Name der Zeitschrift: Das Mittelalter Jahrgang: 21 Heft: 1 Seiten: 123-144.

By using the notions of exact truth and exact falsity, one can give 16 distinct definitions of classical consequence. This paper studies the class of relations that results from these definitions in settings that are paracomplete, paraconsistent or both and that are governed by the Strong Kleene schema. Besides familiar logics such as Strong Kleene logic, the Logic of Paradox and First Degree Entailment, the resulting class of all Strong Kleene generalizations of classical logic also contains a host of unfamiliar (...) logics. We first study the members of our class semantically, after which we present a uniform sequent calculus that is sound and complete with respect to all of them. Two further sequent calculi and \ calculus) will be considered, which serve the same purpose and which are obtained by applying general methods to construct sequent calculi for many-valued logics. Rules and proofs in the SK calculus are much simpler and shorter than those of the \ and the \ calculus, which is one of the reasons to prefer the SK calculus over the latter two. Besides favourably comparing the SK calculus to both the \ and the \ calculus, we also hint at its philosophical significance. (shrink)

According to Hempel’s influential theory of explanation, explaining why some a is G consists in showing that the truth that a is G follows from a law-like generalization to the effect that all Fs are G together with the initial condition that a is F. While Hempel’s overall account is now widely considered to be deeply flawed, the idea that some generalizations play the explanatory role that the account predicts is still often endorsed by contemporary philosophers of science. This idea, (...) however, conflicts with widely shared views in metaphysics according to which the generalization that all Fs are G is partially explained by the fact that a is G. I discuss two solutions to this conflict that have been proposed recently, argue that they are unsatisfactory, and offer an alternative. (shrink)

Research teams have used extra-uterine systems to support premature fetal lambs and to bring them to maturation in a way not previously possible. The researchers have called attention to possible implications of these systems for sustaining premature human fetuses in a similar way. Some commentators have pointed out that perfecting these systems for human fetuses might alter a standard expectation in abortion practices: that the termination of a pregnancy also entails the death of the fetus. With Biobags, it might be (...) possible, some argue, that no woman has the right to expect that outcome if the technology is able to sustain fetal life _after_ an abortion. In order to protect the expectation that the termination of a pregnancy always entails the death of the fetus, Elizabeth Romanis has argued that fetuses sustained in Biobags have a status different than otherwise ‘born’ children. In support of that view, she argues that these ‘gestatelings’ are incapable of independent life. This argument involves a misunderstanding of the gestational support involved, as well as a misapprehension of neonatology practice. Here, we argue that any human fetus sustained in a Biobag would be as ‘independent’ as any other premature infant, and just as ‘born’. Neonatologists would seem to have certain presumptive moral responsibilities toward any human fetus gestating in a Biobag. It remains a separate question whether the perfection and widespread application of Biobags for premature human beings would or should alter the expectation that ending a pregnancy also entails fetal death. (shrink)

reality is a complex affair. It comprises a huge variety of different elements. Importantly, though, reality is not a mere aggregate of its elements but rather a structured whole or system whose building blocks are not all on the same level. Instead, they form hierarchical networks ordered by relations of priority. In such networks, derivative aspects of reality obtain in virtue of their grounds, that is, in virtue of more fundamental aspects of reality that are prior to them.This picture of (...) reality as a structured whole is currently enjoying a renaissance in the works of philosophers such as Kit Fine, Jonathan Schaffer, and many others. But far from being a new picture, it has been widely endorsed throughout the... (shrink)

This paper revisits a well-known rebuttal of Peter van Inwagen’s consequence argument. This CS-rebuttal, as I shall call it, focuses on the counterfactual structure of alternative possibilities. It shows that the ability to do otherwise is such that if the agent had exercised it, the distant past and/or the laws of nature would have been different. On the counterfactual scenario, there is, therefore, no need for the agent to exercise an ability to change the past or the laws of nature. (...) I first present van Inwagen’s original version of the consequence argument. After exposing some difficulties with Lewis’ famous version of the CS-rebuttal, I proceed by explaining and defending an older and, in my view, superior version. I subsequently discuss a traditional incompatibilist rejoinder, which insists that the past and the laws of nature are fixed. Although this rejoinder delivers a valid argument against the existence of alternative possibilities, it relies on premises the compatibilist explicitly rejects. The outcome of the debate is therefore properly characterized as a genuine dialectical stalemate between compatibilists and incompatibilists. In the final sections of the paper, I demonstrate that attempts by Fischer, Holliday and Fischer and Pendergraft to move beyond the stalemate in favor of the incompatibilist position all fail. I thereby show that the debate is marred by a misunderstanding of the semantics underlying the backtracking conditionals sometimes associated with the compatibilist position. In view of my arguments, the dialectical stalemate between compatibilists and incompatibilists regarding the counterfactual structure of the ability to do otherwise remains fully intact. (shrink)

"Provides translations of Bolzano's most important work on grounding, including previously untranslated material"--.

In this chapter we deal with the challenge to the existence of free will and moral responsibility that is raised by the threat of determinism from a Wittgensteinian perspective. Our argument starts by briefly recapitulating Wittgenstein’s analysis of the practice of doubt in On Certainty. We subsequently turn to the problem of free will. We argue that the existence of free will is a basic certainty and that the thesis of determinism fails to cast doubt on it. We thereby make (...) use of – but also try to go beyond – Wittgenstein’s own remarks in his “Lectures on Freedom of the Will”. In the final section we focus more explicitly on moral responsibility. Inspired by P.F. Strawson’s work on free will and moral responsibility, which we take to be deeply Wittgensteinian, we argue that our practices of holding each other responsible manifest basic human certainties which cannot be meaningfully challenged by invoking the thesis of determinism. (shrink)

According to an increasingly popular view among philosophers of science, both causal and non-causal explanations can be accounted for by a single theory: the counterfactual theory of explanation. A kind of non-causal explanation that has gained much attention recently but that this theory seems unable to account for are grounding explanations. Reutlinger :239-256, 2017) has argued that, despite these appearances to the contrary, such explanations are covered by his version of the counterfactual theory. His idea is supported by recent work (...) on grounding by Schaffer and Wilson who claim there to be a tight connection between grounding and counterfactual dependence. The present paper evaluates the prospects of the idea. We show that there is only a weak sense in which grounding explanations convey information about counterfactual dependencies, and that this fact cannot plausibly be taken to reveal a distinctive feature that grounding explanations share with other kinds of explanations. (shrink)

It is sometimes mentioned that Bernard Bolzano’s work on grounding anticipates many insights of the current debate on metaphysical grounding. The present paper discusses a certain part of Bolzano’s theory of grounding that has thus far not been discussed in the literature. This part does not so much anticipate what are nowadays common assumptions about grounding, but rather goes beyond them. Central to the discussion will be a thesis of Bolzano’s by which he tries to establish a connection between grounding (...) and unification. The paper spells out this thesis in detail and discusses the assumptions on which it rests. Next to this mainly historical aim, the paper also presents reasons why philosophers who are not interested in the historical Bolzano should find the thesis interesting by relating it to a certain view on unification and explanation that has been put forward by Kim. A final part of the paper provides a critical evaluation of the thesis against the background of current accounts of grounding. (shrink)

In this paper, we argue that antecedents of modern corporate social responsibility prior to the Industrial Revolution can be referred to as “proto-CSR” to describe a practice that influenced modern CSR, but which is different from its modern counterparts in form and structure. We develop our argument with the history of miners’ guilds in medieval Germany—religious fraternities and secular mutual aid societies. Based on historical data collected by historians and archeologists, we reconstruct a long-term process of pragmatic experimentation with institutions (...) of mutual aid that address social problems in the early mining industry, and thus before the rise of the modern state and the capitalist firm. Co-shaped by economic and political actors, these institutions of mutual aid have influenced the social responsibility programs of early industrialists, modern social welfare legislation, and contemporary CSR. We conjecture that other elements of proto-CSR might have evolved according to similar trajectories. (shrink)

Towards a critical posthumanism -- Genealogy of posthumanism -- Our posthuman humanity and the multiplicity of its forms -- Posthumanism and science fiction -- Interdisciplinarity and the posthumanities -- Posthumanism, digitalization, and new media -- Posthumanity, subject, and system -- Other side of life.

Within evolutionary biology, life-history theory is used to explain cross-species differences in allocation strategies regarding reproduction, maturation, and survival. Behavioral scientists have recently begun to conceptualize such strategies as a within-species individual characteristic that is predictive of behavior. Although life history theory provides an important framework for behavioral scientists, the psychometric approach to life-history strategy measurement—as operationalized by K-factors—involves conceptual entanglements. We argue that current psychometric approaches attempting to identify K-factors are based on an unwarranted conflation of functional descriptions and (...) proximate mechanisms—a conceptual mix-up that may generate unviable hypotheses and invites misinterpretation of empirical findings. The assumptions underlying generic psychometric methodology do not allow measurement of functionally defined variables; rather these methods are confined to Mayr’s proximate causal realm. We therefore conclude that K-factor scales lack validity, and that life history strategy cannot be identified with psychometrics as usual. To align theory with methodology, suggestions for alternative methods and new avenues are proposed. (shrink)

Construction grammar organizes its basic elements of description, its constructions, into networks that range from concrete, lexically-filled constructions to fully schematic ones, with several levels of partially schematic constructions in between. However, only few corpus studies with a constructionist background take this multi-level nature fully into account. In this paper, we argue that understanding language variation can be advanced considerably by systematically formulating and testing hypotheses at various levels in the constructional network. To illustrate the approach, we present a corpus (...) study of the Dutch naar-alternation. It is found that this alternation primarily functions at an intermediate level in the constructional network. (shrink)

This paper critically compares a deliberative system based on parliamentary elections (an electoral system) and a deliberative system based on sortition (a lottocratic system). Both systems are analyzed in three dimensions. The epistemic dimension concerns the rational quality of the democratic process. The power dimension concerns the distribution of power and the extent to which citizens genuinely control all decisions. The motivational dimension, finally, concerns citizens’ identification with the decision-making process and their willingness to abide by its outcomes. We argue (...) that an electoral system is, in all three dimensions, normatively superior to a sortition-based system. Most prominently, we claim that electoral mechanisms provide visibility to the decision-making process. This enables a form of interactive representation in which citizens and their representatives engage in a joint process of opinion and will formation. Sortition, in contrast, is characterized by a democratically much poorer form of descriptive representation. The selected citizens are a representative sample of the wider citizenry, but they deliberate in a forum that remains mostly disconnected from that wider citizenry and therefore cannot shoulder the process of collective self-government. (shrink)

The entropy-reduction hypothesis claims that the cognitive processing difficulty on a word in sentence context is determined by the word's effect on the uncertainty about the sentence. Here, this hypothesis is tested more thoroughly than has been done before, using a recurrent neural network for estimating entropy and self-paced reading for obtaining measures of cognitive processing load. Results show a positive relation between reading time on a word and the reduction in entropy due to processing that word, supporting the entropy-reduction (...) hypothesis. Although this effect is independent from the effect of word surprisal, we find no evidence that these two measures correspond to cognitively distinct processes. (shrink)

"Sowohl in den antiken Mythen des Übergangs der Toten in den Hades wie auch in der New Yorker Subway sind es kleine münzartige Artefakte, welche transitorische Praktiken und Subjekte entscheidend formen. Die zahlreichen Konflikte und Subversionen um diese Objekte offenbaren ihre Offenheit als konfiguriert durch die Gefüge, in denen sie sich bewegen. Versteht man also, was Gefüge sind und welche Wirkungen sie entfalten, erlaubt dies, die soziale Wirkmächtigkeit von Artefakten besser zu verstehen. Both in ancient myths about the passage of (...) the dead to Hades and in the New York subway, small coin-like artifacts shape decisively transitory practices and subjects alike. The numerous conflicts and subversions surrounding these objects reveal their openness as configured by the assemblages in which they develop. Thus, understanding what assemblages are and what effects they produce, one might understand the social effectiveness of artifacts more clearly. ". (shrink)

Both in ancient myths about the passage of the dead to Hades and in the New York subway, small coin-like artifacts shape decisively transitory practices and subjects alike. The numerous conflicts and subversions surrounding these objects reveal their openness as configured by the assemblages in which they develop. Thus, understanding what assemblages are and what effects they produce, one might understand the social effectiveness of artifacts more clearly.

Can private companies legitimately regulate sharing markets, and if yes, how? Whereas scholars have either criticized sharing platforms for expanding into private and public arenas or welcomed them to counterbalance encroaching government regulations, studies document their unbridled popularity. On the basis of a special version of social contracts theory pioneered by James Buchanan, we develop a heuristics that helps guide reasoning about the legitimacy of the sharing economy’s regulatory function. First, we discuss the conditions under which free and responsible individuals (...) deliberately subject themselves to rules without their prior direct participation, that is, exit, voice, and constitutional limits. Second, we suggest sharing platforms can use novel ordo-responsibilities to establish a sharing constitution that takes these conditions into account. Third, we argue that sharing platforms can legitimately do so within an enabling institutional environment in society, the provision of which relies on the joint efforts of sharing platforms, political actors, and civil society. (shrink)

This essay revisits Erving Goffman’s question regarding the connection between couple relationships and gender construction, expanding upon it by examining the ambivalent relationship of couples towards gender difference, in which the latter is constitutive of their formation. On the one hand, couples exploit the equality of their gender composition, while, on the other, they systematically ignore it in order to establish individualized personal relationships. The article culminates in a sociological diagnosis of this ambivalence, with statistical inequalities between men and women (...) emerging as an aggregate effect of millions of small dyadic entities, each searching for their own relational meaning. How might they reconstruct their sexual inequality in view of the fact that gender is losing its relevance? Meanwhile, what used to be thought of as homosexual and heterosexual relations are losing their meaning as gender relations. (shrink)

The diachronic change of word-formation patterns is currently gaining increasing interest in cognitive-linguistic and constructionist approaches. This paper contributes to this line of research with a corpus-based investigation of nominalization with the suffix -ung in German. In doing so, it puts forward both theoretical and methodological considerations on morphology and morphological change from a usage-based perspective. Regarding methodology, the long-standing topic of how to measure the productivity of a morphological pattern is discussed, and it is shown how statistical association measures (...) can be applied to quantify the relationship between word-formation patterns and their bases. These findings are linked up with theoretical considerations on the interplay between constructional schemas and their respective instances. (shrink)

Polish philosophy of science has been the beneficiary of three powerful creative streams of scientific and philosophical thought. First and fore­ most was the Lwow-Warsaw school of Polish analytical philosophy founded by Twardowski and continued in their several ways by Les­ niewski, Lukasiewicz, and Tarski, the great mathematical and logical philosophers, by Kotarbinski, probably the most distinguished teacher, public figure, and culturally influential philosopher of the inter-war and post-war period, and by Ajdukiewicz, the linguistic philosopher who was intellectually sympathetic with (...) the anti-irrationalist (as he would say), logistic and meta-theoretical inquiries of the Vienna Circle. Second was independent and lively Polish Marxism, with its fine development of social research under Krzywicki, a social anthropologist and younger contemporary of Engels, and then after the war the economist Lange, the philosophers Schaff, Kolakowski, Baczko, and many others. Finally there has been a wide range of philosophical, scientific and humanistic scholar­ ship which lends its various qualities to the understanding of both the logic of science and the historical situation of the sciences: we mention only that great and humane physicist Infeld, the phenomenologist with deep epistemological interest Ingarden, the historian of scientific ideas Zawirski, the historian of philosophy and aesthetics Tatarkiewicz, and the mathematical logicians such as Mostowski and Szaniawski. (shrink)

Wenn digitale Technologien wie künstliche Intelligenz, Blockchain und Robotik auf die Medizin treffen, entstehen zwangsläufig ethische Fragestellungen. Diese lassen sich nicht ohne Weiteres mit medizinisch-technologischen, rechtlichen oder ökonomischen Argumenten allein beantworten. Neue Themenfelder wie die sich wandelnde Rolle der Patienten, die neue Verantwortung von Ärzten und Pflegenden, neue digitale Möglichkeiten in der Medizin, Smart Hospitals im Klinikalltag, die gesellschaftliche Legitimität eines möglichen dritten Datengesundheitsmarktes, eine zukunftsfeste Ausbildungslandschaft für den Gesundheits-/Medizinbereich sowie die Grenzen der digitalen Forschung bedürfen einer kritischen und gleichzeitig (...) thematisch breiten Auseinandersetzung mit ethischen Aspekten in der digitalen Gesundheitswirtschaft und Medizin. (shrink)

This book endeavours to pinpoint the relations between musical, and especially instrumental, practice and the evolving conceptions of pitch systems. It traces the development of ancient melodic notation from reconstructed origins, through various adaptations necessitated by changing musical styles and newly invented instruments, to its final canonical form. It thus emerges how closely ancient harmonic theory depended on the culturally dominant instruments, the lyre and the aulos. These threads are followed down to late antiquity, when details recorded by Ptolemy permit (...) an exceptionally clear view. Dr Hagel discusses the textual and pictorial evidence, introducing mathematical approaches wherever feasible, but also contributes to the interpretation of instruments in the archaeological record and occasionally is able to outline the general features of instruments not directly attested. The book will be indispensable to all those interested in Greek music, technology and performance culture and the general history of musicology. (shrink)

In their recent paper Bi-facial truth: a case for generalized truth values Zaitsev and Shramko [7] distinguish between an ontological and an epistemic interpretation of classical truth values. By taking the Cartesian product of the two disjoint sets of values thus obtained, they arrive at four generalized truth values and consider two “semi-classical negations” on them. The resulting semantics is used to define three novel logics which are closely related to Belnap’s well-known four valued logic. A syntactic characterization of these (...) logics is left for further work. In this paper, based on our previous work on a functionally complete extension of Belnap’s logic, we present a sound and complete tableau calculus for these logics. It crucially exploits the Cartesian nature of the four values, which is reflected in the fact that each proof consists of two tableaux. The bi-facial notion of truth of Z&S is thus augmented with a bi-facial notion of proof. We also provide translations between the logics for semi-classical negation and classical logic and show that an argument is valid in a logic for semi-classical negation just in case its translation is valid in classical logic. (shrink)

A computational model of inference during story comprehension is presented, in which story situations are represented distributively as points in a high‐dimensional “situation‐state space.” This state space organizes itself on the basis of a constructed microworld description. From the same description, causal/temporal world knowledge is extracted. The distributed representation of story situations is more flexible than Golden and Rumelhart's [Discourse Proc 16 (1993) 203] localist representation.A story taking place in the microworld corresponds to a trajectory through situation‐state space. During the (...) inference process, world knowledge is applied to the story trajectory. This results in an adjusted trajectory, reflecting the inference of propositions that are likely to be the case. Although inferences do not result from a search for coherence, they do cause story coherence to increase. The results of simulations correspond to empirical data concerning inference, reading time, and depth of processing.An extension of the model for simulating story retention shows how coherence is preserved during retention without controlling the retention process. Simulation results correspond to empirical data concerning story recall and intrusion. (shrink)

A computational model of inference during story comprehension is presented, in which story situations are represented distributively as points in a high‐dimensional “situation‐state space.” This state space organizes itself on the basis of a constructed microworld description. From the same description, causal/temporal world knowledge is extracted. The distributed representation of story situations is more flexible than Golden and Rumelhart's [Discourse Proc 16 (1993) 203] localist representation.A story taking place in the microworld corresponds to a trajectory through situation‐state space. During the (...) inference process, world knowledge is applied to the story trajectory. This results in an adjusted trajectory, reflecting the inference of propositions that are likely to be the case. Although inferences do not result from a search for coherence, they do cause story coherence to increase. The results of simulations correspond to empirical data concerning inference, reading time, and depth of processing.An extension of the model for simulating story retention shows how coherence is preserved during retention without controlling the retention process. Simulation results correspond to empirical data concerning story recall and intrusion. (shrink)

We have found that proposals addressing the old cosmological constant problem come in various categories. The aim of this paper is to identify as many different, credible mechanisms as possible and to provide them with a code for future reference. We find that they all can be classified into five different schemes of which we indicate the advantages and drawbacks.

Der Artikel diskutiert Bolzanos Theorie der Abfolge (grounding). Im Mittelpunkt steht eine kritische Untersuchung der These Bolzanos, dass sich eine Vielzahl von Grund-Folge-Beziehungen auf die Beziehung der Abfolge zurückführen lassen.

The paradox of predictability refers to situations in which, even in a deterministic universe, a correct prediction of a future action is seemingly impossible because the agent whose action is predicted is determined to act counterpredictively. In a recent contribution to this journal, Victor Gijsbers provides an example of the paradox in which the undecidability of the situation plays an essential role and claims, additionally, that this undecidability is at the root of all examples of the paradox. This paper argues, (...) first, that the latter claim is not correct because there are clear examples of the paradox in which the situation remains fully decidable. The paper argues, secondly, that, because of its reliance on rather artificial conditions and in contrast with examples referring to the physical nature of the predictor, the example presented by Gijsbers, though technically correct, has little relevance for our understanding of the role of (counter-)predictability in the context of human interactions. (shrink)

This chapter discusses some of the central theoretical perspectives on culture and cultural practices implied in Pragmatism and interactive constructivism. The first part of the chapter highlights three major perspectives on cultural theory to be found in Dewey's thought: culture and experience, culture and habit, and culture and communication. The chapter then compares basic conceptual tools and interpretive approaches and shows that Dewey's work continues to provide fundamental resources in this field. Through this connection, it presents a brief introduction to (...) theories of discourse and power and discusses some implications for current controversies regarding multiculturalism. It argues that Dewey's Pragmatism and the Cologne program of interactive constructivism share a robust interest in culture and cultural diversity. (shrink)

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