„Rechtsgefühl“ kann das individuelle Gerechtigkeitsempfinden, das Judiz der Richterin im Entscheidungsfindungsprozess, das emotionale Aufbäumen der unterlegenen Partei nach der Entscheidung, eine kollektive Rechtsüberzeugung bezeichnen. Verweise auf das „Rechtsgefühl“ werden oft genutzt, um Rechtssysteme oder einzelne Rechtsakte von innen oder von außen zu legitimieren oder zu delegitimieren. Als sozialer Kompass und normative Rechtfertigung versagt „Rechtsgefühl“ dagegen, wenn es mit zahlreichen gegenläufigen Rechtsgefühlen konkurriert. Dieser Frage nach dem Stellenwert divergierender Rechts- und Gerechtigkeitsempfindungen gehen die in diesem Band versammelten Beiträge aus praktischer, theoretischer (...) und historischer Perspektive nach. Mit Beiträgen von Prof. Dr. Gabriele Britz, Prof. Dr. Jeanne Gaakeer, Prof. Dr. Thorsten Keiser, Prof. Dr. Sylvia Kesper-Biermann, Prof. Dr. Frans-Willem Korsten, Prof. Dr. Greta Olson und Prof. Dr. Franz Reimer. (shrink)

I respond to Charles McCoy's criticisms of my view of Niebuhr's theological ethics by arguing that “conversion,” understood as tacit reorientation rather than explicit choice, does accurately depict Niebuhr's 1929 shift in perspective; that “language” emphasized as central to his ethics does in fact hold act and word together; that “praxis,” while not a part of Niebuhr's conscious agenda, is inherent in his idea of response; and that Niebuhr's thought is revolutionary which could and should be developed, but by someone (...) else, into a full-blown postcritical theological ethics. (shrink)

According to the naïve, pre-theoretic conception, lying seems to be characterized by the intent to deceive. However, certain kinds of bald-faced lies appear to be counterexamples to this view, and many philosophers have abandoned it as a result. I argue that this criticism of the naïve view is misplaced; bald-faced lies are not genuine instances of lying because they are not genuine instances of assertion. I present an additional consideration in favor of the naïve view, which is that abandoning it (...) comes at an extremely high price; alternative accounts which eschew the intent-to-deceive condition on lying have difficulty distinguishing lies from non-literal speech. (shrink)

This book argues that the major traditions in the philosophy of language have mistakenly focused on highly idealized linguistic contexts. Instead, it presents a non-ideal foundational theory of language that contends that the essential function of language is to direct attention for the purpose of achieving diverse social and political goals. Philosophers of language have focused primarily on highly idealized linguistic contexts in which cooperative agents are working toward the shared goal of gaining information about the world. This approach abstracts (...) away from important issues like power, ideology, social position, and diversity of goals which are crucial to explaining linguistic phenomena both at the semantic and pragmatic levels. This book begins by examining the work of some of the pioneers of this tradition--primarily David Lewis, Paul Grice, and Robert Stalnaker. The author shows that various problems have their source in idealizations made at the foundational level of linguistic theory and proposes to rebuild from the ground-up. She presents a non-ideal foundational theory of language which retains the major insights of traditional frameworks while rejecting the social idealizations that guide them. Then, she explores the social and political applications of her account to issues such as dog whistling, propaganda, slurs and racist speech, silencing, and manipulation. Non-Ideal Foundations of Language will appeal to researchers and advanced students in philosophy of language who are interested in the social and political applications of language, as well as traditional metasemantic theory. (shrink)

Drawing on recent work in formal pragmatic theory, this paper shows that the manipulation of discourse structure—in particular, by way of shifting the Question Under Discussion mid-discourse—can constitute an act of epistemic injustice. I argue that the “All Lives Matter” response to the “Black Lives Matter” slogan is one such case; this response shifts the Question Under Discussion governing the overarching discourse from Do Black lives matter? to Which lives matter? This manipulation of the discourse structure systematically obscures the intended (...) meaning of “Black lives matter” and disincentivizes future utterances of it. (shrink)

H. Richard Nieburh's major work, which he did not live to complete, was to be on theological ethics. Based on the published and unpublished writings that Niebuhr completed during the last decade of his life, Roots of Relational Ethics demonstrates that Niebuhr's conception of responsibility was the culmination of his thought about self, God, Christ, the church, ethics and decision-making, and social evil. R. Melvin Keiser examines the limitations and potential of Niebuhr's use of responsibility in comparison with relevant (...) themes in liberation and feminist theological ethics. He suggests that Niebuhr's mature work can contribute to the alleviation of environmental exploitation, sexism, anti-Judaism, war, racism, and classism. (shrink)

This paper attempts to revive a once-lively program in the philosophy of language—that of reducing linguistic phenomena to facts about mental states and actions. I argue that recent skepticism toward this project is generated by features of traditional implementations of the project, rather than the project itself. A picture of language as essentially a mechanism for cooperative information exchange attracted theorists to metasemantic accounts grounding language use in illocutionary action (roughly, using an utterance to elicit a propositional attitude). When this (...) picture is rejected, a metasemantics grounding language in locutionary action (using an utterance to direct attention) emerges as a more viable proposal, dissolving an intractable issue for traditional theories: The metasemantics of subsentential expressions. (shrink)

This paper defends the use-based metasemantic project against the problem of meaning without use, which allegedly shows the predictions of use-based metasemantic accounts to be indeterminate with respect to unusably long or complex expressions. This criticism is commonly taken to be decisive, prompting various retreats and contributing to the project’s eventual decline. Using metasemantic conventionalism as a case study, I argue the following: either such expressions do not belong to used languages or their meanings are uniquely determined by use. Thus, (...) the alleged problem of meaning without use offers no challenge to the use-based metasemantic project generally, nor to conventionalism in particular. (shrink)

Michael Polanyi names Augustine as inaugurates of his “postcritical”philosophy. To understand what this means by exploring creation in the Confessions will clarify complex problems in Augustine and articulate theological implications in Polanyi. Specifically, it will show why an autobiographical account of conversion ends speaking of creation; how creation can thus be understood as “personal” language; how creation can be recovered in a time preoccupied with conversion; how conversion and creation are linked with incarnation, hermeneutics, and confessional rhetoric; and it will (...) suggest a contemporary use of creation language that connects the scientific and the religious. (shrink)

In vision research metacontrast masking is a widely used technique to reduce the visibility of a stimulus. Typically, studies attempt to reveal general principles that apply to a large majority of participants and tend to omit possible individual differences. The neural plasticity of the visual system, however, entails the potential capability for individual differences in the way observers perform perceptual tasks. We report a case of perceptual learning in a metacontrast masking task that leads to the enhancement of two types (...) of adult human observers despite identical learning conditions. In a priming task both types of observers exhibited the same priming effects, which were insensitive to learning. Findings suggest that visual processing of target stimuli in the metacontrast masking task is based on neural levels with sufficient plasticity to enable the development of two types of observers, which do not contribute to processing of target stimuli in the priming task. (shrink)

Many scholars claim that Frege's theory of colouring is committed to a radical form of subjectivism or emotivism. Some other scholars claim that Frege's concept of colouring is a precursor to Grice's notion of conventional implicature. I argue that both of these claims are mistaken. Finally, I propose a taxonomy of Fregean colourings: for Frege, there are purely aesthetic colourings, communicative colourings or hints, non-communicative colourings.

In the so-called “international credit market crisis,” which started in the second half of 2007 in the US subprime mortgage market, financial derivatives, most notably credit default swaps (CDS), have been publically blamed for having caused, or at least aggravated, the economic and monetary debacle. However, sound economic [...].

In 'Lying and Insincerity', Andreas Stokke argues for the superiority of the Stalnakerian account of lying on the basis of its ability to accommodate the intuition that bald-faced lies are genuine lies. In this paper I question this and other predictions of the Stalnakerian account, arguing that they hinge crucially on how we sharpen our understanding of two technical terms: assertion and official common ground. I survey a number of potential precisifications, arguing that none provide a clear and non-circular metric (...) for verifying the predictions at issue. Because the options I consider are not exhaustive, it is possible for Stalnakerian theorists to provide a robust metric for testing the theory in controversial cases. My aim is to put pressure on them to do so, and to show that—until then—the Stalnakerian approach has no clear advantage over the Gricean approach. (shrink)

This paper is partly exegetical, partly systematic. I argue that Frege's account of what he called “colouring” contains some important insights on how communication is related to mental states such as mental images or emotions. I also show that the Fregean perspective is supported by current research in psycholinguistics and that a full understanding of some linguistic phenomena that scholars have accounted for in terms of either semantics or pragmatics need involve psycholinguistic elements.

The author argues that there is no such thing as a unique and general taxonomy of non-at-issue contents. Accordingly, we ought to shun large categories such as “conventional implicature”, “F-implicature”, “CI”, “Class B” or the like. As an alternative, we may, first, describe the “semantic profile” of linguistic devices as accurately as possible. Second, we may explicitly tailor our categories to particular theoretical purposes.

I argue that “general pejoratives” such as “jerk” or “bastard” differ crucially from items such as “that damn N”. While items such as the latter typically serve to give vent to one's attitudes, general pejoratives essentially involve judgments about a person's behaviour or character. This is particularly evident in cases where pejoratives occur not as epithets, but as predicate nominals. If we want to account for the overall contribution of words such as “jerk”, there are three kinds of content that (...) ought to be distinguished: truth-conditional contents, evaluative presuppositions, and expressive contents that are either at-issue (in the case of expressive predicates) or non-at-issue (in the case of epithets). (shrink)

This paper offers a detailed reconstruction of Frege’s theory of side-thoughts and its relation to other parts of his pragmatics, most notably to the notion of colouring, to the notion of presupposition, and to his implicit notion of multi-propositionality. I also highlight some important differences between the subsemantic categories employed by Frege and those used in contemporary pragmatics.

In metacontrast masking target visibility is modulated by the time until a masking stimulus appears. The effect of this temporal delay differs across participants in such a way that individual human observers’ performance shows distinguishable types of masking functions which remain largely unchanged for months. Here we examined whether individual differences in masking functions depend on different response criteria in addition to differences in discrimination sensitivity. To this end we reanalyzed previously published data and conducted a new experiment for further (...) data analyses. Our analyses demonstrate that a distinction of masking functions based on the type of masking stimulus is superior to a distinction based on the target–mask congruency. Individually different masking functions are based on individual differences in discrimination sensitivities and in response criteria. Results suggest that individual differences in metacontrast masking result from individually different criterion contents. (shrink)

This discussion, featuring short comments by R. Melvin Keiser, Durwood Foster, Richard Gelwick and Donald Musser, grew out of articles in TAD 35:3 (2008-2009) on connections and disconnections between the thought of Polanyi and Tillich (featuring essays by Foster and Gelwick with a response from Musser). Keiser raises questions about perspectives articulated in the earlier articles and Foster, Gelwick and Musser respond here.

In den letzten drei Dekaden ist es zu einer Renaissance des Republikanismus gekommen. Ein spezifisch republikanisches Freiheitsverstandnis und die Debatte um entpolitisierende Wirkungen komplexer liberaler Demokratien haben sich dabei als in hohem Masse anschlussfahig an eine Vielzahl gegenwartiger Diskurse - von Global Governance bis hin zu Postdemokratie - erwiesen. Das Verstandnis von Republikanismus als einer modernen politischen Theorie wurde so weiter gestarkt und republikanische Ansatze gelten wieder als der zentrale Gegenspieler eines liberalen Staats- und Politikverstandnisses. Der Sammelband greift diese Renaissance (...) auf und bietet einen fur den deutschen Sprachraum bis dato fehlenden Uberblick uber Entwicklungstendenzen und Debatten im modernen republikanischen Denken. Er liefert eine Systematisierung von Ansatzen und Stromungen und erortert die Leistungsfahigkeit republikanischer Theorie gerade mit Blick auf Gegenwartsfragen. Mit Beitragen von: Richard Bellamy, Dorothea Gadeke, Philip Holzing, Sebastian Huhnholz, Marcus Llanque, Horst Mewes, Andreas Oldenbourg, Emanuel Richter, Daniel Schulz, Winfried Thaa, Thorsten Thiel, Christian Volk, Florian Weber und Sabrina Zucca-Soest. (shrink)

Linguistic meaning is determined by use. But given the fact that any given expression can be used in a variety of ways, this claim marks where metasemantic inquiry begins rather than where it ends. It sets an agenda for the metasemantic project: to distinguish in a principled and explanatory way those uses that determine linguistic meaning from those that do not. The prevailing view (along with its various refi nements), which privileges assertion, suffers from being at once overly liberal and (...) overly idealized. By parsing the most prominent aims we use language to achieve, noting their relations of dependence and the specific type of uses they involve, I arrive at a novel metasemantic account: facts of linguistic meaning are determined by locutionary action. (shrink)

What, exactly, is the difference between words such as ‘dead’ and ‘deceased’? In this paper, I argue that such differences in register, or style, ought to be construed as genuine differences in non-truth-conditional meaning. I also show that register cannot plausibly accounted for in terms of either presupposition or conventional implicature. Register is, rather, an instance of what I call pure use-conditional meaning. In the case of register, a difference in meaning does not correspond to a difference in the contents (...) speakers intend to convey. (shrink)

A longstanding debate regarding the nature of consent has marked a tri-fold division among philosophical and legal theorists according to whether they take consent to be a type of mental state, a form of behaviour, or some hybrid of the two. Theorists on all sides acknowledge that ordinary language cannot serve as a guide to resolving this ontological question, given the polysemy of the word “consent” in ordinary language. Similar observations have been noted about the function of consent in the (...) law and use of the word “consent” in legal contexts. This paper makes a parallel argument regarding consent’s characteristic normative role: roughly, to transform moral prohibitions into permissions. This role is neither unique nor essential to any one particular kind of thing, be it a mental state, form of behaviour, or hybrid of the two—rather, it is played by mental states and behaviour in independent and context-sensitive ways. The upshot is that insofar as we are interested in its normative implications, we ought to adopt a pluralistic approach to consent which gives independent weight to the moral contributions of facts about mental states and facts about behaviour relative to a context. (shrink)

Being in a state of confusion is, unfortunately, an ordinary part of human experience. What is going on in our heads exactly, when we are confused about something? Surely, there are many different ways of being confused, but in his engaging new book Talking About, Elmar Unnsteinsson takes on the special case of what he calls identity confusion. He suggests that understanding what happens when we are in a state of identity confusion – and what kinds of things this confusion (...) allows us to, or inhibits us from doing – will dissolve Frege's puzzle. And more importantly, it will pave the road to a new theory of reference which relies on what he calls the Edenic Constraint – a constraint that makes acts of reference unavailable to victims of identity confusion. I argue that this account is convincing if the Edenic Constraint is restricted to certain cases of combinatory confusion – namely those that involve conflicting intentions – but that it is less plausible that the reference mechanism fails in cases of combinatory confusion that don't involve conflicting intentions, or in any cases of separatory confusion. (shrink)

Silicon Valley is both object of intense fascination and stark criticism. Academic observers have described it as a unique amalgamation of hippie culture, libertarian thinking, wild experimentation, but also scientific rigor, high-tech precision, and turbo-capitalism – a seemingly improbable, even paradoxical combination. Nevertheless, Silicon Valley continues to be an economic powerhouse and a global innovation hub. The current study explores its socio-cultural and ideological foundations through the lens of an insider perspective to find explanations for its stability and sustained success (...) in light of conflicting components. Based on 15 interviews with Silicon Valley experts from start-ups, tech giants, and academic institutions, the study identifies several paradoxes on the level of ideology and environment, structure(s), and actors. These can be grouped into a binary, oppositional view, indeed describing the Silicon Valley paradox. However, alternative explanations are given, including the conceptualization as a non-dualist phenomenon. (shrink)

Die Idee, daß die Bedeutung sprachlicher Ausdrücke im Rückgriff auf ihren Gebrauch in der Sprache zu klären ist, ist seit Wittgenstein gängig. Das Buch verteidigt diesen Grundgedanken durch die Ausarbeitung einer prozeduralistischen Bedeutungstheorie, die zwei theoretische Strömungen zusammenführt: eine inferentialistische Semantik und eine konventionalistische Sprechakttheorie. Das Buch bietet darüber hinaus eine gründliche Diskussion realistischer und bescheidener Bedeutungstheorien sowie alternativer gebrauchstheoretischer Ansätze.

Since Arthur Schopenhauer’s conceptual differentiation between the two modes of givenness regarding the own body, theoretical philosophy is confronted with another serious problem, which is distinct from the problem about the relation of mind and brain. In German language there are two terms to mark the two relata: Körper (living body) and Leib (~ the felt body). But both the ontological mode of Leib and body and their relation are still obscure. In this paper I propose a solution of the (...) Body-Leib-Problem by analyzing the relation between Leib and body, Leib and consciousness, and Leib and world. My essential thesis is that the living body is the representation of the Leib in the world. And this implies that Leib and body are neither identical nor completely different entities. And most notably: the Leib isn’t the mental representation of the own body. (shrink)

Die vorliegende Arbeit möchte anhand des Gehirn-Geist-Problems zeigen, warum eine radikale methodologische Neubegründung der Philosophie notwendig ist. Sie umfasst zwei Teile: Im ersten Teil wird eine philosophische Methode und Methodologie im engeren Sinne begründet und ausgearbeitet, im zweiten Teil eine hieraus folgende begriffliche Neubestimmung des Menschseins (in Form einer Fundamentalanthropologie) unternommen. Anders als in der platonisch-cartesianischen Tradition und im gegenwärtigen Naturalismus wird der Mensch hierbei nicht auf ein (Körper) oder zwei Aspekte (Körper und Geist) reduziert, sondern als das komplexe Zusammenspiel (...) von sechs Grundmomenten (Anthropoialien) verstanden. Neben Körper und Geistigkeit sind dies: der Leib, die Umwelt, das Erleben und das Ich. Durch diese holistische Beschreibung gelingt dann auch eine originelle Auflösung des Gehirn-Geist-Problems. (shrink)