The education of students and professionals in business ethics is an increasingly important goal on the agenda of business schools and corporations. The present study provides a meta-analysis of 25 previously conducted business ethics instructional programs. The role of criteria, study design, participant characteristics, quality of instruction, instructional content, instructional program characteristics, and characteristics of instructional methods as moderators of the effectiveness of business ethics instruction were examined. Overall, results indicate that business ethics instructional programs have a minimal␣impact on increasing (...) outcomes related to ethical perceptions, behavior, or awareness. However, specific criteria, content, and methodological moderators of effectiveness shed light on potential recommendations for␣improving business ethics instruction. Implications for␣future research and practice in business ethics are discussed. (shrink)

This paper aims to clear up the epistemology of learning morality from Artificial Moral Advisors (AMAs). We start with a brief consideration of what counts as moral enhancement and consider the risk of deskilling raised by machines that offer moral advice. We then shift focus to the epistemology of moral advice and show when and under what conditions moral advice can lead to enhancement. We argue that people’s motivational dispositions are enhanced by inspiring people to act morally, instead of merely (...) telling them how to act. Drawing upon these insights, we claim that if AMAs are to genuinely enhance people morally, they should be designed as inspiration and not authority machines. In the final section, we evaluate existing AMA models to shed light on which holds the most promise for helping to make users better moral agents. (shrink)

" Waldie speculates on the meanings and implications of the snapshots in this book and of snapshots generally, which he sees as expressions of "the hunger of memory.".

I present unexplored and unaccounted for uses of 'wants'. I call them advisory uses, on which information inaccessible to the desirer herself helps determine what she wants. I show that extant theories by Stalnaker, Heim, and Levinson fail to predict these uses. They also fail to predict true indicative conditionals with 'wants' in the consequent. These problems are related: intuitively valid reasoning with modus ponens on the basis of the conditionals in question results in unembedded advisory uses. I consider two (...) fixes, and end up endorsing a relativist semantics, according to which desire attributions express information-neutral propositions. On this view, 'wants' functions as a precisification of 'ought', which exhibits similar unembedded and compositional behavior. I conclude by sketching a pragmatic account of the purpose of desire attributions that explains why it made sense for them to evolve in this way. (shrink)

In this article, I explore displacement as a force that precludes dwelling. I do so in the context of the georgic mode, a literary tradition defined by dwelling and by the kind of agricultural endeavoring that Heidegger relates to “building.” As he explains in “Building Dwelling Thinking,” to build is not only to make or to construct, but also “to preserve and care for, specifically to till the soil, to cultivate the vine”. Thus, in addition to creation outright, Heidegger’s “building” (...) involves husbandry. His expansive definition multiplies the kinds of human activity described by building. When humans cultivate plants, they create a situation and environment wherein the crop can flourish. The generative force is nonhuman; growth comes from the plant itself. We cannot build a vineyard as we can a structure. In addition to placing humans in a caretaking role, the three terms in Heidegger’s title further indicate that the husbandman’s “building” requires his continual attention to his place and to his work. Building, in the agricultural sense of the word, requires prolonged physical presence and much thought. Heidegger’s choice of a vineyard underscores the importance of time to dwelling: as a perennial plant that requires years of investment before bearing fruit, the vineyard functions as a site where planning and labor, observation and care unfold across the seasons and over a period of years. The full scope of Heidegger’s dwelling, then, involves prolonged and productive agricultural thinking and laboring. My fundamental premise is that Heideggerian dwelling reaches a confluence with the georgic mode. (shrink)

We explore the relationship between analytic behavior of a computable real valued function and the computability-theoretic complexity of the individual values of its derivative almost-everywhere. Given a computable function f, the values of its derivative \\), where they are defined, are uniformly computable from \, the Turing jump of the input. It is known that when f is \, the values of \\) are actually computable from x. We construct a \ function f so that, almost everywhere, \\ge _T x'\). (...) Although the values \\) at each point x cannot uniformly compute the corresponding jumps \ of the inputs x almost everywhere for any \ function f, we produce an example of a \ function f such that \\ge _T \emptyset '\) uniformly on subsets of arbitrarily large measure, effectively. We also explore analogous questions for weaker smoothness conditions, such as for f differentiable everywhere, and f differentiable almost everywhere. (shrink)

What determines whether interest groups choose to contact politicians or bureaucrats? Despite the importance of this question for policymaking, democracy, and some prominent principal-agent understandings of politics, it is relatively unexplored in the literature. We argue that government stability plays a major part in interest groups decisions is their assessment of the likelihood that politicians currently in power will continue to be in the future. We deduce logical, but totally contrasting hypotheses, about how interest groups lobby under such conditions of (...) uncertainty and then test these using a heteroskedastic probit model that we apply to a unique longitudinal survey of interest groups in Japan. We find that when it is unclear if the party controlling the government will maintain power in the future, interest groups are more likely to contact the bureaucracy. When it is believed that the party in power will retain control for a considerable period, interest groups are more inclined to contact politicians. In addition, during times of government uncertainty, interest groups that are supportive of the governing party (or parties) are more likely to contact politicians and those that are less supportive will be more likely to contact bureaucrats. (shrink)

The voice for all animals and people dedicated to a sustainable future for all species.

Citing the poem’s most obvious example, the devils’ forced transformation into snakes, this essay argues that the Dantean contrapasso at work in this Book Ten episode factors more generally into Paradise Lost. In Dante’s Inferno, often the damned suffer punishments in which they reenact for eternity the sins they committed in life. The same principle applies to Milton’s Satan, and all the devils. Book Five’s account of their initial rebellion, wherein Satan misleads them and they prove willfully misled, sets the (...) pattern by which he and his followers are debased. Such debasement, culminating in the death of the sinner’s will, also pertains to Milton’s idea of the spiritual condition of any human sinner. (shrink)

A lively exploration of contemporary Buddhism from one of its most admired teachers. Do you feel at home right now? Or do you sense a hovering anxiety or uncertainty, an underlying unease that makes you feel just a bit uncomfortable, a bit distracted and disconnected from those around you? In The Road Home, Ethan Nichtern, a senior teacher in the Shambhala Buddhist tradition, investigates the journey each of us takes to find where we belong. Drawing from contemporary research on (...) meditation and mindfulness and his experience as a Buddhist teacher and practitioner, Nichtern describes in fresh and deeply resonant terms the basic existential experience that gives rise to spiritual seeking--and also to its potentially dangerous counterpart, spiritual materialism. He reveals how our individual quests for self-awareness ripple forward into relationships, communities, and society at large. And he explains exactly how, by turning our awareness to what's happening around us and inside us, we become able to enhance our sense of connection with others and, at the same time, change for the better our individual and collective patterns of greed, apathy, and inattention. In this wise and witty invitation to Buddhist meditation, Nichtern shows how, in order to create a truly compassionate and enlightened society, we must start with ourselves. And this means beginning by working with our own minds--in whatever state we find them in. (shrink)

Between 1945 and 1953, while the Soviet Union confronted postwar reconstruction and Cold War crises, its unchallenged leader Joseph Stalin carved out time to study scientific disputes and dictate academic solutions. He spearheaded a discussion of "scientific" Marxist-Leninist philosophy, edited reports on genetics and physiology, adjudicated controversies about modern physics, and wrote essays on linguistics and political economy. Historians have been tempted to dismiss all this as the megalomaniacal ravings of a dying dictator. But in Stalin and the Soviet Science (...) Wars, Ethan Pollock draws on thousands of previously unexplored archival documents to demonstrate that Stalin was in fact determined to show how scientific truth and Party doctrine reinforced one another. Socialism was supposed to be scientific, and science ideologically correct, and Stalin ostensibly embodied the perfect symbiosis between power and knowledge. Focusing on six major postwar debates in the Soviet scientific community, this elegantly written book shows that Stalin's forays into scholarship can be understood only within the context of international tensions, institutional conflicts, and the growing uncertainty about the proper relationship between scientific knowledge and Party-dictated truths. The nature of Stalin's interventions makes clear that more was at stake than high politics: these science wars were about asserting that the Party was rational and modern, and about codifying the Soviet worldview in a battle for the hearts and minds of people around the globe during the early Cold War. Ultimately, however, the effort to develop a scientific basis for Soviet ideology undermined the system's legitimacy. (shrink)

Together with Plato's Republic, Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Social Contact is regarded as one of the most original examples of Utopian political engineering in the history of ideas. Similar to the Republic, Rousseau's Social Contract is better known today for its author's idiosyncratic view of political justice than its lessons on law-making or governance in any concrete sense. Challenging this common view, Rousseau, Law and the Sovereignty of the People examines the Genevan's contribution as a constitutionalist and builder of institutions, relating his (...) major ideas to issues and debates in twenty-first century political science. Ethan Putterman explores how Rousseau's just state would actually operate, investigating how laws would be drafted, ratified and executed, arguing that the theory of the Social Contract is more pragmatic and populist than many scholars assume today"--Provided by publisher. (shrink)

Agriculture occupies 38% of the planet’s terrestrial surface, using 70% of freshwater resources. Its modern practice is dominated by an industrial–productivist discourse, which has contributed to the simplification and degradation of human and ecological systems. As such, agricultural transformation is essential for creating more sustainable food systems. This paper focuses on discursive change. A prominent discursive alternative to industrial–productivist agriculture is regenerative agriculture. Regenerative discourses are emergent, radically evolving and diverse. It is unclear whether they have the potential to generate (...) the changes required to shift industrial–productivist agriculture. This paper presents a literature-based discourse analysis to illustrate key thematic characteristics of regenerative agricultural discourses. The analysis finds that such discourses: situate agricultural work within nested, complex living systems; position farms as relational, characterised by co-evolution between humans and other landscape biota; perceive the innate potential of living systems as place-sourced; maintain a transformative openness to alternative thinking and practice; believe that multiple regenerative cultures are necessary for deeply regenerative agriculture; and depart from industrialism to varying degrees. The paper concludes by reviewing three transformative opportunities for regenerative discourses—discourse coalitions, translocal organising and collective learning. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that the ‘social meanings’ associated with sociolinguistic variation put pressure on the standard philosophical conception of language, according to which the foremost thing we do with words is exchange information. Drawing on parallels with the explanatory challenge posed by slurs and pejoratives, I argue that the best way to understand social meanings is to think of them in speech act theoretic terms. I develop a distinctive form of pluralism about the performances realized by means of (...) sociolinguistic variants, and I claim that engagement with such performances is an utterly pervasive feature of our linguistic activity. (shrink)

The aim of this book is to help students write mathematics better. Throughout it are large exercise sets well-integrated with the text and varying appropriately from easy to hard. Basic issues are treated, and attention is given to small issues like not placing a mathematical symbol directly after a punctuation mark. And it provides many examples of what students should think and what they should write and how these two are often not the same.

This article presents an in-depth study of a constellation of interrelated texts trans- mitted in three Chinese rishu 日書 manuscripts dating from the third to first centuries BCE. All of the manuscripts have an archaeologically verified provenance in the central Yangtze River Valley region of the former Warring States kingdom of Chu, and taken together they reveal in unusual detail the effects, both intentional and possibly unintentional, of Qin assimilation policies after the transfer of authority beginning with the conquest of (...) the Chu capital in 278 BCE. These effects are shown to reverberate for millennia in China’s rich tradition of hemerology and related technical arts, and by doing so, they weave a surprising human tapestry connecting nameless diviners, minor officials of the early empire, the First August Thearch of Qin, Mongols, Manchus, and others. Methodologically, it is suggested that despite the idiosyncratic nature of these manuscripts, productive analysis of structural elements remains possible and worthwhile. (shrink)

Friendship in the Hebrew Bible. By Saul M. Olyan. The Anchor Yale Bible Reference Library. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017. Pp. xiii + 191. $50.

In this paper, I take a critical angle on the supposed “death of art” literature by challenging its conclusions on what the death of art portends for both Hegel and Nietzsche. I posit that in the wake of Hegel’s observation of art’s diminished role and against Nietzsche’s lamentation of this loss, art remains both indispensable and insufficient for addressing the profound contradictions of contemporary life. I argue that, while art cannot reclaim its historical centrality or resolve the existential dilemmas it (...) illuminates, its necessity lies precisely in its unique capacity to articulate these dilemmas, offering a space for reflection and engagement unavailable through philosophy alone. This contradiction—between art’s necessity and its limitations—underscores a larger tension within modernity itself, one that art uniquely reveals but cannot by itself overcome. (shrink)

When the Anglican Church Missionary Society started work on the East African coast in 1874 it had no intention of working among Muslims, nor did it mention Islam as a motivation for its desire to work with the people of the interior. This was due largely to the fact that members of the mission thought Islam in the region was stagnant and posed no threat to their work. As the organisation expanded inland, and as missionaries observed the Muslims of the (...) region, its attitudes and strategies towards Islam started to change. This article explores the reasons for these changes and discusses the early relations between missionaries and Muslims. (shrink)

Recently, philosophers have offered compelling reasons to think that demonstratives are best represented as variables, sensitive not to the context of utterance, but to a variable assignment. Variablists typically explain familiar intuitions about demonstratives—intuitions that suggest that what is said by way of a demonstrative sentence varies systematically over contexts—by claiming that contexts initialize a particular assignment of values to variables. I argue that we do not need to link context and the assignment parameter in this way, and that we (...) would do better not to. (shrink)

In this rich intellectual history of the French-Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas's Talmudic lectures in Paris, Ethan Kleinberg addresses Levinas's Jewish life and its relation to his philosophical writings while making an argument for the role and importance of Levinas's Talmudic lessons. Pairing each chapter with a related Talmudic lecture, Kleinberg uses the distinction Levinas presents between "God on Our Side" and "God on God's Side" to provide two discrete and at times conflicting approaches to Levinas's Talmudic readings. One is (...) historically situated and argued from "our side" while the other uses Levinas's Talmudic readings themselves to approach the issues as timeless and derived from "God on God's own side." Bringing the two approaches together, Kleinberg asks whether the ethical message and moral urgency of Levinas's Talmudic lectures can be extended beyond the texts and beliefs of a chosen people, religion, or even the seemingly primary unit of the self. Touching on Western philosophy, French Enlightenment universalism, and the Lithuanian Talmudic tradition, Kleinberg provides readers with a boundary-pushing investigation into the origins, influences, and causes of Levinas's turn to and use of Talmud. (shrink)

The Knower paradox purports to place surprising a priori limitations on what we can know. According to orthodoxy, it shows that we need to abandon one of three plausible and widely-held ideas: that knowledge is factive, that we can know that knowledge is factive, and that we can use logical/mathematical reasoning to extend our knowledge via very weak single-premise closure principles. I argue that classical logic, not any of these epistemic principles, is the culprit. I develop a consistent theory validating (...) all these principles by combining Hartry Field's theory of truth with a modal enrichment developed for a different purpose by Michael Caie. The only casualty is classical logic: the theory avoids paradox by using a weaker-than-classical K3 logic. I then assess the philosophical merits of this approach. I argue that, unlike the traditional semantic paradoxes involving extensional notions like truth, its plausibility depends on the way in which sentences are referred to--whether in natural languages via direct sentential reference, or in mathematical theories via indirect sentential reference by Gödel coding. In particular, I argue that from the perspective of natural language, my non-classical treatment of knowledge as a predicate is plausible, while from the perspective of mathematical theories, its plausibility depends on unresolved questions about the limits of our idealized deductive capacities. (shrink)

The twenty-first century will witness an unprecedented decline in the diversity of the world’s languages. While most philosophers will likely agree that this decline is lamentable, the question of what exactly is lost with a language has not been systematically explored in the philosophical literature. In this paper, I address this lacuna by arguing that language loss constitutes a problematic form of illocutionary silencing. When a language disappears, past and present speakers lose the ability to realize a range of speech (...) acts that can only be realized in that language. With that ability, speakers lose something in which they have a fundamental interest: their standing as fully empowered members of a linguistic community. (shrink)

In the last two decades, there has been a blossoming literature aiming to counter the neglect of plant capacities. In their recent paper, Miguel Segundo-Ortin and Paco Calvo begin by providing an overview of the literature to then question the mistaken assumptions that led to plants being immediately rejected as candidates for sentience. However, it appears that many responses to their arguments are based on the implicit conviction that because animals have far more sophisticated cognition and agency than plants, and (...) that plants should not have the same moral status as animals, plants should not have any moral status. Put in simpler terms: it is not as bad to eat plants than to eat, say, pigs. While there are still uncertainties around comparative moral and policy implications between animals and plants, given a gradualist account of quasi-sentience and partial moral status, both of which we claim are a matter of degree, we may not have to abolish our convictions by declaring that plants have no sentience or moral status at all. Indeed, we can hold two things at the same time: that animals and plants have moral status, but animals have prima facie more moral status than plants. (shrink)

We read with great interest Garland, Morain and Sugarman’s manuscript on the obligations of clinicians to participate in pragmatic clinical trials (PCTs) (Garland, Morain and Sugarman 2023). We bel...

Despite its status at the heart of a closely related field, philosophers have so far mostly overlooked a phenomenon sociolinguists call ‘social meaning’. My aim in this paper will be to show that by properly acknowledging the significance of social meanings, we can identify an important new set of forms that discursive injustice takes. I begin by surveying some data from variationist sociolinguistics that reveal how subtle differences in the way a particular content is expressed allow us to perform importantly (...) different illocutionary actions, actions we use to do things like constructing a public persona and building a rapport with an audience. The social importance of these activities and the pervasiveness of our engagement in them means that the ethical stakes involved are high—substantial injustices may result if speakers from different social groups are differently empowered with regard to the illocutionary possibilities made available to them by variation. (shrink)

Ethical frameworks are often used in professional fields as a means of providing explicit ethical guidance for individuals and institutions when confronted with ethically important decisions. The notion of an ethical framework has received little critical attention, however, and the concept subsequently lends itself easily to misuse and ambiguous application. This is the case with the ‘ethical framework’ offered by Canada’s Nuclear Waste Management Organization (NWMO), the crown-corporation which owns and is responsible for the long-term management of Canada’s high-level nuclear (...) fuel waste. It makes a very specific claim, namely that it is managing Canada’s long-lived radioactive nuclear fuel waste in an ethically responsible manner. According to this organization, what it means to behave in an ethically responsible manner is to act and develop policy in accordance with its ethical framework. What, then, is its ethical framework, and can it be satisfied? In this paper I will show that the NWMO’s ethical and social framework is deeply flawed in two respects: (a) it fails to meet the minimum requirements of a code of ethic or ethical framework by offering only questions, and no principles or rules of conduct; and (b) if posed as principles or rules of conduct, some of its questions are unsatisfiable. In particular, I will show that one of its claims, namely that it seek informed consent from individuals exposed to risk of harm from nuclear waste, cannot be satisfied as formulated. The result is that the NWMO’s ethical framework is not, at present, ethically acceptable. (shrink)

This book argues that the philosophical history of India contains a tradition of skepticism about philosophy represented most clearly by three figures: Nāgārjuna, Jayarāśi, and Śrī Harṣa. Furthermore, understanding this tradition ought to be an important part of our contemporary metaphilosophical reflections on the purposes and limits of philosophy.

In this paper I discuss some of the mathematics behind an often quoted existence theorem from Richard Jeffrey's The Logic of Decision (Jeffrey 1990) in order to pose several new questions about the meaning and value of that mathematics for decision theory.

The paper addresses the question of whether authenticity is a conceptual possibility for Dasein given Heidegger’s insistence in Being and Time that Dasein is necessarily fallen into its mode of everydayness and that fallenness is necessarily inauthentic. By exploring the relationship between Dasein and existentials, I reveal a structure of possibility in allexistentials that provides the seeming paradox a resolution. I use the concept of “logical existentialism” to explore what Heidegger may have meant when he talks of existentials and I (...) look at some passages from The History of the Concept of Time to read propensity as the substance of falling. In the process, l address and discard the only two real attempts in the secondary literature to cope with the paradox: that of Hubert Dreyfus and Rudi Visker.L’article se penche sur la question de savoir si l’authenticité est une possibilité conceptuelle du Dasein, étant donnée I’insistance de Heidegger dans Être et Temps à I’effet que le Dasein est nécessairement déchu dans ses modes de quotidienneté, et que la déchéance est nécessairement inauthentique. À travers I’exploration de la relation entre le Dasein et les existantiaux, je révèle une structure de possibilité dans tous les existantiaux qui permet une résolution du paradoxe apparent. J’utilise le concept d’ «existentialisme logique»pour explorer ce que Heidegger voulait sans doute dire par les existantiaux, et je considère certains passages des The History of the Concept of Time pour interpréter la propension comme substance de la déchéance. Ce faisant, j’aborde et rejette les deux seules tentatives de résolution du paradoxe dans la littérature secondaire: celle de Hubert Dreyfus et de Rudi Visker. (shrink)

The paucity of classical sources concerning the Cārvāka/Lokāyata school is mirrored by a scarcity of contemporary scholarship. On that note, this book is a welcome contribution. The subtitle of this book promises “a review and reconstruction.” There is some review of classical and contemporary sources ; however, the bulk of the book is Kar’s reconstruction of what he thinks the Cārvākas might have or should have said. I will follow Kar in using “Cārvāka” and “Lokāyata” interchangeably to refer to the (...) classical Indian school usually taken to endorse materialism, atheism, hedonism, and/or skepticism.Kar’s book consists of an introduction and conclusion with six chapters on a variety... (shrink)

Due to the influence of Christian philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, modern Jewish readings of the Aqedah, or “binding of Isaac” (Gen 22:1–19), tend to understand the story in terms of a conflict between divine command and human ethics. Drawing on both biblical and extrabiblical evidence, this article argues that the conflict in the story is more plausibly understood as one between divine command and covenantal promise. Despite not being about theological ethics in the usual sense, this interpretation may still have Jewish (...) meaning if we situate it in the realm of theodicy. (shrink)

n a 25-year career as a successful public intellectual, Stephen Jay Gould has accrued nearly all the trappings of celebrity: a new loft in SoHo, tenure at Harvard, a gig at NYU, book sales totaling in the millions (his twentieth title, The Lying Stones of Marrak ech, comes out next month), not to mention a schedule that takes him to London, Paris, or L.A. almost weekly. Not bad for a college professor. But recently, he's picked up one of the less (...) desirable accoutrements of fame. The graying, 58-year-old Queens native has become the first paleontologist in history with his own stalker—albeit an intellectual one. (shrink)

During the latter part of the nineteenth century our description of nerve cell structure underwent a relatively unrecognized, though fundamental, transformation-a quiet revolution of sorts. The central problem facing scientists in neurology (the study of the nervous system) was a related pair: are nerve cells continuous with each other or not, and how is information conducted? Microscope resolution and staining techniques were inadequate at the time to yield definitive proof either way. I contend that explanatory coherence provides a means to (...) elucidate this instance of theory change in the history of science. The means of elucidation will be Thagard's computational model of explanatory coherence, ECHO (). (shrink)

Billy Idol was the name we gave Ruthie in the hospital in the days immediately after she was born. She had fluorescent white hair, and had she been born to different parents, they might have thought more of it. But both of Ruthie's parents had bleached blond hair as young children. So in the late summer and into the fall of 2006, we happily celebrated the arrival of our second child, little blond baby Ruthie "Billie Idol" Weiss.Like many second-time parents, (...) we doted less. We did not love less, but we were clearly less excited. We were much more exhausted. We also paid a little less attention. Around the time Ruthie turned one month old, Palmer started to tell me about things she had noticed that seemed off. By... (shrink)

Standard semantic theories predict that non-deictic readings for complex demonstratives should be much more widely available than they in fact are. If such readings are the result of a lexical ambiguity, as Kaplan (in: Almog, Perry, Wettstein (eds) Themes from Kaplan, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1977) and others suggest, we should expect them to be available wherever a definite description can be used. The same prediction follows from ‘hidden argument’ theories like the ones described by King (Complex Demonstratives: a Quantificational (...) Account, MIT Press, Cambridge, 2001) and Elbourne (Situations and Individuals, MIT Press, Cambridge, 2005). Wolter (That’s That; the Semantics and Pragmatics of Demonstrative Noun Phrases. Ph.D. thesis, University of California at Santa Cruz, 2006), however, has shown that complex demonstratives admit non-deictic interpretations only when a precise set of structural constrains are met. In this paper, I argue that Wolter’s results, properly understood, upend the philosophical status quo. They fatally undermine the ambiguity theory and demand a fundamental rethinking of the hidden argument approach. (shrink)

What determines the meaning of a context-sensitive expression in a context? It is standardly assumed that, for a given expression type, there will be a unitary answer to this question; most of the literature on the subject involves arguments designed to show that one particular metasemantic proposal is superior to a specific set of alternatives. The task of the present essay will be to explore whether this is a warranted assumption, or whether the quest for the one true metasemantics might (...) be a Quixotic one. We argue that there are good reasons—much better than are commonly appreciated—for thinking the latter, but that there nevertheless remains significant scope for metasemantic theorizing. We conclude by outlining our preferred option, metasemantic pluralism. (shrink)

Conceptual engineering is a philosophical method that aims to design and spread conceptual and linguistic devices to cause meaningful changes in the world. So far, however, conceptual engineers have struggled to successfully spread the conceptual and linguistic entities they have designed to their target communities. This paper argues that conceptual engineering is far more likely to succeed if it incorporates empirical data and empirical methods. Because the causal factors influencing successful propagation of linguistic or conceptual devices are as complicated and (...) interwoven as they are, proper empirical research will greatly boost the likelihood that propagation is successful. In arguing for the superiority of empirical conceptual engineering over armchair-based conceptual engineering, this paper proposes a framework for understanding the causal forces at play in propagation. This is a three-part framework between the label of a lexical item, the psychological states associated with the lexical item, and the worldly things associated with the lexical item. By understanding the way causal forces affecting propagation play out at these three levels, conceptual engineers can better conceptualize, study, and harness the different causal forces affecting the success of their conceptual engineering projects. (shrink)

It is increasingly common for philosophers to rely on the notion of an idealised listener when explaining how the semantic values of context-sensitive expressions are determined. Some have identified the semantic values of such expressions, as used on particular occasions, with whatever an appropriately idealised listener would take them to be. Others have argued that, for something to count as the semantic value, an appropriately idealised listener should be able to recover it. Our aim here is to explore the range (...) of ways that such idealisation might be worked out, and then to argue that none of these results in a very plausible theory. We conclude by reflecting on what this negative result reveals about the nature of meaning and responsibility. (shrink)