Applications of willingness to pay have shown the difficultly to discriminate between various options. This reflects the problem of embedding in both its specific sense, of options being nested within one another, and its more general sense, whereby respondents cannot discriminate between close substitutes or between more-disparate rivals for the same budget. Furthermore, high proportions of reversals between WTP-value and simple preference based rankings of options are often highlighted. Although an incremental WTP approach was devised to encourage more differentiated answers (...) and a higher degree of consistency among respondents, a theoretical basis for this approach has not been elucidated, and there is little evidence to show that this approach might indeed achieve greater consistency between explicit and implicit rankings inferred from WTP values. We address both these issues. Following our theoretical exposition, standard and incremental approaches were compared with explicit ranking in a study assessing preferences for different French emergency care services. 280 persons, representative of the French adult population, were interviewed. Half received the incremental version, the other half the standard version. Results suggest that the incremental approach provides a ranking of options fully in line with explicit ranking. The standard approach was reasonably consistent with explicit ranking but proved unable to differentiate between the five most preferred providers, as predicted by theory. Our findings suggest that the incremental approach provides results which can be used in priority-setting contexts. (shrink)

Performance Generating Systems (PGS) are rule- and task-based approaches to improvisation on stage in theatre, dance, and music. These systems require performers to draw on predefined source materials (texts, scores, memories) while working on complex tasks within limiting rules. An interdisciplinary research team at a large Western Canadian university hypothesized that learning to sustain this praxis over the duration of a performance places high demands on executive functions; demands that may improve the performers’ executive abilities. These performers need to continuously (...) shift attention while remaining responsive to embodied and environmental stimuli in the present, they are required to inhibit automated responses and impulses using the rules of the system, and they strive towards addressing multitasking challenges with fluidity and flexibility. This study set out to test the mentioned hypothesis deductively and identify mediating processes inductively, using mixed empirical methods. In a small sample experiment with a control group (28 participants; 15 in intervention group, 13 in control group), standardized quantitative tests of executive functions (D-KEFS) were administered before and after an eight-week intervention. Participant-reported qualitative observations from the praxis were also collected throughout the intervention for grounded analysis. Within the limitations of small sample data, we found both statistically significant and trending effects on inhibition, problem-solving initiation, fluidity, and cognitive flexibility. Examining the mediating process, we found that participants experienced significant challenges sustaining the practice halfway through the intervention. The participant-reported solutions to these challenges, which emerged as the strongest behavioural patterns when coding the qualitative data to saturation, were strategies of problem-solving and of re-directing attention. These strategies support and advance our understanding of the effects measured in the standardized tests. In terms of application, our results identify characteristics of PGS that could potentially maintain and strengthen executive functions over and above less demanding performing arts interventions. The results also deliver new insight into how PGS works, which may contribute to the development and teaching of this artistic practice. (shrink)

Since its inception as a topic of inquiry, mirror-self-recognition has usually been explained by two models: one, initiated by Guillaume, proposes that mirror-self-recognition depends upon kinesthetic-visual matching, and the other, initiated by Gallup, that self-recognition depends upon a self-concept. These two models are examined historically and conceptually. This examination suggests that the kinesthetic-visual matching model is conceptually coherent and makes reasonable and accurate predictions; and that the self-concept model is conceptually incoherent and makes inaccurate predictions from premises which are themselves (...) inaccurate. From a theoretical standpoint, the kinesthetic-visual matching model is the better explanation of self-recognition. (shrink)

Heyes's literature review of deception, imitation, and self-recognition is inadequate, misleading, and erroneous. The anaesthetic artifact hypothesis of self-recognition is unsupported by the data she herself examines. Her proposed experiment is tantalizing, indicating that theory of mind is simply a Turing test.

_Alien Identities: Exploring Differences in Film and Fiction_ Edited by Deborah Cartmell, I. Q. Hunter, Heidi Kaye and Imelda Whelehan London: Pluto Press, 1999 ISBN: 0-7453-1405-8 197 pp.

Tomasello, Kruger & Ratner deserve congratulations for their well-reasoned ideas on the development of cultural learning. Their arguments are generally convincing, perhaps because their distinctions and developmental relations among types of cultural learning and agency mirror concepts of my own.

Dog play bows are recognized as indicating play motivation in dog-dog play, but have never been examined in dog-human play. Twenty-seven dogs and 26 humans engaged in interspecific interactions with familiar and unfamiliar cross-species partners to play; videotapes of the resulting 50 play interactions were examined for play bows. Fifty play bows were detected, enacted by 10 dogs playing with their owner, 6 of whom also enacted play bows with an unfamiliar player. Play bows occurred only infrequently before or after (...) pauses (or non-play activities) by the dog or the human, or before escape during play. Play bows appeared to be integral to dogs’ play activities, usually when the dog was playing object-keepaway and tug o’ war, or the dog was reacting to the human engaging in frustration games like object-keepaway or fakeout. Play bows appear to be multi-purpose actions indicating play motivation within dog-human play. (shrink)

The “intentional schema” seems identical to or dependent upon kinesthetic–visual matching, both of which account for similar empirical findings. The intentional schema, however, fails to account for variability in children's understanding of false belief and differences in children's understanding of self and other in pretense.

From editors Carl Mitcham and Robert Mackey comes an unusually reflective and wide-ranging colloquium on technology as a philosophical problem. Organized into sections on conceptual issues, ethical and political critiques, religious critiques, existentialist critiques, and metaphysical studies, Philosophy and Technology features an introductory overview that suggests the aims of truly comprehensive philosophy of technology. Philosophy and Technology features essays by Jacques Ellul, Lewis Mumford, Ortega y Gasset, and C.S. Lewis. This revised and fully updated edition features a comprehensive bibliography.

In this article the author adduces a non‐positivist argument for a necessary connection between law and morality; the argument is based on the claim to correctness, and it is directed to an attack stemming from Eugenio Bulygin. The heart of the controversy is the claim to correctness. The author first attempts to show that there are good reasons for maintaining that law necessarily raises a claim to correctness. He argues, second, for the thesis that this claim has moral implications. Finally, (...) he attempts to refute Bulygin's objection that the claim‐based argument for non‐positivism boils down to contradiction and triviality. (shrink)

In the debate between positivism and non-positivism the argument from relativism plays a pivotal role. The argument from relativism, as put forward, for instance, by Hans Kelsen, says, first, that a necessary connection between law and morality presupposes the existence of absolute, objective, or necessary moral elements, and, second, that no such absolute, objective, or necessary moral elements exist. My reply to this is that absolute, objective, or necessary moral elements do exist, for human rights exist, and human rights exist (...) because they are justifiable. (shrink)

Bender, Robert Review of: Women in Cambridge: A Men's university - though of a mixed type, by Rita McWilliams-Tullberg, Gollancz 1975, 255 pp.

The author outlines his thesis that legal discourse is a special case of general practical discourse (Sonderfallthese) and develops it as an attempt to cover both the authoritative, institutional, or real and free, discursive, or ideal dimension of legal reasoning. On this basis, he examines the objections raised by Habermas (1996) to the special case thesis. First, he discusses the reduction of general practical discourse to moral discourses (genus proximum problem) holding that the former is a combination of moral, ethical, (...) and pragmatic arguments within the priority of just; second, he examines the objection that general practical arguments change their character or nature when employed in legal contexts (subset and specification problem) and the related problems concerning legal validity and unjust law. He concludes proposing a procedural (opposite to a coherential) integration of general practical arguments in the legal context. (shrink)

Wehmeier [2012] argues that identity is a problematic relation and that we can eliminate all mention of it. In this note I show, to the contrary, that if identity is problematic then Wehmeier has not given us the means to dispense with it.

Both an anthology of Augustine's writings and a commentary on them, this work features substantial selections from On the _Trinity_, _Confessions_, _The City of God_, and _On Freedom of the Will_, as well as selections from lesser known works--all brilliantly knit together and illuminated by philosopher Robert Meagher.

In this article, I take up two arguments in favor of the discursive model of legal argumentation: the claim to correctness argument and the dual nature thesis. The argument of correctness implies the dual nature thesis, and the dual nature thesis implies a nonpositivistic concept of law. The nonpositivistic concept of law comprises five ideas. One of them is the special case thesis. The special case thesis says that positivistic elements, that is, statutes, precedents, and prevailing doctrines, are necessary for (...) law in order to achieve legal certainty. Without this, law would not be as perfect as it could possibly be. But it says, at the same time, that this alone would not be enough to fulfill the claim to correctness. The claim to correctness refers not only to the real dimension of law, defined by statutes, precedents, and prevailing doctrines, but also to its ideal dimension, defined, first and foremost, by justice. The special case thesis is my oldest thesis. It has remained an essential element of my system over the years. Its connection with four other theses—the Radbruch formula, the human rights thesis, the idea of deliberative democracy, and principles theory—does not change this at all. On the contrary, this connection has lent greater strength to the special case thesis. (shrink)

According to the author there is no doubt that one has to distinguish between the justification and the application of norms. Problems are seen only to arise if one asks what exactly the distinction is and which consequences have to be drawn from it. Recently, Klaus Günther, in particular, has searched for this distinction and connected it with far‐reaching conclusions concerning the theory of norms, arguments, and morals. His theses are the object of the author's considerations.

This book argues that the primary function of human thinking in language is to make judgments, which are logical-normative connections of concepts. Robert Abele points out that this presupposes cognitive conditions that cannot be accounted for by empirical-linguistic analyses of language content or social conditions alone. Judgments rather assume both reason and a unified subject, and this requires recognition of a Kantian-type of transcendental dimension to them. Judgments are related to perception in that both are syntheses, defined as the (...) unity of representations according to a rule/form. Perceptual syntheses are simultaneously pre-linguistic and proto-rational, and the understanding makes these syntheses conceptually and thus self-consciously explicit. Abele concludes with a transcendental critique of postmodernism and what its deflationary view of ontological categories—such as the unified and reasoning subject—has done to political thinking. He presents an alternative that calls for a return to normativity and a recognition of reason, objectivity, and the universality of principles. (shrink)

Law's Ideal Dimension provides a comprehensive account in English of renowned legal theorist Robert Alexy's understanding of jurisprudence, as expanded upon from his publications A Theory of Legal Argumentation (OUP 1989), A Theory of Constitutional Rights (OUP 1985), and The Argument fromInjustice (OUP 1992).The collection is divided into three parts. Part One concerns the nature of law: it explores its real and ideal dimensions and how the ideal dimension of law is sometimes employed but does not play a systematically (...) important role. Part Two discusses constitutional rights, human rights, andproportionality. It defends the construction of constitutional rights as principles against objections raised by the rule construction and elaborates on the nature of constitutional rights as well as the mathematical balancing of those rights. Part Three concerns the relation between argumentation,correctness, and law. The author concludes this volume with a biographical reflection. (shrink)

This paper has three parts. The first outlines the history of Nestorianism. From the end of the fifth century all the way into the thirteenth century, quite a large population—in fact most Christians in Asia—belonged to branches of the Nestorian church. The second part provides a brief biography of Nestorius, after whom this church was named. The third part explores two elements of Nestorius’s christology, as they are found in his posthumously discovered theological writings. Does Christ have one nature or (...) two, and if two, how can one person have two natures? To what extent was Adam, the first man, created for a role that Christ eventually fulfilled? (shrink)

These are the answers I gave to Brian Bix, Peter Koller, Ralf Posher, Torben Spaak, Timothy Endicott, and Jan Sieckmann at the end of a splendid conference day in 2018. The critique given to me concerned important aspects of three main themes in my work: the claim to correctness, human and constitutional rights, and the ideal dimension of law. In the last decades I have attempted to connect these themes systematically. The result is the idea of democratic constitutionalism as an (...) institutionalization of practical reason. (shrink)

Focusing on Hans Kelsen's concept of the 'ought', the main problem is whether the 'ought' qua obligation or the 'ought' qua empowerment or competence serves as his fundamental normative concept. Stanley L Paulson has adduced strong textual arguments for the thesis that the fundamental role played by empowerment represented Kelsen's opinion ever since the late 1930s. But to accept the thesis of the fundamental character of empowerment as an interpretive thesis is not, eo ipso , to accept it as a (...) norm-theoretic thesis. In light of this background, I take up three arguments for conceiving the modality of obligation as being at least as fundamental: the chain argument, the argument from unlawfulness, and the argument from overload. This leads to the conclusion that Kelsen's 'ought' would be incomplete if it did not comprise obligation as a modality that is at least as fundamental as the modality of empowerment or competence. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:26. IN DEFENSE OF SECTION V: A REPLY TO PROFESSOR YOLTON Professor Yolton's article is especially valuable for its opening paragraphs on the writing done in the eighteenth century on the physiological basis of cognition. These provide a much-needed background to Hume's own remarks on the nature of perceptions.. It is both correct and helpful, I think, to understand any philosopher as a man of his own century. Professor (...) Yolton offers this article, in part at least, to differ with my interpretation given in "The Location, Extension, Shape, and Size of Hume's Perceptions." It seems to me, however, that this opening part of his article serves instead to lend support to mine. I have not said, by the way, that Hume believes that ideas are "brain impressions," since Hume has not used that phrase himself. Instead, I have merely provided evidence that Hume believes some perceptions have location, extension, shape and size; and I have pointed out an inconsistency that arises in this connection. Professor Yolton warns against taking Hume to intend, in saying that an idea represents its impression, that the idea is an image of the impression. I find, however, that Hume does assert that ideas are images: Those perceptions, which enter with most force and violence, we may name impressions.... By ideas I mean the faint images of these in thinking and reasoning.... (Tl) Again, in explaining memory: For what is the memory but a faculty, by which we raise up the images of paet perceptions? And as an image necessarily resembles its object.... (T260) At the end of his Part I, Professor Yolton concludes: (1) Hume never mentions the brain and the physiological processes. It is the mind or the soul which considers, conceives, imagines, remembers, thinks It seems to me not at all clear that Hume distinguishes soul 27. or mind from the brain, for he says: Bodily pains and pleasures...arise Originally in the soul, or in the body, whichever you please to call it.... (T276) And Hume certainly does describe the brain and its physiological processes on T60-61 and T185, as Professor Yolton himself later recognizes explicitly on his pages 12 and 16. An ambiguity arises regarding 'representation', Professor Yolton concludes, because Hume is writing in two languages in his account of ideas as representations : The difficulties of interpretation arise from Hume's application of quantitative terms to ideas - size, parts, divisibility. We have to balance this quantitative language of ideas by Hume's ascription of logical properties to ideas - truth, contradiction, possibility. When he speaks of ideas 'representing' things, to which language does 'representation' belong: to the quantitative or to the logical language? (6) I gather that Professor Yolton finds some sort of incompatibility between the "quantitative" characteristics of ideas and their "logical" ones; yet he offers no explanation why he finds them incompatible. More to the point, of course, is whether Hume himself regarded them as incompatible. I find he does not. Rather, it appears that it is the "quantitative" aspects of some ideas that permit them to be adequate representations, having the same "logical" properties as do objects. On T28 Hume has concluded that some ideas are very small: This however is certain, that we can form ideas, which shall be no greater than the smallest atom of the animal spirits of an insect a thousand times less than a mite.... Then on the following page he makes use of this conclusion to argue that ideas have the same "logical" properties as the objects they represent: Wherever ideas are adequate representations of objects, the relations, contradictions and 28. agreements of the ideas are all applicable to the objects ; and this we may in general observe to be the foundation of all human knowledge. But our ideas are adequate representations of the most minute parts of extension; and thro' whatever divisions and subdivisions we may suppose these parts to be arriv'd at, they can never become inferior to some ideas, which we form. The plain consequence is, that whatever appca rn impossible and contradictory upon the comparison of these ideas, must be really impossible and contradictory, without any farther excuse or evasion. (T29), Thus I... (shrink)

There are two things about Siewert's project that worry me. First, it's not clear to me that by taking Siewert's first-person approach, we can come to grasp what he means by 'consciousness'. And second, even if we are able to come to grasp what he means by this term, it's not clear to me that all the "consciousness-neglectful theoreticians of mind" - for example, Dennett, Rosenthal, and Tye - have failed to give an account of the property which Siewert's term (...) picks out. (shrink)

This dissertation explores three areas of philosophical interest: expressivist or non-cognitivist construals of normative discourse, normative construals of semantic discourse, and the plausibility of semantic non-factualism or irrealism. These three areas are not as unrelated as they may at first glance appear to be. In particular the work presented here demonstrates that the notions of disagreement and inconsistency play a crucial role in all three areas. ;Regarding the first area, it is argued that reflection on the nature of disagreement and (...) inconsistency yields some deep problems for expressivist construals of normative discourse. The best current attempts to provide an expressivist construal of normative discourse---due to Blackburn and Gibbard---model what disagreement and inconsistency amount to on the expressivist account on the way in which forbidding p conflicts with permitting p. However, closer examination of what exactly constitutes disagreement and inconsistency raises doubts about whether such a move is legitimate. Regarding the second area, it is argued that the normativity of meaning is required to explain how disagreement itself is possible. Finally, regarding the last area, it is argued that the attempts of Boghossian and Wright to establish that semantic non factualism inflates into global non-factualism are not successful. The notion of disagreement is once more crucial here. In particular it is argued that getting clear on what exactly it is to disagree is the key to seeing where Wright's line of reasoning goes astray. (shrink)

Holds the figure of Orpheus as the bridge between the Greek tribal shaman and poet Mallarme (1842-98), the father of modernism.