存在论的基本问题

唯名论和实在论之间的较量在整个哲学史上占据着重要地位。由于贝克莱、休谟和康德等人的工作,唯名论在哲学上一直处于主导地位。然而,当唯名论进入语言分析后,在处理不同语境的句子的联合这个存在论的基本问题时,给出了无数的讨论,但仍然无法给出让人接受的解决办法。于是,人们另辟新径、提出了偶态分析。美国哲学家普兰廷伽的偶态分析相当完整地解决了唯名论语言分析所遇到的问题。有意思的是,为了说明全部可能世界的存在意义,普兰廷伽不得不引进基督教的全知上帝概念。把普兰廷伽的偶态观念运用在认识论上,隐含着对恩典概念的引进。我们发现,恩典概念是可操作的,而且对存在论讨论是必要的。     

Re-Thinking the Human: Heidegger,Fundamental Ontology,and Humanism

This essay engages with Heidegger’s attempt to re-think the human being. It shows that Heidegger re-thinks the human being by challenging the way the human being has been thought, and the mode of thinking traditionally used to think about the human being. I spend significant time discussing Heidegger’s attempt before, in the final section, asking some critical questions of Heidegger’s endeavour and pointing out how his analysis can re-invigorate contemporary attempts to understand the human being.     

The Equivocity of Being: Heidegger,Multiplicity, and Fundamental Ontology

Human Studies - The Heidegger–Deleuze relationship has attracted significant attention of late. This paper contributes to this line of research by examining Deleuze’s claim, recently...     

Connecting Scientific Reasoning and Causal Inference

Literature on multivariable causal inference (MCI) and literature on scientific reasoning (SR) have proceeded almost entirely independently, although they in large part address the same phenomena. An effort is made to bring these paradigms into close enough alignment with one another to compare implications of the two lines of work and examine how they might illuminate one another. The conclusion is that SR research stands to benefit from recognition that it addresses a broader set of cognitive phenomena than reasoning in contexts that are explicitly scientific, whereas MCI research stands to benefit from recognizing inter- and, especially, intra-individual variability that its methods may have masked. Data reported here based on a merging of the two methodological paradigms support a model in which individuals have available a repertory of different inference strategies or rules (reflecting different criteria for inferences of causality) from which they select variably across occasions, in a dynamic process of theory-evidence coordination.     

Fundamental Quantification and the Language of the Ontology Room

Nihilism is the thesis that no composite objects exist. Some ontologists have advocated abandoning nihilism in favor of deep nihilism, the thesis that composites do not exist_O, where to exist_O is to be in the domain of the most fundamental quantifier. By shifting from an existential to an existential_O thesis, the deep nihilist seems to secure all the benefits of a composite‐free ontology without running afoul of ordinary belief in the existence of composites. I argue that, while there are well‐known reasons for accepting nihilism, there appears to be no reason at all to accept deep nihilism. In particular, deep nihilism draws no support either from the usual arguments for nihilism or from considerations of parsimony.     

A Test by Any Other Name: P Values,Bayes Factors,and Statistical Inference

Procedures used for statistical inference are receiving increased scrutiny as the scientific community studies the factors associated with insuring reproducible research. This note addresses recent negative attention directed at p values, the relationship of confidence intervals and tests, and the role of Bayesian inference and Bayes factors, with an eye toward better understanding these different strategies for statistical inference. We argue that researchers and data analysts too often resort to binary decisions (e.g., whether to reject or accept the null hypothesis) in settings where this may not be required.     

自我宽恕的概念、测量及其与其他心理变量的关系

自我宽恕是指当自己是侵犯者时,发生于自己内部的,对待自己的动机由报复转向善待的变化。自我宽恕的概念在其对象、过程、实质和价值方面都存在着争议,即自己与他人、给予与寻求、特质与情境、积极与消极的争论。自我宽恕与人际宽恕在其对象、影响因素与后果等诸多方面也存在区别。对自我宽恕的测量现有宽恕自我（FS）量表、Heartland宽恕量表（HFS）以及状态自我宽恕量表（SSFS）3种工具。有关自我宽恕的相关研究显示,自我宽恕与人格特质的关系还待探讨,而自我宽恕与心理健康水平有相关。未来的研究应深化自我宽恕的界定、拓展其研究方法、扩大其研究内容。     

Inference,explanation, and asymmetry

Explanation is asymmetric: if A explains B, then B does not explain A. Traditionally, the asymmetry of explanation was thought to favor causal accounts of explanation over their rivals, such as those that take explanations to be inferences. In this paper, we develop a new inferential approach to explanation that outperforms causal approaches in accounting for the asymmetry of explanation.

     

Argument,Inference, and Persuasion

This paper distinguishes between two types of persuasive force arguments can have in terms of two different connections between arguments and inferences. First, borrowing from Pinto (in Argument, inference, and dialectic, Kluwer Academic Pub, Dordrecht, 2001), an arguer's invitation to inference directly persuades an addressee if the addressee performs an inference that the arguer invites. This raises the question of how invited inferences are determined by an invitation to inference. Second, borrowing from Sorenson (J Philos 88:245–266, 1991), an arguer's invitation to inference indirectly persuades an addressee if the addressee performs an inference guided by the argument even though it is uninvited. This raises the question of how an invitation to inference can guide inferences that the arguer does not use the argument to invite. Focusing on belief-inducing inference, the primary aims here are (i) to clarify what is necessary for an addressee's belief-inducing inference to be invited by an argument used as an instrument of persuasion; and (ii) to highlight the capacity of arguments to guide such inferences. The paper moves beyond Pinto's (2001) discussion by using Boghossian's (Philos Stud 169:1–18, 2014) Taking Condition in service of (i) and (ii) in way that illustrates how epistemically bad arguments can rationally persuade addressees of their conclusions.

     

Noneism,Ontology, and Fundamentality

In the recent literature on all things metaontological, discussion of a notorious Meinongian doctrine—the thesis that some objects have no kind of being at all—has been conspicuous by its absence. And this is despite the fact that this thesis is the central element of the noneist metaphysics of Richard Routley (1980) and Graham Priest (2005). In this paper, we therefore examine the metaontological foundations of noneism, with a view to seeing exactly how the noneist's approach to ontological inquiry differs from the orthodox Quinean one. We proceed by arguing that the core anti‐Quinean element in noneism has routinely been misidentified: rather than concerning Quine's thesis that to be is to be the value of a variable, the real difference is that the noneist rejects what we identify as Quine's “translate‐and‐deflate” methodology. In rejecting this aspect of Quinean orthodoxy, the noneist is in good company: many of those who think that questions of fundamentality should be the proper focus of ontological inquiry can be read as rejecting it too. Accordingly, we then examine the differences between the noneist's conception of ontology and that offered by the fundamentalist. We argue that these two anti‐Quinean approaches differ in terms of their respective conceptions of the theoretical role associated with the notion of being. And the contrast that emerges between them is, in the end, an explanatory one.     

Language,Ontology, and Metaphysics

Thomas Hofweber's Ontology and the Ambitions of Metaphysics is ambitious, thought‐provoking, and a good read. It expands upon a project he's developed in several previous papers—a project that seamlessly weaves together both metaphysics and metametaphysics. The book is as much about methodology as it is about the substantive conclusions he draws about what there is. As a consequence, it is a long book that covers a lot of ground. Since I cannot do justice to all of it, I hope my fellow symposiasts will take up parts of the book that I neglect. There is a lot of good stuff in there.