This paper develops a theory of analog representation. We first argue that the mark of the analog is to be found in the nature of a representational system’s interpretation function, rather than in its vehicles or contents alone. We then develop the rulebound structure theory of analog representation, according to which analog systems are those that use interpretive rules to map syntactic structural features onto semantic structural features. The theory involves three degree-theoretic measures that capture three independent ways in which (...) a system can be more or less analog. We explain how our theory improves upon prior accounts of analog representation, provides plausible diagnoses for novel challenge cases, extends to hybrid systems that are partially analog and partially symbolic, and accounts for some of the advantages and disadvantages of representing analogically versus symbolically. (shrink)

What does 'if' mean? Timothy Williamson presents a controversial new approach to understanding conditional thinking, which is central to human cognitive life. He argues that in using 'if' we rely on psychological heuristics, fast and frugal methods which can lead us to trust faulty data and prematurely reject simple theories.

When I take off my glasses, the world looks blurred. When I put them back on, it looks sharpedged. I do not think that the world really was blurred; I know that what changed was my relation to the distant physical objects ahead, not those objects themselves. I am more inclined to believe that the world really is and was sharp-edged. Is that belief any more reasonable than the belief that the world really is and was blurred? I see more (...) accurately with my glasses on than off, so visual appearances when they are on have some cognitive priority over visual appearances when they are off. If I must choose which kind of visual appearance to take at face value, I will choose the sharp-edged look. But what should I think when I see a mist, which looks very blurred however well I am seeing? Indeed, why choose to take any of the looks at face value? Why not regard all the choices as illegitimate projections of ways of seeing the world onto the world itself? (shrink)

Since our visual perception of physical things essentially involves our identifying objects by their colours, any theory of visual perception must contain some account of the colours of things. The central problem with colour has to do with relating our normal, everyday colour perceptions to what science, i.e. physics, teaches us about physical objects and their qualities. Although we perceive colours as categorical surface properties of things, colour perceptions are explained by introducing physical properties like reflectance profiles or dispositions to (...) cause certain experiences in normal human perceivers. Hence, it seems as if colours as they are experienced by us have no place in the physical world, because they are fundamentally different from the properties which we ascribe to physical objects in scientific accounts of colour perceptions. This special issue on perspectives on colour perception presents new suggestions to solve to this major problem. (shrink)

Operational epistemology is, to a first approximation, the attempt to provide cognitive rules such that one is in principle always in a position to know whether one is complying with them. In Knowledge and its Limits, I argue that the only such rules are trivial ones. In this paper, I generalize the argument in several ways to more thoroughly probabilistic settings, in order to show that it does not merely demonstrate some oddity of the folk epistemological conception of knowledge. Some (...) of the generalizations involve a formal semantic framework for treating epistemic probabilities of epistemic probabilities and expectations of expectations. The upshot is that operational epistemology cannot work, and that knowledge-based epistemology has the right characteristics to avoid its problems. (shrink)

Anne Conway and Maria W. Stewart are quietly revolutionary philosophers who provide valuable insights into the nature of suffering and its relation to justice. Conway scholars have claimed that she offers a theodicy, trying to reconcile suffering with the existence of a just God. However, this does not make sense of her arguments or audience. Instead, we should see her as a theoretician of the role of suffering in a person's life. Moving beyond the personal, Stewart's emphasis on social sources (...) of suffering leads her to posit a vision for bringing about a more just society in the near term that is absent in Conway. Both philosophers provide fascinating insight into how to theorize suffering and justice, including the role of unity in a just society. (shrink)

This chapter aims to attempt no more than to make some informal and unsystematic remarks on the transformation of analytic philosophy. It deals with a few sketchy remarks on the historiography of recent analytic philosophy. Writing in 1981, David Lewis described “a reasonable goal for a philosopher” as bringing one’s opinions into stable equilibrium. A natural comparison is between Lewis’s Quinean or at least post‐Quinean methodology and the methodology of Peter Strawson, Quine’s leading opponent from the tradition of ordinary language (...) philosophy. Analytic epistemology provides a good case study of the philosophical application of Gricean pragmatics outside the philosophy of language. On Michael Dummett picture of the history of philosophy, Descartes had made epistemology first philosophy, the engine for the rest of philosophy, and then Frege had replaced epistemology by the philosophy of language as first philosophy. The chapter suggests that philosophy sometimes already uses an abductive methodology and ought to use it more in the future. (shrink)

According to the Fragmentation Analysis, epistemic akrasia is a state of conflict between beliefs formed by the linguistic and non-linguistic belief-formation systems, and epistemic akrasia is irrational because it is a state of conflict between beliefs so formed. I argue that there are cases of higher-order epistemic akrasia, where both beliefs are formed by the linguistic belief-formation system. Because the Fragmentation Analysis cannot accommodate this possibility, the Fragmentation Analysis is incorrect. I consider three objections to the possibility of higher-order epistemic (...) akrasia. Along the way, I offer a revision of the Fragmentation Analysis that can allow for the possibility of higher-order akrasia while avoiding the problems I point out for the original view. (shrink)

Corporate social responsibility has become of great interest to both researchers and practitioners alike with much discussion on whether the costs outweigh the performance implications. CSR has become a firm strategic tool as firms recognize that the customer value proposition and CSR is integrated with the focus on how to differentiate the firm from the view of the customer. We utilized market orientation theory as our foundation for our research as it explains how organizations adapt to their customer environment to (...) develop competitive advantages. With the current customer focus on CSR, MO assists the field in identifying a possible firm differentiation. Our research found that firms that ranked high on CSR correlated positively to performance. We also found our theoretically developed constructs of firm customer orientation and firm market orientation correlated with the firm adopting CSR. The results also indicated that CSR positively mediates CO and MO to firm performance. As past research had mixed results over the direct relation of MO to performance, our research suggests that CSR may be the missing variable to explain the MO/performance relationship. (shrink)

Audi explains what he means by ‘normative’ in the case of belief: cognitive (epistemic) normativity is a matter of what ought to be believed, where the force of the “ought” is in part to attribute liability to criticism and negative (disapproving) attitudes toward the person(s) in question.

Alex Oliver and Timothy Smiley provide a new account of plural logic. They argue that there is such a thing as genuinely plural denotation in logic, and expound a framework of ideas that includes the distinction between distributive and collective predicates, the theory of plural descriptions, multivalued functions, and lists.

Medical practice is ideally based on robust, relevant research. However, the lack of disease-modifying treatments for Alzheimer’s disease has motivated “innovative practice” to improve patients’ well-being despite insufficient evidence for the regular use of such interventions in health systems treating millions of patients. Innovative or new non-validated practice poses at least three distinct ethical questions: first, about the responsible application of new non-validated practice to individual patients ; second, about the way in which data from new non-validated practice are communicated (...) via the scientific and lay press ; and third, about the prospect of making new non-validated interventions widely available before more definitive testing. We argue that the authors of metabolic enhancement protocols for Alzheimer’s disease have overstated the evidence in favor of these interventions within the scientific and lay press, failing to communicate weaknesses in their data and uncertainty about their conclusions. Such unmeasured language may create false hope, cause financial harm, undermine informed consent, and frustrate the production of generalizable knowledge necessary to face the societal problems posed by this devastating disease. We therefore offer more stringent guidelines for responsible innovation in the treatment of Alzheimer’s disease. (shrink)

Four Views on Christian Metaphysics presents four prominent views held among Christians today on the major questions in philosophical metaphysics. What is the nature of existence itself? What is it for something to exist? What are universals? What is the soul? How do these things relate to God, in light of special and general revelation? The four Christian perspectives presented in this book are: Platonism, Aristotelianism, idealism, and postmodernism. The purpose of this book is to help Christians think deeply and (...) carefully about a Christian view of the ultimate nature of reality and our place in it. (shrink)

Starting with the Greeks, philosophers have been prone to demand certainty in their subject. As we know, this was not a local demand; the prevailing view was that all knowledge, scientific as well as philosophic, must be certain. The demand for philosophic certainty was thus the result of a more general view about knowledge and, equally important, the conviction that philosophy and science are one or, at least, continuous. Eventually, however, although there was agreement on the ideal, disagreement on virtually (...) everything else of importance bred skepticism about philosophic knowledge itself. The heirs to this skepticism in the present century were the logical positivists. -/- As they saw the matter, philosophy is discontinuous with science and, once shorn of its nonsense, contains only logical analyses or clarifications of meanings and not, as had been thought, claims about real existences. Philosophic certainty was retained in principle, although, given the controversial nature of their other claims, it was not emphasized. Science also came down a notch or two. The certainty of mathematics was reaffirmed, but it too was relegated to the realm of meanings; on the other hand, empirical science, since it rests on observation and experiment, was demoted to the level of high probability. -/- In all, the boldness and rigor of the positivist position are unmatched in the present century. Nevertheless, I think it is mistaken. In the present paper, I will argue that, because of difficulties with verificationism and the analytic-synthetic distinction, there is no reason to think that philosophic statements differ in kind from factual claims. The result, I think, is a partial vindication of the long-standing conception that philosophy is continuous with science. As for the other feature of the traditional view of philosophy, viz. certainty, I shall say little. However, if the account I defend here is correct, it should be clear that certainty in philosophy is unattainable. (shrink)

We have been asked to consider the feasibility of piloting a Citizens’ Basic Income : a basic, unconditional, universal, individual, regular payment that would replace aspects of social security and be introduced alongside changes to taxes. Piloting and evaluating a CBI as a Cluster Randomized Control Trial raises the question of whether intervention and comparison groups would be in equipoise, and thus whether randomization would be ethical. We believe that most researchers would accept that additional income, or reduced conditions on (...) receiving income would be likely to improve health, especially at lower income levels. However, there are genuine uncertainties about the impacts on other outcomes, and CBI as a mechanism of providing income. There is also less consensus amongst civil servants and politicians about the impacts on health, and substantial disagreement about whether these would outweigh other impacts. We believe that an RCT is ethical because of these uncertainties. We also argue that the principle of equipoise should apply to randomized and non-randomized trials; that randomization is a fairer means of allocating to intervention and comparison groups; and that there is an ethical case for experimentation to generate higher-quality evidence for policymaking that may otherwise do harm. (shrink)

The ArgumentHistorians of science naturally tend to express interest in other forms of intellectual activity only when these intersect with science. This tendncy has produced a number of enlightening studies of what happens when science and (for instance) law or theology come into contact, but little by way of how science enters into the calculations and social status of such forms of knowledge after the conjuction has passed. Recent work in the sociology of professions, in contrast, has focused attention precisely (...) on those moments when the expert knowledge produced by different group doesnotoverlap. This has been the contribution of Andrew Abbortt's theory of “jurisdictional boundaries” between competing professions. The case of Victorian actuaries who worked hard to maintain unique intellectual claims in the competitive life insurance industry while maintainiing strong social connections and overlaps in knowledge with organized science, challenges the way both historians of science and sociologists of professions view contending knowledge claims. By observing what motivated actuaries to forge an alliance with men of science in the 1820s, then tracing their gradual recognition of a need to distance themselves from certain of the “scientific” values that had earlier informed their collective identity, it is possible to make sense of connections as well as disconnections between science and other forms of knowledge. A history of quantification from the actuaries' perspective, in other words, allows us to view science bothasandincontext. (shrink)

In this chapter, we begin with a discussion of motivation itself, and use that discussion to sketch four possible theories of distinctively moral motivation: caricature versions of familiar instrumentalist, cognitivist, sentimentalist, and personalist theories about morally worthy motivation. To test these theories, we turn to a wealth of scientific, particularly neuroscientific, evidence. Our conclusions are that (1) although the scientific evidence does not at present mandate a unique philosophical conclusion, it does present formidable obstacles to a number of popular philosophical (...) approaches, and (2) theories of morally worthy motivation that best fit the current scientific picture are ones that owe much more to Hume or Aristotle than to Kant. (shrink)

With _Trilogy of Resistance_, the political philosopher Antonio Negri extends his intervention in contemporary politics and culture into a new medium: drama. The three plays collected for the first time in this volume dramatize the central concepts of the innovative and influential thought he has articulated in his best-selling books _Empire_ and _Multitude_, coauthored with Michael Hardt. In the tradition of Bertolt Brecht and Heiner Müller, Negri’s political dramas are designed to provoke debate around the fundamental questions they raise about (...) resistance, violence, and tyranny. In _Swarm_, the protagonist searches for an effective mode of activism; with the help of a Greek-style chorus, she tries on different roles, from the suicide bomber and party apparatchik to the multitude. _The Bent Man_, set in fascist Italy, focuses on a woodcutter who resists fascism by bending himself in two and using his own now-twisted body as a weapon against war. In _Cithaeron_, perhaps the most audacious of the three plays, Negri reworks Euripides’s _Bacchae_ to explore the circumstances that would compel a diverse and creative community to withdraw from both the despotic government that constrains it and the traditional family relationships that reinforce that despotism. First published in France in 2009 and featuring an introduction by Negri, _Trilogy of Resistance_ provides a direct and passionate distillation of Negri’s concepts and offers insights into one of the most important projects in political philosophy currently under way, as well as a timely reminder of the power of theater to effectively dramatize complex and challenging ideas. (shrink)

The formal representation of the strength of witness testimony has been historically tied to a formula — proposed by Condorcet — that uses a factor representing the reliability of an individual witness. This approach encourages a false dilemma between hyper-scepticism about testimony, especially to extraordinary events such as miracles, and an overly sanguine estimate of reliability based on insufficiently detailed evidence. Because Condorcet’s formula does not have the resources for representing numerous epistemically relevant details in the unique situation in which (...) testimony is given, many late 19th century thinkers like Venn turned away from the probabilistic analysis of testimony altogether. But a more nuanced approach using Bayes factors provides a better, more flexible, formalism for representing the evidential force of testimony. (shrink)

Several visual and emotional processes reflect similar underlying patterns of cortical activation. Characteristic individual perceptual style was measured by lateral attentional errors in a standard visual line-bisecting task. The direction of error indicates a predominance of activation in the contralateral prefrontal cortex. Individual differences in mood were measured by the self-endorsement of emotional adjectives. A total of 27 right-handed adults responded to the trait version of the Positive and Negative Affect Schedule (PANAS). As predicted, rightward errors in visual line bisecting (...) correlated positively and significantly with the Positive Affect subscale. The scale adjectives determined and strong had significant correlations with the visual bisecting measure. The negative affect subscale was correlated with neither the line bisecting measure nor the positive subscale. An extension from trait to state measures tested the self-description of current affect using related synonyms and antonyms in a subset of 22 of the participants. Active, dominant, mighty, powerful, and strong were significantly associated with rightward bisecting errors, whereas passive and cooperative were correlated with errors in the opposite direction. The results were incompatible with the valence model (positive-negative), direction model (approach-withdrawal), and movement model (approach-resistance) of the lateral prefrontal substrate of emotion. The action tendency model (active approach-passive yielding) was supported. (shrink)

Within the context of a critique of volitionism, Trying Without Willing articulates a new philosophy of the mind and its role in intentional action, based on the notion of de re intentionality. This book will be of interest to anyone seriously interested in the philosophy of mind, the nature of intentional action and mental causation, or the influence of Cartesianism in contemporary analytic philosophy.

The problem St. Augustine confronts in the Confessions is fundamentally one of rhetoric: God should be singularly desirable, yet rhetoric seems necessary to motivate our pursuit of him. Religion participates in the relative marketplace of rhetoric, where ideals need to be authorized because they lack a self-sufficient rationale. In his early encounters with Cicero and the Platonists, Augustine struggles to renounce all such partial ideals in order to pursue philosophical truth unequivocally. Yet the refusal of rhetoric is, paradoxically, another willed (...) ideal authorized by its own rhetoric. Augustine ultimately escapes rhetoric in the conversion scene by demonstrating his inescapable subjection to it; in doing so, he surrenders his will in such a way as to permit God's grace to operate through him. His conversion ultimately results from this inverted humiliation, which forces Augustine to abdicate his ascetic efforts and pretensions. (shrink)

Explicitly utopian novels are relatively uncommon in twentieth-century Scottish fiction, perhaps due to a prevailing conception of Scottish literature as inherently peripheral; for many critics and authors, Scotland is already a place outside the mainstream of political and historical narrative. Utopian themes and imagery, however, have frequently been used by Scottish writers to address the role of religious experience in contemporary life. In novels by Robin Jenkins, Neil M. Gunn, Alasdair Gray, and Iain M. Banks, the utopian form presents the (...) possibility of abandoning traditional religious practices in favor of direct discourse with the divine. Even as they appear to repudiate organized religion, these novels also demonstrate the continued relevance of God and myth. Whether in outright science fiction such as Banks’s Culture series and portions of Gray’s “Lanark,” classical utopias such as Gunn’s “The Green Isle of the Great Deep,” or ostensibly realist novels such as Jenkins’s “The Missionaries,” utopian imagery is used to examine what role the divine might have in a secular society. These Scottish utopias offer a place to discuss the relationships between individuals, communities, and nations and how these relationships are reconstituted in a modernity where God is known only as absence. (shrink)

I offer examples of what Catholic liturgical law regards as liturgical abuses. I provide examples of practices that are not formal abuses but raise questions of clericalism, noting that clericalism has contributed to the Catholic sex abuse crisis. I discuss (a) recourse to the tabernacle for distribution of Communion at Mass; (b) reserving one chalice at Mass for the exclusive use of the presider; (c) the installation Mass of Archbishop Nelson Pérez of Philadelphia; and (d) a Mass in Buffalo in (...) the wake of the resignation of then-Bishop Richard Malone. The paper concludes with reflections on what it means to offer worship to God that is necessarily imperfect. (shrink)