Awareness of the risks posed by excess nitrogen is low beyond the scientific community. As public understanding of scientific issues is partly influenced by news reporting, this article is the first to study how the British press has discussed nitrogen pollution. A corpus-assisted frame analysis of newspaper articles highlighted five frames: Activism, where environmental charities and organizations are portrayed as having an active role in fighting pollution; Government Responsibility, where privatization is presented as central and positioned as one of the (...) main causes of pollution; Industry Responsibility, in which industries’ actions are depicted as causing pollution to increase; Pollutions as Politics, in which pollution is not discussed as a problem to be solved but rather as a means to increase votes; and Risk, where readers are warned about the possible effects of pollution on human health, flora and fauna. The analysis also points to the absence of named scientists and sources with the coverage being dominated by politicians. (shrink)

While the value of the extended mind hypothesis for human cognition is disputed, this paper examines the explanatory utility of the extended mind framework in the domain of AI systems, specifically the Google self-driving car. I argue that the cognitive architecture of the Google-car is best explained as an instance of extended cognition. The argument for this claim begins with a description of the Google-car’s cognitive architecture, including the indispensable role of “prior maps” in its performance. I then argue that (...) the hypothesis of extended cognition provides a better explanation of the Google-car’s performance than two rival, non-extended alternatives. Consideration of the Google-car also offers insight into whether driverless vehicles have achieved human-level competency in the cognitive skills required for driving, or instead remain “poor substitutes.”. (shrink)

The young women had survived the car crash, after a fashion. In the five months since parts of her brain had been crushed, she could open her eyes but didn't respond to sights, sounds or jabs. In the jargon of neurology, she was judged to be in a persistent vegetative state. In crueler everyday language, she was a vegetable.

Morality and Moral Controversies, 10th Edition challenges students to critically assess today's leading moral, social, and political issues. And as a comprehensive anthology, it provides students with the tools they need to understand philosophical ideas that are currently shaping our world. The 10thEditionincludes classic and contemporary readings in moral theory, the most current topics in applied ethics, and updated debates in social and political philosophy. As in the previous nine editions, the materials were selected for balance, timeliness, and accessibility after (...) reviewing a vast range of possible articles from leading scholarly journals, mainstream periodicals, online posts, and book chapters. Hallmarks include carefully edited and philosophically relevant U.S. Supreme Court decisions, compelling readings, and contrasting points of view that reflect a broad ethical and political spectrum. Upon completing this book, readers will be able to: Understand philosophical ideas that are shaping the world today. Apply various philosophical ideas to politics, religion, ethics, economics, personal relationships, medicine, the environment and climate change, warfare, and other areas. Appreciate how to construct, apply, and evaluate basic philosophical arguments. Key updates to the 10th Edition include: Publishing all material in the actual book (in contrast to placing sections online behethical and political spectrum. Upon completing this book, readers will be able to: Understand philosophical ideas that are shaping the world today. Apply various philosophical ideas to politics, religion, ethics, economics, personal relationships, medicine, the environment and climate change, warfare, and other areas. Appreciate how to construct, apply, and evaluate basic philosophical arguments. Key updates to the 10th Edition include: Publishing all material in the actual book (in contrast to placing sections online behind a paywall, as was the case in earlier editions with a different publisher). New readings on: autonomous warfare self-driving cars the right to health care technology and privacy the value of democracy racial equality immigration. (shrink)

THE CASE FOR GOVERNMENT BY ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE. Tired of election madness? The rhetoric of politicians? Their unreliable promises? And less than good government? -/- Until recently, it hasn’t been hard for people to give up control to computers. Not very many people miss the effort and time required to do calculations by hand, to keep track of their finances, or to complete their tax returns manually. But relinquishing direct human control to self-driving cars is expected to be more of a (...) challenge, despite the predicted decrease in vehicle accidents thanks to artificial intelligence that isn’t subject to human distractions and errors of judgment. -/- If turning vehicle control over to artificial intelligence is a challenge, it is a very mild one compared with the idea that we might one day recognize and want to implement the advantages of human government by AI. But, like autonomous vehicle control, government by AI is likely to offer decided benefits. -/- In other publications, the author has studied a variety of widespread human limitations that, throughout human history, have led to much human suffering as well as ecological destruction. For the first time, these psychological and cognitive human shortcomings are taken into account in an essay that makes the case for government by artificial intelligence. (shrink)

In the restoration of art and artifacts there are three salient types of value to consider: relic, aesthetic, and practical. Relic value includes an object’s age, aura, originality, authenticity, and epistemic value. Aesthetic value is connected to how an object looks, sounds, or tastes. Practical value involves whether a thing can be used as designed—whether a book can be read, a building occupied, a car driven. I argue that while these are all legitimate values, it is impossible for a restorer (...) to maximize them all. I conclude that restoration inexorably involves aesthetic choices; there is no supreme value to be maximized and we should be pluralists about the right balance of values. Restoration is like baking a cake; there are many wrong ways to do it, but there are many right ways as well. (shrink)

Morality and Moral Controversies, 10th Edition challenges students to critically assess today's leading moral, social, and political issues. And as a comprehensive anthology, it provides students with the tools they need to understand philosophical ideas that are currently shaping our world. The 10thEditionincludes classic and contemporary readings in moral theory, the most current topics in applied ethics, and updated debates in social and political philosophy. As in the previous nine editions, the materials were selected for balance, timeliness, and accessibility after (...) reviewing a vast range of possible articles from leading scholarly journals, mainstream periodicals, online posts, and book chapters. Hallmarks include carefully edited and philosophically relevant U.S. Supreme Court decisions, compelling readings, and contrasting points of view that reflect a broad ethical and political spectrum. Upon completing this book, readers will be able to: Understand philosophical ideas that are shaping the world today. Apply various philosophical ideas to politics, religion, ethics, economics, personal relationships, medicine, the environment and climate change, warfare, and other areas. Appreciate how to construct, apply, and evaluate basic philosophical arguments. Key updates to the 10th Edition include: Publishing all material in the actual book (in contrast to placing sections online behind a paywall, as was the case in earlier editions with a different publisher). New readings on: autonomous warfare self-driving cars the right to health care technology and privacy the value of democracy racial equality immigration. ethical and political spectrum. Upon completing this book, readers will be able to: Understand philosophical ideas that are shaping the world today. Apply various philosophical ideas to politics, religion, ethics, economics, personal relationships, medicine, the environment and climate change, warfare, and other areas. Appreciate how to construct, apply, and evaluate basic philosophical arguments. Key updates to the 10th Edition include: Publishing all material in the actual book (in contrast to placing sections online behind a paywall, as was the case in earlier editions with a different publisher). New readings on: autonomous warfare self-driving cars the right to health care technology and privacy the value of democracy racial equality immigration. >the right to health care technology and privacy the value of democracy racial equality immigration. (shrink)

Is argumentation essentially adversarial? The concept of a devil's advocate—a cooperative arguer who assumes the role of an opponent for the sake of the argument—serves as a lens to bring into clearer focus the ways that adversarial arguers can be virtuous and adversariality itself can contribute to argumentation's goals. It also shows the different ways arguments can be adversarial and the different ways that argumentation can be said to be "essentially" adversarial.

If circumstances were always simple and all arguers were always exclusively concerned with cognitive improvement, arguments would probably always be cooperative. However, we have other goals and there are other arguers, so in practice the default seems to be adversarial argumentation. We naturally inhabit the heuristically helpful but cooperation-inhibiting roles of proponents and opponents. We can, however, opt for more cooperative roles. The resources of virtue argumentation theory are used to explain when proactive cooperation is permissible, advisable, and even mandatory (...) – and also when it is not. (shrink)

Short food supply chains have become the focus of considerable research in the last two decades. However, studies so far remain highly localized, and claims about the economic and social advantages of such channels for farmers are not backed by large-scale empirical evidence. Using a web survey of 613 direct-market farmers across Canada, this article explores the potential economic and social benefits that farmers derive from participating in short food supply chains. We used multivariate analysis to test whether a farmer’s (...) degree of involvement in direct food channels is positively correlated with levels of work enjoyment, social satisfaction, and economic satisfaction. The results indicate that, overall, direct-market farmers report high levels of occupational satisfaction, although work-related challenges persist, such as stress, excessive workloads, and competition. Farmer participation in short food chains was also a positive predictor of work enjoyment and economic satisfaction, but not of social satisfaction, as measured by the share of total farm sales attributable to direct selling. Net annual farm revenue, the share of direct food sales involving a middleman, age, and gender also correlated with one or more dimensions of occupational satisfaction. (shrink)

Martin Heidegger’s existential account of care in _Being and Time_ (2010) provides us with an opportunity to reimagine what the proper theoretical grounding of an ethic of care might be. Heidegger’s account of care serves to deconstruct the two primary foundations that an ethic of care is often based upon. Namely, that we are inevitably interdependent upon one another and/or possess an innate disposition to care for fellow humans in need. Heidegger’s account reveals that both positions are founded upon an (...) ontic (meaning factual existence), as opposed to an ontological (which refers to the nature of being), understanding of care. The distinctions between an ontic and ontological understanding of care are significant. Yet, I maintain that they are not completely incompatible. Both Heidegger and care ethicists contend that our existence with others is understood through a relational ontology. Furthermore, there are certain ontological structures from Heidegger which resonate with an ethic of care. Two key existential structures are leaping-ahead and being-guilty. These existential structures are latent in care ethics, and by explicitly revealing them I reinforce the connection between Heidegger’s account and care theory. Lastly, I develop the theoretical foundations of care ethics by proposing an existential ethic of care. (shrink)

This paper reviews studies of corporate ethical codes published since 2000 and concludes that codes be can effective instruments for shaping ethical behavior and guiding employee decision-making. Culture and effective communication are key components to a code’s success. If codes are embedded in the culture and embraced by the leaders, they are likely to be successful. Communicating the code’s precepts in an effective way is crucial to its success. Discussion between employees and management is a key component of successful ethical (...) codes. (shrink)

Previous claims that psychology is propaedeutic to the other sciences have been met with enthusiastic indifference. Contributing to this indifference has been the fact that psychology, a young and unproved discipline which habitually borrowed the methods of the older sciences, has too frequently revised its notion as to its own nature and subject-matter. More important, however, has been the faith of the physical sciences in the absolute character of their own basic concepts: in the reality of Absolute Space and Absolute (...) Time and in the universality of deterministic principles, for, as long as physics presumed to deal with entities which are what they are regardless of the nature of man, nothing other than these entities appeared to demand prior consideration. The problem of the nature of the observer in the physical experiment became important to physics only as a consequence of the recent ‘subjective’ revolution. It is this revolution which has revitalized the problem of the propaedeutic science and has accentuated the distinction which we must make between the behavioral phenomenon of individuals creating formal arrays of words or symbols which are without operational meaning and the discriminatory responses, or operations, by which the empirical meaning of such arrays is determined. (shrink)

It is widely assumed that Russell's problems with the unity of the proposition were recurring and insoluble within the framework of the logical theory of his Principles of Mathematics. By contrast, Frege's functional analysis of thoughts (grounded in a type-theoretic distinction between concepts and objects) is commonly assumed to provide a solution to the problem or, at least, a means of avoiding the difficulty altogether. The Fregean solution is unavailable to Russell because of his commitment to the thesis that there (...) is only one ultimate ontological category. This, combined with Russell's reification of propositions, ensures that he must hold concepts and objects to be of the same logical and ontological type. In this paper I argue that, while Frege's treatment of the unity of the proposition has immediate advantages over Russell's, a deeper consideration of the philosophical underpinnings and metaphysical consequences of the two approaches reveals that Frege's supposed solution is, in fact, far from satisfactory. Russell's repudiation of the Fregean position in the Principles is, I contend, convincing and Russell's own position, despite its problems, conforms to a greater extent than Frege's with common sense and, furthermore, with certain ideas which are central to our understanding of the origins of the analytical tradition. (shrink)

In his article The Nature, Importance, and Difficulty of Machine Ethics, James H. Moor distinguishes two lines of argument for those who wish to draw a “bright line” between full ethical agents, such as human beings, and “weaker” ethical agents, such as machines whose actions have significant moral ramifications. The first line of argument is that only full ethical agents are agents at all. The second is that no machine could have the presumed features necessary for ethical agency. This paper (...) shows why Moor is mistaken in his refutation of the first line of argument; it also makes a positive case that “weaker” ethical agents are not agents at all. This positive case, however, allows Moor’s rejection of the second line of argument to stand: allowing that there could be moral machines, but that these machines would have to be full moral agents and not merely something that models moral behavior or can be used in morally charged ways. (shrink)

BackgroundType-Token Ratio, given its relatively simple hand computation, is one of the few LSA measures calculated by clinicians in everyday practice. However, it has significant well-documented shortcomings; these include instability as a function of sample size, and absence of clear developmental profiles over early childhood. A variety of alternative measures of lexical diversity have been proposed; some, such as Number of Different Words/100 can also be computed by hand. However, others, such as Vocabulary Diversity and the Moving Average Type Token (...) Ratio rely on complex resampling algorithms that cannot be conducted by hand. To date, no large-scale study of all four measures has evaluated how well any capture typical developmental trends over early childhood, or whether any reliably distinguish typical from atypical profiles of expressive child language ability.Materials and MethodsWe conducted linear and non-linear regression analyses for TTR, NDW, VocD, and MATTR scores for samples taken from 946 corpora from typically developing preschool children, engaged in adult-child toy play, from the Child Language Data Exchange System. These were contrasted with 504 samples from children known to have delayed expressive language skills. We also conducted a separate sub-analysis which examined possible contextual effects of sampling environment on lexical diversity.ResultsOnly VocD showed significantly different mean scores between the typically -developing children and delayed developing children group. Using TTR would actually misdiagnose typical children and miss children with known language impairment. However, computation of VocD as a function of toy interactions was significant and emerges as a further caution in use of lexical diversity as a valid proxy index of children’s expressive vocabulary skill.DiscussionThis large scale statistical comparison of computer-implemented algorithms for expressive lexical profiles in young children with traditional, hand-calculated measures showed that only VocD met criteria for evidence-based use in LSA. However, VocD was impacted by sample elicitation context, suggesting that non-linguistic factors, such as engagement with elicitation props, contaminate estimates of spoken lexical skill in young children. Implications and suggested directions are discussed. (shrink)

v. 1. Psychological issues.--v. 2. Structural issues.--v. 3. Awareness and self-awareness.--v. 4. Clinical issues.

Cooperation is common across nonhuman animal taxa, from the hunting of large game in lions to the harvesting of building materials in ants. Theorists have proposed a number of models to explain the evolution of cooperative behavior. These ultimate explanations, however, rarely consider the proximate constraints on the implementation of cooperative behavior. Here we review several types of cooperation and propose a suite of cognitive abilities required for each type to evolve. We propose that several types of cooperation, though theoretically (...) possible and functionally adaptive, have not evolved in some animal species because of cognitive constraints. We argue, therefore, that future modeling efforts and experimental investigations into the adaptive function of cooperation in animals must be grounded in a realistic assessment of the psychological ingredients required for cooperation. Such an approach can account for the puzzling distribution of cooperative behaviors across taxa, especially the seemingly unique occurrence of cooperation observed in our own species. (shrink)

The law of torts is concerned with the secondary obligations generated by the infringement of primary rights. This work seeks to show that this apparently simple proposition enables us to understand the law of torts as found in the common law. Using primarily English materials, but drawing heavily upon the law of other common law jurisdictions, Stevens seeks to give an account of the law of torts which relies upon the core material familiar to most students and practitioners with (...) a grasp of the law of torts. This material is drawn together in support of a single argument in a provocative and accessible style, and puts forward a new theoretical model for analysing the law of torts, providing an overarching framework for radically reconceiving the subject. (shrink)

Ten years after the Human Genome Project’s completion the life sciences stand in a moment of uncertainty, transition, and contestation. The postgenomic era has seen rapid shifts in research methodology, funding, scientific labor, and disciplinary structures. Postgenomics is transforming our understanding of disease and health, our environment, and the categories of race, class, and gender. At the same time, the gene retains its centrality and power in biological and popular discourse. The contributors to Postgenomics analyze these ruptures and continuities and (...) place them in historical, social, and political context. Postgenomics, they argue, forces a rethinking of the genome itself, and opens new territory for conversations between the social sciences, humanities, and life sciences. Contributors. Russ Altman, Rachel A. Ankeny, Catherine Bliss, John Dupré, Michael Fortun, Evelyn Fox Keller, Sabina Leonelli, Adrian Mackenzie, Margot Moinester, Aaron Panofsky, Sarah S. Richardson, Sara Shostak, Hallam Stevens. (shrink)

We evaluate here the performance of four models of cross-situational word learning: two global models, which extract and retain multiple referential alternatives from each word occurrence; and two local models, which extract just a single referent from each occurrence. One of these local models, dubbed Pursuit, uses an associative learning mechanism to estimate word-referent probability but pursues and tests the best referent-meaning at any given time. Pursuit is found to perform as well as global models under many conditions extracted from (...) naturalistic corpora of parent-child interactions, even though the model maintains far less information than global models. Moreover, Pursuit is found to best capture human experimental findings from several relevant cross-situational word-learning experiments, including those of Yu and Smith (), the paradigm example of a finding believed to support fully global cross-situational models. Implications and limitations of these results are discussed, most notably that the model characterizes only the earliest stages of word learning, when reliance on the co-occurring referent world is at its greatest. (shrink)

Paul Stevens; On the Nuffield Philosophy of Science, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 12, Issue 1, 30 May 2006, Pages 99–111, https://doi.org/10.1111/.

THE TITLE OF THIS PAPER calls for clarification. Not only are there several senses in which something may be said to "be," there are also many nuances to the terms "categorial" and "intuition." Taking Aristotle as a guide, let us focus upon the primary sense of "being," that is, substance considered both as first substance and second substance. We may then take "categorial" as referring to what Aristotle calls the "figures of predication," the ways in which predicates characterize subjects, indicating (...) "what" the subject is, its quality, quantity, relation, its "where," its "when," and so forth. The term "intuition" expresses something too primitive to be defined, but Edmund Husserl's metaphorical contrast between the "emptiness" of thought and speech and the "fullness" of intuition successfully highlights its essential characteristic. A couple of examples should suffice to grasp the import of Husserl's distinction. Consider the difference, for instance, between first entertaining vague plans of visiting a foreign city and then experiencing the fulfillment of actually strolling through its streets, or the difference between first reading a manual of instructions for performing some task and then actually executing the task skillfully. Taking Husserl as a guide, let us therefore characterize intuition broadly as the presentation of something in its fullness, as opposed to thinking or talking about it in an empty way. Finally, combining Husserlian and Aristotelian terminologies, we may describe categorial intuition as the presentation of figures of predication. Rather than presenting some particular thing, say a red chair, categorial intuition presents the chair's being red, the red quality's belonging to the chair. In short, categorial intuition makes present the modes of presentation of things. (shrink)

In this paper, we advance a novel conception of normative ethics and draw out its implications within the domain of professional ethics. We argue that all moral agents, and thus professionals, share a fundamental and constitutive normative interest in correctly conceiving of their ends. All professionals, we claim, by virtue of their positions of social power, have special role responsibilities in cultivating and sustaining societies oriented by this shared ideal of practically oriented ethical understanding. We defend this conception against a (...) familiar opponent of a philosophical approach to professional ethics: the morally skeptical student. By taking the skeptic’s challenge seriously, we clarify the conditions for a sound account of normative ethics and then provide a response that meets this test. Against this type of skeptic, we claim that a fundamental commitment to the ideal of understanding our ends ought to be included within any curriculum of professional et... (shrink)

Patient consent has been formulated in terms of radical individualism rather than shared benefits. Medical education relies on the provision of patient consent to provide medical students with the training and experience to become competent doctors. Pelvic examination represents an extreme case in which patients may legitimately seek to avoid contact with inexperienced medical students particularly where these are male. However, using this extreme case, this paper will examine practices of framing and obtaining consent as perceived by medical students. This (...) paper reports findings of an exploratory qualitative study of medical students and junior doctors. Participants described a number of barriers to obtaining informed consent. These related to misunderstandings concerning student roles and experiences and insufficient information on the nature of the examination. Participants reported perceptions of the negative framing of decisions on consent by nursing staff where the student was male. Potentially coercive practices of framing of the decision by senior doctors were also reported. Participants outlined strategies they adopted to circumvent patients’ reasons for refusal. Practices of framing the information used by students, nurses and senior doctors to enable patients to decide about consent are discussed in the context of good ethical practice. In the absence of a clear ethical model, coercion appears likely. We argue for an expanded model of autonomy in which the potential tension between respecting patients’ autonomy and ensuring the societal benefit of well-trained doctors is recognised. Practical recommendations are made concerning information provision and clear delineations of student and patient roles and expectations. (shrink)

Si la tradition analytique cautionne en general la preference moderne pour une rationalite de type mathematique, et demeure mefiante vis-a-vis de la causalite formelle et de l'intuition eidetique, la tradition phenomenologique, en revanche, privilegie l'intuition intellectuelle plutot que les procedures techniques, et propose de rehabiliter nombre des categories meprisees par les penseurs modernes. La these developpee dans cette etude soutient que la phenomenologie offre une explication a la fois plus equilibree et plus coherente de l'objectivite de la connaissance. La vulnerabilite (...) de la philosophie analytique face aux versions contemporaines de l'historicisme et du relativisme est l'aboutissement logique des premisses empiristes communes a la critique fregeenne du psychologisme et a la critique wittgensteinienne de la representation. Le point de vue phenomenologique a pour clef la theorie husserlienne de l'intuition categoriale qui retrouve et renouvelle l'explication aristotelicienne de l'origine des predicats classificatoires a partir des aspects des choses. (shrink)

Much of the research on the delivery of advice by professionals such as physicians, health workers and counsellors, both on the telephone and in face-to-face interaction more generally, has focused on the theme of client resistance and the consequent need for professionals to adopt particular formats to assist in the uptake of the advice. In this article we consider one setting, Kid’s Helpline, the national Australian counselling service for children and young people, where there is an institutional mandate not to (...) give explicit advice in accordance with the values of self-direction and empowerment. The article examines one practice, the use of script proposals by counsellors, which appears to offer a way of providing support which is consistent with these values. Script proposals entail the counsellors packaging their advice as something that the caller might say — at some future time — to a third party such as a friend, teacher, parent or partner, and involve the counsellor adopting the speaking position of the caller in what appears as a rehearsal of a forthcoming strip of interaction. Although the core feature of a script proposal is the counsellor’s use of direct reported speech, they appear to be delivered not so much as exact words to be followed, but as the type of conversation that the client needs to have with the third party. Script proposals, in short, provide models of what to say as well as alluding to how these could be emulated by the client. In their design, script proposals invariably incorporate one or more of the most common rhetorical formats for maximizing the persuasive force of an utterance such as a three-part list or a contrastive pair. Script proposals, moreover, stand in a complex relation to the prior talk and one of their functions appears to be to summarize, respecify or expand upon the client’s own ideas or suggestions for problem solving that have emerged in these preceding sequences. (shrink)

INTRODUCTION ". . . a universe unfinished, with doors and windows open to possibilities uncontrollable in advance." A possibility which William James would ...

This article introduces Harvey Brown and Oliver Pooley’s ‘dynamical approach’ to special relativity, and argues that it may be construed as a relationalist form of Einstein’s ‘practical geometry’. This construal of the dynamical approach is shown to be compatible with related chapters of Brown’s text and also with recent descriptions of the dynamical approach by Pooley and others.

The Snowden revelations in 2013 redrew the lines of debate surrounding surveillance, exposing the extent of state surveillance across multiple nations and triggering legislative reform in many. In the UK, this was in the form of the Investigatory Powers Act. As a contribution to understanding resistance to expanding state surveillance activities, this article reveals the intertwining of diverse interests and voices which speak in opposition to UK state surveillance. Through a computational topic modelling-based mixed methods analysis of the submissions made (...) to the draft Investigatory Powers Bill consultation, the article demonstrates the diversity and intersection of discourses within different actor groups, including civil society and the technology industry. We demonstrate that encryption is a key issue for these groups, and is additionally conflated with a human rights discourse. This serves to unite seemingly disparate interests by imbuing encryption with a responsibility for the protection of human rights, but also threatens to legitimate corporate interests and distract from their own data-driven activities of surveillance capitalism. (shrink)

Accountants confronted with ethical dilemmas are expected to comply with their ethical guide or seek advice from their professional body. This study of Chartered Accountants in Ireland records their views on the usefulness of a Code of Ethics, the efficacy of their professional Institute and the need for ethics courses in Continuing Professional Development. Peter Clarke is a lecturer in the Department of Accountancy, University College Dublin, Dublin 4; Nancy Hill and Kevin Stevens are members of the School of (...) Accountancy, DePaul University, Chicago. (shrink)

In this paper I defend Kaplan’s claim that the sentence “I am here now” is logically true. A number of counter-examples to the claim have been proposed, including occurrences of the sentence in answerphone messages, written notes left for later decoding, etc. These counter-examples are only convincing if they can be shown to be cases where the correct context with respect to which the utterance should be evaluated is the context in which it is decoded rather than encoded. I argue (...) that this is not the case, and draw on the distinction between force and content to suggest an alternative account of how information is communicated in these cases that is consistent with Kaplan’s semantic theory. (shrink)