The only way to be successful now days in every field of life is the effective use of verbal expression. Language serves as a toolkit to inform, reveal, explore, expose, explain, manipulate, exaggerate, intensify, mitigate and what not. It has every hidden potential to serve its users. Significance of this toolkit of language can also be a bravura feature in gaining comic and/or tragic effects in media. The language of the media violates its few communicative principles which can be termed (...) as Gricean cooperative principle, to serve the specific interests via playing upon the common use of language. The present study explores the intricacies involved in any communication to achieve comic effects. For this purpose, Gricean maxims have been investigated thoroughly with the help of Pakistani comedy show “Bulbulay” which is a famous TV series all over the country. The TV series is considered to be popular among the masses due to its different and unique language that is achieved by flouting the maxims in Gricean’s terminology. The study explains the inimitable ways of achieving comic effects in series and also suggests further work on other areas regarding the unusual use of language to achieve desired results. (shrink)

Those who argue against physician participation in state mandated executions tend to bracket the question of whether the death penalty should be abolished. I argue that these issues cannot be neatly separated. On the one hand, if justice demands that some criminals be executed for their crimes, then there can be no ethical or moral barrier to the participation of physicians in the execution process. On the other hand, I contend that the testimony and expertise of the medical community is (...) a necessary component of any fruitful reflection on whether capital punishment is, in fact, just. Thus, although the justice of capital punishment may render it permissible for physicians to participate in the execution process, the experience of physicians also sheds important light on whether the death penalty is morally justified. (shrink)

Criteria of adequacy for scientific representation of the phenomena pertain to accuracy and truth. But that representation is selective and may require distortion even in the selected parameters; this point is intimately connected with the fact that representation is intentional, and its adequacy relative to its particular purpose. Since observation and measurement are perspectival and the appearances to be saved are perspectival measurement outcomes, the question whether this “saving” is an explanatory relation provides a new focus for the realist/antirealist debate. (...) The Born rule and von Neumann's “collapse” postulate in quantum mechanics provide a telling case for this question in recent physics. (shrink)

As interpreted here, Garfinkel's "ethnomethodological experiment" (1967) demonstrates the existence of a social convention by flouting it and observing the consternation and aversive consequences for the perpetrator which that provokes. I suggest that the hostility which behaviorism has provoked throughout its history is evidence that it flouts an important social convention, the convention that, whenever possible, human beings are treated as and must always give the appearance of being rational agents. For these purposes, a rational agent is someone whose (...) behavior is controlled by a logically consistent body of means-end beliefs ("rules" in Skinner's terminology) and complementing desires which between them provide a basis for predicting how the individual will behave and for suggesting what arguments will persuade the agent to modify his or her beliefs and the behavior based upon them. The behaviorist flouts this convention by suggesting that its fictional character makes it unsuitable for the purposes of scientific explanation of behavior. The hostility that this suggestion provokes is evidence of the importance attached by the verbal community both to preserving a consistent and rational connection between what is said and what is done and presenting it as part of the natural order of things. (shrink)

I argue that although Paul Grice’s picture of conversational maxims and conversational implicature is an immensely useful theoretical tool, his view about the nature of the maxims is misguided. Grice portrays conversational maxims as tenets of rationality, but I will contend that they are best seen as social norms. I develop this proposal in connection to Philip Pettit’s account of social norms, with the result that conversational maxims are seen as grounded in practices of social approval and disapproval within a (...) given group. This shift to seeing conversational maxims as social norms has several advantages. First, it allows us to neatly accommodate possible variation with respect to the maxims across well-functioning linguistic groups. Second, it facilitates a more psychologically plausible account of flouting. And third, it generates insights about the nature of social norms themselves. (shrink)

This essay argues, flouting paradox, that Mill was a utilitarian but not a consequentialist. First, it contends that there is logical space for a view that deserves to be called utilitarian despite its rejection of consequentialism; second, that this logical space is, in fact, occupied by John Stuart Mill. The key to understanding Mill's unorthodox utilitarianism and the role it plays in his moral philosophy is to appreciate his sentimentalist metaethics—especially his account of wrongness in terms of fitting guilt (...) and resentment. Mill recognizes a fundamental moral asymmetry between the agent and others, which conflicts intractably with a presupposition of consequentialism. This allows him to differentiate three potentially conflicting evaluative spheres: morality, prudence, and aesthetics. This essay's account of Mill's utilitarianism coheres with his defense of individual liberty and his embrace of supererogation, both of which elude traditional interpretations. (shrink)

Athletes who flout doping bans are generally thought to have gained an unfair advantage. In this paper, I critically examine this view. I begin by defending an effort-based account of desert in sport, explaining why it is preferable to the hybrid account that is favoured in the literature. Drawing on the effort-based account, I construct the Unfair Advantage Argument formally, in what I take to be its most plausible form. I then argue that the Unfair Advantage Argument should be rejected, (...) for two main reasons. First, I challenge its assumption that dopers have put in less effort than their opponents. Second, I explain why, even if dopers have put in less effort, they have still exerted a sufficient amount. Though doping is problematic from an institutional perspective, it is not – from a pre-institutional perspective – cause for moral concern. (shrink)

Negative Dialects is a phrase that flouts tradition. As early as Plato, dialectics meant to achieve something positive by means of negation; the thought figure of a 'negation of negation' later became the succinct term. This book seeks to free dialectics from such affirmative traits without reducing its determinacy.

According to Singer, it is not directly wrong to kill 'non-self-conscious beings', such as lower animals, human foetuses and newborn infants, provided that any consequent loss of happiness is made good by the creation of new sentient life. In contrast, normal adult humans, being 'self-conscious', generally have a strong preference for going on living, the flouting of which cannot, Singer argues, be morally counterbalanced by creating new, equally happy individuals. Singer's case might be reinforced by taking account, not only (...) of the preference for continued life itself, but also of other preferences for whose satisfaction continued life is essential. It proves difficult, however, to find a formulation of 'preference utilitarianism' which, while lacking other obviously unacceptable consequences, supports Singer's 'non-replaceability principle'. Also, Singer's position fails adequately to accommodate our conviction that the lives of human beings are, in general, more valuable than those of other animals. Finally, his thesis that lower animals (let alone human infants) are replaceable, has decidely counterintuitive implications. (shrink)

When Carl Wellman introduced the reasoning-type conduction, he endorsed a dialectical view on natural language argumentation. Contemporary scholarship, by contrast, treats conductive argument predominantly on a product view. Not only did Wellman’s reasons for a dialectical view thus fall into disregard; a product-treatment of conduction also flouts the standard semantics of ‘argument’. Attempting to resolve these difficulties, our paper traces Wellman’s preference for a dialectical view to the role of defeasible warrants. These act as stand-ins for value hierarchies that arguers (...) of normal suasory inclination find acceptable. We also improve on extant ways of diagramming conduction and distinguish two of its structural variants. (shrink)

Derrida's first book-length work, The Problem of Genesis in Husserl's Philosophy , was originally written as a dissertation for his diplôme d'etudes superieures in 1953 and 1954. Surveying Husserl's major works on phenomenology, Derrida reveals what he sees as an internal tension in Husserl's central notion of genesis, and gives us our first glimpse into the concerns and frustrations that would later lead Derrida to abandon phenomenology and develop his now famous method of deconstruction. For Derrida, the problem of genesis (...) in Husserl's philosophy is that both temporality and meaning must be generated by prior acts of the transcendental subject, but transcendental subjectivity must itself be constituted by an act of genesis. Hence, the notion of genesis in the phenomenological sense underlies both temporality and atemporality, history and philosophy, resulting in a tension that Derrida sees as ultimately unresolvable yet central to the practice of phenomenology. Ten years later, Derrida moved away from phenomenology entirely, arguing in his introduction to Husserl's posthumously published Origin of Geometry and his own Speech and Phenomena that the phenomenological project has neither resolved this tension nor expressly worked with it. The Problem of Genesis complements these other works, showing the development of Derrida's approach to phenomenology as well as documenting the state of phenomenological thought in France during a particularly fertile period, when Levinas, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Ricoeur, and Tran-Duc-Thao, as well as Derrida, were all working through it. But the book is most important in allowing us to follow Derrida's own development as a philosopher by tracing the roots of his later work in deconstruction to these early critical reflections on Husserl's phenomenology. "A dissertation is not merely a prerequisite for an academic job. It may set the stage for a scholar's life project. So, the doctoral dissertations of Max Weber and Jacques Derrida, never before available in English, may be of more than passing interest. In June, the University of Chicago Press will publish Mr. Derrida's dissertation, The Problem of Genesis in Husserl's Philosophy , which the French philosopher wrote in 1953-54 as a doctoral student, and which did not appear in French until 1990. From the start, Mr Derrida displayed his inventive linguistic style and flouting of convention."--Danny Postel, Chronicle of Higher Education. (shrink)

Epistemic responsibility involves at least two central ideas. (V) To be epistemically responsible is to display the virtue(s) epistemic internalists take to be central to justification (e.g., coherence, having good reasons, fitting the evidence). (C) In normal (non-skeptical)circumstances and in thelong run, epistemic responsibility is strongly positively correlated with reliability. Sections 1 and 2 review evidence showing that for a wide range of real-world problems, the most reliable, tractable reasoning strategies audaciously flout the internalist''s epistemic virtues. In Section 3, I (...) argue that these results force us to give up either (V), our current conception of what it is to be epistemically responsible, or (C) the responsibility-reliability connection. I will argue that we should relinquish (V). This is likely to reshape our epistemic practices. It will force us to alter our epistemic judgments about certain instances of reasoning, to endorse some counterintuitive epistemic prescriptions, and to rethink what it is for cognitive agents to be epistemically responsible. (shrink)

In recent decades, interest in non-monogamous intimate relationships has grown rapidly. Polyamory, relationship anarchy, consensual or ethical non-monogamy, and more have become popular in academic and public discourse. These practices destabilize the privileging of heterosexual nuclear families and the assumption that romantic coupledom is the ultimate form of love. Non-monogamous approaches flout cultural norms of exclusivity by avowing that intimacy is compatible with multiple dyadic and/or multi-party relationships. This article explores Simone de Beauvoir's theory and practice of non-monogamy in her (...) theoretical writings and diaries. (shrink)

Our meta-argumentative vocabulary supplies the conceptual tools used to reflectively analyse, regulate, and evaluate our argumentative performances. Yet, this vocabulary is susceptible to misunderstanding and abuse in ways that make possible new discursive mistakes and pathologies. Thus, our efforts to self-regulate our reason-transacting practices by articulating their norms makes possible new ways to violate and flout those very norms. Scott Aikin identifies the structural possibility of this vicious feedback loop as the Owl of Minerva Problem. In the spirit of a (...) shared concern for the flourishing or our rational, argumentative practices, this paper approaches the Owl of Minerva Problem from a vantage point that, by comparison with Aikin’s, affords perspectives that are more pessimistic in some aspects and more optimistic in others. Pessimistically, the problem at the root of the weaponization of our meta-argumentative vocabulary is motivational, not structural. Its motivational nature explains its resistance to the normal repertoire of reparative argumentative maneuvers, as well as revealing a profound and deeply entrenched misunderstanding of the connection between our reasons-transacting practices and the goods achievable within them. Optimistically, in the absence of this motivational problem, the misunderstandings and errors made possible by our meta-argumentative vocabularies are amenable to remedy by familiar techniques of discursive instruction and repair. More optimistically, even though our meta-argumentative vocabularies are generated only retrospectively, they can be used prospectively, thereby making possible an aspirational motivation resulting in a virtuous cycle of increasingly autonomous normative self-regulation. Properly harnessed, the Owl of Minerva releases the Lark of Arete. (shrink)

This paper explains how the practice of ‘no platforming’ can be reconciled with a liberal politics. While opponents say that no platforming flouts ideals of open public discourse, and defenders see it as a justifiable harm-prevention measure, both sides mistakenly treat the debate like a run-of-the-mill free speech conflict, rather than an issue of academic freedom specifically. Content-based restrictions on speech in universities are ubiquitous. And this is no affront to a liberal conception of academic freedom, whose purpose isn’t just (...) to protect the speech of academics, but also to give them the prerogative to determine which views and speakers have sufficient disciplinary credentials to receive a hearing in academic contexts. No platforming should therefore be acceptable to liberals, in principle, in cases where it is used to support a university culture that maintains rigorous disciplinary standards, by denying attention and credibility to speakers without appropriate disciplinary credentials. (shrink)

We sometimes have reasons to perform actions due to what they would communicate. Those who have discussed such reasons have understood what an action ‘communicates’ as what it conventionally expresses. Brennan and Jaworski argue that when a convention ensures that expressing the appropriate thing would be costly, we should change or flout the convention. I argue that what really matters is often what attitudes we indicate rather than conventionally express, using social science to show that indicating our attitudes is often (...) unavoidably costly, and sometimes worth the cost. I use this account to defend communicative arguments for egalitarian distributive policies. (shrink)

Communication is complicated, and so is the ethics of communication. We communicate about innumerable topics, to varied audiences, using a gamut of technologies. The ethics of communication, therefore, has to address a wide range of technical, ethical and epistemic requirements. In this book, Onora O'Neill shows how digital technologies have made communication more demanding: they can support communication with huge numbers of distant and dispersed recipients; they can amplify or suppress selected content; and they can target or ignore selected audiences. (...) Often this is done anonymously, making it harder for readers and listeners, viewers and browsers, to assess which claims are true or false, reliable or misleading, flaky or fake. So how can we empower users to assess and evaluate digital communication, so that they can tell which standards it meets and which it flouts? That is the challenge which this book explores. (shrink)

The topic of this special issue of Synthese is hyperintensionality. This introduction offers a brief survey of the very notion of hyperintensionality followed by a summary of each of the papers in this collection. The papers are foundational studies of hyperintensionality accompanied by ample philosophical applications.Hyperintensionality concerns the individuation of non-extensional entities such as propositions and properties, relations-in-intension and individual roles, as well as, for instance, proofs and judgments and computational procedures, in case these do not reduce to any of (...) the former. Hyperintensional individuation is frequently also referred to as ‘fine-grained’ or sometimes simply ‘intensional’ individuation, when ‘intensional’ is not understood in the specific sense of possible-world semantics or in the pejorative sense of flouting various logical rules of extensional logic. A principle of individuation qualifies as hyperintensional as soon as it is finer than necessary .. (shrink)

How do we ensure that future generally intelligent AI share our values? This is the value-alignment problem. It is a weighty matter. After all, if AI are neutral with respect to our wellbeing, or worse, actively hostile toward us, then they pose an existential threat to humanity. Some philosophers have argued that one important way in which we can mitigate this threat is to develop only AI that shares our values or that has values that ‘align with’ ours. However, there (...) is nothing to guarantee that this policy will be universally implemented—in particular, ‘bad actors’ are likely to flout it. In this paper, I show how the predictive processing model of the mind, currently ascendant in cognitive science, may ameliorate the value-alignment problem. In essence, I argue that there are a plurality of reasons why any future generally intelligent AI will possess a predictive processing cognitive architecture (e.g. because we decide to build them that way; because it is the only possible cognitive architecture that can underpin general intelligence; because it is the easiest way to create AI.). I also argue that if future generally intelligent AI possess a predictive processing cognitive architecture, then they will come to share our pro-moral motivations (of valuing humanity as an end; avoiding maleficent actions; etc.), regardless of their initial motivation set. Consequently, these AI will pose a minimal threat to humanity. In this way then, I conclude, the value-alignment problem is significantly ameliorated under the assumption that future generally intelligent AI will possess a predictive processing cognitive architecture. (shrink)

Summary I outline an approach to the phenomenology of improvised music which takes typification and the development of multi‐ordered phenomenological structures as central. My approach here is firmly in line with classical Husserlian phenomenology, taking the discussion of types in Experience and Judgment (Husserl, 1973) and Brudzińska (2015) as guide. I provide a phenomenological analysis of musical types as they are found in improvisational contexts, focusing on jazz in the 20th century. Styles are higher‐order musical types. Musical types are structures (...) that are temporally “thick,” relying on sedimented typification and knowledge, driving expectations as definitional. In most forms of music (including improvised music), musical styles involve maintaining a balance between confirming expectations and flouting expectations. I show that improvised music has a phenomenal structure which is enriched by the communicative and “ real‐time” nature of improvised music. Improvised music can be seen as an exploration of a possibility space rendered by the juxtaposition of the musical types afforded by a performance environment (instrumentation, harmonic and melodic traditions, etc.). I show that improvisation in music is a multi‐vectoral form of communication. The communication is founded in what Dieter Lohmar calls “non‐linguistic thinking.” The expression is constituted in the results of active and synthesis. The culmination of improvisational exploration of possibility spaces is the precisification and enrichment of styles‐as‐types, while in some cases developing new styles in the process. (shrink)

It is argued that conceptual analysis as practiced by the philosophers of ordinary language, is an empirical procedure that relies on a version of Garfinkel's ethnomethodological experiment. The ethnomethodological experiment is presented as a procedure in which the existence and nature of a social norm is demonstrated by flouting the putative convention and observing what reaction that produces in the social group within which the convention is assumed to operate. Examples are given of the use of ethnomethodological experiments, both (...) in vivo and as a thought experiment, in order to demonstrate the existence of otherwise invisible conventions governing human social behavior. Comparable examples are cited from the writings of ordinary language philosophers of ethnomethodological thought experiments designed to demonstrate the existence of linguistic conventions. (shrink)

Are epistemic reasons merely a species of instrumental practical reasons, making epistemic rationality a specialized form of instrumental practical rationality? Or are epistemic reasons importantly different in kind? Despite the attractions of the former view, Kelly (2003) argues quite compellingly that epistemic rationality cannot be merely a matter of taking effective means to one’s epistemic ends. I argue here that Kelly’s objections can be sidestepped if we understand epistemic reasons as instrumental reasons that arise in light of the aims held (...) by social collectives of which we are members, rather than being fixed by our own individual goals. This social version of epistemic instrumentalism would not be subject to counterexamples that point to the failure of individual people to possess desires or goals that would account for all of the epistemic reasons we find it natural to attribute to them. I conclude by comparing the proposed view to the alternative version of instrumentalism defended by Kornblith (1993). I argue that the social view I sketch here has one noteworthy advantage. It better accounts for the intuitive distinctness of our practical and epistemic reasons for belief in cases where flouting epistemic norms would better help us to achieve our own individual goals. (shrink)

Ian Stoner has recently argued that we ought not to colonize Mars because doing so would flout our pro tanto obligation not to violate the principle of scientific conservation, and there is no countervailing considerations that render our violation of the principle permissible. While I remain agnostic on, my primary goal in this article is to challenge : there are countervailing considerations that render our violation of the principle permissible. As such, Stoner has failed to establish that we ought not (...) to colonize Mars. I close with some thoughts on what it would take to show that we do have an obligation to colonize Mars and related issues concerning the relationship between the way we discount our preferences over time and projects with long time horizons, like space colonization. (shrink)

In 2016, Discourse Studies published a special issue on the ‘epistemics of epistemics’ comprising six papers, all of which took issue with a strand of my research on how knowledge claims are asserted, implemented and contested through facets of turn design and sequence organization. Apparently coordinated through some years of discussion, the critique is nonetheless somewhat confused and confusing. In this article, I take up some of more prominent elements of the critique: my work is ‘cognitivist’ substituting causal psychological analysis (...) for the classic conversation analytic focus on the normative accountability of social action, my work devalues and indeed flouts basic tenets of CA methodology such as the ‘next-turn proof procedure’, my analysis of epistemic stance introduces unwarranted themes of conflict and hostility into CA thinking, various concepts that I have introduced involve the invocation of ‘hidden orders’ of social conduct that is inimical to the traditions of our field and that my work rests on an unwarranted ‘informationism’ – the discredited idea that much of human interaction is driven by a need to traffic in information. In this rebuttal, I refute all of these commentaries and correct many other ancillary mistakes of representation and reasoning that inhabit these papers. (shrink)

Payment reforms that link health care providers’ reimbursements to their performance on various metrics incentivize providers to improve the quality and efficiency of care they provide to patients. Unfortunately, these reforms also create strong incentives for providers to reject patients who do not adhere to medical advice. This commentary argues that providers’ avoidance of non-adherent patients flouts the medical profession's commitment to patients’ best interests, undermines patients' trust in health professionals, and aggravates disparities in health. Moreover, the economic incentives under (...) payment reforms that encourage quality and efficiency gains are weakened when providers can escape the financial penalties for poor outcomes by simply firing their non-adherent patients. (shrink)

The natural duty theory holds that "we have a natural duty to support the laws and institutions of a just state" (Jeremy Waldron). We owe this not because we ever promised to support these laws and institutions, nor because fair play requires we support the cooperative ventures from which we receive benefits. The claim is that we have a general duty to promote institutions that do something justice requires wherever these institutions may be, a duty that does not depend on (...) our having special ties to these institutions, special ties of the sort we have to the institutions of our own government. I argue that we do not need to appeal to the idea of a natural duty to justify compliance with many laws. For example, New Zealanders must not murder, rape, or steal while in France, not because they have a duty to obey laws of a just state, but because it is wrong to murder, rape, or steal. If the natural duty theory is taken to be a statement of the conditions necessary for an obligation to exist, it would wrongly conclude there is no duty to obey laws against murder or rape in a state whose institutions and laws are not just. A second class of laws reflect not moral judgments but, rather, local conventions, conventions that are morally arbitrary but which may be useful in coordinating action. For example, New Zealanders visiting France must drive on the right side of the road, as dictated by French convention. Here, too, the natural duty theory fails to provide a suitable account of the relation noncitizens have to such laws. Our reasons for driving on the right side of the road when this is accepted convention have nothing to do with the justice of the institutions of the state. To flout this convention is not to undermine justice since there is nothing just or unjust about driving on one side of the road or another. I question the advantages of the natural duty theory, especially in light of important ambiguities in the theory. (shrink)

The record shows that Poseidon was once worshipped in every part of Greece as a god of general importance to the community. In the glimpse of Mycenaean ritual afforded by the Pylos tablets Poseidon is the chief deity, and the offerings and perhaps also the custom of ‘spreading the bed’ point to agrarian concerns. In each of the main districts of historical Greece he is rooted in tradition: Arcadia, that ancient landscape, is full of ancient cults of Poseidon; Ionia gathers (...) to honour Poseidon Helikônios; ‘all Boeotia is sacred to Poseidon’, according to Aristarchus , and here and in Thessaly he dominates mythical genealogy; the Dorian Peloponnesus is likewise ‘sacred to Poseidon’ , and at his shrine on Calaureia, the seat of an early amphictyony, Mycenaean antecedents come into question – as at few other shrines in Greece. Yet much of the testimony is antiquarian and retrospective; Poseidon's pre-eminence is more of a memory than a reality. In such a well-documented city as Athens Poseidon has a very small place indeed in public festivities. In Greek literature his authority is slight and his powers are narrow, being virtually confined to earthquakes and storms at sea; he is chivvied by Zeus and flouted by Odysseus, and the reparation which Odysseus is required to make, of establishing Poseidon's worship among landsmen who take an oar for a winnowing fan, is a mocking and belated tribute to his former domain. (shrink)

Referential uses of quantified determiner phrases other than descriptions have not been extensively considered. In this paper they are considered in some detail, and related to referential uses of descriptions. The first aim is to develop the observation that, contrary to the currently received view that it is only for descriptions that referential uses are frequent and standard, arising in run-of-the-mill contextual scenarios, this is in fact the case for all usual kinds of quantifier phrases. A second aim is to (...) offer a preliminary discussion of how these data about quantifier phrases other than descriptions constrain the feasible extensions of theories of descriptions to cover the referential uses of quantifier phrases in general. I argue that the data don’t support a semantic explanation of referential uses of descriptions, and in fact suggest problems for several semantic theories of referential uses of quantifier phrases in general. I also argue that pragmatic theories of referential uses of quantifier phrases in general might plausibly explain standard referential uses as involving a genus of particularized conversational implicatures in which no conversational maxims are “flouted” or even violated, rather than generalized implicatures or particularized implicatures of Grice’s “exploitative” type. I nevertheless emphasize that I don’t take the dispute between semantic and pragmatic theories of referential use to have been satisfactorily resolved. (shrink)

Since people can often successfully interpret utterances that flout or ignore conventions, Davidson concludes that shared conventions are neither necessary nor sufficient for linguistic interpretation. This conclusion is based on an overly narrow conception of what it is to know, and to share, a language. Rather than, as Davidson argues, simply interpreting the meaning the speaker intends their words to be interpreted as having (and their words’ truth conditions), successful interpretation requires interpreting the illocutionary act the speaker intends to be (...) interpreted as performing (and the act’s felicity conditions). This change in focus highlights the need for many types of shared conventions, beyond the conventional meanings of words that Davidson considers and dismisses as unnecessary. When any one convention is ignored or flouted, interpretation is possible because the apparently unconventional utterance nonetheless conforms to a host of other shared conventions. Conventions are necessary for linguistic interpretation. (shrink)

Zygmunt Bauman was unquestionably one of the most popular contemporary thinkers. His writings provoked not only worldwide acclaim but also severe criticism, while the complexities of his personal life gave rise to international controversies. On the basis of three recently published biographies of Bauman, as well as a personal acquaintance and scholarly cooperation, in this paper I attempt to explain the sources of his astounding popularity, but also try to dispel mysteries and controversies surrounding his difficult carrier, especially those pertaining (...) to the critical assessments of the scholarly quality of his work. I argue that having been released from academic duties, gradually and ever more boldly he abandoned the regime of scientific explanatory poetics in favour of an interpretative narrative of the social world, helping himself to the results of science, but also to idiosyncratically read works of poetry and fiction. Flouting academic orthodoxies, Bauman developed a unique art of transforming scientific knowledge into wisdom, and transformed himself from a scientist into a sage. (shrink)

On "Revolutionary Road": A Proposal for Extending the Gricean Model of Communication to Cover Multiple Hearers The paper addresses the problem of multiple hearers in the context of the Gricean model of communication, which is based on speaker meaning and the Cooperative Principle, together with its subordinate maxims, legitimately flouted to yield implicatures. Grice appears to have conceived of the communicative process as taking place between two interlocutors, assuming that the speaker communicates meanings, while the hearer makes compatible inferences. A (...) thesis propounded here is that this dyadic account must undergo a number of fundamental modifications to cover a variety of hearer types, both ratified and unratified, partaking in polylogic interactions. (shrink)

Sentences are often used by speakers to communicate thoughts about particular items. Call this de re communication. If a listener is to understand these uses, she must form interpretations of them that are sufficiently similar to the thoughts they express. This similarity between the thoughts on both sides should be anchored in some principled fashion in the content of the utterances. In this essay, I critically discuss a theory of de re communication and utterance content that Anne Bezuidenhout has recently (...) developed in a series of articles.1 This theory, in the Relevance tradition of Sperber and Wilson,2 regards the significance of utterances as more pragmatic in nature than allowed by traditional accounts; further, it downplays logical considerations in explaining de re communication, choosing instead to emphasize its psychological character. Included among the implications of this approach is the rejection of what can be called common content, or utterance content that is held in common by speaker and listener. After describing this theory, I argue, first, that Bezuidenhout does not supply us with a sufficient reason to prefer her account of utterance content over more traditional alternatives, and second, that her account of de re communication supplies even more reason to reject the view of content to which she subscribes. In the end, it will be clear that she has no principled reason for rejecting common content. At bottom, her view and others like it fail because they flout the distinction between the logical and the psychological, thereby making it impossible for them to appreciate the roles that logical considerations play in utterance content and de re communication. (shrink)

Aristotle's ethical theorizing contains resources for explaining what I call ‘ethical disability’. In theories such as Kant's and Mill's it is important that criteria of right action be accessible to anyone. Aristotle's moral psychology yields a plausible account of how they are not available to everyone. Unless a correct appreciation of good is part of the agent's second nature, the agent will not recognize ethical requirements, and will not have the resources to alter his judgments. Often, bad action is not (...) a matter of agents' flouting or violating criteria of right action that they recognize, but is a matter of agents' regarding as choiceworthy things that are in fact no good, and the agents are unable to appreciate this because of their vices. However, on the Aristotelian view, this is not a condition that diminishes responsibility, because of how voluntariness is interpreted. Some of the views of Susan Wolf and Bernard Williams are discussed in the development of this view of the moral landscape. (shrink)

Nāgārjuna is reconstructed in the essay as someone who challenges the way much of mainstream Western and Indian philosophical traditions deal with the tension between conceptions of ultimate and conventional reality. I argue that Nāgārjuna’s philosophical deliberation exhibits a clear recognition that conceptions of ultimate and conventional reality are, in the final analysis, incompatible and that most of the effort to reconcile the tension has resulted in sacrificing the reality of the world and, as such, is misguided. I make the (...) case that Nāgārjuna stands out as one of the few major thinkers in the history of philosophy, Western and Indian, who fully recognize the tension between the two conceptions of reality and vigorously argues for their incommensurability. However, Nāgārjuna flouts the mainstream approach, both in the West and in India, which tends to sacrifice the conventional reality. First, he rejects the bifurcation of reality into ultimate and conventional by calling into question our naturalized but naive understanding of the ultimate and the conventional. Second, he repudiates any conception of ultimate reality—which turns out to be empty—and embraces a radicalized conception of conventional reality—which is the only reality for him. Third, and most importantly, in so doing he problematizes the subtle presence of ultimate entities within our understanding of the world and radicalizes such an understanding by cleansing it from any ultimate element, such as substance and essence, et cetera. (shrink)

I develop and defend a novel norm-based explanation of Moore’s paradox in thought, according to which the sheer absurdity we intuitively feel in judging an instance of Moore’s paradox stems from violating the constitutive norm of belief inexplicably, i.e., in a way that cannot be made sense of through the categories of mistake, ignorance, cheating, akrasia, and flouting. I highlight the ways my explanation is different from other normative proposals and argue that this explanation is not subject to the (...) problems that beset other normative explanations of Moore’s paradox. The normative explanation of Moore’s paradox proposed here can also shed light on absurdity in norm-constituted practices in general. (shrink)

Direct Informational Semantics, according to which [X]s represent X if ‘Xs cause [X]s’ is a law, and Fodorian naturalistic semantics both suffer from double disjunctivitis. I argue that robustness, properly construed, characterizes both represented properties and representing symbols: two or more properties normally regarded as non-disjunctive may each be nomologically connected to a non-disjunctive symbol, and two or more non-disjunctive symbols may each be nomologically connected to a property. This kind of robustness bifurcates the so-called disjunction problem into a Represented-Disjunction (...) Problem, of which Fodor was aware, and a Representer-Disjunction Problem, of which he was on the whole oblivious. Fodor fails to solve these problems: his solution to the former, the Asymmetric Dependence Condition, presupposes a successful solution to the latter, while possible responses that Fodor might make to the latter either beg the former or cannot be met or else flout the Naturalistic Requirement and the Atomistic Requirement. Even setting the Representer-Disjunction Problem aside, the Represented-Disjunction Problem does not get solved, because the robustness involving phonological/orthographic sequences guarantees that nothing can meet the Asymmetrical Dependence Condition. Indeed there is a serious problem of individuating phonological/orthographic tokens and types in a manner that satisfies Fodor’s expectations. This is made manifest by the presence of orthographic tokens embedded in larger tokens. (shrink)

The manuscripts of De officiis all record something strange at 1.148: Cicero says that the philosophers Socrates and Aristippus had exceptional licence to flout social custom and convention owing to their ‘great and divine good qualities’ (magna et divina bona). There are no worries about Socrates, but the example of Aristippus seems preposterous. This paper makes the following argument: (1) elsewhere Cicero defines divina bona in such a way to exclude hedonists; this should rule out crediting Aristippus with magna et (...) divina bona alongside Socrates; (2) all scholarly efforts to account for the presence of Aristippus at 1.148 fail to convince; (3) the name Aristippus at 1.148 should, therefore, be remedied; (4) there are excellent philosophical reasons to think that Antisthenes, a follower of Socrates who is credited with setting in motion the Cynic philosophical tradition, is the name that Cicero wrote or should have written in the original. (shrink)

Communication is complicated, and so is the ethics of communication. We communicate about innumerable topics, to varied audiences, using a gamut of technologies. The ethics of communication, therefore, has to address a wide range of technical, ethical and epistemic requirements. In this book, Onora O'Neill shows how digital technologies have made communication more demanding: they can support communication with huge numbers of distant and dispersed recipients; they can amplify or suppress selected content; and they can target or ignore selected audiences. (...) Often this is done anonymously, making it harder for readers and listeners, viewers and browsers, to assess which claims are true or false, reliable or misleading, flaky or fake. So how can we empower users to assess and evaluate digital communication, so that they can tell which standards it meets and which it flouts? That is the challenge which this book explores. (shrink)

Since the Second World War, Japanese firms have gone from being ridiculed in the West for poor quality products to being highly praised and imitated for their success in manufacturing innovation, quality standards and management philosophy. Arguably, however, one area in which Japanese firms can be said to lag behind their western counterparts is in the development and articulation of policies mandating ethical business practices. In its own markets, but particularly abroad, Japanese business has been accused of a variety of (...) ethical shortcomings, including racial and sexual discrimination, bribery, environmental irresponsibility and the flouting of local laws and customs. This article will consider the reasons for the apparent lag in conduct, examine the issues involved, consider the likelihood of imminent change and offer some personal observations on the subject. (shrink)

Adherents of different moral views hold conflicting views on the permissibility of embryonic stem cell research. Pace Ronald Dworkin, no liberal compromise is possible. Whichever way the decision goes, some people will be deeply hurt and feel that basic moral principles are being flouted. And yet, when a majority exists in defence of such research, it should not hesitate to allow it.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Hume Studies Volume 30, Number 1, April 2004, pp. 51-85 Scratched Fingers, Ruined Lives, and Acknowledged Lesser Goods CASS WELLER It is not contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my finger. It is not contrary to reason for me to choose my total ruin, to prevent the least uneasiness of an Indian, or person wholly unknown to me. It is (...) as little contrary to reason to prefer even my own acknowledged lesser good to my greater, and have a more ardent affection for the former than the latter. (T 2.3.3.6; SBN 416)1 Everyone is familiar with the cases Hume parades in this passage when he dramatically displays just how far one's preferences and other passions can go without being contrary to reason. His general point is tediously clear. Whatever failing there is in one who prefers the destruction of the world to the scratching of his finger or chooses his total ruin to prevent the least uneasiness of a person wholly unknown to him, it is not a failing of reason, unless this preference and choice involve false suppositions of fact, existence, or mathematics. But they do not according to Hume. So they are not contrary to reason. At the same time, anyone who is given to worrying and fretting over the text will be initially somewhat at a loss to explain in any further detail the nature of the phenomena Hume flaunts as not flouting reason and how they relate to one another. For example, is the notion of preference at work that of a settled judgment of value or that of a blind impulse to be understood only in terms of strength of desire? Is the character Hume inhabits in the first person one who simply finds himself with a blind urge to keep his finger scratch-free or one who Cass Weiler is Associate Professor of Philosophy, University of Washington, Seattle, WA 98195, USA. e-mail: cjwr@u.washington.edu 52 Cass Weller has a settled policy of keeping his finger scratch-free viewed as more valuable than anything else. Is preferring my lesser good to my acknowledged greater good the practical counterpart of self-consciously believing that Ï• and not p? Or is it, rather, a common form of weakness? And if so, how is it related to the two previous cases? Although most discussions of Hume's views on practical reason refer to this passage, I know of no extended discussion of the three notorious cases.2 This is no doubt due in part to the fact that the details do not really matter for understanding the main point. A mental state not involving a false belief of experience or a priori reason cannot be contrary to reason.3 Nevertheless, I think it is a good idea to try and figure out just what Hume is saying and that by digging right here we may hope to uncover important aspects of Hume's theory of evaluation, motive, and reason. The task is to get a more detailed view of Hume's own theoretical understanding of the preferences and choices he exhibits as not contrary to reason, in particular whether a preference is an evaluative attitude, and how it may conflict with an acknowledged interest. To this end we will have to go beyond what is adequate for a reader's understanding of the preferences in their narrow rhetorical context. Hume himself invites the reader, inadvertently or not, to look for the wider Humean explanation of preferring one's acknowledged lesser good to the greater by deploying the analogy of a one pound weight's raising a hundred through the advantage of its situation. This idea connects with other passages in the Treatise, as we shall see, in particular with Hume's discussion of the preference for the contiguous over the remote at T 3.2.7 (SBN 534-9). With a clearer view of Hume's understanding of the preferences we will be in a better position to ask about the sort of criticism persons with such preferences are subject to. And, to tip my hand, we will see that Hume... (shrink)

In response to crises, people sometimes prioritize fewer specific identifiable victims over many unspecified statistical victims. How other factors can explain this bias remains unclear. So two experiments investigated how complying with public health recommendations during the COVID19 pandemic depended on victim portrayal, reflection, and philosophical beliefs (Total N = 998). Only one experiment found that messaging about individual victims increased compliance compared to messaging about statistical victims—i.e., "flatten the curve" graphs—an effect that was undetected after controlling for other factors. (...) However, messaging about flu (vs. COVID19) indirectly reduced compliance by reducing perceived threat of the pandemic. Nevertheless, moral beliefs predicted compliance better than messaging and reflection in both experiments. The second experiment’s additional measures revealed that religiosity, political preferences, and beliefs about science also predicted compliance. This suggests that flouting public health recommendations may be less about ineffective messaging or reasoning than philosophical differences. (shrink)

The web creates manyopportunities for encroachment on intellectualproperty including trademarks. Our principaltask in this paper is an investigation into anunusual form of such encroachment: theimproper use of metatags. A metatag is a pieceof HTML code that provides summary informationabout a web page. If used in an appropriatemanner, these metatags can play a legitimaterole in helping consumers locate information. But the ``keyword'' metatag is particularlysusceptible to manipulation. These tags can beeasily abused by web site creators anxious tobait search engines and bring (...) scores ofvisitors to their sites. The law aboutmetatags is far from settled and many legalscholars are uncomfortable with the conclusionthat the unauthorized use of a trademark in ametatag represents infringement. How should weassess this practice known as ``spamdexing'' froma normative perspective? Is it commercial fairplay or something more sinister? We make thecase here that there are salient moral problemswith spamdexing since it exploits thereputational goodwill of trademark owners andconfuses consumers. It violates basic moralduties and it flouts the golden rule principle. Hence unauthorized use of a competitor'strademark in a metatag is not morallyacceptable. (shrink)

A recent update to the Geneva Declaration’s ‘Physician Pledge’ involves the ethical requirement of physicians to share medical knowledge for the benefit of patients and healthcare. With the spread of COVID-19, pockets exist in every country with different viral expressions. In the Chareidi religious community, for example, rates of COVID-19 transmission and dissemination are above average compared with other communities within the same countries. While viral spread in densely populated communities is common during pandemics, several reasons have been suggested to (...) explain the blatant flouting of public health regulations. It is easy to fault the Chareidi population for their proliferation of COVID-19, partly due to their avoidance of social media and internet aversion. However, the question remains: who is to blame for their community crisis? The ethical argument suggests that from a public health perspective, the physician needs to reach out and share medical knowledge with the community. The public’s best interests are critical in a pandemic and should supersede any considerations of cultural differences. By all indications, therefore, the physician has an ethical obligation to promote population healthcare and share medical knowledge based on ethical concepts of beneficence, non-maleficence, utilitarian ethics as well as social, procedural and distributive justice. This includes the ethical duty to reduce health disparities and convey the message that individual responsibility for health has repercussions within the context of broader social accountability. Creative channels are clearly demanded for this ethical challenge, including measured medical paternalism with appropriate cultural sensitivity in physician community outreach. (shrink)

This paper discusses the volenti non fit injuria maxim. The volenti maxim states that a person is not wronged by that to which she consents, provided her consent is valid. I will argue, however, that the volenti maxim does not apply to all instances of valid consent. In some cases the consenter is wronged even if his consent is valid. Valid consent can only release others from consent-sensitive duties, not from consent-insensitive duties. If the consentee flouts a consent-insensitive duty the (...) consentee wrongs the consenter and thereby commits a wrong. (shrink)

In light of recent social psychological literature, I expand Miranda Fricker’s important notion of testimonial injustice. A fair portion of Fricker’s account rests on an older paradigm of stereotype and prejudice. Given recent empirical work, I argue for what I dub prescriptive credibility deficits in which a backlash effect leads to the assignment of a diminished level of credibility to persons who act in counter-stereotypic manners, thereby flouting prescriptive stereotypes. The notion of a prescriptive credibility deficit is not merely (...) an interesting conceptual addendum that can be appended to Fricker’s theory without need for further emendation. I develop the wider implications of prescriptive credibility deficits and argue that they pose a challenge to Fricker’s conception of the function of credibility assignments in conversational exchange and how a virtuous listener should respond to the potential threat of a prejudicial stereotype affecting her credibility assignments. (shrink)

It is prima facie uncontroversial that the justification of an assertion amounts to a collection of other (inferentially related) assertions. In this paper, we point at a class of assertions, i.e. mathematical assertions, that appear to systematically flout this principle. To justify a mathematical assertion (e.g. a theorem) is to provide a proof—and proofs are sequences of directives. The claim is backed up by linguistic data on the use of imperatives in proofs, and by a pragmatic analysis of theorems and (...) their proofs. Proofs, we argue, are sequences of instructions whose performance inevitably gets one to truth. It follows that a felicitous theorem, i.e. a theorem that has been correctly proven, is a persuasive theorem. When it comes to mathematical assertions, there is no sharp distinction between illocutionary and perlocutionary success. (shrink)

Background: Although health is a right of all individuals without any distinction, the realisation of this right has remained very difficult for the marginalised populations of poor countries. Inequitable distribution of health opportunities globally is a major factor in explaining why this is the case. Whereas the Protection, Promotion and Fulfilment of the health rights of poor country citizens are a joint responsibility of both domestic and external governments, most governments flout their obligations. So far disproportionate effort has been dedicated (...) to reaffirming and interpreting these obligations as opposed to investigating the fundamental question regarding why these obligations have nevertheless remained largely unfulfilled. Further the normative question regarding what ought to be done about the shortcomings of current obligations has been largely ignored. Methods: We conduct a critical content analysis of existing literature on efforts towards the realisation of the health rights of marginalised populations in our attempt to ascertain their capacity to guarantee basic health opportunities to marginalised populations. In our analysis we treat issues of ‘health rights’ and ‘justice in global health’ as having unity of purpose – guaranteeing basic health opportunities to the marginalised populations. Results: We identify two sets of reasons for the failure of present obligations for global distributive justice in general: a set of ‘superficial reasons’ and a set of ‘fundamental reasons’ which account for the superficial reasons. Discussion: In order to overcome these reasons we propose a strategy which consists in specifying a number of minimum and less-demanding obligations for both external and domestic governments to guarantee to all individuals a certain threshold of health goods and services. We argue that these minimum obligations can be freely accepted and fully complied with or enforced with “a thin system of enforcement” without significant threat to national sovereignty and autonomy. Conclusion: The futility of countries’ obligations for the health rights of the global poor as is the case with global distributive injustice is because of lack of political will to specify and enforce such obligations. Minimum obligations should be specified and enforced with a “thin system” which is consistent with principles of national sovereignty and autonomy. (shrink)

This essay attempts to define a value (not «the» value) of what, in it, comes to be called an «eccentric». In a largely standardized and stereotyped society like ours of the present times, a society where a human being can be creative but only within certain predefined limits, diverse groups exert all kinds of pressure on an individual, and with growing geographical as well as social mobility these kinds of pressure, intertwined and superimposed, give rise to overdue stress and situations (...) of psychological and maybe even metaphysical impossibility. One solution is a «no notice» attitude, in which all rules but a few selected ones are more or less dignifiedly flouted. Another solution is an attitude of an eccentric, close to, but not identical with, that of John Henry Newman’s «gentleman». I try to define this attitude and show one of its values: enabling us to evade too much social pressure without estranging us from society. (shrink)