Behavior, language, development, identity, and science—all of these phenomena are commonly characterized as 'social' in nature. But what does it mean to be 'social'? Is there any intrinsic 'mark' of the social shared by these phenomena? In the first book to shed light on this foundational question, twelve distinguished philosophers and social scientists from several disciplines debate the mark of the social. Their varied answers will be of interest to sociologists, anthropologists, philosophers, psychologists, and anyone interested in the theoretical foundations (...) of the social sciences. (shrink)

The nature and legitimacy of commitments. Objectivity vs. commitment, by H. Smith. Institutional commitment: a social scientist's view, by H. R. Davis. The sectarian nature of liberal education, by L. J. Averill. The identity of the Christian college, by W. W. Jellema.--Commitments and the dimensions of learning. Discursive truth and evangelical truth, by A. C. Outler. Natural order and transcendent order, by W. G. Pollard. Limited cognition and ultimate cognition, by R. W. Friedrichs. Academic teaching and human experience, by M. (...) Novak. Academic excellence and moral value, by W. W. Jellema.--Norms and models of commitment. Biblical realism as a norm, by W. Herberg. Christian ethical community as a norm, by W. Beach. A pluralistic model, by W. B. Martin. A singular model, by L. J. Averill. (shrink)

These essays use particular issues, thinkers and texts to engage the question of God in early Christianity.

‘Real’ and ‘really’ are deflated and minimalized in parallel to the minimalist and de-flationary treatment of truth. J.L. Austin's insightful comment that with ‘real’: ‘The negative wears the trousers’ is elucidated and developed. There follows a discussion of the bearing of the point on Plato's claims about knowledge, belief and ignorance. It is maintained that it is implausible to hope that acquaintance with a Form for various Fs is going to provide complete knowledge of the wardrobe of Austinian trousers, especially (...) inasmuch as that wardrobe grows and changes with the vicissitudes of socio-industrial-commercial-technological life. (shrink)

This book is a version of a D.Phil. thesis done at Oxford under the direction of Richard Swinburne and Basil Mitchell. Its basic premise is one shared by both these philosophers, namely, the putative inadequacy of traditional deductive and inductive arguments in philosophical theology. The central argument of the book is that the alternative proposed by Mitchell is superior to the one proposed by Swinburne. Roughly half the book is devoted to supporting this claim. Particular attention is given to showing (...) that Bayes' theorem as used by Swinburne is inadequate for assessing the probability of a theistic hypothesis. Other chapters are devoted to informal reasoning in philosophical theology, criteria of explanatory adequacy within a nondeductive framework, causality, and God as a logically necessary being. In these chapters the author attempts to develop further Mitchell's work. A final chapter undertakes to defend the book's basic thesis against some positions that in various ways contradict the author's approach. It includes replies to two attacks on the very idea of philosophical theology by J. L. Mackie and Stewart Sutherland, a response to John Hick's most recent attack on the personhood of God, and a criticism of the version of Thomistic philosophical theology held by E. L. Mascall. (shrink)

Our goal here is to help identify the contextualist’s most worthy competitor to relativism. Recently, some philosophers of language and linguists have argued that, while there are contextualist-friendly semantic theories of deontic modals that fit with the relativist’s challenge data, the best such theories are not Lewis-Kratzer-style semantic theories. If correct, this would be important: It would show that the theory that has for many years enjoyed the status of the default view of modals in English and other languages is (...) in need of revision. Here we defend the default view by showing how a Kratzer-style semantics is able to make available readings of the relevant utterances that fit with the pretheoretical judgments opponents purport it cannot fully capture. Having established this, we turn to considering the more theoretical grounds proponents have offered for preferring their rival contextualist views. Here the question is to what extent such grounds favor semantic over what Korta and Perry call “near-side pragmatic” explanations of our judgments. In particular, we argue that our favored readings figure in near-side pragmatic explanations of those judgments that possess the methodological and theoretical advantages of systematicity and unity at least as well as, if not to a greater extent than, those of opponents who argue for their revised semantic theories on the basis of these advantages. (shrink)

Autobiographical memories typically give rise either to memory reports (“I remember going swimming”) or to first person past-tense judgements (“I went swimming”). This article focuses on first person past-tense judgements that are (epistemically) based on autobiographical memories. Some of these judgements have the IEM property of being immune to error through misidentification. This article offers an account of when and why first person past-tense judgements have the IEM property.

This chapter suggests that descriptive epidemiological studies like the Global Burden of Disease Study can usefully be divided into four tasks: describing individuals’ health states over time, assessing their health states under a range of counterfactual scenarios, summarizing the information collected, and then packaging it for presentation. The authors show that each of these tasks raises important and challenging ethical questions. They comment on some of the philosophical issues involved in measuring health states, attributing causes to health outcomes, choosing the (...) counterfactual against which to assess causes, aggregating and summarizing complex information across multiple domains, discounting, age-weighting, handling fetal deaths, measuring health inequalities, representing uncertainty, and assessing personal responsibility for health outcomes. (shrink)

Volume 20, Issue 9, September 2020, Page 39-41.

The contributions in the first part Re-modelling logic of this volume take account of formal logic in the theory of rational argumentation.