We present four classical theories of counterpossibles that combine modalities and counterfactuals. Two theories are anti-vacuist and forbid vacuously true counterfactuals, two are quasi-vacuist and allow counterfactuals to be vacuously true when their antecedent is not only impossible, but also inconceivable. The theories vary on how they restrict the interaction of modalities and counterfactuals. We provide a logical cartography with precise acceptable boundaries, illustrating to what extent nonvacuism about counterpossibles can be reconciled with classical logic.

It is a truism that some industries are controversial either because the processes employed or the resulting products, for instance, can potentially harm the well-being of people. The controversy that surrounds certain industries can sharply polarise public opinion and debate. In this article, we employ legitimacy theory and morality policy to show how one industry sector (the electronic gaming machine sector as part of the wider gambling industry) is subject to this reaction. We suggest that the difficulty in establishing legitimacy (...) surrounding CSR practices in this sector is related to morality policy, whereby ideology and personal values play important roles in dividing opinion. Thus, gambling is often framed as an activity that is morally and ethically problematic. To show how this can manifest, we examine the veracity of two state-funded studies in Australia used in the development of gambling policy and their subsequent adoption in academic research. We highlight methodological, analytical and reporting issues in these studies that normally should be identified by those using such findings. The significance is that when morality policy and conflict surrounding legitimacy are involved, then it can explain why adherence to normative research standards is potentially lowered. Our theoretical posture leads us to further speculate that the adoption and communication of CSR in electronic gambling will be contested by opponents of the industry. (shrink)

The effects of climate change are far reaching and widespread. As the issue continues to batter the world, the call for mitigation initiatives is becoming louder. In responding to this call we take a multidisciplinary approach to examining board diversity as an innovative solution in tackling climate change. Utilizing data from 69 fossil fuel organizations, our findings suggest that increasing female representation and foreign culture representation on the board can effectively reduce greenhouse gas emissions, the main contributor to climate change. (...) In part, this is achieved through responsible leadership and innovation. Our contributions reach beyond traditional board diversity literature, where the benefits of diversity are confined primarily to a discussion of corporate social responsibilities. Instead, we depict the benefits of board diversity as a direct lever in mitigating climate change. We propose that this is through the diversified board's enhanced ability to identify stakeholder needs and, subsequently, conceive of more effective and responsibly innovative solutions. (shrink)

Liao and Carbonell explore how oppressive medical technologies constitute materiality insofar as they reflect past oppression, embody oppression in the present day, and carry oppression into the fu...

Community-supported agriculture (CSA) initiatives are spaces where diverse work relations are performed. From a postcapitalist perspective, these initiatives attempt to create alternative-capitalist and non-capitalist work relations next to capitalist ones. While analyses of work relations in CSA abound, it remains uncertain how such diversification is made possible and how it is shaped by the micro-politics of and power relations in these initiatives. This paper addresses this gap by analysing how power shapes transformations to postcapitalist work relations in CSA. It provides (...) substantial empirical evidence of multiple manifestations of power enabling or constraining postcapitalist work relations through a comparative case study of three CSA initiatives in Portugal. Results show that while CSA creates postcapitalist work relations that are non-alienated, non-monetised and full of care, they insufficiently unmake unbalanced power relations established in capitalist work relations. This paper argues that, when establishing postcapitalist work relations, the selected CSA initiatives could benefit from actively deconstructing internal hierarchies, de-centralising decision-making power from farm owners and addressing oppressive power relations that are ossified in their local and cultural context. (shrink)

Adam Elga (Philosophers’ Imprint, 10(5), 1–11, 2010) presents a diachronic puzzle to supporters of imprecise credences and argues that no acceptable decision rule for imprecise credences can deliver the intuitively correct result. Elga concludes that agents should not hold imprecise credences. In this paper, I argue for a two-part thesis. First, I show that Elga’s argument is incomplete: there is an acceptable decision rule that delivers the intuitive result. Next, I repair the argument by offering a more elaborate diachronic puzzle (...) that is more difficult for imprecise Bayesians to avoid. (shrink)

Some theorists have developed formal approaches to truth that depend on counterexamples to the structural rules of contraction. Here, we study such approaches, with an eye to helping them respond to a certain kind of objection. We define a contractive relative of each noncontractive relation, for use in responding to the objection in question, and we explore one example: the contractive relative of multiplicative-additive affine logic with transparent truth, or MAALT. -/- .

Curnow, Rohan This article is concerned with the beginning of the trajectory of thought that links two events: Vatican II and the emergence of an explicit doctrine of the Preferential Option for the Poor in the official documents of the Latin American Episcopal Conference's (CELAM) meetings at Puebla, Mexico in 1968, and Medell n, Columbia in 1979. Specifically, this article concentrates on a group that formed early in proceedings at Vatican II, known as both the 'Group of the Church (...) of the Poor' or the 'Belgian College Group' (after the place in which it met). The group, albeit an informal one, championed the issue of poverty in work that was conducted largely behind the scenes and outside official Conciliar structures. This article illustrates that, via the work of the Group of the Church of the Poor, the poor broke into the Church's consciousness at the Council in a new - if limited - way. To demonstrate this point, this article focuses on the Group of the Church of the Poor's: (a) origins and complexion; (b) aims and activities; and, (c) achievements and shortcomings at the Council. (shrink)

Many accept David Lewis's (1983) claim that, among the candidate meanings for our predicates, some are more natural than others -- they do better or worse at ``carving nature at its joints''. Call this claim predicate naturalism. Disagreement remains over whether the notion of naturalness extends ``beyond the predicate'' (à la Sider, 2011). Are the candidate meanings of logical vocabulary also more or less natural? Call this claim logical naturalism. -/- One motivation for predicate naturalism comes from its supposed ability (...) to help rebut various radical indeterminacy arguments associated with Hilary Putnam (1977, 1980, 1981). It does so in combination with a popular meta-semantic theory called reference magnetism. I argue that the same threats of Putnam-style radical indeterminacy rearise for proponents of predicate naturalism -- threats which logical naturalism helps rebuts. So, if we accept predicate naturalism because it helps fend off threats of indeterminacy, we should also accept logical naturalism. (shrink)

We provide an overview of the meta-ontological position known as "Quantifier Variance".

Generative AI models are shaping our future. In this work, we discover and expose the bias against physically challenged people in generative models. Generative models (Stable Diffusion XL and DALL·E 3) are unable to generate content related to the physically challenged, e.g., inclusive washroom, even with very detailed prompts. Our analysis reveals that this disability bias emanates from biased AI datasets. We achieve this using a novel strategy to automatically discover bias against underrepresented groups like the physically challenged. Finally, we (...) track the root of this disability bias in search engines (Google, Bing, Yandex, and DuckDuckGo). Search engines suffer from disability bias for neutral prompts. The standard strategy of using synonyms to retrieve diverse results does not automatically include the physically challenged. Search engines require specific mention of the underrepresented group to retrieve relevant results. Therefore, conscious effort is required to include underrepresented groups while scraping datasets from search engines. A future built by generative AI having little understanding of physically challenged people will have serious implications. We hope that our effort lays the groundwork for future datasets and algorithms that include this underrepresented group. (shrink)

Does moral vagueness require ontic vagueness? A central challenge for nonontic treatments of moral vagueness arises from the referential stability of moral terms across small changes in how they are applied: if moral vagueness is not ontic vagueness, it’s hard to explain this referential stability. Pointing to this challenge, Miriam Schoenfield has argued that moral vagueness is ontic vagueness, at least for a moral realist. I disagree. I argue that a moral realist can use a conceptual role semantics for moral (...) terms to give a purely semantic treatment of moral vagueness. (shrink)

We present evidence that preschool children oftentimes understand disjunctive sentences as if they were conjunctive. The result holds for matrix disjunctions as well as disjunctions embedded under every. At the same time, there is evidence in the literature that children understand or as inclusive disjunction in downward-entailing contexts. We propose to explain this seemingly conflicting pattern of results by assuming that the child knows the inclusive disjunction semantics of or, and that the conjunctive inference is a scalar implicature. We make (...) two assumptions about implicature computation in the child: that children access only a proper subset of the adult alternatives, and that children possess the adult capacity to strengthen sentences with implicatures. As a consequence, children are expected to sometimes not compute any implicatures at all, but in other cases they are expected to compute an implicature that is different from the adult implicature. We argue that the child’s conjunctive strengthening of disjunctive sentences realizes the latter possibility: the adult infers that the conjunction is false but the child infers that the conjunction is true. This behaviour is predicted when our assumptions about child development are coupled with the assumption that a covert exhaustive operator is responsible for strengthening in both the child and the adult. Specifically, children’s conjunctive strengthening is predicted to follow from the same mechanism used by adults to compute conjunctive free choice implicatures in response to disjunctive permission sentences. We furthermore argue that this parallel between the child and the adult extends to disambiguation preferences. In particular, we present evidence that children prefer to strengthen disjunctions to conjunctions, in matrix and embedded positions ; this result mirrors previous findings that adults prefer to compute free choice, at the root and under every. We propose a disambiguation strategy that explains the preference for conjunctive strengthening – by both the child and the adult – even though there is no general preference for exhaustification. Specifically, we propose that the preference for a conjunctive strengthening follows from a pragmatic preference for a complete answer to the Question Under Discussion. (shrink)

In this paper we will provide a modal-to-modal translational embedding of E into K, simplifying a similar result which is obtainable using a novel translation due to S.K. Thomason.

According to Amie Thomasson’s modal normativism, the function of modal discourse is to convey semantic rules. But what is a "semantic rule"? I raise three worries according to which there is no conception of a semantic rule that can serve the needs of a modal normativist. The first worry focuses on de re and a posteriori necessities. The second worry concerns Thomasson's inferential specification of the meaning of modal terms. The third worry asks about the normative status of semantic rules.

The #1 guide to finding inner peace and outer success. In this ground breaking book, International Yoga Instructor Rohan James has catapulted the practice of Yoga into the 21st century. We live in a fast paced material world but this need not detract from you achieving inner peace nor should following a spiritual practice hinder you in being successful in the world. You can have it all!

This paper considers some issues to do with valuational presentations of consequence relations, and the Galois connections between spaces of valuations and spaces of consequence relations. Some of what we present is known, and some even well-known; but much is new. The aim is a systematic overview of a range of results applicable to nonreflexive and nontransitive logics, as well as more familiar logics. We conclude by considering some connectives suggested by this approach.

Rituals are able to transform ordinary objects into extraordinary objects. And while rituals typically do not cause physical changes, they may imbue objects with a particular specialness – a simple gold band may become a wedding ring, while an ordinary dessert may become a birthday cake. To treat such objects as if they were ordinary then becomes inappropriate. How does this transformation take place in the minds of observers, and how do we recognize it when we see it? Here, we (...) suggest that two under-examined elements of ritual need deeper consideration within the context of ritual cognition. We propose a fully integrated operational definition in which these two critical ritual elements – causal opacity and goal demotion – are included. In a pre-registered experiment one-hundred and one adults, in a 2 × 2 mixed-within participants design observed actions performed upon profane objects. These actions were either ordinary or ritualized, and were described as a blessing, a curse, or were not described at all. Contrary to established findings and pre-registered predictions, we found that ritualized actions alone are not enough to influence perceptions of, and attributions towards, objects, and that positive goal information are more behaviorally persuasive than negative information. However, we found that participants recalled ritualized action in greater detail and with more specificity than ordinary actions. In effect, we demonstrate that causal opacity and goal information interact to allow us to recognize a ritual as a ritual. (shrink)

According to the plurivaluationist, our vague discourse doesn’t have a single meaning. Instead, it has many meanings, each of which is precise—and it is this plurality of meanings that is the source of vagueness. I believe plurivaluationist positions are underdeveloped and for this reason unpopular. This paper attempts to correct this situation by offering a particular development of plurivaluationism that I call supersententialism. The supersententialist leverages lessons from another area of research—the Problem of the Many—in service of the plurivaluationist position. (...) The Problem reveals theoretical reasons to accept that there are many cats where we thought there was one; the supersententialist claims that we are in a similar situation with respect to languages, propositions and sentences. I argue that the parallel suggested by the supersententialist reveals unappreciated advantages and lines of defense for plurivaluationism. (shrink)

What does it take for two logics to be mere notational variants? The present paper proposes a variety of different ways of cashing out notational variance, in particular isolating a constraint on any reasonable account of notational variance which makes plausible that the only kinds of translations which can witness notational variance are what are sometimes called definitional translations.

Our concern here is with the extent to which the expressive equivalence of Wehmeier’s Subjunctive Modal Language and the Actuality Modal Language is sensitive to the choice of background modal logic. In particular we will show that, when we are enriching quantified modal logics weaker than S5, AML is strictly expressively stronger than SML, this result following from general considerations regarding the relationship between operators and predicate markers. This would seem to complicate arguments given in favour of SML which rely (...) upon its being expressively equivalent to AML. (shrink)

One desideratum for a theory of fundamentality is to give us the conceptual tools to articulate fruitful metaphysical distinctions between the assortment of ‘realist’ and ‘anti-realist’ positions in a given domain such as meta-ethics. The ability to articulate such distinctions gives us a way to assess rival theories of fundamentality, such as Fine’s grounding theory and Sider’s metaphysical semantic theory. Indeed, Sider has argued that metaphysical semantic theories have an edge with respect to this desideratum and takes this as an (...) important reason to prefer those theories over rival grounding theories. This paper takes a closer look at how the rival theories compare with respect to questions of realism and defends the grounding theorist’s ability to meet the desideratum. (shrink)

Imaginative pretend play is often thought of as the domain of young children, yet adults regularly engage in elaborated, fantastical, social-mediated pretend play. We describe imaginative play in adults via the term “pretensive shared reality;” Shared Pretensive Reality describes the ability of a group of individuals to employ a range of higher-order cognitive functions to explicitly and implicitly share representations of a bounded fictional reality in predictable and coherent ways, such that this constructed reality may be explored and invented/embellished with (...) shared intentionality in anad hocmanner. Pretensive Shared Reality facilitates multiple individual and social outcomes, including generating personal and group-level enjoyment or mirth, the creation or maintenance of social groups, or the safe exploration of individual self-concepts (such as alternative expression of a players sexual or gender identity). Importantly, Pretensive Shared Reality (both within the specific context of table-top role-playing games, and other instances) are primarily co-operative and co-creative. We draw on multiple examples, and focus on Table-Top Role Playing games (TTRPG) – and specifically, the most popular and enduring table-top role-playing games, Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) – as a primary example of such play. Our conception of “pretensive shared reality” links the widespread existence and forms of adult imaginative play to childhood pretense, places it within a developmental and evolutionary context, and argues that pretensive shared realities – which underpin many forms of imaginative culture – are an important topic of study unto themselves, and may be utilized to provide methodological insight into a variety of psychological domains. (shrink)

Provocative and disconcerting, The False Past confronts what many generations hold near and dear about their memorials. What if everything we know about colonial history is wrong? What if history is driven by vanity and unexamined moral claims? What if fabrication and corruption are so integral to history that it must be written anew? These questions, posed by Nietzsche, are answered in this exciting new work. The False Past takes a disturbing escapade through Australia’s colonial past. Using a Nietzschean evaluation (...) of how the eternal recurrence of suffering worked in practice, it announces a fresh vision for frontier history. And in the finest Nietzschean tradition, Price reveals the uncaring absurdity and inconsistency of settlers in the pioneer past as their supreme failing because it produces contemporary trauma. The False Past evaluates claims to colonial nobility, too. Who were the souls aiming beyond humanity who rose up Down Under? Was its Übermensch a dark and moody genius with a taste for conquest, a supreme talent in pastoral profiteering, an Indigenous exemplar, or a cunning bushranger out on a mission? Awkward and confronting, bold and experimental, this book often says the unsayable. The False Past lays siege to nostalgia, piety, vanity and nihilism to explain how unfounded exceptionalism has come to rule our lives. A revisionist assault on settled history, The False Past promises to spark debate among readers for many years to come. (shrink)

Are there ethics justifying anti-colonial violence? How and why did the violence and visions of nationalist movements become incorporated by colonial and neo-colonial rule? Using the insurrection by the Malayan Communist Party (1948–1960) as an example, this book argues that resorting to violence sped up the decolonisation of British Malaya by forcing its colonial administration to invent Malay nationalism and pursue ameliorative social policy among the Chinese diaspora community in a manner clearly derived from the Party’s platform. Yet this was (...) not the same as giving the country economic emancipation from the expectations of neo-colonial rule. Violence and Emancipation in Colonial Ideology entertains no warm colonial memories of the cold war years. Confirming Price’s reputation as a plain speaking critic of Empire apologia, this book asks how colonial ideology was considered to be beneath Europe yet desperately needed by it. He faces down nostalgic communities defending an outdated view that “might was right” in South East Asia and that communism failed to contribute to the world that came to be. Using an Althusserian assumption, the book begs the question: if a late colonial state was subjective, then how did it claim a sufficiently objective mantle to rule and how did ideological techniques enable this? (shrink)

Our words are vague, yet the world is precise. This dissertation consists of three essays that jointly attempt to articulate, explore, and defend this claim. In the first essay, I present my positive proposal for a non-metaphysical treatment of vagueness. Inspired by research on the Problem of the Many, I claim that we are speaking many perfectly precise languages simultaneously and that each speech act involves uttering many perfectly precise sentences. This position, which I call supersententialism, is the most plausible (...) alternative to metaphysical vagueness: it provides a fully reductive account of vagueness that preserves the T-schema. The second essay aims to address a rampant, albeit unnoticed, argument schema that purports to show that non-metaphysical accounts of vagueness cannot explain vagueness in fundamental, or perfectly natural, properties. In response, I propose a position that I call ersatz metaphysical vagueness according to which the term ‘perfectly natural’ is vague. Ersatz metaphysical vagueness retains the idea that the world is precise, but replicates the advantages of genuine metaphysical vagueness. I show how, by adopting this hypothesis, there can be vagueness in attributions of perfectly natural properties arising from the vagueness in our notion of perfect naturalness rather than from ‘the world itself’. Ersatz metaphysical vagueness thus provides us with a highly general alternative to genuine metaphysical vagueness. The final essay explores the relationship between metaphysical vagueness and ontological deflationism. Ontological deflationist positions treat the quantifier as having a highly plastic meaning. This plasticity naturally leads to vagueness in the quantifier. Thus, ontological deflationists are committed to vague existence. Is this vague existence ‘metaphysical vagueness’ or ‘vagueness in the world’? The rest of the essay clarifies this question and answers it under various clarifications. (shrink)

The automated identification of national implementations of European directives by text similarity techniques has shown promising preliminary results. Previous works have proposed and utilized unsupervised lexical and semantic similarity techniques based on vector space models, latent semantic analysis and topic models. However, these techniques were evaluated on a small multilingual corpus of directives and NIMs. In this paper, we utilize word and paragraph embedding models learned by shallow neural networks from a multilingual legal corpus of European directives and national legislation (...) to develop unsupervised semantic similarity systems to identify transpositions. We evaluate these models and compare their results with the previous unsupervised methods on a multilingual test corpus of 43 Directives and their corresponding NIMs. We also develop supervised machine learning models to identify transpositions and compare their performance with different feature sets. (shrink)

Maximize Presupposition! is an economy condition that adjudicates between contextually equivalent competing structures. Building on data discovered by O. Percus, I will argue that the constraint is checked in the local contexts of embedded constituents. I will argue that this architecture leads to a general solution to the problem of antipresupposition projection, and also allows I. Heim’s ‘Novelty/Familiarity Condition’ to be eliminated as a constraint on operations of context change.

Public benefit corporations are National Health Service, that is, state, entities whose function to provide healthcare in discharge of public duties. If we regardvalue as the output of such organisations, it seems logical to connect the values of the organisation to thevalue produced by such organisations. But, on closer examination there are competing underlying logics in play: (1) those based on promoting organisational efficiency and efficacy; and (2) those based on the idea of building service provision around the clinician–patient relationship. (...) Underlying these logics are differing value sets. These clash. Because of the clashing of underlying moral frameworks the connection between values andvalue becomes hard, if not impossible. This paper argues that (1) the clash in these moral frameworks must be addressed by the organisation rather than between individuals or groups of individuals within the organisation; (2) alloying duties within hybrid professionals submerges but does not resolve these conflicts; (3) one approach could be to impose on the organisation itself an ethical imperative to promote, enhance and protect from deterioration the welfare of the patients; (4) a board ethics committee is a possible organisational structure that could transparently and fairly balance clashes within the competing moral frameworks in a way that could reconcile the competing logics and (5) if such conflicts can be better resolved at the organisational level what the organisation must do to achieve its objectives will become clearer because what needs to be valued would naturally emerge connecting values,value and what is valued. (shrink)

Academic research studies examining the ethical attitudes and behaviors of salespeople have produced several frameworks that explore the ethical decision-making processes to which salespeople adhere when faced with ethical dilemmas. Past literature enriches our understanding; however, a critical review of the relevant literature suggests that an emotional route to salesperson ethical decision-making has yet to be explored. Given the fact that individuals’ emotional capacities play an important role in decision-making when faced with an ethical dilemma, there is a need for (...) empirical research in this area. We address this issue by outlining and testing an emotion-based model to study the ethical attitudes and behaviors of salespeople in a relational selling context. Building on the cognitive-affective model proposed by Gaudine and Thorne (J Bus Ethics 31:175–187, 2001 ), we outline a framework that incorporates higher order prosocial emotions: capacity for concern and capacity for guilt. We include salesperson’s role clarity within the organization as a moderator to examine person–situation interaction. (shrink)

In recent months, pharmaceutical manufacturers have brought legal challenges to a provision of the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) empowering the federal government to negotiate the prices Medicare pays for certain prescription medications. One key argument made in these filings is that price negotiation is a “taking” of property and violates the Takings Clause of the US Constitution. Through original case law and health policy analysis, we show that government price negotiation and even price regulation of goods and services, including (...) patented goods, are constitutional under the Takings Clause. Finding that the IRA violates the Takings Clause would radically upend settled constitutional law and jeopardize the US’s most important state and federal health care programs. (shrink)

This essay traces the parallel, but unrelated, evolution of two sets of reactions to traditional idealist history of science in a world-historical context. While the scholars who fostered the postcolonial approach, in dealing with modern science in the non-West, espoused an idealist vision, they nevertheless stressed its political and ideological underpinnings and engaged with the question of its putative Western roots. The postidealist history of science developed its own vision with respect to the question of the global spread of modern (...) science, paying little heed to postcolonial debates. It then proposes a historiographical approach developed in large part by historians of South Asian politics, economics, and science that, without compromising the preoccupations of each of the two groups, could help construct a mutually comprehensible and connected framework for the understanding of the global workings of the sciences. (shrink)

Approximately speaking, an urn model for first-order logic is a model where the domain of quantification changes depending on the values of variables which have been bound by quantifiers previously. In this paper we introduce a model-changing semantics for urn-models, and then give a sequent calculus for urn logic by introducing formulas which can be read as saying that “after the individuals a1,..., an have been drawn, A is the case”.

Background‘The Clinical Ethics Advisory Group’ (CEAG) is the clinical ethics support body for Newcastle upon Tyne Hospitals National Health Service Foundation Trust. A significant change in CEAG’s way of working occurred over the past 5 years as a result of Court decisions, increasing public expectations and an increase in CEAG’s paediatric case flow.PurposeReview historical data: (a) as a useful benchmark to look for the early impact of significant service changes and (b) to seek possible reference (‘sentinel’) cases for use with (...) a posited practical (casuistic) case-based reasoning model.MethodsAudit of the minutes of the first 22 years’ meetings was undertaken by the two chairs of CEAG over that period of time.Results223 matters discussed: 86 Trust policy issues; 117 clinical cases (84 adult (32 urgent), 33 child (8 urgent)); 12 CEAG procedural issues and 8 UK Clinical Ethics Network ‘round robin’ cases. The range of topic areas was wide. A broad range of ethical structures were deployed, principlism predominated. Quality was subjectively assessed by each reviewer, but different methods were used. This proved highly concordant between the two reviewers. 47% (105/223) of discussions were ‘excellent’ (*A4C4–A4C4) and 70% (156.5/223) ‘good’ or better (*A4C4–A3C3). By meeting the criteria of ‘excellent’ and ‘prospective’, 92/223 (41%) of matters were deemed potentially suitable as sentinel cases.ConclusionsThe audit provides a rich vein of information. There is demand for CEAG’s services, workload is becoming more complex. Formal funding for such services seems justified. (shrink)

According to one view of linguistic information, a speaker can convey contextually new information in one of two ways: by asserting the content as new information; or by presupposing the content as given information which would then have to be accommodated. This distinction predicts that it is conversationally more appropriate to assert implausible information rather than presuppose it. A second view rejects the assumption that presuppositions are accommodated; instead, presuppositions are assimilated into asserted content and both are correspondingly open to (...) challenge. Under this view, we should not expect to find a difference in conversational appropriateness between asserting implausible information and presupposing it. To distinguish between these two views of linguistic information, we performed two self-paced reading experiments with an on-line stops-making-sense judgment. The results of the two experiments—using the presupposition triggers the and too—show that accommodation is inappropriate relative to non-presuppositional controls when the presupposed information is implausible but not when it is plausible. These results provide support for the first view of linguistic information: the contrast in implausible contexts can only be explained if there is a presupposition-assertion distinction and accommodation is a mechanism dedicated to reasoning about presuppositions. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Martha Nussbaum and the Moral Life of MiddlemarchRohan MaitzenWe are all of us born in moral stupidity, taking the world as an udder to feed our supreme selves.George Eliot, MiddlemarchIAs is well known to readers of this journal, Martha Nussbaum emphasizes in her essays on fiction as moral philosophy that the philosophical significance of novels is found, not in whatever theories or principles they might overtly discuss or dramatize, (...) but in their literary form and their prose style. In particular, she finds in the late novels of Henry James an alternative to the reductive, pseudoscientific prose of contemporary analytic philosophy, which she argues inhibits the range of possible answers to the basic ethical question "How should one live?"1 James's prose shows "attention to particulars, a respect for the emotions, and a tentative and non-dogmatic attitude to the bewildering multiplicities of life" (LK, p. 27), and thus it exemplifies the Aristotelian ethical conception she advocates.In this essay I want to disentangle Nussbaum's theory of the ethical significance of fictional form—which I endorse—from her preoccupation [End Page 190] with James—which I do not. Far from being, as she believes, egalitarian, humane, and morally responsible, the Jamesian consciousness Nussbaum would have us emulate is elitist, exclusionary, and morally inert; further, in its commitment to indeterminacy, mystery, and obscurity, the Jamesian model is in fact profoundly anti-philosophical.2 I propose instead George Eliot's Middlemarch as exemplary of fiction's potential contribution to "the job of moral philosophy" (LK, p. 138). Nussbaum may admire the subtlety and density of The Golden Bowl, but I will argue that in its narrative strategies and its integration of novelistic perception and philosophic reflection, Middlemarch proves a better ethical guide and a better example of literature that is also philosophy.In making this argument, I will rely on the terms set by Nussbaum herself for the ethical evaluation of fiction. Unlike other philosophers who invoke literature only as a "rich source of examples awaiting illumination by philosophy," Nussbaum insists that analysis of a text's literary properties is the essential methodology of ethical criticism.3 Every aspect of form and style "expresses a sense of life and of value, a sense of what matters and what does not" (LK, p.5). We discover this "sense of life" through close reading; "our engaged experience line by line," as Wayne Booth says, reveals the character of the implied author, the would-be friend urging on us a particular "pattern of desires."4On Nussbaum's reading, James's prose is ethically exemplary because it is "the prose of Aristotelian perception":It depicts in its cadences the moral effort of straining to see correctly and to come up with the appropriate picture or description; its tensions, obliquities, and circumnavigations express the sheer difficulty of finding the right description or picture for what is there before one. If, as James says, to "put" is to "do," showing this is showing moral activity of a valuable kind.(LK, p. 88)But Nussbaum ends up at James because her alternative moral theory begins there, not because moral philosophy that is literary inevitably sounds like James or supports Aristotle.5 As Nussbaum's gestures towards a more general theory of the role of "the novel" in philosophy indicate, novels may share generic features which complement or correct conventional philosophical discourse, but investigating other novels in this way may also lead us to other, non-Aristotelian, non-Jamesian ethical conceptions. My commentary on Middlemarch presents one such alternative. First, however, I will consider our "engaged experience" of The [End Page 191] Golden Bowl, a key example for Nussbaum, to show more particularly why we ought to be cautious about accepting James's late style as exemplary for moral philosophy, despite Nussbaum's passionate advocacy. What kind of friend do we meet there, in that world full of indeterminacy, obliquity, and circumnavigation? What kind of guidance in practical reasoning do we get from this implied author—what "ought" emerges from the Jamesian "is"?Perhaps because, as Nussbaum admits, her work on fiction as moral philosophy emerged "out of a longstanding love" for The... (shrink)

The teaching of critical race, feminist, and queer theory generally, and of LGBT rights specifically, has developed into a discrete, contested, and politicised area of teaching in English law schools and beyond. While there is some academic discussion on the personal and political significance of ‘promoting LGBT rights’ within law schools, less considered is how ‘LGBT rights’ are shaped by the emotions of legal academics and how these emotions circumscribe what we imagine LGBT rights can and/or should mean in law (...) and critical legal study. To illustrate this dynamic, this paper uses critical race, feminist, and queer scholarship alongside work in the emerging field of Law and Emotion to articulate the ‘emotional grammar’ of teaching a Gender, Sexuality and Law unit at an English law school. Turning to autoethnography, I use my emotional experiences as a methodological tool to explore how emotions co-constitute the pedagogical, political, scholarly, and personal registers of LGBT rights as a descriptive, critical, and normative pursuit. In doing so, I use ‘emotional grammar’ as a novel way to map how emotions structure legal pedagogies invested in pursuing LGBT rights. Emotional grammar illustrates how emotions structure: (1) the articulation of LGBT rights as an object of study in law; (2) the pursuit of law to secure the rights of LGBT people; and (3) the shape of legal critique relating to LGBT rights. (shrink)

It is well known that no consistent normal modal logic contains (as theorems) both ♦A and ♦¬A (for any formula A). Here we observe that this claim can be strengthened to the following: for any formula A, either no consistent normal modal logic contains ♦A, or else no consistent normal modal logic contains ♦¬A.

In a paper from the 1980s, Byrd claims that the logic of "eventual permanence" for linear time is KD5. In this note we take up Byrd's novel argument for this and, treating the problem as one concerning translational embeddings, show that rather than KD5 the correct logic of "eventual permanence" is KD45.