Volume 34, Issue 8, December 2020, Page 1608-1620.

‘Smart’ devices are becoming increasingly ubiquitous. While these sophisticated machines are useful for various purposes, they sometimes evoke feelings of eeriness or discomfort that constitute uncanniness, a much-discussed phenomenon in robotics research. Adult participants (N = 115) rated the uncanniness of a hypothetical future smart speaker that was described as possessing the mental capacities for experience, agency, neither, or both. The novel condition prompting participants to attribute both agency and experience to the speaker filled an important theoretical gap in the (...) literature. Consistent with the mind perception hypothesis of uncanniness (MPH; Gray & Wegner, 2012), participants in the with-experience condition rated the device significantly higher in uncanniness than those in the control condition and the with-agency condition. Participants in the with-both (experience and agency) condition also rated the device higher in uncanniness than those in the control condition and the with-agency condition, although this latter difference only approached statistical significance. (shrink)

A propositional logic has the variable sharing property if φ → ψ is a theorem only if φ and ψ share some propositional variable. In this note, I prove that positive semilattice relevance logic and its extension with an involution negation have the variable sharing property. Typical proofs of the variable sharing property rely on ad hoc, if clever, matrices. However, in this note, I exploit the properties of rather more intuitive arithmetical structures to establish the variable sharing property for (...) the systems discussed. (shrink)

We propose a descriptive version of the classical multi-attribute utility model; to that end, we add a new parameter, momentary salience, to the customary formulation. The addition of this parameter allows the theory to accommodate changes in the decision maker’s mood and circumstances, as the saliencies of anticipated consequences are driven by concerns of the moment. By allowing for the number of consequences given attention at the moment of decision to vary, the new model mutes the criticism that SEU models (...) call for an omniscient decision maker. Use of the model is illustrated with a large-scale longitudinal study showing that adolescent smokers have higher utility for smoking than nonsmokers. We also propose to use the model hierarchically to describe everyday decisions that people deal with repeatedly. Big decisions, which set policy, guide a host of nested little decisions, which in turn lead to action. For a little decision, one of the options will be consistent with the policy, and will inherit its high utility. Accordingly, most little decisions will be made quickly and will follow the policy. However, people do sometimes decide to violate their own policies, and we describe how these lapses can lead to collapse of the policy. (shrink)

This paper is an attempt so to construe the arguments of the Hippias Minor as to remove the justification for regarding it as unworthy of Plato either because of its alleged fallaciousness and Sophistic mode of argument or because of its alleged immorality. It focuses, therefore, only on the arguments and their conclusions, steering clear of the dialogue's dramatic and literary aspects. Whereas I do not wish to deny the importance of these aspects to a proper understanding of the dialogue (...) – on the contrary, in a dialogue so heavily laden with irony and caricature, these aspects are necessarily more significant than they are in other dialogues – I do think there is something to be gained from concentrating on the arguments themselves. Although there can be little doubt that Socrates is up to something in the Hippias Minor, the task of determining just what he is up to can only be simplified by clarifying the arguments first.The Hippias Minor has traditionally been thought to contain two independent arguments, each having its own paradoxical conclusion. The first argument begins, it is said, when Hippias characterizes the two Homeric heroes Achilles and Odysseus as the true man and the false man respectively. Through its discovery that both the false man and the true man have δύναμις, it results in the paradox that the false man and the true are identical. The second argument, on this view, leaves the subject of ⋯ ⋯ληθ⋯ς and ⋯ ψευδ⋯ς and compares instead all sorts of agents in intentional and unintentional action. Finding that the intentional agent is in every case better than the unintentional, the argument concludes that the intentional evil-doer is also better than the unintentional. Viewing the dialogue as thus containing two distinct topics treated in two self-sufficient arguments is perhaps not the best way to understand it. (shrink)

Anamnesis (Swiatlo Dnia) was written as an aftermath of a six-day performative installation at the twelfth-century castle in Trancoso, Portugal with the participation of local women and men, mainly farmers. It was written concurrently while working on the editing of the video and the sound, which I filmed and recorded on site (or, as I think of it, layering of images, sounds and different time paths). The text addresses the act of drawing as related to speech, mark, trace, scripture, presence (...) and absence as it elaborates on the notion of gesture across the media and time. The vital connections between the performative act of drawing and the desire to mark since time immemorial and the contemporary virtual and cinematic mediums are crucial to the notion of anamnesis in both the physical installation in real time with performative inhabitation of space and in the virtual and altered memory of that occurrence in the resulting video piece. (shrink)

I developed a first-day exercise for my interdisciplinary “Feminist Epistemology” class that calms students’ fears about what they imagine will be the unduly abstract course content, and engages them in easy but revealing conversation about knowledge. Individually and then together, we explore metaphors and proverbs about knowing body parts and bodily images of knowledge that have the potential to teach us something about knowledge itself. From “the nose knows” to having “seminal ideas” to being a “birdbrain,” expressions reveal how we (...) conceive of knowledge, how we value it, what threatens and safeguards it, and how it relates to identity. (shrink)

I argue that a practice can only be taken to be one of apparent rule following if it contains a practice of policing moves within the practice. So the existence of an apparently rule-governed practice entails the existence of, what I call, a policing practice. I then argue that this entailment cannot be reconciled with a non-factualist construal of the policing practice. Thus non-factualism about the policing practice is false. Factualism about the policing practice entails realism about rules. So I (...) conclude that we ought to be realists about rules. Finally I distinguish a position which I call ultra-realism about rules and note that this too is a casualty of the view developed here. (shrink)

THERE ARE MANY TYPES OF EXPERIENCE, each with a distinctive grain. In each of them we can discern something peripheral and focal, the mine and the not-mine, the private and the public, the episodic and the constant. Each answers to different sides of our separated and interrelated selves. Aesthetic experience is qualitatively toned, and encountered through the agency of emotions, partly mediated through the senses. Undergone in privacy it has a distinctive texture; sometimes it has a different one when undergone (...) by a number of men together. In secular experience we confront rather conspicuous steady regions through the agency of organically defined bodily reactions, appetites and needs. It is normally shared with others in fact or in prospect, and when privately undergone it continues to bear the marks of what it exhibited to men together. Ethical experience encompasses values sensed through the help of our attitudes and beliefs. The experience here is usually individual, but small groups of men sometimes have the experience together more or less in the way they had it privately. Religious experience, which has features, when private, that are distinct from those it has when public, brings us into relation with a felt power that assesses what we are and have attained. (shrink)

2. Since whatever is actual is also possible, some possibilities must be ingredient in actualities.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:New Comparative Grammar of Greek and LatinMichael WeissAndrew L. Sihler. New Comparative Grammar of Greek and Latin. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995. xxiv + 686 pp. Cloth, $60.00.Exactly one hundred years ago the seventeenth volume of AJP contained, besides articles about Avestan, Sanskrit, Propertius, and Pliny, an article by Carl Darling Buck called Some General Problems of Greek Ablaut. In later years C.D. Buck went (...) on to become the English–speaking classical linguist's great and trusty friend producing a string of invaluable handbooks and textbooks. Finest among these, to my mind, is his Grammar of Oscan and Umbrian, which remains unsurpassed in its combinations of firm linguistic judgment and sound pedagogical method. The same excellent virtues are also found in abundance in Buck's Greek Dialects. But undoubtedly Buck's best–known book is A Comparative Grammar of Greek and Latin, which has introduced generations of classicists to the field of comparative grammar. In addition to Buck's other virtues this book was also characterized by a wholesome conservativism. By this I mean 1) that Buck did not present what in 1933 was the "cutting edge" line, but instead what the majority of linguists could then have agreed to be generally well–established and 2) that Buck did not burden the beginner with long discussions of his own views on certain controversial points. The end result was a book of long–lasting value. But as time passed the gap between what was generally accepted by the majority of linguists and what was presented in Buck's book widened. The pages on ablaut, for example, are now hopelessly outdated. A replacement of Buck has for many years now been an urgent desideratum. In my own teaching I have foregone the use of Buck entirely relying instead on handouts and the blackboard.It was with great eagerness, therefore, that I looked forward to the publication of Andrew L. Sihler's New Comparative Grammar of Greek and Latin (NCGGL) and I should state at the outset that Professor Sihler deserves the gratitude of all classical linguists for having undertaken the daunting task of rewriting and expanding Buck. Sihler's NCGGL does follow Buck's format very closely. Part I, an introduction (1–34), covers the Indo–European family of languages, the external history of Greek and Latin, and the Greek and Latin writing systems. Part II (35–242) covers the historical phonology in the order made traditional by Buck. Part III (243–368) deals with nominal morphology. Part IV [End Page 670] (369–401) discusses the pronouns in much greater detail than Buck. Part V (402– 441) is about the numerals and prepositions. Part VI (442–629) discusses verbal morphology. I will use this book the next time I teach comparative grammar. That said, I cannot wholeheartedly endorse Sihler's book. For it suffers from many serious flaws both pedagogical and scientific.In general terms, the absence of a single bibliographical reference is unfortunate. This makes NCGGL a dead end for the self–teaching student. Even when it would have cost Sihler little space, he avoids mentioning scholars by name and sticks to formulations like "some see evidence..." (38) or "one view holds..." (45). In contrast, Buck's book, although not generous with footnotes, did at least have a basic bibliography. Would five pages or so of bibliography have added too much bulk to a book that is already almost 700 pages long?Another overarching problem is the great deal of space spent on Sihler's personal views (and on those of Warren Cowgill, Sihler's acknowledged master). For example, most of 176 is devoted to a discussion of Edgerton's Law and the converse of Siever's Law, which S. himself has elsewhere shown to be without basis (Language 45 [1969] 248–73).Why even mention these outmoded opinions in an introductory textbook? Sihler's discussion of Lindeman's Law (177) involves a rather more detailed analysis of Vedic metrical evidence than the average classicist needs to know. In order to accommodate these views, and also, more justifiably, to include a fuller discussion of the evidence, Sihler has eliminated Buck's sections... (shrink)

This article defends the idea of applying principles of corrective justice to the matter of climate change. In particular, it argues against the excusable ignorance objection, which holds that historical emissions produced at a time when our knowledge of climate change was insufficient ought to be removed from the equation when applying rectificatory principles to this context. In constructing my argument, I rely on a particular interpretation of rectificatory justice and outcome responsibility. I also address the individualism objection by showing (...) why we should view states as relevant agents of climate change. This argument is built on the assumption that states are institutions set up to coordinate and regulate human interaction, so as to protect their citizens from the unwanted consequences of such interaction. (shrink)

Natural languages contain many layers of sequential structure, from the distribution of phonemes within words to the distribution of phrases within utterances. However, most research modeling language acquisition using artificial languages has focused on only one type of distributional structure at a time. In two experiments, we investigated adult learning of an artificial language that contains dependencies between both adjacent and non-adjacent words. We found that learners rapidly acquired both types of regularities and that the strength of the adjacent statistics (...) influenced learning of both adjacent and non-adjacent dependencies. Additionally, though accuracy was similar for both types of structure, participants’ knowledge of the deterministic non-adjacent dependencies was more explicit than their knowledge of the probabilistic adjacent dependencies. The results are discussed in the context of current theories of statistical learning and language acquisition. (shrink)

Die neue Reihe Ideen&Argumente ist dem Ideal einer pluralistischen und offenen Argumentationskultur verpflichtet und präsentiert in solider Ausstattung Themen und Fragestellungen, die inhaltlich oder methodisch wichtige Beiträge zur zeitgenössischen Philosophie leisten. Die Publikationen sollen die Vorzüge angelsächsischer und kontinentaler Philosophietraditionen in ein produktives Zusammenspiel bringen. Herausragende, systematisch ausgerichtete Originalausgaben und deutsche Erstausgaben aus allen Teilgebieten der Theoretischen und Praktischen Philosophie finden in Ideen&Argumente ihren Platz. Willkommen sind programmatische Monographien jeglicher philosophischer Provenienz. Es gilt, die zeitgenössische Philosophie in ihrer thematischen und (...) methodischen Vielfalt neu zur Geltung zu bringen. (shrink)

This text examines the philosophy of Paul Weiss. Much of Dr Weiss's impact has come through his example, discussions, and such activities as founding and editing the Review of Metaphysics and founding and leading the Metaphysical Society of America.

In this book, Shira Weiss elucidates the moral tradition of the Hebrew Bible by subjecting ethically challenging biblical texts to moral philosophical analysis. Examining the most essential questions of Jewish Thought, she uses contemporary philosophy to decipher Scriptural ethics as uncovered from a variety of biblical stories. Aided by ancient, medieval, and contemporary resources, Weiss presents a comprehensive discussion of enduring ethical questions that arise from biblical narrative and continue to be contested in modern times. She shows how (...) such analysis can unsettle assumptions and beliefs, as well as foster moral reflection. Ethical Ambiguity in the Hebrew Bible will be of interest to scholars and students of ethics, philosophy, Jewish thought, biblical theology, and exegesis. (shrink)

Open-ended interviews remain the default data generation technique for qualitative psychology and sociology. This commentary raises questions with Griffin's understanding of naturalistic materials and the emic/ etic distinction. It reiterates problems in the use of open-ended interviews, and repeats the case for more considered support for their use.