Finally, what are the implications of global justice for participation in a nation's military forces? From what I have said thus far, it should be clear ...

The terms red, green, yellow, and blue are both necessary and sufficient to describe our chromatic experience. Their uniqueness and opponent nature is supported by evidence obtained under supra-threshold conditions, especially hue cancellation. These constraints are nontrivial. How some electrophysiologically identified mechanisms contribute to colour appearance is not known, but their complexities do not refute our experience of elemental hues.

Byrne & Hilbert (B&H) give some excellent replies to the objections to realism about color. However, the particular form of realism they propose, based on opponent processing, prompts several challenges. Why characterize a color by its tendency to produce an intermediate brain signal, rather than in terms of the final effect – either a perception or a neural substrate for it? At the level of the retina, and even of the cortex, there are processes that partly parallel the structure of (...) color experience; but the correspondence is not exact. Must we assume that there is any place in the brain where an exact structural correspondence is found? At the level of psychophysical functioning, there is indeed opponency; but it is not clear that this gives us the kind of type-reduction that B&H want. (shrink)

Arguments that claim opponents of abortion are inconsistent in some manner are becoming increasingly prevalent both in academic and public discourse. For example, it is common to claim that they spend considerable time and resources to oppose induced abortion, but show little concern regarding the far greater numbers of naturally occurring intrauterine deaths (miscarriages). Critics argue that if abortion opponents took their beliefs about the value of embryos and fetuses seriously, they would invest more time and resources combating these naturally (...) occurring deaths than those caused by induced abortion. The implication is that abortion opponents do not take their beliefs about embryos and fetuses seriously—and so why should anyone else? These “inconsistency arguments”, as we have called them, have considerable intuitive appeal: showing that someone is living inconsistently or holding beliefs that seem prima facie inconsistent seems to many to undermine those beliefs. However, upon closer examination, these arguments become less convincing. In short, we show that the inconsistency arguments we are aware of are severely flawed, and so, if critics wish to continue their criticism, they should abandon inconsistency arguments in favor of other styles of argument. We will proceed in four stages. First, we describe the basic form of inconsistency arguments against abortion opponents. Second, we outline specific instances of the inconsistency argument that have been advanced. Third, we outline specific responses to these arguments, noting ways in which responses also conform to set patterns. Finally, we assess the debate and suggest how it might progress in productive ways. (shrink)

Playing to your opponent’s weakness is a strategy commonly adopted in head-to-head sports. I argue, however, that competitors in head-to-head sports should adopt the opposite strategy: playing to your opponent’s strength. To do so, I first distinguish two senses of victory and explain what constitutes a meaningful victory in head-to-head sports. I then examine the implications of mutualism as exhibited in Robert L. Simon’s view that sport is a mutual quest for excellence through challenge. Finally, I defend the notion that (...) competitors in head-to-head sports should adopt PTS by stating and answering seven objections. (shrink)

Human Resources Practices and unions coexist in some organisations to manage the employment relationships of the workers. In this study, we analyse how the presence/absence of unions and HRPs are combined in private European organisations, and which of these combinations are related to higher levels of wellbeing and the quality of labor relations. Data come from 24,503 workers of private organisations, obtained from the Sixth European Working Conditions Survey. Latent profiles analysis and different analyses of the variance suggested four different (...) profiles. The profile with the greatest presence of HRPs and union presence is related to the highest levels of employees' wellbeing and quality of labor relations in organisations, whereas those organisations with a low level of union presence or HRPs reached the worst levels in employees' wellbeing and quality of labor relations indicators. The results and their practical implications are discussed. (shrink)

There is no natural and pretheoretical classification of colour appearances into hue, saturation, brightness, unique hues, and so on. Rather, our theoretical insights into the coding of colour have reciprocally shaped the way we talk about colour appearances. Opponency is only one of many fundamental aspects of colour coding, and we are hardly justified in ascribing some theoretical prominance to it.

In this paper I offer a new interpretation of Melissus' argument at DK 30 B8. In this passage Melissus uses an Eleatic argument against change to challenge an opponent who appeals to the authority of perception in order to support the view that there are a plurality of items in the world. I identify an orthodox type of approach to this passage, but argue that it cannot give a charitable interpretation of Melissus' strategy. In order to assess Melissus' overall argument (...) we have to identify the opponent at whom it is aimed. The orthodox interpretation of the argument faces a dilemma: Melissus' argument is either a poor argument against a plausible opponent or a good argument against an implausible opponent. My interpretation turns on identifying a new target for Melissus' argument. I explain the position I call Bluff Realism (contrasting it with two other views: the Pig Headed and the Fully Engaged). These are positions concerning the dialectical relation between perception on the one hand, and arguments to counterperceptual conclusions on the other. I argue that Bluff Realism represents a serious threat from an Eleatic point of view, and is prima facie an attractive position in its own right. I then give a charitable interpretation of Melissus' argument in DK 30 B8, showing how he produces a strong and incisive argument against the Bluff Realist position I have identified. Melissus emerges as an innovative and astute philosopher. (shrink)

This essay considers two concepts of repetition in thinking about canon, the history of ideas, and the work of an opponent, both real and fantastical. I take up these motifs in a variety of figures and cases, but principally in Søren Kierkegaard’s reading of the biblical Abraham in Fear and Trembling, a text rich in interpretive challenges. How might readers in the humanities contend with interpretive rivals while investing in the power of diverse readings? The argument turns on the relationship (...) between the struggle for self‐consciousness, understood through Hegel and Freud as an appointment with otherness, and the work of interpretation, understood as the endeavor to understand others, including other texts, other minds, and one’s own mind. What is the aim of interpretation? How does interpretation fail? To which history of ideas is a reader responsible? (shrink)

In this paper, we’ll present, explain, and defend a Christian ethic for sport that takes loving all individuals as the fundamental moral imperative. First, we’ll begin by taking a seeming detour through views about the morality of war. More specifically, we’ll consider realism, according to which, roughly, moral requirements and rules are suspended during war such that it is misguided to attempt to apply moral terms to acts performed within the context of war. Second, by paying attention to relevant surveys (...) and testimonies, we’ll see how this sort of realism seems to be prevalent within the sports world. We’ll see that a singular focus upon winning seems to cultivate this orientation toward realism and its corresponding relaxed attitude toward rule exploitation and violation and the imposition of harms upon one’s opponents. Third, we’ll present an argument from counterexamples against realism about war and then we’ll consider a structurally identical argument against realism in sport. Fourth, we’ll fill the resulting void by presenting, explaining, and defending the aforementioned Christian ethic for sport. Finally, we’ll apply our Christian ethic for sport, tracing some of its implications for fighting in the NHL, taunting and trash-talking, and telling the truth within gameplay. (shrink)

I do not want to be misunderstood as saying that the cultural situation I describe here caused Reagan, or that it typifies Reaganism, or that everything about it can be ascribed or referred back to the personality of Ronald Reagan. What I argue is that a particular situation within the field we call "criticism" is not merely related to but is an integral part of the currents of thought and practice that play a role within the Reagan era. Moreover, I (...) think, "criticism" and the traditional academic humanities have gone through a series of developments over time whose beneficiary and culmination is Reaganism. Those are the gross claims that I make for my argument.A number of miscellaneous points need to be made here. I am fully aware that any effort to characterize the present cultural moment is very likely to seem quixotic at best, unprofessional at worst. But that, I submit, is an aspect of the present cultural moment, in which the social and historical setting of critical activity is a totality felt to be benign , uncharacterizable as a whole and somehow outside history. Thus it seems to me that one thing to be tried–out of sheer critical obstinacy–is precisely that kind of generalization, that kind of political portrayal, that kind of overview condemned by the present dominant culture to appear inappropriate and doomed from the start.It is my conviction that culture works very effectively to make invisible and even "impossible" the actual affiliations that exist between the world of ideas and scholarship on the one hand, and the world of brute politics, corporate and state power, and military force, on the other. The cult of expertise and professionalism, for example, has so restricted our scope of vision that a positive doctrine of noninterference among fields has set in. This doctrine has it that the general public is best left ignorant, and the most crucial policy questions affecting human existence are best left to "experts," specialists who talk about their specialty only, and–to use the word first given wide social approbation by Walter Lippman in Public Opinion and The Phantom Public–"insiders," people who are endowed with the special privilege of knowing how things really work and, more important, of being close to power1.1. See Ronald Steel, Walter Lippmann and the American Century , pp. 180-85 and 212-6. (shrink)

This study examined audience perceptions of a political candidate’s credibility and likeability as a function of varying the candidate’s responses to an opponent’s nonverbal disparagement during a televised debate. 412 participants watched a purported televised debate between candidates for mayor in a small city in Utah. In all six versions, one debater engaged in strong nonverbal disagreement during his opponent’s opening statement. His opponent responded to the nonverbal behavior with one of six decreasingly polite messages. Results indicated that more direct (...) messages increased audience perceptions of the speaker’s expertise and character compared to providing no response. The results also showed a significant interaction between response type and audience member’s level of trait verbal aggressiveness. The “indirect” and “on-record with redress” responses led to stronger perceptions of speaker composure and extroversion for members high in verbal aggression and the “off the record” strategy led to higher perceptions of extroversion and composure for members low in verbal aggression. (shrink)

This paper examines the role of a proper opponent (phyi rgol yang dag) in debate from the standpoint of the Tibetan Buddhist theory of argumentation. A proper opponent is a person who is engaged in the process of truth-seeking. He is not a debater who undertakes to refute the tenets of a proponent. But rather, he is the model debater to whom a proponent can teach truth by using a probative argument in the most effective way. A proper opponent is (...) thus the model thinker conceived by Tibetan Buddhist scholars, especially by the dGe lugs pa exegetes, to explain the idea of “inference for others.” The term phyi rgol yang dag figures in many text books of the dGe lugs pa school. And the germ of the dGe lugs pa's idea of ``proper opponent'' is found in early Tibetan tshad ma literature, too. The present paper shows that the dGe lugs pa scholars are largely concerned with the process by which one obtains an inferential knowledge about the unknown object, and also that they, when talking about a proper opponent, emphasize the pedagogical role of dialectic conversation rather than the competitive feature of debates. (shrink)

In everyday usage, ‘realism’ is often used as a name for a practically or epistemically low-ambition attitude, while ‘idealism’ is often taken to denote a highambition—if not utopian—attitude. In philosophcal usage, mostly, it is the other way around: those who are called realists tend to claim more than their opponents—they are the philosophical optimists. Within philosophy itself, ‘realism’ adopts a variety of interrelated and contested meanings. It is used as the name for doctrines about issues such as perceptual access to (...) reality, the existence of universals, the goals and achievements of science, the nature of truth, the objectivity of morality, and many other things. Given this variety, no single shorthand definition of the term ‘realism’ can be provided. One manifestation of this variety is that the opponents of realism about these issues are not called uniformly by a single label (other than the rather uninformative ‘antirealism’): the labels used include idealism, phenomenalism, instrumentalism, conventionalism, fictionalism, noncognitivism, constructivism, relativism, irrealism, and others. Sometimes such labels vary from one dispute or domain to another even when similar ideas are being expressed. Sometimes they are used to make claims that are specific to the domain at hand and distinct from other antirealist theses. In what follows a brief tour will be taken along some of the representative philosophical highways and lanes, from ontology through semantics to epistemology. Along the way, realism will be confronted with some of its various opponents and internal conflicts. The philosophical landscape in the neighborhood of realism is nowadays much broader than it used to be: in a typical older encyclopedia, ‘realism’ was taken to name doctrines about universals or about perception, or both, to the exclusion of much of its present coverage, and many of the current opponents were missing from view altogether. (shrink)

Arguments that claim opponents of abortion are inconsistent in some manner are becoming increasingly prevalent both in academic and public discourse. For example, it is common to claim that they spend considerable time and resources to oppose induced abortion, but show little concern regarding the far greater numbers of naturally occurring intrauterine deaths (miscarriages). Critics argue that if abortion opponents took their beliefs about the value of embryos and fetuses seriously, they would invest more time and resources combating these naturally (...) occurring deaths than those caused by induced abortion. The implication is that abortion opponents do not take their beliefs about embryos and fetuses seriously—and so why should anyone else? These “inconsistency arguments”, as we have called them, have considerable intuitive appeal: showing that someone is living inconsistently or holding beliefs that seem prima facie inconsistent seems to many to undermine those beliefs. However, upon closer examination, these arguments become less convincing. In short, we show that the inconsistency arguments we are aware of are severely flawed, and so, if critics wish to continue their criticism, they should abandon inconsistency arguments in favor of other styles of argument. We will proceed in four stages. First, we describe the basic form of inconsistency arguments against abortion opponents. Second, we outline specific instances of the inconsistency argument that have been advanced. Third, we outline specific responses to these arguments, noting ways in which responses also conform to set patterns. Finally, we assess the debate and suggest how it might progress in productive ways. (shrink)

Charges of inconsistency are frequently made against opponents of abortion for failing to ‘live out’ their beliefs. One such popular charge is that opponents of abortion are inconsistent for failing to ‘adopt the babies they don’t want aborted’—in this chapter, I will focus on a slightly broader version of this charge. I will understand adoption* broadly to include adopting and/or fostering children, as well as concretely supporting the systems involved in facilitating adoption and foster care through financial means, volunteering, and/or (...) advocacy. I will argue that opponents of abortion do not have special obligations to adopt* for the reasons often presumed, and thus are not inconsistent for failing to do so. However, I will go on to argue that they nevertheless have compelling reasons to do so—to decrease future abortions and oppose abortion with integrity. (shrink)

Op-ed on the role of schadenfreude in political propaganda. Co-authored with Kelsey Ichikawa.

The paper aims to determine the identity of an unnamed opponent in a passage of the first chapter of the Prasannapadā whose school affiliation eluded traditional Tibetan scholars and is disputed by modern scholars. The individual(s) in question, whose fundamental ontological views are made evident in the passage’s opening objection as presented by Candrakīrti, has/have alternatively been identified as the Mādhyamika Bhāviveka, as representatives of the Naiyāyika school and, following Stcherbatsky, as Dignāga and/or later members of his epistemological-logical tradition. Although (...) textual evidence adduced by authors of recent publications has been viewed as supportive of the hypothesis that the interlocutor is Dignāga, the general nature of this evidence and awareness of Dignāga’s ontological presuppositions suggest that the matter requires reconsideration. (shrink)

This article is currently available as a free download on ingentaconnect.

Habituation is defined as a decline in responding to a repeated stimulus. After more than eighty years of research, there is an enduring consensus among researchers on the existence of 9-10 behavioral regularities or parameters of habituation. There is no similar agreement, however, on the best approach to explain these facts. In this paper, we demonstrate that the Sometimes Opponent Processes (SOP) model of stimulus processing accurately describes all of these regularities. This model was proposed by Allan Wagner as a (...) quantitative elaboration of Priming Theory, which states that the processing of a stimulus, and therefore its capacity to provoke its response, depends inversely on the degree to which the stimulus is pre-represented in short-term memory. Using computer simulations, we show that all the facts involving within-session effects or short-term habituation might be the result of priming from recent presentations of the stimulus (self-generated priming). The characteristics involving between-sessions effects or long-term habituation would result from the retrieval of the representation of the stimulus from memory by the associated context (associatively-generated priming). (shrink)