PHILOSOPHY.
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Pictures, content and normativity: the semantic of graphic rules
Fellow: Mariela Aguilera Abstract: In our daily lives, we can find that different kinds of representational media are employed in normative ways, to express different kinds of rules. Sometimes, this is overlooked by the primacy of discursive representations in our normative practices. However, a look into these practices often shows that they are more complex and richer, and particularly that they include more than one kind of representation. Regarding this, this paper will be focused on the capacity and limitations of different kinds of representational media to express normative contents, that is, to express the content of rules. Keywords: correction conditions, nonlinguistic representation, deontic pictures, instrumental maps |
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On the Good Use of Structure: Descriptivism versus Normativism
Fellow: Jocelyn Benoist Abstract: In the first place, the author tries to shed some light on the concept of structure by unveiling its origin and its being double-sided in the phenomenological concept of the a priori (analytic and synthetic) as it is taken back within some contemporary Analytic ontologies. Then, he discusses the nature of the a prioricity of the structure: is it normative or ontological? He upholds the necessity to have a mere ontological theoretical approach of structures. |
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Un concept normatif de l’intentionalité ?
Fellow: Jocelyn Benoist |
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Quand’è che smettiamo di giocare ad un gioco?
Fellow: Jocelyn Benoist |
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Refining the skill hypothesis: replies to Andrews/Westra, Tomasello, Sterelny, and Railton
Fellow: Jonathan Birch Abstract: I reflect on the commentaries on my ‘skill hypothesis’ from Andrews/Westra, Tomasello, Sterelny, and Railton. I discuss the difference between normative cognition and the broader category of action-guiding representation, and I reflect on the relationship between joint intentionality and normative cognition. I then consider Sterelny and Railton’s variants on the skill hypothesis, which highlight some important areas where future evidence could help us refine the account: the relative importance of on-the-fly skill execution vs. longer-term strategizing, the relative importance of toolmaking vs. collaborative foraging, and the question of whether norms are encoded in control models themselves or in the goals and ideals that our control models help us pursue. Keywords: normative cognition, skill, cognitive control, norms, evolution |
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The skilful origins of human normative cognition
Fellow: Jonathan Birch Abstract: I briefly present and motivate a ‘skill hypothesis’ regarding the evolution of human normative cognition. On this hypothesis, the capacity to internally represent action-guiding norms evolved as a solution to the distinctive problems of standardizing, learning and teaching complex motor skills and craft skills, especially skills related to toolmaking. We have an evolved cognitive architecture for internalizing norms of technique, which was then co-opted for a rich array of social functions. There was a gradual expansion of the normative domain, with ritual playing an important role in bridging the gap between concrete, enacted norms and general, abstract norms, such as kinship norms. I conclude by stating nine predictions arising from the skill hypothesis. Keywords: normative cognition, skill, cognitive control, norms, evolution |
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Toolmaking and the evolution of normative cognition
Fellow: Jonathan Birch Abstract: We are all guided by thousands of norms, but how did our capacity for normative cognition evolve? I propose there is a deep but neglected link between normative cognition and practical skill. In modern humans, complex motor skills and craft skills, such as toolmaking, are guided by internally represented norms of correct performance. Moreover, it is plausible that core components of human normative cognition evolved as a solution to the distinctive problems of transmitting complex motor skills and craft skills, especially skills related to toolmaking, through social learning. If this is correct, the expansion of the normative domain beyond technique to encompass more abstract norms of fairness, reciprocity, ritual and kinship involved the elaboration of a basic platform for the guidance of skilled action by technical norms. This article motivates and defends this “skill hypothesis” for the origin of normative cognition and sets out various ways in which it could be empirically tested. Keywords: normative cognition, skill, cognitive control, norms, evolution |
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How cooperation became the norm
Fellow: Jonathan Birch Abstract: Most of the contributions to Cooperation and Its Evolution grapple with the distinctive challenges presented by the project of explaining human sociality. Many of these puzzles have a ‘chicken and egg’ character: our virtually unparalleled capacity for large-scale cooperation is the product of psychological, behavioural, and demographic changes in our recent evolutionary history, and these changes are linked by complex patterns of reciprocal dependence. There is much we do not yet understand about the timing of these changes, and about the order in which different aspects of human social psychology (co-)evolved. In this review essay, I discuss four such puzzles the volume raises. These concern punishment and norm-psychology, moral judgement and the moral emotions, hierarchy and top-down coercion, and property rights and legal systems. Keywords: Human evolution, cooperation, norms, punishment, morality, emotions, hierarchy, property |
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The psychology of moral reasoning
Fellow: Monica Bucciarelli Abstract: This article presents a theory of reasoning about moral propositions that is based on four fundamental principles. First, no simple criterion picks out propositions about morality from within the larger set of deontic propositions concerning what is permissible and impermissible in social relations, the law, games, and manners. Second, the mechanisms underlying emotions and deontic evaluations are independent and operate in parallel, and so some scenarios elicit emotions prior to moral evaluations, some elicit moral evaluations prior to emotions, and some elicit them at the same time. Third, deontic evaluations depend on inferences, either unconscious intuitions or conscious reasoning. Fourth, human beliefs about what is, and isn’t, moral are neither complete nor consistent. The article marshals the evidence, which includes new studies, corroborating these principles, and discusses the relations between them and other current theories of moral reasoning. Keywords: moral reasoning, deontic reasoning, intuitions, inferences, moral dilemmas. |
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Political corruption, individual behaviour and the quality of institutions
Fellow: Emanuela Ceva Abstract: Is the corrupt behaviour of public officials a politically relevant kind of wrong only when it causes the malfunctioning of institutions? We challenge recent institutionalist approaches to political corruption by showing a sense in which the individual corrupt behaviour of certain public officials is wrong not only as a breach of personal morality but in inherently politically salient terms. To show this sense, we focus on a specific instance of individual corrupt behaviour on the part of public officials entrusted with the power to implement public rules in a liberal democracy. Although not necessarily unlawful, their behaviour is politically wrong qua corrupt when it contradicts surreptitiously the requirement of public justification that undergirds the public order. Then, we distinguish this form of corruption as surreptitious action from such unlawful but publicly justifiable kinds of political misbehaviour as civil disobedience. Keywords: political corruption, publicity, liberal democracy, impartiality, civil disobedience |
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Responsibility for Reason-Giving: The Case of Individual Tainted Reasoning in Systemic Corruption
Fellow: Emanuela Ceva Abstract: The paper articulates a new understanding of individual responsibility focused on exercises of agency in reason-giving rather than intentional actions or attitudes towards others. Looking at how agents make sense of their actions, we identify a distinctive but underexplored space for assessing individual responsibility within collective actions. As a case in point, we concentrate on reason-giving for one's own involvement in systemic corruption. We characterize systemic corruption in terms of its public ‘unavowability’ and focus on the redescriptions to which corrupt agents typically resort to vindicate their actions (e.g., when they present bribes as tokens of appreciation for services rendered). Through a multidimensional approach to reason-giving, we show that the individual rationalisations these redescriptions point to are necessarily less-than-successful since they keep thedifferent categories of reasons involved in making sense of one’s own conduct misaligned. We argue that this involves a kind of tainted reasoning at the interface between epistemic vice and epistemic disadvantage. We then consider such test cases as self-deception, wilful ignorance, and actions on ‘autopilot’ to show that tainted reasoning is constitutive of systemic corruption, not merely caused by it. On this ground, we expound a new view of responsibility centred on reason-giving as the epistemic core which all responsibility assessments track. To demonstrate the interest of this view, we compare it with existing alternatives revolving around the ideas of accountability and attributability. We conclude by showing how our understanding of responsibility can shed new light on the analysis and normative assessment of an agent’s responsible ignorance. Keywords: Systemic corruption, Rationalisation, Responsibility, Reason-giving, Self-deception, Wilful ignorance, Accountability, Attributability |
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Failing Institutions, Whistle‐Blowing, and the Role of the News Media
Fellow: Emanuela Ceva Abstract: The article discusses the normative grounds for recognising a watchdog role to the news media as concerns the dissemination of information about an institutional failure menacing a well‐ordered society. This is, for example, the case of the news media’s role in the diffusion of whistle‐blowers’ disclosures. We argue that many popular justifications for the watchdog role of the news media (as a ‘fourth estate’; a trustee of the people’s right to know; expert communicator) fail to ground that role in some unique feature that makes the news media special as concerns the performance of the role. We offer an alternative argument that shows how the watchdog role of the news media shares a justificatory ground with the role that any member of a well‐ordered society has in terms of a general duty of answerability in the face of institutional failures. Although this duty does not bear only on the news media, we concede that in some contingent circumstances, the news media might be better positioned to discharge it and, therefore, to initiate corrective actions of institutional failures effectively and conscientiously. However, the establishment of the news media’s responsibility in this sense is an empirical, not a conceptual or a normative matter. |
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On the Logical Philosophy of Assertive Graphs
Fellow: Daniele Chiffi Abstract: The logic of assertive graphs (AGs) is a modification of Peirce’s logic of existential graphs (EGs), which is intuitionistic and which takes assertions as its explicit object of study. In this paper we extend AGs into a classical graphical logic of assertions (ClAG) whose internal logic is classical. The characteristic feature is that both AGs and ClAG retain deep-inference rules of transformation. Unlike classical EGs, both AGs and ClAG can do so without explicitly introducing polarities of areas in their language. We then compare advantages of these two graphical approaches to the logic of assertions with a reference to a number of topics in philosophy of logic and to their deep-inferential nature of proofs. Keywords: Assertion, Assertive graphs, Existential graphs, Peirce, Classical vs. non-classical logical graphs, Deep inference, Inferentialism |
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Technology and Anarchy: A Reading of Our Era
Fellow: Simona Chiodo Abstract: In Technology and Anarchy: A Reading of Our Era, Simona Chiodo argues that our technological era can be read as the most radical form of anarchism ever experienced. People are not only removing the role of the expert as a mediator, but also trying, for the first time in history, to replace the role of a transcendent god itself by creating, especially through information technology, a totally immanent technological entity characterized by the typical ontological prerogatives of the divine: omnipresence (by being everywhere), omniscience (by knowing everything, especially about us), omnipotence (by having power, especially over us), and inscrutability. Chiodo proposes a novel view of our technological era by reading it as the last step of a precise trajectory of Western thought, i.e. as the most radical form of anarchism we have ever experienced, due to the crisis of the founding epistemological relationship between ideality and reality. By doing this, Chiodo helps fill the gap between technological innovation and the humanities, which is becoming an emerging research goal that is more and more urgent in order to face the greatest challenges of our present and future. Keywords: Philosophy, Epistemology, Political Philosophy, Technology & Engineering, Philosophy of Technology |
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The greatest epistemological externalisation: reflecting on the puzzling direction we are heading to through algorithmic automatisation
Fellow: Simona Chiodo Abstract: The aim of the article is reflecting on a fundamental epistemological issue which characterises our present technological progress: where are we heading to, as humankind, while we are progressively externalising our most crucial decision processes towards algorithms, from which decisive data, coming from human experience and mind (including the very experience of human abilities), are left out? By reflecting on some cases, I shall try to argue that the most puzzling issue which engineers and philosophers should be aware that they have to jointly challenge may be that what we are actually doing through algorithmic automatisation is developing a novel human condition, according to which: (1) we are progressively thinking that algorithmic abstraction is always better than mental abstraction, because, at least in the Western culture, we come from a history of a progressive restriction of the best use of our minds to the realm of rationality, first, then to the realm of computation, second, and then to the realm of algorithmic automatisation, third, which finally exceeds our minds and (2) in doing so, we are progressively externalising not only human contents, but also human abilities, i.e., we are progressively atrophying ourselves, by becoming creatures who are progressively delegating the core of their very essence, which has always included the epistemological ability, together with the ethical courage, of making complex decisions on both our lives and the others’ lives. Keywords: Epistemological externalisation, Algorithm, Future of humankind. |
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Come pensa un europeo. Epistemologia di un agire comune
Fellow: Simona Chiodo Abstract: Quando crediamo che i diritti umani siano universali stiamo spremendo il succo della specificità del pensiero europeo: è il pensiero europeo ad avere inventato sia l’idea che qualsiasi essere umano possa condividere la sua essenza identitaria con la totalità degli altri esseri umani sia l’idea che, allora, possiamo definire diritti convertibili in leggi universali. Nel primo caso stiamo astraendo e nel secondo caso stiamo idealizzando, cioè stiamo usando gli strumenti essenziali attraverso i quali un europeo pensa da millenni. L’obiettivo del libro è mettere a fuoco le specificità degli strumenti più distintivi del modo europeo di pensare, insieme con le loro potenzialità straordinarie: l’analisi, l’astrazione e l’idealizzazione – in sintesi, l’invenzione della metafisica, e il salto che facciamo dai particolari all’universale in qualsiasi articolazione della nostra cultura, dalla religione alla filosofia e dalla scienza all’arte e al diritto. Mettere a fuoco come pensiamo ci aiuta a capire di più sia come parliamo sia come agiamo e, in ultimo, che cosa il pensiero europeo può ancora dare di essenziale, a partire dall’idea secondo la quale fare esercizi di astrazione significa fare esercizi di democrazia, se è vero che in entrambi i casi alleniamo la capacità di riconoscere che cosa è uguale in che cosa è diverso. |
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A priori of the Law and Values in the Social Ontology of Wilhelm Schapp and Adolf Reinach
Fellow: Francesca De Vecchi Abstract: In my paper, I investigate the problem of whether, and how, in Schapp’s (Die neue Wissenschaft vom Recht. Eine phänomenologische Untersuchung) and Reinach’s (Die apriorischen Grundlagen des burgerlichen Rechts) theories of a priori structures of the law, values can be connected with the law in an a priori relation. I suggest that, ultimately, Schapp’s foundation of the law in the evaluations of values is not as such an a priori foundation, while Reinach’s eidetics of the law involves genuine a priori connections, but they solely concern the being of the social and legal entities and are not grounded in values. Nevertheless, I argue that Schapp’s theory of the a priori foundations of the law in values entails an analysis of the ontological status of values, of the sociality of values and of the sharing of values from which emerges an account of the existential relation between law and values that is very significant for social ontology. I point out that such account opens up a quite fruitful perspective on the existential foundation of the law, grounded on the essential tendency of human beings to enjoy values to the full. I underline that this perspective represents a completely new and compelling inquiry by social ontology into the existential quality of social entities and into the greater or lesser degrees of vitality, fullness, fairness, etc. of social entities. I suggest that this is a crucial point which has to be highlighted not only in order to do justice to Schapp, but also to devote greater attention to the needs of the Life-world in social ontology. Keywords: Values, A priori of the law, Social ontology, Eidetics, Existential foundation |
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Proxy social acts. A particular case of plural agency
Fellow: Francesca De Vecchi Abstract: I focus on proxy acts' plural agency and argue that it is a particular case of plural agency, irreducible to that of collective agency. I start from Reinach's phenomenological account of proxy acts, according to which they are an eidetic modification of social-speech acts. I point out that as social-speech acts, proxy acts are also spontaneous acts and at least second-degree position-takings; but I argue that, unlike social-speech acts, their agency is modified. Such modification involves different agents at different times, different degrees of authorship, and different extensions of efficacy. I conclude that proxy acts' plural agency is constituted by several layers of agency that are bound together in the temporally expanded unity of the proxy act as a whole. Keywords: Spontaneous-social-speech acts, Proxy acts, Plural agency and authorship, Intentionality as positionality, Eidetic modification. |
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The intentionality and positionality of spontaneous acts
Fellow: Francesca De Vecchi Abstract: This chapter discusses Adolf Reinach’s account of agency and his phenomenological approach to agency. It shows that Reinach’s account of agency concerns intentional acts, rather than intentional bodily actions, and explains how it is grounded in a phenomenological account of intentional lived experiences that are characterized by different levels of positionality. The chapter argues that the sense of agency captured by Reinach’s account of spontaneous acts is a sense of “authorship” that ought to be sharply distinguished from a sense of ownership. It describes that the agency of social acts requires the involvement of at least two individuals and that they are position-takings of a second level, as spontaneous acts are, or even of a higher level. The specific contribution of Reinach’s work is the extension of that idea to social reality and the discovery of such material a priori in the social world. |
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Revisiting Searle on Deriving "Ought" from "Is"
Fellow: Paolo Di Lucia Abstract: This book reconsiders the supposed impossibility of deriving "Ought" from "Is". John R. Searle’s 1964 article How to Derive "Ought " from "Is’’ sent shockwaves through the philosophical community by offering a straightforward counterexample to this claim of impossibility: from your promising something- and this is an "is" - it simply follows that you "ought" to do it. This volume opens with a brand new chapter from Searle who, in light of his subsequent philosophical developments, expounds the reasons for the validity of that derivation and its crucial significance for social ontology and moral philosophy. Then, in a fresh interview with the editors of this volume, Searle explores a range of topics including how his derivation relates to constitutive rules, and how he views Wittgenstein’s philosophy, deontic logic, and the rationality of action. The remainder of the volume is dedicated to a deep dive into Searle’s essay and its implications by international scholars with diverse backgrounds ranging from analytic philosophy, phenomenology, and logic, to moral philosophy and the philosophy and sociology of law. With thirteen original chapters, the contributors provide fresh and timely insights on hotly debated issues: the nature of "Ought"; the logical structure of the social world; and the possibility of deriving not only "Ought" from "Is", but "Is" from "Ought". |
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Pragmatic Ambiguity: The Thetic Function of Modality
Fellow: Paolo Di Lucia Abstract: the aim of this paper is to present an overview of the pragmatic aspects of ambiguity present in deontic sentences, which may have three pragmatic functions: a prescriptive or a descriptive or a constitutive function. This type of ambiguity is investigated on the lexical, phrasal, and sentential level. The discussion focuses on the deontic constructions of the German verb sollenand the English shall as they are used in legal texts. It also includes comments on the thetic function of the Latin imperative mood and the subjunctive mood. Keywords: modality, deonticity, speech act, mood, ambiguity, pragmatics |
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Deviation without Contradiction in Adolf Reinach’s Ontology
Fellow: Paolo Di Lucia Abstract: Is it possible to affirm the existence of eidetic a priori laws, if these laws can be contradicted by positive law propositions? How is it possible a deviation from a priori juridical propositions? These are the two questions to which the present paper “Deviation without contradiction in Adolf Reinach’s ontology” is devoted. The aim of the paper is to analyse the relations between a priori juridical propositions and propositions of positive law as investigated by Adolf Reinach. The Author presents and illustrates Adolf Reinach’s conception of conditioned a priori connections. Keywords: “A priori” juridical structures, positive law propositions, ontology, deviation, contradiction. |
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Norm: What Is It? Ontological and Pragmatical Perspectives
Fellow: Paolo Di Lucia |
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Human Dignity: absolute and intrinsic value?
Fellow: Robinson Dos Santos Abstract: Os conceitos dignidade (Würde) e dignidade humana (Menschenwürde) são empregados amplamente, nas mais diversas áreas do conhecimento, mas com muito mais frequência em áreas como a filosofia moral e política, na filosofia do direito, na bioética etc. quando se trata de justificar ou aplicar princípios, assim como fundamentar filosoficamente certos direitos e determinados deveres morais. Para isso, com grande frequência, recorre-se à filosofia prática de Kant. No âmbito da filosofia não há dúvidas de que Kant é uma das referências modernas mais importantes no que se refere à concepção de dignidade. Se, por um lado, a dignidade é lembrada como uma característica distintiva que indica a posição do ser humano no reino da natureza, isto é, distingue-o dos demais seres, tomando por base. Keywords: Value Theory, Immanuel Kant, Morality, Human Dignity, Dignidad Humana. |
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Kant e a metaética contemporânea
Fellow: Robinson Dos Santos Keywords: Immanuel Kant, Moral anti-realism, Moral, Normative Ethics and Metaethics, Realismo Moral |
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Between analyticity and reciprocity: Schönecker and Allison on GMS III
Fellow: Robinson Dos Santos Abstract: A Fundamentação da Metafísica dos Costumes (1785) de Kant conta nos dias de hoje com uma literatura comentadora cuja extensão e desdobramentos impõem cada vez mais dificuldades para o estabelecimento de um diagnóstico atualizado da discussão. Esta obra continua sendo objeto de investigações no âmbito da Kant-Forschung, tanto por conta de seus problemas imanentes, tais como sua estrutura, o emprego de determinados conceitos e argumentos, quanto em função de seu status no corpus kantiano, isto é, sua posição e relação face às outras obras, especialmente as de filosofia prática. Isso apenas corrobora a tese de que ainda não se chegou a uma interpretação conclusiva desta obra, ainda que tenhamos à disposição, como já dito, uma literatura abrangente e altamente especializada. Neste contexto, entre os trabalhos já reconhecidos, são muito relevantes as interpretações do pesquisador alemão Dieter Schönecker Kant: Grundlegung III-Die Deduktion des kategorischen Imperativs (1999) e de Henry Allison, um dos mais renomados pesquisadores kantianos de língua inglesa, Kant's Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals: A Commentary (2011). Estas são duas das mais importantes interpretações contemporâneas tanto da Fundamentação da Metafísica dos Costumes 1 como um todo, quanto da sua Seção III em particular 2. Entre as razões que podem ser citadas para justificar tal relevância eu destacaria três: a) primeiro pelo fato de serem interpretações abrangentes, rigorosas e extremamente detalhadas (oferecem evidências textuais em abundância para suas respectivas interpretações); b) segundo por tratar-se de dois reconhecidos. Keywords: Immanuel Kant, Moral Philosophy, Kantian ethics |
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In Defense of Normativism about the Aim of Belief
Fellow: Pascal Engel Abstract: I answer the objections which have been addressed to the normative account of the norm for belief – a belief is correct if and only if it is true . These objections are that the norm fails to motivate, or motivates too much, that it is trivial and that it is unfathomable and does not provide any regulation or actual guidance for our belief. But specifying what the correctness conditions of a mental state are is one thing, and giving an account of its regulation is another thing. If we respect this distinction, it becomes possible to envisage a separate account of the regulation of belief by a norm of truth, through the psychological feature of the transparency of belief, and to hold that the norm for belief is actually dependent upon the norm of knowledge. Keywords: Belief, normativity, correctness, truth, knowledge |
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The Norm of Truth: a Dialogue
Fellow: Pascal Engel Abstract: Pilates' question might have been different from the fampur "What is truth?". Perhaps he was actually interested in asking Jesus what the value of truth was, and whether truth is the norm of belief. In a surprising anticipation of contemporary debates Pilate and his Epicurean interlocutor discuss these issues, some 50 years after J.C., and ask whether truth, justification or knowledhe is the main norm of belief. They discuss the form that the norm has to take in order to guide our beliefs, and the nature of the normativity which is involved in our epistemic attitudes. They conclude their satisfaction, that the true norm of belief is knowledge. |
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La philosophie comme science morale et des normes
Fellow: Pascal Engel Abstract: Résumé Les sciences morales ont un statut paradoxal. D’un côté quand on les recrute au sein des sciences, c’est pour leur accorder la capacité de parvenir à des connaissances sinon certaines et exactes, du moins comparables à celles que peuvent nous fournir les sciences naturelles. De l’autre, en tant que sciences de l’esprit, elles semblent échapper aux critères des sciences de la nature, et ne relever que de l’interprétation par les raisons, et non pas de l’explication par les causes. Mais que devient cette différence à partir du moment où la science contemporaine renonce à l’idéal de certitude et que l’on tient tout savoir comme faillible? Quelle place la philosophie peut-elle occuper parmi les sciences morales ? N’est-elle pas, de par même l’incertitude de ses principes encore plus faillible et incertaine que les autres sciences morales et a fortiori que les sciences naturelles ? Dans cet exposé on soutiendra deux thèses à l’encontre de ces conceptions :
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Les Vices du savoir. Essai d’éthique intellectuelle
Fellow: Pascal Engel Abstract: «Notre société “de l’information” et “de la connaissance”, dans laquelle le marketing et la propagande ont pris des dimensions inédites, est envahie par le bullshit. Politiquement, le but du bullshitter n’est pas tant de plaire aux électeurs que de promouvoir un système dans lequel le vrai n’a plus de place parce qu’il n’est plus une valeur. Or celui qui ne respecte pas la vérité est aussi celui qui admet que seuls le pouvoir et la force sont les sources de l’autorité. Les penseurs post‑modernes aiment à dire que l’abandon de la vérité comme valeur laissera la voie libre à d’autres valeurs comme la solidarité ou le sens de la communauté, mais on peut aussi bien dire que le non-respect de la vérité et la promotion du baratin auront comme conséquences le règne du cynisme, le culte du pouvoir et la domination brute des puissants.». Ni réductible à l’éthique tout court, ni simple branche de l’épistémologie, l’éthique intellectuelle définit les normes qui fondent objectivement la correction des croyances. Dans ce livre, Pascal Engel montre que l’indifférence à leur égard, qu’ont en partage, à l’échelle planétaire, tant de nos politiques, journalistes et universitaires contemporains, représente la forme la plus aboutie du vice intellectuel et sape, dans la cité, la possibilité d’une démocratie véritable. |
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Confusion of Tongues: A Theory of Normative Language
Fellow: Stephen Finlay Abstract: Can normative words like ‘good’, ‘ought’, and ‘reason’ be defined in entirely non-normative terms? This book argues that they can, advancing an end-relational theory of the meaning of this language as providing the best explanation of the many different ways it is ordinarily used. Whereas it is widely maintained that relational theories cannot account for the special features of moral and deliberative uses of these words, this book argues that the end-relational theory accommodates these features systematically on the basis of a single fundamental principle of conversational pragmatics. These challenges comprise the central problems of metaethics, including the connection between normative judgment and motivation, the categorical character of morality, the nature of intrinsic value, and the possibility of normative disagreement. This linguistic analysis has far-reaching implications for the metaphysics, epistemology, and psychology of morality, as well as for the nature and possibility of normative ethical theory. Most significantly it supplies a nuanced answer to the ancient Euthyphro Question of whether things are desired because they are judged to be good, or vice versa. Normative speech and thought may ultimately be just a manifestation of our nature as intelligent animals motivated by contingent desires for various conflicting ends. Keywords: normativity, morality, normative language, meaning, pragmatics, context, metaethics, end-relational. |
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Defining Normativity
Fellow: Stephen Finlay Abstract: This paper aims to clarify debate over the nature, existence, extension, and analyzability of normativity, by investigating whether different philosophers’ claims are about the same subject or (as argued by Derek Parfit) they are using the terms ‘normative’ and ‘normativity’ with different meanings. While I suggest the term may be multiply ambiguous, I also find reasons for optimism about a common subject-matter for metanormative theory. This is supported by sketching a special hybrid view of normative judgment, perspectivism, that occupies a position between cognitivism and noncognitivism, naturalism and nonnaturalism, objectivism and subjectivism. I explore three main fissures: between (i) the “normativity” of language/thought versus that of facts and properties, (ii) abstract versus substantive, and (iii) formal versus robust normativity. |
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Normativity, Necessity and Tense: A Recipe for Homebaked Normativity
Fellow: Stephen Finlay |
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Recent Work on Normativity
Fellow: Stephen Finlay |
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Normativity and Concepts
Fellow: Hannah Ginsborg Abstract: A number of philosophers, including Kant, Kripke, Boghossian, Gibbard and Brandom, can be read as endorsing the view that concepts are normative. I distinguish two versions of that view: a strong, non-naturalistic version which identifies concepts with norms or rules (Kant, Kripke), and a weaker version, compatible with naturalism, on which the normativity of concepts amounts only to their application’s being governed by norms or rules (Boghossian, Gibbard, Brandom). I consider a problem for the strong version: grasp of a rule seems to require grasp of the concepts which constitute the content of that rule, so how can we explain concept acquisition without falling into regress? I offer a Kantian response, on which grasp of a rule does not require antecedent grasp of concepts, but still involves the recognition of normativity in one’s rule-governed behavior. I distinguish the normativity of concepts, so understood, from the normativity associated with truth or warrant. Keywords: Concepts, normativity, rules, Kant, Kripke, Boghossian, Gibbard, Brandom |
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The Normativity of Nature
Fellow: Hannah Ginsborg Abstract: The book consists of thirteen previously published essays, one new essay, and a new introduction. Collectively, the essays present a distinctive interpretation of Kant’s Critique of Judgement as an important contribution to Kant’s theory of cognition and as offering insights relevant to contemporary philosophy. The faculty of judgement, on this interpretation, is the capacity that human beings have to respond to the world in ways that incorporate an awareness of the normativity of those very responses, where the normativity is ‘primitive’ in the sense that it is not based on the prior recognition of a rule or principle. It is because we possess this capacity that our responses to the world are conceptual rather than merely discriminative, and stand in an intentional rather than a merely causal relation to the objects which occasion them. The essays develop and defend this view of judgement both on its own terms and by showing how it figures in the discussions of aesthetics and teleology which constitute most of the body of the Critique of Judgement. They address specific interpretive problems in Kant’s aesthetics, philosophy of biology, and theory of cognition, but also explore the relevance of Kant’s views to contemporary philosophical issues, in particular regarding aesthetic judgement, intentionality, normativity, biological functions, concept-acquisition, perceptual content, and the possibility of rule following and meaning. Keywords: Aesthetics, cognition, intentionality, judgement, Kant, meaning, philosophy of biology, primitive normativity, rule following, teleology |
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Determinate attitudes and indeterminate norms
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The Building Blocks of Social Trust: The Role of Customary Mechanisms and Property Relations for the Emergence of Social Trust in the Context of the Commons
Fellow: Marc Goetzmann Abstract: This paper argues that social trust is the emergent product of a complex system of property relations, backed up by a sub-system of mutual monitoring. This happens in a context similar to Ostrom’s commons, where cooperation is necessary for the management of resources, in the absence of external authorities to enforce sanctions. I show that social trust emerges in this context because of an institutional structure that enables individuals to develop a generalized disposition to internalize the external effects of their actions. This is made possible by the “patrimonial” nature of this structure. Keywords: Elinor Ostrom, commons, social trust, property, structuralism |
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Spaces of Law and Customs
Fellow: Marc Goetzmann Abstract: This collection brings together a carefully curated selection of researchers from law, sociology, anthropology, philosophy, history, social ontology and international relations, in order to examine how law and custom interact within specific material and spatial contexts.Normativity develops within these contexts, while also shaping them. This complex relationship exists within all physical places from traditional agrarian spaces to the modern shifting post-industrial workplace. The contributions gathered together in this volume explore numerous examples of such spaces from different disciplinary perspectives to interrogate the dynamic relationship between custom and law, and the material spaces they inhabit. While there are a dynamic series of conclusions regarding this relationship in different material realities, a common theme is pursued throughout: a proper understanding of law and custom stems from their material locatedness within the power dynamics of particular spaces, which, in turn, are reflexively shaped by that same normativity. The book thus generates an account of the locatedness of law and custom, and, indeed, of custom as a source of law. In this way, it provides a series of linked explorations of normative spaces, but, more fundamentally, it also furnishes a cross-disciplinary toolkit of concepts and critical tools for understanding law and custom, and their relationship.As the diversity of the contributors indicates, this book will be of great interest to legal theorists of different traditions, also legal historians and anthropologists, as well as sociologists, historians, geographers and developmental economists. |
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Relativism and the expressivist bifurcation
Fellow: Javier González de Prado Salas Abstract: Traditional expressivists want to preserve a contrast between the representational use of declarative sentences in descriptive domains and the non-representational use of declarative sentences in other areas of discourse (in particular, normative speech). However, expressivists have good reasons to endorse minimalism about representational notions, and minimalism seems to threaten the existence of such a bifurcation. Thus, there are pressures for expressivists to become global anti-representationalists. In this paper I discuss how to reconstruct in nonrepresentationalist terms the sort of bifurcation traditional expressivists were after. My proposal is that the relevant bifurcation can be articulated by appeal to the contrast between relativistic and non-relativistic assertoric practices. I argue that this contrast, which can be specified without appeal to representational notions, captures the core intuitions behind the expressivist bifurcation (in particular, it captures the anti-realist intuitions motivating many expressivist proposals). Keywords: Expressivism, anti-representationalism, pragmatism, relativism, bifurcation thesis, minimalism |
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Dispossessing Defeat
Fellow: Javier González de Prado Salas Abstract: Higher-order evidence can make an agent doubt the reliability of her reasoning. When this happens, it seems rational for the agent to adopt a cautious attitude towards her original conclusion, even in cases where the higher-order evidence is misleading and the agent’s original reasons were actually perfectly good. One may think that recoiling to a cautious attitude in the face of misleading self-doubt involves a failure to properly respond to one’s reasons. My aim is to show that this is not so. My proposal is that (misleading) higher-order evidence can undermine the agent’s possession of her first-order reasons, constituting what I call a dispossessing defeater. After acquiring the higher-order evidence, the agent is no longer in a position to rely competently on the relevant first-order considerations as reasons for her original conclusion, so that such reasons stop being available to her (even if they remain as strong as in the absence of the higher-order evidence). In this way, an agent with misleading higher-order evidence can adopt a cautious stance towards her original conclusion, while properly responding to the set of reasons that she possesses–a set that is reduced due to the acquisition of higher-order dispossessing defeaters. |
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Philosophical Pragmatics in Amedeo G. Conte
Fellow: Antonio Incampo Abstract: At the beginning of his essay “Minima deontica” (1988) Conte highlights how the title expressly alludes to Minima moralia (1951) by Theodor Adorno. It is not a simple word game. Quite the contrary. It is a true philosophical project. Even the Deontics, in fact, as semiotics of normative language, does not fail in the task of giving moral explanations of the world. This article explores some legal validity conditions that go back to the very concept of legal acts (they are conditions of “praxeological validity” to use Conte’s lexicon), demonstrating the importance that the “rules of function” have on the moral concept of good. Keywords: Deontics, Pragmatics, Praxeological Validity, Function, Rule of Function, Speech Act, Good. |
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Experience and Justification: Revisiting McDowell’s Empiricism
Fellow: Daniel Kalpokas Abstract: In this paper I try to defend McDowell’s empiricism from a certain objection made by Davidson, Stroud and Glüer. The objection states that experiences cannot be reasons because they are—as McDowell conceives them—inert. I argue that, even though there is something correct in the objection (only an accepted content can be a reason), that is not sufficient for rejecting the epistemological character that McDowell attributes to experiences. My strategy consists basically in showing that experiences involve a constitutive attitude of acceptance of their contents. |
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Experience and Justification: Revisiting McDowell’s Empiricism
Fellow: Daniel Kalpokas Abstract: ¿Puede haber algún papel cognitivo para la percepción en el campo de la moral? ¿Tiene sentido y resulta plausible sostener que, así como podemos ver un hecho empírico, podemos ver también un hecho moral? ¿Hay juicios morales que puedan ser justificados por la percepción de un hecho moral? La ética del discurso de Jürgen Habermas ofrece una respuesta negativa a estas preguntas. En contraste, en este trabajo exploro la posibilidad de que la percepción tenga, de un modo nada misterioso, cierto papel en la aprehensión de hechos morales y, consecuentemente, en la justificación de, al menos, cierto tipo de enunciados morales. Abstract: Palabras clave juicio moral, hecho moral, ética del discurso, Habermas |
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Why are there descriptive norms? Because we looked for them
Fellows: Chiara Lisciandra Abstract: In this work, we present a mathematical model for the emergence of descriptive norms, where the individual decision problem is formalized with the standard Bayesian belief revision machinery. Previous work on the emergence of descriptive norms has relied on heuristic modeling. In this paper we show that with a Bayesian model we can provide a more general picture of the emergence of norms, which helps to motivate the assumptions made in heuristic models. In our model, the priors formalize the belief that a certain behavior is a regularity. The evidence is provided by other group members’ behavior and the likelihood by their reliability. We implement the model in a series of computer simulations and examine the group-level outcomes. We claim that domain-general belief revision helps explain why we look for regularities in social life in the first place. We argue that it is the disposition to look for regularities and react to them that generates descriptive norms. In our search for rules, we create them. Keywords: Descriptive norms, Norm emergence, Explanation, Social epistemology, Agent-based modeling |
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Measuring norms using social survey data
Fellow: Chiara Lisciandra Abstract: This paper proposes a novel measure of civic norm compliance. We combine the literature on norm compliance from institutional economics and social philosophy. Institutional economics draws on survey data to measure civic norms, whereas social philosophy offers a theoretical framework that proves fruitful when used to operationalize civic norms. This paper shows that significantly different results emerge when the operationalization of civic norms in institutional economics draws on the theoretical framework that social philosophy offers. Furthermore, this study is relevant for social philosophy too, as it shows the potential of survey data as a test-bed for philosophical theories of norm compliance. Keywords: Social norms, civic norms, measurement, social survey data |
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Speaking about the normativity of meaning
Fellow: Patrizio Lo Presti Abstract: Contemporary debate on the nature of meaning centres on whethermeaning is normative. Agreement is widespread that meaning implies correct-ness, but disagreement on whether correctness is normative remains.Normativists argue that correctness implies obligations or permissions. Anti-normativists disagree and hold that correctness is a descriptive term. Thispaper argues that, fundamentally, meaning presupposes norms, but not inthe generic normativist sense: a vocabulary is recognisable as part of alanguageifandonlyifitispartofapracticeofcommittingandentitlingtoask for and provide reasons for what is said. To commit and entitle is notobliged or permitted. It is a presupposition for speaking about obligations andpermissions. |
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Conceptual Confusions and causal Dynamics
Fellow: Patrizio Lo Presti Abstract: This paper argues that rules and norms are conceptually distinct: what is norm is not thereby rule, and vice versa. Versions of conflating the two are discussed and an argument for distinction given. Two objections to the argument are responded to. It is accepted that rules and norms are often intimately related. They are so causally, not conceptually: what norms we live by can make a difference to what rules we accept and what rules we accept can make a difference to what norms we live by. This is a social, dynamic and continuous causal process of development of the social practices of community. Keywords: norms, rules, social practice, causal dynamics, know-how. |
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Corporeal Drawn Norms. An investigation of graphic normativity in the material world of everyday objects
Fellow: Giuseppe Lorini Abstract: Starting from the ontological question of norms, namely from the question “What do we talk about when we talk about norms?”, the author highlights the existence of thetic norms, that is, norms established through an act of normative production, which have not been formulated linguistically. Notably, the author focuses on drawn (or graphic) norms, that is those norms that do not arise from a linguistic formulation or from a linguistic representation, but from a graphic representation, from a drawing (for example, Ikea’s diagram instruction manuals and traffic signs). In conclusion, the author examines a particular set of drawn norms, corporeal drawn norms, and investigates their essentially deictic nature. Keywords: drawn norms, graphic norms, normative drawnings, normativity, non-verbal norms, thetic norms, corporeal norms, deicticity |
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Ruling without Rules: Not Only Nudges. Regulation beyond Normativity
Fellows: Giuseppe Lorini, Stefano Moroni Abstract: Often, when a problem arises, someone immediately declares: “There’s a regulatory gap to plug. What we need is a new rule.” As if everything could be solved with a new regulation. And, when we think of a regulation that can fix things, generally what we have in mind is a verbal – preferably written – regulation. There are two aspects we wish to highlight here. Firstly, behaviour can be regulated not only with verbal norms but also with non-verbal norms. Secondly, behaviour may even be regulated without any specific rule: this article is dedicated to this fascinating regulatory phenomenon. Keywords: regulation, normativity, nudge, deontic artifacts, ruling without rules |
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How to make norms with drawings: An investigation of normativity beyond the realm of words
Fellows: Giuseppe Lorini, Stefano Moroni Abstract: A widespread opinion holds that norms and codes of conduct as such can only be established via words, that is, in some lexical form. This perspective can be criticized: some norms produced by human acts are not word-based at all. For example, many norms are actually conveyed through graphics (e. g. road signs and land-use maps), sounds (e. g. the referee’s whistle), a silent gesture (the traffic warden’s signal to halt). In this article, we will focus on the norms that are created by means of drawings and can be termed “drawn norms” or “graphical norms.” Specifically, we will inquire into the phenomenon of graphical norms with particular regard to traffic signs and land-use plans, and we will discuss the philosophical and legal problems to which these phenomena give rise. Keywords: normativity, graphical norms, drawn norms, verbal norms, traffic signs, urban plans. |
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Deontic artifacts. Investigating the normativity of objects
Fellows: Giuseppe Lorini, Stefano Moroni, Olimpia Giuliana Loddo Abstract: Since the middle of the last century, normative language has been much studied. In particular, the normative function performed by certain sentences and by certain speech acts has been investigated in depth. Still, the normative function performed by certain physical artifacts designed and built to regulate human behaviors has not yet been thoroughly investigated. We propose to call this specific type of artifacts with normative intent ‘deontic artifacts’. This article aims to investigate this normative phenomenon that is so widespread in our daily reality, but so often forgotten by scholars of norms and normativity. Keywords: Normativity; artifacts; traffic signs; deontology; deontic reasoning |
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Rule‐free regulation: Exploring regulation ‘without rules’ and apart from ‘deontic categories’
Fellows: Giuseppe Lorini, Stefano Moroni Abstract: Regulation can occur “with (specific) rules/norms” or “without (specific) rules/norms”. Numerous studies have been devoted to the first option. To the point where “regulation” and “rules” have often been seen to coincide in some academic research, and also in everyday ways of thinking. We deal with the second option in this article: regulation without rules/norms. Namely, a type of regulation by which it is intended to influence others' behaviour without recourse to rules/ norms, and without directly altering the “normative environment”. Keywords: Deontic artifacts, regulation, ruling without rules, normativity, nudge |
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Non‐Propositional Regulation
Fellows: Giuseppe Lorini, Stefano Moroni Abstract: When thinking about how human behaviour is regulated, one generallyimagines a regulation consisting of norms linguistically expressed insentences: that is, “sentential deontic regulation”. However, this notion of regulation is reductive because there are (non-deontic and) non-sentential forms of regulation. In this article, we do not restrict ourinvestigation to (non-deontic and) non-sentential forms of regulation; weexamine whether there are forms of (non-deontic) regulation that areeven not propositional. In this regard, we advance the hypothesis thatthere are indeed cases of “non-propositional regulation”: that is,regulation that does not need propositions and propositional contents. |
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Drawn norms: The example of traffic signs
Fellow: Patrick Maynard |
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Rules: a Toy Box
Fellow: Patrick Maynard Abstract: “Induction provides a path to first principles” (Aristotle): so we approach our topic by sampling three distinct sorts of data—rules in actions as exemplified in games; rules as directives for manufacture; as laws not only for maintaining order among people but also relations between citizens and governments—finding in each case the parts that nonverbal expressions of rules play. While words are essential to formulating constitutive rules defining sporting games, they seem less important than emulation for recreational uses. They drop out in children’s games of make-believe, which developmental psychology shows to be crucial to early development, since ours is a naturally rule making and following species. Industrial artifacts, thereby the modern world, depend on graphic systems, here exemplified by origami notation, which feature isolation and sequence in simultaneity, lacked by words. Such notations also exhibit a five-order pattern of intentionality, whose importance is demonstrated by communication breakdowns in road signage, undermining civic life. Keywords: rules, directive signs, road signs, artifacts, games, make-believe, child development, orders of intentionality, civility, Vygotsky, Walton, Tomasello, Hobson, Ardizonne, origami. |
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Understanding undermining defeat
Fellow: Giacomo Melis Abstract: Taking the inspiration from some points made by Scott Sturgeon and Albert Casullo, I articulate a view according to which an important difference between undermining and overriding defeaters is that the former require the subject to engage in some higher-order epistemic thinking, while the latter don’t. With the help of some examples, I argue that underminers push the cognizer to reflect on the way she formed a belief by challenging the epistemic worthiness of either the source of justification or the specific justificatory process. By contrast, overriders needn’t pose any such challenge. I also consider some problems for the proposed view, and I put forward some possible solutions. Finally, I provide some details on how undermining defeat works in different cases. Keywords: epistemology; defeaters; undermining; overriding; justificatory process; higher-order. |
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The Intertwinement of Propositional and Doxastic Justification
Fellow: Giacomo Melis Abstract: One important distinction in the debate over the nature of epistemic justification is the one between propositional and doxastic justification. Roughly, while doxastic justification is a property of beliefs, propositional justification is a property of propositions. On a rather common view, which accounts for doxastic justification in terms of propositional justification plus the so-called ‘basing relation’, propositional justification is seen as the prior notion, and doxastic justification is explained in terms of it. According to the opposing view, the direction of explanation needs to be reversed, and doxastic justification should be seen as primary. I distinguish between two notions of priority, and I argue that they give different verdicts with respect to the issue of which notion of justification comes first. The lesson may be taken to be that propositional and doxastic justification are in a relation of intertwinement. |
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How Many Normative Notions of Rationality? A Critical Study of Wedgwood’s The Value of Rationality
Fellow: Giacomo Melis |
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Uncertainty and Planning: Cities, Technologies and Public Decision-Making
Fellows: Stefano Moroni, Daniele Chiffi Abstract: Decision-making under uncertainty is sometimes investigated as a homogeneous problem, independently of the type of decision-maker and the level and nature of the decision itself. However, when the decision-maker is a public authority, there immediately arise problems additional to those that concern any other (private) decision-maker. This is not always clearly recognised in orthodox discussions on decisions under conditions of uncertainty. This article investigates the methodological, strategic and procedural challenges of taking public decisions in such conditions. It focuses mainly on decisions involving urban contexts, such as planning decisions regarding land use and building transformations, by trying to develop some pioneering research studies in this field. |
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Two arguments supporting the thesis of the predictive nature of reasons for action
Fellow: Michał Piekarski Abstract: The dominant view in contemporary philosophy of action is that, to explain an action we need to provide a reason for it. A reason is what rationalises an action. According to Donald Davidson, before we can describe a reason we must identify the need that accompanies the performance of a given action, as well as the specific attitude of the agent to the action. The author of “Action, Reason and Cause” believes that the proattitude/ belief pair helps determine the reason for action, which is at the same time the action’s cause. Davidson’s view has a lot of supporters today and is strictly related to the so-called post-Humean theories of action. The objective of the present analysis is to demonstrate that the primary reason for action is not provided by the pro-attitude/belief pair, but by predictions due to which agents act in such and such a way. This expands on Elizabeth Anscombe’s intuition according to which each intention is predictive in nature. I will support the thesis about the predictive nature of reasons for action by means of two arguments. The first argument relies on the analysis of the Knobe effect concerning the asymmetry between attributing intentionality and attributing responsibility for actions; the other draws upon the theory of predictive processing. The remainder of this paper has the following structure: in §1, I will discuss Donald Davidson’s theory. §2 will focus on Elizabeth Anscombe’s conception. In §3, I will examine an argument drawn from the analysis of the Knobe effect, according to which an agent will intentionally perform a given action when he can predict the effects of performing it. §4 will introduce the problem of providing reasons for action in the context of folkpsychological explanations. §5 will examine the theory of predictive processing. §6 will demonstrate that predictions serve a specific, normative role in the decision-making processes, whereas §7 will advance the argument from predictive processing whereby to explain an action is to identify specific predictive reasoning which caused the action to be performed . In the Conclusions, I will show the consequences of my main thesis for the problem of the nature of actions and explanations, as well as the rationale for using folk-psychological categories. Keywords: reason for action, agency, normativity, Knobe effect predictions, predictive processing, folk psychology uncertainty . |
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Normativity of Predictions: A New Research Perspective
Fellow: Michał Piekarski Abstract: One of the most interesting philosophical aspects of predictive processing (PP) is the normativity of predictive mechanisms and its function as a guide of action. In my opinion this framework provides us with good tools to describe and explain the phenomenon of normativity. It is possible to justify the thesis that explanations in the PP approach are normative in nature. They are like that because predictive mechanisms themselves are normative. By normative function of prediction I understand a feature of prediction which is constitutive (Bickhard, 2003) for action control as well as for the structure and content of the world model that is internal to a given cognitive system. They are normative in the sense of possibly being wrong (Bickhard, 2015a,b, 2016). Normative are also some properties of the environment. Both those factors are crucial for content and truth-value of representations. With no normativity, there is no error and it is hard to explain the possibility of misrepresentations. It means that predictions are also normative for action because they can be true (more probably in the Bayesian manner) or false (less probably in the Bayesian manner). Keywords: predictive processing, normativity, active inference, uncertainty, mechanism, environment, content, casuality |
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Artefacts as Social Things: Design-Based Approach to Normativity
Fellow: Michał Piekarski Abstract: In these reflections, we want to prove a thesis whereby normativity of rules and norms may be linked to the domain of artefacts which we understand as social things. We claim that some norms and rules are situated in human socio-material ecosystems especially when it comes to the role played by affordances. The thesis advanced in this article will also enable us to indicate one of the potential interpretations of Wittgenstein’s ‘forms of life’ concept, demonstrating that some solutions suggested by the author of Philosophical Investigations are still relevant today. We will relate the issue of the normativity of artefacts to the problem of rule recognition which Wittgenstein also raises in some of his later studies. We will demonstrate that the problem of normativity recognition is linked to (1) relational properties of objects, that is affordances; (2) structured nature of the world of human communities; and (3) the ability to recognise affordances related to the ability to create predictions about future states of affairs. The analyses presented herein will show that it is possible to link the perspectives of cognitive ecology, design practice and philosophical analyses focused on the problem of normativity. Keywords: Wittgenstein, normativity, artefacts, form of life, affordance |
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From shared intentionality to moral obligation? Some worries.
Fellow: Neil Roughley Abstract: According to Tomasello’s natural history of human morality, morality's key structures come into being in the dyadic joint action of early human hunters. Such joint action, Tomasello claims, involves the generation of a new entity, a “joint agent,” and brings with it insight into the agent-independence of agential roles. These two features are, Tomasello argues, decisive for the inception of early humans’ “respect”-based proto-morality. The key structures at work are then, he claims, “scaled up” in the “group morality” of modern humans. I raise three worries about the narrative at the level of early humans’ proto-morality. These concern the content of proto-moral “respect,” the role of language or proto-language, and the limits of focusing on dyads. In a final step, I express the concern that Tomasello’s construal of the “scaling up” process appears to lose the key structural features of respect, as it seems unable to distinguish social and moral norms. |
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Contraddizione, pensabilità, impossibilità
Fellow: Venanzio Raspa |
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Sollen: il dover essere è un oggetto? Le risposte di Meinong e Veber
Fellow: Venanzio Raspa Abstract: The paper examines Meinong’s and Veber’s conceptions of “ought”.Meinong’s theory of ought is a part of his value theory. In Über emotionale Präsentation the ought is a property of being, which cannot be viewed asseparated from a desiring subject. The ought is an ideal object of higherorder; it concerns neither factuality nor non-factuality, but subfactuality,that is the realm of possibility. In Die Natur des Sollens, Veber proposes atheory of ought, which is grounded on Meinongian concepts. The ought isthe object of a volition, it is a genuine object, even though ideal. Finally,the differences between Veber’s and Meinong’s conceptions of the oughtare portrayed. Keywords: ought, value, Meinong, Veber, emotions |
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In-contraddizione. Il principio di contraddizione alle origini della nuova logica
Fellow: Venanzio Raspa |
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The Normative Animal? On the Anthropological Significance of Social, Moral, and Linguistic Norms
Fellow: Neil Roughley Abstract: Humans, it is often claimed, are rational, linguistic, cultural, or moral creatures. What these characterizations may all have in common is the more fundamental claim that humans are normative animals, in the sense that they are creatures whose lives are structured at a fundamental level by their relationships to norms. The various capacities singled out by talk of rational, linguistic, cultural, or moral animals might then all essentially involve an orientation to obligations, permissions, and prohibitions. And, if this is so, then perhaps it is a basic susceptibility or proclivity to normative or deontic regulation of thought and behaviour that enables humans to develop the various specific features of their life form. This volume of new essays investigates the claim that humans are essentially normative animals in this sense. The contributors do so by looking at the nature and relations of three types of norms, or putative norms—social, moral, and linguistic—and asking whether they might all be different expressions of one basic structure unique to humankind. These questions are posed by philosophers, primatologists, behavioural biologists, psychologists, linguists, and cultural anthropologists, who have collaborated on this topic for many years. The contributors are committed to the idea that understanding normativity is a two-way process, involving a close interaction between conceptual clarification and empirical research. Keywords: normative animal thesis, social norm, linguistic rule, moral principle, standard of correctness, convention, collective intentionality, rule following, particularism, semantic norm |
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Might We Be Essentially Normative Animals?
Fellow: Neil Roughley Abstract: This chapter poses the question of whether humans might be essentially normative animals, i.e. whether traditionally prominent specificities of the human life form—our linguistic, social, and moral “natures”—might ground in a basic susceptibility, or proclivity to the deontic regulation of thought and behaviour: the “normative animal thesis.” The chapter lays out the issues at stake in attempting to answer this question. It divides into two main parts. The first begins by clarifying the—norm-related—concept of normativity at issue, distinguishing it from the—reason-related—conceptualisation current in meta-ethics and theories of rationality. It then discusses the primary candidates for generic features of norms, before dividing the normative animal thesis into various sub-claims. The second part presents the key questions at issue in the discussion of social, moral, and linguistic norms, comparing ways of conceiving them and marking the significance of such conceptualisations for the normative animal thesis. Keywords: normative animal thesis, social norm, linguistic rule, moral principle, standard of correctness, convention, collective intentionality, rule following, particularism, semantic norm |
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Moral Obligation from the Outside In
Fellow: Neil Roughley Abstract: This chapter presents an analysis of moral obligation, proceeding from the assumption that the decisive facts can only have resulted from the development of psychological structures specific to the human life form. The method involves piecing together a psychology of deontic moral judgement and arguing that moral obligation is what must be the case if such judgements are true. The three key building blocks are resentment*, an affectively coloured, egoistic demand in reaction to agential ill will or indifference, found in both primates and psychopaths; Smithian empathy, which makes possible vicarious resentment*, or indignation*; and impartial empathising. Facts about moral obligation turn out to be facts about counterfactual informed impartial empathic indignation*. Phylogenetically, the constitution of such facts presumably required the prior genesis of social norms through the sharing of indignation*. This phylogenetic condition is, however, no part of the concept of moral obligation thus made possible. Keywords: moral obligation, deontic moral judgement, resentment, indignation, empathy, Strawson, Adam Smith, psychopathy, inequity aversion. |
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Forms of Fellow Feeling: Empathy, Sympathy, Concern and Moral Agency
Fellow: Neil Roughley Abstract: What is the basis of our capacity to act morally? This is a question that has been discussed for millennia, with philosophical debate typically distinguishing two sources of morality: reason and sentiment. This collection aims to shed light on whether the human capacity to feel for others really is central for morality and, if so, in what way. To tackle these questions, the authors discuss how fellow feeling is to be understood: its structure, content and empirical conditions. Also discussed are the exact roles that relevant psychological features - specifically: empathy, sympathy and concern - may play within morality. The collection is unique in bringing together the key participants in the various discussions of the relation of fellow feeling to moral norms, moral concepts and moral agency. By integrating conceptually sophisticated and empirically informed perspectives, Forms of Fellow Feeling will appeal to readers from philosophy, psychology, sociology and cultural studies. |
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The Empathy in Moral Obligation. An Exercise in Creature Construction
Fellow: Neil Roughley Abstract: Neil Roughley ’s contribution assumes that metaethics can learn from empirical psychology. His focus is, however, not on motivational internalism or indeed primarily on moral judgement . Rather, proceeding from the assumption that morality is the product of the phylogenesis of certain kinds of psychological structure, before the development of which moral categories quite simply had no purchase, he argues that the construction of a psychology capable of supporting moral obligation can clarify the nature of moral obligation itself. In his exercise in ‘creature construction’, he makes use of data from psychopathology and comparative psychology in order to support the claim that the psychological features on which moral obligation builds are indeed conceivable in nonnormative form. Roughley ’s first level of construction bequeaths a creature disposed to what he calls ‘resentment *’. The term picks out an emotional reaction of a specific kind to manifestations of ill will or indifference on the part of others, forms of behaviour whose omission the creature dispositionally demands. Roughley argues that, although the disposition to resentment* may in normal humans be difficult to disentangle from normative preconditions (and thus from resentment), it is plausibly manifested by both psychopaths and primates. The disposition is supplemented on the second level by the capacity for Smithian empathy , that is, the capacity to take on emotions on behalf of another. The conjunction of these two capacities generates the disposition to indignation *, that is, to vicarious resentment*. Moral obligation can, Roughleyargues, be constructed with these materials, as it corresponds to the indignation* that would be felt by an impartial empathiser . If the construction is successful, then moral judgementitself requires the capacity for Smithian empathy, as the concept of impartial indignation is only available to an agent capable of vicarious emoting. This means that, although there are plausibly a whole set of moral judgements which, for reasons concerning their content, require no occurrent empathy, the disposition to empathy may be a necessary condition of making deontic judgements that count as genuinely moral. Keywords: Moore-paradoxicality and wanting, Optative attitudes, The guise of the good and the pure ascription view, Direction of fit and subjective standard setting, Wants without beliefs in non-human animals |
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Wanting and Intending. Elements of a Philosophy of Practical Mind
Fellow: Neil Roughley |
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Expressive Explication and the Optative Model
Fellow: Neil Roughley Chapter 4 develops the idea of an expressive explication of the attitudes, which grounds in the claim that there is an essential structural analogy between mental states and linguistic utterances. The strengths of the conception are first demonstrated by showing how it explains the phenomenon of Moore-paradoxical sentences for beliefs. Applied to wants*, it reveals them as essentially optative attitudes, that is, as mental states articulated by utterances of the form “Let it be the case that p”. The optative analysis is then confronted with two competing proposals stemming from the field of moral psychology. According to the first, axiological theory, “desires” entertain the same relation to the good as beliefs do to truth. The main argument for the view, Anscombe’s hermeneutic vertigo argument, is shown to conflate the putative incoherence of a non-axiological concept of wanting with the incomprehensibility of an agent’s reasons for wanting. According to the second proposal, the pure entailment view, which revives the main premise of the Logical Connection Argument, talk of “desires” is, in at least certain important cases, simply a way of characterising an action as intentional, a characterisation that makes no substantial contribution to its explanation. I distinguish three reasons for this view and show why none of them justify the claim that wants* are mere ascriptions. In an appendix to the chapter, the optative analysis is related to the metaphor of “direction of fit”. I argue against reductive attempts to rid us of the metaphor, claiming instead that it marks an irreducibly normative feature of attitudinising. At the close, the chapter returns to the suggestion at the end of Chap. 2, that there may be creatures that play host to motivational states without being believers. This possibility turns out to be entailed by the conception of wanting* as the setting of subjective standards, which, unlike the objective standard required by belief, don’t require the capacities for full Davidsonian triangulation. |
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The Limits of Realism in the Philosophy of Social Science
Fellow: David-Hillel Ruben Abstract: There is an old Russian proverb, quoted in Vladimir Medem’s autobiography, that says: “an individual in Russia was composed of three parts: a body, a soul, and a passport”. It isn’t only that there are these three aspects of a person, but moreover that somehow the three are connected or related in some way. I assume that identity theories and reductive strategies about their relationship fail and I remind the reader why this is so. The mind cannot be reduced to body and the social (and this includes social action) cannot be reduced to what goes on in the minds of individuals and to their non-social actions, even when physical environment is added to the allegedly reducing base. I canvass two alternatives: supervenience and constructivism. Supervenience turns out to be too “brute” a relation to account for the mind-body-social relationships. It is essentially a co-variance relation and even if the social supervenes on the non-social, or the mental on the physical, supervenience leaves that co-variance inexplicable and mysterious. I ask whether constructivist solutions could explain the co-variance (I look specifically at the work of John Searle) and raise some issues with regard to their ability to explain these relationships. In particular, I focus on Searle’s use of the idea of constitutive rules and on his reliance on the ideas of agreement and consent to such rules. Keywords: Social World, Mental Life, Constitutive Rule, Global Supervenience, Political Obligation. |
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Traditions and True Successors
Fellow: David-Hillel Ruben Abstract: How can different parties to a dispute in aesthetics, history, politics or religion, either individuals or groups, each claim, apparently with at least some justification, that it, but not its rival(s), is the true or authentic successor or later representative for some earlier group or individual, or that it, but not its rival(s), stands in the same authentic tradition as the earlier one? Such social disputes seem essentially endless and interminable. Is this so? Can the disputes receive a rational resolution? I try and illustrate these disputes with numerous specific examples. I focus on the two concepts of tradition and true succession for my analysis. The idea of qualitative similarity of beliefs and practices can illuminate social disputes over true succession or membership of a tradition. (Causal connexion has a necessary role to play.) Other analyses frequently identify the vagueness or ambiguity in the concepts of the specific traditions as the source of dispute. On the contrary, I argue that the vagueness inherent in the question of how similar beliefs and practices need to be is what explains these apparently endless disputes that social groups have with one another over these questions. Keywords: Traditions, True Succession, Social Disputes |
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Anaphoric deflationism, primitivism, and the truth-property
Fellow: Pietro Salis Abstract: Anaphoric deflationism is a prosententialist account of the use of “true.” Prosentences are, for sentences, the equivalent of what pronouns are for nouns: as pronouns refer to previously introduced nouns, so prosentences like “that’s true” inherit their content from previously introduced sentences. This kind of deflationism concerning the use of “true” (especially in Brandom’s version) is an explanation in terms of anaphora; the prosentence depends anaphorically on the sentence providing its content. A relevant implication of this theory is that “true” is not understood as a predicate and that truth is not a property. Primitivism, defended by Frege, Moore, and Davidson, is associated with two ideas: (1) that truth is a primitive and central trait of our conceptual system and (2) that truth, as such, cannot be defined. This second claim can be called “negative primitivism,” and it especially points out the facts about the “indefinability” of truth generally advocated by primitivists. In what follows, a connection is established between the deflationist’s rejection of the predicate and of the property and facts (and primitivist ideas) about the indefinability of truth. This connection establishes a common framework to lend further explanatory power to both options. According to the resulting view, this indefinability can explain the appeal and soundness of a deflationist dismissal of predicates and properties dealing with truth. Keywords: Brandom, Deflationism, Davidson, Indefinability of truth, Prosententialism, Truth. |
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Does language have a downtown? Wittgenstein, Brandom, and the game of "giving and asking for reasons"
Fellow: Pietro Salis Abstract: Wittgenstein’s Investigations proposed an egalitarian view about language games, emphasizing their plurality (“language has no downtown”). Uses of words depend on the game one is playing, and may change when playing another. Furthermore, there is no privileged game dictating the rules for the others: games are as many as purposes. This view is pluralist and egalitarian, but it says little about the connection between meaning and use, and about how a set of rules is responsible for them in practice. Brandom’s Making It Explicit attempted a straightforward answer to these questions, by developing Wittgensteinian insights: the primacy of social practice over meanings; the idea that meaning is use; the idea of rule–following to understand participation in social practices. Nonetheless, Brandom defended a non–Wittgensteinian conception of discursive practice: language has a “downtown”, the game of “giving and asking for reasons”. This is the idea of a normative structure of language, consisting of advancing claims and drawing inferences. By means of assertions, speakers undertake “commitments” that can be challenged/defended in terms of reasons (those successfully justified can gain “entitlement”). This game is not one among many: it is indispensable to the very idea of discursive practice. In this paper, my aim will be that of exploring the main motivations and implications of both perspectives. Keywords: Discursive Practice, Inferentialism, Language Games, Pluralism, Rule Following. |
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Implicit norms
Fellow: Pietro Salis Abstract: Robert Brandom has developed an account of conceptual content as instituted by social practices. Such practices are understood as being implicitly normative. Brandom proposed the idea of implicit norms in order to meet some requirements imposed by Wittgenstein’s remarks on rule-following: escaping the regress of rules on the one hand, and avoiding mere regular behavior on the other. Anandi Hattiangadi has criticized this account as failing to meet such requirements. In what follows, I try to show how the correct understanding of sanctions and the expressivist reading of the issue can meet these challenges. Keywords: Brandom, Heath, Hattiangadi, Dispositionalism, Expressivism, Implicit norms, Norms, Normativity |
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Collective Intentionality, Inferentialism and the Capacity for Claim-Making
Fellow: Glenda Satne Abstract: Some of our linguistic practices are special in that they involve claims about how things stand in the world. These judgments are thought to be true or false with respect to what they are about. The nature of these practices of claim-making has been studied by philosophers and psychologists alike. Furthermore, important strands in evolutionary studies have relied on both psychological and philosophical theories for addressing the question of how these practices evolved in the hominins lineage, claiming that engagement in such linguistic practices is humans’ exclusive heritage. This paper aims to show that (some of) the conceptual tools provided by collective intentionality and inferentialist theorists can productively complement each other in pursuing this theoretical endeavor, namely the elucidation of human practices of claim-making. In particular, I argue that (i) Brandom’s inferentialist account of basic linguistic practices in interpretational terms is problematic and that these problems can be addressed via appeal to the collective intentionality theorist’s toolbox, and (ii) Inferentialists resource to linguistic norms in understanding meaning and claim-making can offer crucial tools for understanding the emergence of human specific cognitive capacities of objective judgement, tools that are needed to complement the accounts offered by collective intentionality theorists. The main aim of the paper is to provide an account of the evolution and development of human-specific abilities of claim-making which combines resources from both approaches in order to understand the nature and crucial role of shared activities in their emergence. Keywords: Collective intentionality, Inferentialism, Claim-making practices |
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Normativity with a Human Face: Placing Intentional Norms
Fellow: Glenda Satne Abstract: Many philosophers identify normativity as the distinctive mark of intentionality. Among them, John McDowell has underscored the need to overcome any form of dualism between reason and nature in order to properly account for the way in which such norms can be about the world around us, dubbing this project a "rehabilitation of empiricism." Steven Crowell argues that McDowell's notion of experience falls short in accounting for the way in which we can experience the world as normative and is hence insufficient for rehabilitating empiricism in McDowell's sense. In this chapter, we will contend that Crowell's attempt to provide a phenomenological account of intentionality goes quite far in the right direction but is nevertheless incomplete. If in fact Crowell succeeds in placing norms in nature through his phenomenological account of perceptual experience, he still shares with McDowell the idea that intentionality proper is to be identified with full-fledged normative contentful capacities. We argue that this commitment leads him to reject the possibility of accounting for the way in which intentional agents are themselves placed in nature. We will claim that placing intentional agents in nature is not only possible, but also necessary for bringing Crowell's and McDowell's respective projects of rehabilitating empiricism to completion. Finally, we sketch a strategy for successfully conducting this task. |
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Shared Intentionality and the Cooperative Evolutionary Hypotesis
Fellow: Glenda Satne, Alessandro Salice Abstract: One important application of theories of collective intentionality concerns the evolution of social understanding and even of human thinking (Tomasello M, A natural history of human thinking, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 2014). A promising idea behind this approach is the Cooperative Evolutionary Hypothesis (CEH), namely, the idea that humans’ capacity for social cooperation is at the heart of their ability to understand others’ mental states and behavior, leading to an explanation of how humans came to share thoughts and language. However, some of the most popular defenses of CEH face important problems. In this paper, we take Tomasello’s account (J Soc Ontol 2(1):117–123, 2016); A natural history of human thinking. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 2014; Origins of human communication. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2008) as a leading example of the CEH which faces such insurmountable problems. In particular, we argue that Tomasello’s analysis of cooperation and spontaneous help is problematic. We locate a source of such issues in the assumption that the right account of joint action and simple forms of shared intentionality is that which is offered by Bratman’s theory of shared intentions. The second part of the article proposes and defends an alternative framework for understanding shared intentionality that can help substantiate CEH. Keywords: Cooperation, Collective intentionality, Evolution. |
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Explorative Experiments: A Paradigm Shift to Deal with Severe Uncertainty in Autonomous Robotics
Fellow: Viola Schiaffonati Abstract: This paper presents a case of severe uncertainty in the development of autonomous and intelligent systems in Artificial Intelligence and autonomous robotics. After discussing how uncertainty emerges from the complexity of the systems and their interaction with unknown environments, the paper describes the novel framework of explorative experiments. This framework presents a suitable context in which many of the issues relative to uncertainty, both at the epistemological level and at the ethical one, in this field should be reframed. The case of autonomous robot systems for search and rescue is used to make the discussion more concrete. |
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Accuracy and epistemic conservatism
Fellow: Florian Steinberger Abstract: Epistemic utility theory (EUT) is generally coupled with veritism. Veritism is the view that truth is the sole fundamental epistemic value. Veritism, when paired with EUT, entails a methodological commitment: norms of epistemic rationality are justified only if they can be derived from considerations of accuracy alone. According to EUT, then, believing truly has epistemic value, while believing falsely has epistemic disvalue. This raises the question as to how the rational believer should balance the prospect of true belief against the risk of error. A strong intuitive case can be made for a kind of epistemic conservatism – that we should disvalue error more than we value true belief. I argue that none of the ways in which advocates of veritist EUT have sought to motivate conservatism can be squared with their methodological commitments. Short of any such justification, they must therefore either abandon their most central methodological principle or else adopt a permissive line with respect to epistemic risk. |
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Three ways in which logic might be normative
Fellow: Florian Steinberger Abstract: Logic, the tradition has it, is normative for reasoning. Famously, the tradition was challenged by Gilbert Harman who argued that there is no straightforward connection between logical consequence and norms of reasoning. A number of authors (including John MacFarlane and Hartry Field) have sought to rehabilitate the traditional view of the normative status of logic against Harman. In this paper, I argue that the debate as a whole is marred by a failure of the disputing parties to distinguish three different types of normative assessment, and hence three distinct ways in which the question of the normativity of logic might be understood. Logical principles might be thought to provide the reasoning agent first-personal directives, they might be thought to serve as third-personal evaluative standards, or they might underwrite our thirdpersonal appraisals of others whereby we attribute praise and blame. I characterize the three normative functions in general terms. I then show how a failure to appreciate this threefold distinction has impeded progress by leading the disputants to talk past one another. Moreover, I show how the distinction paves the way for a more fruitful engagement with and, ultimately, resolution of the question. |
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Logical pluralism and logical normativity
Fellow: Florian Steinberger Introduction: This paper explores an apparent tension between two widely held views about logic: that logic is normative and that there are multiple equally legitimate logics. The tension is this. If logic is normative, it tells us something about how we ought to reason. If, as the pluralist would have it, there are several correct logics, those logics make incompatible recommendations as to how we ought to reason. But then which of these logics should we look to for normative guidance? I argue that inasmuch as pluralism draws its motivation from its ability to defuse logical disputes—that is, disputes between advocates of rival logics—it is unable to provide an answer: pluralism collapses into monism with respect to either the strongest or the weakest admissible logic. The paper proceeds as follows: Section 2 provides a novel analysis of the normative structure of logical disputes. Logical disputes involve various types of normative assessments. In particular, I distinguish external assessments that question the correctness of the principles to which the agent assessed holds herself, and internal ones by which we criticize the agent for her failure to comply with her own principles. I identify and articulate the principles underlying these normative assessments. Section 3 offers a taxonomy of logical pluralisms and investigates the extent to which each of the taxa leaves room for the aforementioned normative assessments. Section 4 explores the consequences of the fact that an important class of pluralisms—the class that incorporates J.C. Beall and Greg Restall’s influential account—is incompatible with external assessments. I demonstrate that the vulnerability of these views to the well-known ‘collapse argument’1 is a consequence of their inability to account for such assessments. Ultimately such forms of pluralism suffer an ‘upward’ collapse into monism with respect to the strongest admissible logic. Section 5 investigates an alternative form of pluralism according to which logics are correct only relative to their appropriate domains of application. Drawing on the literature on alethic pluralism, I argue that at least when it comes to certain forms of cross-domain discourse such forms of domain-relative pluralism are subject to a different but symmetrically analogous form of ‘downward’ collapse into monism with respect to the weakest logic. Section 6 argues that on account of the findings of the previous section, the distinction between monism and domain-relative pluralism is merely terminological. Finally, I conclude that the only viable forms of ‘pluralism’ in light of the normativity of logic are ones that allow for normative conflicts and hence logical rivalry. |
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Sentimentalism and Moral Dilemmas
Fellow: András Szigeti Abstract: It is sometimes said that certain hard moral choices constitute tragic moral dilemmas in which no available course of action is justifiable, and so the agent is blameworthy whatever she chooses. This paper criticizes a certain approach to the debate about moral dilemmas and considers the metaethical implications of the criticisms. The approach in question has been taken by many advocates as well as opponents of moral dilemmas who believe that analysing the emotional response of the agent is the key to the debate about moral dilemmas. The metaethical position this approach is most naturally associated with is sentimentalism. Sentimentalists claim that evaluation, and in particular moral evaluation, crucially depends on human sentiment. This paper is not concerned with the question whether moral dilemmas exist, but rather with emotion‐based arguments used on both sides of the debate. The first aim of the paper is to show that emotion‐based arguments by friends or foes of moral dilemmas cannot garner support from sentimentalism. The second aim is to show that this constitutes a serious problem for sentimentalism. |
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No Need to Get Emotional? Emotions and Heuristics
Fellow: András Szigeti Abstract: Many believe that values are crucially dependent on emotions. This paper focuses on epistemic aspects of the putative link between emotions and value by asking two related questions. First, how exactly are emotions supposed to latch onto or track values? And second, how well suited are emotions to detecting or learning about values? To answer the first question, the paper develops the heuristics-model of emotions. This approach models emotions as sui generis heuristics of value. The empirical plausibility of the heuristics-model is demonstrated using evidence from experimental psychology, evolutionary anthropology and neuroscience. The model is used then to answer the second question. If emotions are indeed heuristics of value, then it follows that emotions can be an important and useful source of information about value. However, emotions will not be epistemically superior in the sense of being the highest court of appeal for the justification of axiological beliefs (the latter view is referred to as the Epistemic Dependence Thesis, or EDT for short). The paper applies the heuristics-model to celebrated cases from the philosophy of emotions literature arguing that while the heuristics-model offers a good explanation of typical patterns of emotional reactions in such cases, advocates of EDT will have a hard time accounting for these patterns. The paper also shows that the conclusions drawn from special cases generalize. The paper ends by arguing that skepticism about the metaethical significance of emotions is compatible with a commitment to the importance of emotions in first-order normative ethics. Keywords: Emotions, Heuristics, Sentimentalism, Metaethics, Value. |
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The Virtues of Will-Power – from a Philosophical & Psychological Perspective
Fellow: Natasza Szutta Abstract: Virtue ethics is currently one of the most widely known ethical theories. According to it, to act morally well, one needs to perfect one’s moral character by acquiring virtues. Among various virtues, we can distinguish the group of so-called virtues of will power to which, among others, belong self-control, decisiveness, patience, etc. As they are necessary for the effectiveness of human actions, they are also called executive virtues. It is doubtful, however, if they deserve the proper name of virtues because they can be used either in the realization of good goals or evil ones. To serve the realization of what is good, they need to be combined with so-called substantial virtues (e.g., benevolence, honesty, or justice). Virtues of will power are often identified with practical skills, and perfecting will power is identified with exercising such practices as playing an instrument, doing some sports, or taking practice in medicine. In my article, I am trying to compare the view of will power virtues with the results in empirical, psychological studies over self-control and self-regulation. I will show to what extent these two descriptions – philosophical and psychological – are congruent. I will also take a closer look at the observed phenomenon of the depleted will, and whether this observation undermines the conclusions assumptions of virtue ethics. |
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.Exemplarist moral theory – some pros and cons
Fellow: Natasza Szutta Abstract: The article makes a number of critical remarks concerning Linda Zagzebski’s exemplarism. On the positive side, I argue that one of its strengths is the focus on motivation as an important factor in moral education whilst, on the negative, I draw attention to two issues. The first is that Zagzebski’s notion of moral exemplars is insufficient since it is too narrow, merely focusing as it does on high standard moral heroes while neglecting more usual moral agents who at least in some respects may also play the role of exemplars. Secondly, I find Zagzebski’s view of admiration (as a fundamental notion in building a moral theory) to be somewhat circular. Keywords: exemplarist moral theory, admiration, exemplars, motivation, Zagzebski. |
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Is Aristotelian Concept of Phronesis Empirically Adequate?
Fellow: Natasza Szutta Abstract: Contemporary virtue ethics, after gaining a strong position in ethics during the last decades of the twentieth century, has become an object of radical criticism. Situationists, such as John Doris, Gilbert Harman and Maria Merritt, inspired by the results of the research in social and cognitive psychology, questioned empirical adequacy of moral psychology on which virtue ethics was based. In their view, not dispositions and character, but situational factors decisively determine human behavior and thinking. At first this criticism of virtue ethics was focused on questioning the existence of ethical virtues, which would explain stable, consistent and morally integrated actions; then, the critics moved on to questioning the ideal of practical wisdom (phronesis) understood as an acquired constant disposition to deliberately search the best ways to respond to given moral reasons, choosing what is right as well as to find best means to realize the goal of good life. Situationists, notice that majority of our cognitive and motivational processes are automatic and unconscious. They are often incongruent with declared moral values to such extend that the model of practical wisdom seems to situationists to be problematic. In my presentation I will try to respond to the situationistic objections. I will analyze a number of experiments, to which they refer, and ask to what extend these experiments allow them for so radical conclusions. I will also present contemporary dual – process theories of cognition and show how they fit with the Aristotelian idea of practical wisdom. Although virtue ethics is normative, there is no easy passage from the analysis of facts (situationists) to the formulation of norms (virtue ethicists), we must admit that formulating norms cannot contradict our knowledge about facts. And for this reason the situational criticism cannot be easily ignored. Keywords: phronesis, virtue, virtue ethics, situationism, Aristotle. |
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Normative Concepts: A Connectedness Model
Fellows: François Schroeter, Laura Schroeter |
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Normative realism: co-reference without convergence?
Fellows: François Schroeter, Laura Schroeter |
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On Credentials
Fellows: Barry Smith, Olimpia Giuliana Loddo, Giuseppe Lorini Abstract: Credentials play an important role in all modern societies, but the analysis of their nature and function has thus far been neglected by social philosophers. We present a view according to which the defining function of credentials is to certify the identity and the institutional status (including certain rights) of individuals. More importantly, credentials enable rights-holders to exercise their rights, so that for a particular right to be exercisable the right-holder should possess, carry and sometimes show to an authority a document of a specific kind. Driving licenses, identity cards, passports, boarding passes, library passes, credit cards, ATM cards, health insurance cards are all examples of credentials in this sense. Credentials have in every case a bearer, and the bearer should be able to carry them easily on his or her person. Credentials should also be inspectable – not least because credentials can be forged. The authors analyze several historical and contemporary examples of credentials, focusing on the credentials carried by the pilgrims of the Way of Saint James. Keywords: credentials, document acts, deontic powers, Way of Saint James, institutional objects, status indicators |
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Normalità o processi di normalizzazione? Le analisi husserliane sulla dimensione orto-estetica e il carattere dinamico dell’esperienza percettiva
Fellow: Michela Summa Abstract: Questo articolo si concentra sull’approccio husserliano al tema della normalità. Muovendo dalla considerazione delle diverse dimensioni alle quali questo concetto si riferisce, si propone un approccio "stratificato" alla normalità, basato sull’analisi dell’esperienza sensibile e di quella che Husserl chiama orto-estesia. La considerazione dei criteri dell’ottimalità e della concordanza, che Husserl introduce per la definizione della normalità individuale e intersoggettiva, ci consentirà di portare in luce la duplice connotazione, descrittiva e normativa, della normalità. Sulla base della considerazione congiunta dei criteri menzionati in relazione all’esperienza individuale e intersoggettiva si propone un’interpretazione della normalità basata sulle dinamiche dei processi di normalizzazione. Keywords: Normalità, orto-estesia, concordanza, optimum, percezione, normatività. |
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Are Fictional Emotions Genuine and Rational? Phenomenological Reflections on a Controversial Question
Fellow: Michela Summa Abstract: The aim of this paper is to discuss the status of so-called ‘fictional emotions’ and their relation to emotions in the face of what is real. Particularly, I consider whether we can take fictional emotions as genuine and rational. I begin with a discussion of a paradoxical characterization of fictional emotions, which introduces questions concerning their genuineness and rationality, and show how these questions are strictly tied to the problem of the existence of fictional objects, or of our disbelief in their existence. I then clarify in what sense emotions can arise independently of our belief in real existence and in what sense we can say that fictional objects ‘exist’ although they do not exist as real. Subsequently, I briefly address the normative implications of fictional experience. And finally, I consider how a phenomenological account of fictional emotions presupposes a discussion of the different modalities of our participation in imaginary and fictional context, and how these different modalities are correlated to different forms of self-consciousness. Keywords: imagination, fiction, fictional emotions, reality, irreality |
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Über Normalität und Abweichung: Ein responsiver Ansatz
Fellow: Michela Summa Abstract: This article aims to highlight the relevance of Bernhard Waldenfels’ responsive phenomenology for questions related to normality and to the different kinds of deviation from what is taken tobe normal. The article begins with a discussion of two limit cases in the understanding of the concepts of normality and deviation: a strictly normative understanding, according to which each deviation is norm-deviation, and a descriptive understanding, according to which deviation is what underlies individuality. Considering Waldenfels’ responsive philosophy in connection with Kurt Goldstein’s and George Canguilhem’s philosophies of the organism, both understandings are critically discussed. In particular, the article shows how both views turn out to be one-sided and should be revised on the basis of a responsive account of the organism (particularly of the human organism) and its situated relation to circumstances, events, and affordances in the world it inhabits. The analysis of the different forms of responsiveness of the human organism, and notably the distinction between ‘catastrophic’ or pathological and ‘creative’ or organising kinds of responsiveness, can allow us to develop a relational and dynamic account of normality and deviation. Accordingly, neither normality nor deviation should be taken as univocally defined states; they should rather be reassessed on the basis of the processes in and through which order is interrupted, disturbed, and possibly reshaped or newly instituted. Keywords: Bernhard Waldenfels, George Canguilhem, Kurt Goldstein, anomaly, normality, organism, pathology, responsiveness. |
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Instrumentalism about practical reason: not by default
Fellow: Thomas Schmidt Abstract: Instrumentalism is the view that all requirements of practical reason can be derived from the instrumental principle, that is, from the claim that one ought to take the suitable means to one's ends. Rationalists, by contrast, hold that there are requirements of practical reason that concern the normative acceptability of ends. To the extent that rationalists put forward these requirements in addition to the instrumental principle, rationalism might seem to go beyond instrumentalism in its normative commitments. This is why it is sometimes thought that rationalism is stronger than instrumentalism in a way that entails that instrumentalism is the default view, while rationalists carry the burden of proof. In this paper, I explore and discuss different ways of spelling out this idea. I argue that rationalism is not stronger than instrumentalism in a way that has implications for matters of justification and differences in prima facie defensibility of the two sorts of views. Keywords: instrumentalism, instrumental principle, rationalism, practical reason, normativity |
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Accounting for Moral Conflicts
Fellow: Thomas Schmidt Abstract: In his recent book The Dimensions of Consequentialism (2013), Martin Peterson defends, amongst other things, the claim that moral rightness and wrongness come in degrees and that, therefore, the standard view that an act’s being morally right or wrong is a one-off matter ought to be rejected. An ethical theory not built around a gradualist conception of moral rightness and wrongness is, according to Peterson, unable to account adequately for the phenomenon of moral conflicts. I argue in this paper that Peterson’s defence of this claim is not convincing. Over and above this negative result, a careful assessment of Peterson’s case for degrees of rightness reveals that the theoretical corridor for accounting for moral conflicts without a gradualist conception of rightness and wrongness is relatively narrow. As I show, the only way of avoiding the conclusion of Peterson’s argument is to reject his conception of the ‘final analysis’ that an ethical theory provides, i.e. of what the theory ultimately has to say about individual acts and their normative properties. According to Peterson, such a final analysis should be seen as comprising the all-things-considered judgements yielded by the theory, and nothing else. As it turns out, the only alternative to this account that is compatible with the standard view about moral rightness and wrongness is to conceive of the final analysis as also containing judgements about morally relevant factors, or aspects, and the way in which they are normatively relevant. |
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Metasemantics for the Relaxed
Fellow: Christine Tiefensee Abstract: In this paper, I develop a metasemantics for relaxed moral realism. More precisely, I argue that relaxed realists should be inferentialists about meaning and explain that the role of evaluative moral vocabulary is to organise and structure language exit transitions, much as the role of theoretical vocabulary is to organise and structure language entry transitions. Keywords: Metasemantics, Relaxed normative, realism, Quietism, Inferentialism |
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Inferentialist metaethics, bifurcations and ontological commitment
Fellow: Christine Tiefensee Abstract: According to recent suggestions within the global pragmatism discussion, metaethical debate must be fundamentally re-framed. Instead of carving out metaethical differences in representational terms, it has been argued that metaethics should be given an inferentialist footing. In this paper, I put inferentialist metaethics to the test by subjecting it to the following two criteria for success: Inferentialist metaethicists must (1) be able to save the metaethical differences between moral realism and expressivism, and (2) do so in a way that employs understandings of these metaethical accounts which would be acceptable to moral realists or expressivists who endorse an inferentialist theory of meaning. Two results follow from my discussion. The first concerns inferentialist metaethics more narrowly, casting doubts on inferentialists’ ability to fulfil the two criteria for success by showing that proposed metaethical demarcation attempts either meet the first criterion but violate the second, or pass the second criterion but fail the first. The second upshot pertains to the global pragmatism debate more widely, pressing the point that inferentialists have not as yet provided a convincing account of ontological commitment. |
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Explaining the Normative
Fellow: Stephen Turner Abstract: Normativity is what gives reasons their force, makes words meaningful, and makes rules and laws binding. It is present whenever we use such terms as ‘correct,' ‘ought,' ‘must,' and the language of obligation, responsibility, and logical compulsion. Yet normativists, the philosophers committed to this idea, admit that the idea of a non-causal normative realm and a body of normative objects is spooky. Explaining the Normative is the first systematic, historically grounded critique of normativism. It identifies the standard normativist pattern of argument, and shows how this pattern depends on circularities, assumptions about the unique correctness of preferred descriptions, problematic transcendental arguments, and regress arguments that end in mysteries. The book considers in detail a paradigm case: legal normativity as constructed by Hans Kelsen. This case exemplifies the problems with normativist arguments. But it also shows how normativism was constructed as an alternative to ordinary social science explanation. The normativist argument is that social science explanations themselves are forced to rely on normative concepts minimally, on normative rationality and on a normative view of ‘concepts' themselves. Empathic understanding of the reasoning and meanings of others, however, can solve the regress problems about meaning and rationality that are central to the appeal of normativism. This account has no need for a parallel normative world, and has a surprising and revealing lineage in the history of philosophy, as well as a basis in neuroscience. |
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Otaka Tomoo’s Conception of Sovereignty as Nomos: A Phenomenological Interpretation
Fellow: Genki Uemura Abstract: The present chapter deals with a controversy on the Japanese sovereignty between Otaka Tomoo (1899–1956) and his colleague Miyazawa Toshiyoshi (1899–1976) in the period from 1947 to 1950. After the overview of the controversy, we introduce a set of philosophical ideas from Otaka’s writings published before 1945 as a background for his theory of so-called Nomos-sovereignty. With this framework at hand, we reinterpret Otaka’s position in the controversy with Miyazawa, and we disclose a phenomenological philosophy of law, which Otaka pursued as a student of Edmund Husserl, the founder of phenomenology, although he did not realize this himself. |
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Husserl’s Conception of Cognition as an Action: An Inquiry into Its Prehistory
Fellow: Genki Uemura Abstract: The present chapter investigates a development in Husserl’s thought concerning cognition. In some of his later writings after the 1920s, Husserl holds that cognition is an action. This claim is available for him only if a previous idea expressed in his Logische Untersuchungen (1900/1901), according to which no act is action, has been abandoned. In addition, there must be a further reason for Husserl’s classification of cognition as action. We attempt to account for this move solely on the basis of Husserl’s discussions of cognition and action before the 1920s. The proposed account consists of two steps. First, drawing mainly on Husserl’s related manuscripts in 1909–1914, we give an outline of Husserl’s phenomenology of action in general. Second, examining some of Husserl’s discussions in the same period, we show that Husserl is already phenomenologically justified at that time to regard his analysis of cognition as dealing with a certain sort of action. Keywords: Creative Process, Phenomenological Analysis, Practical Philosophy, Intentional Correlate, Congruence Model |
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Motives in Experience: Pfänder, Geiger,and Stein
Fellow: Genki Uemura |
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Collective Intentions and Collective Intentionality
Fellow: Leo Zaibert Abstract: John Searle believes that collective intentions are crucial to his philosophy, but he is yet to present a coherent account of these entities. No account whatsoever of collective intentions is presented in the book where Searle needs them the most (The Construction of Social Reality), or, for that matter, in any other of Searle's major books. The only account, and a defective one at that (so I argue), is found in a short, somewhat obscure article entitled “Collective Intentions and Actions,” but in fact what Searle presents there is, at best, an account of collective actions, not of collective intentions. In light of Searle own ground‐breaking work in the philosophy of mind, and in particular in light of his far‐reaching analyses showing how intentions differ from related mental states, I argue that collective intentions are not consistent with Searle's philosophy of mind. |
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The Varieties of Normativity: An Essay on Social Ontology
Fellows: Leo Zaibert, Barry Smith Abstract: For much of the first fifty years of its existence, analytic philosophy shunned discussions of normativity and ethics. Ethical statements were considered as pseudo-propositions, or as expressions of pro-or con-attitudes of minor theoretical significance. Nowadays, in contrast, there are prominent analytic philosophers who pay close attention to normative problems and important books written by such philosophers on topics in law and social justice and on social and institutional ontology. Here we focus our attention on the work of Searle, at the same time drawing out an important connection between Searle’s work and that of two other seminal figures in this development: H.L.A. Hart and John Rawls. Keywords: Intentional State, Constitutive Rule, Naturalistic Fallacy, Illocutionary Force, Evaluative Statement |
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Cooperation with Animals? What Is and What Is Not
Fellow: Federico Zuolo Abstract: The idea of cooperation has been recently used with regard to human–animal relations to justify the application of an associative theory of justice to animals. In this paper, I discuss some of these proposals and seek to provide a reformulation of the idea of cooperation suitable to human–animal relations. The standard idea of cooperation, indeed, presupposes mental capacities that probably cannot be found in animals. I try to disentangle the idea of cooperation from other cognate notions and distinguish it from exploitation, use, and relationship. The upshot is a minimal taxonomy of human–animal relations that covers most possibilities, from the worst type of relation (exploitation) to that which is most favourable to animals’ welfare (relationship). In this taxonomy, cooperation is a form of relation where animals are used to produce a valuable good in a way that is compatible with their ethological features and without being harmed. Keywords: Animal politics, Associative theories of justice, Cooperation, Exploitation, Human-animal relations |
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Misadventures of Sentience: Animals and the Basis of Equality
Fellow: Federico Zuolo Abstract: This paper aims to put in question the all-purposes function that sentience has come to play in animal ethics. In particular, I criticize the idea that sentience can provide a sound basis of equality, as has been recently proposed by Alasdair Cochrane. Sentience seems to eschew the standard problems of egalitarian accounts that are based on range properties. By analysing the nature of range properties, I will show that sentience cannot provide such a solution because it is constructed as a sui generis range property. After criticizing the approaches seeking to ground animals’ equal status, I turn to Singer’s principle of equal consideration of interests. Despite its seeming non-controversiality, I argue that it cannot do without referring to the moral status of a being in order to determine the weight of a being’s interests. Moreover, it outlines a weak egalitarian basis because it relies on the presumption of equality of interests in virtue of our lack of knowledge of the weight of individuals’ interests. I conclude in a more positive tone by arguing that, irrespective of the troubles of range property egalitarianism, animal ethics can rely on other normative resources to defend the cause of animals. Keywords: basis of equality; equal consideration of interests; equality in animal ethics; sentience; proportionality; Alasdair Cochrane; Peter Singer |