bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
What's Wrong with Social Norms? An Alternative to Elster's Theory
Authors: van Zetten Frans 
Published: June 2016

Is guidance by social norms compatible with rationality? Jon Elster has argued inThe Cement of Societythat there is a fundamental contrast between rationality and conformity to social norms. The context of study is the problem of collective action, with special emphasis on collective wage bargaining. In such negotiations, the appeal to social norms rather than to self-interest can block agreement. Suppose one union is committed to the norm of equal pay for equal work; another one appeals to the norm of equal pay for everybody, regardless of the type of work. ‘In the presence of competing norms that favor different groups, the self-righteousness conferred by belief in a norm can lead to a bargaining impasse.'In confrontations between individuals, codes of honor can produce similar problems. It is in no one's interest to face a colleague over the barrel of a gun because one has made a nasty remark about his latest book, but if the code demands that one fight it out, the challenge must be accepted.
On Some Untamed Anaphora1
Authors: Wilson George M. 
Published: June 2016

A sentence of the form(1)Either Jones or Smith entered the room, and he saw the Maltese Falcon,has some notable properties due largely to the sprightly behavior of the pronoun in its second conjunct. For instance, that pronoun can not be a pronoun of laziness for the disjunctive noun phrase, ‘Jones or Smith,’ since (1) patently does not express the thought that(1’) Either Jones or Smith entered the room, and either Jones or Smith saw the Maltese Falcon.(1’), but not (1), would be true if Jones entered the room but didn't see the Maltese Falcon, and Smith saw the Maltese Falcon but never entered the room.
Is Nationalism Legitimate? A Sociological Perspective on a Philosophical Question
Authors: Greenfeld Liah 
Published: June 2016

To answer, or even consider, the question ‘Is nationalism legitimate?', whether from the sociological or ethical, philosophical point of view, it is first necessary to define what nationalism is or, in other words, to understand its nature and the source of its appeal. As concerns nationalism's definition, there are several points, in regard to which there exists among the students of the phenomenon more or less general agreement, but which, nevertheless, should be emphasized at the outset:Nationalism is a modem phenomenon: for most of its recorded history humanity has not known it; it emerged quite recently and therefore cannot be seen as an automatic response to some universal need; its very historicity presupposes that it is essentially a cultural and not a psychological phenomenon, and that, as any cultural phenomenon, it can develop, take various forms within certain limits, and disappear.
Democracy and Nationalism
Authors: Putte André Van De 
Published: June 2016

In 1789 Sieyès defined the nation as “un corps d'associés vivant sous une loi commune et représentés par la même législature.”In so doing, he gave expression to an idea that would follow a remarkable historical course and develop a complex and ambiguous logic. In this study we attempt to clarify this ambiguity, thereby gaining some insight into the complicated relationship between democracy and nationalism.The revolutionary idea of the nation, expressed by Sieyès, did not come out of thin air, but arose within a process of social and political transformation which began long before the French Revolution. By attempting to establish its sovereign power and found a state, the French monarchy came into conflict with regional and other traditional powers with whom it had previously shared power asprimus inter pares.The absolutist state founders discovered how important it was to have the community united behind them, so they sought to create feelings of national unity that would transcend the old regional loyalties and make France a ‘patria’ in the minds of the people, with the king as its incarnation and guarantor.
National Identity, Multiculturalism, and Aboriginal Rights: An Australian Perspective
Authors: Poole Ross 
Published: June 2016

My main concern in this paper will be with questions of national identity, multiculturalism, and aboriginal rights as they have emerged in Australia, especially over the past twenty or so years. The issues are not, of course, unique to Australia: similar questions have arisen in other places, including Canada, New Zealand, and the United States. However, each place has specific problems, and while I hope that much of what I say has relevance to these countries, I will not try to establish this here.The paper falls into two parts. In the first, I argue for certain limits on the practice of multiculturalism. The basis of this argument is a concern for national identity – especially for what I will call ‘national sovereignty.’ This is a familiar conservative position; however, I hope to show that it is one which liberals and those on the left should take seriously. In the second part of the paper, I distinguish the issue of Aboriginal (or indigenous) rights from multiculturalism, and try to establish that the basis of these rights is a principle very similar to the notion of national sovereignty.
What is Frege's Relativity Argument?
Authors: Yourgrau Palle 
Published: June 2016

Sets are multitudes which are also unities. It is surprising that the fact that multitudes are also unities leads to no contradictions: this is the main fact of mathematics.Kurt Gödel (Hao Wang,A Logical Journey: From Gödel to Philosophy)In what sense can something be at the same time one and many? The problem is familiar since Plato (for example,Republic524e). In recent times, Whitehead and Russell, inPrincipia Mathematica,have been struck by the difficulty of the problem: ‘If there is such an object as a class, it must be in some senseoneobject, yet it is only of classes that many can be predicated. Hence, if we admit classes as objects, we must suppose that the same object can be both one and many, which seems impossible.' It is, however, in Frege's great work,The Foundations of Arithmetic(henceforth,Grundlagen),that many see the final resolution of the old question: how can something be at the same time one and many?
Schiller's Critique of Kant's Moral Psychology: Reconciling Practical Reason and an Ethics of Virtue
Authors: Gauthier Jeffrey A. 
Published: June 2016

Mention of the name of Friedrich Schiller among both critics and defenders of Kant's moral philosophy has most often been with reference to the well known quip:“Gladly I serve my friends, but alas I do it with pleasure.Hence I am plagued with doubt that I am not a virtuous person.““Sure, your only resource is to try to despise them entirely,And then with aversion to do what your duty enjoins you.''This attention, however, has served to obscure the fact that Schiller truly intended his remark as a joke, representing a serious, if understandable, misinterpretation of Kantian morality. Though Schiller's various attempts to articulate a theory of moral motivation include important divergences from Kant's account, they represent a response to a set of problems that arise in the context of Kantian moral theory. As such, they may be of greatest interest to moralists who are working within the Kantian tradition. In this paper, I clarify certain points of Schiller's critique of Kant's account of moral motivation and place them in the context of his broader project of reconciling Kantianism and an ethics of virtue.
An Asymmetry Concerning Virtue and Vice
Authors: Montmarquet James A. 
Published: June 2016

In this paper I want to explore, and suggest a theoretical explanation of, an apparent asymmetry governing some of our most basic ethical judgments. I also want to use this asymmetry to probe into the relative plausibility of ‘moral character’ and ‘volition’ based accounts of moral responsibility. Briefly, my argument will be that, with suitable modifications, the latter type of account succeeds just where the former, the more Aristotelian approach, breaks down.Consider, first, a series of acts exemplifying the same vice.A person, say, is repeatedly late or is consistently selfish. Now our tendency here, surely, would be to view such acts as increasingly blameworthy — increasingly worthy, one might say, of some form of punishment (or, perhaps better to say, worthy of increasingly severe punishments) — as they are repeated.
Pragmatism and Moral Knowledge
Authors: Bakhurst David 
Published: June 2016

In the last twenty years there has been a dramatic revival of interest in the idea that there can be genuine moral knowledge. The noncognitivist assumptions that dominated so much twentieth-century ethical theory no longer seem the obvious truths they once did to so many thinkers. It is now common to hear the claim that moral values are genuine constituents of the furniture of the world - or at least of its upholstery- and that moral deliberation and judgment legitimately aspire to truth. Morality, it is frequently argued, is a realm of discovery rather than invention, and moral reasoning, and the play of moral imagination, must be constrained by how the moral facts stand.Such “realist” or “cognitivist” views in ethics take many forms. This essay considers whether a pragmatist account of moral knowledge might fruitfully be developed. My project will recommend itself only to those who believe that pragmatist insights serve to support relatively robust conceptions of truth and justification.
Democratic Deliberations, Equality of Influence, and Pragmatism
Authors: Baker Judith 
Published: June 2016

Democracy is committed to procedures of decision-making which express the values of both political equality and truth. One current program, that of strong or deliberative democracy, explicitly defends institutions which reflect the dual commitments to truth and equality. Like many other political theorists, however, deliberative democrats do not address the issue of a minority group which always loses the vote. The presumption is that free and equal deliberation by agents who think in terms of the common good is sufficient for political equality. I will argue, however, that the proposed deliberative procedures do not preclude persistent failure for a minority, and that this problem should lead us to acknowledge that power relations can underpin decision-making arrangements even within the ideal framework of deliberative democracy. Political equality and effective political equality seem to come apart.In order to come closer to the idea of effective political equality, this paper will look at the notion of equality of influence. It may seem tautological, and so redundant, to argue that political egalitarians and particularly deliberative democrats need to recognize equality of influence.
Fodor's Very Deep Thought
Authors: Montminy Martin 
Published: June 2016

Pooh rubbed his nose with his paw, and said that the Heffalump might be walking along, humming a little song, and looking up at the sky, wondering if it would rain, and so he wouldn't see the Very Deep Pit until he was half-way down, when it would be too late. (A.A. Milne, Winnie-the-Pooh)Jerry Fodor is loath to have content be constituted, even in part, by inferential relations. This loathing, I will argue, gets him into trouble. In his latest book, Concepts, Fodor contrasts informational atomism, his view of concepts and their content, with inferential role theory. The latter, he argues, is almost certainly false. This strikes cognitive science at its core, he adds, since the major theories of concepts currently in vogue in cognitive science are all variants on inferential role theory.
Kant on Welfare
Authors: LeBar Mark 
Published: June 2016

Contemporary debate over public welfare policy is often cast in Kantian terms. It is argued, for example, that respect for the dignity of the poor requires public aid, or that respect for their autonomy forbids it. In some recent political discourse, the views of Kant himself have been invoked in defense of public welfare provision. Some have argued that his moral theory mandates welfare as an expression of our duty to be beneficent, or that Kant's commitments to freedom require public provision of aid to those in need. These implications are thought to be reflected in his political theory in a variety of ways.However, at no point in his political works does Kant explicitly argue for the public provision of welfare on the basis of either beneficence or freedom. These omissions are the more striking because he does explicitly endorse the public provision of welfare. But the rationale for welfare he offers is that it is instrumentally necessary for the security and the stability of the state. This approach is very different from one grounded in moral duties of beneficence or respect for freedom, and may perhaps be disappointing to those who would like to establish some more hortatory moral rationale for welfare. But if Kant is to be enlisted in the cause of public welfare provision for the sake of beneficence or freedom, then an explanation is required why he offers no argument to that effect.
Could Experience Disconfirm the Propositions of Arithmetic?
Authors: Wilson Jessica M. 
Published: June 2016

I regard the whole of arithmetic as a necessary, or at least a natural, consequence of the simplest arithmetical act, that of counting…Richard DedekindAlbert Casullo has argued that the propositions of arithmetic could be experientially disconfirmed, with the help of an invented scenario wherein experiences involving our standard counting procedures, as applied to collections of objects, seem to indicate that 2+2≠4. Our best response to this scenario would be, Casullo suggests, to accept the results of our standard counting procedures as correct, and give up our standard arithmetical theory. This suggestion, interestingly enough, is not as bizarre as it initially appears. But indeed a problem lies in the assumption, common to Casullo’s scenario and to his suggested resolution, that our arithmetical theory might possibly be independent of our standard counting procedures. Here I show that this assumption is incoherent, whether the independence at issue is supposed to make room for the genuine possibility that 2+2≠4, or the merely epistemic possibility that we could rationally believe that 2+2≠4: given our standard counting procedures, then (on pain of irrationality) our arithmetical theory follows.
Does Continuous Creation Entail Occasionalism? Malebranche (and Descartes)
Authors: Pessin Andrew 
Published: June 2016

‘God needs no instruments to act,’ Malebranche writes in Search 6.2.3; “it suffices that He wills in order that a thing be, because it is a contradiction that He should will and that what He wills should not happen. Therefore, His power is His will” (450). After nearly identical language in Treatise 1.12, Malebranche writes that “[God's] wills are necessarily efficacious … His power differs not at all from His will” (116). God exercises His causal power, here, via His volitions; what He causes depends not merely on the fact that He wills, but specifically (since volitions are intentional states) on the content of His volitions, on “what He wills.” Yet despite the obviously key role the ordinary notion of volitional content plays for Malebranche, recent writers have paid surprisingly little attention either to it or its exegetical implications. I hope partly to rectify this situation here.The plan of this paper is this:(I) to borrow current work in the philosophy of mind to sketch the notion of an incomplete volition, i.e. one whose content is ‘incomplete’ in a sense to be explained;(II) to note that Malebranche accepts and uses something like this notion;
Welfare Should Be the Currency of Justice
Authors: Arneson Richard J. 
Published: June 2016

Some theories of justice hold that individuals placed in fortunate circumstances through no merit or choice of their own are morally obligated to aid individuals placed in unfortunate circumstances through no fault or choice of their own. In these theories what are usually regarded as obligations of benevolence are reinterpreted as strict obligations of justice. A closely related view is that the institutions of a society should be arranged in a way that gives priority to helping people placed in unfortunate circumstances through no fault or choice of their own. Any theory of this type needs a way of assessing individuals’ circumstances to determine who is fortunate and who is unfortunate.I shall argue that the standard for assessing people's circumstances to determine what they owe and are owed according to distributive justice should be the welfare or well-being level that they can attain, given their circumstances. This claim, that the ‘currency of justice’ should be welfare, has attracted criticisms that some have thought decisive. My counterclaim is that if we adopt an objective account of welfare and properly accommodate concerns about individual responsibility, the criticisms can be drained of their force.
Statements of Fact: Whose? Where? When?
Authors: Code Lorraine 
Published: June 2016

The phrase “statements of fact” has a clear, unequivocal ring. It speaks of a stable place untouchable by contests in epistemology and in more secular places, around questions of constructivism, subjectivism, and the politics of knowledge. It offers fixity, a locus of constancy in a shifting landscape where traditional certainties have ceased to hold, maintains a vantage point outside the fray, where knowledge-seekers can continue to believe in some degree of “correspondence” between items of knowledge and events in the world. Within the social institutions and practices where knowledge is an issue, it designates a secure starting place for deliberation, a way of ensuring that processes of decision-making remain cognizant of the “realities” they have to address.In the institutions of knowledge production and knowledgeable practice that generate the examples I appeal to in this essay – medicine and law – “statements of fact” appear to comprise an incontestable core around which interpretive strategies may indeed have to be enlisted, but which itself functions as a kind of interpretation-exempt zone. There are good reasons for its retaining that status, for resisting the instabilities and sheer whimsicalities that would follow from dislodging it.
A Tale of Two Froggies
Authors: Allen Colin 
Published: June 2016

There once was an ugly duckling. Except he wasn't a duckling at all, and once he realized his error he lived happily ever after. And there you have an early primer from the animal literature on the issue of misrepresentation – perhaps one of the few on this topic to have a happy ending.Philosophers interested in misrepresentation have turned their attention to a different fairy tale animal: the frog. No one gets kissed in this story and the controversial issue of self-recognition is avoided. There are simply some scientifically established facts about ways to get a frog to stick out its tongue. (Who would want to kiss a frog under those conditions, anyway?) Some frogs, it seems, are fairly indiscriminate about sticking out their tongues. Not just flies, but a whole slew of other things will go down the hatch if propelled at just the right velocity and range through a frog's visual field, provoking a tongue-flicking response. Fortunately for us all, frogs seem to be a bit more discriminating about whom they will kiss.
Are Frege Cases Exceptions to Intentional Generalizations?
Authors: Aydede Murat , Robbins Philip 
Published: June 2016

I IntroductionLet's assume there are psychological generalizations that the folk rely upon in explaining and predicting the behavior of their fellows. Let's further assume these generalizations are intentional, in that they do their explanatory and predictive work by attributing to the subjects in their domain intentional mental states such as beliefs, desires, and the like. Then we can define a broad intentional psychology as one that adverts only to broad, viz. purely denotational/ truth-conditional, mental contents in its generalizations; so the sentences expressing its generalizations should be read transparently. A narrow psychology is one that is not so restricted. Accordingly, sentences expressing narrow generalizations will contain opaque contexts, indicated by ‘that’ -clauses ('believes that…,’ ‘desires that … ,’ and the like). Here is an example of the sort of generalization we have in mind:(G) If S desires that P and believes that S can bring it about that P, then, ceteris paribus, S will try to bring it about that P.
What's Puzzling Gottlob Frege?
Authors: Thau Mike , Caplan Ben 
Published: June 2016

By any reasonable reckoning, Gottlob Frege's ‘On Sense and Reference’ is one of the more important philosophical papers of all time. Although Frege briefly discusses the sense-reference distinction in an earlier work (‘Function and Concept,’ in 1891), it is through ‘Sense and Reference’ that most philosophers have become familiar with it. And the distinction so thoroughly permeates contemporary philosophy of language and mind that it is almost impossible to imagine these subjects without it.The distinction between the sense and the referent of a name is introduced in the second paragraph of ‘Sense and Reference.’
Natural Selection Explanation and Origin Essentialism
Authors: Pust Joel 
Published: June 2016

Does natural selection explain why individual organisms have the traits that they do? This question has been the subject of vigorous debate in recent philosophy of biology. Sober and Walsh have defended the thesis that natural selection does not explain why any individual organism has the traits that it does. This thesis, I shall call ‘the Negative View.’ Neander and Matthen have defended the contrary thesis, which I shall call ‘the Positive View,’ according to which natural selection at least sometimes does explain why an individual organism has the traits that it does. In this paper, I will argue that recent arguments for the Positive View fail for a reason hitherto unnoticed and I will demonstrate that other recent defenses of the Negative View depend upon my own for their plausibility.I begin, in Section II, by showing that the issue is whether or not natural selection explains, of an individual, why it has the traits it does.
Anselm's Account of Freedom
Authors: Williams Thomas , Visser Sandra 
Published: June 2016

According to Anselm's official definition, freedom of choice is ‘the power to preserve rectitude of will for the sake of that rectitude itself.’ From the point of view of contemporary metaphysics, this is one of the most unhelpful definitions imaginable. Does such freedom require alternative possibilities, for example? Is it compatible with causal determination? Is the exercise of such freedom a necessary and sufficient condition for moral responsibility? The definition sheds no light on these questions.And so we need to move on from Anselm's definition to Anselm's account of freedom. Here, though, we encounter the opposite problem. Where Anselm's definition seems not to answer these questions at all, Anselm's account seems to answer all these questions, sometimes with a yes and sometimes with a no. Consider the question about alternative possibilities. In De libertate arbitrii, Anselm seems clearly to deny that freedom involves alternative possibilities. God, the good angels, and the blessed dead cannot do otherwise than preserve rectitude, but they are still free- freer, in fact, than those who are capable of abandoning rectitude.