We defend a contextualist account of deontic judgments as relativized both to (i) information and to (ii) standards or ends, against recent objections that turn on practices of moral disagreement. Kolodny & MacFarlane argue that information-relative contextualism cannot accommodate the connection between deliberation and advice; we suggest in response that they misidentify the basic concerns of deliberating agents. For pragmatic reasons, semantic assessments of normative claims sometimes are evaluations of propositions other than those asserted. Weatherson, Schroeder and others have raised (...) parallel objections to standard-relative contextualism; we argue for a parallel solution. (shrink)

There’s a general assumption that teleology and function do not exist in inanimate nature. Throughout biology, it is generally taken as granted that teleology (or teleonomy) and functions are not only unique to life, but perhaps even a defining quality of life. For many, it’s obvious that rocks, water, and the like, are not teleological, nor could they possibly have stand-alone functions. This idea - that teleology and function are unique to life - is the target of this paper. I (...) begin with an overview of McShea’s field theoretic account of teleology. I start with the field theoretic account because it presents a promising analysis of teleological systems. It is promising because, in not making any assumptions about life’s special status in teleological systems, it avoids counterexamples that have problematized other accounts. I then consider some of the prominent efforts that have been made to attempt to avoid ascribing functions or teleology to some form of inanimate nature. In my assessment, none of the efforts are successful. I conclude by offering mineral evolution as a case study to show how inanimate nature can be both teleological and functional. The evolution of mineral species reveals that teleology and function extend to inanimate nature, and that teleology and function come in degrees. (shrink)

Teleology has a complicated history in the biological sciences. Some have argued that Darwin’s theory has allowed biology to purge itself of teleological explanations. Others have been content to retain teleology and to treat it as metaphorical, or have sought to replace it with less problematic notions like teleonomy. And still others have tried to naturalize it in a way that distances it from the vitalism of the nineteenth century, focusing on the role that function plays in teleological explanation. No (...) consensus has seemed possible in this debate. This paper takes a different approach. It argues that teleology is a perfectly acceptable scientific notion, but that the debate took an unfortunate misstep some 2300 years ago, one that has confused things ever since. The misstep comes in the beginning of Aristotle’s Physics when a distinction is made between two types of teleological explanation. One type pertains to artifacts while the other pertains to entities in nature. For Aristotle, artifacts are guided by something external to themselves, human intentions, while natural entities are guided by an internal nature. We aim to show that there is, in fact, only one type of legitimate teleological explanation, what Aristotle would have considered a variant of an artifact model, where entities are guided by external fields. We begin with an analysis of the differences between the two types of explanation. We then examine some evidence in Aristotle’s biological works suggesting that on account of his natural-artifactual distinction, he encountered difficulties in trying to provide teleological accounts of spontaneous generation. And we show that it is possible to resolve these difficulties with a more robust version of an artifact model of teleology, in other words, with an externalist teleology. This is McShea’s model, in which goal-directed entities are guided by a nested series of upper-level fields. To explain teleological behavior, this account invokes only external physical forces rather than mysterious internal natures. We then consider how field theory differs from other efforts to naturalize teleology in biology. And finally, we show how the account enables us to grapple with certain difficult cases – genes and intentions – where, even in biology today, the temptation to posit internal natures remains strong. (shrink)

My purpose in this article is to raise the problem of meaning in sport. The problem has two aspects. One is whether sport has any meaning in itself. The other is about how sport can be a part of a...

AdaBoost has been successfully applied to a number of classification tasks, seemingly defying problems of overfitting. AdaBoost performs gradient descent in an error function with respect to the margin. This method concentrates on the patterns which are hardest to learn. However, this property of AdaBoost can be disadvantageous for noisy problems. Indeed, theoretical analysis has shown that the margin distribution plays a crucial role in understanding this phenomenon. Loosely speaking, some outliers should be tolerated if this has the benefit of (...) substantially increasing the margin on the remaining points. In this paper, we propose new noise robust boosting methods using the concepts of ν-Support Vector Classification and Arc-GV. These methods allow for the probability of a pre-specified fraction ν of points to lie in the margin area or even on the wrong side of the decision boundary. This algorithms can give a nicely interpretable way of controlling the trade-off between minimizing the training error and capacity. (shrink)

Our food and farming system is not socially, economically or ecologically sustainable. Many of the ills are a result of market competition driving specialization and linear production models, externalizing costs for environmental, social and cultural degradation. Some propose that market mechanisms should be used to correct this; improved consumer choice, internalization of costs and compensation to farmers for public goods. What we eat is determined by the path taken by our ancestors, by commercialization and fierce competition, fossil fuels and demographic (...) development. Based on those, governments and the food industry are the choice architects who determine what we eat; consumer choice plays a marginal role. Using market mechanisms to internalize cost and compensate farmers for public goods has been proposed for decades but little progress has been made. There are also many practical, ethical and theoretical objections to such a system. The market is not a good master for a sustainable food system. Instead we need to find new ways of managing the food system based on food as a right and farming as a management system of the planet Earth. The solutions should be based on relocalization of food production and de-commodification of food and our symbionts, the plants and animals we eat. (shrink)

Stephanie Collins’ Group Duties offers interesting new arguments and brings together numerous interconnected issues that have hitherto been treated separately. My critical commentary focuses on two particularly original and central claims of the book: (1) Only groups that are united under a group-level decision-making procedure can bear duties. (2) Attributions of duties to other groups should be understood as attributions of “coordination duties” to each member of the group, duties to take steps responsive to the others with a view to (...) the group’s φ-ing or express willingness to do so. In support of the first claim, Collins argues that only groups that can make decisions can bear duties, and that the ability to make decisions requires the relevant sort of decision-making procedure. I suggest that both parts of this argument remain in need of further support. I furthermore argue that Collins’ account of coordination duties gets certain kinds of cases wrong, and suggest that attributions of duties to groups without decision-making procedures are more plausibly understood as attributing shared duties. (shrink)

What kind of a science is psychoanalysis? What constitutes its domain? What truth claims does it maintain? In this unique and scholarly work concerning the nature of psychoanalysis, Gunnar Karlsson guides his arguments through phenomenological thinking which, he claims, can be seen as an alternative to the recent attempts to cite neuropsychoanalysis as the answer to the crisis of psychoanalysis. Karlsson criticizes this effort to ground psychoanalysis in biology and neurology and emphasizes instead the importance of defining the psychoanalytic (...) domain from the vantage point of the character of consciousness. His understanding of the unconscious, the libido and the death drive offer new insights into the nature of psychoanalysis, and he also illuminates and develops neglected dimensions such as consciousness and self-consciousness. Karlsson's approach to psychoanalysis is rigorous yet original, and this book fills an intellectual gap with implications for both the theoretical understanding and clinical issues of psychoanalysis. (shrink)

The chapter begins by introducing the problem of free will and moral responsibility and the standard terminology used to frame it in the philosophical context. It turns to the contributions of experimental philosophy and the prospects for the use of this methodology in the area. People believe that experimental philosophy is relevant to the traditional debates. The chapter discusses an error theory for incompatibilist intuitions proposed by Eddy nahmias and colleagues, and the role that empirical studies might have in the (...) assessment of manipulation arguments for incompatibilism. It also presents the suggestion that empirical studies reveal that core criteria for moral responsibility ought not to be applied invariantly across different sorts of cases. A number of philosophers argue that the results of surveys provide confirming evidence for a meta‐view about moral theories, variantism. (shrink)

Stanisław Lem’s short story Are you there Mr. Jones?, first published in 1955, is set in a courtroom. The plaintiff is Cybernetics Company – a provider of prosthetics – and the defendant is Harry Jones, a race-car driver. It turns out that Mr. Jones, after a series of grave accidents, has had his entire body gradually replaced by prostheses. He is now deep in debt to the provider, Cybernetics Company, which consequently has sued him to reclaim their property. We aim (...) to show that this short story illustrates important philosophical questions concerning personal identity and persistence over time, and that Lem in fact anticipates several of the main insights of functionalism, later introduced by Putnam (1967) and today a main contender for a theory of the mind. If the identity of Mr. Jones is constituted solely by his prostheses’ functional role, i.e., their causal relations to input, output and other bodily and mental states, Lem here gives us an early example of causal-theoretical functionalism. This brings us to the next question, implicitly raised by Lem: Is functional identity sufficient for personal identity? Is Mr. Jones the same person as he was before replacing all his body parts? In court, Mr. Jones argues for his continued personhood by appealing to memories from the past. This suggests the view that his persistence as a person depends on some form of psychological continuity, and we will discuss how the case of Mr. Jones relates to views on personal identity. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: What Are Aesthetic Objects? Lines and Routes Preference and Personal Taste Is Proprioception an Aesthetic Sense? Beautiful Movements or Beautiful Routes? Summary Notes.

How do people survive under extreme conditions? Will selfish, non-cooperating free-rider types – the solo players – have the best chances of surviving? Or would cooperating, hard-working types – the team players – have higher chances? All morale put aside, it is interesting to know whether non-cooperation or cooperation pays off in a game characterized by scarcity and hard competition for survival. A study of people in such a Hobbesian state of nature can also teach us important lessons about social (...) dynamics in contemporary, prosperous societies. An interesting case of ‘The survival game’ can be found in Solzhenitsyn’s (1963 [1962]) self-biographical book, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, depicting life in a Soviet Gulag prison camp in Siberia January 1951. We use Solzhenitsyn’s work as evidence of the interplay between five player types among prisoners: Cooperative blind-riders (BRs), hard-riders (HRs) and tough-riders (TRs), i.e. the so-called ‘toilers’; non-cooperative easy-riders (ERs), looked upon by the toilers as ‘bastards’, ‘screws’ and ‘errand boys’; and finally Low-riders (LRs), comprising ‘goners’ and ‘jackals’. The main research question addresses the successfulness of the survival strategies of the five player types. Apart from a Multiple Player Approach (MPA) that may be seen as a further development of second-generation theory of collective action (Ostrom & Ahn, 2009), we apply Goffman’s (1959) dramaturgical theory on our case. Hence, we argue that impression management at two different ‘stages’ – the Brigade stage and the Camp stage – is crucial for survival for hard-riding as well as for easy-riding players, in particular strategic masking. Seeking to unite Goffman and game-theoretic MPA, our overall purpose is to make a theoretical contribution to “game-related sociology” (Swedberg, 2001). (shrink)

This paper argues that the account of teleology previously proposed by the authors is consistent with the physical determinism that is implicit across many of the sciences. We suggest that much of the current aversion to teleological thinking found in the sciences is rooted in debates that can be traced back to ancient natural science, which pitted mechanistic and deterministic theories against teleological ones. These debates saw a deterministic world as one where freedom and agency is impossible. And, because teleological (...) entities seem to be free to either reach their ends or not, it was assumed that they could not be deterministic. Mayr’s modern account of teleonomy adheres to this basic assumption. Yet, the seeming tension between teleology and determinism is illusory because freedom and agency do not, in fact, conflict with a deterministic world. To show this, we present a taxonomy of different types of freedom that we see as inherent in teleological systems. Then we show that our taxonomy of freedom, which is crucial to understanding teleology, shares many of the features of a philosophical position regarding free will that is known in the contemporary literature as ‘compatibilism’. This position maintains that an agent is free when the sources of its actions are internal, when the agent itself is the deterministic cause of those actions. Our view shows that freedom is not only indispensable to teleology, but also that, contrary to common intuitions, there is no conflict between teleology and causal determinism. (shrink)

Gunnar Olsson's tale follows an explorer from the oldest creation epics extant to the power struggles of today, an attempt to codify the taken-for-granted, a struggle with the invisible powers that make us so obedient and so predictable.

This paper poses a problem for traditional phylogenetics: The identity of organisms that reproduce through fission can be understood in several different ways. This prompts questions about how to differentiate parent organisms from their offspring, making vertical gene transfer unclear. Differentiating between parents and offspring stems from what I call the identity problem. How the problem is resolved has implications for phylogenetic groupings. If the identity of a particular asexual organism persists through fission, the vertical lineage on a phylogenetic tree (...) will split differently than if the identity of an organism does not survive the fission process. (shrink)

This study aims at discovering the essential constituents involved in the experiences of guilt and shame. Guilt concerns a subject’s action or omission of action and has a clear temporal unfolding entailing a moment in which the subject lives in a care-free way. Afterwards, this moment undergoes a reconstruction, in the moment of guilt, which constitutes the moment of negligence. The reconstruction is a comprehensive transformation of one’s attitude with respect to one’s ego; one’s action; the object of guilt and (...) the temporal-existential experience. The main constituents concerning shame are its anchorage in the situation to which it refers; its public side involving the experience of being perceptually objectified; the exclusion of social community; the bodily experience; the revelation of an undesired self; and the genesis of shame in terms of a history of frozen now-ness. The article ends with a comparison between guilt and shame. (shrink)

Since Tversky argued that similarity judgments violate the three metric axioms, asymmetrical similarity judgments have been particularly challenging for standard, geometric models of similarity, such as multidimensional scaling. According to Tversky, asymmetrical similarity judgments are driven by differences in salience or extent of knowledge. However, the notion of salience has been difficult to operationalize, especially for perceptual stimuli for which there are no apparent differences in extent of knowledge. To investigate similarity judgments between perceptual stimuli, across three experiments, we collected (...) data where individuals would rate the similarity of a pair of temporally separated color patches. We identified several violations of symmetry in the empirical results, which the conventional multidimensional scaling model cannot readily capture. Pothos et al. proposed a quantum geometric model of similarity to account for Tversky's findings. In the present work, we extended this model to a more general framework that can be fit to similarity judgments. We fitted several variants of quantum and multidimensional scaling models to the behavioral data and concluded in favor of the quantum approach. Without further modifications of the model, the best-fit quantum model additionally predicted violations of the triangle inequality that we observed in the same data. Overall, by offering a different form of geometric representation, the quantum geometric framework of similarity provides a viable alternative to multidimensional scaling for modeling similarity judgments, while still allowing a convenient, spatial illustration of similarity. (shrink)

The Bachmann-Howard structure, that is the segment of ordinal numbers below the proof theoretic ordinal of Kripke-Platek set theory with infinity, is fully characterized in terms of CARLSON’s approach to ordinal notation systems based on the notion of Σ1-elementarity.

Central cases of moral blame suggest that blame presupposes that its target deserves to feel guilty, and that if one is blameworthy to some degree, one deserves to feel guilt to a corresponding degree. This, some think, is what explains why being blameworthy for something presupposes having had a strong kind of control over it: only given such control is the suffering involved in feeling guilt deserved. This chapter argues that all this is wrong. As evidenced by a wider range (...) of cases, blame doesn’t presuppose that the target deserves to feel guilt and doesn’t necessarily aim at the target’s suffering in recognition of what they have done. On the constructive side, the chapter offers an explanation of why, in many cases of moral blameworthiness, the agent nevertheless does deserve to feel guilt. The explanation leans on a general account of moral and non-moral blame and blameworthiness and a version of the popular idea that moral blame targets agents’ objectionable quality of will. Given the latter idea, the morally blameworthy have harmed the standing of some person or value, giving rise to obligations to give correspondingly less relative weight to their own standing, and so, sometimes, to their own suffering. (shrink)

Metaethical absolutism is the view that moral concepts have non-relative satisfaction conditions that are constant across judges and their particular beliefs, attitudes, and cultural embedding. Two related premises underpin the argument for absolutism: that moral thinking and discourse display a number of features that are characteristically found in paradigmatically absolutist domains, and only partly in uncontroversially non-absolutist domains; and that the best way of making sense of these features is to assume that absolutism is correct. This chapter defends the prospect (...) of a non-absolutist explanation of these “absolutist” features, thus calling into question the second premise. The chapter proposes independently motivated general accounts of attributions of agreement, disagreement, correctness, and incorrectness that can explain both why absolutist domains display all “absolutist” features and why these non-absolutist domains display some, and thus provides preliminary reasons to think that these features of moral discourse can be given a non-absolutist explanation. (shrink)

The exact correspondence between ordinal notations derived from Skolem hull operators, which are classical in ordinal analysis, and descriptions of ordinals in terms of Σ1-elementarity, an approach developed by T.J. Carlson, is analyzed in full detail. The ordinal arithmetical tools needed for this purpose were developed in [G. Wilken, Ordinal arithmetic based on Skolem hulling, Annals of Pure and Applied Logic 145 130–161]. We show that the least ordinal κ such that κ<1∞ 19–77] and described below) is the proof theoretic (...) ordinal of the set-theoretic system , confirming a claim of Carlson. Moreover, we characterize the class of all ordinals κ such that κ<1∞ and provide an ordinal arithmetical analysis of Carlson’s entire structure in the style of [T.J. Carlson, Ordinal arithmetic and Σ1-elementarity, Archive for Mathematical Logic 38 449–460]. (shrink)

Buddhistiska ballader och larodikter. Bokförlaget Forum, Tegnérgatan 40, S-113 59 Stockholm.

The debate between Habermas and Rawls that took place in 1990s concerned how philosophy can justify the principles of justice under the conditions of pluralism of different and irreconcilable moral, philosophical, and religious doctrines. The context of the debate was mainly Rawls’ Political Liberalism and Habermas’ Between Facts and Norms as well. This paper argues that a wider geo-cultural perspective is pertinent in order to better comprehend the different justification strategies in Habermas and Rawls, concerning the principle of justice. This (...) goes for their different geo-cultural experiences and presuppositions – in short, Rawls living in a self-confident North America in the post-war period versus Habermas’ German experience of civilization breakdown. However, it might also be relevant for the assessment of these two strategies in our time, faced with new kinds of geo-political differences and conflicts. (shrink)

Taking up ordinal notations derived from Skolem hull operators familiar in the field of infinitary proof theory we develop a toolkit of ordinal arithmetic that generally applies whenever ordinal structures are analyzed whose combinatorial complexity does not exceed the strength of the system of set theory. The original purpose of doing so was inspired by the analysis of ordinal structures based on elementarity invented by T.J. Carlson, see [T.J. Carlson, Elementary patterns of resemblance, Annals of Pure and Applied Logic 108 (...) 19–77], [G. Wilken, Σ1-Elementarity and Skolem hull operators, Annals of Pure and Applied Logic 145 162–175], and [G. Wilken, Assignment of ordinals to patterns of resemblance, The Journal of Symbolic Logic ]. Within the arithmetical context laid bare in this work, the “-numbers” play a role analogous to the role epsilon numbers play in the ordinal arithmetic based on the notion of Cantor normal form. (shrink)

Biologists are nearing the creation of the first fully synthetic eukaryotic genome. Does this mean that we still soon be able to create genomes that are parts of an existing genetic lineage? If so, it might be possible to bring back extinct species. But do genomes that are synthetically assembled, no matter how similar they are to native genomes, really belong to the genetic lineage on which they were modelled? This article will argue that they are situated within the same (...) genetic lineage. To see why requires closely examining whether material overlap between parents and offspring is a necessary feature of biological reproduction. The processes used to create synthetic genomes shows that these processes are a form of scaffolded reproduction because they use external machinery and take ownership of the material parts used to create synthetic genomes. Closely examining these processes also reveals, surprisingly, that ‘synthetic reproduction’ can take place between entities that don’t participate in the same biological lineages. 1Introduction2The Argument for Lineage-less Genomes3Synthetic Eukaryotic Chromosomes and Material Overlap4Biological Reproduction, Material, and Information5Synthetic Reproductive Processes and Their Implications. (shrink)

Recent work in experimental philosophy shows that folk intuitions about moral responsibility are sensitive to a surprising variety of factors. Whether people take agents to be responsible for their actions in deterministic scenarios depends on whether the deterministic laws are couched in neurological or psychological terms (Nahmias et. al. 2007), on whether actions are described abstractly or concretely, and on how serious moral transgression they seem to represent (Nichols & Knobe 2007). Finally, people are more inclined to hold an agent (...) responsible for bringing about bad than for bringing about good side effects that the agent is indifferent about (Knobe 2003). Elsewhere, we have presented an analysis of the everyday concept of moral responsibility that provides a unified explanation of paradigmatic cases of moral responsibility, and accounts for the force of both typical excuses and the most influential skeptical arguments against moral responsibility or for incompatibilism. In this article, we suggest that it also explains the divergent and apparently incoherent set of intuitions revealed by these new studies. If our hypothesis is correct, the surprising variety of judgments stems from a unified concept of moral responsibility. -Knobe, J. (2003) Intentional Action and Side Effects in Ordinary Language. Analysis 63, pp.190–93. -Nahmias, E.; Coates, J.; Kvaran. T. (2007) Free will, moral responsibility, and mechanism: experiments on folk intuitions. Midwest studies in Philosophy XXXI -Nichols, S.; Knobe, J. (2007) Moral responsibility and determinism: the cognitive science of folk intuitions, Noûs 41:4, 663-685. (shrink)

International scientific collaboration has increased both in volume and importance. In this article, the authors study the interpretation of macro-level data on international co authorship collaboration. They address such questions as how one might explain country- to-country differences in the rates of international coauthorship, networks of interna tional scientific collaboration among countries, and patterns of international collaboration in scientific fields. Attention is drawn to cognitive, social, historical, geopolitical, and economic factors as potential determinants of the observed patterns. They present a (...) methodology that gives one a measure, independent of size, of countries'propensities to collaborate internationally. (shrink)

Horkheimer/Adornos im kalifornischen Exil verfasste Dialektik der Aufklärung untersucht das Scheitern menschlicher Befreiung und die Errichtung neuer Herrschaftsformen. Obgleich ein Schlüsseltext der philosophischen Zeitdiagnose, gab es bislang keinen Kommentar zu ihr. Der hier vorgelegte kooperative Kommentar geht der Dialektik der Aufklärung in zwei Durchgängen nach. Ein erster Durchgang kommentiert die einzelnen Abschnitte des Buches; ein zweiter Durchgang verfolgt Koordinaten seines theoretischen Horizonts. Abschließend gelangt die Wirkungsgeschichte des Textes zur Darstellung. Ein Gravitationstext der kritischen Theorie unserer Zeit findet damit erstmals eine (...) kommentierende Auslegung. (shrink)

People rely on reason to think about and navigate the abstract world of human relations in much the same way they rely on maps to study and traverse the physical world. Starting from that simple observation, renowned geographer Gunnar Olsson offers in Abysmal an astonishingly erudite critique of the way human thought and action have become deeply immersed in the rhetoric of cartography and how this cartographic reasoning allows the powerful to map out other people’s lives. A spectacular reading (...) of Western philosophy, religion, and mythology that draws on early maps and atlases, Plato, Kant, and Wittgenstein, Thomas Pynchon, Gilgamesh , and Marcel Duchamp, Abysmal is itself a minimalist guide to the terrain of Western culture. Olsson roams widely but always returns to the problems inherent in reason, to question the outdated assumptions and fixed ideas that thinking cartographically entails. A work of ambition, scope, and sharp wit, Abysmal will appeal to an eclectic audience—to geographers and cartographers, but also to anyone interested in the history of ideas, culture, and art. (shrink)