Central to the particularist project, one that has become the consensus in the philosophy of conspiracy theory theory, is the claim that a general dismissal of these things called `conspiracy theories' is unsustainable. That is, if we want to say a conspiracy theory is suspicious such that we should not believe it, then we have to engage in at least some investigation of it. Particularists have detailed just why a general attitude of skepticism towards conspiracy theories is implausible; they have, (...) in effect, created the case against generalism. The case for particularism, then, has largely been about challenging and rebutting generalist arguments. But what of the bigger picture? If particularists argue that we should not assume conspiracy theories are mad, bad, or dangerous but, rather, investigate them, then how should we go about that investigation? In this paper I describe (some) of the preliminary concerns the particularist (and the generalist) needs to account for when developing an ethics of investigation into these things called `conspiracy theories.' Whilst this paper does not provide a framework for the investigation of conspiracy theories, it provides the framework for such a framework. (shrink)

This paper examines the work ethic characteristics of particular practising Protestant, Catholic and Muslim managers in Britain, Ireland and Turkey. Max Weber, argued that Protestant societies had a particular work ethic which was quite distinct from non-Protestant societies. The Protestant work ethics (PWE) thesis of Weber was reviewed. Previous empirical and analytical research results showed that the number of research results which support Weberian ideas were more than those which did not support. Methodological issues were also discussed. Results revealed that (...) there was a considerable difference between Muslim and other groups in terms of PWE characteristics. The Muslim group showed the highest PWE level, while the Protestant group was placed second and the Catholic group third. The Protestant group showed a slightly higher of PWE level than the Catholic group. The possible reasons for the higher level of the PWE values of Muslim managers are discussed in the light of historical, political, social and economic developments in Turkey. (shrink)

In today's complex business world, the question of business ethics is increasingly gaining importance as managers and employees face numerous ethical dilemmas in their jobs. The ethical climate in the Turkish business environment is also at a critical stage, and the business community as a whole is troubled by ethical problems. This study attempts to determine the effect of individual, managerial and organizational factors on the ethical judgments of Turkish managers, and to evaluate the ethical perceptions of these managers. The (...) findings of this study reveal that the ethics score, the measure of ethical judgment, of Turkish managers differs significantly only with respect to gender and that female managers have higher ethics score than male managers. Other individual, managerial and organizational factors considered in this study do not have any significant effect on the ethical judgments of the managers. A comparative analysis between female and male managers in terms of their ranking of the eleven ethical business scenarios, ranking of the sixteen unethical acts, ranking of the factors influencing managers to engage in unethical practices, and ranking of the various parties to whom a company is socially responsible enables the researchers to enlighten the subject of business ethics in Turkey. (shrink)

The paper considers the question of when the operator L of necessity in modal logic can be expressed in terms of the operator meaning it is non-contingent that.

Disagreement is a pervasive feature of human discourse and a crucial force in shaping our social reality. From mundane squabbles about matters of taste to high-stakes disputes about law and public policy, the way we express and navigate disagreement plays a central role in both our personal and political lives. Legal discourse, in particular, is rife with disagreement - it is the very bread and butter of courtroom argument and legal scholarship alike. Consider a debate between two legal philosophers, Ronald (...) and Herbert, about the Eighth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, which prohibits ‘cruel and unusual punishment’. Ronald asserts: ‘It is the law that capital punishment is prohibited’. In response, Herbert states: ‘It is not the law that capital punishment is prohibited’. We intuitively think Ronald and Herbert are disagreeing, which reveals in the fact that they are licensed to use ex¬pressions like no (it isn’t) and nuh-uh when responding to their opponent’s claim. But despite the ubiquity and significance of legal disagreement, its precise nature remains elusive. This chapter discusses what exactly is going on when two people disagree about what the law requires, and how can hybrid theory may answer this question. (shrink)

A unifying theory of general anesthetic-induced unconsciousness must explain the common mechanism through which various anesthetic agents produce unconsciousness. Functional-brain-imaging data obtained from 11 volunteers during general anesthesia showed specific suppression of regional thalamic and midbrain reticular formation activity across two different commonly used volatile agents. These findings are discussed in relation to findings from sleep neurophysiology and the implications of this work for consciousness research. It is hypothesized that the essential common neurophysiologic mechanism underlying anesthetic-induced unconsciousness is, as with (...) sleep-induced unconsciousness, a hyperpolarization block of thalamocortical neurons. A model of anesthetic-induced unconsciousness is introduced to explain how the plethora of effects anesthetics have on cellular functioning ultimately all converge on a single neuroanatomic/neurophysiologic system, thus providing for a unitary physiologic theory of narcosis related to consciousness. (shrink)

Jan Narveson has articulated a deeply held, widely shared intuition regarding what moral law has to say about bringing additional people into existence: while we are “in favour of making people happy,” we are “neutral about making happy people.” Various formulations of the Narvesonian intuition (closely related to the person-affecting intuition or restriction) have been widely criticized. This present paper outlines an off-the-beaten-path alternate construction of the intuition—the existence condition—and argues that that particular construction has the resources to avoid some (...) of those criticisms. But still other considerably more widely recognized alternate constructions have been offered as well. Thus John Broome outlines what he calls the neutrality intuition. While Broome finds the underlying intuition “strongly attractive,” he nonetheless argues that the neutrality intuition itself leads us quickly into inconsistency. Wlodek Rabinowicz disagrees. On his view, Broome’s inconsistency argument shows, not that the neutrality intuition is false, but rather that it doesn’t follow, from the fact that the outcome, or possible future or world, that includes the additional person is neither better nor worse than the (otherwise similar) world that excludes that person, that the one world is exactly as good as the other. The better view, according to Rabinowicz, is that, on occasion, and specifically when the coming into existence of additional people is at stake, the one world is incommensurate with the other. What is called the principle of trichotomy is, in other words, false. Difficulties arise, however, when we try to reject that seemingly compelling conceptual principle. This present paper concludes with the argument that the availability of the existence condition—which, together with certain other uncontroversial moral principles and a handful of conceptual principles, forms the existential approach—shows that we can maintain the most intuitive parts of neutrality intuition while avoiding both Broome’s inconsistency worry and Rabinowicz’s commitment to incommensurability. Incommensurability may be correct on other grounds—but not, this present paper argues, on the grounds provided by Broome’s inconsistency argument. (shrink)

I distinguish between sentences like(1) Last Thursday we drove from Wellington to Waikanae and (2) Last Thursday my copy of Aspects of the Theory of Syntax remained on my bookshelf. Sentence (2) has the subinterval property. If it is true at an interval t it is true at every subinterval of t. (1) lacks this property. (1) reports an event. (2) reports a state. Events do not have the subinterval property but states do have it, and so do objects. If (...) something is a linguist at an interval t then that person is a linguist at all subintervals of t. I argue that exists applies to things which have the subdinterval property, and occurs applies to things which lack it. (shrink)

We consider the desirability, or otherwise, of various forms of induction in the light of certain principles and inductive methods within predicate uncertain reasoning. Our general conclusion is that there remain conflicts within the area whose resolution will require a deeper understanding of the fundamental relationship between individuals and properties.

Early in his Essays on Intellectual Powers, Reid draws a distinction between mental power, mental operation, and mental capacity (EIP 21). To the untrained eye, these terms could probably be used interchangeably, and Reid believes this is correct, up to a point. He argues that, if we are interested in understanding exactly how the human mind works, we must use these terms with more precise meanings. This is part of his more general strategy of trying to always use the words (...) with their common meanings, as much as possible, but also pointing out that certain philosophical distinctions are needed to carry out the project of laying out the foundations of the science of the mind. This paper explains what the distinction between power, operation, and capacity is, according to Reid, with the goal of understanding why it is important to draw such a distinction, not only for the Reidian project, but for action theory, more generally. (shrink)

The model of language can relatively concretely reveal the mechanism of the epistemology, which is extended by the ontology that takes “person” as the unit. It unveils an intuitable dimension to represent the epistemolog’s paradigm and limitations. Deriving from the inherent relation between epistemology and ontology, the retrospection of the epistemology’s ontological origin can be actualized by locating or grasping the epistemological first person’s ontological essence. Hence, the illusional and frail essence of the ontology behind this epistemology would be uncovered. (...) “Person” is not a stable unit in the ontological world, since the application of this unit stimulates the development of the operating style of the epistemology which relies on the supplement of paradox. After this study that intends to get the epistemological and ontological truth of the current using nominative, the new era of one or more unknown but solid epistemology and its ontology will be gradually recognized. Furthermore, the circumstance of past and current philosophical study is going to be changed. (shrink)

The outputs of generative artificial intelligence (generative AI) are often called “synthetic” to imply that they are not natural but artificial. Against that use of the term, this article focuses on a different denotation of synthesis, stressing the unifying and compositional aspects of anything synthetic. The case of large language models (LLMs) is used as an example to address synthesis philosophically alongside notions of representation in contemporary computational systems. It is argued that synthesis in generative AI should be understood as (...) a search for unity that is fundamental to the making of a representational reality. This representational reality, internal to computation, is a stable (if imperfect) whole, a togetherness of distributed representations. The article thus demonstrates that developing the philosophical concept of synthesis to investigate today’s generative AI involves examining how structuring occurs in LLMs and studying the kinds of forms that structuring results in. (shrink)

This article appeals to the table of nothingness (Nichts) occurring within Kant's Critique of Pure Reason to assess three recent accounts of nothingness - by Graham Priest, Filippo Costantini, and Filippo Casati & Naoya Fujikawa - under the light of folk preconceptions about nothingness. After defining the two strongest preconceptions as the absence of unrestrictedly everything (nihil absolutum) and the idea of nothingness as a self-contradictory item (nihil negativum), I argue that both might be read as two Aristotelian connected homonyms, (...) rather than conflating them into a single item (as Priest's and Casati and Fujikawa's accounts seem to do), or dropping the idea of the nihil absolutum, as Costantini's account does. (shrink)

In this paper, logics are conceived as two-sorted first-order structures, and we argue that this broad definition encompasses a wide class of logics with theoretical interest as well as interest from the point of view of applications. The language, concepts and methods of model theory can thus be used to describe the relationship between logics through morphisms of structures called transfers. This leads to a formal framework for studying several properties of abstract logics and their attributes such as consequence operator, (...) syntactical structure, and internal transformations. In particular, we treat Belief Revision Systems (BRS) as our main example, defining the Wide Belief Revision Systems (WBRS''s). This generalization allows us to define BRS''s in an abstract setting for classical and non-standard logics. We also show how the concept of translation between logics can be obtained as a particular case of transfers. (shrink)

The formal time symmetry of the quantum measurement process is extensively discussed. Then, the origin of the alleged association between a fixed temporal direction and quantum measurements is investigated. It is shown that some features of such an association might arise from epistemological rather than purely physical assumptions. In particular, it is brought out that a sequence of statements bearing on quantum measurements may display intrinsic asymmetric properties, irrespective of the location of corresponding measurements in time t of the Schrodinger (...) equation. The situation of an observer performing two measurements in two opposite directions of t is eventually investigated. Essential differences are found between two descriptions of this situation: the internal one (taking only into account what is recorded in the observer's memory) and the external one (whereby the observer is considered as a quantum system ruled by the Schrodinger equation). Finally, a method allowing several observers to establish a correspondence between their memory sizes is analyzed. The most important facts that usually lead to the associating of a preferential temporal direction with quantum measurements may be inferred from this correspondence. (shrink)

R. K. Elliott once commended R. S. Peters' work in philosophy of education for being an authentic expression of the self. Many philosophers, probably including Peters, might see this more as a weakness. In an attempt to resolve this difference various kinds of continuity between philosopher and philosophy are explored. These point to an ideal of a two-way, and ultimately ‘organic’, relationship whereby the philosophy expresses the self and the self is formed by the philosophy. Ways of teaching to favour (...) the development of such authenticity in novice philosophers are discussed. (shrink)

One central strand in Quine's criticism of common-sense notions of linguistic meaning is an argument from the holism of empirical content. This paper explores (with many digressions) the several versions of the argument, and discovers them to be uniformly bad. There is a kernel of truth in the idea that ?holism?, in some sense, ?undermines the analytic?synthetic distinction?, in some sense; but it has little to do with Quine's radical empiricism, or his radical scepticism about meaning.

The aim of this paper is to consider some logical aspects of the debate between the view that the present is the only 'real' time, and the view that the present is not in any way metaphysically privileged. In particular I shall set out a language of first-order predicate tense logic with a now predicate, and a first order (extensional) language with an abstraction operator, in such a way that each language can be shewn to be exactly translatable into the (...) other. I shew that this translation is preserved at the metalinguistic level, so that equivalent truth conditions can be defined in a tensed metalanguage or an indexical metalanguage. I then make some remarks about the connection between proofs of relative consistency and metaphysical truth; and some historical remarks about Arthur Prior's use of formal logic in expressing his presentist views. (shrink)

I first distinguish several notions that have traditionally been conflated (or otherwise neglected) in discussions of the metaphysics of time. Thus, for example, I distinguish between the passage of time and temporal becoming. The former is, I maintain, a confused notion that does not represent a feature of the world; whereas a proper understanding of the latter provides the key for a plausible and comprehensive account of the nature of temporal reality. There are two general classes of views of the (...) nature of temporal reality; proponents of particular views in both classes attempt to account for the phenomenon of temporal becoming in terms of qualitative change. I argue that any such account – in terms of change – is irredeemably problematic. And so I propound a different account of temporal becoming, based on the notion that temporal reality is transient, which provides the means to characterize intuitively and vividly the significant effects of time on the metaphysical nature of the world. (shrink)

Several recent publications have suggested that hermeneutics, the method of literary criticism, might prove to be useful in medicine. In this essay I consider this thesis with particular attention to the claim that medicine is hermeneutics all the way down. After examining an anti-positivist critique of positivist medicine and arguing that hermeneutic interpretation involves a more radical critique of modern medicine, I examine the supposed consequences of hermeneutical universalism:relativism, skepticism andantirealism which further evaluation reveals to be only potential consequences of (...) hermeneutics. A brief discussion ofphronesis and of the possible texts of medicine concludes the article. (shrink)

Is it possible to establish a line of research that brings Gabriel Marcel and Jean-Paul Sartre closer together? With this article, we will positively support this idea, by distancing ourselves from the overly rigid interpretations that exclusively focus on antinomic elements sliding into a reductionist and nowadays “canonical” presentation of the relationship between these philosophers. Beyond the undeniable and, fortunately, unmediated differences between the two philosophers, this article aims to investigate their positions regarding the concept of “relationship”. In doing so, (...) we will highlight how Gabriel Marcel’s “coesse” and Jean-Paul Sartre’s “being-for-others” have numerous points of contact that place both philosophers, beyond their personal positions in the religious sphere, within the common ground of “existentialism”. (shrink)

In 2005 St Andrews Studies published a volume of essays by Anscombe entitled Human Life, Action and Ethics, followed in 2008 by a second with the title Faith in a Hard Ground. Both books were highly praised. This third volume brings essays on the thought of historical philosophers in which Anscombe engages directly with their ideas and arguments. Many are published here for the first time and the collection provides further testimony to Anscombe's insight and intellectual imagination.

This study adopts the Cross-Cultural Speech Act Realization Patterns (CCSARP) framework to investigate the apology strategies used by L1 speakers of Tashelhit, a variety of Amazigh spoken in central Morocco. To this end, 82 university students either filled an assessment questionnaire or participated in an oral closed role-play. The findings indicated that L1 speakers of Tashelhit employed seven strategies to apologize, namely taking on responsibility, Illocutionary Force Indicating Devices (IFIDs), explanation or account, offer of repair, promise of forbearance, determinism, and (...) self-criticism. While taking on responsibility, IFIDs, and explanation or account were used most frequently in all the role-play situations to realize apologies, the other apology strategies appeared to be situation-dependent. There was also a tendency for L1 speakers of Tashelhit to use certain religious expressions to modify their apologies. These findings yielded a number of recommendations for further research and suggestions for improving the teaching of apologies in Tashelhit. (shrink)

It seems that in interpreting others we sometimes simulate, sometimes apply theory. Josef Perner has suggested that a fruitful line of inquiry in folk psychology would seek "criteria for problems where we have to use simulation from those where we do without or where it is even impossible to use." In this paper I follow Perner with a suggestion that our understanding of our interpretive processes may benefit from considering their physiological bases. In particular, I claim that it may be (...) useful to consider the role emotion plays in the respective interpretive processes. I give reasons for believing that affective processes are more heavily involved in simulation (especially in situations of practical judgment and practical reasoning) than in theory-application. But affective processes have distinctive neurological and metabolic properties. These distinctive features of emotion may not only enrich our understanding of the simulation process, but also afford us a step towards responding to Perner's challenge. (shrink)

This paper explores a modal analogue of Hugh Mellor''s version of McTaggart''s argument against the reality of tense. I show that if Mellor''s argument succeeds in showing that the present moment cannot be any more real than any other moment then it also shows that the actual world cannot be any more real than any other possible world.