Increasingly there are calls for climate services to be “co-produced” with users, taking into account not only the basic information needs of users but also their value systems and decision contexts. What does this mean in practice? One way that user values can be incorporated into climate services is in the management of inductive risk. This involves understanding which errors in climate service products would have particularly negative consequences from the users’ perspective (e.g., underestimating rather than overestimating the change in (...) an impact variable) and then prioritizing the avoidance of those errors. This essay shows how inductive risk could be managed in climate services in ways that serve user values and argues that there are both ethical and practical reasons in favor of doing so. (shrink)

The belief that White people are targeted victims of dispossession, displacement, and genocide has spread with shocking intensity since Donald Trump’s 2016 electoral college victory. Although this Great Replacement myth may seem absurd and irrational, its destructive real-world consequences force the question: what explains its efficacy and appeal? Drawing on White nationalists Greg Johnson and Tucker Carlson, I argue that the Great Replacement myth functions as an explanation for the real socioeconomic decline that has culminated in deaths of (...) despair. I then explore this decline’s sociohistorical context to argue that deaths of despair are consequences of political-economic domination reinforced by White supremacy. Put otherwise, these deaths result from socioeconomic violence that White people have inflicted on each other. I conclude that the real problem “the White race” faces today is not a Great Replacement but a Slow White Suicide. (shrink)

Our topic is the notion of logical consequence: the link between premises and conclusions, the glue that holds together deductively valid argument. How can we understand this relation between premises and conclusions? It seems that any account begs questions. Painting with very broad brushtrokes, we can sketch the landscape of disagreement like this: “Realists” prefer an analysis of logical consequence in terms of the preservation of truth [29]. “Anti-realists” take this to be unhelpful and o:er alternative analyses. Some, like Dummett, (...) look to preservation of warrant to assert [9, 36]. Others, like Brandom [5], take inference as primitive, and analyse other notions in terms of it. There is plenty of disagreement on the “realist” side of the fence too. It is one thing to argue that logical consequence involves preservation of truth. It is another to explain how far truth must be preserved. Is the preservation essentially modal (in all circumstances [25]) or analytic (vouchsafed by.. (shrink)

In 2008, researchers reported that Timothy Brown , a man with HIV infection and leukemia, received a stem-cell transplant that removed HIV from his body as far as can be detected. In 2013, an infant born with HIV infection received anti-retroviral treatment shortly after birth, but was then lost to the health care system for the next six months. When tested for HIV upon return, the child had no detectable viral load despite cessation of treatment. These remarkable clinical developments have (...) helped reinvigorate the field of ‘HIV cure’ research. (shrink)

Some empirical findings seem to show that people value health benefits differently depending on the age of the beneficiary. Health economists and philosophers have offered justifications for these preferences on grounds of both efficiency and equity. In this paper, I examine the most prominent examples of both sorts of justification: the defence of age-weighting in the WHO's global burden of disease studies and the fair innings argument. I argue that neither sort of justification has been worked out in satisfactory form: (...) age should not be taken into account in the framework of the burden of disease measure, and on the most promising formulations of the fair innings argument, it turns out to be merely an indicator of some other factor. I conclude by describing the role of age in theories of justice of healthcare resource allocation. (shrink)

Gustav Bergmann was, arguably, the greatest ontologist of the twentieth century in pursuing the fundamental questions of first philosophy as deeply as any philosopher of any time. In 2006 and 2007, international conferences devoted solely to Bergmann's work were held at the University of Iowa in the USA, Université de Provence in France, and Università degli Studi Roma Tre in Italy. The papers in this volume were presented at the first of these conferences, in Iowa City, where Bergmann taught for (...) nearly four decades after escaping from Europe, following the dissolution of the Vienna Circle of which he had been the youngest member. There are nine philosophical papers, reminiscences of three of his students, and a complete bibliography of his published writings. (shrink)

Philosophers love a priori knowledge: we delight in truths that can be known from the comfort of our armchairs, without the need to venture out in the world for confirmation. This is due not to laziness, but to two different considerations. First, it seems that many philosophical issues aren’t settled by our experience of the world — the nature of morality; the way concepts pick out objects; the structure of our experience of the world in which we find ourselves — (...) these issues seem to be decided not on the basis of our experience, but in some manner by things prior to (or independently of) that experience. Second, even when we are deeply interested in how our experience lends credence to our claims about the world, the matter remains of the remainder: we learn more about how experience contributes to knowledge when we see what knowledge is available independent of that experience. (shrink)

summary of work in relevant in the Anderson– tradition.]; Mares Troestra, Anne, 1992, Lectures on , CSLI Publications [A quick, easy-to.

Stephen Read (2002, 2006) has recently discussed Bradwardine's theory of truth and defended it as an appropriate way to treat paradoxes such as the liar. In this paper, I discuss Read's formalisation of Bradwardine's theory of truth and provide a class of models for this theory. The models facilitate comparison of Bradwardine's theory with contemporary theories of truth.

In the distribution of resources, persons must be respected, or so many philosophers contend. Unfortunately, they often leave it unclear why a certain allocation would respect persons, while another would not. In this paper, we explore what it means to respect persons in the distribution of scarce, life-saving resources. We begin by presenting two kinds of cases. In different age cases, we have a drug that we must use either to save a young person who would live for many more (...) years or an old person who would only live for a few. In different numbers cases, we must save either one person or many persons from certain death. We argue that two familiar accounts of respect for persons―an equal worth account, suggested by Jeff McMahan, and a Kantian account, inspired by the Formula of Humanity―have implausible implications in such cases. We develop a new, “three-tiered” account: one that, we claim, generates results in such cases that accord better with many people’s considered judgments than those produced by its rivals. (shrink)

There are certain explanations that scientists do not accept, even though such explanations do not conflict with observation, logic, or other scientific theories. I argue that a common version of the no-miracles argument (NMA) for scientific realism relies upon just such an explanation. First, scientists (usually) do not accept explanations whose explanans neither generates novel predictions nor unifies apparently disparate phenomena. Second, scientific realism (as it appears in the NMA) is an explanans that makes no new predictions, and fails to (...) unify disparate phenomena. Third, Psillos, Boyd, and other proponents of the NMA explicitly adopt a naturalism that forbids philosophy of science from using any methods not employed by science itself. Therefore, such naturalistic philosophers of science should not accept the version of scientific realism that appears in the NMA. [Publication note: This text is for a talk at the 2008 PSA convention. An expanded version of the talk was later published as a regular article in Philosophy of Science (2010).]. (shrink)

Quality of life research aims to develop and apply indices for the measurement of human welfare. It is an increasingly important field within the social sciences and its results are an important resource for policy making and evaluation. This paper explores the conceptual background of quality of life research. It focuses on its single most important issue: the controversy between the use of ``objective social indicators'' and the use of people's ``subjective evaluations'' as proxies for welfare. Most quality of life (...) researchers today argue that people's own evaluations have an indispensable role in quality of life measurement. I argue that their position must be defended on philosophical grounds, because their use of evaluations commits them to some particular theories of welfare. I explore the connections between theories of welfare in philosophy and the use of evaluations in quality of life research. I conclude that even though evaluations may have a role in particular applications, they are unlikely to have a role in all applications. (shrink)

Reason, objectivity, and human nature are now suspect ideas. Among postmodern thinkers, Richard Rorty has advanced an especially forceful critique of these notions. Drawing partly on Wittgenstein's philosophy of language, Rorty contends that objectivity is no more than a metaphysical name for intersubjective agreement, and that “human nature” is an empty category, there being nothing beneath history and culture. Wittgenstein himself, however, recognized within the world's many civilizations “the common behavior of mankind,” without which Rorty's ethnocentric “solidarity” would be inconceivable. (...) This common form of life—the life of those who speak—encompasses countless human activities that presuppose and are interwoven with the concepts of reason and objectivity. (shrink)

Bernard Lonergan has argued for a theory of cognition that is transcendentally secure, that is, one such that any plausible attempt to refute it must presuppose its correctness, and one that also grounds a correct metaphysics and ontology. His proposal combines an identity theory of knowledge with an intentional relation between knower and known. It depends in a crucial way upon an appropriation of one’s own cognitional motives and acts, that is, upon “knowing one’s own knowing.” I argue that because (...) of conflicts between the identity and intentionality components of the theory, rational self-appropriation cannot, as Lonergan claims, be an iteration of just the same acts by which we acquire other sorts of knowledge. I propose an amended theory in which the relation between intending-subject and intended-object of first-level cognition becomes, in RSA, a numerical identity of knower and known and of the epistemic and the ontological. (shrink)

Tucker, E. 'Spinoza's Multitude", in A. Santos Campos Spinoza: Key Concepts, Exeter: Imprint Academic, 2015, 129-141 -/- Spinoza's 'multitude', while a key concept of his political philosophy, allows us to better understand Spinoza's work both in its historical context and as a systematic unity. In this piece, I will propose that we understand Spinoza's concept of the 'multitude' in the context of the development of his political thought, in particular his reading and interpretation of Thomas Hobbes, for whom 'multitude' (...) was indeed a technical term. I will show that Spinoza develops his own notion of multitude as an interpretive extension of Hobbes's concept. Spinoza's notion of 'multitude' is shaped by the new answers he gives to the Hobbesian questions about the human power, human emotion and the metaphysical-political questions of how individuals can become a whole, or a state. 2015. Tucker, E. 'The Multitude", in A. Santos Campos Spinoza: Key Concepts, Exeter: Imprint Academic. (shrink)

More than 40 years ago, Gilbert Gottlieb and like-minded scholars argued for the philosophical necessity of approaching genetic contributions to development through a multilevel, bidirectional systems perspective. Charney's target article builds on this heritage in significant ways, offering more recent examples of the interactions of biology and context, as well as the diversity of developmental mechanisms, and reaffirming a way forward for genetic research.

This note calls attention to the fact that efficient causes – the sort of cause that changes something or makes something happen – can play no constitutive role in the immediate, cognitively conscious relation between cognitive subject and a cognit-ive object. It notes that: (1) it is a necessary condition for an efficient causal relation that it alter its relata; and (2) it is a necessary condition for a conscious cognitive relat-ion that it does not alter its relata. This has (...) important implication for the theories of knowledge and consciousness, the “Hard Problem,” and related puzzles. (shrink)

§0. Preface. There has been an expectation that the endgame of the more tenacious problems raised by the Los Angeles ‘cabal’ school of descriptive set theory in the 1970's should ultimately be played out with the use of inner model theory. Questions phrased in the language of descriptive set theory, where both the conclusions and the assumptions are couched in terms that only mention simply definable sets of reals, and which have proved resistant to purely descriptive set theoretic arguments, may (...) at last find their solution through the connection between determinacy and large cardinals.Perhaps the most striking example was given by [24], where the core model theory was used to analyze the structure of HOD and then show that all regular cardinals below ΘL are measurable. John Steel's analysis also settled a number of structural questions regarding HODL, such as GCH.Another illustration is provided by [21]. There an application of large cardinals and inner model theory is used to generalize the Harrington-Martin theorem that determinacy implies )determinacy.However, it is harder to find examples of theorems regarding the structure of the projective sets whose only known proof from determinacy assumptions uses the link between determinacy and large cardinals. We may equivalently ask whether there are second order statements of number theory that cannot be proved under PD–the axiom of projective determinacy–without appealing to the large cardinal consequences of the PD, such as the existence of certain kinds of inner models that contain given types of large cardinals. (shrink)

In this paper I call attention to the fact that Lonergan gives two radically opposed accounts of how sense perception relates us to the external world and of how we know that this relation exists. I argue that the position that Lonergan characteristically adopts is not the one implied by what is most fundamental in his theory of cognition. I describe the initial epistemic position with regard to the problem of skepticism about the external material world that is in fact (...) implied by his theory of cognition, and I sort out some confusion about various forms of direct and representative perceptual realism. The paper concludes with a critique of Lonergan’s theory of description and explanation in empirical science that makes evident the difficulties into which he is led by lack of clarity in his theory of perception. (shrink)

In: Ruse, M., editor. Philosophy of Biology. Prometheus Books. Amherst, NY. Pp. 385-392.

This volume features in-depth philosophical analyses of major Japanese Confucian philosophers as well as themes and topics addressed in their writings. Its main historical focus is the early-modern period (1600-1868), when much original Confucian philosophizing occurred. Written by scholars from the United States, Canada, Europe, Australia, Japan, and China and eclectic in methodology and disciplinary approach, this anthology seeks to advance new multidimensional studies of Japanese Confucian philosophy for English language readers. It presents essays that focus on Japanese Confucianism, while (...) including topics related to Buddhism, Shintō, Nativism, and even Andō Shōeki (1703-1762), one of the most vehement critics of Confucianism in all of East Asia. The book builds on the premise that Japanese Confucian philosophy consists in the ongoing engagement in critical, self-reflective discussions of and speculative theorizing about ethics, epistemology, metaphysics, political theory, and spiritual problems, as well as aesthetics, cosmology, and ontology. (shrink)

A coordinate-free formulation is established for (semi) classical particle-field interactions. The exterior language of spacetime chains and De-Rham currents enables the description to include extended strings and membranes besides point particles. Treating physical fields in terms of sections of particular bundles, a unified account of interactions is presented in terms of an intrinsic action principle on a bundle of jets over spacetime. The theory is illustrated by considering the specific model of point particles with intrinsic spin covariantly coupled to theU(1) (...) andSL(2, C) connections describing the electromagnetic and gravitational fields, respectively. The notion of dual spin is examined in this context and coupled equations for this particle-field system are explicitly derived in a local chart. Attention is drawn to the global implications of the theory. (shrink)

Analysing Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin (2013), this article provides an overview of the importation of suture theory from psychoanalysis into film theory and Žižek’s revisiting of this theory, then bringing about a rapprochement between the concepts of suture and Malabou’s destructive plasticity, as expounded in her work The New Wounded. The forms of wounded subjectivity we find there are unable to stitch themselves into the illusory narratives needed to enable them to access a fixed sense of individual or shared (...) identity and enclose them in a subjectivity separated off from all else around. Here, on the contrary, alterity, the alien, is situated within. It is such a form of subjectivity, I argue, that we find in Glazer’s Under the Skin where this narrative plays out not only diegetically, as we witness the alien that has sutured itself inside a human envelope attempt and fail to articulate itself to an external narrative that remains inaccessible to it, but infratextually also. Indeed, ultimately this article suggests that Under the Skin can be read as a commentary on the viewing subject required by (and forms of subjectivity produced by) post-cinematic media forms that at first seem to operate according to a different logic to the cinematic syntax of classical cinema, but which may in fact require us to reconsider some of our assumptions with regard to all forms of cinematic subjectivity produced in the relations between spectator and screen. (shrink)

What are the moral stakes involved when we will have the same power to engineer our bodies as we do our automobiles? Which specific bioethics problems will put the most pressure on our ethical traditions? What should we do now to prepare for this brave new world? With Greg Loeben, Ronald Munson, and Wade Robison.

This article sets out to think through the double absence of literary language posited by Blanchot in L’Espace littéraire in the shadow cast by a consideration of Alvin Lucier’s piece I am sitting in a room and the sound installation practice of Bernhard Leitner. What I wish to suggest is that a consideration of these sound works enables us to identify a parallelism in the mechanics of the literary sign that creates the space of literature in Blanchot and the phenomenological (...) experience of the visitor entering into and thereby enacting the space of installation. If the term “phenomenological” here requires a parenthetical qualifier, this is because the double absence enacted on the sign in Blanchot is deployed here from within the visitor in the creation of the space of installation in a move that requires us to reformulate our thinking about the creation of space of all kinds. In revisiting Blanchot’s L’Espace littéraire in this way, it is suggested that the ethical and... (shrink)

In real‐world markets, individual intentions cannot be brought into perfect harmony before decisions are taken. Choices made without this pre‐ordering—choices made in ignorance of one another—produce unwanted outcomes. It is this absence of coordination among plans, not centralized banking, that is the primary cause of macroeconomic market failure. Steven Hor‐witz's free‐banking alternative would aggravate the collective‐action problems inherent in economies without complete markets.

This book examines Rousseau’s ideas about the natural transparency of human intention, the loss of this transparency in the opaque cities of Europe, and the possibility of its restoration within small republican communities. The author weaves together Rousseau’s provocative conjectures about transparency and opaqueness to provide an original interpretation of Rousseau’s political thought and its bearing on several contemporary controversies. He also argues that civic cooperation in Rousseau’s model republic requires mutual surveillance; that Hobbes’s argument for a sovereign state assumes (...) the natural opacity of human intention; and that Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” cannot efficiently coordinate the self-interested choices of opaque traders. (shrink)

It is possible to completely characterize which countable models generated by 0# exist inL. This in turn has applications in the study of analytic equivalence relations; for instance, ifE is∑ 1 1 and every invariant∑ 1 1 (0#) set isΔ 1 1 , thenE has at most ℵ0 many equivalence classes.

The Axiom of Projective Determinacy implies the existence of a universal $\utilde{\Pi}^{1}_{n}\setminus\utilde{\Delta}^{1}_{n}$ set for every $n \geq 1$. Assuming $\text{\upshape MA}(\aleph_{1})+\aleph_{1}=\aleph_{1}^{\mathbb{L}}$ there exists a universal $\utilde{\Pi}^{1}_{1}\setminus\utilde{\Delta}^{1}_{1}$ set. In ZFC there is a universal $\utilde{\Pi}^{0}_{\alpha}\setminus\utilde{\Delta}^{0}_{\alpha}$ set for every $\alpha$.

There exists a model in a countable language having a unique element which is not definable in $\scr{L}_{\omega _{1},\omega}$.

Suppose that any two Π12 sets are comparable in the sense of Wadge degrees. Then every real has a dagger. This argument proceeds by using the Dodd-Jensen core model theory to show that x ε ωω along with, say, “0† implies the existence of a Π12 norm of length u2. As a result of more recent work by John Steel, the same argument will extend to show that the Wadge comparability of all Π12 sets implies Π12 determinacy.

Stephen Schiffer has argued that natural languages do not have compositional semantics. But it has been widely held that compositional semantics is required in order to explain how it is possible that we have the linguistic capacities that we do. In particular, our use of natural languages is productive in the sense that there are indefinitely many sentences that we have never heard or considered before, but which we are nonetheless capable of understanding. How is this possible? Compositionality evidently supplies (...) a clear answer to that question, because it guarantees that there is some way of determining the meaning of each sentence of the language from a fixed and finite base of semantic value assignments. This poses a serious challenge to Schiffer's negative thesis. -/- Schiffer proposes to answer this challenge in a way that will also provide a solution to the language-relation problem. This is the problem of specifying what relation must obtain between a population P and a language L in order for L to be a language of P. Schiffer's strategy is to reduce the problem for public languages to that of specifying the language-relation for languages of thought-specifying what it is to think in a language. -/- I will show in a precise way that Schiffer has neither met the productivity challenge nor solved the language-relation problem. Using Schiffer's characterization of what it is to think in a language, I show that if an agent thinks in some language L, then there is an infinity of languages that the agent also thinks in with the very same sentence tokens, but with arbitrarily different meanings. Thus, Schiffer has clearly not given a sufficient condition for an agent to think in a language, and Schiffer cannot do with less than a sufficient condition. Moreover, I will argue that Schiffer cannot avail himself of various attempts in the literature to address similar problems. (shrink)

interesting. In this paper, we combine nonclassical logics of negation and possibility in the presence of conjunction and disjunction, and then we combine the resulting systems with intuitionistic logic. We will nd that Kracht's results on the undecidability of classical modal logics generalise to a non-classical setting. We will also see conditions under which intuitionistic logic can be combined with a non-intuitionistic negation without corrupting the intuitionistic fragment of the logic.

There are many different approaches to the logic of truth. We could agree with Tarski, that the appropriate way to formalise a truth predicate is in a hierarchy, in which the truth predicate in one language can apply only to sentences from another language. Or, we could attempt to do without type restrictions on the truth predicate. Bradwardine’s theory of truth takes the second of these options: it is type-free, and admits sentences which say of themselves that they are not (...) true to be well-formed. We could take the behaviour of the paradoxes such as the liar to motivate a revision of the basic logic of propositional inference, to allow for truth-value gaps or gluts [9, 11, 15]. On the other hand, we could take it that the paradoxes are no reason to revise our account of the basic laws of logic: a novel account of the behaviour of the truth predicate is what is required. Bradwardine’s account, as elaborated by Read, takes this second option.1 Finally. (shrink)

“Paraconsistent” means “beyond the consistent” [3, 15]. Paraconsistent logics tolerate inconsistencies in a way that traditional logics do not. In a paraconsistent logic, the inference of explosion A, ∼AB is rejected. This may be for any of a number of reasons [16]. For proponents of relevance [1, 2] the argument has gone awry when we infer an irrelevant B from the inconsistent premises. Those who argue that inconsistent theories may have some logical content but do not commit us to everything, (...) have reason to think that these theories are closed under a relation of paraconsistent logical consequence [12, 18]. Another reason to adopt a paraconsistent logic is more extreme. You may take the world to be inconsistent [14], and a true theory incorporating this inconsistency must be governed by a paraconsistent logic. (shrink)

Alfred Tarski's (1936) semantic account of the logical properties (logical consequence, logical truth and logical consistency) makes essential appeal to a distinction between logical and non-logical terms. John Etchemendy (1990) has recently argued that Tarski's account is inadequate for quite a number of different reasons. Among them is a brief argument which purports to show that Tarski's reliance on the distinction between logical and non-logical terms is in principle mistaken. According to Etchemendy, there are very simple (even first order) languages (...) for which no such distinction can be made. This is a surprising result, and an important one, if true. Since Tarski's account does indeed depend on such a distinction, Etchemendy's argument, if correct, would rule out definitively the received view on logical truth (as well as logical consequence and logical consistency). But his argument is not correct, and it is the job of this paper to show that. (shrink)

For much of the second half of the 20th Century, the primary role logical empiricism played was that of the argumentative foil. The 'received view' on a given topic (especially in philosophy of science, logic, or language) was frequently identified with some supposedly dogmatic tenet of logical empiricism. However, during the last twenty-five years, scholars have paid serious, sustained attention to what the logical positivists, individually and collectively, actually said. Early scholarship on logical empiricism had to engage in heavy-duty PR (...) work: why should anyone study the now-discarded mixture of blunders and implausibilities collected under the label 'logical empiricism'? However, thanks to the efforts of the pioneers, people studying the logical empiricists today need not articulate an extended apologia for their chosen subject of study -- rather, they can simply get on with their work. Many of the best fruits of these recent labors are on display in The Cambridge Companion to Logical Empiricism (CCLE), edited by Alan Richardson and Thomas Uebel. (shrink)