Philosophers often claim that forgiveness is a paradoxical phenomenon. I here examine two of the most widespread ways of dealing with the paradoxical nature of forgiveness. One of these ways, emblematized by Aurel Kolnai, seeks to resolve the paradox by appealing to the idea of repentance. Somehow, if a wrongdoer repents, then forgiving her is no longer paradoxical. I argue that this influential position faces more problems than it solves. The other way to approach the paradox, exemplified here by the (...) work of Jacques Derrida, is just too obscure to be by itself helpful. Yet, I argue that what I take to be its spirit is on the right track. I recommend distinguishing between the definition and the justification of forgiveness, and also between forgiveness understood as a mental phenomenon and an overt, communicative act. These distinctions are not given their due in the specialized literature, and I expose the nefarious consequences of this neglect. By focusing on forgiveness as a mental phenomenon I seek to analyze the root of the talk of paradoxes which surrounds the discussion of forgiveness. Finally, I present an analysis of forgiveness as a pure mental phenomenon, and argue that this analysis is the most important step in understanding forgiveness in any other sense. While my analysis reveals interesting aspects of forgiveness, it reveals, too, that forgiveness is not quite as paradoxical after all. (shrink)

The present volume contains articles of well-known representatives of the Meaning-Text Theory (MTT) and other related linguistic theories. Founded by I. Mel'cuk and A. Zholkovsky in the sixties in Moscow, MTT soon became known in the West as a “prominent outsider” theory. The picture changed since then, though. MTT gained importance in several areas of linguistics and computational linguistics. It influenced the design of new grammar formalisms such as Dependency Tree Grammars. Also, specific parts of MTT have been directly overtaken (...) into other theories; consider, for example, the work on integrating Lexical Functions into Pustejovsky's Generative Lexicon. The present volume is a further convincing demonstration of MTT's liveliness and relevance to the field's “burning” issues. The focus of the volume is on semantics, semantic representation and relation of semantics to surface in MTT. Six out of eight articles (Polguère; Escalier & Fournier; Paducheva; St.-Germain; Beck; Bogulavsky) deal with problems related to these topics, while the last two articles of the volume (Sgall and Rambow; Joshi) throw a bridge between MTT, or, more precisely, between dependency-based theories of which MTT is one instantiation, and other linguistic theories. (shrink)

"-- M. J. Silverthorne,The Humanities Association Review Leo Strauss (1899-1973) was the Robert Maynard Hutchins Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus of ...

We propose to analyze well-known cases of "imaginative resistance" from the philosophical literature (Gendler, Walton, Weatherson) as involving the inference that particular content should be attributed to either: (i) a character rather than the narrator or, (ii) an unreliable, irrational, opinionated, and/or morally deviant "first person" narrator who was originally perceived to be a typical impersonal, omniscient, "effaced" narrator. We model the latter type of attribution in terms of two independently motivated linguistic mechanisms: accommodation of a discourse referent (Lewis, Stalnaker, (...) Kamp) and 'cautious' updating as a model of non-cooperative information exchange (Eckardt). (shrink)

We propose to characterize imaginative resistance as the failure or unwillingness of the reader to take a fictional description of a deviant reality at face value. The goal of the paper is to explore how readers deal with such a breakdown of the default Face Value interpretation strategy. We posit two distinct interpretative ‘coping’ strategies which help the reader engage with the resistance-inducing fiction by attributing the offending content to one of the fictional characters. We present novel empirical evidence that (...) shows that actual readers use these strategies and we flesh out the exact workings of these strategies by integrating them into a general formal semantic framework for interpreting fiction. (shrink)

We propose an empirical mode decomposition (EMD-) based method to extract features from the multichannel recordings of local field potential (LFP), collected from the middle temporal (MT) visual cortex in a macaque monkey, for decoding its bistable structure-from-motion (SFM) perception. The feature extraction approach consists of three stages. First, we employ EMD to decompose nonstationary single-trial time series into narrowband components called intrinsic mode functions (IMFs) with time scales dependent on the data. Second, we adopt unsupervised K-means clustering to group (...) the IMFs and residues into several clusters across all trials and channels. Third, we use the supervised common spatial patterns (CSP) approach to design spatial filters for the clustered spatiotemporal signals. We exploit the support vector machine (SVM) classifier on the extracted features to decode the reported perception on a single-trial basis. We demonstrate that the CSP feature of the cluster in the gamma frequency band outperforms the features in other frequency bands and leads to the best decoding performance. We also show that the EMD-based feature extraction can be useful for evoked potential estimation. Our proposed feature extraction approach may have potential for many applications involving nonstationary multivariable time series such as brain-computer interfaces (BCI). (shrink)

This commentary on coderre & katz, wiesenfeld-hallin et al., and dickenson focuses on: (a) the brain as an under-recognized contributor to pain facilitation at the spinal cord; (b) these brain-to-spinal pathways being activated by learning or by body infection/inflammation; and (c) the resultant spinal release of anti-analgesic neuropeptides, activators of the NMDA-NO cascade, and activators of glia.

It appears that in mixed quotations like the following, the quoted expression is used and mentioned at the same time: (1) George says Tony is his ``bestest friend''. Most theories seek to account for this observation by assuming that mixed quotations operate at two levels of content at once. In contradistinction to such two-dimensional theories, we propose that quotation involves just a single level of content. Quotation always produces a change in meaning of the quoted expression, and if the quotation (...) is mixed the shift is, to a first approximation at least, from '...' to ``what x calls '...''', where x is a variable whose value is determined by the context. We argue that quotation is generally context dependent in various ways, and that some of these ways are presuppositional in nature; we present a detailed analysis of the presuppositions in question. (shrink)

Offering an innovative approach to critical thinking, Good Reasoning Matters! identifies the essential structure of good arguments in a variety of contexts and also provides guidelines to help students construct their own effective arguments. In addition to examining the most common features of faulty reasoning--slanting, bias, propaganda, vagueness, ambiguity, and a common failure to consider opposing points of view--the book introduces a variety of argument schemes and rhetorical techniques. This edition adds material on visual arguments and more exercises.

The essays are based on a long and intimate familiarity with the works, but the essay on Aristotle is especially important as one of Strauss's few writings on ...

Understanding how activity in the brain leads to a subjective percept is of great interest to philosophers and neuroscientists alike. In the last years, neurophysiological experiments have approached this problem directly by measuring neural signals in animals as they experience well-defined visual percepts. Stimuli in these studies are often inherently ambiguous, and thus rely upon the subjective report, generally from trained monkeys, to provide a measure of perception. By correlating activity levels in the brain to this report, one can speculate (...) on the role of individual neurons and groups of neurons in the formation and maintenance of a particular percept. However, in order to draw valid conclusions from such experiments, it is critical that the responses accurately and reliably reflect what is perceived. For this reason, a number of behavioural paradigms have been developed to control and evaluate the truthfulness of responses from behaving animals. Here we describe several approaches to optimizing the reliability of a monkey's perceptual report, and argue that their combination provides an invaluable approach in the study of subjective visual perception. (shrink)

Philosophers have in the past had difficulty in determining how to define ethical terms. here they are defined as open-context terms with a loosely limited range of substitution instances, in conformity with actual language usage. ethical terms are in themselves meaningless. it is a misuse to say, "x is wrong in itself." ethical terms then reduce to empirical terms concerning wants, likes, knowledge of cause and effect and consequences, knowledge of how ethical terms themselves work. ethical commands reduce to if-then (...) statements. blame may possibly never make sense. (shrink)

' Here is Tolstoy's religion; and non-violence is at its heart. Simon Parke, author of The Beautiful Life.

This collection of Leo Abse's last essays are writings that he was working on from 2006 up to and during his final illness.

During the last decade, one source of debate in argumentation theory has been the notion that there are different modes of arguing that need to be distinguished when analyzing and evaluating arguments. Visual argument is often cited as a paradigm example. This paper discusses the ways in which it and modes of arguing that invoke non-verbal sounds, smells, tactile sensations, music and other non-verbal entities may be defined and conceptualized. Though some attempts to construct a ‘multimodal’ theory of argument are (...) criticized, it advocates for an argumentation theory that makes room for visual arguing and for other non-verbal modes that have not been explored in depth. In the process, the paper provides a method for identifying the structure of multimodal arguments and argues that adding modes to our theoretical tool box is an important step toward a comprehensive account of argument. (shrink)

Deduction has frequently been condemned as a useless intellectual instrument because of its tautological character. To thoroughgoing opponents of rationalism, the pretensions of deduction are on the same level with those of induction. Both presume to yield more knowledge from the fact that we have some knowledge; and this is an impossible paradox, which not even so powerful an opponent of the “Philosophy of Experience” as Bradley could resolve to his own satisfaction. I wish in this brief note to indicate (...) how this semblance of paradox may very easily be removed without having to deny, as has often been thought necessary, the tautologicality of deduction. (shrink)

This uniquely fascinating volume is not merely a learned treatise in historical semantics; it is itself a stupendous display of world harmony as a creed-a vivid demonstration that "all is all.".

Punishment is a phenomenon which occurs in many contexts. Discussions of punishment assume punishment is criminal punishment carried out by the State. This book contains an account of punishment which overcomes the difficulties of competing accounts and treats punishment comprehensibly to better understand how it differs from similar phenomena, discussing its justification fruitfully.

Most infonnallogic texts and articles assume a verbal account of reasoning which defines "argument" as a set of sentences. The present paper broadens this definition in order to account for "visual arguments" which are communicated with nonverbal visual images. Standard approaches to verbal arguments are extended in a way that allows them to explain and evaluate visual argumentation.

Numerous studies indicate that observing or knowing about another's action automatically activates the same motor representations that are active when we perform the other's action by ourselves. We investigated how affect influences this mirror mechanism. Based upon findings that positive affect encourages and negative affect impairs spreading activation, we hypothesised that positive affect should increase and negative affect decrease the automatic co-representation of other individuals' actions during jointly performed tasks. Recent research has shown that joint-action effects in a go/no-go variant (...) of the Simon task provide a good index for co-representing another's action. Participants performed such a Simon task together with another person after the induction of neutral, positive, or negative affect. Consistent with our predictions, the joint Simon-like effect was strongest after positive affect induction and absent after negative affect induction. These results represent the first evidence of affect-induced differences in the mirroring of another's action and suggest that affect influences one of our essential abilities for successful social interactions. (shrink)

Politics, Philosophy & Economics, Volume 21, Issue 4, Page 347-371, November 2022. We sometimes have to choose between options that are seemingly incomparable insofar as they seem to be neither better than, worse than, nor equal to each other. This often happens when the available options are quite different from one another. For instance, consider a choice between prioritizing either criminal justice reform or healthcare reform as a public policy goal. Even after the relevant details of the goals and possible (...) reforms are filled in, it is plausible that neither goal is better than, worse than, nor equal to the other. Such seemingly incomparable options present a problem for rational choice since it is unclear how an agent might rationally choose between them. What we need are some principles to help govern rational choice when faced with seemingly incomparable options. I here present three such principles. While each principle is individually compelling, I show that they are jointly incompatible. I then argue that the correct response to this inconsistent triad is to reject the principle that rationally censures performing a sequence of choices one knows will result in a suboptimal outcome. The upshot is that when seeming incomparability is involved, an agent can money pump themselves without being less rational for it. (shrink)

The age-old debate about what constitutes just punishment has become deadlocked. Retributivists continue to privilege desert over all else, and consequentialists continue to privilege punishment's expected positive consequences, such as deterrence or rehabilitation, over all else. In this important intervention into the debate, Leo Zaibert argues that despite some obvious differences, these traditional positions are structurally very similar, and that the deadlock between them stems from the fact they both oversimplify the problem of punishment. Proponents of these positions pay insufficient (...) attention to the conflicts of values that punishment, even when justified, generates. Mobilizing recent developments in moral philosophy, Zaibert offers a properly pluralistic justification of punishment that is necessarily more complex than its traditional counterparts. An understanding of this complexity should promote a more cautious approach to inflicting punishment on individual wrongdoers and to developing punitive policies and institutions. (shrink)

For much of the first fifty years of its existence, analytic philosophy shunned discussions of normativity and ethics. Ethical statements were considered as pseudo-propositions, or as expressions of pro- or con-attitudes of minor theoretical significance. Nowadays, in contrast, prominent analytic philosophers pay close attention to normative problems. Here we focus our attention on the work of Searle, at the same time drawing out an important connection between Searle’s work and that of two other seminal figures in this development: H.L.A. Hart (...) and John Rawls. We show that all three thinkers tend to assume that there is but one type of normativity within the realm of social institutions – roughly, the sort of normativity that is involved in following the results of chess – and that they thereby neglect features that are of crucial significance for an adequate understanding of social reality. (shrink)

Informal logic is an attempt to develop a logic that can assess and analyze the arguments that occur in natural language discourse. Discussions in the field may address instances of scientific, legal, and other technical forms of reasoning, but the overriding aim has been a comprehensive account of argument that can explain and evaluate the arguments found in discussion, debate and disagreement as they manifest themselves in daily life — in social and political commentary; in news reports and editorials in (...) the mass media ; in advertising and corporate and governmental communications; and in personal exchange. (shrink)

In the paper ‘COVID-19 vaccine boosters for young adults: a risk–benefit assessment and ethical analysis of mandate policies at universities,’ Bardoshet alargued that college mandates of the COVID-19 booster vaccine are unethical. The authors came to this conclusion by performing three different sets of comparisons of benefits versus risks using referenced data and argued that the harm outweighs the risk in all three cases. In this response article, we argue that the authors frame their arguments by comparing values that are (...) not scientifically or reasonably comparable and that the authors used values that represent grossly different risk profiles and grouped them into a set of figures to create an illusion of fair comparisons. We argue that absent the falsely skewed portrayals of a higher level of risk over benefit in their misrepresented figures, the five ethical arguments they presented completely fall apart. (shrink)

In this paper, I explore what gives collective testimony its epistemic credentials, through a critical discussion of three competing accounts of the epistemology of collective testimony. According to the first view, collective testimony inherits its epistemic credentials from the beliefs the testimony expresses— where this can be seen either as the beliefs of all or some of the group’s members, or as the beliefs of group itself. The second view denies any necessary connection to belief, claiming instead that the epistemic (...) credentials of collective testimony derive from the reliability or truth-conduciveness of the statement that expresses the testimony. Finally, the third view claims that the epistemic credentials of collective testimony derive from the fact that it involves undertaking a collective commitment to trustworthiness, which makes the group susceptible to rebuke and blame if its testimony is not trustworthy. I argue that this last account holds the most promise for preserving what is distinctive about testimonial knowledge while still underwriting a robust epistemology of collective testimony. (shrink)