Arguments from fission cases, most notably made by Parfit, have historically been utilized in discussions of Everettian quantum mechanics (EQM) in an attempt to illuminate details of familiar accounts in which an agent ‘splits’. Whilst such imagery is often seen as an innocuous depiction of Everett's theory, it is in fact a poisoned chalice. I argue firstly that the fission case analogy is responsible for the conceptual foundations of probability arguments in EQM and secondly, following a number of disanalogies between (...) fission cases and Everettian branching, I argue that the analogy is unfounded. I conclude that much of the discussion of the probability problem over the past 20 years has been predicated on a problematic analogy and its effects are still apparent today. (shrink)

The problem of race has typically been treated as a problem of individual or institutional prejudice. However, more attention needs to be paid to structural racism, which shows how racialized opportunity structures sustain racial injustice even when actors are not prejudiced. Because Catholic social thought treats social structures as mere aggregates of individual behavior, however, it is unable to explain how opportunity structures constrain human agency, how social positions condition the behaviors of people who occupy them, and how harms may (...) occur without intent. A critical realist approach to understanding social structure corrects the reductive tendencies of dominant perspectives on race, such as colorblindness and antiracism, and helps explain how nonracists can perpetuate racial injustice. An analysis of the case of residential segregation shows how the pursuit of individual goods in racialized opportunity structures like the housing market simultaneously hinders the common good. (shrink)

Neil Tennant and Joseph Salerno have recently attempted to rigorously formalize Michael Dummett's argument for logical revision. Surprisingly, both conclude that Dummett commits elementary logical errors, and hence fails to offer an argument that is even prima facie valid. After explicating the arguments Salerno and Tennant attribute to Dummett, I show how broader attention to Dummett's writings on the theory of meaning allows one to discern, and formalize, a valid argument for logical revision. Then, after correctly providing a rigorous statement (...) of the argument, I am able to delineate four possible anti-Dummettian responses. Following recent work by Stewart Shapiro and Crispin Wright, I conclude that progress in the anti-realist's dialectic requires greater clarity about the key modal notions used in Dummett's proof. (shrink)

Esports competitions have become a world-wide phenomenon with millions of viewers and fans. Learn about how esports competitions deal with things from gambling to cheating software. Aligned with curriculum standards, these books also highlight key 21st Century content including information, media, and technology skills. Engaging content and hands-on activities encourage creative and design thinking. Book includes table of contents, glossary, index, author biography, and sidebars.

American policymakers delegate the administration of many welfare programs to states, where officials implement them in increasingly diverse ways. Welfare state scholarship has little to say about this subnational policy divergence, and it portrays the complexity of delegated governance as a barrier to nonelite legislative influence. Drawing on an ethnographic study of one state’s Medicaid program, this article shows that delegated governance offers ample opportunity for nonelite influence and policy divergence, but through regulatory governance rather than legislative advocacy. Medicaid is (...) opaque to politicians, whose inability to monitor program details creates conditions of bureaucratic autonomy and even activism: health-care agency personnel sequence regulatory tweaks to protect and expand entitlements. But budget cuts, outsourcing, and fraught provider relations also deprive bureaucrats of street-level know-how, and bureaucrats depend on beneficiaries’ advocates who selectively illuminate a path to reform. A full rendering of subnational divergence in American federalism requires attention to underexamined factors such as bureaucratic activism, agency advocacy, and regulatory governance. (shrink)

In his autobiography, _My Many Selves,_ Wayne C. Booth is less concerned with his professional achievements---though the book by no means ignores his distinguished career---than with the personal vision that emerges from a long life lived thoughtfully. For Booth, even the autobiographical process becomes part of a quest to harmonize the diverse, often conflicting aspects of who he was. To see himself clearly and whole, he broke the self down, personified the fragments, uncovered their roots in his experience (...) and background, and engaged those selves and experiences in dialogue. Basic to his story and to its lifelong concern with ethics and rhetoric was his Mormon youth in rural Utah. In adulthood he struggled with that background, abandoning most Mormon doctrines, but he retained the identity, ethical questions, and concern with communication that this upbringing gave him. The uncommon wisdom and careful attention that empower Wayne Booth's many other books cause _My Many Selves_ to transcend its genre, as the best memoirs always do. The book becomes a window through which we who read it will see our own conflicts, our own ongoing struggle to live honestly and ethically in the world. Wayne Booth died in October 2005, soon after completing work on this autobiography. (shrink)

David Rosenthal and Josh Weisberg have recently provided a counter argument to Ned Block’s argument that a Higher Order Thought (HOT) theory of consciousness cannot accommodate the existence of hallucinatory conscious states (i.e. a conscious episode consisting of a HOT without the presence of a relevant lower order thought). Their counter argument invokes the idea of mental appearances: a non-existent intentional object which is to aid in an account of subjective conscious awareness. I argue that if mental appearances are (...) to do the work they are supposed to, we cannot draw a mental appearance/reality distinction. I provide an alternative story that a HOT theorist can invoke to account for cases of conscious misrepresentation. Such a story will require denying the existence of hallucinatory conscious states while still accounting for conscious misrepresentation. This is a cost I believe the HOT theorist should be willing to pay. (shrink)

In a series of papers, Donald Davidson :3–17, 1984, The philosophical grounds of rationality, 1986, Midwest Stud Philos 16:1–12, 1991) developed a powerful argument against the claim that linguistic conventions provide any explanatory purchase on an account of linguistic meaning and communication. This argument, as I shall develop it, turns on cases of what I call lexical innovation: cases in which a speaker uses a sentence containing a novel expression-meaning pair, but nevertheless successfully communicates her intended meaning to her audience. (...) I will argue that cases of lexical innovation motivate a dynamic conception of linguistic conventions according to which background linguistic conventions may be rapidly expanded to incorporate new word meanings or shifted to revise the meanings of words already in circulation. I argue that this dynamic account of conventions both resolves the problem raised by cases of lexical innovation and that it does so in a way that is preferable to those who—like Davidson—deny important explanatory roles for linguistic conventions. (shrink)

At the outset of the Republic, Polemarchus advances the bold thesis that “justice is the art which gives benefit to friends and injury to enemies”. He quickly rejects the hypothesis, and what follows is a long tradition of neglecting the ethics of enmity. The parallel issue of how friendship affects the moral sphere has, by contrast, been greatly illuminated by discussions both ancient and contemporary. This article connects this existing work to the less explored topic of the normative significance of (...) our negative relationships. I explain how negative partiality should be conceptualized through reference to the positive analogue, and argue that at least some forms of negative partiality are justified. I further explore the connection between positive and negative relationships by showing how both are justified by ongoing histories of encounter. However, I also argue that these relationships are in some important ways asymmetrical. (shrink)

What, according to proponents of doxastic deontologism, is responsible belief? In this paper, we examine two proposals. Firstly, that responsible belief is blameless belief (a position we call DDB) and, secondly, that responsible belief is praiseworthy belief (a position we call DDP). We consider whether recent arguments in favor of DDP, mostly those recently offered by Brian Weatherson, stand up to scrutiny and argue that they do not. Given other considerations in favor of DDP, we conclude that the deontologist should (...) maintain that doxastic responsibility is a concept about freedom from appropriate blame. (shrink)

Aristotle observes that substances have no contraries. Consider one possible role that the contrary of a substance might play, were it to exist. Just as objects serve as guarantors of the instantiation of properties, contraries of objects could serve as guarantors of the non‐instantiation of properties. By first considering a reframing of deontic logic that takes ‘being permitted’ rather than ‘being forbidden’ as the default state, I develop logical tools that allow the construction of extremal models in which everything is (...) permitted and nothing is forbidden. Transferred to quantified logic, these same tools give us a conception of antiobjects which block property instantiation. The resulting picture of antiobjects is then used as a test case to examine questions about the role of symmetry considerations in philosophical methodology. (shrink)

In De Caelo III 2, Aristotle observes that each element is determined by an intrinsic principle to move to its proper place: earth downward, fire upward, and water and air to their respective places in the middle. However, how are we to determine the cause of elemental motion? Aristotle admits that this ranks among the most difficult problems (μάλιστα δ’ ἀπορεῖται) as it is directly related to the argument of Physics VIII 4, which defends the view that whatever is in (...) motion is moved by something. The question of how the elements move is not resolved until we are presented with his definition of inclination (ῥοπή) in De Caelo IV 1. Inclination is the nature of each element to move to its proper place. Aristotle concludes that the principle of inclination is a cause of motion continuously orienting the elements toward their proper places by activating that which is potentially heavy or potentially light. In what follows, I shall demonstrate the internal coherence of Aristotle’s natural philosophy by deploying inclination as a principle of motion and rest to define the nature of each element. This account of inclination as a principle of motion is consistent with Aristotle’s definition of nature in Physics II 1. As an active principle of motion, inclination is identified with the activity (ἐνέργεια) of the element enacting and maintaining its own end (ἐντελέχεια) by being at rest in its proper place. As a passive principle of motion, inclination is identified with the passivity of the element to be moved to its proper place by another element insofar as the respective element undergoes generation or substantial change. (shrink)

The conventional wisdom holds that U.S. political institutions are inhospitable to industrial policy. The authors call the conventional wisdom into question by making four claims: the activities targeted by industrial policy are increasingly governed by decentralized production networks rather than markets or hierarchies, “network failures” are therefore no less threatening to industrial dynamism than market or organizational failures, the spatial and organizational decentralization of production have simultaneously increased the demand and broadened the support for American industrial policy, and political decentralization (...) is therefore likely to improve the functioning of industrial policies designed to combat network failures. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This paper proposes a novel answer to the Special Composition Question. In some respects it agrees with brutalism about composition; in others with universalism. The main novel feature of this answer is the insight I think it gives into what the debate over the Special Composition Question is about.

Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 56, Issue 1, Page 173-179, February 2022.

Destined to be classic: a tale from the Buddhist sutras told in the memorable and engaging rhyming verse in the tradition of Dr. Seuss and Shel Silverstein. Children and their parents will both love it, and be encouraged. Illustrated in a style that brings both humor and tradition, by the renowned and award-winning illustrator of Wisdom's Illustrated Lotus Sutra, and many other books. I See You, Buddha will help children (and their parents) difficulty with patience and learn to see the (...) good in everyone-including themselves! I See You, Buddha is based on a chapter in the Lotus Sutra, one of the most influential Buddhist texts worldwide-a classical scripture that has inspired a whole genre of works, especially in Japan, known as Lotus Literature. The Lotus Sutra teaches the Way of the Bodhisattva-beings engaged in compassionate, enlightened activity in the service of all-by offering examples of what this activity might look like in the world. One such model in the text is Bodhisattva Never Disrespectful (or Never Disparaging), who, despite troubling encounters with and even harsh treatment from others, bows down respectfully to everyone, recognizing their Buddha Nature and honoring their own journeys along the bodhisattva path to enlightenment-whether they know they're future Buddhas or not! (shrink)

All editors have taken the words to mean ‘thou wouldst anger a very st ne’. So did the scholiast.

OBJECTIVE: Questions have been posed about the competence of persons with serious mental illness to consent to participate in clinical research. This study compared competence-related abilities of hospitalized persons with schizophrenia with those of a comparison sample of persons from the community who had never had a psychiatric hospitalization. METHODS: The study participants were administered the MacArthur Competence Assessment Tool for Clinical Research (MacCAT-CR), a structured instrument designed to aid in the assessment of competence to consent to clinical research. The (...) scores of 27 persons who met DSM-IV criteria for schizophrenia who were long-stay patients on a state hospital research ward were compared with those of 24 individuals from the community who were of similar age, gender, race, and socioeconomic status. RESULTS: Significant differences were found between the patients and the community sample on three measures of competence-related abilities: understanding, reasoning, and appreciation. Degree of psychopathology and cognitive functioning were significantly negatively correlated with understanding and appreciation among the patients with schizophrenia. Length of hospitalization was significantly negatively correlated with all measures of decision-making capacities. CONCLUSIONS: The generally poor performance of the long-stay patients with chronic schizophrenia highlights the difficulties this group is likely to encounter in providing consent to research. However, variation across the sample points to the need for individualized assessment and for validated techniques for facilitating decision making in the face of decisional impairments. (shrink)

Terrorism, international gangs, and other frequently mentioned national security threats are actually less dangerous than a new type of state-corporate crime that may be called national insecurity crime. This crime poses not only unprecedented victimization, but a massive ethical problem. Examples in the U.S. include the 1980s Savings and Loan (S&L) scandal, the late-1990s dot-com bubble, the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, and the 2007–09 financial crisis. National insecurity crime threatens national security because of its geographic and social extensiveness, severity (...) of harm, dynamism, and unpredictability. It endangers the political, economic, social, and environmental security of most or all of the U.S. population. This endangerment includes increasing the risks of loss, suffering, and destruction on a large scale. This article offers a starting point for a sociological criminology of national insecurity crime. National insecurity crime involves large-scale cooperation that relies on often indirect or mediated interaction between perpetrating persons, groups, and organizations. It also involves widespread social harm for private gain, and yet, due to ideology and social construction, it tends to be hidden in plain sight. (shrink)

Pekka Hämäläinen’s The Comanche Empire reflects critical historiographical turns—indigenous power, responses to settler colonialism, and a reorientation of perspective—while uncovering new directions in American Indian history. Moreover, his four-part framework for understanding power—spatial control, economic control, assimilation, and influence over neighbors—provides a useful model for analyzing indigenous polities in other places and times. However, by not explicitly framing the narrative of the Comanche empire within notions of sovereignty, Hämäläinen leaves open opportunities for other scholars of the Comanche and of Native (...) North America. Future historical studies of Native sovereignty, though, should include tribally specific notions of sovereignty and ways of knowing and remembering the past. (shrink)

To be successful, collaboration at work requires its participants to have a common sense about what is happening and where things are heading. But how can collaborators have such a sense in common if what is going on continuously changes? This study investigates the joint communicative work participants in collaborative activity do to remain aligned on how things are going and where things are at for the purpose of maintaining a ground in common. Our test case for illustrating this joint (...) work is the fluid and constantly changing world of software development. Our study uses a transactional approach to show how software developers working together continuously make available what they are attuned to, which constitutes their common ground that allows actions and talk to make sense. The common ground enables a common, inherently shared sense of what is happening and how things are going. Rather than having “meaning” in themselves, signifiers (words, gestures, body movements, cursor movements) create and are part of the common ground against which they make sense. Signifiers are motivated by and produce an accented visible that is available to all group members; and this accented visible (including the signs) makes for the common ground. (shrink)

When you have ruled everything else out, then what you are left with, no matter how improbable, must be the truth. This adage from Doyle describes the path taken by Leopold Stubenberg in his book, Consciousness and Qualia. He spends most of the work critically examining and then discarding potential explications of consciousness before finally, in the last chapter, offering his own theory, carefully selected to avoid the pitfalls that did in rival accounts. He delivers a bold and simple slogan (...) that distills the essence of his view: “To be conscious is to have qualia” (262). (shrink)

In his Paris Reportatio John Duns Scotus challenges ordinary views of identity and distinction. I argue that Scotus affirms that there is more than one type of identity: some forms of identity are...

In his two recent books on ontology, Universals: an Opinionated Introduction, and A World of States of Affairs, David Armstrong gives a new argument against nominalism. That argument seems, on the face of it, to be similar to another argument that he used much earlier against Rylean behaviourism: the Truthmaker Argument, stemming from a certain plausible premise, the Truthmaker Principle. Other authors have traced the history of the truthmaker principle, its appearance in the work of Aristotle [10], Bradley [16], and (...) even Husserl [15]. But that is not my task — in this paper I argue that Armstrong’s new argument is not logically analogous to the old, and, in particular, that it is quite possible to be a thoroughgoing nominalist, and hold a truthmaker principle. (shrink)

Carruthers proposes that for a mental state to be conscious , it must be present in a.

The possibility of “clean milk”—dairy produced without the need for cows—has been championed by several charities, companies, and individuals. One can ask how those critical of the contemporary dairy industry, including especially vegans and others sympathetic to animal rights, should respond to this prospect. In this paper, I explore three kinds of challenges that such people may have to clean milk: first, that producing clean milk fails to respect animals; second, that humans should not consume dairy products; and third, that (...) the creation of clean milk would affirm human superiority over cows. None of these challenges, I argue, gives us reason to reject clean milk. I thus conclude that the prospect is one that animal activists should both welcome and embrace. (shrink)

The central claim of my paper is that pragmatics has a wider scope of application than has been generally appreciated. In particular, I will argue that many discussions of pragmatics are guilty of a problematic form of provincialism. The provincialism at issue restricts the class of target systems of study to those involving groups of developmentally typical humans (or slightly idealized versions thereof), either explicitly as a matter of principle or implicitly as consequence of how it construes the underlying pragmatic (...) notions. In what follows, I will argue that this kind of provincialism is problematic because there are patterns of non-human animal social interaction that cannot be properly explained without recourse to the theoretical tool-kit of pragmatics. Crucially, rejecting provincialism about pragmatics does not entail that there are not important theoretical differences between human and non-human systems of pragmatics. It does, however, require that our core philosophical theories of social interaction and communication be centered on features independent not merely of those at work in human languages but also of uniquely human features of cognition and sociality more generally. (shrink)

Science frequently gives us multiple, compatible ways of solving the same problem or formulating the same theory. These compatible formulations change our understanding of the world, despite providing the same explanations. According to what I call "conceptualism," reformulations change our understanding by clarifying the epistemic structure of theories. I illustrate conceptualism by analyzing a typical example of symmetry-based reformulation in chemical physics. This case study poses a problem for "explanationism," the rival thesis that differences in understanding require ontic explanatory differences. (...) To defend conceptualism, I consider how prominent accounts of explanation might accommodate this case study. I argue that either they do not succeed, or they generate a skeptical challenge. (shrink)

Our ordinary assertions are often imprecise, insofar as the way we represent things as being only approximates how things are in the actual world. The phenomenon of assertoric imprecision raises a challenge to standard accounts of both the norm of assertion and the connection between semantics and the objects of assertion. After clarifying these problems in detail, I develop a framework for resolving them. Specifically, I argue that the phenomenon of assertoric imprecision motivates a rejection of the widely held belief (...) that a semantic theory for a language associates a single semantic value with each of the simple and complex expressions of that language, relative to the contexts in which they occur. Instead, I propose that we adopt a framework I call semantic pluralism. (shrink)

Josh Wilburn examines the relationship between Plato's views on psychology and his political philosophy. Focusing on his reflections on the spirited part of the tripartite soul, or thumos, and spirited motivation, he explores the social and political challenges that occupy Plato throughout his works.