of automation whereby human workers become subservient to AI. But these situations are better framed, I argue, as autonomy gaps rather than achievement gaps. (shrink)

A DOUTRINA NEOFUNCIONALISTA DE INTEGRAÇÃO REGIONAL E A NECESSIDADE DE ADOÇÃO DO MECANISMO ELETIVO DIRETO NO ÂMBITO DO PARLASUL: A TEORIA DE ERNST HAAS NA CONSOLIDAÇÃO PARLAMENTAR SUPRANACIONAL.

This document describes my dissertation proposal, “Aspect, plurality and quantification”, for a nonlinguist audience for the purposes of Penn’s SAS Dissertation Completion Fellowship. The dissertation proposal is available online on my website, http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~champoll/, as well as a handout with a description targeted at a linguist audience.

Psycholinguistic experiments show that pronouns tend to be resolved differently depending on whether they occur in main or subordinate clauses. If a pronoun in a subordinate clause has more than one potential antecedent in the main clause, then the pronoun tends to refer to the antecedent which has a certain thematic role (depending on the verb and on the subordinating conjunction). In contrast, pronouns in main clauses tend to refer back to the subject of the previous main clause, and this (...) tendency is not affected by any verbs or conjunctions. In natural language processing, these findings have recently led to a proposal that pronoun resolution systems should have a split architecture, i.e. that they should use different mechanisms for pronoun resolution in the two cases. With the help of two parsed and coreference-annotated corpora, this paper estimates the impact of the split-architecture proposal. The findings of this work are as follows: (1) Subject pronouns in authentic texts behave the same way in main and subordinate clauses. (2) The number of sentences in which a split architecture would behave differently than a system that treats both cases the same way is close to zero. Therefore, a separate treatment of resolution within and across units is unlikely to improve the performance of any system. This result casts a doubt on the split-architecture proposal, and more generally on approaches that directly incorporate psycholinguistic results into performance-oriented algorithms for anaphora resolution without assessing the relative importance of the phenomena that underlie them. (shrink)

This is a description of the collection of scripts which I'm submitting as a term project for the CIS530 course, what their purpose is, and how to use them. Note that at the moment I'm writing this, the tool is installed on alpha.nlp.liniac.upenn.edu in the directory /home/champoll/tblplus. It will most likely not run anywhere else at the moment, though it can be adapted easily if the relevant packages (especially fnTBL) are installed. See below fore more details.

Neste trabalho, pretendemos investigar o poder que os argumentos do apêndice da Parte I da _ Ética _ possuem para enfraquecer a superstição que reside na mente do leitor. Dada a necessidade dos preconceitos que levam à consolidação da superstição finalista, é esperado que o leitor, ao se deparar com a _ Ética _, esteja completamente tomado pelas crenças finalistas. Tendo isso em vista, como poderia a compreensão desses argumentos ser capaz de eliminar a superstição? Como intentamos demonstrar, o conhecimento (...) adquirido é incapaz, ao menos num primeiro momento, de levar a cabo essa tarefa: é necessária uma meditação amiúde reiterada. Isso é possível porque a meditação, ao utilizar o conhecimento sobre a necessidade da superstição como ponto de partida, é capaz de reorganizar os afetos, de modo a tornar os afetos racionais gradativamente mais fortes que os afetos ligados à superstição. (shrink)

La question que nous nous proposons de traiter dans cet article concerne le statut de l’événement de la déconstruction en tant qu’image de la raison : Quelle raison trouvons-nous par le biais de la de'construction? Le geste déconstructeur veut dépasser le logos de la métaphysique occidentale sans le de'passer, manifestant l’impossibilité radicale d’un tel dépassement : peut-on parler donc d’un logos déconstructeur? La diffe'rance est-elle coupée du logos ou bien est-elle une autre forme de logos? Quel est son statut lo- (...) gique? Que signifie « logique » pour la rationalité de l’écriture? La diffe'rance peut-elle être formulée logiquement? Nous chercherons à démontrer a) que la déconstruction met en œuvre une logique qui est une logique analogique, et donc b) que l’analogie, conçue dans un sens très technique, b.1) peut non seulement recevoir le statut d’une logique, b.2) mais nous aide aussi à repenser le geste décons- tructeur lui-même. Ainsi la voie est ouverte pour une confrontation entre l’œuvre de Derrida et celle d’Enzo Melandri. (shrink)

La question que nous nous proposons de traiter dans cet article concerne le statut de l’événement de la déconstruction en tant qu’image de la raison : Quelle raison trouvons-nous par le biais de la de'construction? Le geste déconstructeur veut dépasser le logos de la métaphysique occidentale sans le de'passer, manifestant l’impossibilité radicale d’un tel dépassement : peut-on parler donc d’un logos déconstructeur? La diffe'rance est-elle coupée du logos ou bien est-elle une autre forme de logos? Quel est son statut lo- (...) gique? Que signifie « logique » pour la rationalité de l’écriture? La diffe'rance peut-elle être formulée logiquement? Nous chercherons à démontrer a) que la déconstruction met en œuvre une logique qui est une logique analogique, et donc b) que l’analogie, conçue dans un sens très technique, b.1) peut non seulement recevoir le statut d’une logique, b.2) mais nous aide aussi à repenser le geste décons- tructeur lui-même. Ainsi la voie est ouverte pour une confrontation entre l’œuvre de Derrida et celle d’Enzo Melandri. (shrink)