To complement theoretically driven work on argument, we present a datadriven description of published, written argument. We analyze political or philosophical treatises, articles in scholarly journals, and U.S. Supreme Court decisions. The description has emerged out of an inductive and a posteriori process based in grounded theory. The result is a suite of thirty-eight features that begins with conditions antecedent to writing and continues through to the consequences for the reader. We relate observational data to theories and practices from the (...) fields of rhetoric and applied linguistics, including pragmatics, to explain how the features work together as social and communicative acts in which the writer produces a text in order to affect or change the beliefs or actions of the reader. For our purposes, the whole text is the argument and is not reduced to its propositional content; it is a unified communicative act. In our description of argument, the writer, reader, and text are central categories. We describe these categories and their features using examples from a variety of types of written argument. (shrink)

Philosophers of language are increasingly engaging with derogatory terms or slurs. Only few theorists take such language as a starting point for addressing puzzles in philosophy of language with little connection to our real-world problems. This paper aims to show that the political nature of derogatory language use calls for non-ideal theorising as we find it in the work of feminist and critical race scholars. Most contemporary theories of slurs, so I argue, fall short on some desiderata associated with a (...) non-ideal approach. They neglect crucial linguistic or political aspects of morally and politically significant meaning. I argue that a two-stage project is necessary to understand the perniciousness of slurs: accounting for the derogatory content of derogatory terms in general and, additionally, explaining the communicative function of slurs more specifically. I end by showing how inferentialism is well-suited to account for the content of derogatory terms whilst allowing for further explanations of the communicative functions of slurs. (shrink)

This paper examines how unethical behavior in the workplace occurs when management places inordinately strong emphasis on goalattainment without a corresponding emphasis on following legitimate procedures. Robert Merton's theory of sodal structure and anomie provides a foundation to discuss this argument. Key factors affecting ethical climates in work organizations are also addressed. Based on this analysis, the paper proposes strategies for developing and changing aspects of organizational culture to reduce anomie, thereby creating work climates which discourage unethical practices and provide (...) employees with mechanisms to resolve ethical conflicts in a constructive way. (shrink)

One of the chief innovations in medieval adaptations of Aristotelian psychology was the expansion of Aristotle's notion of imagination orphantasiato include a variety of distinct perceptual powers known collectively as the internal senses. Amongst medieval philosophers in the Arabic world, Avicenna offers one of the most complex and sophisticated accounts of the internal senses. Within his list of internal senses, Avicenna includes a faculty known as “estimation”, to which various functions are assigned in a wide variety of contexts. Although many (...) philosophers in the Arabic world as well as in the Latin West accepted Avicenna's positing of an estimative faculty, Avicenna's best-known critics, al-Ghazâlî and Averroes, found Avicenna's arguments in support of a distinct estimative faculty problematic. For different reasons, both Averroes and Ghazâlî raised the basic question of whether one needed to posit a distinct faculty of estimation to supplement the perceptual abilities of the other internal senses, and whether the notion of an estimative power as defined by Avicenna was internally coherent. Such criticisms suggest that the Avicennian conception of estimation is not entirely unambiguous, and that a correct understanding of Avicenna's motivations for delineating an estimative power requires a careful study of the diverse activities assigned to it throughout Avicenna's philosophical writings. (shrink)

It has long been a truism of the history of philosophy that intentionality is an invention of the medieval period, and within this standard narrative, the central place of Arabic philosophy has always been acknowledged. Yet there are many misconceptions surrounding the theories of intentionality advanced by the two main Arabic thinkers whose works were available to the West, Avicenna and Averroes. In the first part of this paper I offer an overview of the general accounts of intentionality and intentional (...) being found in the linguistic, psychological, and metaphysical writings of Avicenna and Averroes, and I trace the terminology of “intentions” to a neglected passage from Avicenna’s logic. In the second part of the paper I examine the way that Avicenna and Averroes apply their general theories of intentionality to the realm of sense perception. I offer an explanation of why Avicenna might have chosen to denominate the objects of the internal sense faculty of estimation as “intentions”, and I explore the implications of Averroes’s decision to attribute intentionality to the external senses and the media of perception. (shrink)

The concept of ‘‘certitude” is central in Arabic discussions of the theory of demonstration advanced by Aristotle in the Posterior Analytics. In the Arabic tradition it is ‘‘certitude,” rather than ‘‘knowledge”, that is usually identified as the end sought by demonstrations. Al-Fārābī himself devotes a short treatise, known as the Conditions of Certitude, to determining the criteria according to which a subject can claim to have absolute certitude of any proposition. In this article the author traces the roots of the (...) concept of certitude to the Arabic translation of the Posterior Analytics. She then offers a close reading of the text of al-Fārābī's Conditions and its parallels in his Epitome of the Posterior Analytics. She argues that the identification of certitude as a cognitive state distinct from knowledge enabled al-Fārābī to introduce a number of interesting and sometimes problematic innovations into Arabic epistemology. Foremost amongst his positive innovations is the recognition that contingent as well as necessary propositions allow for an attenuated form of certitude, and the introduction of reliabilism into the justification of claims to certitude. But al-Fārābī is also one of the first philosophers to articulate explicitly the idea that certitude must include an element of ‘‘knowing that one knows,” a controversial principle that tends to undermine both al-Fārābī’s reliabilism and his efforts to loosen some of the strictures in traditional Aristotelian epistemology. (shrink)

Recently, there has been growing interest in methodological issues of non-ideal theoretical philosophy. While some explicitly commit to non-ideal theorising, others doubt that there is anything useful about the ideal/non-ideal distinction in theoretical philosophy. The aim of this paper is twofold. On the one hand, I propose a way of doing non-ideal theoretical philosophy, once we realise how limited certain idealised projects are. Since there is a big overlap between projects that are called non-ideal and applied, the second aim is (...) to distinguish between these categories in order to show that applied theoretical philosophy is only worth pursuing if it operates in a non-ideal framework. I argue that we should be pluralistic about possible non-ideal theories and view the ideal/non-ideal differences as a matter of degree, rather than kind. As an example, I show how my version of non-ideal theory is useful to a concrete debate in philosophy of language. My proposal allows us to identify already existing non-ideal approaches to linguistic meaning and encourages us to further engage in the debate on non-ideal theoretical philosophy. (shrink)

Despite eschewing the utility of ends or purposes in natural philosophy, Descartes frequently engages in functional explanation, which many have assumed is an essentially teleological form of explanation. This article considers the consistency of Descartes's appeal to natural functions, advancing the idea that he is utilizing a non-normative, non-teleological form of functional explanation. It will be argued that Cartesian functional analysis resembles modern causal functional analysis, and yet, by emphasizing the interdependency of parts of biological systems, is able to avoid (...) many of the problems attendant upon modern causal theories. It is for this reason, if no other, that the study of Descartes's natural philosophy should be of interest to contemporary theorists of functional analysis. (shrink)

Verbal derogation is not only a linguistic but also, and perhaps more importantly, a political phenomenon. In this paper, I argue that to do justice to the political relevance of derogatory terms, we must not neglect the social practices and structures in which the use of these terms is embedded. I aim to show that inferentialist semantics is especially helpful to account for this social embeddedness and, consequently, the political relevance of derogatory terms. I am concerned with specifying the linguistic (...) and political aspects of terms that are at the core of derogatory language use. I explain them with the help of Brandomian inferentialism which tends to be quickly dismissed or ignored in discussions about the meaning of derogatory terms. My inferentialist account is in line with Lynne Tirrell’s broader inferentialist framework for understanding derogatory communicative practices. I provide the semantic details of her broader inferentialist view and thereby aim to show that inferentialist semantics is a promising theory which cannot be neglected in further discussion of meaning and politics in derogatory language use. (shrink)

Inferentialism seems to be an unpopular theory where derogatory terms are concerned. Contrary to most theorists in the debate on the meaning of derogatory terms, I think that inferentialism constitutes a promising theory to account for a broad range of aspects of derogatory language use. In order to make good on that promise, however, inferentialism must overcome four main objections that are usually raised against Michael Dummett's and Robert Brandom's inferentialist explanations of derogatory terms. This paper aims at debunking these (...) objections and thereby further developing the inferentialist interpretation of derogatory terms. I shall first discuss and reject three of the objections by pointing to the core assumptions of Brandomian inferentialism. Overcoming the fourth objection requires adjusting Dummett's and Brandom's explanation of the meaning of derogatory terms. In order to do so, I shall elaborate on the role that the explication of implicit material inferences plays with regard to different kinds of derogatory terms. The inferentialist account I am proposing fares better in terms of its explanatory power and broadness of application than Dummett's and Brandom's sketchy and oft-criticised views. (shrink)

I bring several ecofeminist critiques of deep ecology to bear on mainstream animal rights theories, especially on the rights and utilitarian treatments of the animal research issue. Throughout, I show how animal rights issues are feminist issues and clarify the relationship between ecofeminism and animal rights.

An important theme to have emerged from the new experimentalist movement is that much of actual scientific practice deals not with appraising full-blown theories but with the manifold local tasks required to arrive at data, distinguish fact from artifact, and estimate backgrounds. Still, no program for working out a philosophy of experiment based on this recognition has been demarcated. I suggest why the new experimentalism has come up short, and propose a remedy appealing to the practice of standard error statistics. (...) I illustrate a portion of my proposal using Galison's experimental narrative on neutral currents. (shrink)

In both the _Treatise and the first _Enquiry, Hume offers an argument from analogy comparing how humans and animals make causal inferences. Yet in these and other texts, he suggests that there are certain differences between human and animal reasoning. This paper discusses Hume's argument from analogy, and examines how Hume can argue for differences in human and animal reasoning without having to attribute to either a special capacity that the other lacks. Hume's empiricism and his claims about sympathy also (...) give him good reason to hold that in animals just as in humans, reason is a virtue. (shrink)

Aristotle, pundits often say, has a 'nous'-body problem. The psychophysical account that succeeds in the case of other psychological faculties and activities, they charge, breaks down in the case of the intellect. One formulation of this difficulty claims that the definition of the soul given in 'De Anima' II.1 is incompatible with the account of 'nous' in 'De Anima' lll and elsewhere in the corpus. Indeed there are four psychological concepts that raise the 'nous'-body problem: the faculty for thought as (...) described in 'De Anima' III.4, the intellection of indivisible objects of thought in 'De Anima' III.6, the active intellect of 'De Anima' III.5 and the type of thinking likened to the activity of the divine mind in _Metaphysics<D> XII.6-8 and _Nicomachean Ethics<D> X.6-8. I consider each in turn and argue that Aristotle is on firmer ground here than is often believed. (shrink)

Cartwright argues for being a realist about theoretical entities but non-realist about theoretical laws. Her reason is that while the former involves causal explanation, the latter involves theoretical explanation; and inferences to causes, unlike inferences to theories, can avoid the redundancy objection--that one cannot rule out alternatives that explain the phenomena equally well. I sketch Cartwright's argument for inferring the most probable cause, focusing on Perrin's inference to molecular collisions as the cause of Brownian motion. I argue that either the (...) inference she describes fails to be a genuinely causal one, or else it too is open to the redundancy objection. However, I claim there is a way to sustain Cartwright's main insight: that it is possible to avoid the redundancy objection in certain cases of causal inference from experiments (e.g., Perrin). But, contrary to Cartwright, I argue that in those cases one is able to infer causes only by inferring some theoretical laws about how they produce experimental effects. (shrink)

Language can be used as an instrument to exert power over people, as in issuing an order or a ban, or when it exercises an intrinsic power by virtue of its semantic or pragmatic content. The Politics of Meaning focuses on this latter aspect and answers the following question: what does it mean for linguistic meaning to be embedded in social structures and practices if we have good reasons to assume that these practices rest on asymmetrical power relations and are (...) often unjust? My comprehensive study of meaning in morally and politically problematic language use accomplishes four major goals. Firstly, I defend a theory of meaning which is able to account for a broad range of politically significant aspects of language use. Secondly, I relate these aspects to non-linguistic aspects of social practices which are structured by asymmetrical power relations. Thirdly, my work responds to topical questions of public debates concerning language criticism, political disagreement, and political correctness. Fourthly and finally, my approach involves reflecting on the methodological problems that arise when we engage in politically relevant philosophical questions. It is both a plea for and an instance of non-ideal philosophy of language. (shrink)

The prelims comprise: Introduction Metatheoretical and Methodological Issues Applied and Synthetic Ethics Traditional and Emerging Issues Conclusion Websites and Other Resources.

Since the idea of forbidden knowledge is rooted in the biblical story of Adam and Eve eating from the forbidden tree of knowledge, its meaning today, in particular as a metaphor for scientific knowledge, is not so obvious. We can and should ask questions about the autonomy of science.

Despite its widespread use in science, the Neyman-Pearson Theory of Statistics (NPT) has been rejected as inadequate by most philosophers of induction and statistics. They base their rejection largely upon what the author refers to as after-trial criticisms of NPT. Such criticisms attempt to show that NPT fails to provide an adequate analysis of specific inferences after the trial is made, and the data is known. In this paper, the key types of after-trial criticisms are considered and it is argued (...) that each fails to demonstrate the inadequacy of NPT because each is based on judging NPT on the grounds of a criterion that is fundamentally alien to NPT. As such, each may be seen to either misconstrue the aims of NPT, or to beg the question against it. (shrink)

Since the advent of the women's movement, women have made unprecedented gains in almost every field, from politics to the professions. Paradoxically, doctors and mental health professionals have also seen a staggering increase in the numbers of young women suffering from an epidemic of depression, eating disorders, and other physical and psychological problems. In The Cost of Competence, authors Brett Silverstein and Deborah Perlick argue that rather than simply labeling individual women as, say, anorexic or depressed, it is time (...) to look harder at the widespread prejudices within our society and child-rearing practices that lead thousands of young women to equate thinness with competence and success, and femininity with failure. They argue that continuing to treat depression, anxiety, anorexia and bulimia as separate disorders in young women can, in many cases, be a misguided approach since they are really part of a single syndrome. Furthermore, their fascinating research into the lives of forty prominent women from Elizabeth I to Eleanor Roosevelt show that these symptoms have been disrupting the lives of bright, ambitious women not for decades, but for centuries. Drawing on all the latest findings, rare historical research, cross-cultural comparisons, and their own study of over 2,000 contemporary women attending high schools and colleges, the authors present powerful new evidence to support the existence of a syndrome they call anxious somatic depression. Their investigation shows that the first symptoms usually surface in adolescence, most often in young women who aspire to excel academically and professionally. Many of the affected women grew up feeling that their parents valued sons over daughters. They identified intellectually with their successful fathers, not with their traditional homemaker mothers. Disordered eating is one way of rejecting the feminine bodies they perceive as barriers to achievement and recognition. Silverstein and Perlick uncover medical descriptions matching their diagnosis in Hippocratic texts from the fourth century B.C., in anthropological studies of Africa, Asia, and Latin America, and in case studies of many noted psychologists and psychiatrists, including the "hysteric" patients Freud used to develop his theories on psychoanalysis. They have also discovered that statistics on disordered eating, depression, and a host of other symptoms soared in eras in which women's opportunities grew--particularly the 1920s, when record numbers of women entered college and the workforce, the boyish silhouette of the flapper became the feminine ideal, and anorexia became epidemic, and again from the 1970s to the present day. The authors show that identifying this devastating syndrome is a first step toward its prevention and cure. The Cost of Competence presents an urgent message to parents, educators, policymakers, and the medical community on the crucial importance of providing young women with equal opportunity, and equal respect. (shrink)

This passage, which appears without variation at the end of four of Euripides' tragedies and with slight variation in a fifth,1 is perhaps the most notorious of the brief sequences of lines, usually anapaestic and usually assigned to the chorus, with which nearly all the extant plays of Sophocles and Euripides conclude.2 Unlike the more varied final speeches of extant Aeschylean tragedy, which are closely integrated with the play's concluding action, these passages often seem almost detachable from such action, a (...) comment upon or merely after finished business rather than a part of its finishing. In some instances there is general scholarly agreement that the concluding lines are relevant to the action of a play, but many of these passages have been variously dismissed by scholars - as interpolations, as mere dramatic conveniences, or as intentional throwaways. (shrink)

This volume rethinks the relations between form and forms of communication, calling for a new logic of representation; it examines the manner in which ...

When Brentano introduces the notion of immanent objectivity or the intentional inexistence of objects in Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint, he cites Scholastic theories of intentionality and suggests that his own view is continuous with medieval and ancient theories of objective being. Very few philosophers of the middle ages used the terminology of esse objectivuum and those that did, such as Peter Aureol, do not appear to be among the primary Scholastic sources for Brentano’s theory of immanence. To a modern (...) ear moreover talk of things existing in the mind objectively is confusing. But the contrast which is important for understanding Brentano’s theory of intentionality is not that between objectivity and subjectivity as commonly understood nowadays, as if having something objectively in mind excluded its being a subjective phenomenon, but something like Descartes’s opposition between that which objectively exists and that which formally exists. Hence for Descartes, whose characterization of immanent objectivity Brentano often cited approvingly in his lectures, any two thoughts, for example, a thought about God and a thought about a horse, will have exactly the same formal reality but may differ enormously in their degree of objective being. (shrink)

I argue that although the judgments required to reach statistical risk assessments may reflect policy values, it does not follow that the task of evaluating whether a given risk assessment is warranted by the evidence need also be imbued with policy values. What has led many to conclude otherwise, I claim, stems from misuses of the statistical testing methods involved. I set out rules for interpreting what specific test results do and do not say about the extent of a given (...) risk. By providing a more objective understanding of the evidence, such rules help in adjudicating conflicting risk assessments. To illustrate, I consider the risk assessment conflict at the EPA concerning the carcinogenicity of formaldehyde. (shrink)

There is a tension within Ockham's theory of mental language between its claim to being a semantics for conventional languages and its claim to being a model of concept acquisition and thought. In particular, the commitment to a redundancy-free mental language which serves to explain important semantic relations such as synonymy and ambiguity conflicts, _prima facie, with the possibility of opaque belief contexts. I argue that it is preferable to treat the theory of mental language as an idealized theory of (...) cognitive competence than to forfeit, as Jerry Fodor does, the commitment to conceptual parsimony. (shrink)

There are surprisingly few texts in which Avicenna discusses our knowledge of separate substances. The most extensive account occurs in Metaphysics 3.8, a text which was cited by Aquinas in a small number of works from relatively early in his academic career. Aquinas’s attitude to Avicenna’s account, which he dubbed knowledge per impressionem, is by no means uniform, even within a single work. Sometimes Avicenna is an adversary; sometimes he is an ally; still other times he is an innocent bystander. (...) I explore the reasons for Aquinas’s shifting evaluation of Avicenna’s theory and show that Aquinas’s attitude depends in part upon whether the separate substance in question is God or the angels, and whether he is considering the soul as separated or embodied. Ultimately I argue that Aquinas’s abandonment of knowledge per impressionem reflects his general move away from any Avicennian influences that smack of dualism in his eyes. (shrink)

The extensive literature on the Learning Organisation proposes that a competitive advantage can be achieved through the systematised generation and application of knowledge. Consequently, much of the debate concerns the processes, routines and organisational features that a firm should adopt to learn more, and faster, than its competitors. Less attention is given to understanding the nature of the knowledge that is created by these Learning Organisations. We hold that the topic is more important than its current weight in the literature (...) because the performance claims of the models proposed critically depend upon the newly acquired knowledge replacing ignorance or knowledge with less utility. In this paper we explore the nature of knowledge that Learning Organisation theory seeks to create by articulating implicit epistemological assumptions found within the literature. We show that the capacities of each epistemology to help an organisation reject falsehood and make greater use of its knowledge are critically undermined by these very routines. The paper concludes by highlighting the importance of a sceptical epistemology and outlines a process that would strengthen doubting behaviour. (shrink)

We argue that while the proposed memory model by Bastin et al. can explain familiarity-based memory judgements through the interaction of a core representation system and an attribution system, recollection-based memory judgements are not based on non-mnemonic signals being attributed to memory.

Se realizó un análisis del proyecto "Acciones intersectoriales en la estimulación temprana del desarrollo del lenguaje" con el objetivo propiciar un estudio social sobre la gestión del conocimiento y la innovación tecnológica en la dirección de programas para la estimulación del desarrollo de menores en edad preescolar, desde la visión de ciencia, tecnología y sociedad. Se muestran conceptos afines al tema, necesarios en la comprensión de la idea de reorganización de los servicios vinculados a la estimulación y atención temprana del (...) desarrollo del lenguaje desde la comunidad, con la participación de profesionales de diferentes instituciones, y se demuestra la necesidad de comprender los estudios de Ciencia, Tecnología y Sociedad como un campo de acción en la actualidad en Cuba. An analysis of the project Intersectorial actions in early stimulation of the language was carried out with the purpose of favoring a social study of knowledge negotiation and technological innovation in the direction of programs to stimulate the development of children in preschool age at the vision of science, technology and society. Concepts related with the topic and necessary to comprehend the idea of reorganizing the services related with the stimulation and early attention of the language development starting in the community and with the participation of professionals from different institutions are shown. The need of comprehend the studies of science, technology and society as a field of action nowadays in Cuba is also demonstrated. (shrink)

Our aim is to put into consideration the topics of “semantics”, “types”, “lifeworld” and “intersubjectivity” following the social theories of Alfred Schutz and Niklas Luhmann. First of all, and inversely to Luhmann’s perspective which receives the schutzian theory comparing equal types and semantics, we will show that types are inherent to subjectivity. Secondly, and consequently, we state that the social systems theory in the analysis of the “lifeworld”, does not pay attention to the past character of its constitution. Last, but (...) not least, we will point out that all these aspects are framed in a critique of the phenomenological notion of intersubjectivity, which from the luhmannian point of view, ignores the autonomy of consciousness, as well as the emergent character of the social. (shrink)

Por mucho tiempo, las teorías del mestizaje han sido utilizadas para analizar e interpretar la hibridez de las identidades y culturas latinoamericanas, pero el mestizaje –al igual que sus críticas– no es un concepto adecuado en el caso de los espacios sociales, culturales y políticos que ocupan en los Estados Unidos las comunidades latinas y sus producciones musicales. A través del análisis de las profundas líneas de falla que existen en la intersección de los conceptos latinoamericanos de mestizaje y los (...) conceptos bipolares estadounidenses sobre raza e identidad racial, este ensayo dilucida el impacto concreto y material que estas discrepancias conceptuales tienen en las comunidades latinas estadounidenses y en sus prácticas musicales. (shrink)

The externality of the inside: body images of pregnancyThis paper draws on literature, empirical data and a range of theoretical perspectives on the maternal body to examine understandings of the relationship between a pregnant woman and her foetus, with a particular focus on the body images used by women to represent this relationship. Psychoanalytic and nursing accounts of the relationship between mother and foetus have often described a symbiotic ‘oneness’ or unity during pregnancy. Such accounts, however, stress the temporary nature (...) of this unity and identify a series of ‘stages’ of separation or ‘polarisation’ between mother and foetus during pregnancy. In contrast, many of the 25 women who participated in our interview study of new motherhood described a confusion of the boundary between self and foetus. For many women the experience of pregnancy and the relationship with the unborn baby was ambiguous and uncertain. Importantly, none of these women described her relationship with the foetus as a series of developmental stages, but rather saw it as fluctuating throughout pregnancy. These findings are more consistent with the work of feminist theorists who describe pregnancy as a dynamic and fluid merging of the inside and the outside of the body/self. (shrink)

In this paper, we pay attention to the impact on staff of what was a new place, Ko Awatea, within a large New Zealand hospital. The place became a space from within which a particular mood arose. This paper seeks to capture that mood and its impact. Using a Heideggerian hermeneutic approach, the study reported on drew on data from interviews with 20 staff. Philosophical notions about the nature and mood of place/space are explored. As staff claimed this space, the (...) mood that emerged was of liveliness, buzz and comfort. It became a space where people wanted to be, where they met others, where conversations unfolded, where thinking happened in new ways. Staff places tend to be sacrificed or poorly resourced in resource-tight environments. We argue that creating a space that feels home-like, where staff come, linger and engage in community is a priority for generating the mood and thinking of an organization. Such spaces do not happen by chance; it takes forethought and intentionality. The gift of such space is the thinking that is sparked and grown. (shrink)

This work defends a modest version of metaphysical realism. The commitments of the view are spelled out and the strongest argument for it is presented. It is suggested that failure to find this argument persuasive frequently arises from either a failure to distinguish between trivial and nontrivial dependence of minds on minds or a tendency to equivocate between metaphysical and theoretical timelines. The notion of mind-dependence is then explored in more detail. It is argued that, while the metaphysical realist has (...) recourse to a sufficiently rich notion of mind-dependence, the notion of mind-dependence required by a rejection of metaphysical realism is far from clear. This further strengthens the case for metaphysical realism. (shrink)