Bloom's eloquent and comprehensive treatment of early word learning holds that social intention is foundational for language development. While we generally support his thesis, we call into question two of his proposals: (1) that attention to social information in the environment implies social intent, and (2) that infants are sensitive to social intent at the very beginnings of word learning.

Racism is a key driver of the social, political, and economic injustices that cause and maintain health inequities. Over centuries and across continents, racism has become deeply ingrained within societies. Therefore, we believe that it is our professional and ethical obligation as scientists, and public health scholars specifically, to address racism head on in order to ameliorate racialized health disparities. We argue that greater focus is needed on addressing racism rather than race and how race is described or defined. We (...) offer input from public health scholarship to help bioethicists and other scientists contribute to addressing racism. To do so effectively and comprehensively, public health scholars, bioethicists, and other scientists should work together to identify and implement equity-driven collaborations to eliminate the deleterious effects of racism on individuals, families, and communities. (shrink)

With no statutory definition of death, the accepted medical definition relies on brain stem death criteria as a definitive measure of diagnosing death. However, the use of brain stem death criteria in this way is precarious and causes widespread confusion amongst both medical and lay communities. Through critical analysis, this paper considers the insufficiencies of brain stem death. It concludes that brain stem death cannot be successfully equated with either biological death or the loss of integrated bodily function. The overemphasis (...) of the brain-stem and its consequences leaves the criteria open to significant philosophical critique. Further, in some circumstances, the use of brain stem death criteria causes substantial emotional conflict for families and relatives. Accordingly, a more holistic and comprehensive definition of death is required. (shrink)

Can groups of people possess epistemic virtues? There has been some attention to this question in recent years in social epistemology and ethics. Interestingly, most defenses and criticisms of collective virtues so far have focused on proving or disproving that groups can have collective versions of individual virtues. Trying to or disprove that a group can have a good motivation that supervenes motivations of individuals, for example, is a typical strategy. But maybe group virtues are a completely different kind of (...) animal. Does it make sense to demand that they resemble individual virtues? I propose that group virtues can be something different that individual virtues, and whether this is plausible or not depends on the theory we adopt about how virtues are grounded. (shrink)

Over the past four decades, software engineering has emerged as a discipline in its own right, though it has roots both in computer science and in classical engineering. Its philosophical foundations and premises are not yet well understood. In recent times, members of the software engineering community have started to search for such foundations. In particular, the philosophies of Kuhn and Popper have been used by philosophically-minded software engineers in search of a deeper understanding of their discipline. It seems, however, (...) that professional philosophers of science are not yet aware of this new discourse within the field of software engineering. Therefore, this article aims to reflect critically upon recent software engineers’ attempts towards a philosophy of software engineering and to introduce our own philosophical thoughts in this context. Finally, we invite the professional philosophers of science to participate in this interesting new discourse. (shrink)

Much research has linked surprise to violation of expectations, but it has been less clear how one can be surprised when one has no particular expectation. This paper discusses a computational theory based on Algorithmic Information Theory, which can account for surprises in which one initially expects randomness but then notices a pattern in stimuli. The authors present evidence that a “randomness deficiency” heuristic leads to surprise in such cases.

We define a notion of projective meaning which encompasses both classical presuppositions and phenomena which are usually regarded as non-presuppositional but which also display projection behavior—Horn’s assertorically inert entailments, conventional implicatures (both Grice’s and Potts’) and some conversational implicatures. We argue that the central feature of all projective meanings is that they are not-at-issue, defined as a relation to the question under discussion. Other properties differentiate various sub-classes of projective meanings, one of them the class of presuppositions according to Stalnaker. (...) This principled taxonomy predicts differences in behavior unexpected on other models among the various conventional triggers and conversational implicatures, while holding promise for a general, explanatory account of projection which applies to all the types of meanings considered. (shrink)

Pascal, turning Augustinianism inside out, radically expanded the powers of imagination implicit in the work of Montaigne and Descartes, and made imagination ...

It has often been said that Marx never achieved a comprehensive treatment of the specifically political area, but in fact there is far more, and far more coherent, material on the topic in his writings than has been assumed. This book brings together everything in Marx's work which bears on politics and treats his approach as a living, evolving theory. For every stage of his career it examines the theory he held, what were its inner tensions and weaknesses, how these (...) were brought out in actual events and how Marx reacted to his successes and failures. A particular virtue of the book's approach is that Marx's views on, for example, the French Revolution or the events of 1848 are set against what historians now tell us of these events and the adequacy of Marx's accounts is assessed. This is an important book because of the exceptional combination of historical and theoretical perspectives Dr Maguire brings to the examination of Marx's theory of politics. Although he does not attempt to solve all the problems of applying Marxism to the twentieth century, he has provided a clear and comprehensive account of Marx's approach in, and to, his own time. (shrink)

We often praise and blame groups of people like companies or governments, just like we praise and blame individual persons. This makes sense. Because some of the most important problems in our society, like climate change or mass surveillance, are not caused by individual people, but by groups. Philosophers have argued that there exists such a thing as group responsibility, which does not boil down to individual responsibility. This type of responsibility can only exist in groups that are organized with (...) joint knowledge, actions and intentions. However, often disorganized groups without joint knowledge, actions and intentions are precisely the kinds of groups that cause problems. Therefore, in such cases, it becomes difficult, according to traditional accounts of collective responsibility to attribute responsibility to such groups. This has problematic implications. Therefore, I propose a new way of seeing collective responsibility, which is able to attribute the vice of irresponsibility to such disorganized groups. This involves seeing responsibility not as a relationship between the group and some action, but rather, as a virtue. In cases where it is difficult to establish whether a group is responsible for something, we should ask ‘is this group responsible, or irresponsible?’ This line of questioning is likely to be a more productive and philosophically legitimate way of holding groups morally responsible in such cases. (shrink)

En Freud y la escena de la escritura Derrida analiza de una forma original cómo los problemas de la escritura y de la memoria fueron tratados por Freud a lo largo de treinta años, respetando el desarrollo cronológico de su obra. El filósofo analiza en su ensayo los textos freudianos: Proyecto de una psicología para neurólogos, La interpretación de los sueños y Nota sobre el Bloc mágico, con el fin de comprobar sus planteamientos. El pensamiento derrideano y el psicoanálisis poseen (...) muchos puntos en común, sin embargo existen también algunas diferencias abordadas a lo largo de la presentación. (shrink)

The empirical phenomenon at the center of this paper is projection, which we define (uncontroversially) as follows: (1) Definition of projection An implication projects if and only if it survives as an utterance implication when the expression that triggers the implication occurs under the syntactic scope of an entailment-cancelling operator. Projection is observed, for example, with utterances containing aspectual verbs like stop, as shown in (2) and (3) with examples from English and Paraguayan Guaraní (Paraguay, Tupí-Guaraní).1 The Guaraní example in (...) (2) and its English translation have at least the following implications: (i) Carla has previously smoked, and (ii) Carla stopped smoking. The first but not the second of these implications is also conveyed by the question version of sentence (2), as in (3a), or when (2) is embedded under entailment-cancelling sentential operators, such as negation, as in (3b), the antecedent of a conditional, as in (3c), or an epistemic modal, as in (3d). Hence, by the definition in (14), the first but not the second implication of (2) projects. (shrink)

In this paper, the meanings of sentences containing the word or and a modal verb are used to arrive at a novel account of the meaning of or coordinations. It is proposed that or coordinations denote sets whose members are the denotations of the disjuncts; and that the truth conditions of sentences containing or coordinations require the existence of some set made available by the semantic environment which can be ‘divided up’ in accordance with the disjuncts. The relevant notion of (...) ‘dividing things up’ is made explicit in the paper. Detailed attention is given to the question of how the proposed truth conditions are derived from the syntactic input. The account offered allows for the derivation of both the disjunctive and the nondisjunctive readings of modal/or sentences, including the much-discussed free choice readings of may/or sentences. (shrink)

Sentencing practices in cases of domestic homicide have been the object of critical scrutiny on previous occasions across a number of jurisdictions. It has been suggested by some that these practices reveal judges to be taking a more lenient approach to women who kill their violent male partners than to men who kill allegedly unfaithful female partners. This note evaluates claims of gender bias in sentencing practices in UK cases of domestic homicide following the Court of Appeal sentencing decision in (...) R. v. Suratan, R. v.Humes and R.v. Wilkinson [2002]E.W.C.A. 2982 concerning three men who killed their female partners. It will argue that in the wake of this decision current proposals to review both the substantive law of provocation and sentencing practices are to be welcomed. (shrink)

_The Empirical Science of Religious Education_ draws together a collection of innovative articles in the field of religious education which passed the editorial scrutiny of Professor Robert Jackson over the course of his impactful fourteen year career as editor of the British Journal of Religious Education. These articles have made an enormous contribution to the international literature establishing of the empirical science of religious education as a research field. The volume draws together, organises and illustrates the contours of this emerging (...) field and is an essential compendium which covers work in: teacher education and teacher experience; student understanding, attitudes and values; varieties of religious schooling, and; worldview and life interpretation Organised into ten thematic sections the contributors cover the field comprehensively and bring with them an international and reflexive approach to their research. It is an essential resource for those practitioners and researchers who wish to access original and innovative research undertaken by way of ethnographic fieldwork, practitioner research, life-history approaches to research, psychological scales and measures, and large surveys. Particularly interested readers will be studying PGCE and masters level programmes in religious education, as well as qualified religious educators undertaking continuing professional development. (shrink)

Studies in collective intelligence have shown that suboptimal cognitive traits of individuals can lead a group to succeed in a collective cognitive task, in recent literature this is called mandevillian intelligence. Analogically, as Mandeville has suggested, the moral vices of individuals can sometimes also lead to collective good. I suggest that this mandevillian morality can happen in many ways in collaborative activities. Mandevillian morality presents a challenge for normative virtue theories in ethics. The core of the problem is that mandevillian (...) morality implies that individual vice is, in some cases, valuable. However, normative virtue theories generally see vice as disvaluable. A consequence of this is that virtue theories struggle to account for the good that can emerge in a collective. I argue that normative virtue theories can in fact accommodate for mandevillian emergent good. I put forward three distinctive features that allow a virtue theory to do so: a distinction between individual and group virtues, a distinction between motivational and teleological virtues, and an acknowledgement of the normativity of “vicious” roles in groups. (shrink)

This paper discusses the semantically parenthetical use of clauseembedding verbs such as see, hear, think, believe, discover and know. When embedding verbs are used in this way, the embedded clause carries the main point of the utterance, while the main clause serves some discourse function. Frequently, this function is evidential, with the parenthetical verb carrying information about the source and reliability of the embedded claim, or about the speaker’s emotional orientation to it. Other functions of parenthetical uses of verbs are (...) discussed. (shrink)

Although relatively neglected, Milton's three Latin poems for his school friend Charles Diodati are arguably amongst the most self-revelatory poems in the 1645 collection. As well as evidence of the strength of their literary friendship, each of these poems adumbrates aspects of Milton's vocational dilemma and provides an intriguing example of how Latin afforded Milton an imaginative freedom that he did not exercise when composing in English at this time. The disillusionment that clouded Milton's first impressions of Cambridge is voiced (...) feelingly in the wittily nuanced Elegia Prima, while Elegia Sexta, for all its affable and accommodating manner, also offers serious reflections on the conditions necessary to nurture poetic creativity, and captures what seems to be a pivotal moment in Milton's understanding of his own poetic vocation. Although both these verse-epistles are directed at Diodati as their immediate recipient, they enabled Milton to engage a European audience when recitations of his Latin verses won him acclaim in the Florentine academies. The Epitaphium Damonis, written after Milton's return from Italy, laments the death of Diodati, his first ?fit audience,? and celebrates the literary fellowship he had enjoyed in Florence. Separated from his school-friend by death and the Florentine literary community by the unbridgeable distance between them, the full force of his isolation found expression in a letter to Carlo Dati in which he described his feelings of inner exile. (shrink)

The current literature on presupposition focuses almost exclusively on the projection problem: the question of how and why the presuppositions of atomic clauses are projected to complex sentences which embed them. Very little attention has been paid to the question of how and why these presuppositions arise at all. As Kay (1992, p.335) observes, “treatments of the presupposition inheritance problem almost never deal with the reasons that individual words and constructions give rise, in the first place, to the particular presuppositions (...) that they do.”1 This is the question on which this paper will focus. (shrink)

This paper offers a critical analysis of Stalnaker''s work on presupposition (Stalnaker1973, 1974, 1979, 1999, 2002). The paper examines two definitions of speaker presupposition offered by Stalnaker – the familiar common ground view, and the earlier,less familiar, dispositional account – and how Stalnaker relates this notion to the linguistic phenomenon of presupposition. Special attention is paid to Stalnaker's view of accommodation. I argue that given Stalnaker's views, accommodation is not rightly seen as driven by the presuppositional requirements of utterances, but (...) only by the interests of speakers in eliminating perceived differences among presuppositions. I also consider the revisions which are needed either to the definition of speaker presupposition or to the definition of sentence presupposition in light of the possibility of informative presupposition. In the concluding section, I discuss the ways in which some recent accounts of context and speaker presupposition depart from their Stalnakerian foundations. (shrink)

The pragmatic framework developed by H.P. Grice in “Logic and Conversation” explains how a speaker can mean something more than, or different from, the conventional meaning of the sentence she utters. But it has been argued that the framework cannot give a similar explanation for cases where these pragmatic effects impact the understood content of an embedded clause, such as the antecedent of a conditional, a clausal disjunct, or the clausal complement of a verb. In this paper, I show that (...) such an explanation is available. One of the central arguments of the paper is that in a significant subset of cases, local pragmatic effects are a consequence of a global pragmatic requirement. In these cases, local pragmatic effects are a consequence of ‘acting locally’ to resolve a potential global pragmatic violation. These cases do not require us to posit application of pragmatic principles to the contents of embedded clauses. The account does, though, require the assumption that interpreters can identify and reason about the contents of unasserted sub-parts of sentences, an assumption that I motivate in section 3. Building on this, in section 4 of the paper, I argue that once we have recognized that interpreters can, and do, reason independently about the contents of non-asserted clauses, it becomes unproblematic to assume that in some cases, Gricean conversational principles do apply directly to these contents, providing an alternative route to account for local pragmatic effects. In revisiting the ideas of this paper in my response to the commentaries, I consider in more detail the revisions to Grice’s broader program that are necessitated by these moves, in particular acknowledging the problematicity of Grice’s notion of what is said. I argue that the starting point for Gricean reconstructions should instead be merely what is expressed, which carries no pragmatic commitments regarding what is speaker meant. (shrink)

Mandy Simons. On The Felicity Conditions of Disjunctive Sentences.

A radical polemic like Intercourse and a Hollywood hit like Fatal Attraction may seem bizarre objects of comparison. Where Andrea Dworkin's study outraged male reviewers, Adrian Lyne's film infuriated their feminist counterparts. But despite the political differences, the two contemporary projects offer a surprisingly similar vision of sex.

In this book, Alston articulates and argues for a use-based and normative account of sentence meaning. He proposes that sentence meaning consists in illocutionary act potential, the usability of a sentence for the performance of a certain illocutionary act type. This potential is itself explained in terms of illocutionary rules, normative rules governing the acceptable use of sentences.

This case note considers the availability in the United Kingdom of the provocation defence in cases of intimate homicide in the context of the recent House of Lords decision in Rv. Smith [2000] 3 W.L.R. 654. The note argues that the expansion of the objective component of the defence to encompass the mental infirmities of individual defendants is dangerous for women. Although it has the potential to help some abused women who kill to use the defence, it has, at the (...) same time, exposed women who are abused by sexually possessive, violent men to even greater danger. It is thus argued that the defence should be restricted in the way envisaged by the minority judgement of Lord Millett so that abused women will still be able to use the defence, but by anon-medical route. Alternatively, the defence should be abolished and defences which pose no risk of encompassing violent men should be developed to accommodate abused women. (shrink)

Unsurprisingly, the negation of sentence (1), shown in (3), does not share this entailment. Neither does the yes/no question formed from this sentence. Similarly, if we add a possibility modal to the sentence, or construct a conditional of which (1) is the antecedent, the resulting sentences do not share the entailment of the original, as we see from the examples below.

Virtue accounts of innovation ethics have recognized the virtue of creativity as an admirable trait in innovators. However, such accounts have not paid sufficient attention to the way creativity functions as a collective phenomenon. We propose a collective virtue account to supplement existing virtue accounts. We base our account on Kieran’s definition of creativity as a virtue and distinguish three components in it: creative output, mastery and intrinsic motivation. We argue that all of these components can meaningfully be attributed to (...) innovation groups. This means that we can also attribute the virtue of creativity to group agents involved in innovation. Recognizing creativity as a collective virtue in innovation is important because it allows for a more accurate evaluation of how successful innovation generally happens. The innovator who takes a collective virtue account of creativity seriously will give attention to the facilitation of an environment where the group can flourish collectively, rather than only nurturing the individual genius. (shrink)

Michael Kohlhase and Mandy Simons. Interpreting Negatives in Discourse.

In this paper, we develop the notion of a natural convention, and illustrate its usefulness in a detailed examination of indirect requests in English. Our treatment of convention is grounded in Lewis’s seminal account; we do not here redefine convention, but rather explore the space of possibilities within Lewis’s definition, highlighting certain types of variation that Lewis de-emphasized. Applied to the case of indirect requests, which we view through a Searlean lens, the notion of natural convention allows us to give (...) a nuanced answer to the question: Are indirect requests conventional? In conclusion, we reflect on the consequences of our view for the understanding of the semantics/pragmatics divide. (shrink)

Like the majority of established publishers, Cambridge University Press is in the middle of a major transformation, shifting from pay-to-read to pay-to-publish models; and it has embraced transformative agreements as a key lever to support this journey. Importantly, they are seen as a key stepping stone, not a destination or the only route, to full open access. Implementing TA s has required huge change internally and necessitated a new kind of collaboration with librarians. As a publisher with a strong emphasis (...) on humanities and social sciences publishing, CUP sees TA s as providing a route to OA for all of its journals and as ensuring no subject area is disadvantaged by the transformation. The shift to OA does come with challenges; a key one is author equity and how to ensure that in eliminating the financial barriers to read content, no new barriers to publication are created. (shrink)

Energy justice literature generally treats its three tenets, distributional justice, procedural justice and recognition justice, as separate and independent issues. These are seen as separate dimensions by which criteria can be formulated for a just state of affairs. And a just state of affairs regarding energy should fulfill all criteria. However, we show, using empirical research on six European energy communities that the tenets of energy justice are interdependent and negotiated in practice. We show this interdependency using three core concerns (...) of justice—risk, effort and power—which we identified through our empirical work. Our findings reveal that community members are often willing to take risks and put in effort, if they are compensated with more power within the community. Similarly, members are willing to compromise power if no effort or risk-taking is required from them. This demonstrates the interdependency of the tenets “procedural justice” and “distributional justice” within energy communities. We reflect on the need for energy justice theory and policymakers to recognize the significance of this interdependency. (shrink)