We review the hypothesis that the brain uses a generative model to explain the causes of sensory inputs, using prediction schemes that operate based upon assimilation of time-series sensory data. We put this hypothesis in the context of psychopathology, in particular, schizophrenia's positive symptoms. Building upon work of Helmholtz and upon theories in computational cognitive processing, we hypothesize that delusions in schizophrenia can be explained in terms of false inference. An impairment in inferring appropriate information from the sensory input reflects (...) upon the ability to assess the environment and predict outcomes. Although the inference mechanism likely involves both conscious and unconscious processes, we hypothesize that the trigger of delusions may lie within the unconscious neural pathways. A collection of computational predictive codes have been proposed for modeling perception. We discuss two examples, which may be eligible as substrates for intuitive coding. We argue that failure of the psychotic patient to choose the correct computational scheme, or the optimal range of parameters, may readily lead to an altered reconstruction of the object and false inference, feeding into the delusion mechanism. We finally propose using these models in conjunction with cognitive and imaging data, in order to obtain more testable predictions. (shrink)

Axel Gosseries considers, and partly defends, several strategies to address the non-identity problem (NIP). We engage critically with two strategies endorsed by Gosseries: the severance strategy and the overlap strategy. The latter comprises two different sub-strategies: the containment sub-strategy and the indirect sub-strategy. We believe that severance is less promising than Gosseries suggests. It comes at a high theoretical cost, which is important to acknowledge even if, ultimately, there is reason to pay it. The sub-strategies that comprise the overlap strategy (...) are more promising, and they can justify more in terms of the scope and content of inter-generational justice than Gosseries suggests in his book. Endorsing the overlap strategies is attractive because doing so limits the need for impersonal considerations in theories of inter-generational justice. (shrink)

Uncovering an archive of laughter, from the forbidden giggle to the explosive guffaw.

Emprunte au domaine de la lumiere et assimile au domaine de la pensee, le diaphane designe pour Aristote, son inventeur, une nature commune a tout milieu dans lequel la vue et la visibilite des choses s'achevent en regard recepteur et en image recue du monde diurne. Car, il ne suffit pas qu'il y ait de la lumiere et du solide pour que le monde puisse etre vu dans ses couleurs et connu sous ses formes et ses especes; il faut aussi (...) qu'il y ait du diaphane, c'est-a-dire un tertium quid qui relie les choses entre elles et ouvre a travers lui la porte de la reception sensible et de l'entendement. Des lors, la notion de diaphane en vient a impregner tacitement toute la representation du monde sous son double aspect sensible et intelligible; il s'opere la une veritable mutation du physique au metaphysique. (shrink)

Intentionalism about demonstratives is the view that the referent of a demonstrative is determined solely by the speaker's intentions. Intentionalists can disagree about the nature of these intentions, but are united in rejecting the relevance of other factors, such as the speaker's gestures, her gaze, and any facts about the addressee or the audience. In this paper, I formulate a particular version of this view, and I defend it against six objections, old and new.

Women continue to be in charge of most childrearing; men continue to be responsible for most breadwinning. There is no consensus on whether this state of affairs, and the informal norms that encourage it, are matters of justice to be tackled by state action. Feminists have criticized political liberalism for its alleged inability to embrace a full feminist agenda, inability explained by political liberals’ commitment to the ideal of state neutrality. The debate continues on whether neutral states can accommodate two (...) feminist demands: to enact policies aimed at dismantling the feminization of caregiving, especially childrearing, and to compensate women for some of the disadvantages they incur by being primary care-givers. I contribute to this debate with three arguments in support of policies meant to de-gender care-giving and compensate care-givers. The first appeals to equality of opportunity to positions of advantage and justifies policies that prevent or mitigate statistical discrimination and implicit biases. The second draws attention to a possible causal relationship between the specialization of women in early childcare and misogyny; since the latter is incompatible with political liberal justice, it yields the conclusion that political liberals ought to further investigate the causal hypothesis with the aim of establishing or refuting it. The third argument concludes that legitimate childrearing prohibits adults from socializing children or, at least girls, into gender norms; it justifies duties of justice on the side of parents, educators, and economic agents, and state policies meant to offset foreseeable breaches of some of these duties. (shrink)

Care-supporting policies incentivise women’s withdrawal from the labour market, thereby reinforcing statistical discrimination and further undermining equality of opportunities between women and men for positions of advantage. This, I argue, is not sufficient reason against such policies. Supporting care also improves the overall condition of disadvantaged women who are care-givers; justice gives priority to the latter. Moreover, some of the most advantageous existing jobs entail excessive benefits; we should discount the value of allocating such jobs meritocratically. Further, women who have (...) a real chance to occupy positions of advantage have most likely already enjoyed more than their fair share of opportunities; they lack a claim to more. Women can have a complaint grounded in the expressive disvalue of sexist discrimination. This gives them special claims against men occupying the vast majority of top positions and against their higher share of opportunities for positions of advantage. But their claim does not speak against care-supporting policies. (shrink)

The evaluation of labour markets and of particular jobs ought to be sensitive to a plurality of benefits and burdens of work. We use the term 'the goods of work' to refer to those benefits of work that cannot be obtained in exchange for money and that can be enjoyed mostly or exclusively in the context of work. Drawing on empirical research and various philosophical traditions of thinking about work we identify four goods of work: 1) attaining various types of (...) excellence; 2) making a social contribution; 3) experiencing community; and 4) gaining social recognition. Our account of the goods of work can be read as unpacking the ways in which work can be meaningful. The distribution of the goods of work is a concern of justice for two conjoint reasons: First, they are part of the conception of the good of a large number of individuals. Second, in societies without an unconditional income and in which most people are not independently wealthy, paid work is non-optional and workers have few, if any, occasions to realize these goods outside their job. Taking into account the plurality of the goods of work and their importance for justice challenges the theoretical and political status quo, which focuses mostly on justice with regard to the distribution of income. We defend this account against the libertarian challenge that a free labour market gives individuals sufficient options to realise the goods of work important to them, and discuss the challenge from state neutrality. In the conclusion, we hint towards possible implications for today’s labour markets. (shrink)

This chapter argues that there is a collective responsibility to have enough children in order to ensure that people will not, in the future, suffer great harm due to depopulation. Moreover, if people stopped having children voluntarily, it could be legitimate for states to incentivize and maybe even coerce individuals to bear and rear children. Various arguments against the enforceability of an individual duty to bear and rear children are examined. Coercing people to have children would come at significant moral (...) cost; however, none of the arguments against enforceability seem decisive. The existence of a collective responsibility to have children bears on the question of whether parents and non-parents ought to shoulder the costs of childbearing and child rearing together. (shrink)

The Unconscious as Space explores the experience of being and the practice of psychoanalysis by thinking of the unconscious in mathematical terms. Anca Carrington introduces mathematical models of space, from dimension theory to algebraic topology and knot theory, and considers their immediate psychoanalytic relevance. The hypothesis that the unconscious is structured like a space marked by impossibility is then examined. Carrington considers the clinical implications, with particular focus on the interplay between language and the unconscious as related topological spaces (...) in which movement takes place along knot-like pathways. The Unconscious as Space will be of appeal to psychotherapists, psychoanalysts, and mental health professionals in practice and in training. (shrink)

There is a broad philosophical consensus that both children’s and prospective parents’ interests are relevant to the justification of a right to parent. Against this view, I argue that it is impermissible to sacrifice children’s interests for the sake of advancing adults’ interest in childrearing. Therefore, the allocation of the moral right to parent should track the child’s, and not the potential parent’s, interest. This revisionary thesis is moderated by two additional qualifications. First, parents lack the moral right to exclude (...) others from associating with the child. Second, children usually come into the world as part of a relationship with their gestational mother; often, this relationship deserves protection. (shrink)

In philosophy, there are two competitor views about the nature and value of childhood: The first is the traditional, deficiency, view, according to which children are mere unfinished adults. The second is a view that has recently become increasingly popular amongst philosophers, and according to which children, perhaps in virtue of their biological features, have special and valuable capacities, and, more generally, privileged access to some sources of value. This article provides a conceptual map of these views and their possible (...) interpretations, and notes their bearing on issues of population ethics and on the duties that we are owed during childhood. (shrink)

Talk of gender identity is at the core of heated current philosophical and political debates. Yet, it is unclear what it means to have one. I examine several ways of understanding this concept in light of core aims of trans writers and activists. Most importantly, the concept should make good trans people’s understanding of their own gender identities and help understand why misgendering is a serious harm and why it is permissible to require information about people’s gender identities in public (...) life. I conclude that none of the available accounts meets these essential criteria, on the assumption that the gender norms of femininity and masculinity are unjustified. But we can, and should, pursue the feminist project without “gender identity”. Such feminism can include trans people because it is possible to account for the specific harm of misgendering without assuming a claim to the recognition of our gender identities. I conclude that we should eliminate the concept of “gender identity.” To understand the phenomena that are putatively captured by “gender identity,” we are better off employing other concepts, such as “sexual dysphoria,” (assigned or aspirational) “gender roles,” and (internalised or endorsed) “gender norms”. These concepts can usefully replace “gender identity” in an individual evaluation of each of the trans people’s claims to inclusion into particular spaces. (shrink)

The classical rule of Repetition says that if you take any sentence as a premise, and repeat it as a conclusion, you have a valid argument. It's a very basic rule of logic, and many other rules depend on the guarantee that repeating a sentence, or really, any expression, guarantees sameness of referent, or semantic value. However, Repetition fails for token-reflexive expressions. In this paper, I offer three ways that one might replace Repetition, and still keep an interesting notion of (...) validity. Each is a fine way to go for certain purposes, but I argue that one in particular is to be preferred by the semanticist who thinks that there are token-reflexive expressions in natural languages. (shrink)

Liam Shields’ sufficientarian commitments mean that he should subscribe to a child-centered account of the right to parent. This point most likely generalizes: sufficientarians who acknowledge children’s full moral status must embrace a child-centered account of the right to parent.

There is a widespread belief that, conceptually, justice cannot require what we cannot achieve. This belief is sometimes used by defenders of so-called ‘non-ideal theories of justice’ to criticise so-called ‘ideal theories of justice’. I refer to this claim as ‘the feasibility constraint on the concept of justice’ and argue against it. I point to its various implausible implications and contend that a willingness to apply the label ‘unjust’ to some regrettable situations that we cannot fix is going to enhance (...) the action-guiding potential of a conception of justice, by providing an aspirational ideal. This is possible on the condition that, at all times, we cannot specify with certainty the limits of what is feasible for us collectively. The rejection of the feasibility constraint entails that there can be injustice without perpetrators; this is a theoretical price worth paying. (shrink)

Since Kaplan : 81–98, 1979) first provided a logic for context-sensitive expressions, it has been thought that the only way to construct a logic for indexicals is to restrict it to arguments which take place in a single context— that is, instantaneous arguments, uttered by a single speaker, in a single place, etc. In this paper, I propose a logic which does away with these restrictions, and thus places arguments where they belong, in real world conversations. The central innovation is (...) that validity depends not just on the sentences in the argument, but also on certain abstract relations between contexts. This enrichment of the notion of logical form leads to some seemingly counter-intuitive results: a sequence of sentences may make up a valid argument in one sequence of contexts, and an invalid one in another such sequence. I argue that this is an unavoidable result of context sensitivity in general, and of the nature of indexicals in particular, and that reflection on such examples will lead us to a better understanding of the idea of applying logic to context sensitive expressions, and thus to natural language in general. (shrink)

In this chapter, I argue that children who were selected for particular traits or genetically enhanced might feel, for this reason, less securely, spontaneously and fairly loved by their parents, which would constitute significant harm. ‘Parents’ refers, throughout this chapter, to the people who perform the social function of rearing children, rather than to procreators. I rely on an understanding of adequate parental love which includes several characteristics: parents should not make children feel they are loved conditionally, for features such (...) as intelligence, looks or temperament; they should not burden children with parental expectations concerning particular achievements of the child; and parental love is often expressed in spontaneous enjoyment and discovery of children’s features. This understanding of parental love provides a reason to question the legitimacy of parental use of selection and enhancement and to explain why parents should not engage on a quest for the ‘best child’. (shrink)

Surrogacy involves a private agreement whereby a woman who gestates a child attempts to surrender her (putative) moral right to become the parent of that child such that another person (or persons), of the woman’s choice, can acquire it. Since people lack the normative power to privately transfer custody, attempts to do so are illegitimate, and the law should reflect this fact.

Forgiveness is a compelling Christian ideal. By contrast, to many philosophers it is not clear that forgiveness should be endorsed as a moral requirement; some argue that unconditional forgiveness is morally wrong. Those who are required to exercise forgiveness can feel that their own dignity and moral worthiness is diminished by such requirement if insignificant recognition was given to the harms they suffered as victims. This is particularly significant when thinking about women’s lives. Forgiveness and justice occasion particularly painful quandaries (...) in feminist ethics. However, an important stream of feminist ethics—namely the ethics of care—can make a convincing case in favor of forgiveness. A main goal of an ethics of care is preserving relationships for which, in the less than ideal conditions of human life, forgiveness is essential. Thus, the ethics of care casts additional light on the tension between pursuing forgiveness and justice. By spelling out these various dilemmas, I illustrate how a feminist ethics and a feminist philosophy of religion can be fruitful intellectual allies. A feminist ethics will benefit from cautious reliance on religious wisdom, concomitantly acknowledging the need for forgiveness and qualifying the requirements of forgiveness such that this ideal does not become, once again, oppressive for women. And a feminist philosophy of religion should be to some extent informed by feminist ethical goals, helping to unveil religious resources that give credit to our ongoing need for forgiveness, without however overlooking the importance of (gender) justice. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Professor’s DesireAnca Parvulescu (bio)Roland Barthes. THE NEUTRAL. Trans. Rosalind E. Krauss and Denis Hollier. New York: Columbia UP, 2005. Trans. of Le Neutre. Paris: Seuil, 2002.I add: a reflection on the Neutral, for me: a manner—a free manner—to be looking for my own style of being present to the struggles of my time.—Roland Barthes, The NeutralWhat I am looking for, during the preparation of this course, is an (...) introduction to living, a guide to life (ethical project): I want to live according to nuance.—Roland Barthes, The NeutralLe Neutre reaches us late. Like an echo, it needed time, and it took its time to come. The second of the three courses Roland Barthes gave at the Collège de France between 1977 and 1980, Le Neutre was published in 2002 by Éditions du Seuil, following the editorial work of Thomas Clerc, under the direction of Éric Marty.1 Rosalind E. Krauss and Denis Hollier’s translation as The Neutral brought it to life in English in 2005. After thirty years, Le Neutre comes indeed late, but perhaps its lateness, the time of the echo, is part of its very scene.Barthes did not conceive of Le Neutre as a book. It was a course, to happen as a onetime affair and then be put aside: “We’ll have to hold on to the unsustainable for thirteen weeks: after that, it will fade” [13]; “This course is made to die on the spot” [250]. As such, the course is not only an attempt to do justice to a “subject,” to which, Barthes insists, we should not hold on once the course is over, but also to meditate on the very situation of teaching.2 The course on the neutral offers the occasion to ask, What is it to teach? And teaching, we soon find out, is a matter of desire: the course should have been called The Desire for the Neutral. The teacher follows his desire and, in doing so—Barthes is reminded by a student—inflects and curbs the student’s desire. What is it, then, that one desires when one desires the neutral? The teacher is pressed to offer something by way of definition:I define the Neutral as that which outplays [déjoue] the paradigm, or rather I call Neutral everything that baffles the paradigm. For I am not trying to define a word; I am trying to name a thing: I gather under a name, which here is the Neutral.[6]The neutral is a “thing” (no qualifying adjective) that outplays, baffles, or dodges the “implacable binarism” of language as seen through Saussurian linguistics: in order to [End Page 32]produce meaning, one is in the same breath choosing A and refusing B. The search here is for a ”thing” that might suspend, thwart, or elude the paradigm, what Barthes calls its arrogance. Indeed, what would it mean to escape the necessity of choosing, say—this is Barthes’s first example—between je ris (I laugh) and je lis (I read)?A problem for the teaching theater unfolds: the moment one names the “thing,” one brings it into the paradigm, constructing an opposition between the neutral and arrogance. The scene of teaching performs an aporia: “Neutral = impossible; to speak it is to defeat it but not to speak it is to miss its ‘setting up’ [...] to speak this cacophony, I need a course” [29]. There is an obvious tension between teaching, its demands for clear and transparent meaning-making and inherent institutional arrogance, and the neutral. “Arrogance”: “the taking of too much upon oneself as one’s right; the assertion of unwarrantable claims in respect of one’s own importance; undue assumption of dignity, authority, or knowledge” [OED]. The teacher is inevitably occupying the place of arrogance. Indeed, foregrounding its righteousness and authority, arrogance is standing, a position Barthes associates with a certain kind of fascism. The neutral teacher struggles to dodge the arrogance inherent to the teaching scene. Sitting, he stammers, cacophonizes. One speaks, but one accompanies speaking with a continuous performance of an apology for speaking.3 The teacher does not offer an anchor in... (shrink)

Le Sophiste est un des dialogues les plus difficiles de Platon, dans lequel se croisent deux questions principales : - qu'est-ce qu'un sophiste? - qu'est-ce que ce qui est? Platon les articule en dévoilant le pouvoir qu'a la parole de donner réalité à ce qui est. En mettant en scène le défi de la pensée confrontée au pouvoir démiurgique du langage hérité des poèmes archaïques, le Sophiste s'avère aussi être un dialogue entre un courant philosophique, l'éléatisme, et une pratique du (...) discours, la sophistique. Il apparaît alors comme le véritable contrepoint du Timée : y émerge, à partir d'une pensée de la rationalité du langage et de la cosmologie qu'elle fonde ou semble fonder, ce qu'Aristote, Plotin ou Jamblique reconnaîtront et critiqueront comme une science de l'être avant l'heure. Seule une telle lecture transversale du Sophiste permet d'y caractériser la thèse originale : la philosophie première habite une démiurgie."--Page 4 of cover. (shrink)

This paper provides an answer to the question why birth parents have a moral right to keep and raise their biological babies. I start with a critical discussion of the parent-centred model of justifying parents’ rights, recently proposed by Harry Brighouse and Adam Swift. Their account successfully defends a fundamental moral right to parent in general but, because it does not provide an account of how individuals acquire the right to parent a particular baby, it is insufficient for addressing the (...) question whether and why there is a right to parent one’s biological child. Such a right is important because, in its absence, fairness towards adequate prospective parents who are involuntarily childless would demand a ‘babies redistribution’; moreover, in societies with entrenched histories of injustice there may be reasons of fairness for shuffling babies amongst all recent parents. I supplement the Brighouse-Swift account of fundamental parental rights by an account of how adequate parents acquire the right to parent their biological babies. I advance two arguments to this conclusion: by the time of birth, the birth parents will have already shouldered various burdens in order to bring children into existence, and are likely to have formed an intimate relationship with the future baby. Denying birth parents who would make at least adequate parents the right to keep their baby would be unfair to them and would destroy already formed parent-baby relationships which, I assume, are intrinsically valuable. (shrink)

Parenting involves an extraordinary degree of power over children. Republicans are concerned about domination, which, on one view, is the holding of power that fails to track the interests of those over whom it is exercised. On this account, parenting as we know it is dominating due to the low standards necessary for acquiring and retaining parental rights and the extent of parental power. Domination cannot be fully eliminated from child-rearing without unacceptable loss of value. Most likely, republicanism requires that (...) we minimise children’s domination. I examine alternative models of child-rearing that are immune to republican criticism. (shrink)

Synonymy, at its most basic, is sameness of meaning. A token-reflexive expression is an expression whose meaning assigns a referent to its tokens by relating each particular token of that particular expression to its referent. In doing so, the formulation of its meaning mentions the particular expression whose meaning it is. This seems to entail that no two token-reflexive expressions are synonymous, which would constitute a strong objection against token-reflexive semantics. In this paper, I propose and defend a notion of (...) synonymy for token-reflexive expressions that allows such expressions to be synonymous, while being a fairly conservative extension of the customary notion of synonymy. (shrink)

Family relationships are often believed to have a unique value; this is reflected both in the special expectations that family members have from each other and in the various ways in which states protect family relationships. Commitment appears to set apart family relationships from other close relationships; however, commitment is in fact present in other close relationships. I conclude that family relationships do not have any special value; love does. In the case of families with children, however, a high degree (...) of commitment between adults may be useful or even necessary for advancing children's wellbeing. This could be a reason to give special protection to relationships between co-parents. (shrink)

Several philosophers argue that individuals have an interest-protecting right to parent; specifically, the interest is in rearing children whom one can parent adequately. If such a right exists it can provide a solution to scepticism about duties of justice concerning distant future generations and bypass the challenge provided by the non-identity problem. Current children - whose identity is independent from environment-affecting decisions of current adults - will have, in due course, a right to parent. Adequate parenting requires resources. We owe (...) duties of justice to current children, including the satisfaction of their interest-protecting rights; therefore we owe them the conditions for rearing children adequately in the future. But to engage in permissible parenting they, too, will need sufficient resources to ensure their own children's future ability to bring up children under adequate conditions. Because this reasoning goes on ad infinitum it entails that each generation of adults owes its contemporary generation of children at least those resources that are necessary for sustaining human life indefinitely at an adequate level of wellbeing. (shrink)

I distinguish between three different ideas that have been recently discussed under the heading of 'the intrinsic goods of childhood': that childhood is itself intrinsically valuable, that certain goods are valuable only for children, and that children are being owed other goods than adults. I then briefly defend the claim the childhood is intrinsically good. Most of the chapter is dedicated to the analysis, and rejection, of the claim that certain goods are valuable only for children. This has implications about (...) how a good society should trade off economic productivity on the one hand and goods such as play and unstructured time on the other hand. (shrink)

This article intends to show the distance between work-life balance as a political and social issue at the EU and Romanian level, through the lens of the local gender equality policies following the process of EU accession. The article provides, in its first part, a brief presentation of the main theoretical axes structuring the available literature, followed up by the analysis of the occurrence of the work-life balance issue at the European level. Then the study examines the normative dimension of (...) work-life balance in post-communist Romania, seeking to understand to what extent work-life balance policies have been designed and implemented in the last 25 years. (shrink)

Three claims about love and justice cannot be simultaneously true and therefore entail a paradox: (1) Love is a matter of justice. (2) There cannot be a duty to love. (3) All matters of justice are matters of duty. The first claim is more controversial. To defend it, I show why the extent to which we enjoy the good of love is relevant to distributive justice. To defend (2) I explain the empirical, conceptual and axiological arguments in its favour. Although (...) (3) is the most generally endorsed claim of the three, I conclude we should reject it in order to avoid the paradox. (shrink)

There is wide agreement that children have human rights, and that their human rights differ from those of adults. What explains this difference which is, at least at first glance, puzzling, given that human rights are meant to be universal? The puzzle can be dispelled by identifying what unites children’s and adults’ rights as human rights. Here I seek to answer the question of children’s human rights – that is, rights they have merely in virtue of being human and of (...) being children – by exploring how children’s interests are different from adults’, and how respect for children’s and adults’ moral status yields different practical requirements. If human rights protect interests, then children have many, but not all, of the human rights of adults, and, in addition, have some human rights that adults lack. I discuss the way in which children’s human rights, as I conceive of them here are, or fail to be, reflected in the law; as an illustration, I use the most important legal document listing children’s rights, namely the 1990 United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. (shrink)

Children's vulnerability gives rise to duties of justice towards children and determines when authority over them is legitimately exercised. I argue for two claims. First, children's general vulnerability to objectionable dependency on their caregivers entails that they have a right not to be subject to monopolies of care, and therefore determines the structure of legitimate authority over them. Second, children's vulnerability to the loss of some special goods of childhood determines the content of legitimate authority over them. My interest is (...) in the so-far little-discussed goods of engaging in world discovery, artistic creation, philosophical pursuits and experimentation with one's self. I call these ‘special goods of childhood’ because individuals, in general, only have full access to them during childhood and they make a distinctive and weighty contribution to wellbeing. Therefore, they are part of the metric of justice towards children. The overall conclusion is that we ought to make good institutional care part of every child's upbringing. (shrink)

In this paper, I propose a new way to distinguish between indexicals, like “I” and “today”, and demonstratives, like “she” and “this”. The main test case is the second person singular pronoun “you”. The tradition would generally count it as a demonstrative, because the speaker’s intentions play a role in providing it with a semantic value. I present cross-linguistic data and explanations offered of the data in typology and semantics to show that “you” belongs on the indexical side, and argue (...) that they can be generalized to a novel criterion for distinguishing between indexicals and demonstratives. The central theoretical claim is that the semantic values of indexicals are objects which play certain utterance-related roles, which are fixed independently of the words being used in the utterance. For instance, the speaker plays the speaker role whether or not she uses the word “I”, and the addressee plays that role whether or not the speaker uses the word “you”. Demonstratives, on the other hand, pick out objects that play no such role, and are instead helped by the speaker’s word-specific intentions. (shrink)

For Austin, Grice, and many others, undertaking a speech act like asserting or promising requires uttering something with a particular sense and reference in mind. We argue that the phenomenon of open-ended promises reveals this 'Locutionary Thesis' to be mistaken.

I review three existing arguments in favor of having some childcare done by nonparents and then I advance five arguments, most of them original, to the same conclusion. My arguments rely on the assumption that, no matter who provides it, childcare will inevitably go wrong at times. I discuss the importance of mitigating bad care, of teaching children how to enter caring relationships with people who are initially strangers to them, of addressing children's structural vulnerability to their caregivers, of helping (...) children and parents contain the ambivalent feelings of the child-parent relationship, and of distributing the responsibility of care and the ensuing blame for bad care more widely. I conclude that nonparental childcare should be universal. (shrink)

The article has two aims. First, to show that a version of luck egalitarianism that includes relational goods amongst its distribuenda can, as a matter of internal logic, account for one of the core beliefs of relational egalitarianism. Therefore, there will be important extensional overlap, at the level of domestic justice, between luck egalitarianism and relational egalitarianism. This is an important consideration in assessing the merits of and relationship between the two rival views. Second, to provide some support for including (...) relational goods, including those advocated by relational egalitarianism, on the distribuenda of justice and therefore to put in a good word for the overall plausibility of this conception of justice. I show why relational egalitarians, too, have reason to sympathise with this proposal. (shrink)

If I am confused, and I think two people are one and the same, that may impair my ability to refer to either of them. This is combinatory confusion. What if I am confused, and think that one person is actually two people? This is separatory confusion, and it seems quite different. After all, even in my confusion, my thoughts and my referential devices seem to track back to a single individual. Elmar Unnsteinsson has recently argued that both types of (...) confusion corrupt, i.e. they may prevent us from referring the right way. In this paper, I examine the four arguments he offers for this conclusion, and I argue that the intuitive view that separatory confusion does not corrupt can withstand his challenge. (shrink)

Traditionally, most philosophers saw childhood as a state of deficiency and thought that its value was entirely dependent on how successfully it prepares individuals for adulthood. Yet, there are good reasons to think that childhood also has intrinsic value. Children possess certain intrinsically valuable abilities to a higher degree than adults. Moreover, going through a phase when one does not yet have a “self of one’s own,” and experimenting one’s way to a stable self, seems intrinsically valuable. I argue that (...) children can have good lives, on several understandings of well-being – as a pleasurable state, as the satisfaction of simple desires or as the realization of certain objective goods. In reply to the likely objection that only individuals capable of morality can have intrinsic value, I explain why it is plausible that children have sufficient moral agency to be as deserving of respect as adults. (shrink)

Common sense morality and legislations around the world ascribe normative relevance to biological connections between parents and children. Procreators who meet a modest standard of parental competence are believed to have a right to rear the children they brought into the world. I explore various attempts to justify this belief and find most of these attempts lacking. I distinguish between two kinds of biological connections between parents and children: the genetic link and the gestational link. I argue that the second (...) can better justify a right to rear. (shrink)

In “Tragedy and Resentment” Ulrika Carlsson claims that there are cases when we are justified in feeling non-moral resentment against someone who harms us without wronging us, when the harm either consists in their attitude towards us or in the emotional suffering triggered by their attitudes. Since they had no duty to protect us from harm, the objectionable attitude is not disrespect but a failure to show love, admiration, or appreciation for us. I explain why unrequited love is the wrong (...) example to use when arguing for the possibility of justified non-moral resentment—and why, therefore, Carlsson’s claim remains unsubstantiated. Pace Carlsson, people who fail to return our love are not best described as harming us, but as merely failing to benefit us by saving us from harm. Moreover, their role in the causal chain that results in our coming to harm is insufficient to warrant our resentment; more plausibly, we ourselves play a greater and more direct causal role in this process. This is a welcome result: Responding with resentment to someone’s failure to return our love indicates that our love has not taken the form of a genuine gift. When we put conditions on successful gifting by allowing for justified resentment if the gift is not returned we are not in fact giving gifts but making a bid for an exchange: I love you so that you love me back. (shrink)

According to Brehm's intensity of emotion theory, if an emotion has motivational properties, its intensity should be non-monotonically affected by factors similar to those determining the intensity of motivational states. These factors are called deterrents. In the case of emotion, one category of deterrents consists of factors that can potentially interfere with feeling the emotion, such as reasons for not feeling the emotion. Two experiments were carried out to examine whether happiness is a motivational state and, thus, if its intensity (...) is non-monotonically determined by the importance of reasons for not feeling happy. We expected happiness to be reduced by a low importance reason for not feeling happy, to remain high in the presence of a moderately important reason, and to be reduced or eliminated by a very important reason. Both experiments supported the cubic function that results from these expectations, and when the results of the two studies were combined, each of the individual legs of the cubic function was found to be reliable along with the cubic function itself. The theoretical implications of these results are discussed. (shrink)

Knowing the level of quality from which the context is no longer valuable in a Context-Aware Data Mining (CADM) system is an important information. The main goal of this research is to study the variations of the predictions in case of different levels of noise and missing context data in practical scenarios for predicting soil moisture. The research has been performed on two locations from the Transylvanian Plain, Romania and two locations from Canada. The values predicted for the soil moisture (...) were compared in mixed scenarios that vary the quantity of noise and missing context data. The studied behavior was performed using Deep Learning, Decision Tree and Gradient Boosted Tree machine learning algorithms. It has been shown that when using the air temperature as context for predicting soil moisture, variations of noise and missing data do not influence the results proportionally with the levels of noise and missing data applied. Also, Gradient Boosted Tree algorithm proves to be the best algorithm from the ones studied, to be considered when predicting soil moisture with the CADM approach. (shrink)