We prove an analogue of the fixed-point theorem for the case of definably amenable groups.

Indeterminacy is metaphysical (or worldly) if it has its source in the way the world is (rather than how it is represented or known). There are two questions we could ask about indeterminacy. First: does it exist? Second: is indeterminacy derivative? I focus on the second question. Specifically, I argue that (at least some) metaphysical indeterminacy can be derivative, where this roughly means that facts about indeterminacy are metaphysically grounded in facts about what is determinate.

Distributional semantic models (DSMs) are a primary method for distilling semantic information from corpora. However, a key question remains: What types of semantic relations among words do DSMs detect? Prior work typically has addressed this question using limited human data that are restricted to semantic similarity and/or general semantic relatedness. We tested eight DSMs that are popular in current cognitive and psycholinguistic research (positive pointwise mutual information; global vectors; and three variations each of Skip-gram and continuous bag of words (CBOW) (...) using word, context, and mean embeddings) on a theoretically motivated, rich set of semantic relations involving words from multiple syntactic classes and spanning the abstract–concrete continuum (19 sets of ratings). We found that, overall, the DSMs are best at capturing overall semantic similarity and also can capture verb–noun thematic role relations and noun–noun event-based relations that play important roles in sentence comprehension. Interestingly, Skip-gram and CBOW performed the best in terms of capturing similarity, whereas GloVe dominated the thematic role and event-based relations. We discuss the theoretical and practical implications of our results, make recommendations for users of these models, and demonstrate significant differences in model performance on event-based relations. (shrink)

No concept attracted as much controversy, or muddled ideological identifications so thoroughly, as ‘myth’ in interwar France. By the late 1930s, ‘la mythomanie’ was drawing systematic attention from existentialists, Surrealists, ethnologists, sociologists, and nascent fascist movements. This essay reconsiders this polemical and misunderstood moment in interwar thought. It focuses on the intellectuals most central to its notoriety: the members of the Collège de sociologie and their fascination with Georges Sorel. Though interwar mythomania has long been treated as an antiparliamentary cultural (...) politics designed to secure enthusiastic mass conformity, this essay argues that such accounts are incomplete. They misunderstand the deeper philosophical debate unfolding about the conditions of revolutionary agency in a desacralized society. Bringing this debate back into focus helps liberate mythomania from historiographic commonplaces. It emphasizes how, for better or worse, many of those who advocated for new political myths aimed to spur human agency, not confiscate it. (shrink)

This paper develops a framework in which to compare the discovery problems determined by a wide range of distinct hypothesis languages. Twelve theorems are presented which provide a comprehensive picture of the solvability of these problems according to four intuitively motivated criteria of scientific success.

This paper argues that cosmopolitan law has been more successfully achieved not by appeal to a supra-state authority or community, but by the development of features of existing treaty law. Specifically, it shows how the International Criminal Court's jurisdiction over serious human rights violations has been extended to the citizens and territories of non-member states – and even to otherwise immune state officials – not by challenging the sovereignty of non-member states directly, but on the basis of member states’ own (...) territorial sovereignty and the universal jurisdiction which they delegate to the Court and to the United Nations Security Council. In light of this, the authors argue that cosmopolitanism is better conceived not as invoking an independent sense of global community that supersedes and constrains state sovereignty, but as an immanent, contingent and creative development of statist criminal law itself, rooted in its principles of state sovereignty. (shrink)

Since 1945 regions undergoing dependent development have displayed a great diversity of regime outcomes. In contrast, the nations of the capitalist core have experienced relatively stable democratic regimes. In this paper I begin the development of a theoretical framework for comprehending these diverse patterns. I argue that regime outcomes vary across regions of the capitalist world economy because structural economic constraints also vary by region. Dependent economies are characterized by two major constraints: 1) the lack of a locally dynamic accumulation (...) process and 2) the persistence of widespread and deep income inequalities. These two factors increase the level of class conflict even while they reduce the level of state resources. Thus, regime officials have insufficient resources to address accumulation and consumption demands simultaneously. Variation in regime outcome in the capitalist periphery is produced by variation in "situations of dependency" (i.e., the forms of integration into the capitalist world economy) that produce different class structures and levels of economic constraints. In the capitalist core, however, locally dynamic accumulation processes and relatively low income inequality provide the structural conditions for stable democratic regimes. (shrink)

Critical social ontology is any study of social ontology that is done in order to critique ideology or end social injustice. The goal of this paper is to outline what I call the fundamentality approach to critical social ontology. On the fundamentality approach, social ontologists are in the business of distinguishing between appearances and (fundamental) reality. Social reality is often obscured by the acceptance of ideology, where an ideology is a distorted system of beliefs that leads people to promote or (...) accept widespread social injustices. Social reality is also obscured in cases where ordinary thought and language simply is not perspicuous enough to represent the social objects, kinds, and structures that are central to understanding social injustice. In both cases, I argue that the critical social ontologist will benefit from using the tools and concepts of fundamental metaphysics. (shrink)

The approach to scientific methodology developed in my recent book The Logic of Reliable Inquiry (LRI) shares many general features with that summarized in Larry Laudan’s concurrently published collection of papers Beyond Positivism and Relativism (BPR). Nonetheless, this fact might not be apparent, as my own work emphasizes mathematical theorems, whereas Laudan’s draws primarily upon historiography. It is, therefore, of some interest to discuss the extent of the agreement and the significance of the differences. More generally, the discussion will (I) (...) provide a logical analysis of the instrumental significance of empirical meta-methodology and (II) redefine the role of logic in a post-positivistic, naturalized approach to epistemology and scientific method. (shrink)

Although the inferring of explanations plays an important role in both our everyday lives and in the workings of science, I argue that inference to the best explanation as it is commonly conceived is often not the best way to capture this sort of reasoning. I suggest that a different form of reasoning – so-called immediate explanatory inference – is instead often much better suited to this task. This is a form of inference in which we are justified in believing (...) explanations for the evidence before us purely in virtue of this evidence, and not in virtue of the evidence plus some general principle or rule of non-deductive reasoning. I defend the idea of such a notion of inference, and argue that it plays a central role in both ordinary life and science. (shrink)

Scholars and leaders have assumed that prosocial motivation is the primary driver for social enterprises (SEs) to do good. Despite the significance of prosocial motivation, we argue that it may not be the single driver for SE motivation. A dual-motivations approach based on insights from motivation research is proposed to examine how different types of SE motivation can act together to influence the outcomes of SEs. Empirical findings based on survey data from Hong Kong demonstrate that dual motivations—prosocial-intrinsic and prosocial-extrinsic (...) motivations—explain the outcomes of SEs beyond what the direct effects of prosocial motivation can explain separately. Based on moderation analyses, intrinsic motivation enhances the positive relationships between prosocial motivation and business and social outcomes, whereas extrinsic motivation undermines the relationship related to business outcomes. Implications for research on social entrepreneurship and business ethics are discussed. (shrink)

One of the central claims of Alexander Bird’s book Knowing Science is that the concept of knowledge is central to understanding science. In light of this, it is unsurprising that Bird construes scientific progress solely in terms of the accumulation of scientific knowledge. Although his account of scientific progress is itself promising, there is an underlying tension between Bird’s support for the knowledge-centric account of scientific progress and his case against rival accounts of scientific progress. Specifically, Bird criticizes semantic accounts (...) of scientific progress on the grounds that they allow achievements that fall short of knowledge to count as genuinely progressive. However, he also acknowledges that there are historical examples where scientific progress was made even though knowledge was not accumulated. In this article, I explicate this tension underlying Bird’s arguments concerning scientific progress, suggest how it might be resolved, and explain the implications for Bird’s take on scientific progress. (shrink)

The selection from Capreolus's work represented in this translation shows him defending Aquinas's conclusions on faith, hope, charity, the gifts of the Holy Spirit, and the virtues against such adversaries.

Recent scholarly and practitioner research on the work of non-governmental organizations has been concerned with questions about the moral legitimacy of humanitarian aid in settings of armed conflict. At issue is the extent to which NGO activities are said to affect the conduct and outcome of warfare, thereby potentially implicating humanitarian aid in the partisan interests which it has traditionally eschewed as a condition of its legitimacy. This paper explores how such issues are taken up in the explanations offered by (...) humanitarian aid operatives in descriptions of the work they carry out in settings of armed conflict. Drawing on a corpus of conversational material recorded in open-ended interviews with representatives of various NGOs that operate in Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories, I examine how speakers work to make themselves accountable to demands for sympathetic affiliation with the losing parties in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict while maintaining a non-aligned stance relative to the partisan considerations that animate that conflict’s conduct. Both in first-hand narrative accounts of personal transformation and in descriptions of contrastive examples where professional colleagues are said to maintain a too-sympathetic affiliation with the partisan concerns of the Palestinian population whose needs they service, speakers work to provide for the legitimacy of their professional activities in the context of otherwise conflicting demands for moral accountability. (shrink)

This book argues that the theory of force in Kantian aesthetics and further developed by Walter Benjamin is of decisive importance both to nineteenth-century poetry and to the connection between poetry and philosophy over the last two ...

This paper argues that John Hick's commitment to the moral principle of altruism undermines his pluralistic claim that all of the major world religions are equally efficacious from a soteriological perspective. This argument is placed in a context of a discussion evaluating the theoretical virtues of various hypotheses about religious diversity. (Published Online April 7 2006).

Cultivation: Art and Aesthetics in Everyday Life is an inquiry into everyday practices with an aesthetic dimension such as collecting, walking and domestic life. I examine the implications of a critical engagement with these practices for philosophical aesthetics and cultural studies. Traditional aesthetic theory has been informed by a fine arts model of creativity and aesthetic experience and, thus, has not adequately treated everyday aesthetic life. The rapidly expanding field of contemporary cultural studies, on the other hand, has been marked (...) by a dramatic shift in attention toward non-fine art objects like film and television. However, the attention of cultural studies remains, for the most part, limited to mass produced commodities, thereby presenting a narrow picture of aesthetic life outside the fine arts. Cultivation presents an alternative to both approaches. Following John Dewey, I develop a model of cultivation that allows me to locate and describe creativity and aesthetic experience in everyday life. Seen within the framework of everyday life, cultivation becomes more than the development of aesthetic sensibility, as in traditional connoisseurship. Instead, it includes as well the ongoing development of the capacity to satisfy this sensibility through the creative manipulation of one's actions and the world. This Pragmatist version of cultivation emphasizes the importance of creating occasions for aesthetic experience, that is, of refining and developing experience through the design of aesthetically motivated endeavors like walking, interior decoration and collecting. Cultivation is essentially a process: we do or make things in order to have experiences which then, internalized through habit and re-organized and redirected upon reflection, serve as the basis for further doing or making and still more refined experiences. This model of cultivation is then deployed in extended analyses of everyday practices. In these analyses, I develop a critical approach that seeks to understand practice as a creative process whose possibilities are intrinsically open to development. (shrink)

This essay examines the theological and rhetorical concerns animating John Henry Newman’s evaluation of efforts to prove the existence of God and/or the truth of Christianity with philosophical arguments about the design of nature. Newman’s complex position on arguments from design ought to be interpreted in light of his broader theological understanding of the challenges posed to the practice of Christian faith in his nineteenth century context. These challenges required that apologetics first and foremost defend the truth of Christianity as (...) a religion of holiness, not as a religion of reasonableness. (shrink)

2009 “Tractarian Beginnings and Endings. Worlds, Facts and Subjects”, Knowledge and Judgment, (Logic, Epistemology and the Unity of Science), eds. G. Primiero & S. Rahman, Berlin: Springer..

The solemnity, sacrifice, and concern for the state of the soul portrayed at Opie's funeral seems out of place among anarchists on motorcycles. The chapter analyzes if Opie's wake should be regarded as a religious rite as Sons of Anarchy are not a Christian sect, nor do they belong to any religious body that Americans commonly embrace. The chapter touches upon gender inequality in religious rites, and male bonding that becomes a primary good and maybe even something like a religious (...) duty. German classicist Walter Burkert terms such a group is a Männerbund (or MB), literally an “all‐male society.” The chapter explains the significance of ubiquitous symbol for the Sons of Anarchy MC – the Grim Reaper logo. Like the image of Santa Muerte, the Reaper logo is what scholars of religion call a hierophany. Finally, the chapter talks about the tragic flaws in the faith of SAMCRO. (shrink)