Although personal relevance is key to sustaining an audience’s interest in any given narrative, it has received little systematic attention in scholarship to date. Across centuries and media, adaptations have been used extensively to bring temporally or geographically distant narratives “closer” to the recipient under the assumption that their impact will increase. In this review article, we review experimental and other empirical evidence on narrative processing in order to unravel which types of personal relevance are more likely to be impactful (...) than others, which types of impact (e.g. aesthetic, therapeutic, persuasive) they have been found to generate, and where their power may become excessive or outright detrimental to reader experience. (shrink)

In “The Meta-Problem of Consciousness”, David Chalmers draws a new framework in which to consider the mind-body problem. In addition to trying to solve the hard problem of consciousness – the problem of why and how brain processes give rise to conscious experience –, he thinks that philosophy, psychology, neuro-science and the other cognitive sciences should also pursue a solution to what he calls the “meta-problem” of consciousness – i.e., the problem of why we think there is a problem with (...) consciousness. My claim is that, while Chalmers’s project is generously ecumenical as well as beautiful in its meticulous detail, it is mistaken in its core assumption that the meta-problem can be formulated as an “easy problem” for science to solve. Furthermore, the project tilts the field toward illusionism against Type-B materialism, as far as physicalist solutions to the hard problem and the meta-problem are concerned. I will argue that Type-B materialism emerges unscathed from this dialectic. (shrink)

Proponents of non-conceptual content have recruited it for various philosophical jobs. Some epistemologists have suggested that it may play the role of “the given” that Sellars is supposed to have exorcised from philosophy. Some philosophers of mind (e.g., Dretske) have suggested that it plays an important role in the project of naturalizing semantics as a kind of halfway between merely information bearing and possessing conceptual content. Here I will focus on a recent proposal by Jerry Fodor. In a recent paper (...) he characterizes non-conceptual content in a particular way and argues that it is plausible that it plays an explanatory role in accounting for certain auditory and visual phenomena. So he thinks that there is reason to believe that there is non-conceptual content. On the other hand, Fodor thinks that non-conceptual content has a limited role. It occurs only in the very early stages of perceptual processing prior to conscious awareness. My paper is examines Fodor’s characterization of non-conceptual content and his claims for its explanatory importance. I also discuss if Fodor has made a case for limiting non-conceptual content to non-conscious, sub-personal mental states. (shrink)

I. Identitások és váltások -- II. Médiák és váltások.

Abstract: On several occasions (see e.g. Principles I/48) Descartes claims that sensations, emotions, imagination and sensory perceptions belong neither to the mind or to the body alone, but rather to their union. This seems to conflict with Descartes’s definition of “thought” given elsewhere, which classifies the same events as modes of a thinking substance, and hence depending for their existence only on minds. In this paper I offer an interpretation, which, I hope, will restore the coherence of Descartes’s dualist theory. (...) I argue that the ‘special modes’ of thinking are special because they are the immediate effects of the body on the mind. They thus depend for their existence on the body because of the general metaphysical principle that “Nothing comes from nothing”. Understood properly, this principle does not contradict the principle about the distinctness of substances. (shrink)

Phenomenality and accessibility are two aspects of conscious experience. “Phenomenality” refers to the felt, experiential aspect of experience, and “accessibility” to a cognitive aspect of it: its availability in general to thought processes, reasoning, decision making, etc. In this paper, I present a dilemma for theorizing about the connection between them. Either there is a conceptual connection linking phenomenality and accessibility (i.e., it is not possible to conceive of a phenomenal experience that is not cognitively accessible for the subject) or (...) there is none but then the empirical evidence will – for principled reasons – be unable to decide the exact nature of the relationship between the two. (shrink)

Symmetric generalized Galois logics (i.e., symmetric gGl s) are distributive gGl s that include weak distributivity laws between some operations such as fusion and fission. Motivations for considering distribution between such operations include the provability of cut for binary consequence relations, abstract algebraic considerations and modeling linguistic phenomena in categorial grammars. We represent symmetric gGl s by models on topological relational structures. On the other hand, topological relational structures are realized by structures of symmetric gGl s. We generalize the weak (...) distributivity laws between fusion and fission to interactions of certain monotone operations within distributive super gGl s. We are able to prove appropriate generalizations of the previously obtained theorems—including a functorial duality result connecting classes of gGl s and classes of structures for them. (shrink)

Relevance logics are known to be sound and complete for relational semantics with a ternary accessibility relation. This paper investigates the problem of adequacy with respect to special kinds of dynamic semantics (i.e., proper relation algebras and relevant families of relations). We prove several soundness results here. We also prove the completeness of a certain positive fragment of R as well as of the first-degree fragment of relevance logics. These results show that some core ideas are shared between relevance logics (...) and relation algebras. Some details of certain incompleteness results, however, pinpoint where relevance logics and relation algebras diverge. To carry out these semantic investigations, we define a new tableaux formalization and new sequent calculi (with the single cut rule admissible) for various relevance logics. (shrink)

The dissertation addresses the mind-body problem, and in particular, the problem of how to fit phenomenal consciousness into the rest of reality. Phenomenal consciousness - the what it’s like feature of experience - can appear to the scientifically inclined philosopher to be deeply mysterious. It is difficult to understand how the swirl of atoms in the void, the oscillation of field values, the firing of synapses, or anything physical can add up to the smells, tastes, feelings, moods, and so forth (...) that comprise our phenomenal experience. There is a series of arguments - the so-called “Conceivability Arguments” - that spells out this puzzlement. If this arguments are successful then there is no place for phenomenal consciousness in a completely physical reality. The main conclusion of this dissertation is that the Conceivability Arguments are all dependent on a flawed premiss, and that therefore these arguments - perhaps the most powerful among anti-physicalist arguments - all fail. Conceivability Arguments begin with the premiss that we can conceive of any physical or functional facts obtaining without there being any phenomenal experience at all. This is sometimes expressed by saying that zombies (i.e., beings that are our physical and functional duplicates, but possess no phenomenal experiences) are conceivable. The claim that zombies are conceivable does not have to do with our powers of imagination, or our psychological abilities, but rather with the nature of physical and phenomenal concepts. The reason that zombies are claimed to be conceivable is that each person’s thinking about phenomenal properties is completely dependent on her first person acquaintance with her own experience. From this assertion of conceivability it is inferred that zombies are genuinely possible. And this conclusion is incompatible with physicalism as that doctrine is usually understood. I argue that these arguments all fail; they are refuted by a master argument that I call “the Zombie Refutation.” The reason they fail has to do with the very nature of phenomenal concepts that gives rise to the conceivability of zombies. Because of the special nature of these concepts, the principle underlying the Conceivability Arguments - that principle that links conceivability and possibility - turns out to be self-refuting. Thus, the zombies that the Conceivability Arguments supposedly demonstrate to be possible, return to undermine those very arguments; a fitting revenge. (shrink)

The dissertation deals with problems in "logic", more precisely, it deals with particular formal systems aiming at capturing patterns of valid reasoning. Sequent calculi were proposed to characterize logical connectives via introduction rules. These systems customarily also have structural rules which allow one to rearrange the set of premises and conclusions. In the "structurally free logic" of Dunn and Meyer the structural rules are replaced by combinatory rules which allow the same reshuffling of formulae, and additionally introduce an explicit marker (...) for the application of the rule---the combinator. The dissertation gives syntactic extensions of such systems introducing conjunction and disjunction . Cut elimination is proved for these systems. ;Syntactic systems as a rule are accompanied by a semantics which interprets them. The extended systems are supplied with semantics using algebraic methods. First, the Lindenbaum algebras are formed, and then these algebras are represented in an algebra of sets. This gives a so called Kripke-style semantics for the systems. The representation for the distributive extension utilizes well-known techniques; it uses sets of prime filters and set theoretical operations on them to deal with conjunction and disjunction, plus a ternary accessibility relation to accommodate the intensional operators as fusion and implication. The representation theorem is proven generally, i.e., for arbitrary sets of combinators using the "squeeze lemma" of Routley and Meyer. ;The non-distributive calculi require a different representation since union and intersection are distributive. Two previous representations for lattices are overviewed, and a modification of the Hartonas-Dunn representation is successfully augmented with the intensional operations. Instead of sets of filters, sets of pairs of minimally inconsistent filters and ideals are used and the representation theorem is proven. The representation results provide soundness and completeness for the systems. The dissertation also investigates properties of dual combinators , proving a series of lemmas about dual combinatory systems not being Church-Rosser and being inconsistent. Combinatorially definable classes of lambda-terms are considered as well. (shrink)

In this commentary I criticize David Rosenthal’s higher order thought theory of consciousness . This is one of the best articulated philosophical accounts of consciousness available. The theory is, roughly, that a mental state is conscious in virtue of there being another mental state, namely, a thought to the effect that one is in the first state. I argue that this account is open to the objection that it makes “HOT-zombies” possible, i.e., creatures that token higher order mental states, but (...) not the states that the higher order states are about. I discuss why none of the ways to accommodate this problem within HOT leads to viable positions. (shrink)

Comment rapprocher Diderot et Watteau, qui représentent deux conceptions artistiques foncièrement différentes? C'est dans une perspective interdisciplinaire, au croisement de la théorie de l'art, de la critique d'art et des études littéraires que les essais rassemblés dans le présent recueil proposent une réflexion peu conventionnelle sur les perceptions de l'image au xvii siècle. Au fil de notions difficilement définissables, telles que la mélancolie, le rêve, la grâce ou la légèreté, aptes cependant à s'ériger en concepts esthétiques généraux, les études réunies (...) ici visent à tracer les contours d'une poétique de l'image. À travers ces catégories, qui peuvent en effet servir de lien entre Diderot et Watteau, l'ouvrage prétend porter un éclairage nouveau sur les questions artistiques et contribuer ainsi à la réinterprétation des notions propres à la théorie de l'art française de l'époque classique."--Page 4 of cover. (shrink)

The network concept is increasingly used for the description of complex systems. Here, we summarize key aspects of the evolvability and robustness of the hierarchical network set of macromolecules, cells, organisms and ecosystems. Listing the costs and benefits of cooperation as a necessary behaviour to build this network hierarchy, we outline the major hypothesis of the paper: the emergence of hierarchical complexity needs cooperation leading to the ageing (i.e. gradual deterioration) of the constituent networks. A stable environment develops cooperation leading (...) to over‐optimization, and forming an ‘always‐old’ network, which accumulates damage, and dies in an apoptosis‐like process. A rapidly changing environment develops competition forming a ‘forever‐young’ network, which may suffer an occasional over‐perturbation exhausting system resources, and causing death in a necrosis‐like process. Giving a number of examples we demonstrate how cooperation evokes the gradual accumulation of damage typical to ageing. Finally, we show how various forms of cooperation and consequent ageing emerge as key elements in all major steps of evolution from the formation of protocells to the establishment of the globalized, modern human society. (shrink)

Glossolalia (“speaking in tongues”) is a rhythmic utterance of word‐like strings of sounds, regularly occurring in religious mass gatherings or various forms of private religious practices (e.g., prayer and meditation). Although specific verbal learning capacities may characterize glossolalists, empirical evidence is lacking. We administered three statistical learning tasks (artificial grammar, phoneme sequence, and visual‐response sequence) to 30 glossolalists and 30 matched control volunteers. In artificial grammar, participants decide whether pseudowords and sentences follow previously acquired implicit rules or not. In sequence (...) learning, they gradually draw out rules from repeating regularities in sequences of speech sounds or motor responses. Results revealed enhanced artificial grammar and phoneme sequence learning performances in glossolalists compared to control volunteers. There were significant positive correlations between daily glossolalia activity and artificial grammar learning. These results indicate that glossolalists exhibit enhanced abilities to extract the statistical regularities of verbal information, which may be related to their unusual language abilities. (shrink)

Four-valued semantics proved useful in many contexts from relevance logics to reasoning about computers. We extend this approach further. A sequent calculus is defined with logical connectives conjunction and disjunction that do not distribute over each other. We give a sound and complete semantics for this system and formulate the same logic as a tableaux system. Intensional conjunction and its residuals can be added to the sequent calculus straightforwardly. We extend a simplified version of the earlier semantics for this system (...) and prove soundness and completeness. Then, with some modifications to this semantics, we arrive at a mathematically elegant yet powerful semantics that we call generalized Kripke semantics. (shrink)

In a recent article, Bernáth and Tőzsér (2021) defend what they call the Bias Argument, a new skeptical argument from expert peer disagreement. They argue that the best contrastive causal explanation for disagreement among leading experts in philosophy is that they adopt their positions in a biased way. But if the leading experts are biased, non-experts either are also biased or only avoid bias through epistemic inferiority. Recognizing this is expected to prompt one to decrease one‘s confidence in one‘s philosophical (...) beliefs. This paper argues that some beliefs are immune to a key premise of the Bias Argument. To show this, the paper develops the concepts of self-favoring theories, decisive support, and standing-incommensurable disagreements. A plausible example of a self-favoring theory, dubbed Mere Reformed Protestantism, is sketched. Many disagreements over self-favoring theories and over beliefs decisively supported by self-favoring theories are shown to be standing-incommensurable. It is then argued that when non-experts are in standing-incommensurable disagreements with experts, the standards of assessing expertise are themselves controverted. This result undercuts the move in the Bias Argument from expert bias to non-expert bias. Finally, a couple reservations about the role of self-favoring theories in philosophy are addressed. (shrink)

This essay proposes a new focus for studies in the relationship between aesthetics and morality in the Enlightenment period. Recent research, especially by Paul Guyer, seems to have established that the traditional question of whether a genealogy for autonomous aesthetics can be traced attending to the concept of disinterestedness in the era can be answered with an unambiguous no. This, however, should only encourage further research into the nature of the way in which the connection between the beautiful and the (...) good was understood. It is argued here that with the gradual erosion of the humanist rhetorical understanding of history from the seventeenth century the specific content of the link between aesthetics and ethics undergoes a fundamental change, making it significantly more abstract and far less specific. (shrink)

The purpose of our study was to measure the relationship between performance on various attentional tasks and hypnotic susceptibility. Healthy volunteers participated in a study, where they had to perform several tasks measuring various attention components in a waking state: sustained attention, selective or focused attention, divided attention and executive attention in task switching. Hypnotic susceptibility was measured in a separate setting by the Waterloo-Stanford Groups Scale of Hypnotic Susceptibility, Form C .We found no significant correlation between any of the (...) attentional measures and hypnotic susceptibility. Highly hypnotizables did not prove to be superior to or worse than the other individuals in any of the tests.These results do not support the neuropsychophysiological model of hypnosis, as they show no consistent relationship between hypnotic susceptibility and waking attentional performance. (shrink)

In this paper I begin to develop an account of the acquaintance that each of us has with our own conscious states and processes. The account is a speculative proposal about human mental architecture and specifically about the nature of the concepts via which we think in first personish ways about our qualia. In a certain sense my account is neutral between physicalist and dualist accounts of consciousness. As will be clear, a dualist could adopt the account I will offer (...) while maintaining that qualia themselves are non-physical properties. In this case the non-physical nature of qualia may play no role in accounting for the features of acquaintance. But although the account could be used by a dualist, its existence provides support for physicalism. (shrink)

Papineau in his book provides a detailed defense of physicalism via what has recently been dubbed the “phenomenal concept strategy”. I share his enthusiasm for this approach. But I disagree with his account of how a physicalist should respond to the conceivability arguments. Also I argue that his appeal to teleosemantics in explaining mental quotation is more like a promissory note than an actual theory.

During the last two decades, several different anti-physicalist arguments based on an epistemic or conceptual gap between the phenomenal and the physical have been proposed. The most promising physicalist line of defense in the face of these arguments – the Phenomenal Concept Strategy – is based on the idea that these epistemic and conceptual gaps can be explained by appeal to the nature of phenomenal concepts rather than the nature of non-physical phenomenal properties. Phenomenal concepts, on this proposal, involve unique (...) cognitive mechanisms, but none that could not be fully physically implemented. David Chalmers has recently presented a Master Argument to show that the Phenomenal Concept Strategy – not just this or that version of it, but any version of it – fails. Chalmers argues that the phenomenal concepts posited by such theories are either not physicalistically explicable, or they cannot explain our epistemic situation with regard to qualia. I argue that it is his Master Argument that fails. My claim is his argument does not provide any new reasons to reject the Phenomenal Concept Strategy. I also argue that, although the Phenomenal Concept Strategy is successful in showing that the physicalist is not rationally compelled to give up physicalism in the light of the anti-physicalist arguments, the anti-physicalist is not rationally compelled to give up the anti-physicalist argument in the light of the Phenomenal Concept Strategy either. (shrink)

This paper was chosen by The Philosopher’s Annual as one of the ten best articles appearing in print in 2000. Reprinted in Volume XXIII of The Philosopher’s Annual. In his very influential book David Chalmers argues that if physicalism is true then every positive truth is a priori entailed by the full physical description – this is called “the a priori entailment thesis – but ascriptions of phenomenal consciousness are not so entailed and he concludes that Physicalism is false. As (...) he puts it, “zombies” are metaphysically possible. I attempt to show that this argument is refuted by considering an analogous argument in the mouth of a zombie. The conclusion of this argument is false so one of the premises is false. I argue at length that this shows that the original conceivability argument also has a false premise and so is invalid. (shrink)

The paper begins with the account of a focus group discussion of Hungarian female managers who demonstrated high level of trust. Drawing on the discussion the author explores the nature of trust and looks at works and research findings in different disciplines. In psychology Erikson’s findings on human growth and development are discussed. Representatives of Eastern and Western philosophy are quoted to highlight the underlying differences of thinking in relation to trust. The impact of cultural heritage and the influence of (...) the environment on trust add further dimensions to the argument. In conclusion it is suggested that management education could be a platform for further research and exploration of trust in individuals and organisations. (shrink)

The article pays homage to the leading authority of 20th century Hungarian music aesthetics, József Ujfalussy, by connecting his heritage to more recent research on the problems of musical time and notably to the study pursued by Raymond Monelle. Rather than a perennial invariant, Monelle interpreted musical time as a historically changing phenomenon constituting implicitly the basic levels of musical semantics, as they have developed throughout the Baroque, Classical and Romantic eras. The present study focuses on the last of these (...) paradigms, claiming that the Romantic experience of musical time has dominated both the production and the reception of music culture up to this day. The Romantic musical experience is based on a latent ‘framework contract’ between composition and audience, which drives the meanings attached to the experience of musical temporality. This latent agreement warrants a need for conventional compositional forms and simultaneously the insufficiency thereof. (shrink)

Descartes's philosophy has had a considerable influence on the modern conception of the mind, but many think that this influence has been largely negative. The main project of The Subject's Point of View is to argue that discarding certain elements of the Cartesian conception would be much more difficult than critics seem to allow, since it is tied to our understanding of basic notions, including the criteria for what makes someone a person, or one of us. The crucial feature of (...) the Cartesian view defended here is not dualism--which is not adopted--but internalism. Internalism is opposed to the widely accepted externalist thesis, which states that some mental features constitutively depend on certain features of our physical and social environment. In contrast, this book defends the minority internalist view, which holds that the mind is autonomous, and though it is obviously affected by the environment, this influence is merely contingent and does not delimit what is thinkable in principle. Defenders of the externalist view often present their theory as the most thoroughgoing criticism of the Cartesian conception of the mind; Katalin Farkas offers a defence of an uncompromising internalist Cartesian conception. (shrink)

In recent years, several philosophers have defended the idea of phenomenal intentionality : the intrinsic directedness of certain conscious mental events which is inseparable from these events’ phenomenal character. On this conception, phenomenology is usually conceived as narrow, that is, as supervening on the internal states of subjects, and hence phenomenal intentionality is a form of narrow intentionality. However, defenders of this idea usually maintain that there is another kind of, externalistic intentionality, which depends on factors external to the subject. (...) We may ask whether this concession to content externalism is obligatory. In this paper, I shall argue that it isn’t. I shall suggest that if one is convinced that narrow phenomenal intentionality is legitimate, there is nothing stopping one from claiming that all intentionality is narrow. (shrink)

This article is about the special, subjective concepts we apply to experience, called “phenomenal concepts”. They are of special interest in a number of ways. First, they refer to phenomenal experiences, and the qualitative character of those experiences whose metaphysical status is hotly debated. Conscious experience strike many philosophers as philosophically problematic and difficult to accommodate within a physicalistic metaphysics. Second, PCs are widely thought to be special and unique among concepts. The sense that there is something special about PCs (...) is very closely tied up with features of the epistemic access they afford to qualia. When we deploy phenomenal concepts introspectively to some phenomenally conscious experience as it occurs, we are said to be acquainted with our own conscious experiences. Accounts of PCs either have to explain the acquaintance relation, or acquaintance with our phenomenal experiences has to be denied. PCs have received much attention in recent philosophy of mind mainly because they figure in arguments for dualism and in physicalist responses to these arguments. The main topic of this article is to explore different accounts of phenomenal concepts and their role in recent debates over the metaphysical status of phenomenal consciousness. (shrink)

Know -wh ascriptions are ubiquitous in many languages. One standard analysis of know -wh is this: someone knows-wh just in case she knows that p, where p is an answer to the question included in the wh-clause. Additional conditions have also been proposed, but virtually all analyses assume that propositional knowledge of an answer is at least a necessary condition for knowledge-wh. This paper challenges this assumption, by arguing that there are cases where we have knowledge-wh without knowledge- that of (...) an answer, for example in the cases familiar from arguments for the Extended Mind hypothesis. (shrink)

Frankish positions his view, illusionism about qualia (a.k.a. eliminativist physicalism), in opposition to what he calls radical realism (dualism and neutral monism) and conservative realism (a.k.a. non-eliminativist physicalism). Against radical realism, he upholds physicalism. But he goes along with key premises of the Gap Arguments for radical realism, namely, 1) that epistemic/explanatory gaps exist between the physical and the phenomenal, and 2) that every truth should be perspicuously explicable from the fundamental truth about the world; and he concludes that because (...) physicalism is true, there could be no phenomenal truths, and no qualia. I think he is wrong to accept 2); and even if he was right to accept it, the more plausible response would be not to deny the existence of qualia but to deny physicalism. In either case, denying the existence of qualia is the wrong answer. I present a physicalist realist alterative that refutes premise 2 of the Gap Argument; I also make a general case against the scientism that accompanies Frankish’s metaphysics. (shrink)

It is an integral part of the phenomenology of mature perceptual experience that it seems to present to us an experience-independent world. I shall call this feature 'perceptual intentionality'. In this paper, I argue that perceptual intentionality is constructed by the structure of more basic sensory features, features that are not intentional themselves. This theory can explain why the same sensory feature can figure both in presentational and non-presentational experiences. There is a fundamental difference between the intentionality of sensory experiences (...) and the intentionality of thoughts: unlike the former, the latter is not constructed. (shrink)

Abstract: Kant declares the judgment of beauty to be neither ‘objective’ nor ‘merely subjective’. This essay takes up the question of what this might mean and whether it can be taken seriously. It is often supposed that Kant's denials of ‘objectivity’ to the judgment of beauty express a rejection of realism about beauty. I suggest that Kant's thought is not to be understood in these terms—that it does not properly belong in the arena of debates about the constituents of ‘reality’—motivating (...) the suggestion by first considering a pair of opposing views on the question of whether Kant can be understood to develop a real alternative to realism about beauty at all. (shrink)

Hallucinations occur in a wide range of organic and psychological disorders, as well as in a small percentage of the normal population According to usual definitions in psychology and psychiatry, hallucinations are sensory experiences which present things that are not there, but are nonetheless accompanied by a powerful sense of reality. As Richard Bentall puts it, “the illusion of reality ... is the sine qua non of all hallucinatory experiences” (Bentall 1990: 82). The aim of this paper is to find (...) out what lends an experience ‘a sense of reality’: what features are required for an experience to feel ‘real’, in the relevant sense? I will investigate the claim that phenomenological features are largely responsible for a sense of reality, and will find this claim wanting. My suggestion is that a sense of reality is created and sustained by the larger nexus of the subject's beliefs. (shrink)

The question of toleration matters more than ever. The politics of the twenty-first century is replete with both the successes and, all too often, the failures of toleration. Yet a growing number of thinkers and practitioners have argued against toleration. Some believe that liberal democracies are better served by different principles, such as respect of, or recognition for, people's ways of life. Others argue that because the liberal state should be entirely neutral or indifferent towards people's ways of life, it (...) can no longer be tolerant - it has no grounds on which it can object, and so there is nothing left to tolerate.Respecting Toleration provides a new, original, and provocative take on the question of toleration and its application to the politics of contemporary diversity. The volume demonstrates how toleration - despite its critics - is essential to any liberal political order. Peter Balint argues that from a conceptual viewpoint, toleration is entirely compatible with liberal politics; and from a normative viewpoint, it is utterly essential. The volume argues that if one cares about people living divergent lives, then it is liberal toleration that should be respected by legislators and policy makers, and not people's differences. It is a book that will shape the debate and demand a response from all who are interested in which political structures most fairly accommodate the competing ways of life that characterise contemporary diversity.Key Features:Develops a new framework of political tolerationProvides a clear demonstration and analysis of complex concepts and argumentsProvides extensive practical and theoretical examples. (shrink)

It is commonly assumed that besides knowledge of facts or truths, there is also knowledge of things–for example, we say that we know people or know places. We could call this "objectual knowledge". In this paper, I raise doubts about the idea that there is a sui generis objectual knowledge that is distinct from knowledge of truths.