Written by a select international group of leading privacy scholars, Social Dimensions of Privacy endorses and develops an innovative approach to privacy. By debating topical privacy cases in their specific research areas, the contributors explore the new privacy-sensitive areas: legal scholars and political theorists discuss the European and American approaches to privacy regulation; sociologists explore new forms of surveillance and privacy on social network sites; and philosophers revisit feminist critiques of privacy, discuss markets in personal data, issues of privacy in (...) health care and democratic politics. The broad interdisciplinary character of the volume will be of interest to readers from a variety of scientific disciplines who are concerned with privacy and data protection issues. (shrink)

The paper presents an argument against a "metaphysical'* conception of logic according to which logic spells out a specific kind of mathematical structure that is somehow inherently related to our factual reasoning. In contrast, it is argued that it is always an empirical question as to whether a given mathematical structure really does captures a principle of reasoning. lMore generally, it is argued that it is not meaningful to replace an empirical investigation of a thing by an investigation of its (...) a priori analyzable structure without paying due attention to the question of whether it really is the structure of the thing in question.) It is proposed to elucidate the situation by distinguishing two essentially different realms with which our reason must deal: "the realm of the natural'*, constituted by the things of our empirical world, and "the realm of the formal'*, constituted by the structures that we use as "prisms'* to view, to make sense of, and to reconstruct the world. It is suggested that this vantage point may throw light on many foundational problems of logic. (shrink)

On what I will call the No Subject view, there is a sense in which one may be aware of a thought, conceived as an event in one's stream of consciousness, without being aware of oneself thinking something. Philosophical work on the delusion of thought insertion is one of the areas in which the No Subject view has been highly influential: the view has framed what, in the philosophy of mind, has become the standard interpretation of the delusion. Here I (...) want to present a challenge to the No Subject view, developing from reflection on the ontology of thinking. I will also consider how, if the standard interpretation fails, we are to understand thought insertion. In particular, I will suggest that we should question the widespread assumption that understanding the delusion has to be a matter of making sense of it. (shrink)

This new book by Beate Rossler is a work of real quality and originality on an extremely topical issue: the issue of privacy and the relations between the private and the public. Rossler investigates the reasons why we value privacy and why we ought to value it. In the context of modern, liberal societies, Rossler develops a theory of the private which links privacy and autonomy in a constitutive way: privacy is a necessary condition to lead an autonomous life. The (...) book develops a theory of freedom and autonomy which sees the ability to pose the "practical question" of how one wants to live, of what a person strives to be, at the centre of the modern idea of autonomy. The question of privacy is emerging as an increasingly important topic in social and political theory and is central to many current debates in law, the media and politics. The Value of Privacy will be widely recognised to be a classic contribution to the subject. (shrink)

In recent years there has been much psychological and neurological work purporting to show that consciousness and self-awareness play no role in causing actions, and indeed to demonstrate that free will is an illusion. The essays in this volume subject the assumptions that motivate such claims to sustained interdisciplinary scrutiny. The book will be compulsory reading for psychologists and philosophers working on action explanation, and for anyone interested in the relation between the brain sciences and consciousness.

This paper has two themes. One is the question of how to understand the relation between inner speech and knowledge of one’s own thoughts. My aim here is to probe and challenge the popular neo-Rylean suggestion that we know our own thoughts by ‘overhearing our own silent monologues’, and to sketch an alternative suggestion, inspired by Ryle’s lesser-known discussion of thinking as a ‘serial operation’. The second theme is the question whether, as Ryle apparently thought, we need two different accounts (...) of the epistemology of thinking, corresponding to the distinction between thoughts with respect to which we are active vs passive. I suggest we should be skeptical about the assumption that there is a single distinction here. There are a number of interesting ways in which thinking can involve passivity, but they provide no support for a ‘bifurcationist’ approach to the epistemology of thinking. (shrink)

This new book by Beate Rossler is a work of real quality and originality on an extremely topical issue: the issue of privacy and the relations between the private and the public. Rossler investigates the reasons why we value privacy and why we ought to value it. In the context of modern, liberal societies, Rossler develops a theory of the private which links privacy and autonomy in a constitutive way: privacy is a necessary condition to lead an autonomous life. The (...) book develops a theory of freedom and autonomy which sees the ability to pose the "practical question" of how one wants to live, of what a person strives to be, at the centre of the modern idea of autonomy. The question of privacy is emerging as an increasingly important topic in social and political theory and is central to many current debates in law, the media and politics. The Value of Privacy will be widely recognised to be a classic contribution to the subject. (shrink)

he paper examines the thesis that participants in shared intentional activities have first-person plural ‘practical knowledge’ of what they are jointly doing, in the sense of ‘practical knowledge’ articulated by G.E.M Anscombe. Who is supposed to be the subject of such knowledge? The group, or members of the group, or both? It is argued that progress with this issue requires conceiving of collective activities (of the kind affording ‘plural practical knowledge’)as instances, not of supra-personal agency, but of interpersonal agency; specifically: (...) as involving communication. There is a sense, it is suggested, in which the basic form of plural practical knowledge is relational: ‘I am doing x with you.’. (shrink)

In this paper we put forward and defend a view of the nature of logic that we call moderate anti-exceptionalism. In the first part of the paper we focus on the problem of genuine logical validity and consequence. We make use of examples from current debates to show that attempts to pinpoint the one and only authentic logic inevitably either yield irrefutable theories or lead to dead ends. We then outline a thoroughly naturalist account of logical consequence as grounded in (...) rules implicit in human linguistic practices. We insist that there are only two existing kinds of language: natural languages, and artificial languages that have been forged by us. There is thus no room for a "genuine" language and hence for "genuine" logic. We conclude that though logical theories are established—and are liable to criticism—in a similar fashion as those of the sciences, and in this sense logic is not exceptional, to fulfill its mission logic must lay a claim to normative authority over our argumentation and reasoning, which makes its methodology somewhat special. Logical theory is not meant to provide just an explanation, the standards it establishes serve also as a tool, providing for a reinforcement of our rational communication. (shrink)

According to Jaspers, claims to the effect that one's thoughts, impulses, or actions are controlled by others belong to those schizophrenic symptoms that are not susceptible to any psychological explanation. In opposition to Jaspers, it has recently been suggested that such claims can be made intelligible by distinguishing two ingredients in our common sense notion of ownership of a thought: It is one thing for a thought to occur in my stream of consciousness; it is another for it to be (...) interpretable in terms of my propositional attitudes. I argue that this distinction cannot be sustained and pursue an alternative suggestion, drawing on Louis Sass's "solipsist interpretation" of schizophrenia. (shrink)

The heyday of discussions initiated by Searle's claim that computers have syntax, but no semantics has now past, yet philosophers and scientists still tend to frame their views on artificial intelligence in terms of syntax and semantics. In this paper I do not intend to take part in these discussions; my aim is more fundamental, viz. to ask what claims about syntax and semantics in this context can mean in the first place. And I argue that their sense is so (...) unclear that that their ability to act as markers within any disputes on artificial intelligence is severely compromised; and hence that their employment brings us nothing more than an illusion of explanation. (shrink)

We investigate several ideal versions of the pseudointersection number \(\mathfrak {p}\), ideal slalom numbers, and associated topological spaces with the focus on selection principles. However, it turns out that well-known pseudointersection invariant \(\mathtt {cov}^*({\mathcal I})\) has a crucial influence on the studied notions. For an invariant \(\mathfrak {p}_\mathrm {K}({\mathcal J})\) introduced by Borodulin-Nadzieja and Farkas (Arch. Math. Logic 51:187–202, 2012), and an invariant \(\mathfrak {p}_\mathrm {K}({\mathcal I},{\mathcal J})\) introduced by Repický (Real Anal. Exchange 46:367–394, 2021), we have $$\begin{aligned} \min \{\mathfrak (...) {p}_\mathrm {K}({\mathcal I}),\mathtt {cov}^*({\mathcal I})\}=\mathfrak {p},\qquad \min \{\mathfrak {p}_\mathrm {K}({\mathcal I},{\mathcal J}),\mathtt {cov}^*({\mathcal J})\}\le \mathtt {cov}^*({\mathcal I}), \end{aligned}$$ respectively. In addition to the first inequality, for a slalom invariant \(\mathfrak {sl_e}({\mathcal I},{\mathcal J})\) introduced in Šupina (J. Math. Anal. Appl. 434:477–491, 2016), we show that $$\begin{aligned} \min \{\mathfrak {p}_\mathrm {K}({\mathcal I}),\mathfrak {sl_e}({\mathcal I},{\mathcal J}),\mathtt {cov}^*({\mathcal J})\}=\mathfrak {p}. \end{aligned}$$ Finally, we obtain a consistency that ideal versions of the Fréchet–Urysohn property and the strictly Fréchet–Urysohn property are distinguished. (shrink)

While most theoreticians of meaning in the first half of the twentieth century subscribed to a representational theory (viewing meanings as entities stood for by the expressions), the second half of the century was marked by the rise of various versions of use-theories of meaning. The roots of this ‘pragmatist turn’ are detectable in the writings of the later Wittgenstein, the Oxford speech act theorists (Austin, Grice) and the American neopragmatists (Quine, Sellars). Though it is now rather popular (and sometimes (...) even fashionable) to invoke the use-theory of meaning, it is by far not so popular to inquire what such a theory really is. In this paper we try to give at least a part of the answer, whereby we find out that the usual conception of such a theory is unsatisfactory. We propose that for an improvement we must, together with Wittgenstein and Sellars, conceive language as a (tool of a) rule-based activity, which enables us to replace the concept of disposition, usually constituting the backbone of the use-theory, by the concept of propriety. The resulting normative version of the use-theory then becomes the investigation of the rules which expressions acquire vis-`a-vis the rules of the relevant language games – especially of the rules of inference. (shrink)

Business ethics represents an important aspect that influences each country’s socio-economic system, and is important to society, environment, and economy. The present article aims to define significant attributes of business ethics in the sector of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and compares their attitudes within the three most significant business sectors in the Visegrad Group countries (V4 countries: Czech Republic, Slovak Republic, Poland, and Hungary). An empirical study, focusing on the attitudes of small and medium-sized firms, was conducted in June (...) 2022 in Visegrad Group countries through the reputable hired company MNFORCE, using the Computer Assisted Web Interviewing research method. The total number of respondents in the Visegrad Group countries was 1,398. Statistical hypotheses were tested using descriptive statistics, chi-square, and Z-score at a significance level of α = 5%. The most important conclusion of this research is that there are no significant differences in the approach of SMEs to business ethics based on the sector in which the companies operate. Some notable differences in attitudes among SMEs in Slovakia and the Czech Republic were identified, but these were marginal. Therefore, differences in the transformation process within selected economic sectors do not impact the formation of attitudes of small and medium-sized companies in business ethics. It is evident that business ethics is significantly determined primarily by the personal characteristics of the owner/manager of the company, and the specificities of individual sectors do not influence this field. (shrink)

_The Sub ject of Con scious ness_ is a rich, strik ingly orig i nal and ambi tious work. It makes an impor tant and timely con tri bu tion to cur rent debates on a num ber of issues which over the last few years have been tak ing cen tre stage in the phi los o phy of mind: for exam ple, self-consciousness, selec tive atten tion and the nature of bodily aware ness. What makes this achieve ment (...) some what unusual, and all the more remark able, is that _The Sub ject of Con scious ness_ was pub lished thirty years ago (Evans, 1970). The reviews it received at the time ranged from the hos tile to the deri sory. (shrink)

The followers of Wilfrid Sellars are often divided into “right” and “left” Sellarsians, according to whether they believe, in Mark Lance's words, that “linguistic roles constitutive of meaning and captured by dot quoted words are ‘normative all the way down.’” The present article anatomizes this division and argues that it is not easy to give it a nontrivial sense. In particular, the article argues that it is not really possible to construe it as a controversy related to ontology, and goes (...) on to argue that it is also not easy to construe it as one concerning the translatability of the normative idiom into the non-normative one. The conclusion is that the only coherent interpretation of this disagreement is as a disagreement about the possibility and desirability of assuming a standpoint “inside” our linguistic practices. (shrink)

A review of deVries' and O'Shea's books, both titled "Wilfrid Sellars". By Jaroslav Peregrin.

Statements purporting to convey practical knowledge in Anscombe's sense are subject to two distinctive kinds of error: errors in performance and errors of practical judgement. I argue that reflection on these kinds of errors sheds light both on the nature of practical knowledge and on the status of Anscombe's account of it. Briefly: practical knowledge is knowledge we ordinarily find intelligible in the light of the agent's non-defective exercise of practical judgement. And Anscombe's account is not primarily designed to make (...) practical knowledge intelligible to philosophers but to make explicit how such knowledge is seen as intelligible — and claims to such knowledge are seen to be justifiable — by those who are engaged in the practice of sharing it. I go on to consider how this interpretation bears on the disagreement between Anscombe's view and what she calls a 'contemplative' conception of knowledge. (shrink)

The article addresses two closely related questions: What are the criteria of adequacy of logical formalization of natural language arguments, and what gives logic the authority to decide which arguments are good and which are bad? Our point of departure is the criticism of the conception of logical formalization put forth, in a recent paper, by M. Baumgartner and T. Lampert. We argue that their account of formalization as a kind of semantic analysis brings about more problems than it solves. (...) We also argue that the criteria of adequate formalization need not be based on truth conditions associated with logical formulas; in our view, they are better based on structural (inferential) grounds. We then put forward our own version of the criteria. The upshot of the discussion that follows is that the quest for an adequate formalization in a suitable logical language is best conceived of as the search for a Goodmanian reflective equilibrium. (shrink)

Growth modelling is of interest to scientists in various disciplines. In our article, we will collect 17 models designed for growth modelling, appraise these models and contribute to the discussion of their applicability. The merit of the paper lies in studying the convergence properties of nonlinear regression in selected models. Our studies will be performed mainly concerning the quality of the obtained estimates, which are closely related to the intrinsic curvature of the model according to Bates and Watts. This curvature (...) determines the size of the linearization domains. Only if the initial solution is in this domain, then the convergence of the estimate in nonlinear regression is guaranteed. The primary goal is to design a methodology for selecting a growth model. We will demonstrate fruitfulness of our methodology on the weight measurements of 10 calves under 25 months of age from cowsheds in the village Záluží in the Czech Republic. Estimated parameters of growth curves, sizes of linearization domain, calculated residues and coefficients of determination indices will be the subject of discussion. (shrink)

Tomáš Marvan Otázka významu: Cesty analytické filosofie jazyka. 1. vyd. Praha: Togga, 2010, ISBN 978-80-87258-33-0, 150 stran.

Leading philosophers & psychologists offer an assessment of the commonsense view that perceptual experience is an immediate awareness of mind-independent objects. They examine the nature of perception, its role in the acquisition of knowledge, the role of causation in perception, & how perceptual understanding develops in humans.

Privacy and surveillance scholars increasingly worry that data collectors can use the information they gather about our behaviors, preferences, interests, incomes, and so on to manipulate us. Yet what it means, exactly, to manipulate someone, and how we might systematically distinguish cases of manipulation from other forms of influence—such as persuasion and coercion—has not been thoroughly enough explored in light of the unprecedented capacities that information technologies and digital media enable. In this paper, we develop a definition of manipulation that (...) addresses these enhanced capacities, investigate how information technologies facilitate manipulative practices, and describe the harms—to individuals and to social institutions—that flow from such practices. -/- We use the term “online manipulation” to highlight the particular class of manipulative practices enabled by a broad range of information technologies. We argue that at its core, manipulation is hidden influence—the covert subversion of another person’s decision-making power. We argue that information technology, for a number of reasons, makes engaging in manipulative practices significantly easier, and it makes the effects of such practices potentially more deeply debilitating. And we argue that by subverting another person’s decision-making power, manipulation undermines his or her autonomy. Given that respect for individual autonomy is a bedrock principle of liberal democracy, the threat of online manipulation is a cause for grave concern. (shrink)

Wilfrid Sellars's analysis of the concept of meaning led, in effect, to the conclusion that the meaning of an expression is its inferential role. This view is often challenged by the claim that inference is a matter of syntax and syntax can never yield us semantics. I argue that this challenge is based on the confusion of two senses of "syntax"; and I try to throw some new light on the concept of inferential role. My conclusion is that the Sellarsian (...) view that something can have meaning only if it is subject to inferences is viable, and that inferential role is a plausible explication of meaning. However I also argue, pace Sellars, that the inferential nature of meaning does not prevent us from engaging in the enterprise of Carnapian formal semantics. (shrink)

1.1 INFERENTIALISM AND REPRESENTATIONALISM 1.2 INFERENTIALISM AND LOGIC 1.3 FROM PROOF THEORY TO SEMANTICS 1.4 BRANDOM'S NORMATIVE INFERENTIALISM..

The causal theory of action is widely recognized in the literature of the philosophy of action as the "standard story" of human action and agency--the nearest approximation in the field to a theoretical orthodoxy. This volume brings together leading figures working in action theory today to discuss issues relating to the CTA and its applications, which range from experimental philosophy to moral psychology. Some of the contributors defend the theory while others criticize it; some draw from historical sources while others (...) focus on recent developments; some rely on the tools of analytic philosophy while others cite the latest empirical research on human action. All agree, however, on the centrality of the CTA in the philosophy of action. The contributors first consider metaphysical issues, then reasons-explanations of action, and, finally, new directions for thinking about the CTA. They discuss such topics as the tenability of some alternatives to the CTA; basic causal deviance; the etiology of action; teleologism and anticausalism; and the compatibility of the CTA with theories of embodied cognition. Two contributors engage in an exchange of views on intentional omissions that stretches over four essays, directly responding to each other in their follow-up essays. As the action-oriented perspective becomes more influential in philosophy of mind and philosophy of cognitive science, this volume offers a long-needed debate over foundational issues. Contributors: Fred Adams, Jesus H. Aguilar, John Bishop, Andrei A. Buckareff, Randolph Clarke, Jennifer Hornsby, Alicia Juarrero, Alfred R. Mele, Michael S. Moore, Thomas Nadelhoffer, Josef Perner, Johannes Roessler, David-Hillel Ruben, Carolina Sartorio, Michael Smith, Rowland Stout. (shrink)

V knize konfrontuji běžné pojetí jazyka, podle kterého je význam záležitostí vztahu slovo-věc, se strukturalistickým pohledem, podle kterého význam nemůže existovat bez toho, aby byly výrazy určitým způsobem provázány mezi sebou. Ukazuji, že takový strukturalismus není jen věcí Ferdinanda de Saussura, ale že se vyskytuje (pod jménem holismus) i v základech (post)analytické filosofie Quina, Davidsona, Sellarse a Brandoma. Ukazuji také, že není neslučitelný s formálně-logickým přístupem k významu, jaký byl rozpracován Carnapem, Montaguem a dalšími.

This book offers a comprehensive account of logic that addresses fundamental issues concerning the nature and foundations of the discipline. The authors claim that these foundations can not only be established without the need for strong metaphysical assumptions, but also without hypostasizing logical forms as specific entities. They present a systematic argument that the primary subject matter of logic is our linguistic interaction rather than our private reasoning and it is thus misleading to see logic as revealing "the laws of (...) thought". In this sense, fundamental logical laws are implicit to our "language games" and are thus more similar to social norms than to the laws of nature. Peregrin and Svoboda also show that logical theories, despite the fact that they rely on rules implicit to our actual linguistic practice, firm up these rules and make them explicit. By carefully scrutinizing the project of logical analysis, the authors demonstrate that logical rules can be best seen as products of the so called reflective equilibrium. They suggest that we can profit from viewing languages as "inferential landscapes" and logicians as "geographers" who map them and try to pave safe routes through them. This book is an essential resource for scholars and researchers engaged with the foundations of logical theories and the philosophy of language. (shrink)

In a remarkable early paper, Wilfrid Sellars warned us that if we cease to recognize rules, we may well find ourselves walking on four feet; and it is obvious that within human communities, the phenomenon of rules is ubiquitous. Yet from the viewpoint of the sciences, rules cannot be easily accounted for. Sellars himself, during his later years, managed to put a lot of flesh on the normative bones from which he assembled the remarkable skeleton of the early paper; and (...) his followers too. However, what they say is somewhat divergent; and therefore my aim in this paper is to concentrate on the very concept of rule and analyse it in the context of the question what it is about us humans that makes us special. (shrink)