RésuméAu cœur de la théorie de Sophia Moreau sur la discrimination répréhensible réside le devoir moral de traiter les autres comme des êtres égaux. Cet essai soulève quelques questions sur les contours de ce devoir et suggère des moyens de renforcer la théorie. En particulier, il suggère d'intégrer une vision cosmopolite de la portée de ce devoir, d’éclairer les caractéristiques à la base du statut moral égal des personnes afin d'en identifier les fondements, ainsi que d'identifier certaines considérations relatives à (...) des intérêts d'importance afin d'en préciser le contenu. La relation entre la théorie de Moreau et le discours sur les droits humains est également brièvement examinée, et une discussion plus approfondie de ce dernier est recommandée. (shrink)

We say that a sentence A is a permissive consequence of a set X of premises whenever, if all the premises of X hold up to some standard, then A holds to some weaker standard. In this paper, we focus on a three-valued version of this notion, which we call strict-to-tolerant consequence, and discuss its fruitfulness toward a unified treatment of the paradoxes of vagueness and self-referential truth. For vagueness, st-consequence supports the principle of tolerance; for truth, it supports the (...) requisite of transparency. Permissive consequence is non-transitive, however, but this feature is argued to be an essential component to the understanding of paradoxical reasoning in cases involving vagueness or self-reference. (shrink)

Michel Janssen and Harvey Brown have driven a prominent recent debate concerning the direction of an alleged arrow of explanation between Minkowski spacetime and Lorentz invariance of dynamical laws in special relativity. In this article, I critically assess this controversy with the aim of clarifying the explanatory foundations of the theory. First, I show that two assumptions shared by the parties—that the dispute is independent of issues concerning spacetime ontology, and that there is an urgent need for a constructive interpretation (...) of special relativity—are problematic and negatively affect the debate. Second, I argue that the whole discussion relies on a misleading conception of the link between Minkowski spacetime structure and Lorentz invari-ance, a misconception that in turn sheds more shadows than light on our understand-ing of the explanatory nature and power of Einstein’s theory. I state that the arrow connecting Lorentz invariance and Minkowski spacetime is not explanatory and uni-directional, but analytic and bidirectional, and that this analytic arrow grounds the chronogeometric explanations of physical phenomena that special relativity offers. (shrink)

To what degree can language be acquired from linguistic input alone? This question has vexed scholars for millennia and is still a major focus of debate in the cognitive science of language. The complexity of human language has hampered progress because studies of language–especially those involving computational modeling–have only been able to deal with small fragments of our linguistic skills. We suggest that the most recent generation of Large Language Models (LLMs) might finally provide the computational tools to determine empirically (...) how much of the human language ability can be acquired from linguistic experience. LLMs are sophisticated deep learning architectures trained on vast amounts of natural language data, enabling them to perform an impressive range of linguistic tasks. We argue that, despite their clear semantic and pragmatic limitations, LLMs have already demonstrated that human-like grammatical language can be acquired without the need for a built-in grammar. Thus, while there is still much to learn about how humans acquire and use language, LLMs provide full-fledged computational models for cognitive scientists to empirically evaluate just how far statistical learning might take us in explaining the full complexity of human language. (shrink)

One way in which we might approach the challenge posed by the Sorites Paradox is considering that Sorites-susceptible predicates have several candidate extensions, or several ways in which these expressions can be made precise. For example, a candidate extension for the predicate ‘is a baby’ is the set of humans of less than two years, but also the set of those less than two years and one second, and of those less than two years and two seconds. In this chapter (...) we present and discuss two theories for vague predicates based on this idea: supervaluationism and subvaluationism. The chapter is structured in three parts. The first presents the super- and subvaluationist theories: their similarities and differences in the semantics, the resulting logics with their most characteristic features. The second reviews the super- and subvaluationist solutions to the Sorites Paradox and provides discussion on several controversies surrounding these theories. The third part introduces proof procedures for s’valuationist logics. (shrink)

Topics in Cognitive Science, Volume 14, Issue 3, Page 634-645, July 2022.

In this paper we investigate a semantics for first-order logic originally proposed by R. van Rooij to account for the idea that vague predicates are tolerant, that is, for the principle that if x is P, then y should be P whenever y is similar enough to x. The semantics, which makes use of indifference relations to model similarity, rests on the interaction of three notions of truth: the classical notion, and two dual notions simultaneously defined in terms of it, (...) which we call tolerant truth and strict truth. We characterize the space of consequence relations definable in terms of those and discuss the kind of solution this gives to the sorites paradox. We discuss some applications of the framework to the pragmatics and psycholinguistics of vague predicates, in particular regarding judgments about borderline cases. (shrink)

This paper is concerned with the claim that supervaluationist consequence is not classical for a language including an operator for definiteness. Although there is some sense in which this claim is uncontroversial, there is a sense in which the claim must be qualified. In particular I defend Keefe's position according to which supervaluationism is classical except when the inference from phi to Dphi is involved. The paper provides a precise content to this claim showing that we might provide complete (and (...) sound) systems of deduction for supervaluationist consequence in which proofs are completely classical with the exception of a single last step (involving the above mentioned inference). (shrink)

It is a widespread belief that the Kochen-Specker theorem imposes a contextuality constraint on the ontology of beables in quantum hidden variables theories. On the other hand, after Bell’s influential critique, the importance of von Neumann’s wrongly called ‘impossibility proof’ has been severely questioned. However, Max Jammer, Jeffrey Bub and Dennis Dieks have proposed insightful reassessments of von Neumann’s theorem: what it really shows is that hidden variables theories cannot represent their beables by means of Hermitian operators in Hilbert space. (...) Hereby I show that i) the very same constraint can be derived from Gleason’s theorem, and that ii) if we consider the import of von Neumann’s and Gleason’s theorems, the relevance of the Kochen-Specker theorem for hidden variables theories gets substantially weakened: it does not force them to be contextual in any interesting sense of the term. (shrink)

This paper presents and defends a way to add a transparent truth predicate to classical logic, such that and A are everywhere intersubstitutable, where all T-biconditionals hold, and where truth can be made compositional. A key feature of our framework, called STTT (for Strict-Tolerant Transparent Truth), is that it supports a non-transitive relation of consequence. At the same time, it can be seen that the only failures of transitivity STTT allows for arise in paradoxical cases.

In this paper I argue that the case of Einstein׳s special relativity vs. Hendrik Lorentz׳s ether theory can be decided in terms of empirical evidence, in spite of the predictive equivalence between the theories. In the historical and philosophical literature this case has been typically addressed focusing on non-empirical features. I claim that non-empirical features are not enough to provide a fully objective and uniquely determined choice in instances of empirical equivalence. However, I argue that if we consider arguments proposed (...) by Richard Boyd, and by Larry Laudan and Jarret Leplin, a choice based on non-entailed empirical evidence favoring Einstein׳s theory can be made. (shrink)

This article describes the effect of a teaching–learning sequence based on the discovery of oxygen in promoting students’ argumentation. It examines the written and oral arguments produced by 63 high school students in France during a complete TLS supervised by the same teacher. The data used in this analysis was derived from students’ written responses, audio and video recordings, and written field notes. The first goal of this investigation was to provide evidence that an approach combining history and philosophy of (...) science and argumentation could increase students’ awareness of the relevance of experimentation and communication to scientific progress. The second goal was to assess the effectiveness of the TLS to engage students in argumentative classroom interactions relating to the discovery of oxygen at the end of the 18th century. The findings show that this historical case can be useful for promoting students’ argumentation and is also appropriate for high school students. Future research should include students of other ages, other historical episodes and experiences in other parts of the world. (shrink)

Substructural approaches to paradoxes have attracted much attention from the philosophical community in the last decade. In this paper we focus on two substructural logics, named ST and TS, along with two structural cousins, LP and K3. It is well known that LP and K3 are duals in the sense that an inference is valid in one logic just in case the contrapositive is valid in the other logic. As a consequence of this duality, theories based on either logic are (...) tightly connected since many of the arguments for and objections against one theory reappear in the other theory in dual form. The target of the paper is making explicit in exactly what way, if any, ST and TS are dual to one another. The connection will allow us to gain a more fine-grained understanding of these logics and of the theories based on them. In particular, we will obtain new insights on two questions concerning ST which are being intensively discussed in the current literature: whether ST preserves classical logic and whether it is LP in sheep’s clothing. Explaining in what way ST and TS are duals requires comparing these logics at a metainferential level. We provide to this end a uniform proof theory to decide on valid metainferences for each of the four logics. This proof procedure allows us to show in a very simple way how different properties of inferences (unsatisfiability, supersatisfiability and antivalidity) that behave in very different ways for each logic can be captured in terms of the validity of a metainference. (shrink)

This paper discusses Fara's so-called 'Paradox of Higher-Order Vagueness' concerning supervaluationism. In the paper I argue that supervaluationism is not committed to global validity, as it is largely assumed in the literature, but to a weaker notion of logical consequence I call 'regional validity'. Then I show that the supervaluationist might solve Fara's paradox making use of this weaker notion of logical consequence. The paper is discussed by Delia Fara in the same volume.

Journal of Mathematical Logic, Volume 22, Issue 02, August 2022. We show that every definable nested family of closed and bounded subsets of a P-minimal field K has nonempty intersection. As an application we answer a question of Darnière and Halupczok showing that P-minimal fields satisfy the “extreme value property”: for every closed and bounded subset [math] and every interpretable continuous function [math] (where [math] denotes the value group), f(U) admits a maximal value. Two further corollaries are obtained as a (...) consequence of their work. The first one shows that every interpretable subset of [math] is already interpretable in the language of rings, answering a question of Cluckers and Halupczok. This implies in particular that every P-minimal field is polynomially bounded. The second one characterizes those P-minimal fields satisfying a classical cell preparation theorem as those having definable Skolem functions, generalizing a result of Mourgues. (shrink)

En este artículo discuto la relevancia que tiene el autorrespeto en la teoría de la justicia de Rawls. Para alcanzar dicho objetivo, en primer lugar examino las nociones de valor moral y mérito y su vinculación con el autorrespeto como forma de autovaloración. En segundo lugar, especifico las bases que sustentan el autorrespeto al interior de su teoría. Finalmente, discuto la función que tiene el autorrespeto en la justificación de los principios de la justicia como equidad.

En este artículo discuto la importancia que tiene para la teoría de la justicia de Rawls el desarrollo del sentido de la justicia como condición para la estabilidad social. Para cumplir con dicho objetivo analizo la interpretación que Rawls ofrece de nuestra psicología moral con la finalidad de evaluar su rol en la aceptación de los principios de justicia, así como las razones para fundar dicha estabilidad en determinados sentimientos morales. El análisis anterior me permitirá concluir que la búsqueda de (...) bases naturales para fundar los sentimientos morales constituye para Rawls una vía alternativa tanto al deductivismo moral, así como a cualquier forma de fundamentación metafísica de los principios que guían nuestras prácticas sociales. (shrink)

This paper analyzes Davidson´s classical version of the principle of charity,in order to suggest a reformulation from which it is possible to extractsome consequences regarding the nature of understanding. Thus, it is putforward an abandonment of the intencionalist hermeneutics as well as theCartesi..

While acoustic analysis methods have become a commodity in voice emotion research, experiments that attempt not only to describe but to computationally manipulate expressive cues in emotional voice...

How should political power and influence be allocated in democratic systems? That is, roughly, the core of the boundary problem in democratic theory. As of late, some authors have begun paying increased attention to the methodological aspects of this dispute. This paper attempts to make a twofold contribution to this ‘methodological turn’. On the one hand, it identifies and analyzes five desiderata of a successful principle of democratic inclusion. Any such principle, I argue, must be grounded in a clearly identifiable (...) set of values, must provide a clear standard of inclusion, must specify the relevant modalities of inclusion, must provide sound bridging principles, and must be extensionally adequate. In the first half of the paper, these desiderata are developed and critically scrutinized. On the other hand, I also extract three lessons from the previous discussion. First, that a unique answer to the boundary problem (i.e. one grounded in one single principle) is unlikely. Second, that a satisfactory answer to the boundary problem need not necessarily appeal, as some have argued, to distinctively democratic values. And third, that intuitions about political exclusion (i.e. those requiring or permitting the exclusion of some individuals) should be treated with special caution. (shrink)

A considerable number of books and papers have analyzed normative concepts using new techniques developed by logicians; however, few have bridged the gap between the English legal culture and the Continental tradition in legal philosophy. This book addresses this issue by offering an introductory study on the many possibilities that logical analysis offers the study of legal systems. The volume is divided into two sections: the first covers the basic aspects of classical and deontic logic and its connections, advancing an (...) explanation of the most important topics of the discipline by comparing different systems of deontic logic and exploring some of the most important paradoxes in its domain. The second section deals with the role of logic in the analysis of legal systems by discussing in what sense deontic logic and the logic of norm-propositions are useful tools for a proper understanding of the systematic structure of law. (shrink)

“But surely if it's not irrational, it can’t be OCD!” my friend exclaimed, when I told them about the paper Carolina Flores and Brent Kious provided their excellent comments for. In all fairness, my friend is not working in philosophy, or psychiatry, or in psychology. Still, I take their sentiment to be expressive of a widely held view: if you have a certain mental illness, then you must be irrational. Conversely, rationality guarantees mental health; the sane life is the rational (...) life. -/- In my paper, I attempted to complicate this picture. My main line of thought was that if the sane life is the rational life, we do not have a good conception of rationality yet. For, our best theories of rationality fail to capture what is going wrong in some cases of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). Addressing the criticisms raised by my commentators will allow me to clear up some misunderstandings and sketch avenues for further work. (shrink)

Whenever a fact P grounds another fact Q, one may ask why that is so. Karen Bennett and Louis deRosset independently argue that grounding facts—such as the fact that P grounds Q—are always grounded in their grounds-part. Bennett calls this the view that grounding is superinternal. My aim in this paper is to argue that grounding is not superinternal. I will do so by showing that superinternality, together with some widely accepted formal features of grounding—namely, transitivity and necessitation—yield implausible claims (...) about how necessities are explained. Then, I will discuss how my argument compares with Dasgupta's argument against superinternality. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the virtue of temperance as a moral competence in professional performance. The analysis relies on three different streams of literature: virtue ethics, positive psychology and competency-based management. The paper analyzes how temperance is defined in each of these perspectives. The paper proposes an integrative definition of temperance as “moral competence” and summarizes behaviors in business environments in which temperance plays a role.

Whenever a fact P grounds another fact Q, one may ask why that is so. Karen Bennett and Louis deRosset independently argue that grounding facts—such as the fact that P grounds Q—are always grounded in their grounds-part. Bennett calls this the view that grounding is superinternal. My aim in this paper is to argue that grounding is not superinternal. I will do so by showing that superinternality, together with some widely accepted formal features of grounding—namely, transitivity and necessitation—yield implausible claims (...) about how necessities are explained. Then, I will discuss how my argument compares with Dasgupta’s argument against superinternality. (shrink)

This paper aims to offer an account of affective experiences within Predictive Processing, a novel framework that considers the brain to be a dynamical, hierarchical, Bayesian hypothesis-testing mechanism. We begin by outlining a set of common features of affective experiences that a PP-theory should aim to explain: feelings are conscious, they have valence, they motivate behaviour, and they are intentional states with particular and formal objects. We then review existing theories of affective experiences within Predictive Processing and delineate two families (...) of theories: Interoceptive Inference Theories and Error Dynamics Theories. We highlight the strengths and shortcomings of each family of theories and develop a synthesis: the Affective Inference Theory. Affective Inference Theory claims that valence corresponds to the expected rate of prediction error reduction. In turn, the particular object of a feeling is the object predicted to be the most likely cause of expected changes in prediction error rate, and the formal object of a feeling is a predictive model of the expected changes in prediction error rate caused by a given particular object. Finally, our theory shows how affective experiences bias action selection, directing the organism towards allostasis and towards optimal levels of uncertainty in order to minimise prediction error over time. (shrink)

Offering the most comprehensive book-length study to-date of reparation programs, this handbook contains an innovative blend of case-study analysis, thematic papers, and national legislation documents from leading scholars and practitioners. This landmark work will make a genuine contribution to the theory and practice of reparations.

Human dignity: social movements invoke it, several national constitutions enshrine it, and it features prominently in international human rights documents. But what is it, why is it important, and what is its relationship to human rights and social justice? Pablo Gilabert offers a systematic defence of the view that human dignity is the moral heart of justice. In Human Dignity and Human Rights (OUP 2019), he advanced an account of human dignity for the context of human rights discourse, which (...) covers the most urgent, basic claims of dignity. This book extends the dignitarian approach to more ambitious claims of maximal dignity of the kind encoded in democratic socialist conceptions of social justice. In particular, this book focuses on the just organization of working practices. It recasts in a dignitarian format the critique of capitalist society as involving exploitation, alienation, and domination of workers, and revamps a neglected but inspiring socialist principle. In its dignitarian interpretation, the Abilities/Needs Principle (‘From each according to their ability, to each according to their needs!’) yields reasonable and feasible requirements on social cooperation geared to empowering each human being to lead a flourishing life. While Human Dignity and Human Rights offered the first systematic philosophical account of human dignity in human rights discourse, Human Dignity and Social Justice presents the first systematic application of the dignitarian framework to the core ideals of democratic socialism. (shrink)

In a recent article, Fabrice Correia explores the project of reducing the notion of grounding to that of essence. He then goes on to provide several candidate definitions and test each of them against a number of objections. His final take on the situation is, roughly, that two of the definitions can handle all of the considered objections. The aim of this paper is to re-evaluate Correia's conclusions in the light of two sources of insights: Firstly, I will argue that (...) one of the objections treated by Correia has been somewhat underestimated, and that it still constitutes a threat against definitions of grounding in terms of essence. Secondly, there are at least two further objections that should be considered by the advocate of such definitions. As I will show, one of them can be neutralized; but the other one is more serious and suggests a clear dialectical edge to an operationalist definition. (shrink)

When we speak about different interpretations of quantum mechanics it is suggested that there is one single quantum theory that can be interpreted in different ways. However, after an explicit characterization of what it is to interpret quantum mechanics, the right diagnosis is that we have a case of predictively equivalent rival theories. I extract some lessons regarding the resulting underdetermination of theory choice. Issues about theoretical identity, theoretical and methodological pluralism, and the prospects for a realist stance towards quantum (...) theory can be properly addressed once we recognize that interpretations of quantum mechanics are rival theories. (shrink)

It is common in political theory and practice to challenge normatively ambitious proposals by saying that their fulfillment is not feasible. But there has been insufficient conceptual exploration of what feasibility is, and very little substantive inquiry into why and how it matters for thinking about social justice. This paper provides one of the first systematic treatments of these issues, and proposes a dynamic approach to the relation between justice and feasibility that illuminates the importance of political imagination and dynamic (...) duties to expand agents’ power to fulfill ambitious principles of justice. (shrink)

Partiendo, de un lado, de la idea de que la especulación es, para el gnóstico,el espejo en el que se reflejan los misterios divinos, cuyo eco percibe asu vez la razón discursiva , y partiendo, de otro, de la exploración intra-lingilística o gramatosófica emprendida por elgnóstico andalusí Ibn al-’Arabi, ofrecemos al lector una traducción comentadade una breve sección del penúltimo capítulo de Las Revelaciones de LaMeca, su principal obra. Nos centraremos, a tal fin, en las diferentes modulacionesmorfológicas y semánticas de (...) la raíz árabe W-D-D, que da lugar alNombre divino al- Wadñd y que permite una original comprensión de la realidaddel amor, su génesis, sus diferentes estados, su carácter divino y susfunciones creadora, cosmológica y antropológica.Palabras clave: Ibn al-’Arabi, Sufismo, Gnosis, Amor, Nombres DivinosEstablished that to think means for the gnostic to reflect divine mysteries,being their echo percieved by reason , and by exploring, on the other hand, Ibn al-’Arabi’s intralinguistical research, which reveals the traces of an authentic grammatosophy, weoffer here a transiation anda commentaly of a brief section ofthe second lastchapter of Ibn al-’ArabT’s Fuu7hat al-Makkiyya, his main opus. We will studyboth the morphological and semantic modulations of te Arabic root W-D-D,from which becomes the Divine Name al- Wadi2d and that permits an originalcomprehension of love’s reality, its genesis, its different grades, its divine sta-tuts and, finally, its creative, cosmological and anthropological functions.Keywords: Ibn al-’Arabi, Sufism, Gnosis, Love, Divine Names. (shrink)