_Animal Experimentation: Working Towards a Paradigm Change_ critically appraises current animal use in science and discusses ways in which we can contribute to a paradigm change towards human-biology based approaches.

The psychopathological phenomenon of delusions of influence comprises variable disturbances of the self-environment-border leading to the feeling of external influence on thoughts, feelings, impulses or behaviors. Delusions of influence are a hallmark in psychotic illness, but nevertheless, attenuated forms can also appear in healthy individuals. Here we present a newly developed paradigm to induce and assess feelings of external influence during instructed imaginations in healthy individuals. In the current study, we asked 60 healthy individuals to visually imagine different objects. To (...) induce feelings of external influence, we applied one of three different physical setups, and informed the participants whether or not an external influence was attempted during the respective trial. The physical setup as well as the information given to the participants alone were able to modulate the feeling of external influence in all three interventions. The impact of information significantly exceeded the impact of the physical setup on the ratings of experienced external influence. Moreover, the response latency correlated with the estimated feeling of external influence. Additional analyses addressed the influence of the emotional content of imagined objects and examined the intensity and emotional valence of the imaginations. Further supplemental analyses correlated external influence estimation of the participants with other psychopathological measures. In conclusion, this study endorses a quantitative model of psychopathological characteristics, in this case feelings of external influence that can be induced by external cues. (shrink)

The article analyses what we term governmental ethics regimes as forms of scientific governance. Drawing from empirical research on governmental ethics regimes in Germany, Franceand the UK since the early 1980s, it argues that these governmental ethics regimes grew out of the technical model of scientific governance, but have departed from it in crucial ways. It asks whether ethics regimes can be understood as new ‘‘technologies of humility’’ and answers the question with a ‘‘yes, but’’. Yes, governmental ethics regimes have (...) incorporated features that go beyond technologies of prediction and control, but the overcoming of the technical model also bears some ambivalence that needs to be understood. The article argues that governmental ethics regimes can be understood as a form of ‘‘reflexive government’’ in that the commitment to techno-scientific innovation is stabilized not through an elitist, technocratic exclusion of non-scientific actors and knowledges or a depreciation of normative and emotional dimensions, but through their inclusion, involvement and mobilization. (shrink)

The objects we encounter in ordinary life and scientific practice - cars, trees, people, houses, molecules, galaxies, and the like - have long been a fruitful source of perplexity for metaphysicians. The Structure of Objects gives an original analysis of those material objects to which we take ourselves to be committed in our ordinary, scientifically informed discourse. Koslicki focuses on material objects in particular, or, as metaphysicians like to call them "concrete particulars", i.e., objects which occupy a single region of (...) space-time at each time at which they exist and which have a certain range of properties that go along with space-occupancy, such as weight, shape, color, texture, and temperature. The Structure of Objects focuses in particular on the question of how the parts of such objects, assuming that they have parts, are related to the wholes which they compose. (shrink)

This chapter discusses why the grounding idiom does not perform as well as we have been led to believe in providing a plausible approach to relative fundamentality. Grounding suffers from some of same deficiencies as supervenience: most prominently, grounding also fails to be sufficiently fine-grained to do its intended explanatory work. In addition, there is doubt as to whether the phenomena collected together under the rubric of grounding are really unified by the presence of a single relation. Grounding turns out (...) not to be helpful in capturing and illuminating what is philosophically important about the traditional substance/non-substance distinction. Although grounding performs better than supervenience in some ways, it does not solve all of the problems to which a supervenience-based approach to relative fundamentality falls prey. (shrink)

There is considerable dispute in the literature as to how much, in Aristotle's universe, living things and artifacts really have in common. To what extent is the relation between form and matter in living things comparable to the relation between form and matter in artifacts? Aristotle no doubt employs artifact-analogies rather frequently in describing the workings of living things. But where does the usefulness of these analogies reach its limits? In this paper, I argue that Aristotle's artifact-analogies are frequently over-extended (...) in such a way that important asymmetries between living things and artifacts are lost in the process. One such asymmetry of crucial importance is the relation between form and matter. Although form and matter in living organisms and artifacts alike are related via hypothetical necessity, it does not apply to both in the same way. I consider particular examples of body-parts and argue that, in each case, a particular kind of matter is picked out by hypothetical necessity. In this way, living things contrast with artifacts which are related via hypothetical necessity only to a disjunction of suitable material; each member of the disjunction is related to the form in question only contingently. In the case of living things, on the other hand, Aristotle is not committed to Multiple Realizability, in contrast to what the functionalist interpretation of Aristotle has claimed. (shrink)

In _Form, Matter, Substance_, Kathrin Koslicki defends a hylomorphic analysis of concrete particular objects (e.g., living organisms). The Aristotelian doctrine of hylomorphism holds that those entities that fall under it are compounds of matter (hulē) and form (morphē or eidos). Koslicki argues that a hylomorphic analysis of concrete particular objects is well-equipped to compete with alternative approaches when measured against a wide range of criteria of success. A successful application of the doctrine of hylomorphism to the special case of (...) concrete particular objects, however, hinges on how hylomorphists conceive of the matter composing a concrete particular object, its form, and the hylomorphic relations which hold between a matter-form compound, its matter and its form. Through the detailed answers to these questions Koslicki develops in this book, matter-form compounds, despite their metaphysical complexity, emerge as occupying the privileged ontological status traditionally associated with substances, due in particular to their high degree of unity. (shrink)

It is common to think of essence along modal lines: the essential truths, on this approach, are a subset of the necessary truths. But Aristotle conceives of the necessary truths as being distinct and derivative from the essential truths. Such a non-modal conception of essence also constitutes a central component of the neo-Aristotelian approach to metaphysics defended over the last several decades by Kit Fine. Both Aristotle and Fine rely on a distinction between what belongs to the essence proper of (...) an object and what merely follows from the essence proper of an object. In order for this type of approach to essence and modality to be successful, we must be able to identify an appropriate consequence relation which in fact generates the result that the necessary truths about objects follow from the essential truths. I discuss some proposals put forward by Fine and then turn to Aristotle’s account: Aristotle’s central idea, to trace the explanatory power of definitions to the causal power of essences has the potential to open the door to a philosophically satisfying response to the question of why certain things are relevant, while others are irrelevant, to the nature or essence of entities. If at all possible, it would be desirable for example to have something further to say by way of explanation to such questions as ‘Why is the number 2 completely irrelevant to the nature of camels?’. (shrink)

Die Arbeit wendet sich einem zentralen Problem der Modernen Sprachphilosophie zu. Mit Kripkes 'Wittgenstein' hat die Sprachphilosophie einen neuen Slogan erhalten: Beudeutung ist normativ. Dass die Sprache nicht naturlich, sondern konventionell sei, gehort dabei seit der griechischen Sophistik zu den Binsenweisheiten dieses Zweigs der Philosophie. Sehen wir jedoch mit Wittgenstein sprachliche Bedeutung als durch den Gebrauch sprachlicher Ausdrucke bestimmt an, wird daraus schnell die These, es seien die 'Regeln' fur den Gebrauch solcher Ausdrucke, die deren Bedeutung bestimmen, die - mit (...) anderen Worten - bestimmen, was korrekter und was inkorrekter Gebrauch ist. Als Normativthese reformuliert, findet die antike Binsenweisheit so auch in der aktuellen Kontroverse breiten Konsens, eint sie Sprachphilosophen unterschiedlicher Couleur. In Auseinadnersetzung u.a. mit Dummett, Kripke, McDowell, Putnam und Wittgenstein arbeitet Kathrin Gluer nicht nur heraus, dass dieser Konsens aufgrund der Unterschiedlichkeit der dabei in Anspruch genommenen Normativitatsverstandnisse ein scheinbarer isr. Daruber hinaus argumentiert sie, an der Normativitatsthese selbst sei so gut wie alles falsch. Auf der Grundlage eines teilweise an der Philosophie Davidsons orientierten nicht-reduktiven Verstandnisses von Bedeutung und Intentionalitat zeige sich vielmehr, dass Normen oder Regeln nicht in den elementaren "Zirkel" intentionaler Begriffe gehoren. Bei der Untersuchung dieser Fragen erweisen sich Sprachphilosophie, Handlungstheorie und Philosophie des Geistes als untrennbar miteinander verbunden. (shrink)

The human-centered AI approach posits a future in which the work done by humans and machines will become ever more interactive and integrated. This article takes human-centered AI one step further. It argues that the integration of human and machine intelligence is achievable only if human organizations—not just individual human workers—are kept “in the loop.” We support this argument with evidence of two case studies in the area of predictive maintenance, by which we show how organizational practices are needed and (...) shape the use of AI/ML. Specifically, organizational processes and outputs such as decision-making workflows, etc. directly influence how AI/ML affects the workplace, and they are crucial for answering our first and second research questions, which address the pre-conditions for keeping humans in the loop and for supporting continuous and reliable functioning of AI-based socio-technical processes. From the empirical cases, we extrapolate a concept of “keeping the organization in the loop” that integrates four different kinds of loops: AI use, AI customization, AI-supported original tasks, and taking contextual changes into account. The analysis culminates in a systematic framework of keeping the organization in the loop look based on interacting organizational practices. (shrink)

My thesis examines the mass/count distinction; that is, to illustrate, the distinction between the role of "hair" in "There is hair in my soup" and "There is a hair in my soup". In "hair" has a mass-occurrence; in a count-occurrence. These two kinds of noun-occurrences, I argue, can be marked off from each other largely on syntactic grounds. Along the semantic dimension, I suggest that, in order to account for the intuitive distinction between nouns in their mass-occurrences and their singular (...) count-occurrences, there must be a difference between the semantic role each of them plays. From among the available options, the most attractive one is to analyze nouns in their mass-occurrences as predicates. But, traditionally, nouns in their singular count-occurrences are also analyzed as predicates. I propose, therefore, that there are two different kinds of predicates: mass-predicates, such as "is-hair", and singular count-predicates, such as "is-a-hair". Neither kind is reducible to the other. ;Mass-predicates and singular count-predicates have something in common: they are both predicates. That is, they are related to their extension in the same way, viz. They are both true of whatever falls in their extension and the relation "is-true-of" at play here is, I conjecture, the same in both cases. The two kinds of predicates are also related to each other in a certain way, namely through a one-way entailment relation going from count to mass: everything that is a hair is also hair, but not conversely. And, finally, there are certain truth-conditional differences between them: the singular count-predicate "is-a-hair" is true only of whole individual hairs; the mass-predicate "is-hair" is true of individual hairs as well as hair-sums and hair-parts. ;These truth-conditional differences turn out to have interesting implications, in particular having to do with the part/whole relation and the act of counting. It is often held that mass-predicates are, as part of their meaning, homogeneous, while singular count-predicates are said to lack this property, as part of their meaning. I suggest, instead, that at least distributivity has to be rejected as a semantic property of mass-predicates, on the grounds that, to pick a representative example, water is not infinitely divisible into parts that are themselves water. The second kind of implication, having to do with the act of counting, is as follows. When we wish to associate, say, the world's hair with cardinal number , we need to speak of it in terms of individual hairs, the things of which the singular count-predicate "is-a-hair" is true. If, on the other hand, we are interested in amounts of hair , we need to speak of the world's hair in terms of those things of which the mass-predicate "is-hair" is true. (shrink)

New Essays on Plato assembles nine original papers on the language and thought of the Athenian philosopher. The collection encompasses issues from the Apology to the Laws and includes discussions of topics in ethics, political theory, psychology, epistemology, ontology, physics and metaphysics, and ancient literary criticism. The contributions by an international team of scholars represent a spectrum of diverse traditions and approaches, and offer new solutions to a selection of specific problems. Themes include the Happiness and Nature of the Philosopher-Kings, (...) Law and Justice, the Tripartition of the Soul, Appearance and Belief, Conditions of Recognition, Ousia or What Something Is, the Reality of Change and Changelessness, Time and Eternity, and Aristotle on Plato. (shrink)

We explore the possibility of characterizing belief wholly in terms of its first-order functional role, its input (evidence) and output (further beliefs and actions), by addressing some common challenges to the view. One challenge concerns the fact that not all belief is evidence-sensitive. In response to this, normativists and teleo-functionalists have concluded that something over and above functional role is needed, a norm or a telos. We argue that both allow for implausibly much divergence between belief and evidence. Others have (...) suggested that belief should be saved as the evidence-sensitive attitude, by making it share its motivational role with an unrecognized state: alief. We argue that the appeal to alief faces a dilemma: Either explanation of intentional action by means of alief is a species of intentional explanation, in which case it becomes hard to distinguish alief from (irrational) belief, or alief is sufficiently different from belief, but then neither the explanation nor the explanandum (action) are recognizably intentional any longer. We conclude that the most promising way forward is an account of belief that makes use of the full functional role of belief, including its role in theoretical reasoning. (shrink)

As large language models (LLMs) continue to demonstrate remarkable abilities across various domains, computer scientists are developing methods to understand their cognitive processes, particularly concerning how (and if) LLMs internally represent their beliefs about the world. However, this field currently lacks a unified theoretical foundation to underpin the study of belief in LLMs. This article begins filling this gap by proposing adequacy conditions for a representation in an LLM to count as belief-like. We argue that, while the project of belief (...) measurement in LLMs shares striking features with belief measurement as carried out in decision theory and formal epistemology, it also differs in ways that should change how we measure belief. Thus, drawing from insights in philosophy and contemporary practices of machine learning, we establish four criteria that balance theoretical considerations with practical constraints. Our proposed criteria include accuracy, coherence, uniformity, and use, which together help lay the groundwork for a comprehensive understanding of belief representation in LLMs. We draw on empirical work showing the limitations of using various criteria in isolation to identify belief representations. (shrink)

Health-care professionals in end-of-life care are frequently confronted with patients who seem to be ‘ambivalent’ about treatment decisions, especially if they express a wish to die. This article investigates this phenomenon by analysing two case stories based on narrative interviews with two patients and their caregivers. First, we argue that a respectful approach to patients requires acknowledging that coexistence of opposing wishes can be part of authentic, multi-layered experiences and moral understandings at the end of life. Second, caregivers need to (...) understand when contradictory statements point to tensions in a patient’s moral experience that require support. Third, caregivers should be careful not to negatively label or even pathologize seemingly contradictory patient statements. (shrink)

This inaugural lecture, delivered on 17 November 2021 at the University of Neuchâtel, addresses the question: Are material objects analyzable into more basic constituents and, if so, what are they? It might appear that this question is more appropriately settled by empirical means as utilized in the natural sciences. For example, we learn from physics and chemistry that water is composed of H2O-molecules and that hydrogen and oxygen atoms themselves are composed of smaller parts, such as protons, which are in (...) turn composed of yet smaller parts, such as quarks, and so on. While the question at the center of this lecture might thus appear to fall more appropriately into the empirical domain of natural science, I argue that metaphysics in fact has an important role to play in determining how best to answer the question before us. More concretely, I propose that the Aristotelian doctrine of hylomorphism, when appropriately interpreted, provides the best metaphysical answer to the question of whether and how material objects are analyzable into more basic constituents. Hylomorphism holds that those entities to which this doctrine applies are, in some sense, compounds of matter (“hylē”) and form (“morphē” or “eidos”). Thus, the title of this lecture, “Form, Matter, Substance”, refers to the claim that lies at the center of the doctrine of hylomorphism, as applied to the domain of material objects, namely that sensible substances are the result of combining matter and form in the right sort of way; or, for short, “form + matter = substance”. I begin in Section II by providing some historical background which brings out Aristotle’s motivations for proposing the doctrine of hylomorphism in the context of his analysis of change. Section III turns to some of the main features of the contemporary hylomorphic theory I have defended especially in Koslicki (2008) and Koslicki (2018). Section IV discusses some challenging questions concerning artifacts which arise for both hylomorphic and other approaches to the metaphysics of concrete particular objects. Section V concludes by summarizing why, as contemporary metaphysicians, we should prefer a hylomorphic theory over its competitors as an analysis of concrete particular objects that is compatible with our current scientific understanding of the world. (shrink)

In his excellent book, Four-Dimensionalism: An Ontology of Persistence and Time (Sider, 2001), Theodore Sider defends a version of four-dimensionalism which he calls the ‘stage-theory’. This paper focuses on Sider's argument from vagueness and argues that, due to the problematic nature of the argument from vagueness, Sider’s case in favor of four-dimensionalism is in the end not successful.

Literary Nonfiction. Philosophy. Winner of the 2008 Independent Publisher Book Award. Translated from the German by Michael Eskin. In this penetrating, thought-provoking, and deeply personal philosophical meditation on the death of the beloved other and the turmoil into which it throws those who were close to him, philosopher Kathrin Stengel opens hitherto unseen vistas onto one of the most painful human experiences. The author's ruthless clarity of observation, coupled with razor-sharp philosophical intuition and unflinching honesty of judgment, allows her (...) to pinpoint the personal and social complexities of life after death in a way that cannot but make us doubt some of our common practices in dealing with death and survival. Kathrin Stengel, Ph.D., is a philosopher residing in New York City with her husband and their three sons. Also available from SPD is the German language edition of this text, NOVEMBER-ROSE: EINE REDE UEBER DEN TOD. (shrink)

Essentialists hold that at least a certain range of entities can be meaningfully said to have natures, essences, or essential features independently of how these entities are described, conceptualized or otherwise placed with respect to our specifically human interests, purposes or activities. Modalists about essence, on the one hand, take the position that the essential truths are a subset of the necessary truths and the essential properties of entities are included among their necessary properties. Non-modalists about essence, on the other (...) hand, oppose the reduction of essence to modality and hold, rather, that essence is more basic than, and explanatory of, modality. This chapter begins with a brief summary of Kit Fine’s well-known challenges to the modal account of essence and considers a recent attempt by “sparse modalists” like Sam Cowling and Nathan Wildman to respond to Fine’s counterexamples by adding a sparseness constraint to the “bare” modal account of essence. A further question arises, however, as to whether and how Fine’s definitional approach can avoid his own counterexamples against the modal approach to essence. The chapter concludes with some final thoughts concerning the theoretical roles ascribed to essence by modalists and non-modalists. (shrink)

This text is an ambitious intellectual enterprise to build a naturalistic foundation for economics, with vast knowledge of physical, biological, social sciences and philosophy. Readers will discover that approaches and insights emergent in institutional studies, (social)-neuroscience, network theory, ecological economics, bio-culture dualistic evolution, etc. are persuasively placed in a grand unified frame.

Concrete particular objects (e.g., living organisms) figure saliently in our everyday experience as well as our in our scientific theorizing about the world. A hylomorphic analysis of concrete particular objects holds that these entities are, in some sense, compounds of matter (hūlē) and form (morphē or eidos). The Grounding Problem asks why an object and its matter (e.g., a statue and the clay that constitutes it) can apparently differ with respect to certain of their properties (e.g., the clay’s ability to (...) survive being squashed, as compared to the statue’s inability to do so), even though they are otherwise so much alike. In this paper, I argue that a hylomorphic analysis of concrete particular objects, in conjunction with a non-modal conception of essence of the type encountered for example in the works of Aristotle and Kit Fine, has the resources to yield a solution to the Grounding Problem. (shrink)

Emotion Review, Volume 14, Issue 1, Page 84-95, January 2022. Emotional stimuli such as images, words, or video clips are often used in studies researching emotion. New sets are continuously being published, creating an immense number of available sets and complicating the task for researchers who are looking for suitable stimuli. This paper presents the KAPODI-database of emotional stimuli sets that are freely available or available upon request. Over 45 aspects including over 25 key set characteristics have been extracted and (...) listed for each set. The database facilitates finding of and comparison between individual sets. It currently contains sets published between 1963 and 2020. A searchable online version allows users to select specific set characteristics and to find matching sets accordingly, as well as to add new published sets. (shrink)

A significant reorientation is currently under way in analytic metaphysics, away from an almost exclusive focus on questions of existence and towards a greater concentration on questions concerning the dependence of one type of phenomenon on another. Surprisingly, despite the central role dependence has played in philosophy since its inception, interest in a systematic study of this concept has only recently surged among contemporary metaphysicians. In this paper, I focus on a promising account of ontological dependence in terms of a (...) non-modal and sufficiently constrained conception of essence developed by Kit Fine. I argue that even this essentialist account is, as it stands, not fine-grained enough to recognize different varieties of dependence which ought to be distinguished even within the realm of ontology. In some cases, an entity may be ontologically dependent on its essential constituents out of which it is constructed; but in other cases, an entity may be ontologically dependent on another for a different reason. A framework which glosses over these differences does not offer a proper diagnosis of why one entity ontologically depends on another. (shrink)

Non-modalists about essence reject the idea that metaphysical modality is prior to essence, e.g., in the sense that the latter can be reduced to or defined in terms of the former. On the contrary, according to these theorists, the explanation, if anything, proceeds in the opposite direction: metaphysical modality does not explain, but is instead explained in terms of, essence. Thus, for non-modalists like Aristotle, Kit Fine and E. J. Lowe, one of the primary theoretical roles of essence is to (...) provide an explanatory basis for metaphysical necessity and possibility. This chapter explores a range of different types of explanatory connections which raise the question of how the non-modalist’s program of explaining metaphysical modality in terms of essence is best carried out. The considerations advanced in this chapter suggest that non-modalists must proceed by way of a non-logical case-by-case engagement with specific cases, since no logical “one-size-fits- all” strategy appears to be available. (shrink)

Social phenomena—quite like mental states in the philosophy of mind—are often regarded as potential troublemakers from the start, particularly if they are approached with certain explanatory commitments, such as naturalism or social individualism, already in place. In this paper, we argue that such explanatory constraints should be at least initially bracketed if we are to arrive at an adequate non-biased description of social phenomena. Legitimate explanatory projects, or so we maintain, such as those of making the social world fit within (...) the natural world with the help of, e.g., collective intentionality, social individualism, and the like, should neither exclude nor influence the prior description of social phenomena. Just as we need a description of the mental that is not biased, for example, by (anti)physicalist constraints, we need a description of the social that is not biased, for example, by (anti)individualist or (anti)naturalist commitments. Descriptive social ontology, as we shall conceive of it, is not incompatible with the adoption of explanatory frameworks in social ontology; rather, the descriptive task, according to our conception, ought to be recognized as prior to the explanatory project in the order of inquiry. If social phenomena are, for example, to be reduced to nonsocial (e.g., psychological or physical) phenomena, we need first to understand clearly what the social candidates for the reduction in question are. While such descriptive or naive approaches have been influential in general metaphysics (see Fine 2017), they have so far not been prominent in analytic social ontology (though things are different outside of analytic philosophy, see esp. Reinach (1913). In what follows, we shall outline the contours of a descriptive approach by arguing, first, that description and explanation need to be distinguished as two distinct ways of engaging with social phenomena. Secondly, we defend the claim that the descriptive project ought to be regarded as prior to the explanatory project in the order of inquiry. We begin, in Section 2, by considering two different ways of engaging with mental phenomena: a descriptive approach taken by descriptive psychology and an explanatory approach utilized in analytic philosophy of mind. We take these two ways of approaching the study of the mind to be analogous to the distinction we want to draw in social ontology between a descriptive and an explanatory approach to the study of social phenomena. We consider next, in Section 3, how our approach compares to neighboring perspectives that are familiar to us from general metaphysics and philosophy more broadly, such as Aristotle’s emphasis on “saving the appearances”, Strawson’s distinction between descriptive and revisionary metaphysics, as well as Fine’s contrast between na¨ive and foundational metaphysics. In Section 4, we apply the proposed descriptive/explanatory distinction to the domain of social ontology and argue that descriptive social ontology ought to take precedence in the order of inquiry over explanatory social ontology. Finally, in Section 5, we consider and respond to several objections to which our account might seem to be susceptible. (shrink)

The project of this chapter is to explore some relations between the rule-following considerations and radical interpretation. I spell out the sense in which the rule-following considerations are about meaning determination, and investigate whether the principle of meaning determination used in the early Davidson's account of meaning determination - the principle of charity - provides an answer to what I shall call "Wittgenstein's paradox". More precisely, I am interested in one aspect of the paradox: the "problem of objectivity". My question (...) then is whether meaning, as determined by charity, is such that the correctness of the applications of meaningful expressions is an objective matter. After running us through the basics of the radical interpretation account of meaning determination I argue that the principle of charity does seem to fall prey to the problem of objectivity. After unsuccessfully trying to rescue objectivity by means of Lewisian natural properties, this is the verdict I in the end endorse. (shrink)

Does the notion of ground, as it has recently been employed by metaphysicians, point to a single unified phenomenon? Jonathan Schaffer holds that the phenomenon of grounding exhibits the unity characteristic of a single genus. In defense of this hypothesis, Schaffer proposes to take seriously the analogy between causation and grounding. More specifically, Schaffer argues that both grounding and causation are best approached through a single formalism, viz., that utilized by structural equation models of causation. In this paper, I present (...) several concerns which suggest that the structural equation model does not transfer as smoothly from the case of causation to the case of grounding as Schaffer would have us believe. If it can in fact be shown that significant differences surface in how the formalism in question applies to the two types of phenomena in question, Schaffer’s attempt at establishing an analogy between grounding and causation has thereby been weakened and, as a result, the application of the Unity Hypothesis to the case of grounding once again stands in need of justification. (shrink)

This essay provides an opinionated survey of some recent developments in the literature on ontological dependence. Some of the most popular definitions of ontological dependence are formulated in modal terms; others in non-modal terms (e.g., in terms of the explanatory connective, ‘because’, or in terms of a non-modal conception of essence); some (viz., the existential construals of ontological dependence) emphasise requirements that must be met in order for an entity to exist; others (viz., the essentialist construals) focus on conditions that (...) must be satisfied in order for an entity to be the very entity it is at each time at which it exists; some are rigid, in the sense that they concern a relation between particular entities; others are generic, in the sense that they involve only a relation between an entity and some entities or other, which bear certain characteristics. I identify three potential measures of success with respect to which these different definitions of ontological dependence can be evaluated and consider the question of how well they in fact meet these desiderata. I end by noting that certain challenges face even the most promising essentialist construals of ontological dependence. (shrink)

According to the account of artifacts developed by Lynne Rudder Baker, artifacts have a certain “proper function” essentially. The proper function of an artifact is the purpose or use intended for the artifact by its “author(s)”, viz., the artifact’s designer(s) and/or producer(s). Baker’s account therefore traces the essences of artifacts back indirectly to the intentions of an artifact’s original author (e.g., its inventor, maker, producer or designer). Like other “author-intention-based” accounts (e.g., those defended by Amie Thomasson, Simon Evnine, and others), (...) Baker’s treatment, or so I have argued, is subject to the concern that, when stated in its most general form, human creative intentions are not nearly as powerful and discriminating as proponents of author-intention-based accounts make them out to be (see Kathrin Koslicki, Form, Matter, Substance, Oxford University Press, 2018, Chapter 8). When Baker responds to a version of this objection launched against her account by Theodore Sider and Dean Zimmerman, she proposes that we cannot simply think things into existence for which “our conventions and practices do not have a place” (Lynne Rudder Baker, The Metaphysics of Everyday Life: An Essay in Practical Realism, 2007, p. 44). For example, I cannot, according to Baker, make up the word, “bonangle”, apply it to a piece of driftwood and thereby succeed in bringing into existence a new artifact, viz., a bonangle, merely by thinking to myself “It would be nice if the world contained bonangles; I hereby make that piece of driftwood a bonangle”. In order for this response to be effective, however, more needs to be said about how our conventions and practices support the creation of some artifacts and artifact kinds, while disallowing the attempted creation of others. In this paper, I examine the effectiveness of Baker’s response in addressing the challenges posed by the inclusion of artifacts in Baker’s practical realist ontology. (shrink)

Some theories of linguistic meaning, such as those of Paul Grice and David Lewis, make appeal to higher–order thoughts: thoughts about thoughts. Because of this, such theories run the risk of being empirically refuted by the existence of speakers who lack, completely or to a high degree, the capacity of thinking about thoughts. Research on autism during the past 15 years provides strong evidence for the existence of such speakers. Some persons with autism have linguistic abilities that qualify them as (...) speakers, but manifest a severely impaired capacity to understand what it is to have beliefs. (shrink)

In [14] we used the term finitely algebraizable for algebraizable logics in the sense of Blok and Pigozzi [2] and we introduced possibly infinitely algebraizable, for short, p.i.-algebraizable logics. In the present paper, we characterize the hierarchy of protoalgebraic, equivalential, finitely equivalential, p.i.-algebraizable, and finitely algebraizable logics by properties of the Leibniz operator. A Beth-style definability result yields that finitely equivalential and finitely algebraizable as well as equivalential and p.i.-algebraizable logics can be distinguished by injectivity of the Leibniz operator. Thus, (...) from a characterization of equivalential logics we obtain a new short proof of the main result of [2] that a finitary logic is finitely algebraizable iff the Leibniz operator is injective and preserves unions of directed systems. It is generalized to nonfinitary logics. We characterize equivalential and, by adding injectivity, p.i.-algebraizable logics. (shrink)

Der Tod als Zukunft -- Der Tod als Gegenwart -- Der Tod als Vergangenheit -- Die Schuld des Lebens.

Amie Thomasson and other proponents of author-intention-based accounts of artifacts hold that an artifact is what its original author(s) intended it to be. By contrast, according to the user-based framework developed by Beth Preston, an artifact’s function is determined by the practices of users and reproducers. In this chapter, I argue that both author-intention-based and user-based frameworks suffer from an overly agent-centric orientation: despite their many interesting differences, both approaches run into difficulties with scenarios in which the attitudes or dispositions (...) of the relevant agents, whether they are authors, users or reproducers, do not serve as a reliable guide on which to base an artifact’s classification as a member of a certain artifact kind. Such alternative categorizations, which conflict with both author-intentions and user-practices, demonstrate the need for a more object-centered alternative perspective concerning prototype production and the nature of artifacts more generally. (shrink)

This chapter reviews several varieties of grounding skepticism as well as responses that have been proposed by grounding enthusiasts to considerations raised by grounding skeptics. Grounding skeptics, as I conceive of them here, are theorists who belong to one of the following two schools of thought. “Old-school” grounding skeptics doubt the theoretical utility of the grounding idiom by denying one of its presuppositions, viz., that this notion is at least intelligible or coherent. “Second-generation” grounding skeptics call into question the theoretical (...) utility of the grounding idiom for other reasons; their skeptical doubts tend to focus on one of the following three purported theoretical virtues grounding enthusiasts ascribe to their idiom: (i) its alleged power to unify an apparently heterogeneous collection of phenomena; (ii) its alleged power to capture and/or elucidate the distinction between the fundamental and the non-fundamental; or (iii) the alleged metaphysical (as opposed to mind-dependent, epistemic, or psychological) utility of grounding claims. Grounding enthusiasts have already formulated responses to many of the objections described in this chapter. At this point, however, it is fair to say that the state of the literature is still evolving, and no conclusive judgment can therefore be reached as of yet as to whether grounding enthusiasts or grounding skeptics have gained the upper hand in these debates. In the meantime, though, grounding skeptics continue to maintain that the classification of factual and/or nonfactual connections under the rubric of grounding does not really help us illuminate the nature of the connections at issue; instead, from the view of the grounding skeptic, we are better off studying these various connections separately and in their own right. (shrink)