In his 1961 paper "Tithenai ta Phainomena",1 G. E. L. Owen addressed the problem of the relationship between science as preached in the Analytics and the practice of the Aristotelian treatises. However, he gave this venerable crux a novel twist by focusing on a different aspect of the issue. According to the Prior Analytics , it appears that the first premises of scientific demonstrations must be obtained from collections (historiai) of facts derived from empirical observation. However, many of the treatises (...) seem to make little use of empirical inquiry and instead concern themselves more with 'conceptual analysis.' This is especially true in the Metaphysics and the ethical treatises, but it is also very much characteristic of the Physics. How are these two kinds of inquiry related? (shrink)

Postmodernism and Education responds to the interest in postmodernism as a way of understanding social, cultural and economic trends. Robin Usher and Richard Edwards explore the impact which postmodernism has had upon the theory and practice of education, using a broad analysis of postmodernism and an in-depth introduction to key writers in the field, including Lacan, Derrida, Foucault and Lyotard. In examining the impact which this thinking has had upon contemporary theory and practice of education, Usher and Edwards concentrate (...) particularly upon how postmodernist ideas challenge existing concepts, structures and hierarchies. (shrink)

Philosophy Compass, Volume 17, Issue 4, April 2022.

Donnellan famously argued that while one can fix the reference of a name with a definite description, one cannot thereby have a de re belief about the named object. All that is generated is meta-linguistic knowledge that the sentence “If there is a unique F, then N is F” is true. Donnellan’s argument and the sceptical position are extremely influential. This article aims to show that Donnellan’s argument is unsound, and that the Millian who embraces Donnellan’s scepticism that the reference-fixer (...) cannot secure the relevant de re belief faces a serious problem: Millianism about names plus scepticism about the reference-fixer’s de re belief conflicts with what seems to be an analytical thesis about the relationship between semantic content and understanding. The upshot is that the Millian has good reason to seek an alternative to scepticism. (shrink)

This explains how to smoothly integrate booked orders with a combinatorial market maker, all for the general case of bets on E[x|A] for arbitrary random variables x and sets A.

Economic growth is determined by the supply and demand of investment capital; technology determines the demand for capital; while human nature determines the supply. The supply curve has two distinct parts; giving the world economy two distinct modes. In the familiar slow growth mode; rates of return are limited by human discount rates. In the fast growth mode; investment is limited by the world's wealth. Historical trends suggest that we may transition to the fast mode in roughly another century and (...) a half. Can some new technology switch us to the fast mode more quickly than this? Perhaps; but such a technology must greatly raise the rate of return for the world's expected worst investment project. It must thus be very broadly applicable; improving almost all forms of capital and investment. Furthermore; investment externalities must remain within certain limits. (shrink)

Future Forms in English. A look at "will" and the futurates. Pretty basic stuff, but some people might find it useful. Register in Academic Writing . This is where I get Hallidayan for a change: an analysis of two different academic genres, with some comments about the teaching of academic writing (this is the paper I would have given at the Reading University conference on writing if I'd been able to afford the air fare!).

This paper investigates whether gender affects ethically sensitive decisions of a personal or business nature. Data from 51 practicing accountants from both public accounting and private industry suggest that while differences exist between female and male accountants in responses to specific situations, overall responses are quite similar. Statistically significant differences were found for only five of the sixteen ethically sensitive situations. Further, when personal and business situations of a similar nature were paired together, two of the eight differences between personal (...) and business responses were significantly different between females and males. Taken as a whole, the results refute the suggestion that the ethical decision making of organizations may be enhanced as more women enter the business field. (shrink)

One of the most important students of Franz Brentano was Anton Marty, who made it his task to develop a philosophy of language on the basis of Brentano’s analysis of mind. It is most unfortunate that Marty does not receive the attention he deserves, primarily due to his detailed and distracting polemics. In the analysis presented here his philosophy of language and other aspects of his thought, such as his ontology , are examined first and foremost in their positive rather (...) than critical character. The analysis is moreover supplemented by translations of four important works by Marty, including his entire work On the Origin of Language. These are in fact the first English translations of any substantial writings by him. The resulting picture that emerges from the analysis and translations is that Marty has much to say that proves to be of enduring interest for the philosophy of language on a range of topics, especially the meanings of statements, of emotive expressions, and of names as regards both their communicative and their ontological aspects. The volume will be of interest not only to philosophers and historians of philosophy, but also to historians of linguistics and psychology. (shrink)

We confirm a conjecture, about neat embeddings of cylindric algebras, made in 1969 by J. D. Monk, and a later conjecture by Maddux about relation algebras obtained from cylindric algebras. These results in algebraic logic have the following consequence for predicate logic: for every finite cardinal α ≥ 3 there is a logically valid sentence X, in a first-order language L with equality and exactly one nonlogical binary relation symbol E, such that X contains only 3 variables (each of which (...) may occur arbitrarily many times), X has a proof containing exactly α + 1 variables, but X has no proof containing only α variables. This solves a problem posed by Tarski and Givant in 1987. (shrink)

In this article we critically evaluate Robin Le Poidevin's recent attempt to set out an argument for the ontological reduction of chemistry independently of intertheoretic reduction. We argue, firstly, that the argument he envisages applies only to a small part of chemistry, and that there is no obvious way to extend it. We argue, secondly, that the argument cannot establish the reduction of chemistry, properly so called.

We consider the problem of finding and classifying representations in algebraic logic. This is approached by letting two players build a representation using a game. Homogeneous and universal representations are characterized according to the outcome of certain games. The Lyndon conditions defining representable relation algebras (for the finite case) and a similar schema for cylindric algebras are derived. Finite relation algebras with homogeneous representations are characterized by first order formulas. Equivalence games are defined, and are used to establish whether an (...) algebra is ω-categorical. We have a simple proof that the perfect extension of a representable relation algebra is completely representable. An important open problem from algebraic logic is addressed by devising another two-player game, and using it to derive equational axiomatisations for the classes of all representable relation algebras and representable cylindric algebras. Other instances of this approach are looked at, and include the step by step method. (shrink)

Feminist philosophers have challenged a wide range of gender injustices in professional philosophy. However, the problem of precarity, that is, the increasing numbers of contingent faculty who cannot find permanent employment, has received scarcely any attention. What explains this oversight? In this article, I argue, first, that academics are held in the grips of an ideology that diverts attention away from the structural conditions of precarity, and second, that the gendered dimensions of such an ideology have been overlooked. To do (...) so, I identify two myths: the myth of meritocracy and the myth of work as its own reward. I demonstrate that these myths—and the two-tier system itself—manifest an unmistakably gendered logic, such that gender and precarity are mutually reinforcing and co-constitutive. I conclude that feminist philosophers have particular reason to organize against the casualization of academic work. (shrink)

We argue that the inference from dispositional essentialism about a property (in the broadest sense) to the metaphysical necessity of laws involving it is invalid. Let strict dispositional essentialism be any view according to which any given property’s dispositional character is precisely the same across all possible worlds. Clearly, any version of strict dispositional essentialism rules out worlds with different laws involving that property. Permissive dispositional essentialism is committed to a property’s identity being tied to its dispositional profile or causal (...) role, yet is compatible with moderate interworld variation in a property’s dispositional profile. We provide such a model of dispositional essentialism about a property and metaphysical contingency of the laws involving it. (shrink)

Humans have slowly built more productive societies by slowly acquiring various kinds of capital, and by carefully matching them to each other. Because disruptions can disturb this careful matching, and discourage social coordination, large disruptions can cause a “social collapse,” i.e., a reduction in productivity out of proportion to the disruption. For many types of disasters, severity seems to follow a power law distribution. For some of types, such as wars and earthquakes, most of the expected harm is predicted to (...) occur in extreme events, which kill most people on Earth. So if we are willing to worry about any war or earthquake, we should worry especially about extreme versions. If individuals varied little in their resistance to such disruptions, events a little stronger than extreme ones would eliminate humanity, and our only hope would be to prevent such events. If individuals vary a lot in their resistance, however, then it may pay to increase the variance in such resistance, such as by creating special sanctuaries from which the few remaining humans could rebuild society. (shrink)

Research has increasingly focussed on the benefits of meditation in everyday life and performance. Mindfulness in particular improves attention, working memory capacity, and reading comprehension. Given its emphasis on moment-to-moment awareness, we hypothesised that mindfulness meditation would alter time perception. Using a within-subjects design, participants carried out a temporal bisection task, where several probe durations are compared to “short” and “long” standards. Following this, participants either listened to an audiobook or a meditation that focussed on the movement of breath in (...) the body. Finally, participants completed the temporal bisection task for a second time. The control group showed no change after the listening task. However, meditation led to a relative overestimation of durations. Within an internal clock framework, a change in attentional resources can produce longer perceived durations. This meditative effect has wider implications for the use of mindfulness as an everyday practice and a basis for clinical treatment. (shrink)

In standard belief models, priors are always common knowledge. This prevents such models from representing agents’ probabilistic beliefs about the origins of their priors. By embedding standard models in a larger standard model, however, pre-priors can describe such beliefs. When an agent’s prior and pre-prior are mutually consistent, he must believe that his prior would only have been different in situations where relevant event chances were different, but that variations in other agents’ priors are otherwise completely unrelated to which events (...) are how likely. Due to this, Bayesians who agree enough about the origins of their priors must have the same priors. (shrink)

A simple exogenous growth model gives conservative estimates of the economic implications of machine intelligence. Machines complement human labor when they become more productive at the jobs they perform, but machines also substitute for human labor by taking over human jobs. At first, expensive hardware and software does only the few jobs where computers have the strongest advantage over humans. Eventually, computers do most jobs. At first, complementary effects dominate, and human wages rise with computer productivity. But eventually substitution can (...) dominate, making wages fall as fast as computer prices now do. An intelligence population explosion makes per-intelligence consumption fall this fast, while economic growth rates rise by an order of magnitude or more. These results are robust to automating incrementally, and to distinguishing hardware, software, and human capital from other forms of capital. (shrink)

Forty years after it first appeared, Sidney Shoemaker's much-read article, "Time without Change" , with its striking thought experiment, still dominates discussions of this intriguing topic. And rightly so: it is imaginative, subtle, and controversial. But times have changed, as they do, and in particular, the epistemological context in which Shoemaker was writing, overshadowed as it was by verificationism, no longer constrains our thinking as once it did. This is the age of bold and unashamedly realist metaphysical argument, in which (...) demands for evidential, as opposed to a priori, support for its theses are rarely made. (shrink)

The American Journal of Bioethics, Volume 12, Issue 8, Page 17-18, August 2012.

Through an analysis of two highly routinized interactive service jobs, fast food service and insurance sales, this article explores the interrelationship of work, gender, and identity. While notions of proper gender behavior are quite flexible, gender-segregated service jobs reinforce the conception of gender differences as natural. The illusion that gender-typed interaction is an expression of workers' inherent natures is sustained, even in situations in which workers' appearances, attitudes, and demeanors are closely controlled by their employers. Gender-typed work has different meanings (...) for women and men, however, because of differences in the cultural valuation of behavior considered appropriate to each gender. (shrink)

This paper is concerned with the discussion of the phenomenon sometimes described as “the utility and disutility of chance” both from the descriptive and the prescriptive point of view Emphasis is not on axioms and formal properties but on the psychological content of decision theoretic constructs.

This paper is an argument against Truthmaker Necessitarianism—the doctrine that the existence of a truthmaker necessitates the truth of the proposition it makes true. Armstrong’s sufficiency argument for necessitarianism is examined and shown to be question begging. It is then argued in detail that truthmaking is a matter of grounding truth and that grounding is a dependency relation that neither entails nor reduces to necessitation.

Name der Zeitschrift: Nietzsche-Studien Jahrgang: 44 Heft: 1 Seiten: 488-489.

Theorizing about human character to understand what it is to be a morally good person and how being morally good relates to acting rightly and living well has always been a central concern of moral philosophy. Traditional virtue theory, however, neglects two significant matters. The first is the sociopolitical dimensions of character: how character is shaped by, supports, and resists domination and subordination. While feminist ethics has begun to theorize virtue in relation to oppression, it shares with traditional virtue theory (...) a second problematic inattention to something of equal importance for understanding character and moral life, namely, bad character or vice. I argue that rich accounts of vice are needed to achieve the aims not only of traditional and feminist ethical theory but also of every moral agent facing the central moral task of trying to become a morally good person leading a morally worthy life. This paper explicates a substantive reorientation in moral theory in general and feminist ethics in particular, arguing for two changes. The first is a move to “critical character theory,” which seeks to understand moral character as both a site and source of domination and subordination, as a center of resistance both to oppression and to change, and as both subject and object of liberatory struggle. The second change is more serious and sustained attention to theorizing vice both as damage inflicted by domination, subordination, and by struggles both to maintain and to resist and overthrow them, and as a mechanism through which domination persists and emancipation is thwarted. (shrink)

This inquiry analyzed the extent to which television commercials used mature models, relative to younger models. It also analyzed the extent to which commercials portrayed the elderly in a favorable or an unfavorable manner. The study used content analysis to test twelve hypotheses. The authors arrived at conclusions relating to the depiction of mature individuals in television commercials and set forth various recommendations to advertisers, based on the analysis.

The Identity of Indiscernibles is the principle that there cannot be two individual things in nature that are qualitatively identical. The principle is not exactly popular. Michael Della Rocca tries to resurrect it by arguing that we must accept this principle, for otherwise we cannot explain the impossibility of completely overlapping indiscernible objects of the same kind that share all their parts and exist in the same place at the same time. I try to show that his argument goes wrong: (...) we need not embrace the identity of indiscernibles to deal with the co-location problem. (shrink)

The literature focussing on digital platforms as intraorganisational intermediaries underlines a key shortcoming of this model that has not been addressed by the literatures on digital social movements, advocacy, and activism. This limitation is related to the fact that platform-based organisations usually exploit widespread representations of digital technologies as tools for democratisation, but then offer low-quality internal democracy. This has implications for these organisations’ internal and external legitimacy, which are vital for mobilising and engaging supporters and the general public. This (...) article proposes an historical and processual study of the hybrid organisation Momentum, with the aim of exploring the organisational implications of the cyber-democratising discourse and its impact on the internal legitimacy of platform-based organisations. (shrink)

A world product time series covering two million years is well fit by either a sum of four exponentials, or a constant elasticity of substitution (CES) combination of three exponential growth modes: “hunting,” “farming,” and “industry.” The CES parameters suggest that farming substituted for hunting, while industry complemented farming, making the industrial revolution a smoother transition. Each mode grew world product by a factor of a few hundred, and grew a hundred times faster than its predecessor. This weakly suggests that (...) within the next century a new mode might appear with a doubling time measured in days, not years. (shrink)

This question might seem odd, but it is, nevertheless, directly relevant to our life today. My intention is to bring ancient Daoist philosophy into a conversation about the challenges that technology poses. Today, cutting-edge technologies do not exist just in research labs but have already easily penetrated all aspects of our lives. It is difficult to argue that we do not yet inhabit a world with Artificial Intelligence, for it has become a pervasive and effective technology woven into the fabric (...) of everyday living. (shrink)