“[A]ny truly neutral state,” writes George Sher in this important and timely new book, “must needlessly cut its citizens off from important goods”. For that reason, he argues, liberal neutrality, the view that government must remain neutral between competing conceptions of the good life, is indefensible. There is, moreover, a uniquely best, rationally defensible conception of the good life—not a subjective view that insists that all value depends on satisfying actual or hypothetical desires, but an objective view that recognizes that (...) some value depends on the realization of certain broad capacities that humans share. However, this objective or perfectionist view, as Sher calls it, is not communitarian, since it rejects the idea that society’s history or conventions must ratify its values or that civic participation or engagement in common projects must be among its recommendations. It is a liberal perfectionism, since it requires procedural and substantive liberal rights and recognizes that there are many different ways of realizing the human capacities whose exercise generates value. Hence, although government may legitimately promote the good, “the ability to promote the good is not all-or-nothing”. (shrink)

When the international community recognizes political entities as states, it confers upon them the rights and powers of statehood. These include the right to territorial integrity, the right to noninterference in their internal affairs, the power to make treaties, and the right to enforce legal rules on those within their territory. According to the justice-based account of recognition, political entities ought to be recognized as states if and only if they satisfy minimal requirements of internal and external justice. According to (...) the pragmatic account, they ought to be recognized as states if and only if cooperating with them and giving them international support would be the best means of achieving peace and justice among and within them—that is, global peace and justice—whether or not they themselves currently satisfy minimal requirements of internal and external justice. (shrink)

This book offers a social contract argument for a theory of international recognition—a normative theory of the criteria that states and international bodies should use to recognize political entities as member states of the international community.

John Rawls produced two versions of the law of peoples: an article, published in 1993, and a book, published in 1999. Both versions defend basic human rights as a minimum requirement of a just law of peoples. However, in an apparent effort to strengthen his defense of this requirement, the argument changed. This paper examines the apparent difficulties that forced the changes and maintains that they still do not succeed in justifying basic human rights. The source of the difficulty, I (...) argue, is Rawls’s reluctance to impose liberal values on nonliberal societies, and the imposition of such values, I suggest, is unavoidable if basic human rights are to be justified. Hence, if our best attempts to justify basic human rights ultimately show that appeals to liberal values are unavoidable, then we should regard such appeals as no more of an imposition than the expectation that all societies must protect basic human rights. Even more significantly, if such appeals justify liberal freedoms that go beyond basic human rights, then arguments in support of basic human rights would also justify international efforts to advance further liberal reforms within nonliberal societies. (shrink)

It is argued that a number of important, and seemingly disparate, types of representation are species of a single relation, here called structural representation, that can be described in detail and studied in a way that is of considerable philosophical interest. A structural representation depends on the existence of a common structure between a representation and that which it represents, and it is important because it allows us to reason directly about the representation in order to draw conclusions about the (...) phenomenon that it depicts. The present goal is to give a general and precise account of structural representation, then to use that account to illuminate several problems of current philosophical interest — including some that do not initially seem to involve representation at all. In particular, it is argued that ontological reductions (like that of the natural numbers to sets), compositional accounts of semantics, several important sorts of mental representation, and (perhaps) possible worlds semantics for intensional logics are all species of structural representation and are fruitfully studied in the framework developed here. (shrink)

The past 50 years have seen an accumulation of evidence suggesting that associative learning depends on high-level cognitive processes that give rise to propositional knowledge. Yet, many learning theorists maintain a belief in a learning mechanism in which links between mental representations are formed automatically. We characterize and highlight the differences between the propositional and link approaches, and review the relevant empirical evidence. We conclude that learning is the consequence of propositional reasoning processes that cooperate with the unconscious processes involved (...) in memory retrieval and perception. We argue that this new conceptual framework allows many of the important recent advances in associative learning research to be retained, but recast in a model that provides a firmer foundation for both immediate application and future research. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to present a new argument against so-called fitting attitude analyses of intrinsic value, according to which, roughly, for something to be intrinsically good is for there to be reasons to want it for its own sake. The argument is indirect. First, I submit that advocates of a fitting-attitude analysis of value should, for the sake of theoretical unity, also endorse a fitting-attitude analysis of a closely related but distinct concept: the concept of intrinsic value (...) for a person, i.e., the concept of welfare. Then I argue directly against fitting-attitude analyses of welfare. This argument, which is the focus of the paper, is based on the idea that whereas whether an event is good or bad for a person doesn’t change over time, the attitudes there is reason to have towards such an event can change over time. Therefore, one cannot explain the former in terms of the latter, as fitting-attitude analyses of welfare attempt to do. (shrink)

There is now a bewildering array of literature about trust, written from a variety of disciplinary orientations.2 However, much of the literature skirts around the fact that trust is closely tied to some ethical judgements. When we discuss trust and trustworthiness, our language spans the gap between fact and value, and that is sometimes forgotten when emphasis is given to the instrumental benefits of trust and trustworthiness. It is important to remember that sometimes trust is good not as a means (...) to an end, but as something that is intrinsically important. Similarly, trustworthiness is inherently part of being a good human being, and focussing on trustworthiness as a means can impede attaining it either as an end or a means. A ‘balanced scorecard’ approach to evaluating organisational performance needs to take account of trust and trustworthiness as components of performance, as something of inherent value, not just as means to it. Further, in many contexts the assessments we make in coming to decisions require us to make judgements about trust and trustworthiness as a basic consideration, without coming to prior judgements about distinct ‘factual’ issues. This emerges in workplace negotiation, when negotiators have to make decisions about how frank and open to be with other parties. (shrink)

What interferes with learning and performing skills well? The Zhuāngzǐ story of the ferryman who steers a sampan through treacherous deeps with preternatural skill highlights one crucial factor: anxiety. Managing or eliminating anxiety is a pivotal step in acquiring and performing skills and, the discursive context of the story suggests, in living a flourishing life. To fare well, in life as in boat-handling, we must learn to forget the deeps and row.

"Feminism, Theory and the Politics of Difference" looks at the question of difference across the full spectrum of feminist theory from liberal, radical, lesbian ...

Recent neo-Humean theories of laws of nature have placed substantial emphasis on the characteristic epistemic roles played by laws in scientific practice. In particular, these theories seek to understand laws in terms of their optimal predictive utility to creatures in our epistemic situation. In contrast to other approaches, this view has the distinct advantage that it is able to account for a number of pervasive features possessed by putative actual laws of nature. However, it also faces some unique challenges. First, (...) since the view tries to characterize the laws in terms of their predictive utility, any respects in which putative actual laws are sub-optimally predictively useful are inherently problematic. Such "predictive infelicities" can easily be found among our best physical theories. Second, in tying the laws to our epistemic situation, neo-Humeanism raises the possibility that by changing our epistemic situation, we can change the laws themselves, though it is hard to believe that we have such influence over the laws. This paper aims to address both of these challenges, first by presenting a variety of strategies for explaining away predictive infelicities, and then by developing a version of Lewis's "rigidification" strategy to preclude the possibility of our changing the laws. (shrink)

Shelly Kagan notices in a recent, influential paper how philosophers of well-being tend to neglect ill-being—the part of the theory of well-being that tells us what is bad in itself for subjects—and explains why we need to give it more attention. This paper does its part by addressing the question, If desire satisfaction is good, what is the corresponding bad? The two most discussed ill-being options for theories on which desire satisfaction is a basic good are the Frustration View and (...) the Aversion View. I aim to show that the Frustration View is more plausible than Kagan and others think; to introduce and evaluate two additional desire-oriented theories of ill-being worth considering, the Pluralist View and the Deflationary View; and to present a new line of argument for the Aversion View. (shrink)

This book provides a systematic study of three foundational issues in the semantics of natural language that have been relatively neglected in the past few decades. focuses on the formal characterization of intensions, the nature of an adequate type system for natural language semantics, and the formal power of the semantic representation language proposes a theory that offers a promising framework for developing a computational semantic system sufficiently expressive to capture the properties of natural language meaning while remaining computationally tractable (...) written by two leading researchers and of interest to students and researchers in formal semantics, computational linguistics, logic, artificial intelligence, and the philosophy of language. (shrink)

The “School of Names” ming jia ) is the traditional Chinese label for a diverse group of Warring States (479-221 B.C.) thinkers who shared an interest in language, disputation, and metaphysics. They were notorious for logic-chopping, purportedly idle conceptual puzzles, and paradoxes such as “Today go to Yue but arrive yesterday” and “A white horse is not a horse.” Because reflection on language in ancient China centered on “names”.

Educational institutions rely on academic citizenship behaviors to construct knowledge in a responsible manner. However, they often struggle to contain the unlawful reuse of knowledge by some learning communities. This study draws upon secondary data from two televised episodes describing contract cheating practices prevalent among international student communities. Against this background, we have investigated emergent teaching and learning structures that have been extended to formal and informal spaces with the use of mediating technologies. Learners’ interactions in formal spaces are influenced (...) by ongoing informal social experiences within a shared cultural context to influence learners’ agency. Building upon existing theories, we have developed an analytical lens to understand the rationale behind cheating behaviors. Citizenship behaviors are based on individual and collective perceptions of what constitutes as acceptable or unacceptable behavior. That is, learners who are low in motivation and are less engaged with learning may collude; more so, if cheating is not condemned by members belonging to their informal social spaces. Our analytical lens describes institutional, cultural, technological, social and behavioral contexts that influence learner agency. (shrink)

Nanotechnologies are enabling technologies which rely on the manipulation of matter on the scale of billionths of a metre. It has been argued that scientific uncertainties surrounding nanotechnologies and the inability of regulatory agencies to keep up with industry developments mean that voluntary regulation will play a part in the development of nanotechnologies. The development of technological applications based on nanoscale science is now increasingly seen as a potential test case for new models of regulation based on future-oriented responsibility, lifecycle (...) risk management, and upstream public engagement. This article outlines findings from a project undertaken in 2008–2009 for the UK Government’s Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) by BRASS at Cardiff University, involving an in-depth survey both of current corporate social responsibility (CSR) reporting in the UK nanotechnologies industry, and of attitudes to particular stakeholder issues within the industry. The article analyses the results to give an account of the nature of corporate social performance (CSP) within the industry, together with the particular model of CSR operating therein (‘do no harm’ versus ‘positive social force’). It is argued that the nature of emerging technologies requires businesses to adopt particular visions of CSR in order to address stakeholder issues, and that the nanotechnologies industry presents specific obstacles and opportunities in this regard. (shrink)

Mobile phone-based applications (apps) can promote faster targeted actions to control COVID-19. However, digital contact tracing systems raise concerns about data security, system effectiveness, and their potential to normalise privacy-invasive surveillance technologies. In the absence of mandates, public uptake depends on the acceptability and perceived legitimacy of using technologies that log interactions between individuals to build public health capacity. We report on six online deliberative workshops convened in New South Wales to consider the appropriateness of using the COVIDSafe app to (...) enhance Australian contact tracing systems. All groups took the position (by majority) that the protections enacted in the app design and supporting legislation were appropriate. This support is contingent on several system attributes including: the voluntariness of the COVIDSafe app; that the system relies on proximity rather than location tracking; and, that data access is restricted to local public health practitioners undertaking contact tracing. Despite sustained scepticism in media coverage, there was an underlying willingness to trust Australian governing institutions such that in principle acceptance of the new contact tracing technology was easy to obtain. However, tensions between the need to prove system effectiveness through operational transparency and requirements for privacy protections could be limiting public uptake. Our study shows that informed citizens are willing to trade their privacy for common goods such as COVID-19 suppression. But low case numbers and cautionary public discourses can make trustworthiness difficult to establish because some will only do so when it can be demonstrated that the benefits justify the costs to individuals. (shrink)

Articulate language is a form of communication unique to humans. Over time, a spectrum of researchers has proposed various frameworks attempting to explain the evolutionary acquisition of this distinctive human attribute, some deploring the apparent lack of direct evidence elucidating the phenomenon, whilst others have pointed to the contributions of palaeoanthropology, the social brain hypothesis and the fact that even amongst contemporary humans, social group sizes reflect brain size. Theologians have traditionally ignored evolutionary insights as an explanatory paradigm for the (...) origin of humankind. However, an increasing number are, of late, contributing to a worldview of humanity which accommodates both the epistemological realities of evolutionary biology as well as insights from theology. This includes reviewing and assessing the origins of articulate language and the physiological attributes necessary for its development. It is in this sense that the evolution of language is relevant from a theological perspective. The association between mental capacity and articulate language, already noted by Darwin, is relevant in explaining the larger group sizes found amongst humans, as is the incipient role played by the evolution of laughter in triggering the neuroendocrine system promoting bonding, to the eventual development of articulate language. Our aim is to review a selection of contemporary perspectives on the evolution of language, amongst others, reasons for the ease with which young children acquire language competency, and whether we may be hardwired for language from birth. Further reading is suggested in the footnotes.Contribution: This article is part of a special collection reflecting on the evolutionary building blocks of our past, present and future. It is based on historical thought and contemporary research with regards to the evolutionary emergence of language. It fits well with the intersectional and trans-disciplinary nature of this collection and journal. (shrink)

To have a fully integrated understanding of neurobiological systems, we must address two fundamental questions: 1. What do brains do (what is their function)? and 2. How do brains do whatever it is that they do (how is that function implemented)? I begin by arguing that these questions are necessarily inter-related. Thus, addressing one without consideration of an answer to the other, as is often done, is a mistake. I then describe what I take to be the best available approach (...) to addressing both questions. Specifically, to address 2, I adopt the Neural Engineering Framework (NEF) of Eliasmith & Anderson [Neural engineering: Computation representation and dynamics in neurobiological systems. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003] which identifies implementational principles for neural models. To address 1, I suggest that adopting statistical modeling methods for perception and action will be functionally sufficient for capturing biological behavior. I show how these two answers will be mutually constraining, since the process of model selection for the statistical method in this approach can be informed by known anatomical and physiological properties of the brain, captured by the NEF. Similarly, the application of the NEF must be informed by functional hypotheses, captured by the statistical modeling approach. (shrink)

This essay examines the theory of ritual propriety presented in the Xúnzǐ and criticisms of Xunzi-like views found in the classical Daoist anthology Zhuāngzǐ. To highlight the respects in which the Zhuāngzǐ can be read as posing a critical response to a Xunzian view of ritual propriety, the essay juxtaposes the two texts' views of language, since Xunzi's theory of ritual propriety is intertwined with his theory of language. I argue that a Zhuangist critique of the presuppositions of Xunzi's stance (...) on language also undermines his stance on ritual propriety. Xunzi contends that state promulgation of anelaborate code of ritual propriety is a key to good social order (zhi) and that state regulation of language is a key to smooth communication and thus also good order. The Zhuāngzǐ provides grounds for doubting both contentions. Claiming that ritual propriety causally produces social order is analogous to claiming that grammar causally produces smooth linguistic communication, when in fact it is more likely our ability to communicate that allows us to develop shared rules of grammar. Humans have fundamental social and communicative capacities that undergird our abilities to speak a language or engage in shared ritual performances. It is these more fundamental capacities, not their manifestation in a particular system of grammar or ritual norms, that provide the root explanation of our ability to communicate or to live together harmoniously. The Xunzi-Zhuangzi dialectic suggests that ritual is indispensable, but normatively justified rituals will be less rigid, less comprehensive, less fastidious, and more spontaneous than a Xunzian theorist would allow. (shrink)

This introduction to the twentieth anniversary volume of The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies celebrates the creating and sustaining of a forum in which writers coming from virtually every discipline, representing a diverse range of critical perspectives, have advanced the scholarly study of Ayn Rand and her times.

This paper explores the conditions under which scientists are warranted in adding the one-dimensional heat equation to their theories and then using the equation to describe particular physical situations. Summarizing these derivation and application conditions motivates an account of idealized scientific representation that relates the use of mathematics in science to interpretative questions about scientific theories.

Many scholars assume a connection between the evolution of language and that of distinctively human group-level morality. Unfortunately, such thinkers frequently downplay a central implication of modern Darwinian theory, which precludes the possibility of innate psychological mechanisms evolving to benefit the group at the expense of the individual. Group level moral regulation is indeed central to public life in all known human communities. The production of speech acts would be impossible without this. The challenge, therefore, is to explain on a (...) Darwinian basis how life could have become subject to the rule of law. Only then will we have an appropriate social framework in which to contextualize our models of how language may have evolved. (shrink)

Overgeneralizations by psychologists of the research evidence on memory and eyewitness testimony, such as “memory decays with time” or “memories are fluid and malleable,” are beginning to appear in legal judgements and guidance documents, accompanied by unwarranted disparagement of lay beliefs about memory. These overgeneralizations could have significant adverse consequences for the conduct of civil and criminal law.

This article aims to give an overview of Carnap's 1928 book Logical Structure of the World or Aufbau and the most influential interpretations of its significance. After giving an outline of the book in Section 2 , I turn to the first sustained interpretations of the book offered by Goodman and Quine in Section 3 . Section 4 explains how this empirical reductionist interpretation was largely displaced by its main competitor. This is the line of interpretation offered by Friedman and (...) Richardson which focuses on issues of objectivity. In Section 5 , I turn to two more recent interpretations that can be thought of as emphasizing Carnap's concern with rational reconstruction. Finally, the article concludes by noting some current work by Leitgeb that aims to develop and update some aspects of the Aufbau project for contemporary epistemology. (shrink)

By making use of Aurel Kolnai's ethical writings I want to offer a more adequate understanding of moral conflicts and moral dilemmas. Insisting on Kolnai's phenomenological method, in particular, focussing on the agent's moral awareness (or conscience) and his deliberation, results in an understanding of moral conflicts as moments of moral choice rather than anomalies of moral theory. In this way, I argue that one can account for Bernard Williams's phenomenological description of moral conflicts without having to accept his anti-realist (...) conclusions. Moreover, this approach indicates the adequacy of ordinary moral reasoning for decisionmaking and action guidance. Lastly and importantly, the essay illustrates the relevance of Kolnai's writings to contemporary moral philosophy. (shrink)

It has been suggested that Marr took the three levels he famously identifies to be independent. In this paper, we argue that Marr's view is more nuanced. Specifically, we show that the view explicitly articulated in his work attempts to integrate the levels, and in doing so results in Marr attacking both reductionism and vagueness. The result is a perspective in which both high-level information-processing constraints and low-level implementational constraints play mutually reinforcing and constraining roles. We discuss our recent work (...) on Spaun—currently the world's largest functional brain model—that demonstrates the positive impact of this kind of unifying integration of Marr's levels. We argue that this kind of integration avoids his concerns with both reductionism and vagueness. In short, we suggest that the methods behind Spaun can be used to satisfy Marr's explicit interest in combining high-level functional and detailed mechanistic explanations. (shrink)

According to Leontiev’s “activity approach,” the external world is not something available to be “worked over” according to a subject’s inner or “ideal” representations; at stake instead is the emergence of an “idealized” objective world that relates to a subject’s activity both internally and externally construed. In keeping with a Marxian account of anthropogenesis, Leontiev links the emergence of “ideality” with social activity itself, incorporating it within the general movement between the poles of ‘inner’ cognition and ‘external’ action. In this (...) manner, Leontiev both parallels and goes beyond Hutto and Myin’s recent “enactivist” account of “content-involving” cognition, where representational thought depends on socio-cultural scaffolding and, as such, is uniquely human. What traditionally comes to be called representational content is for Leontiev the result of the transition from a primitive cognitive apparatus of “image-consciousness” to a one which is mediated by social activity. For the being endowed with “activity-consciousness,” mental content is something apprehended by assimilating “the objective world in its ideal form” [Leontiev, 1977, p. 189]. And the precondition for such assimilation is the apprehension of meanings from their origin in the social-material system of activity. The genesis of content-involving cognition is thus coeval with the development of socializing activity systems, replete with the external representations of values and norms as described in enactivist literature as publicly scaffolded symbol systems. Leontiev thus offers an anti-internalist account of cognition commensurate with Hutto and Myin but with the added dimension of a developmental scale of analysis with which to explain the origin of human-specific cognition. (shrink)

This paper tests a novel implication of the original version of prospect theory (Kahneman and Tversky, 1979): that choices may systematically violate transitivity. Some have interpreted this implication as a weakness, viewing it as an anomaly generated by the ‘editing phase’ of prospect theory which can be rendered redundant by an appropriate re-specification of the preference function. Although there is some existing evidence that transitivity fails descriptively, the particular form of non-transitivity implied by prospect theory is quite distinctive and hence (...) presents an ideal opportunity to expose that theory to test. An experiment is reported which reveals strong evidence of the predicted intransitivity. It is argued that the existence of this new form of non-transitive behaviour presents a fresh theoretical challenge to those seeking descriptively adequate theories of choice behaviour, and a particular challenge to those who seek explanations within the conventional economic paradigm of utility maximisation. (shrink)