At least many conditionals seem to convey the existence of a link between their antecedent and consequent. We draw on a recently proposed typology of conditionals to revive an old philosophical idea according to which the link is inferential in nature. We show that the proposal has explanatory force by presenting empirical results on two Dutch linguistic markers.

Virtual reality enables individuals to be exposed to naturalistic environments in laboratory settings, offering new possibilities for research in human neuroscience and treatment of mental disorders. We used VR to study psychological, autonomic and postural reactions to heights in individuals with varying intensity of fear of heights. Study participants were immersed in a VR of an unprotected open-air elevator platform in an urban area, while standing on an unstable ground. Virtual elevation of the platform elicited robust and reliable psychophysiological activation (...) including increased distress, heart rate, and electrodermal activity, which was higher in individuals suffering from fear of heights. In these individuals, compared with individuals with low fear of heights, the VR height exposure resulted in higher velocity of postural movements as well as decreased low-frequency body sway oscillations. This indicates that individuals with strong fear of heights react to heights with maladaptive rigidity of posture due to increased weight of visual input for balance control, while the visual information is less reliable at heights. Our findings show that exposure to height in a naturalistic VR environment elicits a complex reaction involving correlated changes of the emotional state, autonomic activity, and postural balance, which are exaggerated in individuals with fear of heights. (shrink)

This paper reports a study of the main key components of influence on the stability of transportation enterprises in the market. A model for evaluating the effectiveness of innovation activity in the transport industry, which takes into account indicators of expenditures on innovations, has been built. It makes it possible to determine the effectiveness of introduced innovations, which indicates the appropriate level of innovation potential and the ways that the enterprise must take to increase it. The main directions of innovative (...) development of transportation enterprises were investigated. The assessment of the economic stability of transportation enterprises in the market has established that the current state of development of enterprises is characterized by a weak level of their innovative activity. A systematic approach to the introduction of innovative technologies by a transportation enterprise in the market has been devised. This approach makes it possible to determine the required level of enterprise stability and to form a relationship between the level of innovative technologies and their stages of implementation under conditions of environmental variability. This makes it possible to increase competitive advantages, improve the efficiency of production and economic activity of enterprises. The practical implementation of the proposed model for evaluating the effectiveness of innovation activity in the transport industry has been carried out, which made it possible to allocate the most important indicators of innovation activity for the enterprise. These include specific efficiency of innovation; unit costs of innovation; innovative potential of the enterprise (defined as the proportion of own innovative developments). According to the study results, it is determined that the specific efficiency of innovations (SEI) exerts the greatest influence, which, with an increase by 1 %, provides an increase in financial stability by 1.48 %. (shrink)

The central conflicts of the world today are closely related to cultural, traditional, and religious differences between nations. As we move to a globalized world, these differences often become magnified, entrenched, and the cause of bloody conflict. Growing out of a conference of distinguished scholars from the Middle East, Europe, and the United States, this volume is a singular contribution to mutual understanding and cooperative efforts on behalf of peace. The term paideia, drawn from Greek philosophy, has to do with (...) responsible education for citizenship as a necessary precondition for effective democracy. (shrink)

The past three decades of policy process studies have seen the emergence of a clear intellectual lineage with regard to complexity. Implicitly or explicitly, scholars have employed complexity theory to examine the intricate dynamics of collective action in political contexts. However, the methodological counterparts to complexity theory, such as computational methods, are rarely used and, even if they are, they are often detached from established policy process theory. Building on a critical review of the application of complexity theory to policy (...) process studies, we present and implement a baseline model of policy processes using the logic of coevolving networks. Our model suggests that an actor’s influence depends on their environment and on exogenous events facilitating dialogue and consensus-building. Our results validate previous opinion dynamics models and generate novel patterns. Our discussion provides ground for further research and outlines the path for the field to achieve a computational turn. (shrink)

It has been claimed that epistemic peers, upon discovering that they disagree on some issue, should give up their opposing views and ‘split the difference’. The present paper challenges this claim by showing, with the help of computer simulations, that what the rational response to the discovery of peer disagreement is—whether it is sticking to one’s belief or splitting the difference—depends on factors that are contingent and highly context-sensitive.Keywords: Peer disagreement; Computer simulations; Opinion dynamics; Hegselmann–Krause model; Social epistemology.

In previous published research (“Conditionals and Inferential Connections: A Hypothetical Inferential Theory,” Cognitive Psychology, 2018), we investigated experimentally what role the presence and strength of an inferential connection between a conditional’s antecedent and consequent plays in how people process that conditional. Our analysis showed the strength of that connection to be strongly predictive of whether participants evaluated the conditional as true, false, or neither true nor false. In this article, we re-analyse the data from our previous research, now focussing on (...) the semantics of conditionals rather than on how they are processed. Specifically, we use those data to compare the main extant semantics with each other and with inferentialism, a semantics according to which the truth of a conditional requires the presence of an inferential connection between the conditional’s component parts. (shrink)

The Lottery Paradox and the Preface Paradox both involve the thesis that high probability is sufficient for rational acceptability. The standard solution to these paradoxes denies that rational acceptability is deductively closed. This solution has a number of untoward consequences. The present paper suggests that a better solution to the paradoxes is to replace the thesis that high probability suffices for rational acceptability with a somewhat stricter thesis. This avoids the untoward consequences of the standard solution. The new solution will (...) be defended against a seemingly obvious objection. 1 The paradoxes of rational acceptability 2 The standard solution 3 A new solution to the paradoxes 4 Basic assumptions 5 The new solution defended 6 Conclusion 7 Appendix. (shrink)

This article addresses the role of auditory-related verbs in the work of Jean-Luc Nancy and Pierre Schaeffer in order to shed light on a broader tendency in French thought. Through a comparative reading of the ways in which Nancy, in Listening, and Schaeffer, in Treatise on Musical Objects, mobilize verbs such as écouter and entendre, I connect the issue of language to debates about descriptive and prescriptive approaches towards listening. Drawing on the Dictionary of Untranslatables, I argue that Nancy's and (...) Schaeffer's engagements with listening can be mapped onto historical modes of framing politics and ethics, which are also characterized by descriptive and prescriptive approaches. By showing how theories of listening connect to political and ethical debates, this study discusses the ideological instrumentalization of listening as opposed to more descriptive and exploratory forms of engagement in the auditory and the faculty of the ear. (shrink)

Various authors have recently argued that you cannot rationally stick to your belief in the face of known disagreement with an epistemic peer, that is, a person you take to have the same evidence and judgmental skills as you do. For, they claim, because there is but one rational response to any body of evidence, a disagreement with an epistemic peer indicates that at least one of you is not responding rationally to the evidence. Given that you take your peer (...) to have the same judgmental skills as you do, and thus regard her to be equally good at assessing the evidence as you are, you will have as much reason for thinking that it is you who is not responding rationally to the evidence as for thinking that it is her. You thus have reason for thinking that your belief on the disputed matter is not a rational response to the evidence. Hence, you cannot rationally stick to your belief. (shrink)

It is undeniable that inductive reasoning has brought us much good. At least since Hume, however, philosophers have wondered how to justify our reliance on induction. In important recent work, Schurz points out that philosophers have been wrongly assuming that justifying induction is tantamount to showing induction to be reliable. According to him, to justify our reliance on induction, it is enough to show that induction is optimal. His optimality approach consists of two steps: an analytic argument for meta-induction (that (...) is, induction over inductive methods) and an application of meta-induction to empirical findings concerning the predictive accuracy of our actual inductive practices as compared to various non-inductive methods. The present article agrees with Schurz’s general conclusion but also argues that it leaves an important aspect of our inductive practices unaccounted for, to wit, that these practices have so far been highly successful; to satisfy the optimality requirement, induction only needs to be as successful as random guessing. To explain the success of induction, I turn to insights from social epistemology, also highlighted in Schurz’s work, and make these formally explicit in a framework that combines the Hegselmann–Krause model for opinion dynamics and Carnap’s system of λ rules. Within this framework, I use a standard evolutionary algorithm to show how communities of interacting agents may, through variation and selection, come to consist of highly successful inductive reasoners. (shrink)

Conditionals are sentences of the form 'If A, then B', and they play a central role in scientific, logical, and everyday reasoning. They have been in the philosophical limelight for centuries, and more recently, they have been receiving attention from psychologists, linguists, and computer scientists. In spite of this, many key questions concerning conditionals remain unanswered. While most of the work on conditionals has addressed semantical questions - questions about the truth conditions of conditionals - this book focuses on the (...) main epistemological questions that conditionals give rise to, such as: what are the probabilities of conditionals? When is a conditional acceptable or assertable? What do we learn when we receive new conditional information? In answering these questions, this book combines the formal tools of logic and probability theory with the experimental approach of cognitive psychology. It will be of interest to students and researchers in logic, epistemology, and psychology of reasoning. (shrink)

The standard approach to the so-called paradoxes of identity has been to argue that these paradoxes do not essentially concern the notion of identity but rather betray misconceptions on our part regarding other metaphysical notions, like that of an object or a property. This paper proposes a different approach by pointing to an ambiguity in the identity predicate and arguing that the concept of identity that figures in many ordinary identity claims, including those that appear in the paradoxes, is not (...) the traditional philosophical concept but one that can be defined in terms of relevant similarity. This approach to the paradoxes will be argued to be superior to the standard one. (shrink)

In recent years, various computational models have been developed for studying the dynamics of belief formation in a population of epistemically interacting agents that try to determine the numerical value of a given parameter. Whereas in those models, agents’ belief states consist of single numerical beliefs, the present paper describes a model that equips agents with richer belief states containing many beliefs that, moreover, are logically interconnected. Correspondingly, the truth the agents are after is a theory (a set of sentences (...) of a given language) rather than a numerical value. The agents epistemically interact with each other and also receive evidence in varying degrees of informativeness about the truth. We use computer simulations to study how fast and accurately such populations as wholes are able to approach the truth under differing combinations of settings of the key parameters of the model, such as the degree of informativeness of the evidence and the weight the agents give to the evidence. (shrink)

A number of authors have recently put forward arguments pro or contra various rules for scoring probability estimates. In doing so, they have skipped over a potentially important consideration in making such assessments, to wit, that the hypotheses whose probabilities are estimated can approximate the truth to different degrees. Once this is recognized, it becomes apparent that the question of how to assess probability estimates depends heavily on context.

The conceptual spaces approach has recently emerged as a novel account of concepts. Its guiding idea is that concepts can be represented geometrically, by means of metrical spaces. While it is generally recognized that many of our concepts are vague, the question of how to model vagueness in the conceptual spaces approach has not been addressed so far, even though the answer is far from straightforward. The present paper aims to fill this lacuna.

A paper on how to adapt your probabilisitc beliefs when learning a conditional.

The bounded confidence model has become a popular tool for studying communities of epistemically interacting agents. The model makes the idealizing assumption that all agents always have access to all other agents’ belief states. We draw on resources from network epistemology to do away with this assumption. In the model to be proposed, we impose an explicit communication network on a community, due to which each agent has access to the beliefs of only a selection of other agents. A much-discussed (...) result from network epistemology shows that densely connected communication networks are not always preferable to sparser networks. The aim of this paper is to investigate whether there are any noteworthy network effects in a version of the bounded confidence model augmented with communication networks, and in particular whether the aforementioned result from network epistemology can be replicated in that version. (shrink)

The paper introduces a new kind of models for the logic of proofs LP, the group justification models. While being an elaboration of Fitting models, the group justification models are a special case of the models of general awareness. Soundness and completeness results of LP with respect to the new semantics are established. The paper also offers an interpretation of the group models, which pertains to awareness and group epistemic dynamics.

Encontramos linguagens e códigos de todos os tipos e em todas as esferas na natureza. No entanto, quando chegamos no homem vemos esses códigos aplicados não como algo mecânico, como é notado na natureza, mas como articulações para o social. A partir disso, é apresentado à psicanálise, que tem como sua coluna vertebral a escuta que é voltada para a natureza discursiva do homem. Iremos explorar neste artigo qual seria a escuta servida para o discurso na clínica, pois não é (...) colocado uma regra no discurso do analisando, este é livre para dizer o que quer dizer e como ele entender, sendo que tal liberdade é evitada nas relações sociais, pois ele (o analisando) não a exerce por ter consciência das leis sociais que são, desde sua infância, aglutinadas a ele, as quais, seu cumprimento é cobrado.Para se ter esse ouvir a psicanálise trabalha para tornar os ouvidos do analista um órgão apropriadamente de escuta e compreensão, pois a fala do analista vem dessa escuta do discurso que não é seu durante aquele tempo, mas que vem a ser depois de completo para ser matéria de análise. (shrink)

Though the average person may take patriotism for granted as a natural feeling of loyalty to one's country, among philosophers the nature, moral standing, and political significance of patriotism have always been contentious. On the one hand, there are those who defend patriotic loyalty as either a duty or a virtue and extol it as an indispensable condition of a viable polity. On the other hand, critics of patriotism maintain that it is morally suspect to prefer one's country and compatriots, (...) and doing so offends against impartial justice and hinders universal human solidarity. Today patriotism is a topic of debate not only in moral philosophy but also in political theory, where it is often brought up as a test case in the confrontation between liberals and communitarians. These debates have produced much high-quality writing, the best of which is here presented in this wide-ranging collection of essays by philosophers and political theorists. All the main varieties of patriotism are covered—moderate and extreme, as well as ethnic/cultural and political—and both critics and defenders are given a hearing. Editor Igor Primoratz has also included articles that discuss the history of the term in moral and political discourse in the English-speaking world, the distinctively American type of patriotism, the relation of patriotism to nationalism and racism, and the tension between patriotism and universal human solidarity, especially as this issue relates to foreign aid. As the first anthology to treat patriotism in its own right, this work emphasizes that patriotism is a distinct moral and political outlook, and is not merely a variety of nationalism or the emotional underpinning of nationalist theories. As such, it will be an important resource for courses in philosophy and political science, and will also serve as an accessible general reader for the interested layperson. (shrink)

My aim is to draw attention to the different forms of social engagement regarding the subject of import. The concept of import was introduced in the theory of action by Bennet Helm. It denotes an intentional characteristic of an object, to be viewed as worthy of pursuit or avoidance. However, according to Helm, the subject of import could be: either an individual person, the other or plural agent. Using this division in the context of social engagement, I propose to distinguish (...) three forms of social engagement: (1) personal social engagement, (2) social engagement for the sake of others and (3) social engagement as togetherness. Social engagement as togetherness (plural agent) should not be confused with plural action with the same goal-directedness (which is part of personal social engagement). This argumentative step was enabled by Helm's complex theory about " us " as a subject of import, contrary to some contemporary theorists who dispute the possibility of plural agents. (shrink)

The constitution of the Islamic State emerged as a very dangerous reality, that it was going take advantage of the weakness of Syria and Iraq to become a serious threat to the balance in the Middle East. His call to jihad would seduce thousands of Muslims around the world to came to fight for its consolidation and expansion, and this would worry western countries that saw their own citizens also come. Concern for this phenomenon led to the making of the (...) British miniseries the State, where it is about and describes the life and fate of several European volunteers in the territories under the rule of the Islamic State. This article addresses, from the perspective of visual history, the ideological and discursive keys posed by of this television fiction. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Byzantinische Zeitschrift Jahrgang: 109 Heft: 2 Seiten: 821-836.

Neste artigo procura-se responder ao desafio da leitura de Heidegger no que concerne à possibilidade de uma relação entre ontologia e ética.O autor investiga a possibilidade da colocação do problema de tal relação,privilegiando a noção heideggeriana de liberdade.

Conditionals whose antecedent and consequent are not somehow internally connected tend to strike us as odd. The received doctrine is that this felt oddness is to be explained pragmatically. Exactly how the pragmatic explanation is supposed to go has remained elusive, however. This paper discusses recent philosophical and psychological work that attempts to account semantically for the apparent oddness of conditionals lacking an internal connection between their parts.

Hegselmann and Krause have developed a simple yet powerful computational model for studying the opinion dynamics in societies of epistemically interacting truth-seeking agents. We present various extensions of this model and show their relevance to the investigation of socio-epistemic questions, with an emphasis on normative questions.

It is known that evidential support, on the Bayesian definition of this notion, is intransitive. According to some, however, the Bayesian definition is too weak to be materially adequate. This paper investigates whether evidential support is transitive on some plausible probabilistic strengthening of that definition. It is shown that the answer is negative. In fact, it will appear that even under conditions under which the Bayesian notion of evidential support is transitive, the most plausible candidate strengthenings are not.

There is an ongoing controversy in philosophy about the connection between explanation and inference. According to Bayesians, explanatory considerations should be given weight in determining which inferences to make, if at all, only insofar as doing so is compatible with Strict Conditionalization. Explanationists, on the other hand, hold that explanatory considerations can be relevant to the question of how much confidence to invest in our hypotheses in ways which violate Strict Conditionalization. The controversy has focused on normative issues. This paper (...) investigates experimentally the descriptive question of whether judgments of the explanatory goodness of hypotheses do play a role when people revise their degrees of belief in those hypotheses upon the receipt of new evidence. We present the results of three experiments that together strongly support the predictive superiority of the explanationist position. (shrink)

The First World War exerted a great influence on the course of twentieth-century history and transformed people’s perception of the world. The collapse of empires and the shipwreck of illusions found their reflection in various spheres of culture and art, including music. Scholars are familiar with how the trauma of war was reflected in the history of the works, lives, and collaboration of two outstanding composers of the twentieth century, Igor Stravinsky and Maurice Ravel. In this article, we explore (...) how, from different perspectives, these composers expressed in music their perception of the war trauma as part of the wider common cultural and social tragedy known as “the collapse of empires”. At the center of our discussion is musical text as a reflection of social phenomena, and how these two composers presented the upheavals that took place in society and their spiritual reaction to them with the help of their musical expressivity. The article focuses on war themes and their reflection in the music of the first half of the twentieth century. (shrink)

As cognitive enhancement research advances, important ethical questions regarding individual autonomy and freedom are raised. Advocates of cognitive enhancement frequently adopt a procedural approach to autonomy, arguing that enhancers improve an individual’s reasoning capabilities, which are quintessential to being an autonomous agent. On the other hand, critics adopt a more nuanced approach by considering matters of authenticity and self-identity, which go beyond the mere assessment of one’s reasoning capacities. Both positions, nevertheless, require further philosophical scrutiny. In this paper, we investigate (...) the ethics of cognitive enhancement through the lenses of political and philosophical arguments about autonomy and freedom. In so doing, we contend that a substantive, relational account of individual autonomy offers a more holistic understanding of the ethical concerns of cognitive enhancement. (shrink)

Any plausible position in the ethics of war and political violence in general will include the requirement of protection of civilians (non-combatants, common citizens) against lethal violence. This requirement is particularly prominent, and particularly strong, in just war theory. Some adherents of the theory see civilian immunity as absolute, not to be overridden in any circumstances whatsoever. Others allow that it may be overridden, but only in extremis. The latter position has been advanced by Michael Walzer under the heading of (...) “supreme emergency.” In this paper, I look into some of the issues of interpretation and application of Walzer’s “supreme emergency” view and some of the criticisms that have been levelled against it. I argue that Walzer’s view is vague and unacceptable as it stands, but that the alternatives proposed by critics such as Brian Orend, C.A.J. Coady, and Stephen Nathanson are also unattractive. I go on to construct a position that is structurally similar to Walzer’s, but more specific and much less permissive, which I term the “moral disaster” view. According to this view, deliberate killing of civilians is almost absolutely wrong. (shrink)

According to so-called epistemic theories of conditionals, the assertability/acceptability/acceptance of a conditional requires the existence of an epistemically significant relation between the conditional’s antecedent and its consequent. This paper points to some linguistic data that our current best theories of the foregoing type appear unable to explain. Further, it presents a new theory of the same type that does not have that shortcoming. The theory is then defended against some seemingly obvious objections.

Inference to the Best Explanation has become the subject of a livelydebate in the philosophy of science. Scientific realists maintain, while scientificantirealists deny, that it is a compelling rule of inference. It seems that anyattempt to settle this debate empirically must beg the question against theantirealist. The present paper argues that this impression is misleading. A methodis described that, by combining Glymour's theory of bootstrapping and Hacking'sarguments from microscopy, allows us to test IBE without begging any antirealistissues.

We provide a complete binary implicational axiomatization of the positive fragment of propositional dynamic logic. The intended application of this result are completeness proofs for non-classical extensions of positive PDL. Two examples are discussed in this article, namely, a paraconsistent extension with modal De Morgan negation and a substructural extension with the residuated operators of the non-associative Lambek calculus. Informal interpretations of these two extensions are outlined.