The energy domain is still dominated by equilibrium models that underestimate both the dangers and opportunities related to climate change. In reality, climate and energy systems contain tipping points, feedback loops, and exponential developments. This paper describes how to create realistic energy transition management models: quantitative models that can discover profitable pathways from fossil fuels to renewable energy. We review the literature regarding agent-based economics, disruptive innovation, and transition management and determine the following requirements. Actors must be detailed, heterogeneous, interacting, (...) learning, and strategizing. Technology should be represented as a detailed and heterogeneous portfolio that can develop in a bottom-up manner, using endogenous feedback loops. Assumptions about discount rates and the social cost of carbon should be configurable. The model should contain interactions between the global, national, local, and individual level. A review of modelling techniques shows that equilibrium models are unsuitable and that system dynamics and discrete event simulation are too limited. The agent-based approach is found to be uniquely suited for the complex adaptive sociotechnical systems that must be modelled. But the choice for agent-based models does not mean a rejection of other approaches because they can be accommodated within the agent-based framework. We conclude with practical guidelines. (shrink)

All too often in contemporary discourse, we hear about science overstepping its proper limits—about its brazenness, arrogance, and intellectual imperialism. The problem, critics say, is scientism: the privileging of science over all other ways of knowing. Science, they warn, cannot do or explain everything, no matter what some enthusiasts believe. In Science Unlimited?, noted philosophers of science Maarten Boudry and Massimo Pigliucci gather a diverse group of scientists, science communicators, and philosophers of science to explore the limits of science (...) and this alleged threat of scientism. In this wide-ranging collection, contributors ask whether the term scientism in fact (or in belief) captures an interesting and important intellectual stance, and whether it is something that should alarm us. Is scientism a well-developed position about the superiority of science over all other modes of human inquiry? Or is it more a form of excessive confidence, an uncritical attitude of glowing admiration? What, if any, are its dangers? Are fears that science will marginalize the humanities and eradicate the human subject—that it will explain away emotion, free will, consciousness, and the mystery of existence—justified? Does science need to be reined in before it drives out all other disciplines and ways of knowing? Both rigorous and balanced, Science Unlimited? interrogates our use of a term that is now all but ubiquitous in a wide variety of contexts and debates. Bringing together scientists and philosophers, both friends and foes of scientism, it is a conversation long overdue. (shrink)

Part of the distinction between artefacts, objects made by humans for particular purposes, and natural objects is that artefacts are subject to normative judgements. A drill, say, can be a good drill or a poor drill, it can function well or correctly or it can malfunction. In this paper I investigate how such judgements fit into the domain of the normative in general and what the grounds for their normativity are. Taking as a starting point a general characterization of normativity (...) proposed by Dancy, I argue how statements such as ‘this is a good drill’ or ‘this drill is malfunctioning’ can be seen to express normative facts, or the content of normative statements. What they say is that a user who has a desire to achieve a particular relevant outcome has a reason to use, or not to use, the artefact in question. Next this analysis is extended to show that not just statements that say that an artefact performs its function well or poorly, but all statements that ascribe a function to an artefact can be seen as expressing a normative fact. On this approach the normativity of artefacts is analyzed in terms of reasons on grounds of practical, and to a lesser extent theoretical, rationality. I close by investigating briefly to what extent reasons on moral grounds are, in the analysis adopted here, involved in the normativity of artefacts.Keywords: Artefact; Normativity; Instrumental reason; Practical rationality; Function; Use. (shrink)

Decision making in noisy and changing environments requires a fine balance between exploiting knowledge about good courses of action and exploring the environment in order to improve upon this knowledge. We present an experiment on a restless bandit task in which participants made repeated choices between options for which the average rewards changed over time. Comparing a number of computational models of participants’ behavior in this task, we find evidence that a substantial number of them balanced exploration and exploitation by (...) considering the probability that an option offers the maximum reward out of all the available options. (shrink)

In this paper, we present our Construction Grammar account of light verb constructions in the Indo-Aryan language Odia. These light verb constructions are asymmetric complex verb predicates that combine a main verb with a light verb. While the LVs are form-identical with a lexical verb, they are “light” because they have lost their lexical content as well as their argument structure. We argue that LV constructions present a coherent system: they all modulate the interpretation of the event encoded by the (...) main verb by adding a particular aspectual profile on the event and some of these light verbs further add a mirative interpretation. The present paper focuses on this subset of “aspectuo-mirative LVs” which can be characterised as non-parasitic expressions of mirativity; in particular, it presents new work on the light verb -uʈh ‘-rise’ that combines a profile on ONSET with mirativity. The constructional view that we present here offers an account of light verbs that is both descriptively and theoretically innovative. Its descriptive value resides in its systematic and fine-grained corpus-based analysis of the formal and semantic features of LVs beyond what is found in the existing literature. The theoretical contribution of our paper not only resides in offering a better understanding of the status of LVs in the grammar, but by situating the semantic value of some of these in the complex category of mirativity, it offers a more unified answer of quite disparate observations in the literature. Finally, we also address the question of whether this mirative value of the aspectuo-mirative LVs is semantic or pragmatic. As we will show, such a strict dichotomy cannot be maintained, which gives further support for a constructional approach. (shrink)

In [6] Albert Visser shows that ILP completely axiomatizes all schemata about provability and relative interpretability that are provable in finitely axiomatized theories. In this paper we introduce a system called ILP that completely axiomatizes the arithmetically valid principles of provability in and interpretability over such theories. To prove the arithmetical completeness of ILP we use a suitable kind of tail models; as a byproduct we obtain a somewhat modified proof of Visser's completeness result.

In this commentary on chapter one, "Why I am So Wise," of Nietzsche's Ecce Homo, the author dispels the long-standing impression that Ecce Homo is an irrational book in which the madness that claimed Nietzsche only months after he began writing it had already begun its work. Ecce Homo, it is alleged, is not egotistical, or narcissistic, or megalomaniacal. It is not a work of madness. In his linear exposition of this first chapter, the author presents Nietzsche's revelation of the (...) tragic fact that his very aliveness was in a state of being overwhelmed, consumed, by powerful unconscious emotion, the condition he called decadence. Nietzsche's madness may have caused him to lose perspective on the meaning of having dwelt in "a world of exalted and delicate things," as he writes of himself in Ecce, but the original experience of elevation that comes of an abundance of life, of a surplus of life, certainly was not pathological. (shrink)

Kate Miliett's book, The Loony-Bin Trip, is an extraordinary account of her personal experience with involuntary psychiatric commitment. The drama of her conflict with professional psychiatry is so tense, so enraging, that one is likely to find oneself having to set the book aside from time to time just to calm down.

We respond to Van Leeuwen's critique of our paper. We clarify why our account is not committed to a unitary view of "belief", and we argue that Van Leeuwen's dichotomy between "fakers" and "fanatics" is a false dilemma, based on an equivocation in the use of the term "fanaticism". Once we pay attention to crucial content differences in religious belief, to which Van Leeuwen is largely oblivious, we can explain all the phenomena that he alludes to. Finally, we discuss some (...) peculiar features of religion, such as the unfalsifiablity of many doctrines and the importance of mystery, but we insist that such features do not rest on a difference in cognitive attitude. By and large, religious folks factually believe what they profess to believe. (shrink)

In this challenging essay, Maarten Doorman argues that in art, belief in progress is still relevant, if not essential. The radical freedoms of postmodernism, he claims, have had a crippling effect on art, leaving it in danger of becoming meaningless. Art can only acquire meaning through context the concept of progress, then, is ideal as the primary criterion for establishing that context. The history of art, in fact, can be seen as a process of constant accumulation, works of art (...) commenting on one another and enriching one another's meanings. It is these complex interrelationships and the progress they create in both art and its observers that Doorman, in a display of great philosophical erudition, defends. (shrink)

What, if anything, is wrong with conspiracy theories? A conspiracy refers to a group of people acting in secret to achieve some nefarious goal. Given that the pages of history are full of such plots, however, why are CTs often regarded with suspicion and even disdain? According to “particularism,” the currently dominant view among philosophers, each CT should be evaluated on its own merits and the negative reputation of CTs as a class is wholly undeserved. In this paper, I defend (...) a moderate version of “generalism,” the view that there is indeed something prima facie suspicious about CTs, properly defined, and that they suffer from common epistemic defects. To demarcate legitimate theorizing about real-life conspiracies from “mere conspiracy theories”, I draw on a deep asymmetry between causes and effects in the natural world. Because of their extreme resilience to counterevidence, CTs can be seen as the epistemological equivalent of black holes, in which unwary truth-seekers are drawn, never to escape. Finally, by presenting a generic “recipe” for generating novel CTs around any given event, regardless of the circumstances and the available evidence, I rescue the intuitions beneath colloquial phrases like “That's just a conspiracy theory.”. (shrink)

Does cultural evolution happen by a process of copying or replication? And how exactly does cultural transmission compare with that paradigmatic case of replication, the copying of DNA in living cells? Theorists of cultural evolution are divided on these issues. The most important objection to the replication model has been leveled by Dan Sperber and his colleagues. Cultural transmission, they argue, is almost always reconstructive and transformative, while strict ‘replication’ can be seen as a rare limiting case at most. By (...) means of some thought experiments and intuition pumps, I clear up some confusion about what qualifies as ‘replication’. I propose a distinction between evocation and extraction of cultural information, applying these concepts at different levels of resolution. I defend a purely abstract and information-theoretical definition of replication, while rejecting more material conceptions. In the end, even after taking Sperber’s valuable and important points on board, the notion of cultural replication remains a valid and useful one. This is fortunate, because we need it for certain explanatory projects. (shrink)

What makes beliefs thrive? In this paper, we model the dissemination of bona fide science versus pseudoscience, making use of Dan Sperber's epidemiological model of representations. Drawing on cognitive research on the roots of irrational beliefs and the institutional arrangement of science, we explain the dissemination of beliefs in terms of their salience to human cognition and their ability to adapt to specific cultural ecologies. By contrasting the cultural development of science and pseudoscience along a number of dimensions, we gain (...) a better understanding of their underlying epistemic differences. Pseudoscience can achieve widespread acceptance by tapping into evolved cognitive mechanisms, thus sacrificing intellectual integrity for intuitive appeal. Science, by contrast, defies those deeply held intuitions precisely because it is institutionally arranged to track objective patterns in the world, and the world does not care much about our intuitions. In light of these differences, we discuss the degree of openness or resilience to conceptual change (evidence and reason), and the divergent ways in which science and pseudoscience can achieve cultural “success”. (shrink)

Cognitive research on Ego-Reference-Point models of time in English traditionally shows that “FUTURE IS IN FRONT OF EGO” and “PAST IS IN BACK OF EGO.” Recently, however, this view has been challenged by other results, showing that there exists a major static model of time wherein “FUTURE IS IN BACK OF EGO” and “PAST IS IN FRONT OF EGO.” However, evidence for both conceptual systems comes predominantly from linguistic and gestural forms of expression. For instance, convincing empirical evidence coming from (...) the manifestation mode of cinema is still lacking. This article attempts to fill this gap by bringing the discussion of temporal metaphors to the foreground of character subjectivity in film. Using concise case-studies taken from various films, this study provides evidence that a majority of flashback scenes seem to base their conceptions of time on a static Ego-Reference-Point model in which the past appears to be in front of the character’s eyes on screen. (shrink)

Starting from a Foucaultian perspective, the article draws attention to current developments that neutralise democracy through the ‘governmentalisation of democracy’ and processes of ‘governmental subjectivation’. Here, ideas of Rancière are introduced in order to clarify how democracy takes place through the paradoxical process of ‘political subjectivation’, that is, a disengagement with governmental subjectivation through the verification of one's equality in demonstrating a wrong. We will argue that democracy takes place through the paradoxical process of political subjectivation, and that today's consensus (...) society tends to depoliticize all processes of subjectivation. A final step in the argumentation is to introduce the concept of ‘pedagogic subjectivation’—to be understood as the experience of potentiality—that is to be distinguished from governmental subjectivation and also from political subjectivation. The concept ‘pedagogic subjectivation’ is proposed as a way of thinking of the school as a public place. (shrink)

Amsterdam University Press is a leading publisher of academic books, journals and textbooks in the Humanities and Social Sciences. Our aim is to make current research available to scholars, students, innovators, and the general public. AUP stands for scholarly excellence, global presence, and engagement with the international academic community.

In recent years, a new type of Neo-Augustinian theology has received extensive attention: Radical Orthodoxy. Leading figures behind Radical Orthodoxy such as John Milbank, Catherine Pickstock, and Graham Ward assert that they reclaim Augustine's theology over and against almost every major types of modern theology. Their leading claim is that an Augustinian participationist theological ontology overcomes Enlightment sourced secularism. In this essay, the Augustinian character of Radical Orthodox theology is put to the test in terms of a comparison and confrontation (...) between Radical Orthodoxy and Augustine's Christology. It is shown that Radical Orthodoxy's sole concern with regard to Christology is in the manifestation or expression of the ontological relationship or unity of God and the world. Thus, Radical Orthodoxy has its roots in a post-Hegelian rethinking of unity in difference rather than being a rediscovery of Augustine's theology. Subsequently, it is shown that Radical Orthodoy's reading of Augustine denies his understanding of the manifestation of the being of God in Christ; furthermore, it does not account for Augustine's doctrine of atonement: where we recover our original justice and happiness through the substituting life and death of Christ, an atonement which prepares us for the vision of God in the Eschaton. (shrink)

Over the last twenty years, in all of these neighbouring fields, modal systems have been developed that we call multi-dimensional. (Our definition of multi ...

Eighteenth century river hydraulics used both theory and measurement to address problems of flood safety, navigation and defense related to the rivers. In the late eighteenth century the Dutch overseer of the rivers, Christiaan Brunings, integrated hydraulic theory and meteorological practices, which enabled him to design a unique instrument for measuring river flow. The question is whether the unprecedented detail of measurements fits the putative empirical stance in the eighteenth century. The interactions between theory, instrument, measurement, and other knowledge practices (...) are here assessed using experiences in similar measurement practices. I argue that Brunings had theoretical and embodied understanding of hydrodynamics, as he knew how to design an instrument for flow measurement of sufficient accuracy for his purpose in the sociopolitical context of river management. (shrink)

An immunizing strategy is an argument brought forward in support of a belief system, though independent from that belief system, which makes it more or less invulnerable to rational argumentation and/or empirical evidence. By contrast, an epistemic defense mechanism is defined as a structural feature of a belief system which has the same effect of deflecting arguments and evidence. We discuss the remarkable recurrence of certain patterns of immunizing strategies and defense mechanisms in pseudoscience and other belief systems. Five different (...) types will be distinguished and analyzed, with examples drawn from widely different domains. The difference between immunizing strategies and defense mechanisms is analyzed, and their epistemological status is discussed. Our classification sheds new light on the various ways in which belief systems may achieve invulnerability against empirical evidence and rational criticism, and we propose our analysis as part of an explanation of these belief systems’ enduring appeal and tenacity. (shrink)

Relationalism maintains that perceptual experience involves, as part of its nature, a distinctive kind of conscious perceptual relation between a subject of experience and an object of experience. Together with the claim that perceptual experience is presentational, relationalism is widely believed to be a core aspect of the naive realist outlook on perception. This is a mistake. I argue that naive realism about perception can be upheld without a commitment to relationalism.

True beliefs are better guides to the world than false ones. This is the common-sense assumption that undergirds theorizing in evolutionary epistemology. According to Alvin Plantinga, however, evolution by natural selection does not care about truth: it cares only about fitness. If our cognitive faculties are the products of blind evolution, we have no reason to trust them, anytime or anywhere. Evolutionary naturalism, consequently, is a self-defeating position. Following up on earlier objections, we uncover three additional flaws in Plantinga's latest (...) formulation of his argument: a failure to appreciate adaptive path dependency, an incoherent conception of content ascription, and a conflation of common-sense and scientific beliefs, which we diagnose as the ‘foundationalist fallacy’. More fundamentally, Plantinga's reductive formalism with respect to the issue of cognitive reliability is inadequate to deal with relevant empirical details. (shrink)

Philosophers of science have given up on the quest for a silver bullet to put an end to all pseudoscience, as such a neat formal criterion to separate good science from its contenders has proven elusive. In the literature on critical thinking and in some philosophical quarters, however, this search for silver bullets lives on in the taxonomies of fallacies. The attractive idea is to have a handy list of abstract definitions or argumentation schemes, on the basis of which one (...) can identify bad or invalid types of reasoning, abstracting away from the specific content and dialectical context. Such shortcuts for debunking arguments are tempting, but alas, the promise is hardly if ever fulfilled. Different strands of research on the pragmatics of argumentation, probabilistic reasoning and ecological rationality have shown that almost every known type of fallacy is a close neighbor to sound inferences or acceptable moves in a debate. Nonetheless, the kernel idea of a fallacy as an erroneous type of argument is still retained by most authors. We outline a destructive dilemma we refer to as the Fallacy Fork: on the one hand, if fallacies are construed as demonstrably invalid form of reasoning, then they have very limited applicability in real life. On the other hand, if our definitions of fallacies are sophisticated enough to capture real-life complexities, they can no longer be held up as an effective tool for discriminating good and bad forms of reasoning. As we bring our schematic “fallacies” in touch with reality, we seem to lose grip on normative questions. Even approaches that do not rely on argumentation schemes to identify fallacies fail to escape the Fallacy Fork, and run up against their own version of it. (shrink)

Even though public awareness about privacy risks in the Internet is increasing, in the evolution of the Internet to the Internet of Things these risks are likely to become more relevant due to the large amount of data collected and processed by the “Things”. The business drivers for exploring ways to monetize such data are one of the challenges identified in this paper for the protection of Privacy in the IoT. Beyond the protection of privacy, this paper highlights the need (...) for new approaches, which grant a more active role to the users of the IoT and which address other potential issues such as the Digital Divide or safety risks. A key facet in ethical design is the transparency of the technology and services in how that technology handles data, as well as providing choice for the user. This paper presents a new approach for users’ interaction with the IoT, which is based on the concept of Ethical Design implemented through a policy-based framework. In the proposed framework, users are provided with wider controls over personal data or the IoT services by selecting specific sets of policies, which can be tailored according to users’ capabilities and to the contexts where they operate. The potential deployment of the framework in a typical IoT context is described with the identification of the main stakeholders and the processes that should be put in place. (shrink)

I has been argued, foremost by David Wiggins, that artefact kinds are defined in a way that makes the existence and persistence of their members, say clocks, dependent on human pragmatic considerations. This supposedly sets artefact kinds apart from natural kinds of things, say tigers, for which some inherent principle determines their existence and persistence. Consequently, artefact kinds would not be acceptable as real kinds in the sense that natural kinds of things are real, i.e. included in the ‘furniture of (...) the universe’. I argue against this position that the stated differences between natural kinds and artefact kinds are not as categorical as claimed. Natural kinds are to some extent similarly subject to ‘ontological vagueness’. The argument for the ‘overall’ indeterminateness of artefact kinds depends largely on their conception as functional kinds. I show that if artefact kinds are conceived as historical subkinds of structural kinds, they can be considered as in relevant respects similar to natural kinds of things, and therefore ontologically on a par with them. The combination of historical and structural determination is one, moreover, that we are well acquainted with for some paradigmatically real kinds of natural things: biological organisms. (shrink)

I defend the truth of the principle of methodological individualism in the social sciences. I do so by criticizing mistaken ideas about the relation between individual people and social entities held by earlier defenders of the principle. I argue, first, that social science is committed to the intentional stance; the domain of social science, therefore, coincides with the domain of intentionally described human action. Second, I argue that social entitites are theoretical terms, but quite different from the entities used in (...) the natural sciences to explain our empirical evidence. Social entities are conventional and open-ended constructions, the applications of which is a matter of judgment, not of discovery. The terms in which these social entities are constructed are the beliefs, expectations and desires, and the corresponding actions of individual people. The relation between the social and the individual 'levels' differs fundamentally from that between, say, the cellular and the molecular in biology. Third, I claim that methodological individualism does not amount to a reduction of social science to psychology; rather, the science of psychology should be divided. Intentional psychology forms in tandom with the analysis of social institutions, unitary psycho-social science; cognitive psychology tries to explain how the brain works and especially how the intentional stance is applicable to human behavior. (shrink)

While Cusanus’ literary sources for his engagement with Islam have been closely studied, questions about possible personal encounters with Muslims, and the role of non-literary sources in developing his concept of interreligious dialogue, remain largely unaddressed. This paper presents original archival research to identify the only person whom Cusanus mentions in the Cribratio Alkorani by name as an oral source about Muslim beliefs – an Italian merchant active in Constantinople at the time of Cusanus’ visit in 1437. In doing so, (...) it casts new light on Cusanus’ treatises on Islam and on his interaction with Muslims. (shrink)

In many logics dealing with information one needs to make statements not only about cognitive states, but also about transitions between them. In this paper we analyze a dynamic modal logic that has been designed with this purpose in mind. On top of an abstract information ordering on states it has instructions to move forward or backward along this ordering, to states where a certain assertion holds or fails, while it also allows combinations of such instructions by means of operations (...) from relation algebra. In addition, the logic has devices for expressing whether in a given state a certain instruction can be carried out, and whether that state can be arrived at by carrying out a certain instruction. (shrink)

In Nicholas Wolterstorff’s ‘Toleration, Justice and Dignity’, he argues for tolerance between religious traditions on the basis of human dignity. In this response to his paper, I argue that a general philosophical argument from human dignity will at best lead to indifference or mere praise, but not true tolerance. In the second part of the paper, I offer a sketch of a distinctly Christian way of arguing for tolerance towards adherents of other religions, namely on the basis of the insight (...) that Christianity itself is a hybrid tradition. (shrink)

The scientific study of living organisms is permeated by machine and design metaphors. Genes are thought of as the ‘‘blueprint’’ of an organism, organisms are ‘‘reverse engineered’’ to discover their functionality, and living cells are compared to biochemical factories, complete with assembly lines, transport systems, messenger circuits, etc. Although the notion of design is indispensable to think about adaptations, and engineering analogies have considerable heuristic value (e.g., optimality assumptions), we argue they are limited in several important respects. In particular, the (...) analogy with human-made machines falters when we move down to the level of molecular biology and genetics. Living organisms are far more messy and less transparent than human-made machines. Notoriously, evolution is an opportunistic tinkerer, blindly stumbling on ‘‘designs’’ that no sensible engineer would come up with. Despite impressive technological innovation, the prospect of artificially designing new life forms from scratch has proven more difficult than the superficial analogy with ‘‘programming’’ the right ‘‘software’’ would suggest. The idea of applying straightforward engineering approaches to living systems and their genomes— isolating functional components, designing new parts from scratch, recombining and assembling them into novel life forms—pushes the analogy with human artifacts beyond its limits. In the absence of a one-to-one correspondence between genotype and phenotype, there is no straightforward way to implement novel biological functions and design new life forms. Both the developmental complexity of gene expression and the multifarious interactions of genes and environments are serious obstacles for ‘‘engineering’’ a particular phenotype. The problem of reverse-engineering a desired phenotype to its genetic ‘‘instructions’’ is probably intractable for any but the most simple phenotypes. Recent developments in the field of bio-engineering and synthetic biology reflect these limitations. Instead of genetically engineering a desired trait from scratch, as the machine/engineering metaphor promises, researchers are making greater strides by co-opting natural selection to ‘‘search’’ for a suitable genotype, or by borrowing and recombining genetic material from extant life forms. (shrink)