In a discussion of rule-following inspired by Wittgenstein, Kripke asks us to consider the relation which holds between meaning plus by ‘+’ and answering questions like, ‘What is the sum of 68 and 57?’. A dispositional theory has it that if you mean plus by ‘+’ then you will probably answer, ‘125’. That is because, according to such a theory, to mean plus by ‘+’is, roughly speaking, to be disposed, by and large, and among other things, to answer such questions (...) with the correct sum. Kripke wants to emphasize, by contrast, that if you mean plus by ‘+’ then, faced with the question, ‘What is 68 + 57?’ yououghtto answer, ‘125’. One could sum up the assumption about meaning which appears to underpin this criticism of dispositional theories in terms of the slogan that meaning is normative. Allan Gibbard gives us a way of reading that slogan which is suggested by Kripke's brief remarks:The crux of the slogan that meaning is normative … might be another slogan: thatmeansimpliesought. To use roughly Kripke's example, from statements saying what I mean by the plus sign and other arithmetic terms and constructions, it will follow that Ioughtto answer ‘7’ when asked ‘What's 5 + 2?’. (shrink)

Many moral theorists argue that the concept of moral wrongness is connected to, and can be understood in terms of, the concept of blameworthiness. This tradition has its earliest roots in Mill’s Utilitarianism, and can be found in the work of, among others, Alan Gibbard, Stephen Darwall, and John Skorupski. Their ambition is to offer a non-circular analysis of the concept of moral wrongness in terms of blameworthiness. While these views have been criticized on various grounds, it has (...) not generally been thought that they encounter difficulties accounting for moral excuses. Indeed, it is often that by including a disjunction in the analysans—for example, S’s A-ing is morally wrong if and only if S is either excused or blameworthy for A-ing—these analyses can adequately account for moral excuses. But in attempting to account for moral excuses, these views wind up being either false or circular. (shrink)

Some philosophers think that two distinct things can occupy exactly the same region of space, as with a statue and a piece of clay. Others think that the statue and the piece of clay are identical, but not necessarily so. I argue that Alan Gibbard’s well-known story of Goliath and Lumpl does not support either of these claims. Not the first, as there is independent reason to think that it cannot be true. Not the second, because there is (...) no need to invoke the dubiously intelligible notion of contingent identity to account for the facts of the story. (shrink)

It was pointed out, first by Robert Stalnaker, then also by Andy Egan, that David Lewis’s model of centered-worlds contents has undesired consequences for communication of de se contents. The recent years have seen a number of attempts to save the model by amending it to handle de se communication. Proposals include the appeal to sequences of individuals in the centers, to ersatz classical propositions, and to operations of “re-centering”. The authors are Dilip Ninan and Stephan Torre, Sarah Moss and (...) Max Kölbel, and Alan Gibbard and Clas Weber. The present paper discusses these attempts. The conclusion is that they fail. (shrink)

This paper has two related goals. First, we develop an expressivist account of negation which, in the spirit of Alan Gibbard, treats disagreement as semantically primitive. Our second goal is to make progress toward a unified expressivist treatment of modality. Metaethical expressivists must be expressivists about deontic modal claims. But then metaethical expressivists must either extend their expressivism to include epistemic and alethic modals, or else accept a semantics for modal expressions that is radically disjunctive. We propose that (...) expressivists look to Amie Thomasson’s work for a general strategy for offering a unified expressivist account of modality. Modals in general, we propose, are devices for expressing metalinguistic commitments within the object language, with deontic, epistemic, and metaphysical modals all expressing different kinds of metalinguistic commitments. (shrink)

Non-cognitivists claim that thick concepts can be disentangled into distinct descriptive and evaluative components and that since thick concepts have descriptive shape they can be mastered independently of evaluation. In Non-Cognitivism and Rule-Following, John McDowell uses Wittgenstein’s rule-following considerations to show that such a non-cognitivist view is untenable. In this paper I do several things. I describe the non-cognitivist position in its various forms and explain its driving motivations. I then explain McDowell’s argument against non-cognitivism and the Wittgensteinian considerations upon (...) which it relies, because this has been sufficiently misunderstood by critics and rarely articulated by commentators. After clarifying McDowell’s argument against non-cognitivism, I extend the analysis to show that commentators of McDowell have failed to appreciate his argument and that critical responses have been weak. I argue against three challenges posed to McDowell, and show that the case of thick concepts should lead us to reject non-cognitivism. (shrink)

Mammalian cells frequently depend on homologous recombination (HR) to repair DNA damage accurately and to help rescue stalled or collapsed replication forks. The essence of HR is an exchange of nucleotides between identical or nearly identical sequences. Although HR fulfills important biological roles, recombination between inappropriate sequence partners can lead to translocations or other deleterious rearrangements and such events must be avoided. For example, the recombination machinery must follow stringent rules to preclude recombination between the many repetitive elements in a (...) mammalian genome that share significant but imperfect homology. This paper takes a conceptual approach in addressing the homology requirements for recombination in mammalian genomes as well as the general strategy used by cells to reject recombination between similar but imperfectly matched sequences. A mechanism of heteroduplex rejection that involves the unwinding of recombination intermediates that may form between mismatched sequences is discussed. BioEssays 30:1163–1171, 2008. © 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

This edited collection showcases some of the best recent research in the philosophy of science. It comprises of thematically arranged papers presented at the 5th conference of the European Philosophy of Science Association (EPSA15), covering a broad variety of topics within general philosophy of science, and philosophical issues pertaining to specific sciences. The collection will appeal to researchers with an interest in the philosophical underpinnings of their own discipline, and to philosophers who wish to study the latest work on the (...) themes discussed. (shrink)

For English-speaking readers, this book serves as an introduction to an important French intellectual whose work, especially on the issues of antisemitism and anti-Zionism, runs counter to the hostility shown toward Jews by some representatives of contemporary critical theory. It presents for the first time in English five essays by Éric Marty, previously published in France, with a new preface by the author addressed to his American readers. The focus of these essays is the debate in France and elsewhere in (...) Europe concerning the "Jew." The first essay on Jean Genet, one of postwar France’s most important literary figures, investigates the nature of Genet’s virulent antisemitism and hatred of Israel and its significance for an understanding of contemporary phenomena. The curious reappearance of St. Paul in theological and political discourse is discussed in another essay, which describes and analyses the interest that secular writers of the far left have shown in Paul’s "universalism" placed over and against Jewish or Israeli particularism. The remaining essays are more polemical in nature and confront the anti-Israeli attacks by Alain Badiou and Gilles Deleuze. (shrink)

[ Alan W. Richardson] This essay explores the uses that Michael Friedman and Bas van Fraassen have recently made of the work of Hans Reichenbach. It uses Friedman's work to complicate van Fraassen's invocation of Reichenbach's voluntarism in support of empiricism. It uses van Fraassen's work to motivate a concern with Friedman's neo-Kantian reading of Reichenbach. We are, finally, left with questions about the status and content of the account of the epistemic subject available to an epistemological voluntarist. /// (...) [Thomas E. Uebel] This response considers the question whether empiricists are condemned to silence about the epistemic agency their theories attribute or presuppose. It is argued that, unlike Reichenbach or Carnap, Neurath allowed for and indeed provided specifications of the role of epistemic agency in scientific inquiry. If this is correct, it underscores once more the need to distinguish between the various strands of logical positivism which show different strengths and weaknesses. (shrink)

Pluractionality (PLR) is the morphological category that generally signifies multiple actions. This paper, based on original fieldwork, provides the first investigation of PLR in Chechen, a Nakh language spoken in the eastern central part of the North Caucasus. The data reflects the standard dialect of Chechen spoken in and near the cities of Murus-Martan and Grozny. Chechen PLR, which is marked by stem vowel alternations, prototypically signifies the repetition of an event (e.g., saca/sieca `to stop once/many times'; laaca/liica `to catch (...) once/many times'). The plurality of the nominative argument can affect the interpretation of some verbs (e.g., ghitta `to wake up'; hitta `to assume a standing position'), rendering the reading distributive. More interestingly, a durative reading, signaling the prolongation of an event, is available for some verbs (e.g., xouzha/xiizha `to ache momentarily/for a while', zouza/ziiza `to itch momentarily/for a while') but not others. Following Ojeda (1998) and Lasersohn (1995), PLR is accounted for in terms of the pluralization of the event argument of a predicate. The various semantic effects are the results of interactions between the aspectual properties of individual verbs and event pluralization. (shrink)

In general relativity, a spacetime and a gravitational field form an indivisible unit: no field, no spacetime. This is a lesson of Einstein's hole argument. We use a simple transformation in a Schwartzschild pacetime to illustrate this.

The past 25 years have seen an increasing interest in later medieval logic and in the theory of supposition. a review of literature reveals, however, wide differences of interpretation of supposition-theory. taking the theory in the widest sense as a contribution to semiotic or the theory of signs, this study shows how supposition has been variously treated as a syntactical, semantical and even pragmatical theory. the main views of p. boehner, e. moody, p. geach, d. p. henry, w. c. kneale (...) and l. m. de rijk are examined, compared and appraised with respect to overall progress in the elucidation of supposition-theory. (shrink)

Which is worse: Doing evil or being evil? If we are free to define ourselves through our choices, as existentialism posits, then the latter is worse. This paper attempts to resolve the issue of the difference between religious (group) ethics and the ethics of a person of faith that embraces individuals with an existential understanding. In the existential view, the individual (whether the self or the other) is the primary concern, and so the issue of personal relational morality supersedes religious (...) narratives, social morality and popular ethics (White, 2002). If we think and choose, there is the possibility that we may occasionally make a mistake and do evil. However, if we do not think about our choices, and if the conventions we hold happen to be flawed in some way, then we become defined by a continual cycle of mistakes. Existentialism teaches that we become who we are in the process of making choices; therefore the difference between doing evil and being evil can be found in the small but important flow of thinking, relating and choosing. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Semiotica Jahrgang: 2015 Heft: 204 Seiten: 101-119.

Book Information The Foundations of Mathematics in the Theory of Sets. The Foundations of Mathematics in the Theory of Sets J. P. Mayberry Cambridge Cambridge University Press 2000 xx + 424 Hardback US$80.00 By J. P. Mayberry. Cambridge University Press. Cambridge. Pp. xx + 424. Hardback:US$80.00.