Contra an expanding number of deflationary commentators onWittgenstein, I argue that philosophical questions about meaningare meaningful and that Wittgenstein gave us ample reason tobelieve so. Deflationists are right in claiming that Wittgensteinrejected the sceptical problem about meaning allegedly to befound in his later writings and also right in stressing Wittgenstein''s anti-reductionism. But they are wrong in taking these dismissals to entail the end of all constructive philosophizing about meaning. Rather, I argue, the rejection of the sceptical problem requires that we (...) abandon the questions that philosophers have traditionally addressed and that we replace them with more appropriate ones, to which constructive answers are forthcoming. However, though quietism is not the only alternative to reductionism, the rejection of reductionism does oblige us seriously to revise our sense of what constructive philosophy can achieve. (shrink)

According to Davidson, 'triangulation' is necessary both to fix the meanings of one's thoughts and utterances and to have the concept of objectivity, both of which are necessary for thinking and talking at all. Against these claims, it has been objected that neither meaning-determination nor possession of the concept of objectivity requires triangulation; nor does the ability to think and talk require possession of the concept of objectivity. But this overlooks the important connection between the tasks that triangulation is meant (...) to perform. One cannot fix concepts or meanings, which one must do for there to be any concepts or meanings at all, without having the concept of objectivity. (shrink)

Central to the discourse on the intentional structure of consciousness encompasses further forms of experience, for instance, the notion of one’s direct experience of others. In essence, one’s experience of others is materialized through intersubjective engagement which is fundamental in comprehending the relation of the Self and Other. Intersubjective engagement between the two cognizing subjects is evidently interactive negotiation of understanding, thus necessarily meditational. This paper will substantiate the meditational or reflective nature of intersubjective engagement with the phenomenology of self-projection, (...) giving emphasis on the experience of the Self in relation to Others. The activity of self- projection onto others which is argued to take place through introspection, incorporates modes such as representation, simulation, imitation, empathic interaction and self-attribution. Furthermore, this paper will conclude intersubjectivity as an advent of joint construction of meaning and representation between the two cognizing subjects, thus, the collaborative endeavor of shared construction of meaning and representation is attained throughout the process. (shrink)

The contents and structure of semantic memory have been the focus of much recent research, with major advances in the development of distributional models, which use word co‐occurrence information as a window into the semantics of language. In parallel, connectionist modeling has extended our knowledge of the processes engaged in semantic activation. However, these two lines of investigation have rarely been brought together. Here, we describe a processing model based on distributional semantics in which activation spreads throughout a semantic network, (...) as dictated by the patterns of semantic similarity between words. We show that the activation profile of the network, measured at various time points, can successfully account for response times in lexical and semantic decision tasks, as well as for subjective concreteness and imageability ratings. We also show that the dynamics of the network is predictive of performance in relational semantic tasks, such as similarity/relatedness rating. Our results indicate that bringing together distributional semantic networks and spreading of activation provides a good fit to both automatic lexical processing (as indexed by lexical and semantic decisions) as well as more deliberate processing (as indexed by ratings), above and beyond what has been reported for previous models that take into account only similarity resulting from network structure. (shrink)

In their recent paper, “Practical Knowledge without Luminosity,” Bob Beddor and Carlotta Pavese (2022) claim that the doctrine of essentially intentional actions, or “essentialism,” is false. Essentialism states that some actions are essentially intentional, such that, “whenever they are performed, they are performed intentionally” (2022, p. 926). Beddor and Pavese work to reject essentialism, which figures as a key premise in Juan Piñeros Glasscock’s anti-luminosity argument against the knowledge condition for intentional action (Piñeros Glasscock, p. 1240). Historically, essentialism has received (...) little attention from philosophers since its inception in Elizabeth Anscombe’s Intention (2000, §47). However, I believe that essentially intentional actions can play an important role in an ontology of action. In my paper, I develop and argue for a variety of essentialism in the context of naive action theory, which I call naive essentialism. Naive essentialism is a two-fold thesis, which claims that (1) essentially intentional actions exist, and (2) that essentially intentional actions ground accidentally intentional actions. My paper has four parts. In the first part, I distinguish between essentially and accidentally intentional actions, and unpack the relevant principles of naive action theory. Second, I present the grounding thesis that accidentally intentional actions are grounded in essentially intentional actions. Next, I provide an argument for the existence of essentially intentional actions. Lastly, I briefly respond to a possible objection to my argument. The upshot of my arguments is that essentially intentional actions form the metaphysical and explanatory bedrock in a naive ontology of action, and that there are good reasons for accepting a key premise in Piñeros Glasscock’s anti-luminosity argument. (shrink)

Wittgenstein and Davidson are two of the most influential and controversial figures of twentieth-century philosophy. However, whereas Wittgenstein is often regarded as a deflationary philosopher, Davidson is considered to be a theory builder and systematic philosopher par excellence. Consequently, little work has been devoted to comparing their philosophies with each other. In this volume of new essays, leading scholars show that in fact there is much that the two share. By focusing on the similarities between Wittgenstein and Davidson, their essays (...) present compelling defences of their views and develop more coherent and convincing approaches than either philosopher was able to propose on his own. They show how philosophically fruitful and constructive reflection on Wittgenstein and Davidson continues to be, and how relevant the writings of both philosophers are to current debates in philosophy of mind, language, and action. (shrink)

According to Barry Stroud, Wittgenstein thought that language is social only in this minimal way: we cannot make sense of the idea of someone having a language unless we can describe her as using signs in conformity with the linguistic practices of some community. Since a solitary person could meet this condition, Stroud concludes that, for Wittgenstein, solitary languages are possible. I argue that Wittgenstein in fact thought that language is social in a much more robust way. Solitary languages are (...) not possible because we cannot make sense of the idea of someone having a language unless we can think of her as actively participating in the linguistic practices that fix the standards governing the applications of her words. (shrink)

I distinguish among three senses in which meaning may be said to be normative, one trivial, the other two more robust. According to the trivial sense, meaningful expressions have conditions of correct application. According to the first robust sense, these conditions are determined by norms. According to the second robust sense, statements about these conditions have normative implications. Normativity in one or the other of the robust senses, but not in the trivial sense, is commonly thought to pose a threat (...) to naturalism. I argue that, given its trivial normativity, meaning cannot be normative in the first robust sense but it is normative in the sense that statements about the meaning of terms have hypothetical normative implications that are essential to meaning. I further argue that this normativity itself poses no threat to naturalism. Rather, this normativity follows from the fact that the trivial normativity of meaning precludes its naturalization. (shrink)

On examine dans cette étude les effets des flux sensoriels et informationnels continus et accélérés sur la conscience, sur les capacités de penser et de réfléchir. Ces flux conduisent – au-delà de l’inachèvement intrinsèque à toute science dont parlait Weber – à des formes instables, changeantes et illimitées, perçues comme telles par le sujet, et tendant dès lors à provoquer un état de crise de la conscience, d’insécurité psychique profonde dans la fluidité contemporaine.We deal here with the effects caused by (...) continuous, accelerated sensory and information flows on consciousness, on thinking. Quite beyond Weber’s conclusion on the intrinsically boundless character of science, those flows lead to unstable, changing and unlimited forms of knowledge, perceived as such by the individual, and tend from now on to induce a permanent state of crisis in consciousness, a strong psychological insecurity in contemporary fluidity. (shrink)

Focusing especially on case studies from the Old High German glosses to the Rule of Benedict, and especially on the lexeme disciplina, one of their central ascetic terms, this contribution examines different manifestations and methods of the glossators’ annotation system from a primarily linguistic viewpoint. The Old High German words interpolated between and to the side of the Latin lines are interpreted not only as linguistic primary material, but at the same time as means of deepening our cultural-historical understanding of (...) medieval forms of life and the spheres of knowledge inherent to them in which asceticism played a major role. (shrink)

The paper presents the main lines of arguments recently offered by Brian Ellis and Steven Mumford in favor of some versions of dispositional essentialism and tries to evaluate them, especially as far as a dispositionalist account of laws is concerned. Favoring herself some form of dispositional realism (rather than essentialism), the author makes some suggestions about the major difficulties which any kind of dispositionalism should be ready to face.

The aim of the text is not so much to stress the importance of Peirce's formal contributions to the semantic view in formal logic as to argue that Peirce's semantic trend is part and parcel of his semiotic treatment of a general theory of meaning, understanding, and interpretation, a theory of how signs function which enables him to classify different sorts of signs in a natural way.

El artículo analiza la función de la teología cristiana en la sociedad actual. A tal fin, el autor comienza por sintetizar los elementos más característicos de la sociedad que se está gestando. En segundo lugar, propone la necesidad de una mediación cultural para la comunicación del evangelio. Seguidamente, el autor reclama el necesario diálogo de la teología con la cultura y la universidad. Y el estudio termina por presentar sintéticamente el papel de los centros superiores de enseñanza de la teología, (...) según las recomendaciones de la Veritatis Gaudium del papa Francisco. (shrink)

Table of contents -- Foreword by klaus schwab -- Author biographies -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction - by armand doucet & jelmer evers -- education in a time of unprecedented change by michael soskil -- education today: a collection of snapshots by elisa guerra -- - overcoming equity gaps in and through education by michael soskil -- Teach me: the learner profile by armand doucet -- the power of learning by nadia lopez -- contextualizing personalization in education by (...) class='Hi'>armand doucet -- Evolution of technology in the classroom by koen timmers -- flip the system: the networked activist teacher by jelmer evers -- Conclusion- by armand doucet & jelmer evers -- Epilogue by andreas schleicher. (shrink)

Corporate governance guidelines are a mechanism that a firm can enact which should reduce agency costs and better align the interests of boards and the suppliers of capital. This study examines stock price reactions primarily attributable to institutional investors occurring when corporations announce the enactment of corporate governance guidelines. A final sample of 77 firms was derived from the first announcement of corporate governance guidelines exclusive to the SEC-EDGAR database. The results indicate that good governance does matter. Firms that announced (...) the enactment of corporate governance guidelines experienced increased stock prices following the announcements. There was an immediate (days 1–4) reaction for firms that provided all or part of the guidelines’ substance; a delayed (days 8–10) reaction occurred for those firms that only referenced the guidelines’ enactment. Additionally, firms with either a potentially greater following or that had a previous history of acrimonious relations with stakeholders were rewarded by the announcement of the enactment of guidelines. (shrink)

A set of images can be considered as meaningfully different for an observer if they can be distinguished phenomenally from one another. Each phenomenal difference must be supported by some neurophysiological differences. Differentiation analysis aims to quantify neurophysiological differentiation evoked by a given set of stimuli to assess its meaningfulness to the individual observer. As a proof of concept using high-density EEG, we show increased neurophysiological differentiation for a set of natural, meaningfully different images in contrast to another set of (...) artificially generated, meaninglessly different images in nine participants. Stimulus-evoked neurophysiological differentiation (over 257 channels, 800 ms) was systematically greater for meaningful vs. meaningless stimulus categories both at the group level and for individual subjects. Spatial breakdown showed a central-posterior peak of differentiation, consistent with the visual nature of the stimulus sets. Temporal breakdown revealed an early peak of differentiation around 110 ms, prominent in the central-posterior region; and a later, longer-lasting peak at 300–500 ms that was spatially more distributed. The early peak of differentiation was not accompanied by changes in mean ERP amplitude, whereas the later peak was associated with a higher amplitude ERP for meaningful images. An ERP component similar to visual-awareness-negativity occurred during the nadir of differentiation across all image types. Control stimulus sets and further analysis indicate that changes in neurophysiological differentiation between meaningful and meaningless stimulus sets could not be accounted for by spatial properties of the stimuli or by stimulus novelty and predictability. (shrink)

Despite its intuitive appeal and the empirical evidence for it, the hypothesis of cognitive polyphasia (Moscovici, 1961/1976/2008) remains largely unexplored. This article attempts to clarify some of the ideas behind this concept by examining its operations at the level of individuals and by proposing a conceptual model that includes some elements of social cognition. Indeed, calls for a rapprochement between the theory of social representations and cognitive psychology have been made by Moscovici, in particular, in his 1984 paper on The (...) myth of the lonely paradigm and in his paper on La nouvelle pensée magique (1992) in which he argues that the theory of social representations provides an explanatory framework for the descriptions offered by cognitive psychology and that their combining could translate into a finer understanding of contemporary social phenomena.Building on the results of an empirical examination of the controversy that surrounded the MMR vaccination programme in the UK between 1998 and 2005, different ways of engaging into cognitive polyphasia are proposed, including what can be described as cognitive “monophasia”, that is, the exclusive use of one type of knowledge, at least at the level of the individual. A brief discussion about the implications of the proposed conceptual model for our understanding of cognitive polyphasia and of the different ways of making sense of the world around us concludes this article. (shrink)

This paper is addressed to recent theoretical discussions of the Anthropocene, in particular Bernard Stiegler’s Neganthropocene (Open Universities Press, 2018), which argues: “As we drift past tipping points that put future biota at risk, while a post-truth regime institutes the denial of ‘climate change’ (as fake news), and as Silicon Valley assistants snatch decision and memory, and as gene-editing and a financially-engineered bifurcation advances over the rising hum of extinction events and the innumerable toxins and conceptual opiates that Anthropocene Talk (...) fascinated itself with—in short, as ‘the Anthropocene’ discloses itself as a dead-end trap…”. The objective of this paper is therefore twofold: (1) to discuss how the Anthropocene is appropriated to certain ideological discourses (paradoxically) to maintain the hegemony of precisely those systems of production that have most accelerated climate change etc.; (2) to consider how the factography of the Anthropocene is exploited in this process to mask the ideological character of industry-aligned “technocratic” environmental management. The paper is not concerned with specific case studies in terms of government and industry policy, or climate science, but rather with the ways in which the discourse of the Anthropocene has been inflected within the humanities and the broader cultural field—that is to say, ideologically, as a system or logic of meaning. How the Anthropocene “means” is, in this respect, a question of some importance. This paper does not attempt to address all the facets of this question, but focuses upon a central “apocalyptic” strain in the discourse of the Anthropocene drawn particularly from Francis Fukuyama’s millennial posthumanism and centred in the question of “sustainability” as catastrophe management—with the risk that real environmental degradation will become an alibi for a revived neoliberalism. In other words, that the critical Earth system transformations that characterise the Anthropocene are themselves commodities, and that the project of their amelioration is in process of defining a future (opportunistic) “crisis” rhetoric with a global political franchise. The ideological import of the Anthropocene stems precisely from the fact that it is planetary and, while catalysed by human agency, independent in its specific behaviour from it. The Anthropocene objectively presents as the contemporary counterpart of the Cold War doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction and the most compelling argument for a new kind of technological “arms race.” But it also presents as the condition of an emerging ideological discourse which will determine how this race is run. From the discourse on “energy security” to the widespread “security crackdown” on environmental activists across the so-called developed & developing world, the Anthropocene has come to represent the co-option of a scientific factography for the thinly disguised resurgence of “ideological science” of the Fukuyamaesque variety (post-history, post-human). For Fukuyama, the true meaning of “posthuman” is thus the accomplishment of humanity’s historical mission. As the “End of History” designates an end of ideological struggle, so too the dénouement of the Anthropocene and the “ends of man” represent the accomplished purpose of species warfare: dominion, not simply over the world, but over all possible worlds. According to this narrative, science—like technology—must be uniquely at the service of the maintenance of the global order, organised around a universal appeal to “crisis management.” It is precisely for this reason that what calls itself post-human masks the return of an ever-more-apocalyptic Humanism. (shrink)

Background: The factors influencing parents’ willingness to enroll their children in biobanks are poorly understood. This study sought to assess parents’ willingness to enroll their children, and their perceived benefits, concerns, and information needs under different consent and data-sharing scenarios, and to identify factors associated with willingness. Methods: This large, experimental survey of patients at the 11 eMERGE Network sites used a disproportionate stratified sampling scheme to enrich the sample with historically underrepresented groups. Participants were randomized to receive one of (...) three consent and data-sharing scenarios. Results: In total, 90,000 surveys were mailed and 13,000 individuals responded (15.8% response rate). 5737 respondents were parents of minor children. Overall, 55% (95% confidence interval 50–59%) of parents were willing to enroll their youngest minor child in a hypothetical biobank; willingness did not differ between consent and data-sharing scenarios. Lower educational attainment, higher religiosity, lower trust, worries about privacy, and attitudes about benefits, concerns, and information needs were independently associated with less willingness to allow their child to participate. Of parents who were willing to participate themselves, 25% were not willing to allow their child to participate. Being willing to participate but not willing to allow one’s child to participate was independently associated with multiple factors, including race, lower educational attainment, lower annual household income, public health care insurance, and higher religiosity. Conclusions: Fifty-five percent of parents were willing to allow their youngest minor child to participate in a hypothetical biobank. Building trust, protecting privacy, and addressing attitudes may increase enrollment and diversity in pediatric biobanks. (shrink)

This article analyzes the “Interlude” in Kierkegaard’s Philosophical Fragments. In particular, it examines Johannes Climacus’s response to Hegel’s view that a past actuality is necessary. I provide an in-depth analysis of Hegel’s view of modality and of what he means when he says that a past actuality is necessary. In contrast to the standard scholarly interpretation, I argue that Climacus need not reject Hegel’s view because Hegel’s view of the necessity of the past is not so controversial or difficult to (...) accept. Finally, I show that Climacus’s main critique is that we cannot know the past as necessary in any meaningful way. He worries that we might get so preoccupied with the futile task of trying to know the Hegelian necessity of the past that we forget to personally appropriate the past in a way that can help us live in the present. (shrink)

Malgré les déclarations d'intention et les efforts des écologistes, la planète est en danger. Ses ennemis cherchent un profit immédiat à empoisonner l'air, les sols et l'eau, à abattre les arbres et les animaux. Ils trouvent un intérêt à détruire la réalité pour lui substituer un monde virtuel contrôlable. Cet essai invite à établir de nouvelles relations entre la planète et les hommes.

Cet article remet en question une définition de la fiction parue en 1988, dans un ouvrage intitulé « Contribution à une étude du concept de fiction ». Etant fondée sur la théorie des actes de langage, cette définition présentait en effet l’inconvénient de ne pouvoir s’appliquer qu’aux fictions verbales. Une nouvelle définition est donc proposée dans cet article, faisant apparaître clairement la fiction comme un concept de nature pragmaticosémiotique : une fiction est une représentation, verbale ou non verbale, qu’un auteur (...) produit consciemment dans le but de la transmettre à un destinataire. En transmettant cette représentation, l’auteur de la fiction adopte une attitude spécifique, consistant à inviter le destinataire à imaginer un monde fictif dont les caractéristiques sont compatibles avec celles du monde décrit dans la représentation. Sur la base de cette définition, l’article recense des exemplifications de fictions aussi diverses que possible, selon la nature de leur support de représentation et selon leur fonction, puis il pose la question du rôle des fictions dans notre vie quotidienne et, en particulier, sur la manière dont elles nous apprennent quelque chose sur le monde réel. (shrink)