... 243-) INTRODUCTION §§243- constitute the eighth 'chapter' of the book. Its point of departure is a natural query with respect to the conclusion of the ...

This volume collects P. M. S. Hacker's papers on Wittgenstein and related themes written over the last decade. Hacker provides comparative studies of a range of topics--including Wittgenstein's philosophy of psychology, conception of grammar, and treatment of intentionality--and defends his own Wittgensteinian conception of philosophy.

This fourth and final volume of the monumental commentary on Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations covers pp 428-693 of the book. Like the previous volumes, it consists of philosophical essays and exegesis.

Even though integrity is widely considered to be an essential aspect of research, there is an ongoing debate on what actually constitutes research integrity. The understanding of integrity ranges from the minimal, only considering falsification, fabrication and plagiarism, to the maximum, blending into science ethics. Underneath these obvious contrasts, there are more subtle differences that are not as immediately evident. The debate about integrity is usually presented as a single, universal discussion, with shared concerns for researchers, policymakers and ‘the public’. (...) In this article, we show that it is not. There are substantial differences between the language of research integrity in the scientific arena and in the public domain. Notably, scientists and policymakers adopt different approaches to research integrity. Scientists tend to present integrity as a virtue that must be kindled, while policy documents and newspapers stress norm enforcement. Rather than performing a conceptual analysis through philosophical reasoning and discussion, we aimed to clarify the discourse of ‘scientific integrity’ by studying its usage in written documents. To this end, large numbers of scientific publications, policy documents and newspaper articles were analysed by means of scientometric and content analysis techniques. The texts were analysed on their usage of the term ‘integrity’ and of frequently co-occurring terms and concepts. A comparison was made between the usage in the various media, as well as between different periods in which they were published through co-word analysis, mapping co-occurrence networks of significant terms and themes. (shrink)

The theory of mental models and its computer implementations have led to crucial experiments showing that no standard logic—the sentential calculus and all logics that include it—can underlie human reasoning. The theory replaces the logical concept of validity (the conclusion is true in all cases in which the premises are true) with necessity (conclusions describe no more than possibilities to which the premises refer). Many inferences are both necessary and valid. But experiments show that individuals make necessary inferences that are (...) invalid, e.g., Few people ate steak or sole; therefore, few people ate steak. Other crucial experiments show that individuals reject inferences that are not necessary but valid, e.g., He had the anesthetic or felt pain, but not both; therefore, he had the anesthetic or felt pain, or both. Nothing in logic can justify the rejection of a valid inference: a denial of its conclusion is inconsistent with its premises, and inconsistencies yield valid inferences of any conclusions whatsoever including the one denied. So inconsistencies are catastrophic in logic. In contrast, the model theory treats all inferences as defeasible (nonmonotonic), and inconsistencies have the null model, which yields only the null model in conjunction with any other premises. So inconsistences are local. Which allows truth values in natural languages to be much richer than those that occur in the semantics of standard logics; and individuals verify assertions on the basis of both facts and possibilities that did not occur. (shrink)

Davidson’s explanation of first‐person authority in utterance of sentences of the form ‘I V that p’ derives first‐person authority from the requirements of interpretation of speech. His account is committed to the view that utterance sentences are truth‐bearers, that believing that p is a matter of holding true an utterance sentence, and that a speaker’s knowledge of what he means gives him knowledge of what belief he expresses by his utterance. These claims are here faulted. His explanation of first‐person authority (...) by reference to the requirements of interpretability is committed to the view that all understanding involves interpretation. This is argued to be a misconception of understanding and of speaker’s meaning. Davidson’s account involves acceptance of the cognitive assumption that normally when a person Vs that p, he knows that he does. This assumption is challenged. Throughout, Davidson’s conception is compared and contrasted with Wittgenstein’s. (shrink)

This fourth and final volume of the monumental commentary on Wittgenstein's _Philosophical Investigations_ covers pp 428-693 of the book. Like the previous volumes, it consists of philosophical essays and exegesis.

James Conant, a proponent of the ‘New American Wittgenstein’, has argued that the standard inter- pretation of Wittgenstein is wholly mistaken in respect of Wittgenstein’s critique of metaphysics and the attendant conception of nonsense. The standard interpretation, Conant holds, misascribes to Wittgenstein Carnapian views on the illegitimacy of metaphysical utterances, on logical syntax and grammar, and on the nature of nonsense. Against this account, I argue that (i) Carnap is misrepresented; (ii) the so-called standard interpretation (in so far as I (...) have contributed to it) is misrepresented; (iii) Wittgenstein’s views, early and late, are misrepresented. I clarify Wittgen- stein’s conception of logical syntax and of the nonsense that results from transgressing it. (shrink)

Law, Morality and Society Essays in Honour of H.L.A Hart.

1. The Tractatus doctrine of saying and showing In a letter to Russell dated 19.4.1919, written shortly after he had finished the Tractatus, Wittgenstein told Russell that the main contention of the book, to which all else, including the account of logic, is subsidiary, ‘is the theory of what can be expressed (gesagt) by prop[osition]s -- i.e. by language -- (and, which comes to the same, what can be thought) and what cannot be expressed by prop[osition]s, but only shown (gezeigt); (...) which I believe is the cardinal problem of philosophy’ (CL 68). This was emphasized in both preface and conclusion of the book. The preface observes that the whole sense of the book can be summed up in the following words: ‘what can be said at all can be said clearly, and what we cannot talk about we must pass over in silence’ (TLP p.3). The conclusion of the book (TLP 7) simply repeats this. The preceding three remarks, however, are noteworthy. They make three claims. First, ‘There are, indeed, things that cannot be put into words. They make themselves manifest. They are what is mystical’ (TLP 6.522). This reiterates the leitmotif of the book, namely that there are things that cannot, by the very nature of representation, be said. But though they cannot be said, they are shown by features of the relevant system of representation. Secondly, the correct method in philosophy would really be to say nothing except what can be said, i.e. empirical propositions that have nothing to do with philosophy, and then, when someone wanted to say something metaphysical, to demonstrate to him that he had failed to give meaning to certain signs in his propositions (TLP 6.53). This method, of course, is not the method that has been followed throughout the book, which consists almost exclusively of modal assertions concerning what must, can or cannot be thus and so in reality, in language and in the relation between language and reality.. (shrink)

1. First person authority: the received explanation Over a wide range of psychological attributes, a mature speaker seems to enjoy a defeasible form of authority on how things are with him. The received explanation of this is epistemic, and rests upon a cognitive assumption. The speaker’s word is a authoritative because when things are thus-and-so with him, then normally he knows that they are. This is held to be because the speaker has direct and privileged access to the contents of (...) his consciousness by means of introspection, conceived as a faculty of inner sense. Like perceptual knowledge, introspective knowledge is held to be direct and non-evidential. Accordingly, the first-person utterances ‘I have a pain’, ‘I believe that p’, ‘I intend to V’ are taken to be descriptions of what is evident to inner sense. Many classical thinkers held such subjective knowledge to be not only immediate, but also infallible and indubitable. The challenge to the received conceptions came from Wittgenstein. He denied the cognitive assumption, arguing that it cannot be said of me at all (except perhaps as a joke) that I know that I am in pain. For what is that supposed to mean — except perhaps that I am in pain?1 If it makes no sense to say that one knows that one is in pain, then the epistemic explanation is a non-starter, since it explains the special authoritative status of a person’s avowal of pain by reference to the putative fact that the subject of pain knows, normally knows, or cannot but know, that he is in pain when he is. It is important to note that Wittgenstein did not mechanically generalize the case of pain across the whole domain of firstperson utterances. The case of pain constitutes only one pole of a range of such utterances. Avowals and averrals of belief and intention approximate the other pole, and require independent analysis and grammatical description. (shrink)

The concept of consciousness has been the source of much philosophical, cognitive scientific and neuroscientific discussion for the past two decades. Many scientists, as well as philosophers, argue that at the moment we are almost completely in the dark about the nature of consciousness. Stuart Sutherland, in a much quoted remark, wrote that.

Background: The factors influencing parents’ willingness to enroll their children in biobanks are poorly understood. This study sought to assess parents’ willingness to enroll their children, and their perceived benefits, concerns, and information needs under different consent and data-sharing scenarios, and to identify factors associated with willingness. Methods: This large, experimental survey of patients at the 11 eMERGE Network sites used a disproportionate stratified sampling scheme to enrich the sample with historically underrepresented groups. Participants were randomized to receive one of (...) three consent and data-sharing scenarios. Results: In total, 90,000 surveys were mailed and 13,000 individuals responded (15.8% response rate). 5737 respondents were parents of minor children. Overall, 55% (95% confidence interval 50–59%) of parents were willing to enroll their youngest minor child in a hypothetical biobank; willingness did not differ between consent and data-sharing scenarios. Lower educational attainment, higher religiosity, lower trust, worries about privacy, and attitudes about benefits, concerns, and information needs were independently associated with less willingness to allow their child to participate. Of parents who were willing to participate themselves, 25% were not willing to allow their child to participate. Being willing to participate but not willing to allow one’s child to participate was independently associated with multiple factors, including race, lower educational attainment, lower annual household income, public health care insurance, and higher religiosity. Conclusions: Fifty-five percent of parents were willing to allow their youngest minor child to participate in a hypothetical biobank. Building trust, protecting privacy, and addressing attitudes may increase enrollment and diversity in pediatric biobanks. (shrink)

We point out that, when the dimension of the Hilbert space is greater than two, Bell’s operators entering the Bell-CHSH inequality do exhibit inequivalent unitary matrix representations. Although the Bell-CHSH inequality turns out to be violated, the size of the violation is different for different representations, the maximum violation being given by Tsirelson’s bound. The feature relies on a pairing mechanism between the modes of the Hilbert space of the system.

P.M.S. Hacker 1. _The problems of Intentionality_ The problems of intentionality have exercised philosophers since the dawn of their subject. In the last century they were brought afresh into the limelight by Brentano. Famously he remarked that.

The thesis of this paper is that games and sports that harm nonhuman animals are unethical because they exceed the permissible limits of optional harm and the more harm the game imposes on the nonhuman animal(s) it objectifies the worse the ethical transgression. Factors in the analysis include the nature of games and sports, the ontology of beings (i.e., human and nonhuman animals) in games, the mitigating power of informed consent among human game-players and its absence among nonhuman game players, (...) harm, and intent. (shrink)

Patterns in Twentieth-Century European Thought contains interpretive essays in the history of the century's Marxism, psychoanalysis, quantum physics, logic, language theory, philosophy, art, literature, and theology. A concluding essay argues that the philosophy and social theory - not to mention the physics and theology - constitute a twentieth-century Counter-Enlightenment that has replaced the Cartesian- and Newtonian-based Enlightenment of the eighteenth century.

My objective in this project is to explore the concept of moral luck as it relates to sports. I am especially interested in constitutive luck. As a foundation I draw from both Bernard Williams and Thomas Nagel’s classic handling of moral luck, generally. Within the philosophy of sport are similar explorations of this nexus by Robert Simon and David Carr that also factor into the present work. My intent is to put a new lens in front of a puzzle drawn (...) from Torbjörn Tännsjö’s well-known article ‘Is Our Admiration of Sports Heroes Facistoid?’ Specifically, the idea that we might admire an athlete who excels without having worked hard for it. If we may call this puzzle ‘the talent problem,’ the questions driving the present work are as follows: what is the relationship between moral luck and the talent problem, and can this relationship provide a prescription for morally assessing the talent problem? The thesis that this exploratory work suggests that more complex games (and... (shrink)

This third volume of the monumental commentary on Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations covers sections 243-427, which constitute the heart of the book. Like the previous volumes, it consists of philosophical essays and exegesis. The thirteen essays cover all the major themes of this part of Wittgenstein's masterpiece: the private language arguments, privacy, avowals and descriptions, private ostensive definition, criteria, minds and machines, behavior and behaviorism, the self, the inner and the outer, thinking, consciounesss, and the imagination. The exegesis clarifies and evaluates (...) Wittgenstein's arguments, drawing extensively on all the unpublished papers, examining the evolution of his ideas in manuscript sources and definitively settling many controversies about the interpretation of the published text. This commentary, like its predecessors, is indispensable for the study of Wittgenstein and is essential reading for students of the philosophy of mind. A fourth and final volume, entitled Wittgenstein: Mind and Will will complete the commentary. (shrink)

Herein I address and extend the sparse literature on deception in sports, specifically, Kathleen Pearson’s Deception, Sportsmanship, and Ethics and Mark J. Hamilton’s There’s No Lying in Baseball. On a Kantian foundation, I argue that attempts to deceive officials, such as framing pitches in baseball, are morally unacceptable because they necessarily regard others as incompetent and as a mere means to one’s own self-interested ends. More dramatically I argue, contrary to Pearson and Hamilton, that some forms of competitor-to-competitor deception are (...) similarly unacceptable. Specifically, I offer a ‘principle of caustic deceit’ according to which any strategic deception that divorces a game from its constitutive skills is morally untoward and ought to be met with negative social pressure at least, and/or legislated out of existence. The problem with these forms of strategic deception is that they treat one’s opponents, again in the Kantian sense, as a mere means to one’s own self-interested ends. (shrink)

Business Ethics, the Environment &Responsibility, EarlyView.

This work is the first to demonstrate the differences and similarities between Plato's myths and the traditional kind of which he was critical. It also actively demonstrates the extent to which his own myths support or undermine the philosophical ideas of the dialogues in which they are set. It offers new arguments and criticism on point of detail concerning modern interpretations.