This chapter contains sections titled: Information and the Veridicality Thesis Information as a Mongrel Concept Natural Information Without Truth Nonnatural Information: The Case for the Veridicality Thesis Nonnatural Information Without Truth An Objection Conclusion Acknowledgments References.

Madole & Harden describe how genetics can be used in a causal framework. We agree with many of their opinions but argue that comparing within-family designs to experiments is unnecessary and that the proposed influence of genetics on behavior can be better described as inus conditions.

Within post - Kuhnian, philosophy of science, much effort has been devoted to issues related to conceptual change, such as incommensurability, scientific progress and realism, but mostly in terms of reference, without a fine - grained theory of scientific concepts/senses. Within the philosophy of language and of mind tradition, there is a large body of work on concepts, but the application to scientific concepts has been very tentative. The aim of this paper is to propose a general framework for (...) a theory for the individuation of scientific concepts. The general view about the individuation of concepts favored here is the possession - condition approach: to individuate a concept is to identify its possession conditions. The general metascientific tools for the analysis of scientific theories are model - theoretic, more specifically, structuralist: scientific theories, the entities to which scientifc concepts belong, are model - theoretic theory - nets. The general idea about the content of scientific concepts that inspires this proposal comes from: (i) our grandfathers’ "laws - plus - correspondence rules", (ii) Kuhns "laws applied to exemplars" views and (iii) moderate operationalism. The aim is to show that some clarification can be gained applying the possesion condition appproach to (an expansion of) these three elements using structuralist metascientific tools. First, I briefly present the two main structuralist ideas I shall use: the difference between observability and non - theoreticity, and the notion of theory - net. Second, I informally introduce the five components that come from my reading of the three traditional elements; these components are, or are not, plausible independently of how they will be integrated within a theory of concept - identity. Third, I present the kore of the theory of possession conditions for concept - identity that we shall use for the integration of such components. Finally, I propose the general traits of the possession condition that corresponds to each of these five components, I present some problems and point out some possible ways of dealing with them. (shrink)

B a c k g r o u n d. The ordinary language philosophy should be considered as a set of different but interconnected research projects within the Anglo-American analytical philosophy of the first half and middle of the 20th century. A common factor for these studies is the application of the method of linguistic analysis of natural language expressions to solve many classical problems for philosophy. This method replaced the prevailing idealistic concepts, and was picked up (...) and developed in Great Britain by the works and scientific explorations of J. Moore and B. Russell. It is a generally accepted opinion that the sphere of interests of representatives of the ordinary language philosophy is divided between two poles, represented by the works of L. Wittgenstein and D. Austin. M e t h o d s. In the article, the author used the method of historical-philosophical reconstruction to clarify the role, place and genesis of the ordinary language philosophy as a dominant methodology within the Anglo-American analytical philosophy of the middle of the 20th century, general scientific methods of cognition: analysis, synthesis, generalization to clarify key ideas and concepts, which is the basis of the methodology of the ordinary language philosophy, as well as methods of systematization and comparison. R e s u l t s. The article clarifies the genesis of the main ideas and concepts of the philosophy of everyday language, as well as gives an example of the modern strategy of criticism of this methodological direction. The key postulates of the ordinary language philosophy age are clarified, namely: (i) the thesis that philosophical problems arise due to the incorrect use of language and must be solved by clarifying the meanings of words, (ii) philosophical analysis should not be based on the discovery of hidden logical forms of expression, and on the clarification of the necessary and sufficient conditions for the use of the expression, including the analysis of the situation of use, (iii) meaning as use, (iv) the philosophical analysis of the meaning should be carried out informally, taking into account the analysis of each specific case of the use of the expression, (v) criticism systematic theories of meaning. C o n c l u s i o n s. At the current stage of the development of analytical philosophy, there is a noticeable increase in attention to the achievements of the ordinary language philosophy. Among modern researchers and critics of this direction, the names of A. Baz, D. Nagel, S. Somes, and T. Williamson can be singled out. The presence of the interest of modern researchers indicates premature statements about the completion of the ordinary language philosophy. This concept should be rehabilitated, and its methodological apparatus should enrich the arsenal of scientific methods of modern analytical philosophers. (shrink)

__The Concept of Evil__ is dedicated to the analysis of the concept of evil. The term "evil" is used widely in ordinary language and yet philosophers have disagreed on what, if anything, distinguishes an evil act from a wrong act or an evil person from a bad one. Is "evil" a distinct and important moral category? Which agents and acts can and should be classified as "evil"? In which areas of practice does evil arise? These questions (...) indicate three essential categories that belong to a thorough analysis of the concept of evil: meta-evil, the nature of evil, and applied evil. The articles presented in this volume provide insight into these categories. (shrink)

The role played by language in our cognitive lives is a topic at the centre of contemporary debates in cognitive (neuro)science. In this paper we illustrate and compare two theories that offer embodied explanations of this role: the WAT (words as social tools) and the LENS (language is an embodied neuroenhancement and scaffold) theories. WAT and LENS differ from other current proposals, because they connect the impact of the neurologically realized language system on our cognition to the (...) ways in which language shapes our interaction with the physical and social environment. Examining these theories together, their tenets and supporting evidence, sharpens our understanding of each, but also contributes to a better understanding of the contribution that language might make to the acquisition, representation and use of abstract concepts. Here we focus on how language provides a source of inner grounding, especially metacognition and inner speech, and supports the flexibility of our thought. Overall, the paper outlines a promising research program focused on the importance of language to abstract concepts within the context of a flexible, multimodal, and multilevel conception of embodied cognition. (shrink)

In this paper, we examine different forms of altruism. We commence by analysing the definition and, after clarifying its conditions for altruism, we argue that it is not in with everyday linguistic usage of the term. We therefore consider a definition, which we likewise refine, and argue that it better reflects ordinary language use. Both behavioural and psychological approaches define altruism descriptively and thus fail to capture an important aspect of altruism, namely its normative component. Altruism, we argue, (...) is a, i.e. one which embodies both positive and normative components. We discuss and compare various formulations of this normative component. (shrink)

This paper tries to determine the philosophical nature of language, its functions, structure and content. It also explains the concept of natural language, ordinary and ideal language i.e. how there is a need of artificial perfect logical language without errors and unclearness in that language. This paper further shows the logical form of language with its syntactical, semantical, innate and acquired criteria for the evaluation of the languages. It deals with the analysis (...) of language to clear what is unclear, to know what is unknown, to make definite what is vague. In this paper I used the method; logical method for interpretation and argumentation, analytical method for simplification, and critical method to investigate the real domain of language. This paper does not deal with ordinary functions of the language but it deals with the conceptual and modular functions of the language. The fundamental aim of this written up is to determine the analytical approach of Wittgenstein to sketch the ‘language as a tool to discuss the state of affairs or facts of the worlds that is also what philosophy does. This paper describes the contributions of rationalism and empiricism in the field of knowing the truths of language. (shrink)

Biological evolution is often viewed narrowly as a change of morphology or allele frequency in a sequence of generations. Here I pursue an alternative informational concept of evolution, as preservation, advance, and emergence of functional information in natural agents. Functional information is a network of signs that are used by agents to preserve and regulate their functions. Functional information is preserved in evolution via complex interplay of copying and construction processes: the digital components are copied, whereas (...) interpreting subagents together with scaffolds, tools, and resources, are constructed. Some of these processes are simple and invariant, whereas others are complex and contextual. Advance of functional information includes improvement and modification of already existing functions. Although the genome information may change passively and randomly, the interpretation is active and guided by the logic of agent behavior and embryonic development. Emergence of new functions is based on the reinterpretation of already existing information, when old tools, resources, and control algorithms are adopted for novel functions. Evolution of functional information progressed from protosemiosis, where signs correspond directly to actions, to eusemiosis, where agents associate signs with objects. Language is the most advanced form of eusemiosis, where the knowledge of objects and models is communicated between agents. (shrink)

This book is an excellent collection of papers which partly spring from, and partly bear on the Study Group on the Unity of Knowledge held in various universities, October, 1967-March, 1970. The papers all bear on the problem of reduction. In "Unity of Physical Law and Levels of Description," Ilya Prigogine argues that organized structures need physical laws of organization, not of entropy only, to explain their genesis and operation." The editor’s paper, "Reducibility: Another Side Issue," argues, following Polanyi, that (...) living things as machines already transcend physics, since they demand both chemical and engineering principles for their explanation." "How is Mechanism Conceivable?" points out that ordinary ways of talking about and explaining behavior, i.e., as involving intention and purpose, differs in logic from mechanistic explanation. But this difference in logic of the two languages is "never an obstacle to the reduction of one theory to another, indeed, there is always such a noncongruence of the conceptual mesh." Anthony J. P. Kenny’s "The Homunculus Fallacy" argues against "the reckless application of human-being predicates to insufficiently human-like objects." In "Behavior, Belief, and Emotion," A. C. MacIntyre argues for the thesis that "there is no necessary connection between at least some emotions and particular forms of behavior." In "The Critique of Artificial Reason," H. Dreyfus criticizes both the empirical and a priori arguments for optimism underlying the work in artificial intelligence. It displays the underlying philosophical assumption inherent in Western philosophical tradition since Plato. The last two papers concern Polanyi’s theory of knowledge. In "Tacit Knowledge and the Concept of Mind," W. T. Scott shows how Ryle’s "Concept of Mind can be significantly extended by considering certain features of the philosophical position that Michael Polanyi has developed around the concept of tacit knowing." R. S. Cohen’s "Tacit, Social and Hopeful" discusses the difficulties in Polanyi’s epistemology and the merits of the logical reconstruction work in science. Only the papers by Dreyfus and Scott have been previously published. Throughout the collection, the editor has provided useful introductory remarks focusing upon the unifying themes in the collection.—A. S. C. (shrink)

This article examines one of the relevant concepts in the current debate on home birth—autonomy in place of birth—and its uses in general language, ethics, and childbirth health care literature. International discussion on childbirth services. A concept analysis guided by the model of Walker and Avant. The authors suggest that autonomy in the context of choosing place of birth is defined by three main attributes: information, capacity and freedom; given the antecedent of not harming others, and (...) the consequences of accountability for the outcome. Model, borderline and contrary cases of autonomy in place of birth are presented. A woman choosing place of birth is autonomous if she receives all relevant information on available choices, risks and benefits, is capable of understanding and processing the information and choosing place of birth in the absence of coercion, provided she intends no harm to others and is accountable for the outcome. The attributes of the definition can serve as a useful tool for pregnant women, midwives, and other health professionals in contemplating their moral status and discussing place of birth. (shrink)

[Edited from Conclusion section:] We have looked at various challenging issues to do with getting connectionism to cope with high-level cognitive activities such a reasoning and natural language understanding. The issues are to do with various facets of generalization that are not commonly noted. We have been concerned in particular with the special forms these issues take in the arena of propositional attitude processing. The main problems we have looked at are: (1) The need to construct explicit representations of (...) generalizations, not just generalize correctly to individual cases; (2) The need to be able to match two or more complex short-term information structures, to enable rapid generalization from recent examples rather than from long-term memories; (3) The need to represent and reason with anomalous combinations of concepts; (4) The need to perform embedded reasoning. This presents special problems for systems using non-concatenative representations (as in mainstream connectionist approaches). We also touched on vague quantification in attitude report complements. Neither this topic nor that of analogies between short-term structures (point 2) has been adequately addressed in the symbolic framework, let alone in connectionism. -/- The opportunities and problems covered are put forward as things worth being optimistic about or pessimistic about, respectively. They are not put forward as decisive arguments for or against connectionism. The hope is that this chapter contributes to a greater understanding of the connectionist/symbolist gap by presenting some unusual issues and by throwing new light on some well known ones. (shrink)

In this book, I will discuss three main topics: the roots and aims of scientific knowledge, scientific knowledge in society, and science and values I understand scientific knowledge as being a planned and continuous production of the general and common knowledge of scientific communities. I begin my discussion with a brief analysis of the main differences between sciences, on the one hand, and everyday experience, philosophies, religions, and ideologies, on the other. I define the concept of science as a (...) set of family resemblances (in Wittgenstein's sense). The sciences can be distinguished along three lines, in terms of the difference between empirical and non-empirical sciences, differences in degrees of theoretical and methodological structure among individual sciences and scientific disciplines. Scientific knowledge is based upon some grounds, paradigmatic knowledge bases. Scientific knowledge is founded on a unified paradigmatic knowledge base. The latter includes fundamental theories, basic facts, generally accepted empirical regularities (laws), scientific research methods, scientific explanations, and established relations to other sciences. Scientific knowledge in general is defined well in classical terms by the definition that knowledge is a true and rationally-justified belief. In this connection, scientific truth is relative, depending on the given paradigmatic knowledge base and on the precision and accessibility of the measurements and observations involved. In the book's first part, I consider the production and testing of scientific hypotheses, scientific explanations, the structure of scientific theories, and the problem of scientific realism. I consider explanation an integral part of a wider nexus of heuristic and theoretical activities in science like giving reasons, understanding, clarification, and founding. Continuous production of scientific explanations is a necessary condition for the systematic reproduction of scientific knowledge. Accordingly, it does not suffice to describe them in terms of the logical structure of the arguments on which they are based, but rather, scientific explanations ought to be given complete with an epistemic and pragmatic context of the explanation. I consider especially deductive-nomological, inductive-statistical, dispositional, teleological-functional, and genetic explanations. I emphasize the ever-increasing importance of explanations by analogy and by model. Orthogonal to these distinctions lies the distinction between causal and epistemic explanation. Epistemic explanations relate scientific discoveries to epistemic progress, and causal explanations are these epistemic explanations that relate scientific discoveries to reality too. Causal explanations inform us that certain changes occur in the world as agents of other changes, or rather, that certain changes are real consequences of other changes. Thus, by having explanations of causes, we can intervene in the world to induce by design certain changes in some course of phenomena. I consider scientific theories as logically and epistemically ordered wholeness of scientific knowledge in a realm of research that enables us to construct useful models of reality. After the discussion of different 'statement' views on theories and different interpretations of the theory-experience relation, I introduce the 'model' theoretical (non-statement) views on theories, especially the structural theory of science. The model views on theories transcend the realism-antirealism dualism by introducing models between theory and reality. Therefore, the question of scientific realism is not merely whether and, if so, which element(s), of scientific theories represent reality, but rather which conditions suffice to infer from a theory that one of its models truly expresses reality. In other words, under which conditions do models of a theory represent models of reality? Generally, models are just as much images of reality in a theory as they are images of a theory in reality. The actual problem of scientific realism doesn't originate in the observable-unobservable distinction (even if this distinction is otherwise theoretically loaded), but rather in ontological quandaries, of the sort especially encountered in modern physical theories such as quantum mechanics, relativity theory, and cosmological theories, although they are known to arise in other sciences as well. Scientific theories may be real, even if they describe nothing about the world. However, such theories can be given this status only if their formal, mathematical postulates exhibit some formal homology between reality and mathematical forms. The very fact that it is possible to describe reality with the help of mathematics even in cases, where every (representational, conceptual) language and thought fall short, would indicate that even mathematics itself is, in some sense, a part of reality, although 'outside' of the empirical world. It follows we have to distinguish the non-empirical reality and the empirical world. Formal objectivity and non-arbitrariness of theories do not emerge from either our language or thoughts, or from the world of facts, causes, and effects, but rather from non-empirical reality, which frames the world as some kind of objective transcendental condition for the possibility of the existence of the world, thoughts, and language. In the second part of the book, I consider the incorporation of scientific work and scientific knowledge into modern society and its relations to values and ethics. Production of scientific knowledge goes on as a parallel distributed process of a special kind of social (shared) cognition. The central part of this cognition is the presentation of parts of the world by scientific (theoretical) models which are warranted by the shared and public practice of justification, and in reflective acting in the world as it would. I consider various formal concepts of collective propositional knowledge (distributed, mutual, common knowledge). Scientific knowledge is an achievement to be ascribed to a scientific community or, indirectly, to all those who apply or expand it, rather than to individuals per se. It presents the continuous and partially planned production of non-trivial common knowledge of the research communities in modern societies. However, besides common knowledge, shared dispositional knowledge (knowledge how of scientific teams) and shared knowledge by acquiring (knowledge of fundamental similarities and differences in scientific teams) are parts of the real body of scientific knowledge. Scientific common knowledge implies the projection into idealized universal knowledge of all real or potentially rational and well-informed individuals. The respect of scientific knowledge thus presents the norm of rationality. Science as the intensively shared and socially distributed kind of cognition enters into modern society as a special kind of work (general work), as a productive force (social invention drive), and as a form of capital (human, social, cultural, informational, etc.). However any of these categories can adequately represent the socio-economical role of science in modern societies, and we are still waiting for a more adequate general concept that would theoretically cover the 'scientification' of modern societies. My thesis is that the most important general effect of scientification is (and will be) the growth of social processes that structurally resemble parallel distributed shared social cognition of science, and not so much the rise of the use of scientific knowledge and scientifically based information in all kinds of production. Scientification of modern societies inevitably includes a much stronger need for moral and social responsibility of scientists for their work and its effects in their local society and the global world. This need comes in contradiction with the quite large accepted idea (and even the 'norm') on value-free research. I discuss to some degree different arguments for the absence of non-epistemic values and ethical reasoning from science and find them non-convincing. The sound idea of value-free research lies in the need for the absence of categorical value statements from scientific explanations and theoretical deductions. Values and ethical judgment have, and sometimes they even have to play an important role in another part of research and its application in science or outside it. Not the value-loudness of research is a danger for science but its blind, non-reflective use. It leads to the ideologization and politicization of science. A similar danger lies in the purely value-neutrality of research. It leads to the instrumentalization of science to the technical or bureaucratic means for 'any' aims. (shrink)

Among philosophers, there are at least two prevalent views about the core concept of intentional action. View I (Adams 1986, 1997; McCann 1986) holds that an agent S intentionally does an action A only if S intends to do A. View II (Bratman 1987; Harman 1976; and Mele 1992) holds that there are cases where S intentionally does A without intending to do A, as long as doing A is foreseen and S is willing to accept A as a (...) consequence of S’s action. Joshua Knobe (2003a) presents intriguing data that may be taken to support the second view.1 Knobe’s data show an asymmetry in folk judgements. People are more inclined to judge that S did A intentionally, even when not intended, if A was perceived as causing a harm (e.g. harming the environment). There is an asymmetry because people are not inclined to see S’s action as intentional, when not intended, if A is perceived as causing a benefit (e.g. helping the environment). In this paper we will discuss Knobe’s results in detail. We will raise the question of whether his ordinary language surveys of folk judgments have accessed core concepts of intentional action. We suspect that instead Knobe’s surveys are tapping into pragmatic aspects of intentional language and its role in moral praise and blame. We will suggest alternative surveys that we plan to conduct to get at this difference, and we will attempt to explain the pragmatic usage of intentional language. (shrink)

In his time, D. Hume made an observation that essentially predetermined the nature of subsequent ethics research. "In every system of morality that I have hitherto met with, I have always remarked," he wrote in A Treatise of Human Nature, "that the author proceeds for some time in the ordinary way of reasoning, and establishes the being of a God, or makes observations concerning human affairs; when of a sudden I am surprised to find that instead of the usual (...) copulations of propositions, is, and is not, I meet with no proposition that is not connected with an ought, or an ought not. This change is imperceptible; but is, however, of the last consequence. … A reason should be given for what seems altogether inconceivable, how this new relation can be a deduction from others, which are entirely different from it. But as authors do not commonly use this precaution, I shall presume to recommend it to the readers; and am persuaded that this small attention would subvert all the vulgar systems of morality, and let us see that the distinction of vice and virtue is not founded merely on the relations of objects, nor is perceived by reason."1 The obvious meaning of this statement is that the imperative nature of moral language cannot be considered an adequate expression of the essence of morality; rather, it conceals the erroneousness of its epistemologized schemes of explanation. The accuracy of such an interpretation of the excerpt, even if it were questionable on the basis of its literal meaning, raises no doubt in the general context of Hume's own ethics where morality is identified with a special moral sense-a sense of sympathy that can be revealed effectively without the compelling force of duty. By some strange logic, ethics after Hume turned his warning into a positive program and saw its task as laying bare the concept of the moral "ought" and trying to find a transition from "is" to "ought." These persistent and multifaceted efforts, which enriched the theory of ethics in many ways, nevertheless did not achieve their immediate goal. The question arises, then, whether the negative result was not predetermined by an improper formulation of the problem itself that arose from the assumption that the specific nature of morality is connected with its imperativeness. (shrink)

Thick terms and concepts, such as honesty and cruelty, are at the heart of a variety of debates in philosophy of language and metaethics. Central to these debates is the question of how the descriptive and evaluative components of thick concepts are related and whether they can be separated from each other. So far, no empirical data on how thick terms are used in ordinary language has been collected to inform these debates. In this paper, we present (...) the first empirical study, designed to investigate whether the evaluative component of thick concepts is communicated as part of the semantic meaning or by means of conversational implicatures. While neither the semantic nor the pragmatic view can fully account for the use of thick terms in ordinary language, our results do favour the semanticist interpretation: the evaluation of a thick concept is only slightly easier to cancel than semantically entailed content. We further discovered a polarity effect, demonstrating that how easily an evaluation can be cancelled depends on whether the thick term is of positive or negative polarity. (shrink)

Background: Clinical genomic implementation studies pose challenges for informed consent. Consent forms often include complex language and concepts, which can be a barrier to diverse enrollment, and these studies often blur traditional research-clinical boundaries. There is a move toward self-directed, web-based research enrollment, but more evidence is needed about how these enrollment approaches work in practice. In this study, we developed and evaluated a literacy-focused, web-based consent approach to support enrollment of diverse participants in an ongoing clinical genomic implementation (...) study. Methods: As part of the Cancer Health Assessments Reaching Many (CHARM) study, we developed a web-based consent approach that featured plain language, multimedia, and separate descriptions of clinical care and research activities. CHARM offered clinical exome sequencing to individuals at high risk of hereditary cancer. We interviewed CHARM participants about their reactions to the consent approach. We audio recorded, transcribed, and coded interviews using a deductively and inductively derived codebook. We reviewed coded excerpts as a team to identify overarching themes. Results: We conducted 32 interviews, including 12 (38%) in Spanish. Most (69%) enrolled without assistance from study staff, usually on a mobile phone. Those who completed enrollment in one day spent an average of 12 minutes on the consent portion. Interviewees found the information simple to read but comprehensive, were neutral to positive about the multimedia support, and identified increased access to testing in the study as the key difference from clinical care. Conclusions: This study showed that interviewees found our literacy-focused, web-based consent approach acceptable; did not distinguish the consent materials from other online study processes; and valued getting access to testing in the study. Overall, conducting empirical bioethics research in an ongoing clinical trial was useful to demonstrate the acceptability of our novel consent approach but posed practical challenges. (shrink)

In recent times, there have been different attempts to make an interesting use of the concept of script (as inherited from the fields of psychology and cognitive sciences) within argumentation theory. Although, in many cases, what we find under this label are computerized routines mainly used in e-learning collaborative proceses involving argumentation, either as an educational means or an educational goal, there are also other studies in which the concept of script plays a more theoretical role as the (...) kind of commonly human cognitive structure that could account for the way in which argumentation might develop in ordinary language and ordinary settings. We aim at exploring these latter possibilities, differentiating between the global ascription of the script concept to argumentation practices as procedural and regulated actions from the somewhat more suggestive association between socially shared scripts (expected narratives, plausible sequences, customary experiences, etc.) and the way some enthymemes work from an interactive, rhetorical perspective. The concept of script could help us understand some more procedural than propositional aspects of the cognitive sets shared by arguer and audience and account for the communicative success of apparently defective argumentation. (shrink)

Among the quantificational notions neglected by classical logic are "many," "few," and "nearly all." Despite the apparent vagueness associated with these terms in ordinary discourse, in specific contexts we can and do draw strict inferences from statements in which they occur. In this pioneering work, Altham has attempted to uncover something of the formal logic that justifies such inferences. He begins by showing the mutual interdefinability of the three terms. If negation and any one of them are taken as (...) primitive, the other two are definable in terms of these. Selecting as his basic semantic notion the idea of a manifold or many-membered-set, he shows it is only necessary to fix upon a number n, greater than one, to represent the least number of elements to constitute a specific manifold and then one can construct a natural deductive system which uses the standard predicate logic. He develops at great length a weak system that yields principles of inference which are valid in every non-empty domain and in which the classical predicate logic appears as a limiting case. One point that emerges is that the three plurality operators may all be exhibited as involving a double quantification not characteristic of "some," "none," or "all." Next, two stronger systems are developed more briefly which are valid only in many-membered domains. The strongest can represent the largest set of informal arguments and seems to be the most natural of the three. Nevertheless, since these three systems admittedly do not give an exhaustive account of the use of these quantifiers in informal discourse, Altham explains three further systems which correspond more closely to the natural language use of these terms. Finally an appendix indicates what modifications would be required for an intuitionistic logic like Heyting's or the minimal logic of Kolmogorov-Johansson. The text is clearly written and requires no greater logical sophistication to understand than would be needed to follow Lemmon's Beginning Logic or Mates' Elementary Logic.--A. B. W. (shrink)

In this methodological reflection, I describe the multidisciplinary hermeneutic process of philosophizing about teacher dissatisfaction. I discuss how philosophy serves as a starting point for interpretive work based on interviews with former teachers and readings of qualitative and quantitative research on teacher attrition and dissatisfaction. The result has been a project that enabled me to offer new descriptions of phenomena and to develop concepts that can be used to interpret the moral dimensions of teacher dissatisfaction. The fact that I return (...) to language and concepts as my research outcomes is why, despite my multidisciplinary approach, I continue to describe my work as philosophical. I suggest that philosophical enquiry pursued through empirical research has the potential to inform larger empirical studies, serve as a “sensitizing instrument” for empirical analysis, and to open discursive spaces where common understandings limit interpretive possibilities. (shrink)

Others consider them as conditions, positions, or roles assumed in society. Such theoretical uncertainty is followed by a similarly uncertain empirical classification. This confusion probably exists because classes are not ostensible objects but concepts, that is, culturally and mutually constructed cognitive schemas. In order to see classes, scientists have to agree about the culturally framed discourse to use. This has not yet happened. This seems to be the main cause of the endless conflict in the debate on social stratification. This (...) article documents that "class," before becoming a scientific construct, was a "folk category." From ordinary language, "class" reached the social sciences, passing through the natural sciences. (shrink)

Informed by theories of embodied cognition, in the present study, we designed a novel priming technique to investigate the impact of spatial diversity and script direction on searching through concepts in both English and Persian (i.e., two languages with opposite script directions). First, participants connected a target dot either to one other dot (linear condition) or to multiple other dots (diverse condition) and either from left to right (rightward condition) or from right to left (leftward condition) on a computer touchscreen (...) using their dominant hand's forefinger. Following the spatial prime, they were asked to generate as many words as possible using two‐letter cues (e.g., “lo” → “love,” “lobster”) in 20 s. We hypothesized that greater spatial diversity, and consistency with script direction, should facilitate conceptual search and result in a higher number of word productions. In both languages, word production performance was superior for the diverse prime relative to the linear prime, suggesting that searching through lexical memory is facilitated by spatial diversity. Although some effects were observed for the directionality of the spatial prime, they were not consistent across experiments and did not correlate with script direction. This pattern of results suggests that a spatial prime that promotes diverse paths can improve word retrieval from lexical memory and lends empirical support to the embodied cognition framework, in which spatial relations play a crucial role in the conceptual system. (shrink)

This book is an excellent collection of papers which partly spring from, and partly bear on the Study Group on the Unity of Knowledge held in various universities, October, 1967-March, 1970. The papers all bear on the problem of reduction. In "Unity of Physical Law and Levels of Description," Ilya Prigogine argues that organized structures need physical laws of organization, not of entropy only, to explain their genesis and operation." The editor’s paper, "Reducibility: Another Side Issue," argues, following Polanyi, that (...) living things as machines already transcend physics, since they demand both chemical and engineering principles for their explanation." "How is Mechanism Conceivable?" points out that ordinary ways of talking about and explaining behavior, i.e., as involving intention and purpose, differs in logic from mechanistic explanation. But this difference in logic of the two languages is "never an obstacle to the reduction of one theory to another, indeed, there is always such a noncongruence of the conceptual mesh." Anthony J. P. Kenny’s "The Homunculus Fallacy" argues against "the reckless application of human-being predicates to insufficiently human-like objects." In "Behavior, Belief, and Emotion," A. C. MacIntyre argues for the thesis that "there is no necessary connection between at least some emotions and particular forms of behavior." In "The Critique of Artificial Reason," H. Dreyfus criticizes both the empirical and a priori arguments for optimism underlying the work in artificial intelligence. It displays the underlying philosophical assumption inherent in Western philosophical tradition since Plato. The last two papers concern Polanyi’s theory of knowledge. In "Tacit Knowledge and the Concept of Mind," W. T. Scott shows how Ryle’s "Concept of Mind can be significantly extended by considering certain features of the philosophical position that Michael Polanyi has developed around the concept of tacit knowing." R. S. Cohen’s "Tacit, Social and Hopeful" discusses the difficulties in Polanyi’s epistemology and the merits of the logical reconstruction work in science. Only the papers by Dreyfus and Scott have been previously published. Throughout the collection, the editor has provided useful introductory remarks focusing upon the unifying themes in the collection.—A. S. C. (shrink)

The recent discussion in scientific psychiatry has paid increasing attention to the role of concepts of the person in psychiatric discourse. What are the uses of concepts of the person, such as self or person, in psychiatric discourse? Does describing these uses clarify the significance of conceptual and empirical elements in conceptions of mental illness? I try to answer these questions in a philosophically informed textual analysis of one representative psychiatric article. I conclude that concepts of the person (...) are used largely interchangeably in their various relevant meanings. The interplay between different uses of the concepts of the person allows us to conceptualize psychopathology and to conceive possibilities of overcoming this vague usage. My results underline the importance of a sensitivity to the ways concepts of the person are used in psychiatry and manifest the embeddedness of the language of psychopathology in everyday "person discourse.". (shrink)

I use the psychological phenomenon of ‘attribute framing’ as a case study for exploring philosophical conceptions of semantics and the semantics-pragmatics divide. Attribute frames are pairs of sentences that use contradictory expressions to predicate the same property of an individual or object. Despite their equivalence, pairs of attribute frames have been observed to induce systematic variability in hearers’ responses. One explanation of such framing effects appeals to the distinct ‘reference point information’ conveyed by alternative frames. Although this information (...) is taken to be pragmatic, a live debate in the philosophy of language concerns the extent to which pragmatic information can really be held apart from semantics. Therefore, in this article I examine whether – and how – reference point information might be thought to intrude on the semantics of an attribute frame. I describe two ways in which the information might be considered broadly semantic, due to its being directly communicated or conventional. However, I argue that the framing data in fact support a narrower conception of semantics, and a semantics-pragmatics distinction that separates standing sentence meaning from enriched communicated meaning. (shrink)

This is a complex work by the author of The Moral Nature of Man. First, it is an inventory of the perceptual world using as a tool an original distinction between noticing and observing. This leads to the establishment of a continuity between the conscious and the subconscious, and to the discernment of various meaning-giving levels of attention. Secondly, it is a review of opinion on sensation and perception in recent Anglo-American thought. Particular attention is given to the ideas of (...) Price, Ayer, and Austin. Thirdly, and most importantly, it contains a full theory of reality based on: 1) the resistance or centered action of dynamic systems; 2) the purposive action that meets this resistance; and 3) the emergence of qualia from the encounter of 1 and 2. The method is that of description of ordinary language conceptions of sensation and sensa, "things," interaction and causation, and symbol. From this analysis Garnett obtains some original conclusions about sense qualia and brain processes, body and mind, and, in general, about the physical and mental elements of the universe.—A. M. (shrink)

This is a complex work by the author of The Moral Nature of Man. First, it is an inventory of the perceptual world using as a tool an original distinction between noticing and observing. This leads to the establishment of a continuity between the conscious and the subconscious, and to the discernment of various meaning-giving levels of attention. Secondly, it is a review of opinion on sensation and perception in recent Anglo-American thought. Particular attention is given to the ideas of (...) Price, Ayer, and Austin. Thirdly, and most importantly, it contains a full theory of reality based on: 1) the resistance or centered action of dynamic systems; 2) the purposive action that meets this resistance; and 3) the emergence of qualia from the encounter of 1 and 2. The method is that of description of ordinary language conceptions of sensation and sensa, "things," interaction and causation, and symbol. From this analysis Garnett obtains some original conclusions about sense qualia and brain processes, body and mind, and, in general, about the physical and mental elements of the universe.—A. M. (shrink)

Augustine’s analysis of time in Book XI of Confessions represents for Ludwig Wittgenstein a good example of a philosophical question. In dealing with such theme, his thought undergoes relevant changes. In the Philosophical Remarks, written more than 10 years after the drafting of the Tractatus, the Austrian philosopher holds that the essence of the world can be expressed in the grammar of language. Philosophy as “custodian” of grammar can grasp the essence of the world by excluding nonsensical combinations of (...) signs. Philosopher, however, are often “tempted” to straightly describe the nature of the world, producing logical-grammatical paradoxes. An example of such a temptation is offered by the attempt to take hold of the essence of time using propositions like “only the present experience has reality.” The logical mistake hidden in this proposition lies in the bad use of the adjectival word “present” that would lose its everyday use and functional role in the language. Only comparing the term “present” with the background of other words referring to time experiences like “past,” “future,” and so on, we are able to understand the true sense of it. Engaging in a grammatical investigation into the notion of time helps us to dispel the different uses of it staving off logical muddles. Wittgenstein makes, in his lecture held at Cambridge in 1932–1933, a relevant distinction between what he calls “memory-time” and “information-time.” If the first can be understood as a now-centered system mostly expressed by indexical sentences or as an arrangement relied on memory, and therefore inadequate to give any external physical criteria for time measurements, the second clearly refers to a public chronology, implemented by clocks, calendars, diaries, and so on. Grammatical misconceptions, however occur when we are “tyrannized” by a metaphor and not able to “move outside of” it. The Austrian philosopher makes no secret of preferring a characterization of time that rejects a truth-functional interpretation. As for the notion of “game” in the Philosophical Investigations, it is impossible to have something like a common denominator shared by every sentence involving time. (shrink)

The experience of organizing the educational process during the quarantine caused by the COVID-19 pandemic is considered. Using of interactive technologies that allow organizing instant audio communication with a remote audience, as well as intelligent tools based on artificial intelligence that can help educational institutions to work more efficiently. Examples of sufficient use of artificial intelligence in distance learning are given. Particular attention is paid to the development of intelligent chatbots intended for use in communications with students of online courses (...) of educational web portals. The use of technologies of ontology formation based on automatic extraction of concepts from external sources is offered, what can lead to greater acceleration of construction of the intellectual component of chatbots. Artificial intelligence tools can become an essential part of distance learning during this global COVID-19 pandemic. While educational institutions are closed to quarantine and many of them transitioned to distance learning lecturers and schoolteachers, as well as students and schoolchildren faced with the necessity to study in this new reality. The impact of these changes depends on people's ability to learn and on the role that the education system will play in meeting the demand for quality and affordable training. The experience of organizing the educational process at the University of Education Management of the National Academy of Pedagogical Sciences of Ukraine in the quarantine caused by the COVID-19 pandemic showed that higher and postgraduate institutions were mostly ready to move to distance learning. However, most distance learning systems, on whatever platform they are organized, need to be supplemented: the ability to broadcast video, providing fast transmission of various types of information, receiving instant feedback when voting, polls and more. The structure of each section of the training course for the online learning system should fully cover the training material and meet all the objectives of the course. Appropriate language should be used, and wording, syntax, and presentation of tasks should be considered. One of the areas of application of artificial intelligence technologies in online learning is the use of chatbots which are characterrized by the following properties. It is advisable to use computer ontologies to ensure the intellectualization of chatbots. In this case, the metadata must be understandable to both humans and software and meet the requirements of modern standards in the field of information technology. The extraction of concepts from external data sources was carried out to build the ontology. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to present and discuss the language of the «givens», a typical stylistic resource of Greek mathematics and one of the major features of the proof format of analysis and synthesis. I shall analyze its expressive function and its peculiarities, as well as its general role as a deductive tool, explaining at the same time its particular applications in subgenres of a geometrical proposition like the locus theorems and the so-called «porisms». The main interpretative (...) theses of this study are the following: the language of the «givens» (1) is the standard idiom in which “existence and uniqueness” of a mathematical object was proved, (2) was conceived as an unified framework reducing to a strictly deductive format disparate argumentative steps such as deductions, constructions, and calculations. (shrink)

Certainly the most elaborate single extant monument of Renaissance French prose literature, Michel de Montaigne's "Essais" presents a subject matter that often discusses and analyzes concepts of language in general as well as language as a vehicle of its own expression. This study addresses the author's exploration of the dedalus of language as he ambles and rambles its roads, streets, and alleys; draws the portrait of his philosophy of language or philology; and concludes his affirmative and (...) positivistic attitude toward language and its literary application or the art and artistry of literature. The great Renaissance humanist's depiction of language in the "Essais" is analyzed in this book on the basis of its division among intellectual, moral, and aesthetic aspects. This threefold reduction, finding its derivation in the critical work of Aristotle, Auerbach, and Bowen, is also related to the few particular and the important general critical studies of Montaigne and his vision and use, creation and re-creation of language. (shrink)

Ontology has been proposed as a solution to the 'Tower of Babel' problem that threatens the semantic interoperability of information systems constructed independently for the same domain. In information systems research and applications, ontologies are often implemented by formalizing the meanings of words from natural languages. However, words in different natural languages sometimes subdivide the same domain of reality in terms of different conceptual categories. If the words and their associated concepts in two natural languages, or even in (...) two terminological traditions within the same language, do not have common referents in the real world, an ontology based on word meanings will inherit the 'Tower of Babel' problem from the languages involved, rather than solve it. In this paper we present evidence from a preliminary comparison of landscape terms in English with those in the Yindjibarndi language of northwestern Australia demonstrating that this problem is not just hypothetical. Some possible solutions are suggested. (shrink)

Chapter 1 First Person Access to Mental States. Mind Science and Subjective Qualities -/- Abstract. The philosophy of mind as we know it today starts with Ryle. What defines and at the same time differentiates it from the previous tradition of study on mind is the persuasion that any rigorous approach to mental phenomena must conform to the criteria of scientificity applied by the natural sciences, i.e. its investigations and results must be intersubjectively and publicly controllable. In Ryle’s view, philosophy (...) of mind needs to adopt an antimentalist stance to achieve this aim. Antimentalism not only definitively rejects the idea that mind is a substance separated from the body, it also denies that mental phenomena radically differ from physical phenomena by virtue of several unique features. Most problematically, mental phenomena have a conscious character (mental states are related to specific qualitative feelings) and are accessible only to the first-person (only the subject knows directly what s/he is experiencing inside his/her mind). Ryle takes a strong stance on antimentalism going so far as to maintain that an approach to mind which aims to meet the criteria of scientificity set by the natural sciences must avoid any reference to internal, unobservable mental states. In his view (which is considered a specifically philosophical version of psychological behaviorism and also addresses questions put forward in psychological research), mental states can be redescribed in terms of behavioral dispositions. In this chapter, we address the historical roots of the antimentalist view and analyze its relation to the later tradition of research on mind. We show that, compared to the antimentalist stance, functionalism and cognitivism take a step back when they maintain that direct reference to mental states is necessary since mental states cause and therefore explain human behavior. This step backwards is often interpreted as a return to mentalism. However, this is only partially true. Indeed, we suggest that these later traditions retain one important element of Ryle’s antimentalism, i.e. the idea that mental states must be uniquely identified using external and publicly observable criteria, while excluding any reference to introspection and those qualitative dimensions of a mental state, which are accessible only to the first-person. According to the perspective we put forward, this epistemological stance has continued to influence contemporary research on mind and current philosophical and psychological theories which both tend to exclude the subjective qualities of human experience from their accounts of how the mind works. The issue we raise here is whether this is legitimate or whether subjective qualities do play a role with respect to the way our mind works. The conclusion of this chapter anticipates the argument the book makes in in favor of this latter position, starting from a particular angle, i.e. the problem of how we categorize concepts related to our internal states. -/- Chapter 2 The Misleading Aspects of the Mind/Computer Analogy. The Grounding Problem and the Thorny Issue of Propriosensitive Information -/- Abstract. After the crisis of behaviorism, cognitivism and functionalism became the predominant models in the field of psychology and of philosophy, respectively. Their success is mainly due to the new key they use for interpreting mental processes: the mind/computer analogy. On the basis of this analogy, mental operations are seen as cognitive processes based on computations, i.e. on manipulations of abstract symbols which are in turn understood as informational unities (representations). This chapter identifies two main problems with this model. The first is how these symbols can relate to and communicate with perception and thus allow us to identify and classify what we perceive through the senses. Here we limit ourselves to presenting this issue in relation to the classical symbol grounding problem originally put forward by Harnad on the basis of Searle’s Chinese room argument. An attempt to address the problem raised here will be made in chap. 3. The second point we discuss in relation to the mind/computer analogy concerns the idea of information it fosters. Indeed, following this analogy, information is something available in the external world which can be captured by the senses and transmitted to the central system without being influenced or modified by the procedures of transmission. This perspective does not take into account that – unlike computers – in living beings information is acquired by means of the body. As Ulric Neisser has already pointed out, the body is itself an informational source that provides us with additional sensory experience that influences (modifies or complements) the information extracted from the external world by the senses. To develop this line of analysis and to determine exactly what information is provided by the body and how this might influence cognition, we examine Sherrington’s and Gibson’s positions. Moving on from their views, we qualify bodily information in terms of ‘proprioception’. We use ‘proprioception’ in a broad sense to describe any kind of experience we have of our internal states (including postural information as well as sensations related to the general state of the body and its parts). Following Damasio’s and Craig’s studies, we further elaborate this position, arguing that living beings are equipped with an internal propriosensitive monitoring system which maps all the changes that constantly occur in our body and that give us perceptual (‘proprioceptive’ or propriosensitive) information about what happens inside us. Moreover, relying on Goldie’s and Ratcliffe’s view, we show that emotional information can also be considered as a form of ‘proprioception’ which contributes to determining everything we perceive. This analysis leads us to the second main thesis of this book: ‘proprioception’ is a form of internal perception and it is an essential component of the sensory information we can access and use for all cognitive purposes. -/- Chapter 3 Semantic Competence from the Inside: Conceptual Architecture and Composition -/- Abstract. Concepts are essential constituents of thought: they are the instruments we use to categorize our experience, i.e. to classify things and group them together in homogeneous sets. Here we define concepts as the internal mental information (representations) that allows us, among other things, to master words in natural language. By analyzing the way in which individuals master word meanings we explore a number of hypotheses regarding the nature of concepts. Following Diego Marconi’s research, we differentiate between two kind of abilities that underpin lexical competence – so-called ‘referential’ and ‘inferential competence’ – and we suggest that, in order to support these abilities, concepts must also include two corresponding kinds of information, i.e. inferential and referential information. We point out that the most widely used and acknowledged theories of concepts do not make this distinction, instead broadly characterizing the information used for categorization in terms of propositionally described feature lists. However, we show that while feature lists can explain inferential competence, they do not account for referential competence. To address the issue of referential competence we examine Ray Jackendoff’s hypothesis that to account for the possibility of linking perceptual and conceptual information we need to assume the existence of a (visual) representation that encodes the geometric and topological properties of objects and bridges the gap between the percept and the concept. Furthermore, we analyze the extension of this work by Jesse Prinz who introduced the notion of a proxytype, a perceptual representation of a class of objects that incorporates structural and parametric information related to their appearance. However, as we point out, proxytypes can only explain the relationship between perception and concepts with respect to instances that can be perceived through the senses and that belong to the same class by virtue of their physical similarity. We suggest that this notion be extended to include larger conceptual classes. To accomplish this, we further develop Mark Johnson, George Lakoff and Jean Mandler’s idea of a schematic image and argue that conceptual representations include a perceptual schema. Perceptual schemata are non-linguistic, structured experiential gestalts (patterns or maps) that make use of information taken from all sensory modalities, including body perception. They accomplish a quasi-conceptual function: they allow us to recognize and to classify different instances. In this work, we hypothesize that perceptual schemata are an essential component of concepts, but not identical to them. Instead, we suggest that concepts include both perceptual and propositional information with perceptual schemata providing the ‘perceptual core concept’ that grounds related propositional information. -/- Chapter 4 In the Beginning There Were Categories. The Bodily Origin of Prelinguistic Categorical Organization: The Example of Folkbiological Taxonomies -/- Abstract. Studies of categorization in psychology and the cognitive sciences have made use of the notions of ‘category’ and ‘concept’ without precisely defining what is meant by either; in fact, often these terms have been used as synonyms, making it difficult to address specific issues related to conceptual development. This chapter begins by discussing the definitions of, as well as the distinctions between, ‘categories’ and ‘concepts’ in the classical philosophical tradition (Aristotle, Kant and Husserl). We introduce our view of categories with reference to Husserl. Categorization is defined as the way in which our experience is originally (pre-linguistically) organized in a passive and fully unconscious manner on the basis of universal structuring principles. Conceptualization is explained as a later process in which the earlier categorical macro-classes are further subdivided into more specific and detailed sets; this later process also relies on linguistic learning and exposure to culture. On the basis of Ray Jackendoff, Jean Mandler, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson’s work, we hypothesize that categorization is a two-step process that begins with the formation of homogeneous sets of entities partitioned into regions that describe the ontological boundaries of the objects that humans perceive (categories) and continues at a later stage with the development of more specific classifications (concepts). In this chapter, we mainly address three related issues: Why should we assume that there is categorical organization which precedes the development of a conceptual system? How do categories and concepts relate to each other? Shall we hypothesize that categories are innate or that they are formed before concepts on the basis of information and organizational structure available at a very early developmental stage? We show that categorical partitions are necessary for categorization and, following Mandler, that the general categories we form at an early age do not match our adult superordinate concepts. As for the third issue, we argue that there might be no need to assume that categories are innately present in the human mind, since their formation can be explained – at least in certain cases – by basic mechanisms that work on body (propriosensitive) information. This hypothesis will not be discussed in general, but in relation to a particularly relevant example of categorical partition, i.e. the folk-biological dichotomy between ANIMATE/INANIMATE. This is compared with other dichotomies that derive from it, but are not directly categorical such as LIVING/NON-LIVING and BIOLOGICAL/NON-BIOLOGICAL. -/- Chapter 5 Internal States: From Headache to Anger. Conceptualization and Semantic Mastery -/- Abstract. Here we ask if we can also apply the distinction between referential and inferential competence we introduced in Chapter 3 to words that do not refer to things that are perceived using the external senses, especially to words/concepts that denote bodily experiences (such as pain, thirst, hunger, etc.) or emotions. We introduce and discuss the hypothesis that – even though such words/concepts do not refer to intersubjectively identifiable entities in the external world – they do have a kind of referent that can be accessed via direct perception, more specifically ‘proprioception’, as we have defined it in terms of all propriosensitive information we can consciously access. In the first part of the chapter, we specifically consider terms denoting bodily experiences such as ‘pain’ or ‘hunger’ and argue that their referents are identified and classified from a first-personal point of view on the basis of four main characteristics: their specific intensity, their localization in the body, their co-occurrence with other signals and above all their specific qualitative sensations. Emotions are addressed in the second part of the chapter. We suggest that there is a continuity between bodily experiences and emotions. In particular, we argue for a perceptual theory of emotions in line with that proposed by James and Lange at the end of the 19th century and developed more recently by authors such as Damasio (see also chap. 2§5, §6). The hypothesis we put forward is that the referential information that supports the categorization of emotions and therefore also our mastery of terms referring to emotions consists in the perception (i.e. the ‘proprioception’) of those bodily states and changes in bodily states which constitute our emotional experience. In the context of this discussion we examine some objections to this line of reasoning that arise from a cognitivist perspective and following authors such as Oatley, Johnson-Laird and Frijda, we distinguish between basic emotions that can be identified and classified solely on the basis on how they feel and complex emotions whose identification and classification additionally depends on cognitive factors. To describe how emotions are identified and classified on the basis of how they feel, we rely on Marcel and Lambie’s distinction between an ‘emotion state’ and an ‘emotion experience’. Both notions indicate kinds of feelings that we consciously experience. However, they describe first-order and second order emotion awareness respectively. The emotion state is the feeling we have of the bodily states and changes that occur when we are experiencing an emotion, while the emotion experience is the fully developed and integrated emotion we both experience and are, with reflection, aware of experiencing. On the basis of this differentiation, we also show that the same characteristics that aid in the identification and classification of bodily experiences (specific qualitative sensations; somatic localization; specific intensity; presence/absence of specific concomitant sensations) can also be used for the identification and classification of emotions – at least basic emotions. In the last two sections of the chapter we present some clinical evidence on the semantic competence of people who suffer from Alexithymia and Autism Spectrum Disorder which supports the conclusions of our preceding analyses. -/- Chapter 6 The ‘Proprioceptive’ Component of Abstract Concepts -/- Abstract. In this chapter, we address the issue of whether the mastery of abstract words requires only inferential knowledge and thus, if the concepts that support the mastery of abstract words include only linguistic information. We start by differentiating the notions of ‘abstract’ and ‘general’ which are often erroneously confused. We then identify a strict definition of abstract, as contrasted with ‘concrete’, that applies to words or concepts whose referent cannot be experienced by the senses. We argue that abstract words/concepts would be better described as theoretical, because they are usually conceived as structured sets of inferential knowledge expressed linguistically; that is, as small theories. Pointing out parallels with Carnap’s analysis of this issue in philosophy of science, we hypothesize that words/concepts denoting non-observable entities are not all ‘equally theoretical’, because their link to sensory experience can be stronger or weaker. We revive the distinction, inspired by Quine, between theoretical and intertheoretical concepts/words. This distinction relies on the fact that the former – unlike the latter – retains a strong, although indirect, connection with perception. In Quine’s discussion, perception is understood uniquely in terms of observability, i.e. of external sensory experience. Here we argue, however, that bodily, ‘proprioceptive’ (i.e. propriosensitive) experience can also serve to referentially ground theoretical (i.e. abstract) concepts/words. We frame this issue using the example of the theoretical concept ‘freedom’ and Lakoff’s hypothesis that this concept is developed on the basis of bodily information. We contrast this with the example of ‘democracy’ which more closely resembles an intertheoretical concept/word. Furthermore, we show that one of the classical views put forward in psycholinguistic research to explain how abstract concepts are mentally represented – i.e. Paivio’s Dual Coding Theory – points in the same direction as our analysis. The same is true of Barsalou’s work suggesting that we use internal information to understand at least some abstract words. To sustain this position, we put forward two lines of evidence: the first comes from psycholinguistic studies while the second examines deficits of semantic competence exhibited by people with Autism Spectrum Disorder. On the basis of our analysis, we put forward a classification that distinguishes between different kinds of concreteness and different degrees of abstraction: concepts/words referring to body experiences and basic emotions are described as analogous to concrete concepts/words because they are grounded in perceptual (i.e. propriosensitive) experience, while abstract concepts/words are considered more or less abstract depending on whether they are intratheoretical (and rely entirely on inferential information) or theoretical (and are partially grounded in perceptual – or more often in propriosensitive perceptual – information). In the last section of the chapter we consider two scales that have been used in psycholinguistic research to measure the degree of concreteness vs. abstractness of words and we show that – used conjointly – they can provide a measure of the internal vs. external grounding of specific words. (shrink)

This paper discusses basic concepts and recentdevelopments in intellectual property ownership in theUnited States. Various philosophical arguments havepreviously been put forward to support the creation andmaintenance of intellectual property systems. However, in an age of information, access toinformation is a critical need and should beguaranteed for every citizen. Any right of controlover the information, adopted as an incentive toencourage creation and distribution of intellectualproperty, should be subservient to an overriding needto ensure access to the information. The principlesunderlying (...) intellectual property regimes in the UnitedStates recognize and embody this. In addition, thephilosophical/ethical dimensions of this debate couldalso be structured to support this attitude as well. Intellectual property is fast becoming digitalproperty. New technologies allow owners to extendtheir control of both legitimate uses and misuses ofthe intellectual property. Recent trends demonstratethat the access principle has not always beenparamount in judicial or legislative applications. Thetrend rather is to allow a proprietarianism factor todominate the analysis. Finally, several principles areforwarded which would assist adjudicators and policymakers in reaffirming the basic purpose of theintellectual property law, which is to benefit thepublic at large. (shrink)

In voicing commitments to the principle that the adoption of artificial-intelligence (AI) tools by armed forces should be done responsibly, a growing number of states have referred to a concept of “Responsible AI.” As part of an effort to help develop the substantive contours of that concept in meaningful ways, this position paper introduces a notion of “responsible reliance.” It is submitted that this notion could help the policy conversation expand from its current relatively narrow focus on interactions (...) between an AI system and its end-user to also encompass the wider set of interdependencies involved in fulfilling legal obligations concerning the use of AI in armed conflicts. The authors argue that to respect international humanitarian law and ensure accountability, states ought to devise and maintain a framework that ensures that natural persons involved in the use an AI tool in an armed conflict could responsibly rely at least on: (1) the tool’s technical aspects, (2) the conduct of other people involved in development and use of that AI tool; and (3) the policies and processes implemented at the state level. According to the authors, the “responsible reliance” notion could serve, among other examples, as a basis on which to articulate legal requirements, prohibitions, and permissions across diverse areas, from the design of AI tools to human-machine interactions to configuration of responsible-command frameworks. (shrink)

\noindent\textbf{Introduction} Online interventions hold great potential for Therapeutic Change Process Research (TCPR), a field that aims to relate in-therapeutic change processes to the outcomes of interventions. Online a client is treated essentially through the language their counsellor uses, therefore the verbal interaction contains many important ingredients that bring about change. TCPR faces two challenges: how to derive meaningful change processes from texts, and secondly, how to assess these complex, varied and multi-layered processes? We advocate the use text mining (...) and multi-level models (MLMs): the former offers tools and methods to discovers patterns in texts; the latter can analyse these change processes as outcomes that vary at multiple levels. \noindent\textbf{Method} We (re-)used the data from \cite{Lamers2015} because it includes outcomes and the complete online intervention for clients with mild depressive symptoms. We used text mining to obtain basic text-variables from e-mails, that we analysed through MLMs. \noindent\textbf{Results} We found that we could relate outcomes of interventions to variables containing text-information. We conclude that we can indeed bridge text mining and MLMs for TCPR as it was possible to relate text-information (obtained through text mining) to multi-levelled TCPR outcomes (using a MLM). \noindent\textbf{Discussion} Text mining can be helpful to obtain change processes, which is also the main challenge for TCPR. We showed how MLMs and text mining can be combined, but our proposition leaves open how to obtain the most relevant textual operationalization of TCPR concepts. That requires interdisciplinary collaboration and discussion. The future does look bright: based on our proof-of-concept study we conclude that MLMs and text mining can indeed advance TCPR. (shrink)

Purpose Employees may feel overwhelmed with information privacy choices and have difficulties understanding what they are committing to in the digital workplace. This paper aims to analyze the role of different thinking styles for effort reduction, such as the use of intuition, when employees make decisions about the credibility and trustworthiness of workplace information privacy issues in Slovakia. While the General Data Protection Regulation sets precise requirements for valid consent, organizations are classified as data controllers and are subject (...) to credibility judgments by their employees. Design/methodology/approach Data was collected from 230 employees in Slovakia using a survey questionnaire. Quantitative analysis using SPSS was conducted to describe employees thinking preferences when judging the credibility of information privacy in their organizations. Findings The survey participants revealed their perceived credibility and trust in personal data protection and thinking preferences. Unconscious thinking is the type of effort reduction often reported by participants, who perceive high credibility and trust in personal data protection. This study can help managers and data controllers in small- and medium-sized enterprises in reflecting about the way in which people use different thinking processes for decision-making about information privacy in their organizations. Research limitations/implications This study set out to explore how decision-making processes at the workplace relate to credibility of data practices. Focusing on the use of different types of intuition, the authors explored whether the preference for a specific decision-making style can explain the perceived credibility of data practices. The part of the workforce in the sample did not have a strict predisposition to use either intuitive or rational thinking. Practical implications The contribution provides scholars with an overview of the field of intuition, a field that is likely to grow given the challenges of digitalization for organizations, such as shitstorms, cyberattacks and whistleblowing. Originality/value The most well-known concepts from intuition research, e.g. the dual process theory, and practice are tested simultaneously, therewith contributing to the applied literature on domain-specific preferences for intuition and deliberation in decision-making. (shrink)

Through a study of a sophisticated contemporary scientific experiment, it is shown how and why use of the term 'observation' in reference to that experiment departs from ordinary and philosophical usages which associate observation epistemically with perception. The role of "background information" is examined, and general conclusions are arrived at regarding the use of descriptive language in and in talking about science. These conclusions bring out the reasoning by which science builds on what it has learned, and, (...) further, how that process of building consists not only in adding to our substantive knowledge, but also in increasing our ability to learn about nature, by extending our ability to observe it in new ways. The argument of this paper is thus a step toward understanding how it is that all our knowledge of nature rests on observation. (shrink)

In this paper I discuss Kant's and Bolzano's differing perspectives on ordinary natural language. I argue that Kant does not see ordinary language as providing semantically organized content and that, as a result, Kant does not believe that ordinary language is sufficiently well-developed to support philosophical analysis and definition. By contrast, for Bolzano, the content given in ordinary language are richly structured entities he calls 'propositions in themselves'. This contrast in views is (...) used to explain Bolzano's criticism of Kant's belief that definition is impossible for philosophical concepts. It is also used to explain Bolzano's criticism of Kant's methods of exposition of philosophical concepts. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Truth Will Set You Free, or How a Troubled Philosophical Theory May Help to Understand How People Talk About Their AddictionPatricia A. Ross (bio)Keywordsveridicality of narrative, contingency of theories, belief-behavior, causal connectionConsider the following proposition: If one were to recognize the unsatisfactory implications of maintaining a certain theoretical position, one would thereby be motivated to accept a more adequate theory, which would alter one's beliefs and, in turn, (...) alter the behaviors that are based upon those beliefs. Faith in this proposition is what motivates many of us to teach. But, alas...Allison Mitchell's argument for rethinking addiction intervention—in particular, rethinking twelve-step programs—is premised on this proposition. According to her argument, addicts function with an impoverished sense of self that is reflective of a grossly simplified form of philosophical materialism. By recognizing the limitations of this philosophically unconvincing view, and by, in effect, accepting a better, more complete materialism, addicts can come to modify their self-conception. This modification is instrumental to recovery.A careful consideration of the chain of events being proposed, and the problems with it, is helpful for understanding the limitations of her argument. There are four points that I consider in turn: (1) considering narratives can tell us something about the self-conception of addicts, (2) philosophical materialism can help us to understand and explain something about an addict's self-conception and how it is inadequate, (3) this sense of self is distinct from nonusers and the way in which it is distinct helps to understand the problem of addiction, and (4) a change in self-conception with respect to materialism helps recovery and, thus, our best intervention is one based on having addicts accept a full materialist theory of the self and not a pretheoretic one. [End Page 227]With respect to the first point, it should be noted that Mitchell's overall argument does not depend on whether or not it is true that narratives of addiction tell us something veridical about the self-conception of addicts. Such narratives may simply provide us with a potential theory—a possible worlds scenario—of how addicts conceive of themselves. Mitchell points this out herself. The narratives and the interpretation that she provides of these narrative, "are meant only to highlight a certain pattern of self-expression and conception that may in fact be common in persons who use mind-altering substances; the readings do not establish any empirical matters of fact or philosophical truths, nor do they prove any conclusions about how such persons (must) express themselves or conceive their nature" (Mitchell 2006, 214).Thus, what the argument is actually concerned with are the theoretical claims about the self-conception of addicts that are garnered from these narratives. Nevertheless, because the narratives provide the starting point for Mitchell's argument, it is worth thinking carefully about the epistemic status of this body of literature. In particular, could a consideration of such literature lead us astray in our endeavors to understand how addicts might misconceive of themselves and, if so, in what way? What sort of epistemic status does this information hold?Mitchell is motivated by Wittgensteinian analyses of the relationship between thought and language. The particular idea that she employs from Wittgenstein is that every act of self-expression, whether it is verbal or written narrative, reveals something about the conceptual framework with which the author is working. Thus, one can learn about the author of a narrative—one can acquire a sense of how that individual conceives of him- or herself—by looking at the language that is employed to talk about and describe him- or herself.Mitchell enumerates some problems with this approach. She mentions that the author may fail to make his or her intended sense clear to readers; that the reader's narrative expectations determine the interpretation given to the narrative; that literary narrative may be less direct, less ordinary than everyday uses of language; and that interpreting such narrative via philosophical framework may ascribe to people positions that are more precise and sophisticated than they actually intend (p. 213).Aside from these quite serious problems, it is necessary to recognize... (shrink)

The purpose of the article is to reveal philosophical ideas in the mythology and folklore of the indigenous peoples of North America. An important question: "Can we assume that the spiritual culture of the American Indians contained philosophical knowledge?" remains relevant today. For example, European philosophy is defined by appeals to philosophers of the past, their texts. The philosophical tradition is characterized by rational argumentation and formulation of philosophical questions that differ from the questions of ordinary language. However, (...) the problem lies in the term "philosophy", which belongs to the so-called "philosophical untranslatability" and has many definitions. The question of whether philosophy is exclusively a phenomenon of European culture is still controversial. In the article, the concept of philosophy is used in a broad sense, which allows the analysis of the intellectual heritage of the culture of the indigenous people of North America for philosophical ideas. Theoretical basis of the study consists of primary sources, which are limited due to the "documentary horizon". It contains myths about the Twins, ritual rhetoric, examples of dream interpretation practices and the practical wisdom of tribal chiefs. The Chronicle of "Vallamolum", or "the Red List", testifies to the special idea of the Indians about history and their own historicity. Analysis of cosmogonical and cosmological ideas reveals the special features of the anthropological ideas of the North American Indians. Combined with the philosophical ideas of the Puritan philosophy of the settlers of New England, this analysis allows us to explore in more detail the processes of acculturation. The study uses critical literature from scholars and leading researchers of the wisdom and philosophy of Native Americans, such as Michael Yellow Bird, J. Baird Callicott, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Dennis H. McPherson, Lewis Henri Morgan, Thomas M. Norton-Smith, J. Douglas Rabb, Paul Radin, Jon Ewbank Manchip White. The views of early American philosophers: R. Williams, W. Penn, R. W. Emerson, on the problem of the relationship between the culture of settlers and the indigenous people of North America are noteworthy. Originality lies in the application of historical and philosophical methodology, identifying the features of philosophizing in the spiritual culture and worldview of the indigenous people of North America. Conclusions. In the conclusions, the obtained results complement the history of the origin and development of philosophical thought of the early American philosophy. (shrink)

The 2014 INPE McLaughlin Lecture explores the emergent concept of the ‘postliberal’ and the increasing frequency of its formal and informal uses in the languages of educational theory and practice. It traces the origins of the term ‘postliberal’ to certain strains of modern Christian theology, maps its migration into liberal democratic theory and examines its important role in the discussion of religious schooling as led for a time by Terry McLaughlin himself. Acknowledging the looseness of the concepts ‘liberal’ (...) and ‘postliberal’ in much current educational polemic, the article nonetheless argues that recurrent adoption of the term ‘postliberal’ in Britain especially signifies a change in attitude towards ‘progressive’ versions of liberal education with which philosophers and theorists must engage. (shrink)

Looks into evaluation of information provision probability from different sources, based on use of linguistic variables. Formation of functions appurtenant for its unclear variables provides for adoption of decisions by the decision maker, in conditions of nonprobabilistic equivocation. The development of market relations in Ukraine increases the independence and responsibility of enterprises in justifying and making management decisions that ensure their effective, competitive activities. As a result of the analysis, it is determined that the condition of economic facilities can (...) be described and determined by the decision-maker, in the presence of the necessary information. The confidence of the decision-maker in the information received is different and the decisions made have a correspondingly different level of information risk. It is important to substantiate the procedure for assessing the numerical extent of information risk in decision-making based on the information obtained in conditions of uncertainty. The use of a linguistic variable in the processing of expert data presented in the form of a matrix of binary relations of values of the membership function, which allowed to move to further processing of knowledge to support decision-making in the management of industrial, commercial, financial and other activities. As a mathematical model for estimating the numerical measure of information risk when making decisions based on the information obtained in conditions of non-stochastic uncertainty, a model has been developed to model natural language uncertainties, which differs from existing ones by formalizing knowledge taking into account uncertainty of input information. Making such a clear decision in a fuzzy environment has appropriate values of effectiveness and risk. The paper proposes all the functions and accessories of indicators of both quantitative nature and qualitative nature to bring their values in the field of definition to one scale. Then the indicator of the effectiveness of decision-making will be a measure of the clarity of the cross-section of fuzzy subsets, which correspond to the introduced indicators of information risk. The condition of economic facilities can be described and determined by the decision-maker, if the necessary information is available. Decision-making on thenumerical measure of information risk must be determined by a set of basic indicators, which can be both quantitative and qualitative in nature. Predictive values of indicators should be determined in conditions of nonstochastic uncertainty. In this case, the indicators of a quantitative nature can be determined by fuzzy triangular numbers, which implement a high level of confidence in the subjective judgments of experts. Indicators of qualitative nature should be presented in linguistic variables. The values of the indicators of qualitative nature that are predicted must be considered for all fuzzy variable terms-sets of linguistic variables introduced into consideration. For any fuzzy variable, the introduction to the consideration of a clear set of values as carriers of the α-level of its membership function allows to reduce to a single interpretation of the predicted values of indicators of quantitative and qualitative nature in terms of non-stochastic uncertainty. (shrink)

Present, as Manuel Castells (1996) notes, we live in the information age. Knowledge and the way it is acquired and processed are the driving forces of the economy, and information processing systems are the strength of economies. The aim of this article is to identify the key role of the information supply phenomenon in contemporary socio-economic processes. The initial part of the article will define such concepts as: information, infodemia, information market, in the further part (...) examples of the use of information in the process of forming social behaviour in the market context will be presented. For this purpose, three major economic crises from the turn of the 20th and 21st century will be used cross-sectionally. The first will be described as the dot-com crisis, i.e. the first global Internet players, which led to the collapse or loss of value of many global Internet platforms through the creation and bursting of a speculative bubble. The second crisis described below was related to the collapse of Lehman Brothers, a leading US bank, and the US housing crisis. In the above case, both supply and concealment of information in the public sphere could be observed. The last crisis described is the crisis related to the SARS-COV2 pandemic, in which dis- and mis- information activities proved to be crucial. (shrink)

Spirituality is a highly contested concept. Within the nursing literature, there are a huge range and diversity of definitions, some of which appear coherent whereas others seem quite disparate and unconnected. This vagueness within the nursing literature has led some to suggest that spirituality is so diverse as to be meaningless. Are the critics correct in asserting that the vagueness that surrounds spirituality invalidates it as a significant aspect of care? We think not. It is in fact the (...) vagueness of the concept that is its strength and value. In this paper, we offer a critique of the general apologetic that surrounds the use of the language of spirituality in nursing. With the critics, we agree that the term ‘spirituality’ is used in endlessly different and loose ways. Similarly, we agree that these varied definitions may not refer to constant essences or objects within people or in the world. However, we fundamentally disagree that this makes spirituality irrelevant or of little practical utility. Quite the opposite; properly understood, the vagueness and lack of clarity around the term spirituality is actually a strength that has powerful political, social, and clinical implications. We develop an understanding of spirituality as a way of naming absences and recognizing gaps in healthcare provision as well as a prophetic challenge to some of the ways in which we practise health care within a secular and sometimes secularizing context such as the National Health Service. (shrink)

The relationship between individual and population health is partially built on the broad dichotomization of medicine into clinical medicine and public health. Potential drawbacks of current views include seeing both individual and population health as absolute and independent concepts. I will argue that the relationship between individual and population health is largely relative and dynamic. Their interrelated dynamism derives from a causally defined life course perspective on health determination starting from an individual’s conception through growth, development and participation in the (...) collective till death, all seen within the context of an adaptive society. Indeed, it will become clear that neither individual nor population health is identifiable or even definable without informative contextualization within the other. For instance, a person’s health cannot be seen in isolation but must be placed in the rich contextual web such as the socioeconomic circumstances and other health determinants of where they were conceived, born, bred, and how they shaped and were shaped by their environment and communities, especially given the prevailing population health exposures over their lifetime. We cannot discuss the “what” and “how much” of individual and population health until we know the cumulative trajectories of both, using appropriate causal language. (shrink)

This article explores the usefulness of interdisciplinarity as method of enquiry by proposing an investigation of the concept of information in the light of semiotics. This is because, as Kull, Deacon, Emmeche, Hoffmeyer and Stjernfelt state, information is an implicitly semiotic term (Biological Theory 4(2):167–173, 2009: 169), but the logical relation between semiosis and information has not been sufficiently clarified yet. Across the history of cybernetics, the concept of information undergoes an uneven development; that (...) is, information is an ‘objective’ entity in first order cybernetics, and becomes a ‘subjective’ entity in second order cybernetics. This contradiction relegates the status of information to that of a ‘true’ or ‘false’ formal logic problem. The present study proposes that a solution to this contradiction can be found in Deely’s reconfiguration of Peirce’s ‘object’ (as found in his triadic model of semiosis) into ‘thing’ and ‘object’ (Deely 1981). This ontology allows one to argue that information is neither ‘true’ nor ‘false’, and to suggest that, when considered in light of its workability, information can be both true and false, and as such it constitutes an organism’s purely objective reality (Deely 2009b). It is stated that in the process of building such a reality, information is ‘motivated’ by environmental, physiological, emotional (including past feelings and expectations) constraints which are, in turn, framed by observership. Information is therefore found in the irreducible cybersemiotic process that links at once all these conditions and that is simultaneously constrained by them. The integration of cybernetics’ and semiotics’ understanding of information shows that history is the analytical principle that grants scientific rigour to interdisciplinary investigations. As such, in any attempt to clarify its epistemological stance (e.g. the semiotic aspect of information), it is argued that biosemiotics does not need only to acknowledge semiotics (as it does), but also cybernetics in its interdisciplinary heritage. (shrink)

Biologists have recently found it useful to give a prominent place in their theories to the concept of a plant or animal population. Genetics, ecology, paleontology, and especially the theory of evolution have been able to make notable advances as a result of employing the concept in their interpretations and inferences. The concept has not, however, first been rigorously defined and then put to work. That is rarely the way fruitful scientific notions develop. On the contrary, in (...) most discussions the term “population” has a large degree of vagueness about it. This is due in part to the fact that the term has been taken over from ordinary language and employed in a number of novel contexts. But some of the vagueness also seems to be an unavoidable consequence of the immensely intricate phenomena to which the term refers. In any case, the role played by the concept of a population in evolutionary theory makes even a brief inquiry into its meaning worthwhile. The present paper is concerned with such an inquiry. What I wish to do is, first, to review the major ways in which the concept has been used by biologists in connection with recent formulations of the theory of evolution; and secondly, to comment on a few misleading issues which may arise if care is not taken to observe certain logical and linguistic distinctions. (shrink)

Purpose of the article is to establish the role of egoism in the life of a person faced with a disability situation, as a moment of self-determination in an existential crisis. I set the task to evaluate the influence of egoism and find out its significance in the prospect of the person’s further existence in the conditions of disability using the philosophical anthropology based on the meta-anthropology principle. Theoretical basis. Based on the fact that the role of egoism is perceived (...) by public opinion as a vice and entails the absorption by a person of the benefits intended for others, I find them inappropriate for a person in a situation of disability. Taking into account the concepts of ego of altruism and altruistic egoism, which partially justify the positive influence of egoism, are only a product of the symbiotic interaction of altruism and egoism. The combination of egoism with altruism cannot reveal the essence of the crisis for a person in a disability situation. In a situation of disability, a person cannot synthesize altruism, as part of the egoism symbiosis. Methodological system in the study of the positive role of egoism, the modern theory of meta-anthropology by Nazip Khamitov is used. The theory that divides the being of a person into various types is able to most fully structure the concept of egoism in the being of a person who has disability. Originality. I made an attempt to prove the positive role of egoism in a situation related to the body transformation into new conditions. The analysis of evidence of the need for the egoism development, as a function capable of actualizing a person in the formed crisis circumstances is carried out. A theory about the need for egoism to get a person out of the existential crisis situation in which he stays due to a disability situation was proposed. Conclusions. I show that taking care of oneself is a balancing factor for a person, as opposing a fatally unfair situation in which a person has received disability. Rational egoism is able to bring a person out of ultimate being and allow him to transform into a new, changed reality. (shrink)

How evaluative are legal texts? Do legal scholars and jurists speak a more descriptive or perhaps a more evaluative language? In this paper, we present the results of a corpus study in which we examined the use of evaluative language in both the legal domain as well as public discourse. For this purpose, we created two corpora. Our legal professional corpus is based on court opinions from the U.S. Courts of Appeals. We compared this professional corpus to a (...) public corpus, which is based on blog discussions on the internet forum Reddit. While many linguistic phenomena can give insights into evaluativity, we investigated the use of a wide selection of evaluative adjectives (more specifically, thick adjectives) to gain a more comprehensive picture of the degree of evaluativity in the legal domain. Our analysis shows that legal professionals use thick terms less evaluatively than laypeople, which suggests that legal texts are less evaluative than ordinary discussions. This result, more generally, supports the philosophical idea that thick concepts may vary in their evaluative intensity. (shrink)