It is shown that, given any finite set of pairs of random events in a Boolean algebra which are correlated with respect to a fixed probability measure on the algebra, the algebra can be extended in such a way that the extension contains events that can be regarded as common causes of the correlations in the sense of Reichenbach's definition of common cause. It is shown, further, that, given any quantum probability space and any set of commuting events in it (...) which are correlated with respect to a fixed quantum state, the quantum probability space can be extended in such a way that the extension contains common causes of all the selected correlations, where common cause is again taken in the sense of Reichenbach's definition. It is argued that these results very strongly restrict the possible ways of disproving Reichenbach's Common Cause Principle. (shrink)

Philosophers and linguists alike tend to call a semantic theory ‘Russellian’ just in case it assigns to sentences in which definite descriptions occur the truth-conditions Russell did in ‘On Denoting’. This is unfortunate; not all aspects of those particular truth-conditions do explanatory work in Russell's writings. As far as the semantics of descriptions is concerned, the key insights of ‘On Denoting’ are that definite descriptions are not uniformly referring expressions, and that they are scope-bearing elements. Anyone who accepts these two (...) claims can account for Russell's puzzle cases the way he did. Russell had no substantive argument for the claim that ‘The F is G’ entails ‘There is at most one F’; in fact, he had important misgivings about it. I outline an argument against this claim, and I argue that by holding on to uniqueness contemporary semanticists make a momentous mistake: they keep the illusion alive that there is a way to account for linguistic meaning without addressing what linguistic expressions are for. (shrink)

Több politikatudománnyal foglalkozó kötettel jelentkezett már Szabó Márton, aki eddigi kutatásait összegezve, egy alternatív szemléletű politikatudomány szemléletébe és kutatásába kívánja bevezetni olvasóit. Célja, hogy bizonyítsa: a politika reális valóságában meghatározó módon jelen van az egyének nyilvános és közös értelmezése és diskurzusa. Hogy a politika ezért nem tekinthető pusztán csak objektív rendszernek, hanem emberek által teremtett és értelmezett valóság. A szerző ezen szemlélet jegyében hét nagyobb egységben mutatja be a politika minden fontos területét, kezdve a politikai tények összetett természetével, folytatva a (...) politikai cselekvések és megismerési módok sajátosságaival. Külön vizsgálja az intézményi kereteket, a politika szereplőit, a politikai ügyeket. Kritikailag elemzi az empirikus politikatudományi kutatás meghatározó területeit, végül a politikatudomány sokféleségével foglalkozik. A vaskos kötetet forrás- és irodalomjegyzék zárja. (shrink)

This article examines the methodology of a core branch of contemporary political theory or philosophy: “analytic” political theory. After distinguishing political theory from related fields, such as political science, moral philosophy, and legal theory, the article discusses the analysis of political concepts. It then turns to the notions of principles and theories, as distinct from concepts, and reviews the methods of assessing such principles and theories (e.g., the reflective-equilibrium method), for the purpose of justifying or criticizing them. Finally, it looks (...) at a recent debate on how abstract and idealized political theory should be, and assesses the significance of disagreement in political theory. The discussion is carried out from an angle inspired by the philosophy of science. (shrink)

The paper sets out to offer an alternative to the function/argument approach to the most essential aspects of natural language meanings. That is, we question the assumption that semantic completeness (of, e.g., propositions) or incompleteness (of, e.g., predicates) exactly replicate the corresponding grammatical concepts (of, e.g., sentences and verbs, respectively). We argue that even if one gives up this assumption, it is still possible to keep the compositionality of the semantic interpretation of simple predicate/argument structures. In our opinion, compositionality presupposes (...) that we are able to compare arbitrary meanings in term of information content. This is why our proposal relies on an ‘intrinsically’ type free algebraic semantic theory. The basic entities in our models are neither individuals, nor eventualities, nor their properties, but ‘pieces of evidence’ for believing in the ‘truth’ or ‘existence’ or ‘identity’ of any kind of phenomenon. Our formal language contains a single binary non-associative constructor used for creating structured complex terms representing arbitrary phenomena. We give a finite Hilbert-style axiomatisation and a decision algorithm for the entailment problem of the suggested system. (shrink)

The present article proposes an integration between cultural psychology and developmental science. Such an integration would draw on the cultural-psychology principle of culture-psyche interactions, as well as on the developmental-science principle of person↔︎context relations. Our proposed integration centers on acculturation, which is inherently both cultural and developmental. Specifically, we propose that acculturation is governed by specific transactions between the individual and the cultural context, and that different types of international migrants (e.g., legal immigrants, undocumented immigrants, refugees, asylum seekers, crisis migrants) (...) encounter quite different culture-psyche interactions and person↔︎context relations. We outline the ways in which various acculturation-related phenomena, such as acculturation operating at macro-level versus micro-level time scales, can be viewed through cultural and developmental lenses. The article concludes with future directions in research on acculturation as an intersection of cultural and developmental processes. (shrink)

Philosophers and linguists alike tend to call a semantic theory ‘Russellian’ just in case it assigns to sentences in which definite descriptions occur the truth-conditions Russell did in ‘On Denoting’. This is unfortunate; not all aspects of those particular truth-conditions do explanatory work in Russell's writings. As far as the semantics of descriptions is concerned, the key insights of ‘On Denoting’ are that definite descriptions are not uniformly referring expressions, and that they are scope-bearing elements. Anyone who accepts these two (...) claims can account for Russell's puzzle cases the way he did. Russell had no substantive argument for the claim that ‘The F is G’ entails ‘There is at most one F’; in fact, he had important misgivings about it. I outline an argument against this claim, and I argue that by holding on to uniqueness contemporary semanticists make a momentous mistake: they keep the illusion alive that there is a way to account for linguistic meaning without addressing what linguistic expressions are for. (shrink)

By the age of two, children are able to engage in highly elaborate games of symbolic pretense, in which objects and actions in the actual world are taken to stand for objects and actions in a realm of make-believe. These games of pretense are marked by the presence of two central features, which I will call quarantining and mirroring (see also Leslie 1987; Perner 1991). Quarantining is manifest to the extent that events within the pretense-episode are taken to have effects (...) only within that pretense-episode (e.g. the child does not expect that ‘spilling’ ( pretend) ‘tea’1 will result in the table really being wet), or more generally, to the extent that proto-beliefs and proto-attitudes concerning the pretended state of affairs are not treated as beliefs and attitudes relevant to guiding action in the actual world. Mirroring is manifest to the extent that features of the imaginary situation that have not been explicitly stipulated are derivable via features of their real-world analogues (e.g. the child does expect that if she up-ends the teapot above the table, then the table will become wet in the pretense), or, more generally to the extent that imaginative content is taken to be governed by the same sorts of restrictions that govern believed content. (shrink)

Bellʼs 1964 theorem causes a severe problem for the notion that correlations require explanation, encapsulated in Reichenbachʼs principle of common cause. Despite being a hallmark of scientific thought, dropping the principle has been widely regarded as much less bitter medicine than the perceived alternative—dropping relativistic causality. Recently, however, some authors have proposed that modified forms of Reichenbachʼs principle could be maintained even with relativistic causality. Here we break down Reichenbachʼs principle into two independent assumptions—the principle of common cause proper and (...) factorization of probabilities. We show how Bellʼs theorem can be derived from these two assumptions plus relativistic causality and the law of total probability for actual events, and we review proposals to drop each of these assumptions in light of the theorem. In particular, we show that the non-commutative common causes of Hofer-Szabó and Vecsernyés fail to have an analogue of the notion that the common causes can explain the observed correlations. Moreover, we show that their definition can be satisfied trivially by any quantum product state for any quantum correlations. We also discuss how the conditional states approach of Leifer and Spekkens fares in this regard. (shrink)

We prove a generalization of the Elekes–Szabó theorem [G. Elekes and E. Szabó, How to find groups?, Combinatorica 32 537–571 ] for relations defina...

It will be shown that the Peres–Mermin square admits value-definite noncontextual hidden-variable models if the observables associated with the operators can be measured only sequentially but not simultaneously. Namely, sequential measurements allow for noncontextual models in which hidden states update between consecutive measurements. Two recent experiments realizing the Peres–Mermin square by sequential measurements will also be analyzed along with other hidden-variable models accounting for these experiments.

The problem of imaginative resistance holds interest for aestheticians, literary theorists, ethicists, philosophers of mind, and epistemologists. We present a somewhat opinionated overview of the philosophical discussion to date. We begin by introducing the phenomenon of imaginative resistance. We then review existing responses to the problem, giving special attention to recent research directions. Finally, we consider the philosophical significance that imaginative resistance has—or, at least, is alleged to have—for issues in moral psychology, theories of cognitive architecture, and modal epistemology.

In this paper, we provide a comprehensive survey of the space of possible analyses of the phenomenon of quantifier domain restriction, together with a set of considerations which militate against all but our own proposal. Among the many accounts we consider and reject are the ‘explicit’ approach to quantifier domain restric‐tion discussed, for example, by Stephen Neale, and the pragmatic approach to quantifier domain restriction proposed by Kent Bach. Our hope is that the exhaustive discussion of this special case of (...) context‐dependence will provide guidelines for how to decide, for an arbitrary case of context‐dependent discourse, whether it should be treated syntactically, semantically, or pragmatically. (shrink)

A recent analysis by de Barros and Suppes of experimentally realizable GHZ correlations supports the conclusion that these correlations cannot be explained by introducing local hidden variables. We show, nevertheless, that their analysis does not exclude local hidden variable models in which the inefficiency in the experiment is an effect not only of random errors in the detector equipment, but is also the manifestation of a pre-set, hidden property of the particles ("prism models"). Indeed, we present an explicit prism model (...) for the GHZ scenario; that is, a local hidden variable model entirely compatible with recent GHZ experiments. (shrink)

Knowledge ascriptions seem context sensitive. Yet it is widely thought that epistemic contextualism does not have a plausible semantic implementation. We aim to overcome this concern by articulating and defending an explicit contextualist semantics for ‘know,’ which integrates a fairly orthodox contextualist conception of knowledge as the elimination of the relevant alternatives, with a fairly orthodox “Amherst” semantics for A-quantification over a contextually variable domain of situations. Whatever problems epistemic contextualism might face, lack of an orthodox semantic implementation is not (...) among them. (shrink)