This paper outlines a new approach to the task of giving an account of the meaning of moral statements: a sort of "conceptual role semantics", according to which the meaning of moral terms is given by their role in practical reasoning. This role is sufficient both to distinguish the meaning of any moral term from that of other terms, and to determine the property or relation (if any) that the term stands for. The paper ends by suggesting reasons for regarding (...) this "conceptual role semantics" approach as preferable to noncognitivism, the causal theory of reference, and noncircular conceptual analysis. (shrink)

Both these ideas are intuitively plausible: rationality has an external aim, such as forming a true belief or good decision; and the rationality of a belief or decision is determined purely by facts about the thinker’s internal mental states. Unlike earlier conceptions, the conception of rationality presented here explains why these ideas are both true. Rational beliefs and decisions, it is argued, are those that are formed through the thinker’s following ‘rules of rationality’. Some rules count as rules of rationality (...) because it is rational to believe---through following other rules---that those rules are reliable. But there must also be certain basic rules, which are a priori, or ‘built into’ our basic cognitive capacities. That these rules are a priori is a purely internal matter; and in following these rules the thinker has done all that could reasonably be expected to achieve the external aim of forming a true belief or good decision. (shrink)

The object of this study is to find a coherent theoretical approach to three problems which appear to interrelate in complex ways: (1) What is the ontological status of consciousness? (2) How can there be 'un conscious,' 'prereflective' or 'self-alienated' consciousness? And (3) Is there a 'self' or 'ego' formed by means of the interrelation of more elementary states of consciousness? The motivation for combining such a diversity of difficult questions is that we often learn more by looking at interrelations (...) of problems than we could by viewing them only in isola tion. The three questions posed here have emerged as especially prob lematic in the context of twentieth century philosophy. 1. The question of the ontological status of consciousness The question 'What is consciousness?' is one of the most perplexing in philosophy-so perplexing that many have been motivated to proceed as though consciousness did not exist. If William James was speaking rhetorically when he said "Consciousness does not exist," 1 many behaviorists of the recent past were not. 2 James meant only to imply that consciousness is not an independently existing soul-substance, along side physical substances. He did not mean that we do not really 'have' consciousness, and he did not provide final resolution for the problem of the causal interrelations between consciousness and the physical realm (e. g. , our bodies). Many recent philosophers and psychologists, however, try to proceed as though these problems did not exist. (shrink)

Non-reductive moral realism is the view that there are moral properties which cannot be reduced to natural properties. If moral properties exist, it is plausible that they strongly supervene on non-moral properties- more specifically, on mental, social, and biological properties. There may also be good reasons for thinking that moral properties are irreducible. However, strong supervenience and irreducibility seem incompatible. Strong supervenience entails that there is an enormous number of modal truths (specifically, truths about exactly which non-moral properties necessitate which (...) moral properties); and all these modal truths must be explained. If these modal truths can all be explained, then it must be a fundamental truth about the essence of each moral property that the moral property is necessarily equivalent to some property that can be specified purely in mental, social and biological terms; and this fundamental truth appears to be a reduction of the moral property in question. The best way to resist this argument is by resorting to the claim that mental and social properties are not, strictly speaking, natural properties, but are instead properties that can only be analysed in partly normative terms. Acceptance of that claim is the price of non-reductive moral realism. (shrink)

In her 1997 OSSA paper, Trudy Govier discusses in detail my thesis that arguers have dialectical obligations. In a 1998 paper she further examines this thesis to see whether it is viable and concludes that it faces serious problems. In this paper, I assess the state of the thesis in light of Govier's discussion of it. I urge that we have something to gain from the empirical turn--from investigating best practices. At the end, I take a step back to ask (...) what is really at issue here and how it connect s to other issues in the theory of argument. (shrink)

We study a real-effort environment, where a delegator has to decide if and to whom to delegate a task. Applicants send cheap-talk messages about their past performance before the delegator decides. We experimentally test the theoretical prediction that information transmission does not occur in equilibrium. In our experiment, we vary the message space available to the applicants and compare the information transmitted as well as the level of efficiency achieved. Depending on the treatment, applicants can either submit a Number indicating (...) past performance, an Interval in which past performance falls, or a free Text message. We observe that messages contain information in all treatments. Interestingly, information transmission occurs only in the treatments where messages are intervals or free text. Social welfare is higher if messages are intervals or free text than precise numbers. Gender and ethnicity stereotypes only influence delegation in the Number treatment, where no information transmission takes place. (shrink)

Reductionist explanations in biology generally assume that biological mechanisms are highly deterministic and basically similar between individuals. A contrasting view has emerged recently that takes into account the degeneracy of biological processes—the ability to arrive at a given endpoint by a variety of available paths, even within the same individual. This perspective casts significant doubt on the prospects for the ability to predict behavior accurately based on brain imaging or genotyping, and on the ability of neuroscience to stipulate ethics.

One of the traditional ways in which we manage dissensus is by argumentation, which may be construed as the attempt of the proponent to persuade rationally the other party of the truth of some thesis. To achieve this, the arguer will often anticipate a possible objection. In this paper, I attempt to shed light on the normative aspect of the task of anticipating objections. I deal with such questions as: How is the arguer to anticipate objections? Which of the anticipated (...) objections are to be dealt with? What is required to deal successfully with an objection? (shrink)

One of the distinctive features of rhetorical approaches to the study of argumentation is the emphasis placed on the role of the audience. Here one thinks immediately of the influence of Chaïm Perelman and of his and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca’s The New Rhetoric. There is something importantly right about an audience-centered approach to argumentation. Clearly if you wish to persuade an audience of your position (or gain the acceptance of your thesis), you must engage that audience and in some sense carry (...) them with you from your starting points to your conclusion. Still, when I read theorists who place strong emphasis on the role of audience (for example, Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca in The New Rhetoric .. (shrink)

The desire for founding educational reform on a sound empirical basis has coincided with a period of impressive progress in the field of neuroscience and wide public interest in its findings, leading to an ongoing debate about the potential of neuroscience to inform education reform. But is neuroscience really suited to provide specific instructions for improving learning conditions at school? This paper explores the educational implications of neuroscience.

It would appear that among scientific men discussion of the general principles of natural science has, on the whole, proved more congenial to mathematicians and physicists than to biologists. Just why this should be so might be difficult to explain or justify. But one reason seems to lie in the comparative ambiguity of the concept of causation in biology. In general, the term causation has been used in science to designate the special rôle of active factors, rather than of passive (...) or stable factors, in the determination of single events. By active factors we mean those which involve physical change, typically associated with transfer of energy; these are distinguished from stable factors or invariants which persist unchanged throughout the process under consideration. Thus in the classical isolated system, the total energy represents a stable factor which remains the same through all transformations of the system. The energy changes its form, potential or distribution, but not its total quantity. This rule of conservation defines a static condition persisting as a limiting factor through any case of change. Similarly, the permanent or unchanging factor in a machine consists in the stable properties and structural interconnections of its parts; together those constitute an invariant which fixes definitely the possible range of activity. Activity itself requires flow of energy; strictly speaking, a causal factor is not a static factor but is a change of some kind; releasing events are included under causal events since they introduce factors without which change does not occur. (shrink)

Philosophy can be very abstract and apparently remote from our everyday concerns. In this book Ralph Blumenau brings out for the non-specialist the bearing that thinkers of the past have on the way we live now, on the attitude we have towards our lives, towards each other and our society, towards God and towards the ethical problems that confront us. The focus of the book is those aspects of the history of ideas which have something to say to our (...) present preoccupations. After expounding the ideas of a particular thinker there follows a discussion of the material and how it relates to issues that are still alive today, based on the author's classroom debates with his own students. Another feature of the book is the many footnotes which refer the reader back to earlier, and forward to later, pages of the book. They are intended to reinforce the idea that throughout the centuries philosophers have often grappled with the same problems, sometimes coming up with similar approaches and sometimes with radically different ones. (shrink)

[opening paragraph]: Nicholas Humphrey argues persuasively that consciousness results from active and efferent rather than passive and afferent functions. These arguments contribute to the mounting recent evidence that consciousness is inseparable from the motivated action planning of creatures that in some sense are organismic and agent-like rather than passively mechanical and reactive in the way that digital computers are. Newton calls this new approach the ‘action theory of understanding'; Varela et al. dubbed it the ‘enactive’ view of consciousness. It was (...) endorsed in passing by the early Dennett , although he never followed up on it in his later work. According to Dennett, ‘No afferent can be said to have a significance ‘A’ until it is ‘taken’ to have the significance ‘A’ by the efferent side of the brain’ . Luria also stressed the neurophysiology of efferent processes as correlated with consciousness . Further elaborations of the enactive approach are defended by Ellis , Newton , Ellis and Newton , Watt , Thelen and Smith , Jarvilehto and Gendlin . According to this view, conscious information processing can arise only as the self-regulated action of a self-organizing process that confronts the world as a system of action affordances. While information can be passively absorbed in the form of afferent input, only efferent nervous activity in the interest of a living organism's homeostatic balance can create consciousness of any information, whether perceptual, imagistic, emotional or intellectual. (shrink)

In considering this problem a distinction should first be made between its scientific and it philosophical aspects. The scientific problem is that of defining in exact understandable terms those conditions and factors which make possible the synthesis of the living organism from the simpler elements of the non-living environment, and also its maintenance in the adult state as a fully developed and autonomous organic individual. The problem as thus stated is one to be approached by methods of observation and experiment, (...) leading to verifiable results which are then expressed in systematic and intelligible form. The final statements or representations thus reached, the accepted scientific generalizations, inevitably take on a theoretical form, and as such are necessarily partial and abstract. Many of them, in fact, are to be regarded primarily as simplifications or models devised in the interest of clear representation or understanding. Their relation to concrete reality may range from attempts at exact portraiture to formulæ or diagrams having little more than heuristic significance. Any realistic philosophy of nature must always remember how incomplete and provisional are the theoretical conceptions of any natural science. (shrink)

Buultjens discusses the future prospects for democracy by asking whether the present "democratic starburst" can be translated into durable systems and working institutions.

The candid student of scientific method will recognize that biology is not entirely a physical science, while acknowledging that it owes its present state of development largely or mainly to physical conceptions and methods. It is clear that the constant features of vital organization and activity presuppose the physical constancies as basis. Nevertheless the living organism has proved in many ways refractory to a purely physical analysis. This is not merely because the higher organisms have their psychical side and that (...) psychological method differs from physical method; conceivably a properly unified science might apply equally to the physical and the psychical sides of nature. Nor is it entirely because vital behaviour is more individualized and less predictable than physical behaviour. It is rather that certain fundamental features of natural process, largely neglected by physics, are just those which are of chief importance in those flux-like entities which are living organisms. The traditional methods of physics, which analyze nature into combinations of invariant elements and processes, are ill-adapted to deal with the fluid, asymmetrical and largely indeterminate features of process as displayed so conspicuously in living organisms. This, put briefly, is the contention of L. L. Whyte, physicist and author of the recent remarkable book on the relations between physics and biology. In the present paper I propose first to consider especially those sections of the book which bear more particularly on the fundamental problems of biology; this part is paraphrase and commentary rather than summary, although never departing far from the subject of unitary principle as defined by Whyte. Later I shall consider some philosophical implications which seem important. For the details of Whyte's exposition the reader should refer to his book, which is notably clear, concise and critical in style and treatment, as well as comprehensive and fully realistic in its point of view. (shrink)

Biology is in a unique position among the natural sciences. It is not simply complex physics and chemistry, for living organisms have a psychological as well as a physical side. Even as physical systems their character is highly special, largely because their material substance is continually changing; perhaps it was from them that Heraclitus derived his idea that all is flow. The comparison with vortexes and candle flames is an old one. Wilhelm Ostwald included living organisms in his class of (...) “stationary systems”: they represent not a static but a kinetic equilibrium, what we now often call a “steady state”; there is a balance of constitutive and dissipative processes. Materials and energy converge to the living center, undergo there characteristic transformations, among which complex chemical and structural syntheses are conspicuous, and are again distributed at random to the surroundings. The living organism is thus the seat of a special type of physical and chemical activity found nowhere else in nature, and it is significant that this is associated with psychical activity—demonstrably in the higher organisms, by implication in the lower. (shrink)