This co-edited volume compares Chinese and Western experiences of engineering, technology, and development. In doing so, it builds a bridge between the East and West and advances a dialogue in the philosophy of engineering. Divided into three parts, the book starts with studies on epistemological and ontological issues, with a special focus on engineering design, creativity, management, feasibility, and sustainability. Part II considers relationships between the history and philosophy of engineering, and includes a general argument for the necessity of dialogue (...) between history and philosophy. It continues with a general introduction to traditional Chinese attitudes toward engineering and technology, and philosophical case studies of the Chinese steel industry, railroads, and cybernetics in the Soviet Union. Part III focuses on engineering, ethics, and society, with chapters on engineering education and practice in China and the West. The book’s analyses of the interactions of science, engineering, ethics, politics, and policy in different societal contexts are of special interest. The volume as a whole marks a new stage in the emergence of the philosophy of engineering as a new regionalization of philosophy. This carefully edited interdisciplinary volume grew out of an international conference on the philosophy of engineering hosted by the University of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing. It includes 30 contributions by leading philosophers, social scientists, and engineers from Australia, China, Europe, and the United States. (shrink)

The starting point of the present study is the interpretation of intuitionistic linear logic in Petri nets proposed by U. Engberg and G. Winskel. We show that several categories of order algebras provide equivalent interpretations of this logic, and identify the category of the so called strongly coherent quantales arising in these interpretations. The equivalence of the interpretations is intimately related to the categorical facts that the aforementioned categories are connected with each other via adjunctions, and the compositions of (...) the connecting functors with co-domain the category of strongly coherent quantales are dense. In particular, each quantale canonically induces a Petri net, and this association gives rise to an adjunction between the category of quantales and a category whose objects are all Petri nets. (shrink)

This volume presents the proceedings of the workshop CSL '91 (Computer Science Logic) held at the University of Berne, Switzerland, October 7-11, 1991. This was the fifth in a series of annual workshops on computer sciencelogic (the first four are recorded in LNCS volumes 329, 385, 440, and 533). The volume contains 33 invited and selected papers on a variety of logical topics in computer science, including abstract datatypes, bounded theories, complexity results, cut elimination, denotational semantics, infinitary queries, Kleene algebra (...) with recursion, minimal proofs, normal forms in infinite-valued logic, ordinal processes, persistent Petri nets, plausibility logic, program synthesis systems, quantifier hierarchies, semantics of modularization, stable logic, term rewriting systems, termination of logic programs, transitive closure logic, variants of resolution, and many others. (shrink)

Written in the 1960s, TRUTH AND METHOD is Gadamer's magnum opus.

Émile Durkheim remains one of the most controversial, and deeply misunderstood, classics of social theory. His work differs from the dominant version of sociology that has essentially accepted the modernist self-description of contemporary societies; and it contradicts the individualism that has come to dominate the social sciences. For everybody who is interested in constructing theoretical alternatives to this individualism, Durkheim's sociology can be a useful inspiration - not only because of the solutions it suggests, but already because of the questions (...) it asks. Making use of the theoretical possibilities offered by the Durkheimian tradition, however, requires going beyond the familiar appropriations. The Oxford Handbook of Émile Durkheim takes stock of the different recent debates on Durkheimian sociology, and makes them accessible to a wide audience spanning various disciplines; this includes crucial debates that, due to language barriers, are not easily accessible for an English-reading public. The handbook's chapters elucidate the controversial key concepts of Durkheimian sociology; situate them within the contemporary political and theoretical debates they were originally responding to; offer surveys of empirical research that uses Durkheimian concepts (on topics that were already central for Durkheim's own work as well as on topics that Durkheim hardly touched upon), thus demonstrating the possibilities of a Durkheimian sociology; bring out the divergent, and competing, ways in which Durkheim's ideas have been appropriated and reformulated within more recent theoretical developments in the social sciences. In doing so, this volume is an important resource for all scholars and students looking to understand Durkheimian sociology. (shrink)

_Christianity and the Roots of Morality_ combines philosophical, early Christian and empirical studies to cast light on the role of religion, especially Christianity, in morality, pro-social behavior and altruism.

This paper argues that the proponents of epistemological scientism must take some stand on scientific methodology. The supporters of scientism cannot simply defer to the social organisation of science because the social processes themselves must meet some methodological criteria. Among such criteria is epistemic evaluability, which demands intersubjective access to reasons. We derive twelve theses outlining some implications of epistemic evaluability. Evaluability can support weak and broad variants of epistemological scientism, which state that sciences, broadly construed, are the best sources (...) of knowledge or some other epistemic goods. Since humanities and social sciences produce epistemically evaluable results, narrow types of scientism that take only natural sciences as sources of knowledge require additional argumentation in their support. Strong scientism, which takes sciences as the only source of knowledge, also needs to appeal to some further principles since evaluability is not an all-or-nothing affair. (shrink)

One of the leading legal philosophers of this century, Kelsen published this short treatise in 1934, when the neo-Kantian influence on his work was at its zenith. An earlier, "constructivist" phase had been displaced by his effort to provide something approximating a neo-Kantian foundation for his theory. If this second phase represents the Pure Theory of Law in its most characteristic form, then the present treatise may well be its central text. And of Kelsen's many statements of the Pure Theory, (...) this one is surely the most accessible. Topics covered include the legal norm and Kelsen's normativity thesis, law and morality, the role of ideology, the concept of the legal person, legal interpretation, the identity of law and state, and the theory of international law. Among the appendices is an annotated bibliography of secondary literature on Kelsen. (shrink)

Comparisons of rival explanations or theories often involve vague appeals to explanatory power. In this paper, we dissect this metaphor by distinguishing between different dimensions of the goodness of an explanation: non-sensitivity, cognitive salience, precision, factual accuracy and degree of integration. These dimensions are partially independent and often come into conflict. Our main contribution is to go beyond simple stipulation or description by explicating why these factors are taken to be explanatory virtues. We accomplish this by using the contrastive-counterfactual approach (...) to explanation and the view of understanding as an inferential ability. By combining these perspectives, we show how the explanatory power of an explanation in a given dimension can be assessed by showing the range of answers it provides to what-if-things-had-been-different questions and the theoretical and pragmatic importance of these questions. Our account also explains intuitions linking explanation to unification or to exhibition of a mechanism. (shrink)

Most research on cross-cultural emotion recognition has focused on facial expressions. To integrate the body of evidence on vocal expression, we present a meta-analysis of 37 cross-cultural studies...

This paper discusses the epistemic import of highly abstract and simplified theoretical models using Thomas Schelling’s checkerboard model as an example. We argue that the epistemic contribution of theoretical models can be better understood in the context of a cluster of models relevant to the explanatory task at hand. The central claim of the paper is that theoretical models make better sense in the context of a menu of possible explanations. In order to justify this claim, we introduce a distinction (...) between causal scenarios and causal mechanism schemes. These conceptual tools help us to articulate the basis for modelers’ intuitive confidence that their models make an important epistemic contribution. By focusing on the role of the menu of possible explanations in the evaluation of explanatory hypotheses, it is possible to understand how a causal mechanism scheme can improve our explanatory understanding even in cases where it does not describe the actual cause of a particular phenomenon. (shrink)

In this chapter we examine Moti Mizrahi’s claim that philosophers’ opposition of scientism is founded on their worry that scientism poses “a threat to the soul or essence of philosophy as an a priori discipline”. We find Mizrahi’s methodology for testing this thesis wanting. We offer an alternative hypothesis for the increased resistance of scientism: the antipathy started as a reaction to the New Atheist movement. We also consider two varieties of weak scientism, narrow and broad, and argue that narrow (...) versions of scientism draw unnatural and unfounded distinctions within science. Mizrahi belongs somewhere between these two types, but he commits the same mistakes as proponents of the narrow variety. We demonstrate that Mizrahi’s defence of weak scientism is problematic, once again, due to methodological reasons. As an alternative, we propose that weak scientism should be based on epistemic opportunism. Epistemic opportunism explains the success of science with scientists’ willingness to adopt any methods that demonstrably work. We also show how opportunistic scientism can avoid charges of triviality. (shrink)

This article compares causal and constitutive explanation. While scientific inquiry usually addresses both causal and constitutive questions, making the distinction is crucial for a detailed understanding of scientific questions and their interrelations. These explanations have different kinds of explananda and they track different sorts of dependencies. Constitutive explanations do not address events or behaviors, but causal capacities. While there are some interesting relations between building and causal manipulation, causation and constitution are not to be confused. Constitution is a synchronous and (...) asymmetric relation between relata that cannot be conceived as independent existences. However, despite their metaphysical differences, the same key ideas about explanation largely apply to both. Causal and constitutive explanations face similar challenges (such as the problems of relevance and explanatory regress) and both are in the business of mapping networks of counterfactual dependence—i.e. mechanisms—although the relevant counterfactuals are of a different sort. In the final section the issue of developmental explanation is discussed. It is argued that developmental explanations deserve their own place in taxonomy of explanations, although ultimately developmental dependencies can be analyzed as combinations of causal and constitutive dependencies. Hence, causal and constitutive explanation are distinct, but not always completely separate forms of explanation. (shrink)

This study explored a dimensional approach to vocal expression of emotion. Actors vocally portrayed emotions (anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness) with weak and strong emotion intensity. Listeners (30 university students and 6 speech experts) rated each portrayal on four emotion dimensions (activation, valence, potency, emotion intensity). The portrayals were also acoustically analysed with respect to 20 vocal cues (e.g., speech rate, voice intensity, fundamental frequency, spectral energy distribution). The results showed that: (a) there were distinct patterns of ratings of activation, (...) valence, and potency for the different emotions; (b) all four emotion dimensions were correlated with several vocal cues; (c) listeners' ratings could be successfully predicted from the vocal cues for all dimensions except valence; and (d) the intensity dimension was positively correlated with the activation dimension in the listeners' ratings. (shrink)

Journal Name: SATS Issue: Ahead of print.

In this chapter I will employ a well-known scientific research heuristic that studies how something works by focusing on circumstances in which it does not work. Rather than trying to describe what scientific understanding would ideally look like, I will try to learn something about it by observing mundane cases where understanding is partly illusory. My main thesis is that scientists are prone to the illusion of depth of understanding (IDU), and as a consequence they sometimes overestimate the detail, coherence, (...) and depth of their understanding. I will analyze the notion of understanding and its relation to a sense of understanding. In order to make plausible the claim that these are often disconnected, I will describe an interesting series of psychological experiments by Frank Keil and his coauthors that suggests that ordinary people routinely overestimate the depth of their understanding. en I will argue that we should take seriously the possibility that scientific cognition is also aðected by IDU and spell out some possible causes of explanatory illusions in science. I will conclude this chapter by discussing how scientific explanatory practices could be improved and how the philosophy of science might be able to contribute to this process. (shrink)

This work consists of two parts. Part I will be a contribution to a philo- sophical discussion of the nature of causal explanation. It will present my contrastive counterfactual theory of causal explanation and show how it can be used to deal with a number of problems facing theories of causal explanation. Part II is a contribution to a discussion of the na- ture of interest explanation in social studies of science. The aim is to help to resolve some controversies (...) concerning interest explanation by explicating the concept of interest and its explanatory uses by using the account of explanation developed in Part I. (shrink)

This article discusses agent-based simulation (ABS) as a tool of sociological understanding. I argue that agent-based simulations can play an important role in the expansion of explanatory understanding in the social sciences. The argument is based on an inferential account of understanding (Ylikoski 2009, Ylikoski & Kuorikoski 2010), according to which computer simulations increase our explanatory understanding by expanding our ability to make what-if inferences about social processes and by making these inferences more reliable. The inferential account also suggests a (...) number of ways in which the use of simulation methodology might give rise to illusory understanding. The structure of the article is as .. (shrink)

Modeling is a relatively new topic in biblical and related subjects—it was first introduced in the 1970s—and it is controversial because the application of social-scientific models raises the difficult question of the cultural gap between the present societies, where the models are usually developed, and the ancient cultural context to which the models are applied.Because biblical and related studies may not belong to the most familiar scholarly fields of the readers of this journal, I first sketch an overall picture of (...) the development of the discipline and its main methods (Section 2). The subsequent sections summarize the arguments presented for and against modeling in biblical studies (Section 3), and discuss .. (shrink)

is chapter takes a fresh look at micro-macro relations in the social sciences from the point of view of the mechanistic account of explanation. Traditionally, micro- macro issues have been assimilated to the problem of methodological individualism. It is not my intention to resurrect this notoriously unfruitful controversy. On the contrary, the main thrust of this chapter is to show that the cul-de-sac of that debate can be avoided if we give up some of its presuppositions. The debate about methodological (...) individualism is based on assumptions about explanation, and once we change those assumptions, the whole argumenta- tive landscape changes. (shrink)

The general topic of my philosophical dissertation is phenomenological ontology of breathing. I do not investigate the phenomenon of breathing as a natural scientific problem, but as a philosophical question. Within our tradition, breathing has been normally understood as a mechanistic-materialistic physiological life-sustaining process of gas exchange and cellular respiration which does not really seem to have any essential connection to human being’s spiritual, mental or philosophical capacities. On the contrary to this natural scientific view, I argue that breathing can (...) be understood as a philosophical question that has phenomenological, experiential, ontological, spiritual, bodily, mental, poetic, elemental, ethical, voluntary and mystical dimensions. My investigation conceptualizes breathing in the first place as a question of phenomenological ontology. Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenologico-ontological method of interrogation of the lived body’s experiential openness to the world and Being provides the most fundamental point of departure in this dissertation. Merleau-Ponty emphasized in his investigations the lived body’s perceptual openness to the world and Being. He argued famously for the primacy of perception. His thesis of the primacy of perception means that perception as the perceptual openness to the world and Being is the foundation which is always presupposed by all the other levels of our existence and being-in-the-world. In this dissertation, I challenge this idea of the primacy of perception with Merleau-Ponty’s own remarks about breathing. I argue that in his own remarks about breathing, he implicitly points toward a level which is even more fundamental than the primacy of perception. In this dissertation, this level of our being-in-the-world I call the primacy of breathing. Breathing as the lived body’s respiratory openness to the world and Being is now understood as the foundation which is always presupposed by all the other dimensions of our being-in-the-world. These dimensions are, for example, our theoretical, practical, social and perceptual ways of relating with the world. If the idea of the primacy of breathing is taken seriously, it means that all the questions of philosophy could be rethought, reexamined and re-experienced within the fundamental atmosphere of respiratory openness to the world and Being. In this dissertation, I initially try to rethink philosophy as a new philosophy of breathing. This new philosophy of breathing would be phenomenological ontology of breathing. The bases of this new phenomenological ontology of breathing are Merleau-Ponty’s remarks about breathing. My task is to explicate and interpret them with the help of Merleau- Ponty’s own phenomenological ontology. In my task of beginning philosophy anew as philosophy of breathing or as respiratory philosophy, I will also use the ideas of Martin Heidegger, Gaston Bachelard, Paul Claudel, Luce Irigaray, Edmund Husserl and David Kleinberg-Levin. My dissertation is divided into two main sections. In Section One, I construct within the framework of phenomenological ontology a new notion of breathing as the primacy of breathing. In Section Two, I develop a phenomenological method that I call the method of ontologico-respiratory reduction. This method will lead us back to the primacy of breathing. (shrink)

This book studies the phenomenological ontology of breathing. It investigates breathing and air as a question of phenomenological philosophy and looks at phenomenological questions concerning respiratory methodology, ontological experience of respiration, respiratory spirituality and respiratory embodiment. Drawing on the ideas of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Gaston Bachelard, Martin Heidegger, Edmund Husserl, Luce Irigaray and David Kleinberg-Levin, the book argues for the ontological primacy of breathing and develops a new principle of philosophy that the author calls "Silence of Breath, Abyss/Yawn of Air". It (...) asserts that breathing is not a thing- or person-oriented relation, but perpetual communication with the immense elemental atmosphere of open and free air. This new phenomenological method of breathing offers readers a chance to begin to wonder, rethink, re-experience and reimagine all questions of life in an innovative and creative way as aerial and respiratory questions of life. Part of the Routledge Critical Perspectives on Breath and Breathing series, the book breaks new ground in phenomenology and phenomenological ontology by offering a decisive and insightful treatment of breath. It will be indispensable for students and researchers of philosophy, phenomenology, and ontology. It will also be of special interest to Merleau-Ponty scholars as it investigates uncharted dimensions of Merleau-Ponty's philosophy. (shrink)

Lectio praecursoria 28.9.2018: Hengitys on hyvin harvinainen teema filosofiassa. Aiemmin hengitystä filosofisena kysymyksenä ovat tarkastelleet mm. Luce Irigaray ja David Kleinberg-Levin. Väitöskirjatutkimuksessani Phenomenological Ontology of Breathing tutkin fenomenologisesti hengityksen filosofiaa, so. miten hengittäminen voisi olla filosofinen kysymys ja miten eletty kokemus hengityksestä voisi mahdollisesti avata ja jäsentää meille aivan uuden tavan tehdä filosofiaa. Väitöskirjani lähtökohtana on aiemmin tutkimattomat Maurice Merleau-Pontyn fenomenologiset huomiot hengityksestä. Näiden Merleau-Pontyn hengitystä koskevien huomioiden pohjalta pyrin jäsentämään uuden fenomenologisen käsityksen hengityksestä. Tämä uusi fenomenologinen käsitys hengityksestä ei (...) perustu fysiologis-luonnontieteelliseen näkemykseen hengityksestä kaasujen vaihteluna ja soluhengityksenä, vaan kokemukselliseen ymmärrykseen hengityksestä kehollisena maailmasuhteena. Hengittävä maailmasuhde on hengittävän kehon ja avoimen ja näkymättömän ilmapiirin, so. ilman atmosfäärin, välistä vuorovaikutusta. Tähän uuteen kokemukselliseen hengitys-käsitykseen perustuen pohdin, miten filosofia voitaisiin mahdollisesti aloittaa uudelleen hengityksen filosofia. Tämä uusi filosofia ei olisi olio- tai persoonaorientoitunut, vaan ilmapiiriorientoitunut filosofia. Merleau-Pontyn fenomenologisen filosofian lisäksi erityisesti Gaston Bachelardin elementaalinen ajattelu ilmasta ja ilman runoilijoista on avittanut väitöskirjatutkimustani tähän uuteen filosofiseen orientaatioon. Bachelardin tarkastelemat ilman runoilijat runoudessaan inspiroituneesti seuraavat ja kuuntelevat kosmista hengitystä pyrkien ilmaisemaan sanoin sen hiljaista viisautta. Väitöskirjassani pyrin kuuntelemaan fenomenologisen filosofian kontekstissa ilman runoilijoiden inspiroimana tätä kosmis-elementaalisen hengittävän ilman hiljaista viisautta. Pyrkimykseni synnyttää tämä uusi hengityksen filosofia kulkee käsi kädessä Irigarayn toiveen kanssa uudesta hengityksen kulttuurin kultivoimisesta. (shrink)

We compare Guala’s unified theory of institutions with that of Searle and Greif. We show that unification can be many things and it may be associated with diverse explanatory goals. We also highlight some of the important shortcomings of Guala’s account: it does not capture all social institutions, its ability to bridge social ontology and game theory is based on a problematic interpretation of the type-token distinction, and its ability to make social ontology useful for social sciences is hindered by (...) Guala’s interpretation of social institution types as social kinds akin to natural kinds. (shrink)

Generalization from a case study is a perennial issue in the methodology of the social sciences. The case study is one of the most important research designs in many social scientific fields, but no shared understanding exists of the epistemic import of case studies. This article suggests that the idea of mechanism-based theorizing provides a fruitful basis for understanding how case studies contribute to a general understanding of social phenomena. This approach is illustrated with a re- construction of Espeland and (...) Sauder's case study of the effects of rankings on US legal education. On the basis of the reconstruction, it is argued that, at least with respect to sociology, the idea of mechanism-based theorizing captures many of the generalizable elements of case studies. (shrink)

We consider arbitrary stratified languages. We study structures which satisfy the same stratified sentences and we obtain an extension of Keisler's Isomorphism Theorem to this situation. Then we consider operations which are definable by a stratified formula and modify the `type' of their argument by one; we prove that for such an operation F the sentence c = F(c) and the scheme $\varphi(c) \leftrightarrow \varphi(F(c))$ , where φ(x) varies among all the stratified formulas with no variable other than x free, (...) imply the same stratified {c}-sentences. (shrink)

Political Correctness ist nicht nur Reizthema und Schlagwort medialer Debatten, sondern auch in Alltagskommunikation oft Ausloser hitziger Debatten um sprachliche Diskriminierung. Doch wie positionieren sich eigentlich Sprachprofis zu diesem Thema, was rat das Worterbuch? Der Einfluss von Diskursen auf Worterbucher ist zwar in der Forschung unstrittig; eine umfassende Untersuchung zur Wirkung eines bestimmten zeitgenossischen Phanomens auf einen abgeschlossenen Wortschatzbereich existierte jedoch bislang nicht. Dieser Lucke widmet sich die Autorin, die den uber eine Korpusanalyse gewonnenen Wortschatz der Political Correctness aus den (...) ersten zehn Jahren (1990-2000) des Diskurses in den ersten sechs Auflagen (1983-2006) des Duden - Universalworterbuchs untersucht. Erstmals wird hier die Diskurslexik der Political Correctness der 1990er Jahre greifbar gemacht. Daruber hinaus werden vorhandene lexikographische Strategien beschrieben sowie deren Defizite im Umgang mit problematischer Lexik aufgedeckt. Die Arbeit zeigt, dass das Ringen um einen angemessenen Sprachgebrauch, die Vermeidung von Pejorisierung feste Bestandteile des Sprachhandelns darstellen, dem sich Worterbucher mit deskriptivem oder normativem Anspruch zu stellen haben. (shrink)

This paper challenges the first Gettier counterexample to the tripartite account of knowledge. Noting that 'the man who will get the job' is a description and invoking Donnellan's distinction between their 'referential' and 'attributive' uses, I argue that Smith does not actually believe that the man who will get the job has ten coins in his pocket. Smith's ignorance about who will get the job shows that the belief cannot be understood referentially, his ignorance of the coins in his pocket (...) shows that it cannot be understood attributively. An explanation for why Smith appeared to have justified true belief is given by distinguishing between 'belief' and 'belief in truth'. Smith believes the sentence 'the man who will get the job has ten coins in his pocket' to be true (he mistakenly believes that Jones will get the job, of whom he knows that he has ten coins in his pocket) (hence his 'belief'), the sentence is true (hence 'truth'), and he has sufficient reason to assent to it (hence his 'justification'). But he does not believe the proposition expressed. Hence he does not know it either. (shrink)

In this paper I will discuss the idea of the invisible hand in the connection of its recent use in the philosophy of science. It has been invoked by some philosophers of science with a naturalistic bent as a part of their account of science. Some have made explicit references to the idea (Hull, 1988a) and others have only presupposed it (Giere, 1988; Goldman, 1991; Kitcher, 1993). I will argue that there are some problematic features in the way the idea (...) of the invisible hand isused inthese accounts. I will first discuss some general properties of the invisible hand explanations and then present some motives for its use in the theory of science. Then I will show how one particular philosopher of science, David Hull, uses the idea. I will use Hull's account as a practising target and offer some comments and criticism in order to promote more disciplined use of this model of explanation in science studies. (shrink)