My dissertation asks how we affect conversational context and how it affects us when we participate in any conversation—including philosophical conversations. Chapter 1 argues that speakers make pragmatic presuppositions when they use proper names. I appeal to these presuppositions in giving a treatment of Frege’s puzzle that is consistent with the claim that coreferential proper names have the same semantic value. I outline an explanation of the way presupposition carrying expressions in general behave in belief ascriptions, and suggest that substitutivity (...) failure is a special case of this behavior. Chapter 2 develops a compositional probabilistic semantics for the language of subjective uncertainty, including epistemic adjectives scoped under quantifiers. I argue that we should distinguish sharply between the effects that epistemically hedged statements have on conversational context, and the effects that they have on belief states. I also suggest that epistemically hedged statements are a kind of doxastic advice, and explain how this hypothesis illuminates some otherwise puzzling phenomena. Chapter 3 argues that ordinary causal talk is deeply sensitive to conversational context. The principle that I formulate to characterize that context sensitivity explains at least some of the oddness of ‘systematic causal overdetermination,’ and explains why some putative overgenerated causes are never felicitously counted, in conversation, as causes. But the principle also makes metaphysical theorizing about causation rather indirectly constrained by ordinary language judgments. (shrink)

In this preliminary study, the authors extend Swanson's concept of normative myopia (the propensity of executives to downplay or ignore the values at stake in their decision making) by using it as a point of reference for studying executives' preference for high pay dispersion. Specifically, the authors designed a survey to examine hypothesized relationships among myopia, personality, and executives' preference for highly stratified organizational pay structures. Data from 133 executive respondents suggest that myopic executives tend to prefer top-heavy compensation (...) systems. In addition, the findings point to an inverse relationship between the personality factor Agreeableness and normative myopia, with the former offsetting the latter. The authors reject the alternative hypothesis that gender influences both agreeableness and myopia and conclude with some implications for business and society, including Swanson's proposition that normative myopia at the top contributes to a neglectful form of corporate social performance. (shrink)

© Swanson 2017How Propaganda Works is a brilliant, rich, and wide-ranging exploration of the interactions between ideology, inequality, democracy and propaganda. Read as a piece of analytic political philosophy, it is radical, arguing for bold theses about democracy: legitimate democratic deliberation, Stanley contends, requires not only political equality but also substantive material equality. Read as a piece of analytic epistemology and philosophy of language, it is more modest, but nevertheless very compelling, extending well-established work in fascinating but methodologically conservative (...) ways. In particular, on Stanley’s view ‘the truth-conditional, cognitivist picture … gives us an elegant account of what happens when communication fails, due to propagandistic manipulation’. Stanley is thus not trying to think outside the box so much as trying to move or expand the box, using familiar, proven tools to make the job easier. The book generously rewards careful study and thought, and any short summary... (shrink)

Aristotle offers a conception of the private and its relationship to the public that suggests a remedy to the limitations of liberalism today, according to Judith A. Swanson. In this fresh and lucid interpretation of Aristotle's political philosophy, Swanson challenges the dominant view that he regards the private as a mere precondition to the public. She argues, rather, that for Aristotle private activity develops virtue and is thus essential both to individual freedom and happiness and to the well-being (...) of the political order. Swanson presents an innovative reading of the Politics which revises our understanding of Aristotle's political economy and his views on women and the family, slavery, and the relation between friendship and civic solidarity. She examines the private activities Aristotle considers necessary to a complete human life--maintaining a household, transacting business, sustaining friendships, and philosophizing. Focusing on ways Aristotle's public invests in the private through law, rule, and education, she shows how the public can foster a morally and intellectually virtuous citizenry. In contrast to classical liberal theory, which presents privacy as a shield of rights protecting individuals from one another and from the state, Aristotle, Swanson argues, presents privacy as opportunity or duty to pursue excellence. She concludes that for Aristotle a regime can attain self-sufficiency only by bringing about a dynamic equilibrium between the public and the private. The Public and the Private in Aristotle's Political Philosophy engages both long-standing and contemporary debates surrounding the interpretation of Aristotle. It will be essential reading for scholars and students of political philosophy, political theory, classics, intellectual history, and the history of women. (shrink)

Reflections on Meaning refines Paul Horwich’s use theory of meaning. Horwich holds that the meaning of a word is constituted by the nonsemantic property that best explains a certain law. For a given word, the law to be explained governs that word’s use by specifying the “acceptance conditions” of a privileged class of sentences containing the word (26). Horwich devotes considerable energy to details in Reflections on Meaning and focuses on especially pressing problems for his use theory of meaning. As (...) a result the book’s topics run the gamut, and the connections between its chapters are not always strong. Rather than try to provide a synoptic overview, I’ll discuss three areas where it seems further clarification and detail could be fruitful: the distinction between semantic and nonsemantic properties, context sensitivity, and compositionality. Horwich thinks ours is a “fundamentally non-semantic world” (27), making it crucial that meaning be explained in nonsemantic terms. In particular, he insists that we “exclude from the analyzing-properties [of word meaning] anything that would itself require analysis in terms of meaning”: we can’t appeal to reference, belief, or intention, for example (37). But Horwich does not object to “accounts of meaning in psychological terms,” and his own theory relies heavily on a psychological, nonsemantic relation that Horwich calls “acceptance” (37). It’s difficult to see a substantive difference between this technical notion and belief. Acceptance, for Horwich, is “the psychological (but nonsemantic) relation to a sentence that is manifested in our relying on it as a premise in theoretical and practical inference” (40–41). Belief, on the other hand, is a relation with these properties except that it is semantic. Horwich’s other characterizations of acceptance don’t sharpen the distinction very much: “S accepts a sentence just in case that sentence, or its mental correlate, is in S’s belief box” (41); “believing a given proposition is nothing more than accepting some sentence that expresses it” (61).. (shrink)

Hoping to expand upon public philosophy endeavors within higher education, the following captures the story behind the course Dialogue, Integration, and Action. The course has yielded a number of innovative pedagogical tools and engagement strategies likely to be of value to philosophy instructors seeking to explore a more participatory, experiential educational approach. As a transdisciplinary, community-engaged philosophy class, it engages students in the theories and practices of deliberative democracy and activism, encouraging the development of dialogic skills for their personal, professional, (...) and civic lives. By documenting the community-instructor-student collaborative design of the university course; the feminist pragmatist philosophic commitments underlying its design; the community-led and student-facilitated dialogue and the subsequent public report, as well as the impact of this work on the students, the community partner, and the instructor, the article highlights the benefits and the challenges of undergraduate philosophic engagement that emerges from and responds to place-based needs. (shrink)

A major obstacle facing interpreters of quantum field theory is a proliferation of different theoretical frameworks. This article surveys three of the main available options—Lagrangian, Wightman, and algebraic QFT—and examines how they are related. Although each framework emphasizes different aspects of QFT, leading to distinct strengths and weaknesses, there is less tension between them than commonly assumed. Given the limitations of our current knowledge and the need for creative new ideas, I urge philosophers to explore puzzles, tools, and techniques from (...) all three approaches. (shrink)

One potentially ethically relevant feature of an utterance is that utterance's influence on the likelihoods that our future discourses wind up with one Stalnakerian ‘common ground’ or body of shared information rather than another. Such likelihoods matter ethically, so the ways our utterances influence them can matter ethically, despite the fact that such influences are often unintended, and often hard to see. By offering a relatively neutral descriptive framework that can enhance our collective sensitivity to and discussion of ethically, socially, (...) and politically important features of language use, this paper contributes to the ethics of language use. It discusses ways in which utterances can influence the likelihoods of future common grounds by deploying one system of categorization rather than another, and argues that language’s effects on the evolution of discourse can affect the paths to and probabilities of different sorts of consensus. (shrink)

Aristotle's theory of moral character focuses on developing virtues, the deep internal dispositional traits from which external actions naturally flow. Aristotle describes moral virtue as a human excellence that can be developed through practice. The morally worst person is the vicious person who does the wrong thing, desires the wrong thing, and doesn't even know the right thing to do—perhaps even mistaking the wrong thing to do for the right thing. This was the sort of person Eleanor was when she (...) entered The Good Place. One objection to the possibility of moral development is called situationism: the claim that people don't really live according to moral character but are overwhelmingly shaped by the situations around them. As Eleanor learns in The Good Place, the road to being a better person starts with caring about those close to us. (shrink)

Ender’s Game, Orson Scott Card’s award-winning 1985 novel, has been discovered and rediscovered by generations of science fiction fans, even being adopted as reading by the U.S. Marine Corps. Ender's Game and its sequels explore rich themes — the violence and cruelty of children, the role of empathy in war, and the balance of individual dignity and the social good — with compelling elements of a coming-of-age story. Ender’s Game and Philosophy brings together over 30 philosophers to engage in wide-ranging (...) discussion on issues such as: the justifiability of pre-emptive strikes; how Ender’s disconnected and dispassionate violence is mirrored in today’s drone warfare; whether the end of saving the species can justify the most brutal means; the justifiability of lies and deception in wartime, and how military schools produce training in virtue. The authors of Ender’s Game and Philosophy challenge readers to confront the challenges that Ender’s Game presents, bringing new insights to the idea of a just war, the virtues of the soldier, the nature of childhood, and the serious work of playing games. (shrink)

Though hippocampal volume reduction is a pathological hallmark of schizophrenia, the molecular pathway responsible for this degeneration remains unknown. Recent reports have suggested the potential role of impaired blood-brain barrier function in schizophrenia pathogenesis. However, direct evidence demonstrating an impaired BBB function is missing. In this preliminary study, we used immunohistochemistry and serum immunoglobulin G antibodies to investigate the state of BBB function in formalin-fixed postmortem samples from the hippocampus and surrounding temporal cortex of patients with schizophrenia and controls without (...) schizophrenia matched for age, sex, and race. Since a functional BBB prevents the extravasation of IgGs, detection of IgGs in the parenchyma is used as direct evidence of BBB breakdown. We also developed a semi-quantitative approach to quantify the extent of IgG leak and therein BBB breach. Analysis of our immunohistochemistry data demonstrated a significantly higher incidence of IgG leak in patients with schizophrenia compared to controls. Further, BBB permeability was significantly higher in advanced-age patients with schizophrenia than both advanced-age controls and middle-aged patients with schizophrenia. Male patients with schizophrenia also demonstrated a significant increase in IgG permeability compared to control males. Interestingly, the extravasated IgGs also demonstrated selective immunoreactivity for neurons. Based on these observations, we suggest that BBB dysfunction and IgG autoantibodies could be two key missing pathoetiological links underwriting schizophrenia hippocampal damage. (shrink)

Objectives:Buddhism, Taoism, and Confucianism have influenced societies and shaped cultures as they have spread across the span of history and ultimately across the world. However, to date, the interrelated nature of their impacts has yet to be examined largely due to the lack of a measure that comprehensively assesses their various tenets. Building on a conceptual integration of foundational texts on each ideology as well as on recent measure development work (much of which is unpublished), the current studies developed a (...) comprehensive measure of these ideologies (the Three Teachings of East Asia Inventory; TTEA) and validated it across four languages.Methods:A combined sample of 2,091 online respondents (Study 1: 322 Chinese respondents, Study 2: 400 Japanese respondents, Study 3: 362 Taiwanese respondents, Study 4: 688 White Americans and 319 Asian Americans) completed 25–35 min online survey in their preferred language: English, Traditional Mandarin, Simplified Mandarin, or Japanese.Results:Exploratory Factor Analyses within a 122-item pool identified 18 stable dimensions across all samples. Measurement invariance analyses identified the final 61-items of the TTEA inventory (demonstrating reasonable invariance across all languages), confirming 18 individual tenet subscales that organize into four higher-order composites: Buddhism, Taoism, Restrictive Confucianism, and Empowering Confucianism. A shorter 36-item version of the TTEA inventory was also developed. The TTEA scales demonstrated (1) acceptable internal consistency, (2) discriminant validity, and (3) incremental predictive validity for current life satisfaction and vitality.Conclusions:The TTEA inventory offers one of the first comprehensive, multilingual measures that will allow cross-cultural researchers to examine the influence of three related Eastern ideologies on societies across the world. (shrink)

We used Nunez's physiologically based dynamic theory of EEG to make predictions about a clinical population of children with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) known to have neuronanatomical abnormalities. Analysis of high-density EEG data (long-range coherence) showed expected age-related differences and surprising regional specificity that is consistent with some of the literature in this clinical area.

This paper develops a compositional, type-driven constraint semantic theory for a fragment of the language of subjective uncertainty. In the particular application explored here, the interpretation function of constraint semantics yields not propositions but constraints on credal states as the semantic values of declarative sentences. Constraints are richer than propositions in that constraints can straightforwardly represent assessments of the probability that the world is one way rather than another. The richness of constraints helps us model communicative acts in essentially the (...) same way that we model agents’ credences. Moreover, supplementing familiar truth-conditional theories of epistemic modals with constraint semantics helps capture contrasts between strong necessity and possibility modals, on the one hand, and weak necessity modals, on the other. (shrink)

According to spacetime state realism, the fundamental ontology of a quantum mechanical world consists of a state-valued field evolving in four-dimensional spacetime. One chief advantage it claims over rival wave-function realist views is its natural compatibility with relativistic quantum field theory. I argue that the original density operator formulation of SSR cannot be extended to QFTs where the local observables form type III von Neumann algebras. Instead, I propose a new formulation of SSR in terms of a presheaf of local (...) state spaces dual to the net of local observables studied by algebraic QFT. 1Introduction2Spacetime State Realism in Quantum Field Theory 2.1Equivalence thesis3Entanglement and the Type III Property 3.1No-Go Lemma 13.2No-Go Lemma 24State Space Axioms for Quantum Field Theory 4.1Revised equivalence thesis5Discussion. (shrink)

Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Volume 104, Issue 1, Page 171-185, January 2022.

To consciously bolster behaviour that is disapproved by others (i.e., stigmatised behaviour) people may hold and report a favourable attitude toward the behaviour. However, achieving such bolstering outside awareness may be more difficult. Explicit attitudes were measured with self-report measures, and the Implicit Association Test was used to assess implicit attitudes toward behaviour held by stigmatised actors (smokers) and nonstigmatised actors (vegetarians and omnivores). Smokers' showed greater attitude-behaviour consistency in their explicit attitudes toward smoking that in their implicit attitudes. By (...) contrast, vegetarians and omnivores showed attitude-behaviour-consistency at both implicit and explicit levels. Smokers' implicit negative attitudes toward smoking may reflect its status as a stigmatised behaviour, or its addictive nature. (shrink)

He returns in this new volume with a focus on the "dangerous" murder cases from the forties and fifties, memorialised in intimate and telling photographs.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Report on the Thirtieth Annual Conference of the Japan Society for Buddhist-Christian StudiesYagi YōichiTranslated by Paul L. SwansonIn Japan, the disasters of the giant tsunami and the resulting crisis at the Fukushima nuclear power plant on 11 March 2011 have been grim reminders of the unprecedented tragedies of the nuclear bombings on Hiroshima and Nagasaki just sixty-six years ago. These are experiences in which one becomes speechless, when words (...) are no longer able to convey what used to be their usual meaning.At that time, people were faced with basic and universal questions concerning the fundamental constitution of human existence. What is the ultimate basis for our thoughts and actions? Is there a way to know? If there is a way to know these answers, how do we attain them? The state of intellectual inquiry in postwar Japan, however, was not able to face these questions and come up with answers. Rather, there was a tendency to avoid facing these questions directly and instead rely on absorbing the pronouncements of Western thought.Within this postwar intellectual environment in Japan, the Japan Society for Buddhist- Christian Studies has continuously attempted in an academic way to discuss comprehensive themes, based on Buddhist-Christian or Christian-Buddhist foundations, and is perhaps the only forum in Japan that has consistently sought answers to these basic and universal questions of human existence.It was in this time of crisis that the thirtieth annual conference of the Japan Society for Buddhist-Christian Studies met 5-7 September 2011 at Hanazono University in Kyoto. Discussion of a recent book, Dialogue and Commentary: The Words of Jesus and the Words of Zen (対談評釈 イエスの言葉／ 禅の言葉, Iwanami Shoten, 2010, in Japanese), a series of dialogues and discussions between Ueda Shizuteru and Yagi Seiichi, was chosen as an appropriate theme for this meeting. This book was chosen because it is a splendid synthesis of the activity and discussion carried out by our Society over the past thirty years. Through the magnificent dialogue of these two men, we hoped to open a "living horizon" for a mutual understanding of "the words of Jesus and the words of Zen." The main themes were "direct experience," "self-awareness," "place," and "words."The two dialoguers—Ueda and Yagi—have not only both served and provided [End Page 139] leadership for the Society over many years, as presidents and in other capacities, but also share a basic sense of fundamental questions. They are also leading philosophers of religion who represent the attempt to seek answers to fundamental questions within Buddhism and Christianity in postwar Japan. Ueda Shizuteru, a leading authority and internationally recognized scholar of Meister Eckhart, is also known for his contributions on the philosophy of religion (especially the idea of "place"/basho) in the tradition of Nishida Kitarō, Nishitani Keiji, and Zen Buddhism. His basic philosophical statement is "I am I when I am not I." Yagi Seiichi, on the other hand, is known for promoting religion (philosophy) as "a logic of place" as seen in the New Testament, and for his historical and essentialist critique of New Testament thought. To Yagi, the essence of "the religion of Jesus" is religion as a "logic of place," and if we return to this place we can (to borrow the exquisite phrasing of Yagi himself) "drink directly from the same fountain that was discovered by Jesus." Through this experience we can transcend not only biblical fundamentalism and the exclusivist absolutism of Christianity, but also make it possible to have a true dialogue with other religions. For Yagi, the dialogue between Buddhism and Christianity not only should deepen common understanding, but also open the way to mutual reform, clarify the truth that flows at the basis of both religions, and probe into the fundamental constitution of human existence, and this is why he has constantly sought after dialogue with Buddhists.Yagi Seiichi has stood out as a partner in dialogue for many years. His discussions with the Zen master Hisamatsu Shin'ichi (A Religion of Awakening, published in 1980) was an epochal event in intellectual history from the perspective of "Buddhism and Christianity." Yagi has also been involved in important dialogues with Nishitani... (shrink)

A successful theory of the language of subjective uncertainty would meet several important constraints. First, it would explain how use of the language of subjective uncertainty affects addressees’ states of subjective uncertainty. Second, it would explain how such use affects what possibilities are treated as live for purposes of conversation. Third, it would accommodate 'quantifying in' to the scope of epistemic modals. Fourth, it would explain the norms governing the language of subjective uncertainty, and the differences between them and the (...) norms governing the language of subjective certainty. Neither truth conditional nor traditional force modfier theories of the language of subjective uncertainty look adequate to the task of satisfying all four of these constraints. (shrink)

The thermal time hypothesis is a proposed solution to the problem of time: a coarse-grained state determines a thermal dynamics according to which it is in equilibrium, and this defines the f...

This article discusses some of the ways in which natural language can express modal information – information which is, to a first approximation, about what could be or must be the case, as opposed to being about what actually is the case. It motivates, explains, and raises problems for Angelika Kratzer's influential theory of modal auxiliaries, and introduces a new approach to one important debate about the relationships between modality, evidentiality, context change, and imperative force.