This volume collects essays which are thematically connected through the work of Kent Emery Jr., to whom the volume is dedicated. A main focus lies on the attempts to bridge the gap between mysticism and a systematic approach to medieval philosophical thought.

This review takes a historical perspective on concepts in the psychology of motivation and emotion, and surveys recent developments, debates and applications. Old debates over emotion have recently risen again. For example, are emotions necessarily subjective feelings? Do animals have emotions? I review evidence that emotions exist as core psychological processes, which have objectively detectable features, and which can occur either with subjective feelings or without them. Evidence is offered also that studies of emotion in animals can give new insights (...) into human emotions. Beyond emotion, motivation concepts have changed over decades too, and debates still continue. Motivation was once thought in terms of aversive drives, and reward was thought of in terms of drive reduction. Motivation-as-drive concepts were largely replaced by motivation-as-incentive concepts, yet aversive drive concepts still occasionally surface in reward neuroscience today. Among incentive concepts, incentive salience is a core motivation process, mediated by brain mesocorticolimbic systems (dopamine-related systems) and sometimes called ‘wanting’ (in quotation marks), to distinguish it from cognitive forms of desire (wanting without quotation marks). Incentive salience as ‘wanting’ is separable also from pleasure ‘liking’ for the same reward, which has important implications for several human clinical disorders. Ordinarily, incentive salience adds motivational urgency to cognitive desires, but ‘wanting’ and cognitive desires can dissociate in some conditions. Excessive incentive salience can cause addictions, in which excessive ‘wanting’ can diverge from cognitive desires. Conversely, lack of incentive salience may cause motivational forms of anhedonia in depression or schizophrenia, whereas a negatively-valenced form of ‘fearful salience’ may contribute to paranoia. Finally, negative ‘fear’ and ‘disgust’ have both partial overlap but also important neural differences. (shrink)

Presenting a novel account of singular thought, a systematic application of recent work in the theory of speech acts, and a partial revival of Russell's analysis of singular terms, this book takes an original approach to the perennial problems of reference and singular terms by separating the underlying issues into different levels of analysis.

This book proposes an account of humility that relies on the most radical Christian sayings about humility, especially those found in Augustine and the early monastic tradition. It argues that this was the view of humility that put Christian moral thought into decisive conflict with the best Greco-Roman moral thought.

Presented here is a new result concerning the computational power of so-called SADn computers, a class of Turing-machine-based computers that can perform some non-Turing computable feats by utilising the geometry of a particular kind of general relativistic spacetime. It is shown that SADn can decide n-quantifier arithmetic but not (n+1)-quantifier arithmetic, a result that reveals how neatly the SADn family maps into the Kleene arithmetical hierarchy. Introduction Axiomatising computers The power of SAD computers Remarks regarding the concept of computability.

A true Turing machine (TM) requires an infinitely long paper tape. Thus a TM can be housed in the infinite world of Newtonian spacetime (the spacetime of common sense), but not necessarily in our world, because our world-at least according to our best spacetime theory, general relativity-may be finite. All the same, one can argue for the "existence" of a TM on the basis that there is no such housing problem in some other relativistic worlds that are similar ("close") to (...) our world. But curiously enough-and this is the main point of this paper-some of these close worlds have a special spacetime structure that allows TMs to perform certain Turing unsolvable tasks. For example, in one kind of spacetime a TM can be used to solve first-order predicate logic and the halting problem. And in a more complicated spacetime, TMs can be used to decide arithmetic. These new computers serve to show that Church's thesis is a thoroughly contingent claim. Moreover, since these new computers share the fundamental properties of a TM in ordinary operation (e.g. intuitive, finitely programmed, limited in computational capability), a computability theory based on these non-Turing computers is no less worthy of investigation than orthodox computability theory. Some ideas about this new mathematical theory are given. (shrink)

Where does normal brain or psychological function end, and pathology begin? The line can be hard to discern, making disease sometimes a tricky word. In addiction, normal ‘wanting’ processes become distorted and excessive, according to the incentive-sensitization theory. Excessive ‘wanting’ results from drug-induced neural sensitization changes in underlying brain mesolimbic systems of incentive. ‘Brain disease’ was never used by the theory, but neural sensitization changes are arguably extreme enough and problematic enough to be called pathological. This implies that ‘brain disease’ (...) can be a legitimate description of addiction, though caveats are needed to acknowledge roles for choice and active agency by the addict. Finally, arguments over ‘brain disease’ should be put behind us. Our real challenge is to understand addiction and devise better ways to help. Arguments over descriptive words only distract from that challenge. (shrink)

This article argues that the much-maligned ‘notational variants’ of a given formal linguistic theory play a role similar to alternative numerical measurement scales. Thus, they can be used to identify the invariant components of the grammar; i.e., those features that do not depend on the choice of empirically equivalent representation. Treating these elements as the ‘meaningful’ structure of language has numerous consequences for the philosophy of science and linguistics. I offer several such examples of how linguistic theorizing can profit from (...) adopting a measurement-theoretic viewpoint. The first concerns a measurement-theoretic response to a famous criticism of Quine's. Others follow from issues of simplicity in the current biolinguistics program. An unexpected similarity with behaviorist practices is also uncovered. I then argue that managable and useful steps can be taken in this area. (shrink)

As the dust jacket proclaims, “this is surely Fodor’s most irritating book in years …. It should exasperate philosophers, linguists, cognitive psychologists, and cognitive neuroscientists alike.” Yes, Fodor is an equal-opportunity annoyer. He sees no job for conceptual analysts, no hope for lexical semanticists, and no need for prototype theorists. When it comes to shedding light on concepts, these luminaries have delivered nothing but moonshine. Fodor aims to remedy things, and not just with snake oil. He serves up plenty of (...) clever barbs, potshots, and one-liners, not to mention arguments, to promote his “informational atomism.” It states that there is a large class of concepts, namely lexical concepts, that are ontologically and semantically primitive: each such concept has no internal structure and has its content not in virtue of any relation it bears to other concepts but in virtue of a nomic relation it bears to some property. The property it is thus “locked to” is its content. (shrink)

We show that every nonzero $\Sigma _{2}^{0}$ enumeration degree bounds a nonsplitting nonzero enumeration degree.

There is a simple view of motivation on which desires are like pain-killers; they come in different strengths, and their strength determines their efficacy. That is, the stronger a desire the greater its motivational force and, when two desires conflict, the stronger one “wins out” over the weaker. This view makes it puzzling how anyone could ever exhibit “strength of will” and act on the weaker desire, even when it is a desire for something more highly valued than what is (...) more strongly desired. When the will, as the agent of reason, enters the fray, an explanation of what a person is motivated enough to do must reckon not only with competing desires and their motivational forces, but also with the will’s capacity to be affected by different ones in ways not proportional to their force. However, this complication sheds little light, for if the will must bestow its stamp of approval on a desire before the desire leads to action, then, it would seem, motivational force should be measured by strength of effect on the will. And if that’s the way to measure motivational force, then, since by that measure one always acts on the desire that affects one’s will most, there is no problem of strength of will after all. But the problem seems real, however inapt the label. (shrink)

Experimenters sometimes insist that it is unwise to examine data before determining how to analyze them, as it creates the potential for biased results. I explore the rationale behind this methodological guideline from the standpoint of an error statistical theory of evidence, and I discuss a method of evaluating evidence in some contexts when this predesignation rule has been violated. I illustrate the problem of potential bias, and the method by which it may be addressed, with an example from the (...) search for the top quark. A point in favor of the error statistical theory is its ability, demonstrated here, to explicate such methodological problems and suggest solutions, within the framework of an objective theory of evidence. (shrink)

This is a paperback reprint of a book published in 1989. In this comprehensive treatise Greenawalt explores the three-way relationship between the idea of freedom of speech, the law of crimes, and the many uses of language. He begins by considering free speech as a political principle, and after a thorough and incisive analysis of the justifications commonly advanced for freedom of speech, looks at the kinds of communications to which the principle of free speech applies. He then turns to (...) an examination of communications for which criminal liability is fixed. Focusing on threats and solicitations to crime, he attempts to determine whether liability for such communications seriously conflicts with freedom of speech. He then goes on to develop the significance of his conclusions for American constitutional law. (shrink)

William James' "The Will to Believe" essay has been the subject of much philosophical and religious discourse in the over one hundred years since its publication. Interpretations of the essay have been varied and numerous. In this thesis, I critique several of the prominent interpretations of "The Will to Believe." I find that each interpretation is lacking in some important way. Most of the interpretations fail to read James' text carefully and faithfully. The interpretations that succeed in reading the text (...) carefully and faithfully fail because they do not provide a useful or helpful strategy to persons who find themselves with questions of belief like those James intended to address. I offer an interpretation of "The Will to Believe" that fails in neither of these ways. I do this by drawing on James' larger philosophical and psychological corpus, using the major struts of his mature thought to develop and clarify several important passages of "The Will to Believe." I conclude that "The Will to Believe," properly interpreted, offers a coherent and powerful strategy to persons confronted with certain types of questions of belief. (shrink)

Influenced by the Wittgensteinian slogan “Don’t look for the meaning, look for the use,” ordinary language philosophers aimed to defuse various philosophical problems by analyzing key words in terms of what they are used to do or the conditions for appropriately using them. Although Moore, Grice and Searle exposed this error – mixing pragmatics with semantics – it still gets committed, now to a different end. Nowadays the aim is to reckon with the fact that the meanings of a great (...) many sentences underdetermine what we would normally mean in using them – even if the sentence is free of indexicality, ambiguity, and vagueness. This can be so because the sentence expresses a “minimal” proposition or even because it doesn’t fully express any proposition. Many theorists are led to defend “truth-conditional pragmatics” (or linguistic “contextualism”), to find a hidden indexical in every syntactic nook or semantic cranny, or otherwise to pay undue respect to seemingly semantic intuitions and intentions. This paper identifies various such moves and explains what’s regressive about them. (shrink)

C.S. Peirce, the American philosopher and a principal figure in the development of the modern study of semiotics, struggled, mostly during his later years, to work out a systematic method for classifying sciences. By doing this, he hoped to define more clearly the various tasks of these sciences by showing how their individual effects are interrelated and how these effects, considered in their interrelations, establish pragmatic meanings for each individual science. Much of his work was centered on the meaning and (...) function of logic in relation to other areas of human knowledge. By rightly defining the work of logic, Peirce argued, the work of the other sciences could be pursued with more rigorous reasoning. Beverley Kent closely examines the published and unpublished writings of Peirce and carefully attends to the chronological development of his systems of classification; she thereby shows for the first time in the scholarly literature how seeming contradictions in Peirce's evolving classification are really part of an increasingly clear position. Logic, Peirce came to understand, is actually dependent on ethics and aesthetics for its principles. Kent shows how Peirce's working out of the classification of logic in relation to other sciences is a clue to the significant differences between his early and late philosophy and, perhaps even more important, to a reading of his more general claims for a philosophy of "pragmaticism." This work will be of interest to readers of Peirce and American philosophy, to historians of logic and semiotics, and to those more generally interested in the history of systems of knowledge-classification. (shrink)

The effectiveness of decision rules depends on characteristics of both rules and environments. A theoretical analysis of environments specifies the relative predictive accuracies of the “take-the-best” heuristic (TTB) and other simple strategies for choices between two outcomes based on binary cues. We identify three factors: how cues are weighted; characteristics of choice sets; and error. In the absence of error and for cases involving from three to five binary cues, TTB is effective across many environments. However, hybrids of equal weights (...) (EW) and TTB models are more effective as environments become more compensatory. As error in the environment increases, the predictive ability of all models is systematically degraded. Indeed, using the datasets of Gigerenzer et al. (1999, Simple Heuristics That Make Us Smart, New York: Oxford University Press), TTB and similar models do not predict much better than a naïve model that exploits dominance. Finally, we emphasize that the results reported here are conditional on binary cues. (shrink)

Amidst long-running debates within the field, high energy physics has adopted a statistical methodology that primarily employs standard frequentist techniques such as significance testing and confidence interval estimation, but incorporates Bayesian methods for limited purposes. The discovery of the Higgs boson has drawn increased attention to the statistical methods employed within HEP. Here I argue that the warrant for the practice in HEP of relying primarily on frequentist methods can best be understood as pragmatic, in the sense that statistical methods (...) are chosen for their suitability for the practical demands of experimental HEP, rather than reflecting a commitment to a particular epistemic framework. In particular, I argue that understanding the statistical methodology of HEP through the perspective of pragmatism clarifies the role of and rationale for significance testing in the search for new phenomena such as the Higgs boson. (shrink)

Although it is possible to regard a species as a set with a special internal structure, it is preferable to regard a species as an individual precisely to emphasize this internal structure. It is necessary to recognize, moreover, that two organisms that are part of a single entity with respect to one process need not be part of a single entity with respect to another process. Furthermore, choosing to regard two entities (with respect to one process) as conspecific is not (...) to deny that there are two entities within this species. Thus, the systematist need not propose formal names for every entity he discovers, but the names he proposes ought to be as faithful to the relationship among the entities as is possible. (shrink)

a comprehensive, somewhat Gricean theory of speech acts, including an account of communicative intentions and inferences, a taxonomy of speech acts, and coverage of many topics in pragmatics -/- .

We examine over 100 top performing Canadian firms in visibly polluting industries as we seek to answer four research questions: What specific environmental issues are firms addressing? How do these issues differ between industries? Are both symbolic and substantive actions financially beneficial? Does green-washing, measured as the difference between symbolic and substantive action, and/or green-highlighting, measured as the combined effect of symbolic and substantive actions, pay? We find that substantive actions of environmental issues (green walk) neither harm nor benefit firms (...) financially, but symbolic actions (green talk) are negatively related to financial performance. We also find that green-washing (discrepancy between green talk and green walk) has a negative effect on financial performance and green-highlighting (concentrated efforts of the talk and walk) has no effect on financial performance. In this article, we provide explanations of our findings and put forth future research directions. (shrink)

When Kent Nerburn received a letter from a young woman questioning her calling to spend her life in the arts, the writer and artist was struck by how closely her questions mirrored the doubts and yearnings of his own youth. Nerburn resolved that he would write his own letter: a letter of welcome and encouragement to all artists setting out on the same strange and magical journey, sharing the wisdom of a life spent working in the arts. From struggles (...) with money and the bitterness of rejection, to spiritual questions of inspiration and authenticity, Dancing With the Gods offers insight, solace and courage to help artists on the winding road to artistic fulfilment. Tender and joyous, it is a celebration of art's power to transform the darkest of human experience and give voice to the grandest of human hopes. (shrink)

Mealey's excellent target article rests on several assumptions that may be questioned, including the overarching assumption that sociopathy reflects the failure of a small minority of males to cooperate with the larger group. I suggest that violent competition in ancestral bands cheatinggame was the primary evolutionary precursor of sociopathy. Today's violent sociopath is far more a than a failed cooperator.

What happens when we vote? What are we counting when we count ballots? Who decides what an election should look like and what it should mean? And why do so many people believe that some or all elections are rigged? Moving between intellectual history, literary criticism, and political theory, The Electoral Imagination offers a critical account of the decisions before the decision, of the aesthetic and imaginative choices that inform and, in some cases, determine the nature and course of democratic (...) elections. Drawing on original interpretations of George Eliot and Ralph Ellison, Lewis Carroll and Kenneth Arrow, Anthony Trollope and Arthur Koestler, Richard Nixon and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the Palm Beach Butterfly Ballot and the Single Transferable Vote, The Electoral Imagination works both to understand the systems we use to move between the one and the many and to offer an alternative to the 'myth of rigging.'. (shrink)

China is the world’s second largest economy and the largest emitter of carbon dioxide, yet we know little about environmental proactivity in the most populated country in the world. We address this gap through a survey of 161 Chinese companies with two respondents per firm (N = 322), where we seek to identify the antecedents and consequences of environmental proactivity. We identify two categorizations of environmental proactivity: Environmental operational improvements and environmental reporting. We find that ecological motivations and regulatory stakeholder (...) pressure are positively related to both types of environmental proactivity, and external stakeholder pressure is negatively related to environmental reporting. Furthermore, we find that (1) if a firm is environmentally proactive (as it relates to either measure) and they are ecologically motivated, there is a positive and significant cost advantage, and (2) if a firm makes use of environmental operational improvement and they are competitively motivated, there is a positive and significant reputation advantage. Implications for researchers, managers, and policy-makers in China are discussed. (shrink)