Hume notoriously pursues a constructive science of human nature in the Treatise while raising serious skeptical doubts about that project and leaving them apparently unanswered. On the perspectivalist reading, Hume endorses multiple incommensurable epistemic perspectives in the Treatise. This reading faces two significant objections: that it renders Hume’s epistemology inconsistent (or at least highly incoherent) and that it is ad hoc. In this paper, I propose a perspectivalist account of epistemic justification in the Treatise that addresses, to a significant degree, (...) these concerns. Hume has available to him an account – what I will call epistemic dispositionalism – that is internally consistent, allows for epistemic continuity between perspectives, and is thoroughly grounded in his naturalism. (shrink)

The “public charge” rule is a long-standing immigration policy that seeks to determine the likelihood that a prospective immigrant will become dependent on the government for subsistence. When the Trump administration sought to expand the criteria that would count against an applicant for permanent residency to include public benefits historically excluded from the calculation, thousands of commenters wrote to oppose or support the proposed changes. This paper explores the moral and practical reasons commenters provided for their position on the public (...) charge rule and considers the value of the public comment process for immigration, health, and social policy. (shrink)

Despite acknowledgment that performance failure among new salespeople is a prevalent issue for organizations, researchers do not fully understand the consequences of repetitive periods of failure on new salespeople’s unethical selling behaviors. Further, little is known about how a sales force’s reward structure and managerial attempts to intervene following failure affect new salespeople’s behavior. Combining an experiment with longitudinal growth models, we show that repetitive periods of failure increase unethical behaviors, and interventions intended to remind the salesperson to behave in (...) the customer’s best interests attenuate this effect under a non-contingent reward structure. However, counter to managerial assumptions, under a contingent reward structure these customer-oriented interventions actually backfire by amplifying the original relationship between repetitive failure and unethical behaviors. The results have potentially important managerial implications for those who manage new salespeople learning how to sell or during other failure-prone periods. (shrink)

Sentence comprehension involves maintaining and continuously integrating linguistic information and, thus, makes demands on working memory. Past research has demonstrated that semantic WM, but not phonological WM, is critical for integrating word meanings across some distance and resolving semantic interference in sentence comprehension. Here, we examined the relation between phonological and semantic WM and the comprehension of center-embedded relative clause sentences, often argued to make heavy demands on WM. Additionally, we examined the relation between phonological and semantic WM and the (...) comprehension of transitive and dative active and passive sentences, which may also draw on WM resources depending on the number of propositions that must be maintained and the difficulty of processing passive clauses. In a large sample of individuals with aphasia, we assessed whether comprehension performance on more complex vs. simpler active-passive or embedded relative clause sentences would be predicted by semantic but not phonological WM when controlling for single word comprehension. For performance on the active-passive comprehension task, we found that semantic WM, but not phonological WM, predicted comprehension of dative sentences when controlling for comprehension of transitive sentences. We also found that phonological WM, but not semantic WM, predicted mean comprehension for reversible active-passive sentences when controlling for trials with lexical distractors. On the relative clause comprehension task, consistent with prior results, we found that semantic WM, but not phonological WM, predicted comprehension of object relative clause sentences and relative clause sentences with a passive construction. However, both phonological WM and semantic WM predicted mean comprehension across all relative clause types for reversible trials when controlling for trials with lexical distractors. While we found evidence of semantic WM’s role in comprehension, we also observed unpredicted relations between phonological WM and comprehension in some conditions. Post-hoc analyses provided preliminary evidence that phonological WM maintains a backup phonological representation of the sentence that may be accessed when sentence comprehension processing is less efficient. Future work should investigate possible roles that phonological WM may play across sentence types. (shrink)

Im "System der Sittenlehre" fand Fichtes praktische Philosophie im direkten Anschluß an die Wissenschaftslehre von 1794 ihre vollendete Gestalt. Fichtes theoretischer Ansatz bietet den bis heute einzigen methodisch konsistenten Versuch einer Letztbegründung des Sollens als Beweis der sittlichen Freiheit des Einzelnen.

Recent commentators have contended that Hume’s skeptical arguments in the Treatise lead him to eschew a traditional epistemic account of justification in favor of a pragmatic account. While this view resolves some textual puzzles, others arise. Instead, Hume should be read as endorsing two completely distinct standards of doxastic normativity: the epistemic and the pragmatic. The epistemic grants beliefs philosophical approval, while the pragmatic circumscribes the domain of investigation to prevent reasoning that leads to extreme skepticism. I argue that the (...) mixed account of justification makes better sense of key passages in the Treatise than either constituent can on its own. One notable virtue of this account is that it explains how Hume can hold that the vulgar can have all things considered warrant. (shrink)

In this timely book L.W. Sumner addresses these issues within the wider context of palliative care for patients in the dying process.

In [1] Todorov has shown by means of axiomatic set theory that there exists a nonstandard function Δ: *ℝn → * ℂ such that for all continuous functions φ: ℝn → ℂ, equation image.Here *ℝ and *ℂ are the set of the nonstandard real numbers and the set of the nonstandard complex numbers, respectively, and *φ: *ℝn → *ℂ is the nonstandard extension of φ In the present note we want to prove an analogous theorem by predicative means only.

The present paper is concerned with a ramified type theory (cf. (Lorenzen 1955), (Russell), (Schütte), (Weyl), e.g.,) in a cumulative version. §0 deals with reasoning in first order languages. is introduced as a first order set.

Few individuals are constitutionally incapable of showing concern for others at an early age, and malleability is possible. Individual variations will be best understood through study of the representational prerequisites of empathy in close conjunction with caregiving environments and affective underpinnings.

ZusammenfassungIn der zeitgenössischen metaethischen Literatur gibt es eine gängige Unterscheidung zwischen zwei Arten von Sollen: dem Sollen substanzieller normativer Gründe und dem Sollen struktureller Forderungen oder Prinzipien der Rationalität. Diese Unterscheidung zwischen Gründesollen und rationalem Sollen führt zur Frage, wie beide zusammenhängen. Eine weit verbreitete Theorie behauptet, dass die Normativität des rationalen Sollens durch die Normativität des Gründesollens zu erklären ist. Ich argumentiere dafür, dass keine Variante dieser Theorie des Primats normativer Gründe in der Lage ist, die Normativität des rationalen (...) Sollens befriedigend zu erklären. Aus meiner Kritik leite ich zwei Adäquatheitsbedingungen ab, die eine Theorie der Normativität der Rationalität einholen muss. Im letzten Teil skizziere ich eine alternative Theorie, deren grundlegender Gedanke ist, dass Rationalitätsforderungen als konstitutive Normen vernünftiger Aktivität zu verstehen sind. Wie ich zeigen werde, verspricht sie beide Adäquatheitsbedingungen einzuholen. (shrink)