. This paper examines the underpinnings of the preservationist approach to characterizing inference relations. Starting with a critique of the ‘truth-preservation’ semantic paradigm, we discuss the merits of characterizing an inference relation in terms of preserving consistency. Finally we turn our attention to the generalization of consistency introduced in the early work of Jennings and Schotch, namely the concept of level.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Dana Scott introduced a kind of generalization (or perhaps simplification would be a better description) of the notion of inference, familiar from Gentzen, in which one may consider multiple conclusions rather than single formulas. Scott used this idea to good effect in a number of projects including the axiomatization of many-valued logics (of various kinds) and a reconsideration of the motivation of C.I. Lewis. Since he left the subject it has been vigorously prosecuted (...) by a number of authors under the heading of abstract entailment relations where it has found an important role in both algebra and theoretical computer science. In this essay we go back to the beginnings, as presented by Scott, in order to make some comments about Scott’s cut rule, and show how much of Scott’s main result may be applied to the case of single-conclusion logic. (shrink)

The concept of compactness is a necessary condition of any system that is going to call itself a finitary method of proof. However, it can also apply to predicates of sets of formulas in general and in that manner it can be used in relation to level functions, a flavor of measure functions. In what follows we will tie these concepts of measure and compactness together and expand some concepts which appear in d'Entremont's master's thesis, "Inference and Level." We will (...) also provide some applications of the concept of level to the "preservationist" program of paraconsistent logic. We apply the finite level compactness theorem in this paper to get a Lindenbaum flavor extension lemma and a maximal "forcibility" theorem. Each of these is based on an abstract deductive system X which satisfies minimal conditions of inference and has generalizations of 'and' and 'not' as logical words. (shrink)

In my dissertation A Study in the Logic of Institutions I develop a logical system for reasoning about institutions and their consistency. Since my dissertation is a work in logic rather than one in socio-political philosophy, I don’t defend a particular theory of institutions. Instead, I did as Yogi Bera suggested and simply took the fork in the road. A well-developed account of institutions is given by John Searle in ; and. His account bases all social reality on language, and (...) I use his account to provide a logic for institutional norms. Briefly, social reality is constructed via language by making our intentions clear to one another. And we do this via speech acts. There is one particular type of speech act that is important to institutions: declarations. Declarations bring about new social objects and create social states of affairs. It is via declarations that social institutions are created. In so far as groups recognize an institution sustaining/making authority, that authority has the ability to generate new institutional rules via declarations. According to Vanderveken ; see also Searle and Vanderveken, speech acts have a logic. That is, performing one speech act can satisfy the conditions of having performed another speech act. A priest declaring a baby baptized will also make it so that the priest has asserted that the baby is baptized, for instance. More importantly, certain declarations will result in the declarations of some of the logical consequences of the initial declarations. I characterize the set of speech acts that stand in that relationship and develop a logical system around that characterization. The formal framework incorporates action and permits representations of complex institution-dependent relations, e.g., rights and duties. I further develop this formalism to investigate the notion of normative consistency. I show how to represent at least a minimal conception of normative inconsistency within the formal framework, and characterize its properties. I conclude by comparing my work to that of others. (shrink)

In this paper we look at two classic methods of deriving consequences from inconsistent premises: Rescher-Manor and Schotch-Jennings. The overall goal of the project is to confine the method of drawing consequences from inconsistent sets to those that do not require reference to any information outside of very general facts about the set of premises. Methods in belief revision often require imposing assumptions on premises, e.g., which are the important premises, how the premises relate in non-logical ways. Such assumptions enable (...) one to select a reasonable collection of formulas from all the formulas of the language. Basic versions of the classic methods only use logical relations between the premises. We compare and criticize each of the classic views with an eye to combining the views to get the most out of inconsistent premises. We do this in a way that will respect the theoretical grounding of each view while meeting our other restrictions. (shrink)

In this paper we take inspiration from a couple of authors on how to think about normative (in)consistency, and then show how to conceive of normative inconsistency in an xstit framework. One view on normative inconsistency is from von Wright, and the other from Hamblin. These two accounts share a conception of normative inconsistency, but their formal frameworks are very different. We propose a way to get the best of both views on normative inconsistency by using an xstit framework, mixed (...) with a version of Anderson’s reduction of deontic logic to alethic modal logic. We consider variations on those ideas and relate it to a work of Ruth Barcan Marcus. (shrink)

The purpose of this brief note is to prove a limitative theorem for a generalization of the deduction theorem. I discuss the relationship between the deduction theorem and rules of inference. Often when the deduction theorem is claimed to fail, particularly in the case of normal modal logics, it is the result of a confusion over what the deduction theorem is trying to show. The classic deduction theorem is trying to show that all so-called ‘derivable rules’ can be encoded into (...) the object language using the material conditional. The deduction theorem can be generalized in the sense that one can attempt to encode all types of rules into the object language. When a rule is encoded in this way I say that it is reflected in the object language. What I show, however, is that certain logics which reflect a certain kind of rule must be trivial. Therefore, my generalization of the deduction theorem does fail where the classic deduction theorem didn’t. (shrink)

This paper presents proofs of completeness and decidability of a non-temporal fragment of an Xstit logic. This shows a distinction between the non-temporal fragments of Xstit logic and regular stit logic since the latter is undecidable. The proof of decidability is via the finite model property. The finite model property is shown to hold by constructing a filtration. However, the set that is used to filter the models isn’t simply closed under subformulas, it has more complex closure conditions. The filtration (...) set is akin to the Fischer–Ladner closure of a set used to show completeness and decidability of propositional dynamic logic. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to explore the use of van Hees and Braham’s conception of causal responsibility in terms of NESS-conditions in formal models of collective action; NESS means ‘Necessary Element of a Sufficient Set’. In particular, the paper looks at their dictatorship result which arises from imposing uniformresponsibility on game forms which are augmented with a probabilistic component. Analogs for uniform NESS-responsibility are formulated within Belnap et al.’s stit models of agency—for both the instantaneous and past-looking versions. (...) In the case of instantaneous stit theory, NESS-responsibility has dstit as a special case, and the probabilistic component is unnecessary for deriving a full dictatorship result. For pastlooking agency, NESS-responsibility has astit as a special case, but uniformity, while not dictatorial, is shown to have a counterintuitive necessary condition: busy choosers. (shrink)

In this paper Gillman Payette looks at various structural properties of the underlying logic X, and ascertains if these properties will hold of the forcing relation based on X. The structural properties are those that do not deal with particular connectives directly. These properties include the structural rules of inference, compactness, and compositionality among others. The presentation of the logic X is carried out in the style of algebraic logic; thus, a description of the resulting ‘forcing algebras’ is (...) given. The paper concludes with a discussion of first-order classical forcing as a particular instance of these properties. (shrink)

Logics—that is to say logical systems—are generally conceived of as describing the logical forms of arguments as well as endorsing cer- tain principles or rules of inference specified in terms of these forms. From this perspective, a correct logic is a system which captures only (and perhaps all) of the correct principles, and good—i.e. logical— reasoning is reasoning which at the level of logical form conforms to the principles of a correct logic. In contrast, as logical particularists we reject the (...) idea that logical validity is a property of logical forms or schema, and instead take validity to be a property of particular in- ferences. In this paper we describe and defend this radically different approach to validity, and explore the particularist understanding of the relationship between logical systems and logical reasoning. (shrink)

This book features mathematical and formal philosophers’ efforts to understand philosophical questions using mathematical techniques. It offers a collection of works from leading researchers in the area, who discuss some of the most fascinating ways formal methods are now being applied. It covers topics such as: the uses of probable and statistical reasoning, rational choice theory, reasoning in the environmental sciences, reasoning about laws and changes of rules, and reasoning about collective decision procedures as well as about action. Utilizing mathematical (...) techniques has been very fruitful in the traditional domains of formal philosophy – logic, philosophy of mathematics and metaphysics – while formal philosophy is simultaneously branching out into other areas in philosophy and the social sciences. These areas particularly include ethics, political science, and the methodology of the natural and social sciences. Reasoning about legal rules, collective decision-making procedures, and rational choices are of interest to all those engaged in legal theory, political science and economics. Statistical reasoning is also of interest to political scientists and economists. (shrink)

Disputes about logic are commonplace and undeniable. It is sometimes argued that these disputes are not genuine disagreements, but are rather merely verbal ones. Are advocates of different logics simply talking past each other? In this paper we argue that pluralists (and anyone who sees competing logics as genuine rivals), should reject the claim that real disagreement requires competing logics to assign the same meaning to logical connectives, or the same logical form to arguments. Along the way we argue that (...) ascriptions of logical form, as well as connective meaning, are always theory-relative. (shrink)

In this essay Gillman Payette and Peter Schotch present an account of the key notions of level and forcing in much greater generality than has been managed in any of the early publications. In terms of this level of generality the hoary notion that correct inference is truth-preserving is carefully examined and found wanting. The authors suggest that consistency preservation is a far more natural approach, and one that can, furthermore, characterize an inference relation. But an examination of (...) the usual account of consistency reveals problems that, in general, can be corrected by means of an auxiliary notion of inference (forcing) which relies upon a kind of generalization of consistency, called level. Preservation of the latter is shown to be another of the properties which characterize a logic and forcing is shown to preserve it. The essay ends with a sketch of a result which locates forcing among all possible level-preserving inference relations. (shrink)

Papers... "selected from a larger number of contributions most of them based on talks presented at the First World Congress on the Square of Opposition organized in Montreux in June 2007"--Preface, p. 12.

Anti-exceptionalists about logic maintain that it is continuous with the empirical sciences. Taking anti-exceptionalism for granted, we argue that traditional approaches to explanation are inadequate in the case of logic. We argue that Andrea Woody's functional analysis of explanation is a better fit with logical practice and accounts better for the explanatory role of logical theories.

The orthodox view of logic takes for granted the central importance of logical principles. Logic, and thus logical reasoning, is to be understood as a system of rules or principles with universal application. Let us call this orthodox view logical generalism. In this paper we argue that logical generalism, whether monist or pluralist, is wrong. We then outline an account of logical consequence in the absence of general logical principles, which we call logical particularism.

Traditional epistemic and doxastic logics cannot deal with inconsistent beliefs nor do they represent the evidence an agent possesses. So-called ‘evidence logics’ have been introduced to deal with both of those issues. The semantics of these logics are based on neighbourhood or hypergraph frames. The neighbourhoods of a world represent the basic evidence available to an agent. On one view, beliefs supported by evidence are propositions derived from all maximally consistent collections evidence. An alternative concept of beliefs takes them to (...) be propositions derivable from consistent partitions of one’s inconsistent evidence; this is known as Schotch-Jennings Forcing. This paper develops a modal logic based on the hypergraph semantics to represent Schotch-Jennings Forcing. The modal language includes an operator U(φ1,…,φn;ψ)\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$$U(\varphi _1, \ldots, \varphi _n;\psi )$$\end{document} which is similar to one introduced in Instantial Neighbourhood Logic. It is of variable arity and the input formulas enjoy distinct roles. The U operator expresses that all evidence at a particular world that supports ψ\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$$\psi $$\end{document} can be supported by at least one of the φi\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$$\varphi _i$$\end{document}s. U can then be used to express that all the evidence available can be unified by the finite set of formulas φ1,…,φn\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$$\varphi _1,\ldots, \varphi _n$$\end{document} if ψ\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$$\psi $$\end{document} is taken to be ⊤\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$$\top $$\end{document}. Future developments will then use that semantics as the basis for a doxastic logic akin to evidence logics. (shrink)

In the fourteenth century, Duns Scotus suggested that the proper analysis of modality required not just moments of time but also “moments of nature”. In making this suggestion, he broke with an influential view first presented by Diodorus in the early Hellenistic period, and might even be said to have been the inventor of “possible worlds”. In this essay we take Scotus’ suggestion seriously devising first a double-index logic and then introducing the temporal order. Finally, using the temporal order, we (...) define a modal order. This allows us to present modal logic without the usual interpretive questions arising concerning the relation called variously ‘accessibility’, ‘alternativeness’, and, ‘relative possibility.’ The system in which this analysis is done is one of those which have come to be called a hybrid logic. (shrink)

My argument is that faced with such reversal of stereotypical female roles, the culture relies on both the institution of the law and the custom of storytelling to reassure itself about boundary confusions—between guilt and innocence, man and woman, seductress and seducer, fact and fiction. The Thaw trial, however, shows that the law itself could not resolve any of those ambiguities, a predicament which, I will argue, Twain entertains and creates in his own fictional courtroom but flees from in his (...) response to the actual trial.My argument thus depends upon establishing particular dialogue between these two cases of seduction, for neither Twain’s nor the journalistic accounts alone tell the story that the two together do. Both cases speak in common to two aspects of fictionality. One is a mode of social differentiation, the sexual and legal categories essential to both cases, but whose actual application was, for different reasons in each, momentarily suspended. It was impossible to decide, for example, whether Evelyn Thaw or Alice or Twain himself, for that matter, should be classified as victim or victimizer, as playing the active or passive role in their respective narratives. The temporary suspension of these categories, I will argue, does not invalidate them or brand them as “fictive,” but rather reveals them as culturally constructed and culturally applied, in Twain’s words “fictions of law and custom” . In both cases, the response to this moment when cultural categories cannot be definitively applied is a process of storytelling—a second aspect of fictionality—that attempts to construct coherent narratives about those suspended “fictions of law and custom.” Although Twain’s “Alice” case opens in 1877, not until it connects with the Thaw trial in 1907 does the full story, as I have just briefly outlined it, emerge. It is precisely that double story that this esay will tell: the story of how Twain’s personal compulsions met up with his culture’s in the act of reporting, representing, interpreting, and finally making its own events mean. Susan Gillman is assistant professor of literature and American studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. This essay is part of a forthcoming book, Dark Twins: Imposture and Identity in Mark Twain’s America. (shrink)

Even under many formally democratic regimes, large swaths of the citizenry experience alienation from states with uneven presence throughout the national territory. Addressing a gap in scholarship that has examined why rather than how states establish new modes of engagement with subaltern groups, this article documents concrete mechanisms by which the Brazilian state built new state-society relations through a particular cultural policy. By recognizing and funding artistic initiatives in underserved communities, the program aimed to expand their access to the state (...) and validate their role in the polity. On the basis of in-depth fieldwork in three Brazilian states, the article argues that new relations actually were forged through state-society encounters around the program’s administrative procedures. The surprising twist—that paperwork, as much as art, played a transformative role—sheds new light on bureaucracy as a point of contact with the state and offers new insights into the ways that cultural politics can shift. (shrink)

Against the view that the physical sciences should be the privileged source of reliable knowledge within the academy in general, and in philosophy in particular, this essay argues that an interdisciplinary approach to knowledge-production, one that includes social and psychological assessment as well as narrative analysis, can better capture the diverse range of human epistemic activities as they occur in their natural settings. Postpositivist epistemologies, including Lorraine Code's social naturalism, Satya Mohanty's and Paula Moya's postpositivist literary and pedagogical projects, and (...) Linda Alcoff's dialogical template for knowledge form the basis of a revised naturalized epistemology that is more accountable to a socially engaged inquiry. This revised naturalism shifts orientation from the idealized setting of the laboratory and its a priori conditions for knowledge to localized settings, where knowledge emerges out of diverse contextualized interpretations of the natural and social world that interlocutors produce as they dialogue with one another. Mayra Montero's neocolonial narrative thematizes the spatial shift of scientific activity, showing how epistemic authority, aligned with North American interests and regional identity, is established, withheld from others, and contested. (shrink)

The theme for this volume is social cognition, construed from a psychological and collective point of view. From the psychological point of view, the question is to understand how the human mind processes social information; how it encodes, stores and uses it in the social context. From a collective point of view, the question is to understand how individual cognition is influenced (improved, increased or impaired) by social interactions, for instance in communicating and collaborating with intelligent agents. These two dimensions (...) of social cognition are obviously interdependent: the psychological dimension makes the collective dimension possible, which can in return modify the psychological dimension. The book is divided into four parts. The first part is about socio-cognitive skills. Among those, we count face recognition, imitation learning, embodied social interaction, cheater detection and psychological concept acquisition. The second part is about persons and memories: stereotypes, attraction judgements and impression formation are the subjects at hand. The third part is about understanding each other. A key part of that understanding is the motor system (whether or not we see it as a "mirror"), but community membership itself can also contribute to our understanding of others. The fourth and final part is about social cognition in societies. This section is unified by the common goal of understand how social cognition actually influences the structure of different societies, whether whole cultures, specific social networks, rural communities or even groups of caterpillars! (shrink)

The modern Jew, living in a world of shattered beliefs and competing ideologies, is often confronted with questions of faith. Sacred Fragments is for those who still care enough to continue the struggle. In forthright, nontechnical language the author addresses the most difficult theological questions of our time and shows that there are still viable Jewish answers for even the greatest skeptics.

The idea of cultural heritage has become widespread in many countries, justifying government regulation and providing the background to disputes over valuable works of art and architecture. In this book, Derek Gillman uses several well-known cases from Asia, Europe, and the United States to review the competing claims that works of art belong either to a particular people and place, or, from a cosmopolitan perspective, to all of humankind. He looks at the ways in which the idea of heritage (...) has been constructed. He focuses first on Britain and the writings of Edmund Burke and then on China and its medieval debate about the nature of 'our culture'. Drawing on a range of sources, including the work of Ronald Dworkin, Will Kymlicka, and Joseph Raz, Gillman relates debates about heritage to those in contemporary political philosophy and offers a liberal approach to moral claims and government regulation. (shrink)

Although intersectionality has been widely disseminated across the disciplines as a tool to center women of color's developed perspectives on social reality, it has been notably absent in the scholarship of feminist philosophy and philosophy of race. I first examine the causes and processes of the exclusions of women of color feminist thought more generally, and of intersectionality in particular. Then, focusing attention on Black feminisms, I read Sandra Jackson-Opoku's 1997 novel, The River Where Blood Is Born, with and against (...) Paget Henry's Africana ethnophilosophy. I model an interdisciplinary, intersectional approach to Henry's ethnophilosophy, broadening its philosophical scope by historicizing the liminality that characterizes the realities of many diasporic Black women. I also develop an interpretation of the female protagonists to suggest how many Black women within different historical contexts develop practices to recover African symbolic and discursive registers as a means to claim their subjectivities. Additionally, I challenge Henry's teleological explanation for an increasingly secular Africana philosophical identity. (shrink)

The paper describes how Robert E. Lucas, Jr.’s monetary economies are based on his methodology of using a single general equilibrium dynamic optimization model with microeconomic foundations that c...

This slim volume comprises the text of the three Baumgardt Lectures on Monotheism and Ethics delivered by Goodman at the Oxford Center for Postgraduate Hebrew Studies in Oxford and at Yarnton Manor in January 1978. Chapter One, "The Logic of Monotheism," argues that the development of the monotheistic idea is inextricably tied to issues of morality, that is, to the emerging idea of God as "the absolute and unconfined summation of all values." Chapter Two, "The Existence of God," presents Goodman's (...) version of a rationalist understanding of God as "the ultimate explanatory principle of the world" which is Itself explicable only by reference to Itself, and is hence, absolute, infinite and perfect. Chapter Three, "Monotheism and Ethics," is clearly the pinnacle of Goodman's study for which the first two chapters provide the infrastructure. Here Goodman asks: what possible bearing can an absolute and infinitely transcendent Being have on human morality? He argues that the derivation of morality from our concept of divinity ceases to be a problem once it is recognized that the concept of a monotheistic God is itself a product of our developing sense of what is moral. How a God who is the embodiment of absolute perfection implies moral obligation Goodman discusses through an extended phenomenological analysis of the Jewish idea of mitzvah, primarily the command that we recognize each person's subjecthood as the moral equivalent of our own. The rest of the chapter deals with the problems involved in deriving specific moral decisions from this "universal moral principle.". (shrink)

The square of opposition is a diagram related to a theory of oppositions that goes back to Aristotle. Both the diagram and the theory have been discussed throughout the history of logic. Initially, the diagram was employed to present the Aristotelian theory of quantification, but extensions and criticisms of this theory have resulted in various other diagrams. The strength of the theory is that it is at the same time fairly simple and quite rich. The theory of oppositions has recently (...) become a topic of intense interest due to the development of a general geometry of opposition (polygons and polyhedra) with many applications. A congress on the square with an interdisciplinary character has been organized on a regular basis (Montreux 2007, Corsica 2010, Beirut 2012, Vatican 2014, Rapa Nui 2016). The volume at hand is a sequel to two successful books: The Square of Opposition - A General Framework of Cognition, ed. by J.-Y. Béziau & G. Payette, as well as Around and beyond the Square of Opposition, ed. by J.-Y. Béziau & D. Jacquette, and, like those, a collection of selected peer-reviewed papers. The idea of this new volume is to maintain a good equilibrium between history, technical developments and applications. The volume is likely to attract a wide spectrum of readers, mathematicians, philosophers, linguists, psychologists and computer scientists, who may range from undergraduate students to advanced researchers. (shrink)

In: B. Hardy-Vallee & N. Payette, eds. Beyond the brain: embodied, situated & distributed cognition. (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholar’s Press), in press. Abstract: In this article, I do three main things: 1. First, I introduce an approach to the mind motivated primarily by evolutionary considerations. I do that by laying out four principles for the study of the mind from an evolutionary perspective, and four predictions that they suggest. This evolutionary perspective is completely compatible with, although broader than, the embodied (...) cognition approach. 2. Then I look at one prediction in depth, the idea that the brain evolved by exaptation–reusing exiting functional units, and combining them in novel ways to generate new cognitive capacities. 3. Finally, I try to lay out some of the implications, both of the in-depth example, and of the more general approach. (shrink)

My dissertation comprises three inter-related chapters, all of which explore the nature of work law and critically analyze the prevailing emphasis on matters of contract. The Escape Plans of Mill and Jefferson: I discuss these thinkers’ unsuccessful “escape plans” to minimize wage work. Mill advocated cooperative, worker-owned firms, while Jefferson favored farming the vast American frontier. I explore whether, if realized, either proposal would have satisfied the demands of justice. I argue that such proposals are normatively deficient because they lead (...) us mistakenly to assume that so long as the law provides alternatives to wage labor, it can justly leave work relationships in an unregulated, Dickensian state. In reply, I contend that we have no just alternative to engaging in the messy and difficult task of regulating the workplace. Revising the Roles of Master and Servant: I critically examine the claim that work law is best understood as part of contract law, arguing that this view is neither descriptively nor normatively instructive. Rather than understanding work law as a set of restraints on freedom of contract, we should see it as creating and defining special relationships, much like the codified definitions of marriages and corporations. I trace the development of work relationships through the common law of “master and servant” and more recent statutory modifications. I argue that the history and present form of work law are not consistent with the contract-centered view of work law as “interfering” with an otherwise free labor market. Competing Ideologies and the End of the Lochner Era: I examine Howard Gillman’s critique of the view that early-20th Century Supreme Court Justices sought to advance policy preferences rather than interpret the law. Gillman reconstructs the legal basis for their decisions, thus undermining the claim that they merely pursued laissez faire policies. However, Gillman then claims that the Justices who overruled liberty-of-contract in West Coast Hotel had no principled basis for their decisions. In response, I argue that West Coast Hotel was not only based on a plausible interpretation of constitutional law, but also the best outcome with respect to justice. (shrink)

In: B. Hardy-Vallee & N. Payette, eds. Beyond the brain: embodied, situated & distributed cognition. (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholar’s Press), in press. Abstract: In this article, I do three main things: 1. First, I introduce an approach to the mind motivated primarily by evolutionary considerations. I do that by laying out four principles for the study of the mind from an evolutionary perspective, and four predictions that they suggest. This evolutionary perspective is completely compatible with, although broader than, the embodied (...) cognition approach. 2. Then I look at one prediction in depth, the idea that the brain evolved by exaptation–reusing exiting functional units, and combining them in novel ways to generate new cognitive capacities. 3. Finally, I try to lay out some of the implications, both of the in-depth example, and of the more general approach. (shrink)

According to Greimas, the semiotic square is far more than a heuristic for semantic and literary analysis. It represents the generative “deep structure” of human culture and cognition which “define the fundamental mode of existence of an individual or of a society, and subsequently the conditions of existence of semiotic objects” (Greimas & Rastier 1968: 48). The potential truth of this hypothesis, much less the conditions and implications of taking it seriously (as a truth claim), have received little attention in (...) the literature. In response, this paper traces the history and development of the logical square of opposition from Aristotle to Greimas and beyond, to propose that the relations modelled in these diagrams are embodied relations rooted in gestalt memories of kinesthesia and proprioception from which we derive basic structural awareness of opposition and contrast such as verticality, bilaterality, transversality, markedness and analogy. To make this argument, the paper draws on findings in the phenomenology of movement (Sheets-Johnstone 2011a, 2011b, 2012, Pelkey 2014), recent developments in the analysis of logical opposition (Beziau & Payette 2008), recent scholarship in (post)Greimasian semiotics (Corso 2014, Broden 2000) and prescient insights from Greimas himself (esp. 1968, 1984). The argument of the paper is further supported through a visual and textual content analysis of a popular music video, both to highlight relationships between the semiotic square and mundane cultural ideologies and to show how these relationships might be traced to the marked symmetries of bodily movement. In addition to illustrating the enduring relevance of Greimasean thought, the paper further illustrates the neglected relevance that embodied chiasmus holds for developments in anthropology, linguistics and the other cognitive sciences. (shrink)