Kopec and Titelbaum collect five alleged counterexamples to Uniqueness, the thesis that it is impossible for agents who have the same total evidence to be ideally rational in having different doxastic attitudes toward the same proposition. I argue that four of the alleged counterexamples fail, and that Uniqueness should be slightly modified to accommodate the fifth example.

This essay describes Newman’s adaptations of plays by Plautus (c. 254–184 BC) and Terence (195/185–159 BC) for performance at the Birmingham Oratory School. Because Newman believed in the value of Latin plays for students, he expended a great deal of energy on their adaptation and production while carefully editing the plays to omit any questionable content.

Contemporary philosophers of mathematics are deadlocked between two alternative ontologies for numbers: Platonism and nominalism. According to contemporary mathematical Platonism, numbers are real abstract objects, i.e. particulars which are nonetheless “wholly nonphysical, nonmental, nonspatial, nontemporal, and noncausal.” While this view does justice to intuitions about numbers and mathematical semantics, it leaves unclear how we could ever learn anything by mathematical inquiry. Mathematical nominalism, by contrast, holds that numbers do not exist extra-mentally, which raises difficulties about how mathematical statements could be (...) true or false. Both theories, moreover, leave inexplicable how mathematics could have such a close relationship with natural science, since neither abstract nor mental objects can influence concrete physical objects. The Thomist understanding of quantity as an accident inhering in concrete substances breaks this deadlock by granting numbers a foundation in extra-mental reality which explains why numeric expressions are relevant in natural science and how we come to know the truth or falsity of mathematical statements. Further, this kind of moderate realism captures the semantic advantages of the Platonists and the ontological parsimony of the nominalists (since for Thomists quantity is not a separate, free-standing ontological addition). Despite these advantages, the Thomistic understanding of number has been out of favor since the work of Cantor, who argued that actual infinities (regarded by Aristotelians as impossible) are required for modern developments in mathematics. This paper frees philosophers of mathematics to embrace the advantages of Thomistic realism by showing that Cantor’s understanding of actual and potential infinity is not the same as Aquinas’s, and that potential infinities (in Aquinas and Aristotle’s sense) can do all the work Cantor claims for actual infinities in modern mathematics. (shrink)

Physicians vary in their moral judgments about health care costs. Social intuitionism posits that moral judgments arise from gut instincts, called “moral foundations.” The objective of this study was to determine if “harm” and “fairness” intuitions can explain physicians’ judgments about cost-containment in U.S. health care and using cost-effectiveness data in practice, as well as the relative importance of those intuitions compared to “purity”, “authority” and “ingroup” in cost-related judgments.

Recent setbacks to international institutions and projects of global governance have been viewed as marking a resurgence of nation-state sovereignty. In fact, however, many of the major controversies and developments in contemporary international law and geopolitics concern the administration, autonomy, and internal hierarchy not of states, but of supra-state regions. The spatial logic of a world divided into such regions is best articulated in Carl Schmitt’s theory of the Großraum, which in various respects describes and explains key features of modern (...) world order. Taking regional systems as self-constituting political units characterized by internal forms of dominance and legitimation aids in identifying the operation of hegemony in contemporary international law and institutions. It also makes possible a reinterpretation of global constitutionalist discourse as a democratizing project that finds its most important expressions in counter-hegemonic movements within the various “great spaces” constituting today’s world. (shrink)

Active inference offers a unified theory of perception, learning, and decision-making at computational and neural levels of description. In this article, we address the worry that active inference may be in tension with the belief–desire–intention model within folk psychology because it does not include terms for desires at the mathematical level of description. To resolve this concern, we first provide a brief review of the historical progression from predictive coding to active inference, enabling us to distinguish between active inference formulations (...) of motor control and active inference formulations of decision processes. We then show that, despite a superficial tension when viewed at the mathematical level of description, the active inference formalism contains terms that are readily identifiable as encoding both the objects of desire and the strength of desire at the psychological level of description. We demonstrate this with simple simulations of an active inference agent motivated to leave a dark room for different reasons. Despite their consistency, we further show how active inference may increase the granularity of folk-psychological descriptions by highlighting distinctions between drives to seek information versus reward—and how it may also offer more precise, quantitative folk-psychological predictions. Finally, we consider how the implicitly conative components of active inference may have partial analogues in other systems describable by the broader free energy principle to which it conforms. (shrink)

Persian possesses a number of stative complex predicates with _dâshtan_ ‘to have’ that express certain kinds of mental state. I propose that these _possessive experiencer complex predicates_ be given a formal semantic treatment involving possession of a portion of an abstract quality by an individual, as in the analysis of property concept lexemes due to Francez and Koontz-Garboden (Language 91(3):533–563, 2015 ; Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 34:93–106, 2016 ; Semantics and morphosyntactic variation: Qualities and the grammar of property concepts, (...) Oxford University Press, 2017 ). Augmented with an analysis of prepositional phrases introducing the target of the mental state and an approach to gradability in terms of measure functions (Wellwood in Measuring predicates, PhD dissertation, University of Maryland, College Park, 2014 ), the analysis explains various properties of possessive experiencer complex predicates, including the behavior of target phrases, the ability of the non-verbal element to be modified by a range of adjectives, the direct participation of the non-verbal element in comparative constructions, and the ability of degree expressions to modify both the non-verbal element and the VP containing the complex predicate. Theoretically, the analysis ties transitive mental state expressions to the grammar and semantics of property concept sentences, which are expressed via possessive morphosyntax cross-linguistically, and connects with syntactic proposals that independently argue for a universal underlyingly possessive morphosyntax for mental state predicates (Noonan in Case and syntactic geometry, PhD dissertation, McGill University, 1992 ; Hale and Keyser in Prolegomenon to a theory of argument structure, MIT Press, 2002 ). The work here also motivates modifications to Francez and Koontz-Garboden’s original proposal, and opens new questions in the original empirical domain of the analysis of possessive predicating strategies for the expression of property concept sentences. (shrink)

Social evolution theory conventionally takes an externalist explanatory stance, treating observed cooperation as explanandum and the positive assortment of cooperative behaviour as explanans. We ask how the circumstances bringing about this positive assortment arose in the first place. Rather than merely push the explanatory problem back a step, we move from an externalist to an interactionist explanatory stance, in the spirit of Lewontin and the Niche Construction theorists. We develop a theory of ‘social niche construction’ in which we consider biological (...) entities to be both the subject and object of their own social evolution. Some important cases of the evolution of cooperation have the side-effect of causing changes in the hierarchical level at which the evolutionary process acts. This is because the traits that act to align the fitness interests of particles in a collective can also act to diminish the extent to which those particles are bearers of heritable fitness variance, while augmenting the extent to which collectives of such particles are bearers of heritable fitness variance. In this way, we can explain upward transitions in the hierarchical level at which the Darwinian machine operates in terms of particle-level selection, even though the outcome of the process is a collective-level selection regime. Our theory avoids the logical and metaphysical paradoxes faced by other attempts to explain evolutionary transitions. (shrink)

Scholars have extensively debated the family’s place within liberalism, generally, and specific attention and critique has been given to the family in Rawls’ work. What has received less focus are the requirements of parents in a Rawlsian polity and, further, what those requirements might imply for the one case where states explicitly regulate the process of becoming parents: adoption. This paper seeks to discover what might be required of parents, adoptive or otherwise, in a Rawlsian social contract state. Second, it (...) considers adoptive parent selection in light of these requirements as well as Rawls’ arguments regarding merit and fair equality of opportunity. Finally, it considers what such a merit-based selection of adoptive parents implies for the disputed rights of same-sex couples to adopt children. Further, because the question of merit in this case will hinge upon what it means to be a “fit parent,” it also draws upon relevant empirical social science studies regarding gay and lesbian parents. The paper, then, evaluates both the theoretical and empirical validity of generalized claims that same-sex couples are less fit to be parents than are heterosexual couples. (shrink)

In this article we outline the ways in which questions of language have both revealed problems with conceptions of knowledge and suggested constructive ways of addressing those problems. Having examined the limitations of instrumental notions of language, we outline some alternatives, especially those developed from the middle of the 19th and throughout the 20th century. We locate forceful and influential philosophical interventions in the writings of Nietzsche and Heidegger and foundational revisions in the linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure and his (...) structuralist inheritors. We also chart the parallel path of literary theory from Mallarmé through Blanchot and poststructuralism to deconstruction. We conclude, after making some observations about the politicization of language in the works of feminist and postcolonial theorists, with some remarks about how the question of language helps to problematize global knowledge. (shrink)

The import of underground facilities in military strategy in the US grew exponentially after the Gulf War. The success of precision-guided conventional missiles meant that any above-ground building or complex could be accurately targeted and destroyed, thus driving states with less sophisticated weapons to go underground to secure space for covert weapons development and the protection of command and control centres for military and governmental functions. Underground facilities have thus become the main challenge to objects of detection and targeting practices (...) for US military research and development. This article provides a meditation on the underground in relation to military planning and technology, the limits of aerial visual control of terrain, the plans by the US military to counter underground defensive moves, the efficacy of tele-technologies to detect and destroy such installations at a distance, and an oblique genealogy of aerial and subterrestrial strategies in relation to technologies to overcome the limitations of each. In so doing, the article argues a deeply connected relationship between the imaginary and the material in attempts to realize a mastery of space and populations essential to military operations, thus posing questions about sensory perception, the status of the subject with regard to agency and control, and the prosthetic outfitting of the subject that both supports and blunts agency and control. (shrink)

The design office of Charles and Ray Eames was a collaborative, interdisciplinary, multimedia affair linking Hollywood, the State Department, universities, the corporate sector and international fairs during the height of the Cold War. Bringing together design, furniture, cutting-edge technology and experimental, avant-garde informed-multiscreen projections, the Eames Office operated as a humanities/IT/media/arts lab. For the 1964 World’s Fair, the Eameses created ‘The Information Machine’ for IBM. The techniques of display and experimental juxtaposition of images, sound and new media capacities later migrated (...) to the many ‘happenings’ following in the wake of Allan Kaprow’s medial and performative experiments. The Eames Office crafted for the 1964 World’s Fair a vision of global change and possibility grounded in avant-garde visual techniques and aesthetics that continue to constitute a specific globe crafted by the US Cold War military-industrial-university-entertainment complex that remains the grounds for our current collective nomos. (shrink)

This introduction to the special section ‘The Half-Life of the Avant-Garde: 50 Years On from 50 Years On’ explains why the section is conceived to look back at the century since the First World War. It is designed to offer ways of rethinking the concept and the role of the anniversary, where the First World War constitutes the memorialized event. The organization of the section follows the movement between often hidden or submerged forms of continuity. It attempts to think some (...) of the aesthetic and technological legacies and inheritances of the First World War in its durational 100th anniversary through a specific temporal strategy most succinctly captured in the phrase ‘50 years on from 50 years on’. The entry point is the middle of the 20th century, allowing contributors to work backward and forward by examining links between the three separate temporal frames. The consistency but also the strangeness of critical practices, as world history passes with its violent climaxes and depressions, has unique contours in each frame, with Dada providing an exemplary through-line. (shrink)

It has become an article of faith among historians of logic that the square of opposition diagram is due not to Aristotle, but to Apuleius. I examine three Aristotelian texts and argue that Prior Analytics I.46 contains a square of opposition, making Aristotle the discoverer of the diagram.

Writers of very different persuasions have relied on arguments about self-ownership; in recent years, it is libertarians who have rested their political theory on self-ownership, but Grotian authoritarianism rested on similar foundations, and, even though it matters a good deal that Hegel did not adopt a full-blown theory of self-ownership, so did Hegel's liberal-conservatism. Whether the high tide of the idea has passed it is hard to say. One testimony to its popularity was the fact that G. A. Cohen for (...) a time thought that the doctrine of self-ownership was so powerful that an egalitarian like himself had to come to terms with it; but he has since changed his mind. I have tackled the topic of self-ownership glancingly elsewhere, but have not hitherto tried to pull together the observations I have made in passing on those occasions. The view I have taken for granted and here defend is that self-ownership is not an illuminating notion—except in contexts that are unattractive to anyone of libertarian tastes. (shrink)

Explores Russell's activities as a polemicist, agitator, educator, and popularizer and discusses the evolution of his moral philosophy and its application, including his final battle against American intervention in Vietnam.

Objective journalism is blamed frequently for all sorts of journalistic failures and weaknesses, but the critiques typically are flawed because their authors fail to understand objectivity or to define it precisely. This defense of objective journalism defines objectivity and suggests that it is indispensable in a free society, summarizes major critiques of and alternatives to objectivity, and proposes that critics and defenders might serve journalism best by seeking common ground.

This paper proposes epistemic environmentalism as a novel framework for accounting for the contribution of the environment – broadly construed – to epistemic standings and which can be used to improve or protect epistemic environments. The contribution of the environment to epistemic standings is explained through recent developments in epistemology and cognitive science, including embodied cognition, embedded cognition, extended cognition and distributed cognition. The paper examines how these developments support epistemic environmentalism, as well as contributes theoretical resources to make epistemic (...) assessments of dynamic environments. The epistemic environmentalist procedure from the assessment of an individual environment to changes made to that environment based on promoting the attainment of epistemic goods is also discussed. (shrink)

For several decades, renewed interest in the connection between perception and knowledge has sustained a robust debate over external world skepticism. Recently, however, a growing consensus claims the skeptical challenge has been substantially met, and that realism in some robust form has emerged a clear victor. I invite us to rethink this consensus in a two-part response. The first forges a temporary alliance with skepticism against prominent forms of contemporary realism. That these fail to rebuff ews bolsters Barry Stroud’s call (...) for a new paradigm of objectivity. In the second part I sketch such a paradigm based upon a transactional interpretation of John Dewey’s pragmatism, and indicate its resilience to skeptical attacks. (shrink)

In his magnum opus, the _Historical and Critical Dictionary_, Pierre Bayle offered a series of brilliant criticisms of the major philosophical and theological systems of the 17 th Century. Although officially skeptical concerning the attempt to provide a definitive account of the truths of metaphysics, there is reason to see Bayle as a reluctant skeptic. In particular, Todd Ryan contends that Bayle harbored deep sympathy for the attempt by Descartes and his most innovative successor, Nicolas Malebranche, to establish a (...) metaphysical system that would provide a foundation for the new mechanistic natural philosophy while helping to secure the fundamental tenets of rational theology. Through a careful analysis of Bayle’s critical engagement with such philosophers as Spinoza, Leibniz, Locke and Newton, it is argued that, despite his reputation as a skeptic, Bayle was not without philosophical commitments of his own. Drawing on the full range of Bayle’s writings, from his early philosophical lectures to his final controversial writings, Ryan offers detailed studies of Bayle’s treatment of such pivotal issues as mind-body dualism, causation and God’s relation to the world. (shrink)

Researchers have raised concerns about teachers’ ability to embed nature of science in their science instruction, a complicated situation that is certainly impacted by the availability of adequate resources to assist K-12 science teachers. In light of the implementation of the ideas from the Framework for K-12 Science Education and the Next Generation Science Standards in the USA, this study sought to identify and evaluate resources aimed at guiding NOS instruction. A search of the National Science Teachers Association database for (...) Next Generation Science Standards -aligned instructional resources resulted in an analytical sample of eight lessons. All materials accompanying these lessons were analyzed for their representations of 10 NOS aspects. The evaluation of these materials revealed a prevalence of implicit, naïve representations in the sample lessons. Examination of the connections to NOS in these lessons leads to a set of recommendations to improve the quantity and quality of NOS representations in future NGSS-aligned instructional resources. The analytical approach used and the issues raised about the presentation and treatment of NOS in precollege lessons are of interest to the broader science education community. (shrink)

Many people believe that Somalia’s economy has been in chaos since the collapse of its national government in 1991. We take a comparative institutional approach to examine Somalia’s performance relative to other African countries both when Somalia had a government and during its extended period of anarchy. We find that although Somalia is poor, its relative economic performance has improved during its period of statelessness. We also describe how Somalia has provided basic law and order and a currency, which have (...) enabled the country to achieve the coordination that has led to improvements in its standard of living. (shrink)

Since the eighteenth century, the study of plants has reflected an increasingly mechanized and technological view of the natural world that divides the humanities and the natual sciences. In broad terms, this article proposes a context for research into flora through an interrogation of existing literature addressing a rapprochement between ways to knowledge. The natureculture dichotomy, and more specifically the plant-to-human sensory disjunction, follows a parallel course of resolution to the schism between objective and subjective forms of knowledge. The foundations (...) of taxonomic botany, as well as the allied fields of environmental studies, ethnobotany and economic botany, are undergirded by universalizing, sensorylimited visual structuring of the natural world. As the study of everyday embodied interactions of humans with flora, expanding upon the lens of cultural ecology, "cultural botany" provides a transdisciplinary research approach. Alternate embodied cultural engagements with flora emerge through a syncretic fusion of diverse methodologies. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reading the Mind:From George Eliot's Fiction to James Sully's PsychologyVanessa L. RyanWhat is the function and value of fiction? Debates over these questions involve considerations that range from aesthetics to ethics, from the intrinsic values of the genre to its moral effects. Recently, largely under the influence of the cognitive sciences, the question has taken on a new cast: might science give us a new answer to these long-standing (...) issues? Studies such as Lisa Zunshine's Why We Read Fiction (2006), John Carey's What Good Are the Arts? (2005), and Alan Palmer's Fictional Minds (2004) are part of a growing area of interdisciplinary work on the relationship between art and consciousness.1 This body of work asks not just how our theories of consciousness inform our understanding of the process and function of [End Page 615] reading fiction, but also whether fiction itself might provide a key to new theories about the nature of consciousness.The nineteenth-century novel is often considered the high point in the literary representation of mind. Indeed, the terms "psychology" and "novel" are explicitly yoked in the nineteenth-century with the simultaneous emergence of both as discrete forms of intellectual and artistic activity. Not surprisingly, George Eliot has come to be identified with the term "psychological novel": in fact, Nicholas Dames argues that she was the first to couple the words psychology and novel in this way in an 1855 review where she contrasted Charles Kingsley's historical romance Westward Ho! with "those 'psychological' novels."2 While George Eliot initially used the phrase in what Dames calls "mock disdain," by the end of the nineteenth century the term "psychological novel" had gained currency as a straightforward description of a type of Victorian novel: Wilbur Cross, in his summary The Development of the English Novel, for example, describes the form as "stressing an inner sequence of thought and feeling, which is brought into harmony with an ethical formula and accounted for in an analysis of motive." Along with Elizabeth Gaskell and George Meredith, Cross also cites George Eliot as one of his central examples of the "psychological novel."3It seems natural, then, when a critic asks, "what is the special distinguishing function of the modern art of fiction?" to turn for an answer to George Eliot's novels and their close connections with psychological science. It is perhaps surprising that this still-current question was posed by the nineteenth-century psychologist James Sully (1842–1923) in an 1881 article in the journal Mind on "George Eliot's Art."4 His essay offers us a Victorian contribution to questions about the relationship of literature and psychology that are being addressed today by critics such as Sally Shuttle-worth, Athena Vrettos, Kay Young, Nicholas Dames, or Rick Rylance, especially [End Page 616] with respect to George Eliot. James Sully's essay not only provides valuable insight into how the Victorians themselves understood the role of psychology in the novel, but also helps to place contemporary debates about fiction and consciousness into sharper relief.In the wake of important studies, such as Rylance's Victorian Psychology and British Culture (2000), that have brought renewed attention to nineteenth-century British psychology, recent scholarship has shown the central role of Victorian debates about the mind in shaping the fiction of the period.5 Nineteenth-century mental science provided material and inspiration for works of literature, with imaginative writers eager to exploit and develop the narrative and thematic potential of contemporary psychological discourse and probe the problems it raised. Novelists such as Wilkie Collins, George Eliot, and Henry James turned to some of the most current work in the science of the mind, which they saw as the most sophisticated and credible approach to psychological realism available. These and other novelists rapidly absorbed the central terms of the new science as it considered problems of consciousness, identity, and memory, and brought them to life by dramatizing and questioning them in their fiction. James Sully's interest in George Eliot reflects this fruitful mid- to late-nineteenth-century cross-pollination between philosophers, scientists, and novelists who were interested in the nature of consciousness, psychology... (shrink)

I argue that the ‘aoristic’ operators, which are intended to describe the logic of vagueness, do not form a standard modal logic. I redefine the operators so that they do form a standard modal logic, provide a semantics of that logic, and argue that the logic is not as strong as standardly claimed.