Rousseau’s Emile, or the Fear of Passions

Notwithstanding the general accepted understanding that Rousseau is the master of modern education reflecting the progress by enlightenment this articles suggests that Rousseau??s Emile is??as most of Rousseau??s other writings are, too??testimony to a brilliant and passionate writer expressing thoughts about his concern how to deal with passions??passion being one of the most disputed concepts in late seventeenth and in eighteenth century. The reading of Emile has therefore take into account polemic as a literary trope in Rousseau??s style of writing.     

A Note on Prototypes,Convexity and Fuzzy Sets

The work on prototypes in ontologies pioneered by Rosch [10] and elaborated by Lakoff [8] and Freund [3] is related to vagueness in the sense that the more remote an instance is from a prototype the fewer people agree that it is an example of that prototype. An intuitive example is the prototypical “mother”, and it is observed that more specific instances like ”single mother”, “adoptive mother”, “surrogate mother”, etc., are less and less likely to be classified as “mothers” by experimental subjects. From a different direction Gärdenfors [4] provided a persuasive account of natural predicates to resolve paradoxes of induction like Goodman’s “Grue” predicate [5]. Gärdenfors proposed that “quality dimensions” arising from human cognition and perception impose topologies on concepts such that the ones that appear “natural” to us are convex in these topologies. We show that these two cognitive principles — prototypes and predicate convexity — are equivalent to unimodal (convex) fuzzy characteristic functions for sets. Then we examine the case when the fuzzy set characteristic function is not convex, in particular when it is multi-modal. We argue that this is an indication that the fuzzy concept should really be regarded as a super concept in which the decomposed components are subconcepts in an ontological taxonomy.     

Two notions of epistemic validity

How to accept a conditional? F. P. Ramsey proposed the following test in (Ramsey 1990). (RT) ‘If A, then B’ must be accepted with respect to the current epistemic state iff the minimal hypothetical change of it needed to accept A also requires accepting B. In this article we propose a formulation of (RT), which unlike some of its predecessors, is compatible with our best theory of belief revision, the so-called AGM theory (see (Gärdenfors 1988), chapters 1–5 for a survey). The new test, which, we claim, encodes some of the crucial insights defended by F. P. Ramsey in (Ramsey 1990), is used to study the conditionals epistemically validated by the AGM postulates. Our notion of validity (PV) is compared with the notion of negative validity (NV) used by Gärdenfors in (Gärdenfors 1988). It is observed that the notions of PV and NV will in general differ and that when these differences arise it is the notion of PV that is preferable. Finally we compare our formulation of the Ramsey test with a previous formulation offered by Gärdenfors (GRT). We show that any attempt to interpret (GRT) as delivering acceptance conditions for Ramsey's conditionals is doomed to failure.     

Normative uncertainty for non-cognitivists

Normative judgments involve two gradable features. First, the judgments themselves can come in degrees; second, the strength of reasons represented in the judgments can come in degrees. Michael Smith has argued that non-cognitivism cannot accommodate both of these gradable dimensions. The degrees of a non-cognitive state can stand in for degrees of judgment, or degrees of reason strength represented in judgment, but not both. I argue that (a) there are brands of noncognitivism that can surmount Smith??s challenge, and (b) any brand of non-cognitivism that has even a chance of solving the Frege?CGeach Problem and some related problems involving probabilistic consistency can also thereby solve Smith??s problem. Because only versions of non-cognitivism that can solve the Frege?CGeach Problem are otherwise plausible, all otherwise plausible versions of noncognitivism can meet Smith??s challenge.     

Exemplarization and self-presentation: Lehrer and Meinong on consciousness

Alexius Meinong??s specific use of the term ??self-presentation?? had a significant influence on modern epistemology and philosophical psychology. To show that there are remarkable parallels between Meinong??s account of the self-presentation of experiences and Lehrer??s account of the exemplarization of experiences is one of this paper??s main objectives. Another objective is to put forward some comments and critical remarks to Lehrer??s approach. One of the main problems can be expressed by the following: The process of using a particular experience as a sample, that is, an exemplar that we use to stand for and refer to a plurality of experiences, Lehrer calls ??exemplarization??. As concrete experiences are multifarious (red and round, for example), how can we single out a specific sort of experiences (the red ones) by the process of exemplarization when we use such a multifarious experience as a sample?     

Arbitrary reference

Two fundamental rules of reasoning are Universal Generalisation and Existential Instantiation. Applications of these rules involve stipulations (even if only implicitly) such as ??Let n be an arbitrary number?? or ??Let John be an arbitrary Frenchman??. Yet the semantics underlying such stipulations are far from clear. What, for example, does ??n?? refer to following the stipulation that n be an arbitrary number? In this paper, we argue that ??n?? refers to a number??an ordinary, particular number such as 58 or 2,345,043. Which one? We do not and cannot know, because the reference of ??n?? is fixed arbitrarily. Underlying this proposal is a more general thesis: Arbitrary Reference (AR): It is possible to fix the reference of an expression arbitrarily. When we do so, the expression receives its ordinary kind of semantic-value, though we do not and cannot know which value in particular it receives. Our aim in this paper is defend AR. In particular, we argue that AR can be used to provide an account of instantial reasoning (one that is better than the prominent alternatives), and we suggest that AR can also figure in offering new solutions to a range of difficult philosophical puzzles.     

Revisiting the Cultural Dope

This essay focuses on the ??cultural dope,?? an ironic reference in Harold Garfinkel??s Studies in Ethnomethodology to the rule-following actor in conventional sociological theories. In the nearly half-century since the publication of that book, the ??cultural dope?? has been incorporated into numerous criticisms of ??models of man?? in the human sciences. Garfinkel??s account appeals to many writers because it seems to present an alternative picture of the actor: an individual who is self-aware, reflective, and skilled in the conduct of daily affairs. A problem with such a generalized picture of the actor is that it may seem to encourage uncritical acceptance of whatever ??the public?? (or a broad segment of the public) happens to believe or support. This paper revisits Garfinkel??s account of the cultural dope, and contrasts ??conservative?? and ??radical?? readings of what Garfinkel does with that figure. The ??conservative?? reading leaves the edifice of a social-structural model largely intact, and provides an alternative, more complex, picture of individual action than that of a cultural dope. The ??radical?? reading places relevant social structures in a dependent relation to the contingencies of action, and thus destabilizes the very theoretical edifice that sets up the problem of how to integrate individual actions with stable social structures. In line with the ??radical?? reading, this paper suggests that Garfinkel creates serious difficulty for any generalized ??model of man,?? regardless of whether it portrays the individual as active or passive, well-informed or ignorant, or reflexive or not.     

Speculative foundations of phenomenology

This essay tries to account for a certain ??speculative turn?? in contemporary philosophy (Q. Meillassoux, G. Harman, M. Gabriel, etc.) from a phenomenological point of view. A first objective of it will consist in exposing the link between, on the one hand, the methodological sense of Husserl??s concrete phenomenological analyses (concerning, for example, time and intersubjective structure of transcendental subjectivity,) and on the other hand, the consequences that follow from the grounding of phenomenology as first philosophy. This will allow a largely underestimated research angle to be opened up, one that I call a ??constructive phenomenology,?? that constitutes an essential and original figure of transcendental philosophy in general. A second objective will then consist in the attempt to sketch the foundation of knowledge as knowledge, the core of a ??phenomenological metaphysics.?? Whereas the first part will remain within a Husserlian framework, the second will develop some elements of a ??speculative transcendentalism?? in a phenomenological perspective.     

Wogegen wandte sich Husserl 1891?

A comprehensive and agreed-upon account of Husserl??s relation to Gottlob Frege does not yet exist. In this situation we encounter interpretations that allow systematic dogmas to reappear that should have long been vanquished??for instance, that the author of the Logical Investigations was not only decisively influenced by Frege, but also that he had already retracted his sharpest Frege-critique by 1891. The present essay contains a largely historical response to W. Künne??s new monograph on Frege that advocates such views. We will concentrate on a small remark that turns out to reference a defining moment for any understanding of Husserl??s early philosophy. We shall argue that Husserl??s supposed self-criticism does not turn on the critique that he had earlier leveled at Frege??s Grundlagen der Arithmetik; rather, it has to do exclusively with his own earlier systematic positions on the grounding of arithmetic. In this context, an important particular of Husserl??s Philosophie der Arithmetik takes center stage: this book is a mosaic composed from old and new insights, a fact that becomes most evident in the two distinct concepts of ??equivalence?? that are founded there, which reflects Husserl??s transition from a theory of arithmetic based on the concept of number to one based on the parallelism between proper and symbolic (improper) presentations. This change involves a long historical development that goes back to a tradition marked by the work of Bolzano, Lotze, Brentano, and Stumpf, and it is closely tied to the problem of how to distinguish between the sense and the object of an act. Systematic neglect of the historical background of the Frege?CHusserl relation has led to disputes over who owns the copyright to the sense/reference distinction, but it has obscured the very core of the original line of questioning.     

Towards a “Sophisticated” Model of Belief Dynamics. Part II: Belief Revision.

In the companion paper (Towards a “sophisticated” model of belief dynamics. Part I), a general framework for realistic modelling of instantaneous states of belief and of the operations involving them was presented and motivated. In this paper, the framework is applied to the case of belief revision. A model of belief revision shall be obtained which, firstly, recovers the Gärdenfors postulates in a well-specified, natural yet simple class of particular circumstances; secondly, can accommodate iterated revisions, recovering several proposed revision operators for iterated revision as special cases; and finally, offers an analysis of Rott’s recent counterexample to several Gärdenfors postulates [32], elucidating in what sense it fails to be one of the special cases to which these postulates apply.     

Risk's Place in Decision Rules

To handle epistemic and pragmatic risks, Gärdenfors and Sahlin (1982, 1988) design a decision procedure for cases in which probabilities are indeterminate. Their procedure steps outside the traditional expected utility framework. Must it do this? Can the traditional framework handle risk? This paper argues that it can. The key is a comprehensive interpretation of an option's possible outcomes. Taking possible outcomes more broadly than Gärdenfors and Sahlin do, expected utility can give risk its due. In particular, Good's (1952) decision procedure adequately handles indeterminate probabilities and the risks they generate.     

Fine-Grained Colour Discrimination without Fine-Grained Colour

René Jagnow [2012] argues that David Rosenthal's theory of consciousness cannot account for certain experiences that involve colours so fine-grained that we do not and cannot have concepts of them. Jagnow claims that an appeal to comparative concepts such as being slightly darker than cannot help Rosenthal, since, in order to apply such concepts, we would already need to be conscious of two distinct fine-grained colours. The present paper contests this claim. It appeals to the Cornsweet illusion and some other visual phenomena, in order to argue that our visual systems can and do represent brutely comparative matters.     

Mencius and Dewey on Moral Perception, Deliberation, and Imagination

I argue against interpretations of Mencius by Liu Xiusheng and Eric Hutton that attempt to make sense of a Mencian account of moral judgment and deliberation in light of the moral particularism of John McDowell. These interpretations read Mencius??s account as relying on a faculty of moral perception, which generates moral judgments by directly perceiving moral facts that are immediately intuited with the help of rudimentary and innate moral inclinations. However, I argue that it is a mistake to identify innate moral inclinations as the foundational source of moral judgments and knowledge. Instead, if we understand that for Mencius an individual??s natural dispositions (xing ??) have a relational element, then the normativity of moral judgments can be seen as stemming from the relationships that constitute the dispositions of each individual. Finally, this essay elaborates on John Dewey's account of moral deliberation as moral imagination, an account which also takes the relational quality of natural dispositions as its starting point, in order to suggest the vital role of imagination for Mencius??s own account of moral deliberation.     

Confucian Ritual as Body Language of Self, Society, and Spirit

This article explains how li ?Y or ??ritual propriety?? is the ??body language?? of ren ?? or the authentic expression of our humanity. Li and ren are interdependent aspects of a larger creative human way (rendao ???) that can be conceptually distinguished as follows: li refers to the ritualized social form of appropriate conduct and ren to the more general, authentically human spirit this expresses. Li is the social instrument for self-cultivation and the vehicle of harmonious human interaction. More, li must mean something that is effectively communicated to others for an authentic, human (ren) interaction to occur. Li is the body language of ren in being the ritual vehicle for its?? expression; however, li is underdetermined by ren and so must be distinguished from it in on further grounds: authentic human activity must not just be equivocated with social convention because conclusively establishing whether a particular action is li (or is a truly ren action) is impossible. As a result, li is often confused with social power and privilege that is easier to empirically identify than ren conduct is, but this is a mistake since li has to express ren or it is not li at all. The inescapable ambiguity of li ?C an ambiguity that attaches to any language ?C can be critiqued by the Western view that sees something ??essential?? to the ??self,?? and that makes one a ??self?? in and of oneself and not in a way that depends on others. I show that such Western individualism ?C while resting on a fundamentally different way of thinking of being a person and living a good life ?C does not reduce Confucian ritual to being an instrument for social discrimination and subordination. My argument is indebted to twentieth-century philosophy of language in the West that offered the idea that some words are actions.     

Causes of causes

When is a cause of a cause of an effect also a cause of that effect? The right answer is either ??Sometimes?? or ??Always??. In favour of ??Always??, transitivity is considered by some to be necessary for distinguishing causes from redundant non-causal events. Moreover transitivity may be motivated by an interest in an unselective notion of causation, untroubled by principles of invidious discrimination. And causal relations appear to ??add up?? like transitive relations, so that the obtaining of the overarching relation is not independent of the obtaining of the intermediaries. On the other hand, in favour of ??Sometimes??, often we seem not to treat events that are very spatiotemporally remote from an effect as its causes, even when connected to the effect in question by a chain of counterfactual or chance-raising dependence. Moreover cases of double prevention provide counterexamples to causal transitivity even over short chains. According to the argument of this paper, causation is non-transitive. Transitizing causation provides no viable account of causal redundancy. An unselective approach to causation may motivate resisting the ??distance?? counterexamples to transitivity, but it does not help with double prevention, and even makes it more intractable. The strongest point in favour of transitivity is the adding up of causal relations, and this is the point that extant non-transitizing analyses have not adequately addressed. I propose a necessary condition on causation that explains the adding up phenomenon. In doing so it also provides a unifying explanation of distance and double prevention counterexamples to transitivity.     

Pretense, imagination, and belief: the Single Attitude theory

A popular view has it that the mental representations underlying human pretense are not beliefs, but are ??belief-like?? in important ways. This view typically posits a distinctive cognitive attitude (a ??DCA??) called ??imagination?? that is taken toward the propositions entertained during pretense, along with correspondingly distinct elements of cognitive architecture. This paper argues that the characteristics of pretense motivating such views of imagination can be explained without positing a DCA, or other cognitive architectural features beyond those regulating normal belief and desire. On the present ??Single Attitude?? account of imagination, propositional imagining just is a form of believing. The Single Attitude account is also distinguished from ??metarepresentational?? accounts of pretense, which hold that both pretending and recognizing pretense in others require one to have concepts of mental states. It is argued, to the contrary, that pretending and recognizing pretense require neither a DCA nor possession of mental state concepts.     

The categorisation process in intergroup relations

In the first two parts of the paper a distinction is made between a ?conflict or convergence of interests' approach (Sherif) and a ?categorisation' approach (Tajfel) in the area of the experimental study of intergroup relations. Some recent experimental findings are mentioned, and a theoretical development of the categorisation approach is proposed. In the third part a new experiment illustrating the relevance of the categorisation approach is described.     

Keith Lehrer on the basing relation

In this paper, we review Keith Lehrer??s account of the basing relation, with particular attention to the two cases he offered in support of his theory, Raco (Lehrer, Theory of knowledge, 1990; Theory of knowledge, (2nd ed.), 2000) and the earlier case of the superstitious lawyer (Lehrer, The Journal of Philosophy, 68, 311?C313, 1971). We show that Lehrer??s examples succeed in making his case that beliefs need not be based on the evidence, in order to be justified. These cases show that it is the justification (rather than the belief) that must be based in the evidence. We compare Lehrer??s account of basing with some alternative accounts that have been offered, and show why Lehrer??s own account is more plausible.     

Hegel’s logic of finitude

In ??Violence and Metaphysics?? Jacques Derrida suggests that ??the only effective position to take in order not to be enveloped by Hegel would seem to be??to consider false-infinity??irreducible.?? Inversely, refuting the charge of logocentrism associated with Hegelian true infinity (wahrhafte Unendlichkeit) would involve showing that Hegel??s speculative logic does not establish the infinity of being exempt from the negativity of the finite. This paper takes up Derrida??s challenge, and argues that true infinity is crucial to Hegel??s understanding of ideality as a question of normative authority, which does not fall prey to logocentrism. Through an exposition of the dialectic of the finite and the infinite in Hegel??s Science of Logic, I argue that true infinity is not an ontological category that eliminates division, but rather refers to the metalogical standpoint involved in a philosophical account of determinacy. Although fully achieved at the end of the Logic, the metalogical standpoint that Hegel elaborates in the Seinslogik under the banner of the true infinite already clarifies that determinacy is a product of normative authority that is itself precarious.