Tim Crane characterizes the cognitive role of singular thought via singular mental files: the application of such files to more than one object is senseless. As many do, he thus stresses the contrast between ‘singular’ and ‘general’. I give a counterexample, plurally-directed singular thought, and I offer alternative characterizations of singular thought—better described as ‘objects-directed thought’—initially in terms of the defeasibility of the descriptions associated with one's thinking of an object, and then more broadly in terms of whether descriptions of (...) the object or description-independent epistemic routes to the object are primarily operative in an agent's thinking. (shrink)

According to some currents of modern historiography, Galilei's propensity for circular motion would have led him to consider this and not rectilinear motion as “natural motion”; therefore the principle of inertia could not be fully attributed to Galileo, which he would never have formulated. The question of the authorship of the principle of inertia certainly weighs on both nationalistic elements and returns of antigaleleism, while the question of its not explicit formulation as a principle is due to ignorance of the (...) type of organization that Galileo intended to give to the exposition of his physics. The author, after having hinted at possible prodromes of the principle of inertia and having reported the adverse opinions of illustrious historians of science (A. Koyré, I. B. Cohen, P. M. Duhem, P. Rossi, G. Holton), through a careful analysis of the Galilean writings, conducted on the digital versions with the help of text analysis programs, firmly reaffirms Galileo's authorship of the principle of inertia and the consequent principle of classical relativity. (shrink)

The controversy that between 1908 and 1912 saw Benedetto Croce and Giovanni Gentile opposed, on one side, and Federigo Enriques, on the other, did not actually have a conclusive episode, but its end was perceived, for its results on culture, on society and teaching in Italy, as a "defeat" of Enriques. A more careful examination of the events and of the historical context in which it took place seems, however, to clearly demonstrate that we can speak not of a personal (...) defeat of the great mathematician from Livorno, but rather of a defeat of the commendable attempts at cultural and social modernization of Italy in an international perspective, of which Enriques was not the only actor but certainly the most exposed. Such intentions were crushed by the myopic provincial conservatism of the Italian neo-idealism, favored by the fascist regime, concerned only with affirming in the world an alleged autarkic national cultural superiority, based on the traditional literary-humanistic culture, ignoring the progress of the new technical-scientific thought, placed in an international context. Sunto_ La polemica che dal 1908 al 1912 vide contrapposti da una parte Benedetto Croce e Giovanni Gentile e dall’altra Federigo Enriques non ebbe, in realtà, un episodio conclusivo, ma la sua fine è stata percepita, per i suoi esiti sulla cultura, sulla società e sull’insegnamento in Italia, come una “sconfitta” dell’Enriques. Un esame più attento delle vicende e del contesto storico nel quale si svolse sembra, invece, dimostrare chiaramente di poter parlare non di una sconfitta personale del grande matematico livornese, quanto piuttosto di una sconfitta dei lodevoli tentativi di ammodernamento culturale e sociale dell’Italia in una prospettiva internazionale, di cui Enriques non fu l’unico attore ma sicuramente quello più esposto. Tali propositi furono schiacciati dal miope conservatorismo provinciale del neoidealismo italiano, favorito dal regime fascista, preoccupato unicamente di affermare nel mondo una pretesa superiorità culturale nazionale autarchica, basata sulla tradizionale cultura letterario-umanistica, ignorando il progresso del nuovo pensiero tecnico-scientifico, per sua natura, invece, inserito in un contesto internazionale. (shrink)

Mistaken reasons for thinking diagrammatic proofs aren't rigorous are explored. The main result is that a confusion between the contents of a proof procedure (what's expressed by the referential elements in a proof procedure) and the unarticulated mathematical aspects of a proof procedure (how that proof procedure is enabled) gives the impression that diagrammatic proofs are less rigorous than language proofs. An additional (and independent) factor is treating the impossibility of naturally generalizing a diagrammatic proof procedure as an indication of (...) lack of rigor. (shrink)

If we must take mathematical statements to be true, must we also believe in the existence of abstract eternal invisible mathematical objects accessible only by the power of pure thought? Jody Azzouni says no, and he claims that the way to escape such commitments is to accept true statements which are about objects that don't exist in any sense at all. Azzouni illustrates what the metaphysical landscape looks like once we avoid a militant Realism which forces our commitment to anything (...) that our theories quantify. Escaping metaphysical straitjackets, while retaining the insight that some truths are about objects that do exist, Azzouni says that we can sort scientifically-given objects into two categories: ones which exist, and to which we forge instrumental access in order to learn their properties, and ones which do not, that is, which are made up in exactly the same sense that fictional objects are. He offers as a case study a small portion of Newtonian physics, and one result of his classification of its ontological commitments, is that it does not commit us to absolute space and time. (shrink)

This book offers an in-depth analysis of the cognitive and ethical role of emotion, particularly empathy, in medical practice. The author explains how doctors can use empathy in diagnosing and treating patients without jeopardizing their objectivity or projecting their own values on to patients.

This study explored the influence of personal values on destructive leader behavior. Student participants completed a managerial assessment center that presented them with ambiguous leadership decisions and problems. Destructive behavior was defined as harming organizational members or striving for short-term gains over long-term organizational goals. Results revealed that individuals with self-enhancement values were more destructive than individuals with self-transcendence values were, with the core values of power (self-enhancement) and universalism (self-transcendence) being most influential. Results also showed that individuals defined and (...) structured leadership problems in a manner that reflected their value systems, which in turn affected the problem solutions they generated. (shrink)

We have conducted a home-based study of children′s dream reports in which parents used open-ended interviewing styles to collect 88 dream reports from their 4- to 10-year-old children in the comfortable and supportive environment of their own homes. Particular attention was paid to formal properties including characters , settings, self-representation, and bizarreness. In contrast to previous studies, our data indicate that young children are able to give long, detailed reports of their dreams that share many formal characteristics with adult dream (...) reports. Because this wide range of dream mentation is only revealed to trusted confidants in a familiar and comfortable environment, an important implication is that the sleep laboratory may not be the best source of naturalistic dream data. (shrink)

Gregory Bateson said that we are “governed by epistemologies that we know to be wrong” back in 1972. In the same book Bateson wrote: “the organism that destroys its environment destroys itself.” Almost forty years later, global ecological systems are in steep decline and converging crises make a deep evaluation of the underlying premises of our philosophical traditions an urgent imperative. This paper will suggest that the roots of the economic crisis are epistemological and that, to correct this error, whole (...) systems thinking and ecological literacy will become increasingly important in business management as well as in other disciplines. It will also suggest that the economic crisis opened new political space and has provided an opportunity for intervention. If we are brave enough to examine the roots of our problems there is possibility for renewal. (shrink)

Perfil de Vasconcelos.--José Vasconcelos: el filósofo y el místico.--Pensamientos inéditos.

Most philosophers of mathematics try to show either that the sort of knowledge mathematicians have is similar to the sort of knowledge specialists in the empirical sciences have or that the kind of knowledge mathematicians have, although apparently about objects such as numbers, sets, and so on, isn't really about those sorts of things as well. Jody Azzouni argues that mathematical knowledge really is a special kind of knowledge with its own special means of gathering evidence. He analyses the linguistic (...) pitfalls and misperceptions philosophers in this field are often prone to, and explores the misapplications of epistemic principles from the empirical sciences to the exact sciences. What emerges is a picture of mathematics both sensitive to mathematical practice, and to the ontological and epistemological issues that concern philosophers. (shrink)

Jody Azzouni argues that we involuntarily experience certain physical items, certain products of human actions, and certain human actions themselves as having meaning-properties. We understand these items as possessing meaning or as having truth values. For example, a sign on a door reading "Drinks Inside" strikes native English speakers as referring to liquids in the room behind the door. The sign has a truth value--if no drinks are found in the room, the sign is misleading. Someone pointing in a direction (...) has the same effect: we experience her gesture as significant. Azzouni does not suggest that we don't recognize the expectations or intentions of speakers ; we do recognize that the person pointing in a certain direction intends for us to understand her gesture's significance. Nevertheless, Azzouni asserts that we experience that gesture as having significance independent of her intentions. The gesture is meaningful on its own. The same is true of language, both spoken and written. We experience the meanings of language artifacts as independent of their makers' intentions in the same way that we experience an object's shape as a property independent of the object's color. There is a distinctive phenomenology to the experience of understanding language, and Semantic Perception shows how this phenomenology can be brought to bear as evidence for and against competing theories of language. (shrink)

When ordinary people - mathematicians among them - take something to follow from something else, they are exposing the backbone of our self-ascribed ability to reason. Jody Azzouni investigates the connection between that ordinary notion of consequence and the formal analogues invented by logicians. One claim of the book is that, despite our apparent intuitive grasp of consequence, we do not introspect rules by which we reason, nor do we grasp the scope and range of the domain, as it were, (...) of our reasoning. This point is illustrated with a close analysis of a paradigmatic case of ordinary reasoning: mathematical proof. (shrink)

Times of crisis bring about increased demands on businesses as shortages, or unexpected but significant, business costs are encountered. Passing on such costs to consumers is a challenge. When faced with a retail price increase, consumers may rely on cues as to the motive behind the increase. Such cues can raise suspicion of alternative motive (e. g., taking advantage of the consumer) affecting consumers' judgments of price fairness. This research investigates two triggers of suspicion: salience of alternative motives, and behavior (...) judged to be out-of-character for the business. Results of the two studies within crisis contexts indicate that suspicion is created when alternative motives are salient and when a retailer acts out-of-character. Multiple group analyses revealed that suspicion induced negative affect and subsequent perceptions of price fairness. When suspicion was present, more negative feelings toward the retailer and judgments of price unfairness resulted. (shrink)

In recent years, autopoietic enactivism has been used to address persistent conceptual problems in psychiatry, such as the problem of demarcating disorder, that other models thus far have failed to overcome. There appear to be three main enactive accounts of psychopathology with subtle, although not incompatible, differences: Maiesecharacterizes disorder as distinct disruptions in autonomy and agency; Nielsen characterizes disorder as behaviors that relevantly conflict with the functional norms of an individual; De Haan emphasizes patterns of disordered sense-making, that are transformed (...) through the existential dimension. Given that these accounts are intended to provide not only an ontologically richer account of psychopathology but also reduce the stigma experienced by individuals with mental disorders by accounting for lived experience, a critical analysis of these approaches is needed. I will provide a problematization of enactive accounts of mental disorder, showing that this particular framework does not, as it stands, necessarily reduce the harm and suffering experienced by individuals with mental disorder because of its ontological openness; enactivism leaves much to be interpreted and applied by the clinician (or patient) such that practical and ethical problems in its use arise. (shrink)

_Knowledge and Reference in Empirical Science_ is a fascinating study of the bounds between science and language: in what sense, and of what, does science provide knowledge? Is science an instrument only distantly related to what's real? Can the language of science be used to adequately describe the truth? In this book, Jodi Azziouni investigates the technology of science - the actual forging and exploiting of causal links, between ourselves and what we endeavor to know and understand.

The interaction between intuitions about inference, and the normative constraints that logical principles applied to mechanically-recognizable derivations impose on (informal) inference, is explored. These intuitions are evaluated in a clear testcase: informal mathe­matical proof. It is argued that formal derivations are not the source of our intuitions of validity, and indeed, neither is the semantic recognition of validity, either as construed model-theoretically, or as driven by the subject-matter such inferences are directed towards. Rather, psychologically-engrained inference-packages (often opportunistically used by mathematicians) (...) are the source of our sense of validity. Formal derivations, or the semantic construal of such, are after-the-fact norms imposed on our inference practices. (shrink)

Background Retraction is a mechanism for alerting readers to unreliable material and other problems in the published scientific and scholarly record. Retracted publications generally remain visible and searchable, but the intention of retraction is to mark them as “removed” from the citable record of scholarship. However, in practice, some retracted articles continue to be treated by researchers and the public as valid content as they are often unaware of the retraction. Research over the past decade has identified a number of (...) factors contributing to the unintentional spread of retracted research. The goal of the Reducing the Inadvertent Spread of Retracted Science: Shaping a Research and Implementation Agenda (RISRS) project was to develop an actionable agenda for reducing the inadvertent spread of retracted science. This included identifying how retraction status could be more thoroughly disseminated, and determining what actions are feasible and relevant for particular stakeholders who play a role in the distribution of knowledge. -/- Methods These recommendations were developed as part of a year-long process that included a scoping review of empirical literature and successive rounds of stakeholder consultation, culminating in a three-part online workshop that brought together a diverse body of 65 stakeholders in October–November 2020 to engage in collaborative problem solving and dialogue. Stakeholders held roles such as publishers, editors, researchers, librarians, standards developers, funding program officers, and technologists and worked for institutions such as universities, governmental agencies, funding organizations, publishing houses, libraries, standards organizations, and technology providers. Workshop discussions were seeded by materials derived from stakeholder interviews (N = 47) and short original discussion pieces contributed by stakeholders. The online workshop resulted in a set of recommendations to address the complexities of retracted research throughout the scholarly communications ecosystem. -/- Results The RISRS recommendations are: (1) Develop a systematic cross-industry approach to ensure the public availability of consistent, standardized, interoperable, and timely information about retractions; (2) Recommend a taxonomy of retraction categories/classifications and corresponding retraction metadata that can be adopted by all stakeholders; (3) Develop best practices for coordinating the retraction process to enable timely, fair, unbiased outcomes; and (4) Educate stakeholders about pre- and post-publication stewardship, including retraction and correction of the scholarly record. -/- Conclusions Our stakeholder engagement study led to 4 recommendations to address inadvertent citation of retracted research, and formation of a working group to develop the Communication of Retractions, Removals, and Expressions of Concern (CORREC) Recommended Practice. Further work will be needed to determine how well retractions are currently documented, how retraction of code and datasets impacts related publications, and to identify if retraction metadata (fails to) propagate. Outcomes of all this work should lead to ensuring retracted papers are never cited without awareness of the retraction, and that, in public fora outside of science, retracted papers are not treated as valid scientific outputs. (shrink)

Our experience of objects is very rich. We perceive objects as possessing individuation conditions. This, however, is a projection of our senses and thinking. Azzouni shows the resulting austere metaphysics tames many ancient philosophical problems about constitution, as well as contemporary puzzles about reductionism.

I argue that psychiatric researchers, clinicians, and the wider public actively regulate the minds of individuals with mental disorder through the prescriptive processes of mind-shaping (see Andrews in South J Philos 53:50–67, 2015a; Andrews in Philos Explor 18(2):282–296, 2015b; McGeer, in: Folk psychology re-assessed, Springer, Berlin, 2007; McGeer in Philos Explor 18:259–281, 2015; Mameli in Biol Philos 16(5):595–626, 2001; Zawidzki in Philos Explor 11(3):193–210, 2008; Zawidzki, in: Kiverstein (ed) The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of the Social Mind, Taylor and Francis (...) Group, London, 2016). Consequently, all those with a vested interest in the language of mental disorder should take a critical and dialogical approach in how concepts of psychopathology are developed, disseminated and used. Mind-shaping describes how our folk-psychological categorizations actively regulate the behaviour of those categorized. This is done through setting certain norms, which can be achieved through the application of folk-psychological concepts. I argue that psychiatry has embedded norms and goals in its activities that are non-epistemic in nature and these are not only bound up in disorder concepts, but also in the social roles that clinicians, researchers and patients play. In this way, psychiatry uses folk-psychological type tools for the social understanding of individuals with mental disorder, and the application of these tools also helps it meet these non-epistemic goals. Given this, I characterise psychiatry as partaking in mind-shaping. When we characterise psychiatry as mind-shaping, we are then able to explain occurrences of looping effects between disorder categories and individuals categorized (Haslam in J Psychopathol 22(1):4–9, 2016) and provide a theoretical basis for the occurrence of hermeneutical injustice in the field of mental health. (shrink)

A normative constraint on theories about objects which we take to be real is explored: such theories are required to track the properties of the objects which they are theories of. Epistemic views in which observation (and generalizations of it) play a central role, and holist views which see epistemic virtues as applicable only to whole theories, are contrasted in the light of this constraint. It's argued that global-style epistemic virtues can't meet the constraint, although (certain) epistemic views within which (...) observation (and, more generally, thick epistemic access) are centralized do meet it. (shrink)

A background assumption of this paper is that the repertoire of inference schemes available to humanity is not fixed, but subject to change as new schemes are invented or refined and as old ones are obsolesced or abandoned. This is particularly visible in areas like health and environmental sciences, where enormous societal investment has been made in finding ways to reach more dependable conclusions. Computational modeling of argumentation, at least for the discourse in expert fields, will require the possibility of (...) modeling change in a stock of schemes that may be applied to generate conclusions from data. We examine Randomized Clinical Trial, an inference scheme established within medical science in the mid-20th Century, and show that its successful defense by means of practical reasoning allowed for its black-boxing as an inference scheme that generates (and warrants belief in) conclusions about the effects of medical treatments. Modeling the use of a scheme is well-understood; here we focus on modeling how the scheme comes to be established so that it is available for use. (shrink)

Proactive policing strategies produce a range of harms to African Americans in poor urban communities. We know little, however, about how aggressive policing is experienced across gender by adolescents in these neighborhoods. The authors argue that important insights can be gained by examining the perspectives of African American youths and draw from in-depth interviews with youths in St. Louis, Missouri, to investigate how gender shapes interactions with the police. The comparative analysis reveals important gendered facets of African American adolescents' experiences (...) with and expectations of law enforcement. Young men described being treated routinely as suspects regardless of their involvement in delinquency and also reported police violence. Young women typically described being stopped for curfew violations but also expressed concerns about police sexual misconduct. This study highlights the differential harms of urban policing for African American young women and men and highlights the need for systematic attention to the intersections of race and gender in research on criminal justice practices. (shrink)

Base of the pyramid ventures seek to create “mutual value” for themselves and poor communities, but often use business models unadapted for the BoP context, and have been less successful than hoped. Sustainable business models’ multi-stakeholder lens offers a promising alternative path to mutual value, but BoP-based SBM studies are scarce. This single case study explores whether and how SBM characteristics manifest in the business model and value outcomes of Habi, a Manila footwear company successfully creating mutual value with BoP (...) suppliers. We find SBM characteristics underpin Habi’s dual-structure business model and success in four ways: viewing profits as a tool for community development resulted in designing both product and business model around community strengths; understanding communities as systems helped Habi address the complexities of poverty; balancing short-term business needs with a long-term, slow-growth approach led to their choice of investors; and implementing community value capture mechanisms ensured enduring community benefit. (shrink)

I revisit my earlier arguments for the (trivial) inconsistency of natural languages, and take up the objection that no such argument can be established on the basis of surface usage. I respond with the evidential centrality of surface usage: the ways it can and can't be undercut by linguistic science. Then some important ramifications of having an inconsistent natural language are explored: (1) the temptation to engage in illegitimate reductio reasoning, (2) the breakdown of the knowledge idiom (because its facticity (...) isn't comfortable with every sentence being true and false). Restoring the utility of the knowledge idiom motivates regimentation - the consistentist reinterpretation of natural language inferences (as they occur in real time). It's then sketched how to give the semantics of a natural language despite its inconsistency: Necessary and sufficient truth conditions are dropped in favor of necessary truth conditions and sufficient truth conditions. (shrink)

The ramifications are explored of taking physical theories to commit their advocates only to ‘physically real’ entities, where ‘physically real’ means ‘causally efficacious’ (e.g., actual particles moving through space, such as dust motes), the ‘physically significant’ (e.g., centers of mass), and the merely mathematical—despite the fact that, in ordinary physical theory, all three sorts of posits are quantified over. It's argued that when such theories are regimented, existential quantification, even when interpreted ‘objectually’ (that is, in terms of satisfaction via variables, (...) rather than by substitution-instances) need not imply any ontological commitments. (shrink)

The form of nominalism known as 'mathematical fictionalism' is examined and found wanting, mainly on grounds that go back to an early antinominalist work of Rudolf Carnap that has unfortunately not been paid sufficient attention by more recent writers.

Our goal is to prove that the golden section, however important, is not the only key to understand a mathematical-formalizing approach to the idea of beauty. Having developed, from this point of view, reading keys linked to the post-modern, it is necessary to link together the multiple rivulets of knowledge that gather in this direction. Moreover the canons of the approaches presented up to now are very indicative for the understanding of many aspects of beauty, which however depends on the (...) historical moment and the cultures created in the various civilizations. Therefore we can affirm that there is no effective definition of "beauty" that can be codified through fixed canons, but that the concept is expressed by a series of stratifications and interpretations that tend to link several major variations, expressing the various answers given by man to the question: what is the beauty? (shrink)

Ordinary language and scientific language enable us to speak about, in a singular way, what we recognize not to exist: fictions, the contents of our hallucinations, abstract objects, and various idealized but nonexistent objects that our scientific theories are often couched in terms of. Indeed, references to such nonexistent items-especially in the case of the application of mathematics to the sciences-are indispensable. We cannot avoid talking about such things. Scientific and ordinary languages thus enable us to say things about Pegasus (...) or about hallucinated objects that are true, such as "Pegasus was believed by the ancient Greeks to be a flying horse," or "That elf I'm now hallucinating over there is wearing blue shoes." Standard contemporary metaphysical views and semantic analyses of singular idioms on offer in contemporary philosophy of language have not successfully accommodated these routine practices of saying true and false things about the nonexistent while simultaneously honoring the insight that such things do not exist in any way at all. That is, philosophers often feel driven to claim that such objects do exist, or they claim that all our talk isn't genuine truth-apt talk, but only pretence. This book reconfigures metaphysics in radical ways that allow the accommodation of our ordinary ways of speaking of what does not exist while retaining the absolutely crucial presupposition that such objects exist in no way at all, have no properties, and so are not the truth-makers for the truths and falsities that are about them. (shrink)

In this book Jody Azzouni challenges existing epistemological conventions about knowledge: what it means to know something, who or what is seen as knowing, and how we talk about it. He argues that the classic restrictive conditions philosophers routinely place on knowers only hold in special cases, and suggests that knowledge can be equally attributed to children, sophisticated animals, unsophisticated animals, and machinery or devices. Through this perspective and a close examination of its relation to linguistics and psychology, Azzouni freshly (...) approaches longstanding epistemological puzzles including the dogmatism paradox, Gettier puzzles, Agrippa's trilemma, and the surprise-exam paradox. (shrink)

Quine, in his 1980 forward to From a Logical Point of View wrote: ‘The time for revision is past. The book is dated, and its dates are 1953 and 1961’ (p. viii). Quine wrote modestly about himself, as he almost always did. His point—not stated loudly—was that the book was now an important historical document, and so its author had lost the right to tamper with it. -/- The book I’m reviewing may seem different. Although Kripke’s Locke Lectures were given (...) in 1973, the book has appeared in print forty years later. Kripke writes: ‘… the transcript has been available at the Oxford University library for many years … and it has had, since then, a modest life of its own, passed on among members of the profession, sometimes even being discussed and criticized in print’ (pp. xi-xii). -/- Kripke understates the transcript’s impact. It influenced everyone in the profession who wrote on these topics, if only because it was read carefully and absorbed by so many philosophers working in this area. Thomasson, on a back-blurb, writes: ‘For decades getting a copy of these lectures has been a holy grail for philosophers working on fiction’. And in the Oxford advertising, included with my review copy of the book, I read: ‘At last in print—the most famous unpublished philosophy manuscript of recent decades’. (shrink)

Claims to sisterhood are premised on women’s experiences with gender oppression, and many have argued that such claims ignore differences among women. Many have therefore dismissed sisterhood as a legitimate claim to solidarity, failing to examine the ways that sisterhood continues to be utilized by feminist activists. This article examines qualitative data from a study of a white, middle-class, feminist, antiracist organization that uses the language of sisterhood in its work on behalf of incarcerated women, who are predominantly of color (...) and poor. The author finds not only that sisterhood is simultaneously rooted in women’s experiences with oppression and pride and pleasure but that such language serves complex functions in feminist organizations that seek to work across difference. Beyond its use in creating and sustaining solidarity, sisterhood is utilized to bridge differences in race, class, and life experiences between women and to generate feelings of legitimacy amongst white, middle-class activists. (shrink)