Two Kinds of Commitments (And Two Kinds of Social Groups)

In this paper, I draw a distinction between two fundamentally different kinds of commitments by highlighting some previously unnoticed subtleties in the pragmatics of "commissive" utterances. I argue that theories which seek to model all commitments on promises, or to ground them all on voluntary consent, can account only for one sort of obligation and not for the other. Since social groups are most perspicuously categorized in terms of the sorts of commitments that bind their members together, this puts me in a position to distinguish two importantly different kinds of social groups, which I call aggregations and associations. I try to show that this position can account for features of the normative structure of social groups that are overlooked by those theorists (e.g. Margaret Gilbert) who have attempted to offer a unitary, voluntarist account of the phenomena under investigation.     

Knowledge Representation: Two Kinds Of Emergence

Two different but closely related issues in current cognitive science will be considered in this essay. One is the controversial and extensively discussed question of how connectionist and symbolic representations of knowledge are related to each other. The other concerns the notion of connectionist learning and its relevance for the understanding of the distinction between propositional and nonpropositional knowledge. More specifically, I shall give an overview of a result in Rantala and Vadén (1994) establishing a limiting case correspondence between symbolic and connectionist representations and, on the other hand, study the problem, preliminarily investigated in Rantala (1998), of how propositional knowledge may arise from nonpropositional knowledge. I shall also try to point out that on some more or less plausible assumptions, often made by cognitive scientists, these results may have some significance when we try to comprehend the nature of human knowledge representation. Some of these assumptions are rather hypothethical and debatable for the time being and they will become justified in the future only if there will be more progress in the empirical and theoretical research on the brain and on artificial networks. The assumptions concern, besides some questions of the behavior of neural networks, such things as the relevance of pattern recognition for modelling human cognition, in particular, knowledge acquisition, and the relation between emergence and reduction.     

科技道德的两种精神

本文致力于挖掘各种科技道德规范背后的伦理精神 ,提出科学精神和人本精神是科技道德规范的灵魂 ;阐释两大精神的丰富内涵 ;辨析二者间的学理关系和实践关系。     

2007年度卿氏奖学金颁奖

2007年12月2日,在“川大文科杰出教授卿希泰先生八十华诞庆典”会场,由台湾道教界人士、成都恩威集团募资的“卿希泰学术基金会”向本年度优秀研究生颁发了奖学金。本次奖学金的评选遵循“品学兼优、鼓励学术、宁缺毋滥”的原则,从众多申请者中遴选出博士生三名:朱丽晓、许宜兰、张海滨;硕士生五名:何江涛、崔晟、王京强、周波、廖玲。基金会终身董事长卿希泰先生、中科院院士赵尔宓先生等为获奖同学颁发了荣誉证书和奖金。2007年度卿氏奖学金颁奖@首之     

Two Kinds of Unknowing

Miranda Fricker claims that a “gap” in collective hermeneutical resources with respect to the social experiences of marginalized groups prevents members of those groups from understanding their own experiences (Fricker 2007). I argue that because Fricker misdescribes dominant hermeneutical resources as collective, she fails to locate the ethically bad epistemic practices that maintain gaps in dominant hermeneutical resources even while alternative interpretations are in fact offered by non‐dominant discourses. Fricker's analysis of hermeneutical injustice does not account for the possibility that marginalized groups can be silenced relative to dominant discourses without being prevented from understanding or expressing their own social experiences. I suggest that a gap in dominant hermeneutical resources is ambiguous between two kinds of unknowing: hermeneutical injustice suffered by members of marginalized groups, and epistemically and ethically blameworthy ignorance perpetrated by members of dominant groups.     

Two Kinds of Stakes

I distinguish two different kinds of practical stakes associated with propositions. The W‐stakes (world) track what is at stake with respect to whether the proposition is true or false. The A‐stakes (attitude) track what is at stake with respect to whether an agent believes (or relies on) the proposition. This poses a dilemma for those who claim that whether a proposition is known can depend on the stakes associated with it. Only the W‐stakes reading of this view preserves intuitions about knowledge‐attributions, but only the A‐stakes reading preserves the putative link between knowledge and practical reasoning that has motivated it.     

Two Kinds of Learning

Episodic analysis is the separation of a novel into its component episodes —i.e., into short stories each of which has a unitary theme—in order to provide equivalent units for content analysis. Independent coders show two types of disagreement. Neither is serious for content analysis, and both may be minimized by some suggested ground rules. In a study of 13 stylistically different books, intercoder reliability ranged from 76% to 94%. Variations in accuracy were clearly related to literary style. Relevant information on the coding process and reliability, as well as data on the number and length of episodes in the 13 books, are given in tabular form. Problems connected with reliable coding are discussed and some solutions are suggested.     

Two Kinds of Self-Knowledge

I argue that a variety of influential accounts of self-knowledge are flawed by the assumption that all immediate, authoritative knowledge of our own present mental states is of one basic kind. I claim, on the contrary, that a satisfactory account of self-knowledge must recognize at least two fundamentally different kinds of self-knowledge: an active kind through which we know our own judgments, and a passive kind through which we know our sensations. I show that the former kind of self-knowledge is in an important sense fundamental, since it is intimately connected with the very capacity for rational reflection, and since it must be present in any creature that understands the first-person pronoun. Moreover, I suggest that these thoughts about self-knowledge have a Kantian provenance.     

Two Kinds of Completeness and the Uses (and Abuses) of Exclusion Principles

I argue that the completeness of physics is composed of two distinct claims. The first is the commonly made claim that, roughly, every physical event is completely causally determined by physical events. The second has rarely, if ever, been explicitly stated in the literature and is the claim that microphysics provides a complete inventory of the fundamental categories that constitute both the causal features and intrinsic nature of all the events that causally affect the physical universe. After showing that these claims are distinct, I argue that they can be used to solve a difficulty with existing responses to the exclusion problem—namely, that these existing responses also undermine the powerful causal argument for physicalism. Recognizing that there are two kinds of completeness opens up room for the nonreductive physicalist to solve the exclusion problem while also endorsing a modified, cogent causal argument for a kind of physicalism compatible with her position.     

Two Kinds of Time-Consciousness and Three Kinds of Content

This paper explores the distinction between perceiving an object as extended in time, and experiencing a sequence of perceptions. I argue that this distinction cannot be adequately described by any present theory of time-consciousness and that in order to solve the puzzle, we need to consider perceptual content as having three distinct constituents: Explicit content, which has a particular phenomenal character, modal content, or the kind of content that is contributed by the psychological mode, and implicit content, which lacks phenomenal character. These notions are then further clarified and related to each other.     

Two Kinds of Feminist Philosophy

This article makes a distinction between two kinds of feminist philosophy. One looks ‘up’ to the realm of philosophy and aims to intervene in this realm in order to make it feminist. The other looks ‘down’ to the world of human experience and aims to make it feminist. This article argues that feminist philosophers’ efforts are better spent on the second kind of feminist philosophy. Feminist philosophy can better achieve its aims by applying philosophy to the critical analysis of women's lives and gender norms, rather than by attempting to change the discipline of philosophy itself.     

Differentiating Two Kinds of Neutrality

Neutrality is a most important concept, yet a controversial one. Theorists of different analytic schools have defined it in their own terms, leaving behind them a legacy of disparate and often contradictory formulations. In this paper, the author reviews briefly some of these ideas about neutrality. Then, from a contemporary interpersonal/relational perspective, the author takes a new look at the idea of neutrality. The author points out how unacknowledged discrepancies among these ideas get in the way of understanding and so complicate analytic discourse, and argues that useful work with this concept requires that analysts differentiate between two aspects of neutrality, specifically operational neutrality and intentional neutrality. The theoretical discussion is followed by a case vignette illustrating the clinical usefulness of this differentiation.     

Two Kinds of Role Property

The realization relation is commonly explicated via, or identified with, the causal role playing relation. However, the realization relation does not formally match the causal role playing relation. While realization is a relation between a base realizer property and a single higher level realized property, I argue that the causal role playing relation as typically defined is a relation between a base property and two higher-level role properties. Advocates of using causal role playing to explicate realization must therefore decide which of the two kinds of role property they identify with realized properties; I argue that neither choice is good, and the fact that one must make a choice is worse. A search for a new way of defining realization is in order.     

Two Kinds of Consequential Implication

The first section of the paper establishes the minimal properties of so-called consequential implication and shows that they are satisfied by at least two different operators of decreasing strength (symbolized by \(\rightarrow \) and \(\Rightarrow \)). Only the former has been analyzed in recent literature, so the paper focuses essentially on the latter. Both operators may be axiomatized in systems which are shown to be translatable into standard systems of normal modal logic. The central result of the paper is that the minimal consequential system for \(\Rightarrow \), CI\(\Rightarrow \), is definitionally equivalent to the deontic system KD and is intertranslatable with the minimal consequential system for \(\rightarrow \), CI. The main drawback ot the weaker operator \(\Rightarrow \) is that it lacks unrestricted contraposition, but the final section of the paper argues that \(\Rightarrow \) has some properties which make it a valuable alternative to \(\rightarrow \), turning out especially plausible as a basis for the definition of operators representing synthetic (i.e. context-dependent) conditionals.     

Two Kinds of Logical Impossibility

In this paper, we argue that a distinction ought to be drawn between two ways in which a given world might be logically impossible. First, a world w might be impossible because the laws that hold at w are different from those that hold at some other world (say the actual world). Second, a world w might be impossible because the laws of logic that hold in some world (say the actual world) are violated at w. We develop a novel way of modelling logical possibility that makes room for both kinds of logical impossibility. Doing so has interesting implications for the relationship between logical possibility and other kinds of possibility (for example, metaphysical possibility) and implications for the necessity or contingency of the laws of logic.     

Two Kinds of Organic Unity

This paper distinguishes two interpretations of G. E. Moore's principle of organic unities, which says that the intrinsic value of a whole need not equal the sum of the intrinsic values its parts would have outside it. A holistic interpretation, which was Moore's own, says that parts retain their values when they enter a whole but that there can be an additional value in the whole as a whole that must be added to them. The conditionality interpretation, which has been defended by Korsgaard, says that parts can change their values when they enter wholes, so no additional value is needed. The paper shows that the two interpretations, which differ on such apparently important issues as the nature of intrinsic value, can always yield the same conclusions about the overall value in a state of affairs, so there is in that sense nothing to choose between them. At the same time, though, the differences between the interpretations make sometimes one and sometimes the other more appropriate for expressing a given evaluative view. In this last connection the paper considers views about beauty, posthumous achievement, vices of disproportion, deserved and compassionate pain, and undeserved and malicious pleasure.     

Two Kinds of Purposive Action

It is normally assumed that there is only one kind of purposive action. This article argues that there are two kinds of purposive action, which require different models of explanation. One kind of action is done without awareness of reasons; another kind of action is done because the agent is aware of reasons for that action. The argument starts by noting that philosophers disagree about what explains action. Some claim that actions are explained by impersonal facts, such as facts about how things should be or have been historically (e.g. Millikan, Stout). Others claim that actions are explained by mental states, such as beliefs and desires (e.g. Davidson, Velleman). These philosophers are usually regarded as offering conflicting accounts of one thing. However, they are best understood as giving accounts of different models of action-explanation. Neither model fits every case, so there are at least two kinds of purposive action.