Must we measure what we mean?

This paper excavates a debate concerning the claims of ordinary language philosophers that took place during the middle of the last century. The debate centers on the status of statements about ‘what we say’. On one side of the debate, critics of ordinary language philosophy argued that statements about ‘what we say’ should be evaluated as empirical observations about how people do in fact speak, on a par with claims made in the language sciences. By that standard, ordinary language philosophers were not entitled to the claims that they made about what we would say about various topics. On the other side of the debate, defenders of the methods of ordinary language philosophy sought to explain how philosophers can be entitled to statements about what we would say without engaging in extensive observations of how people do in fact use language. In this paper, I defend the idea that entitlement to claims about what we say can be had in a way that doesn’t require empirical observation, and I argue that ordinary language philosophers are (at least sometimes) engaged in a different project than linguists or empirically minded philosophers of language, which is subject to different conditions of success.     

Kierkegaard and Camus: either/or?

The philosophies of Søren Kierkegaard and Albert Camus have typically been considered as inverted images of each other. Kierkegaard turns to faith in God as a path of redemption from meaninglessness while Camus rejects faith as a form of intellectual suicide and cowardice. I argue that an analysis of key terms of contest—faith and lucidity, revolt and suicide, Abraham and Sisyphus, despair and its overcoming—serves to blur the lines of contrast, making Kierkegaard and Camus much closer in their views of what sort of life we should live in face of the forsakenness of our condition than they seem at first glance.     

Do we hear size or sound? Balls dropped on plates

The aim of this study is to examine whether it is possible to recover directly the size of an object from the sound of an impact. Specifically, the study is designed to investigate whether listeners can tell the size of a ball from the sound when it is dropped on plates of different diameters (on one, two, or three plates in Experiments 1, 2, and 3, respectively). In this paradigm, most of the sound produced is from the plate rather than the ball. Listeners were told neither how many different balls or plates were used nor the materials of the balls and plates. Although listeners provided reasonable ball size estimates, their judgments were influenced by the size of the plate: Balls were judged to be larger when dropped on larger plates. Moreover, listeners were generally unable to recognize either ball and plate materials or the number of plates used in Experiments 2 and 3. Finally, various acoustic properties of the sounds are shown to be correlated with listeners' judgments.     

Interpersonal choice: The advantage on the left or on the right?

This study explored whether body specificity unconsciously influenced preferences for certain people. Participants were presented pictures of the heads of 2 persons who were described as having the similar personality, profession and family background. They were instructed to choose 1 in each pair as the preferred date, preferred friend, more charismatic boss or as the better national leader. The results showed body specificity had an influence on the selection preference on first impression. Participants tended to choose the character on their dominant‐hand side. This study not only provided the first social psychological evidence for the body‐specificity hypothesis, but also first demonstrated a role for body specificity in impression formation and selection preference.     

What do we owe co-nationals and non-nationals? why the liberal nationalist account fails and how we can do better

Liberal nationalists have been trying to argue that a suitably sanitized version of nationalism—namely, one that respects and embodies liberal values—is not only morally defensible, but also of great moral value, especially on grounds liberals should find very appealing. Although there are plausible aspects to the idea and some compelling arguments are offered in defense of this position, one area still proves to be a point of considerable vulnerability for this project and that is the issue of what, according to the liberal nationalists, we owe both members of our nation, our co-nationals, and what we owe those who are not members of our nation. It is here that we see the project still has some distance to go if a version of liberal nationalism is, indeed, to be morally defensible. In this paper I examine leading liberal nationalist accounts of our obligations to co-nationals and non-nationals. I argue that liberal nationalists have not yet given us an adequate account of our obligations to non-nationals for a number of reasons. For instance, on the issue of the priority we may give co-nationals' interests over non-nationals', the theorists' view show significant tension, they seem to be confused about what their positions entail, the views are unhelpful, ad hoc, or the positions are quite unclear. Liberal nationalists also have a misleading impression that their positions better capture the relation between personal identity and duty, but this turns out to be false. Other defects with their specific projects are highlighted. I go on to offer a more promising method for determining our obligations to non-nationals. Rather than this alternative precluding any scope for nationalism, it actually makes clearer to us how there might be some defensible space for nationalism once our obligations to put in place appropriate institutions and sets of rules have been fulfilled.     

Must the Scientific Realist be a Rationalist?

Marc Alspector-Kelly claims that Bas van Fraassen’s primary challenge to the scientific realist is for the realist to find a way to justify the use of some mode of inference that takes him from the world of observables to knowledge of the world of unobservables without thereby abandoning empiricism. It is argued that any effort to justify such an “inferential wand” must appeal either to synthetic a priori or synthetic a posteriori knowledge. This disjunction turns into a dilemma for the empirically-minded realist as either disjunct leads to unwanted consequences. In this paper, I split the horns of this dilemma by arguing that the realist can justify one particular such mode of inference – abduction – without committing himself to rationalism. The realist may justify this mode of inference by appealing to the analytic a priori axioms of the probability calculus. I show that Peter Lipton’s tripartite defense of abduction constitutes such a method of justification.     

Must God Be Dead? Reinventing the Sacred

Newton became a death knell for a theistic God and for a non-epiphenominal mind. The culprit is the deterministic causal closure of classical physics. Two major revolutions are taking us beyond this closure. The first is Quantum Mechanics, which is non-deterministic. The second revolution may just be happening. The emergence and evolution of life in our or any biosphere is governed by no law at all. This freedom suggests one sense of God as the natural creativity of the Universe.     

Why are we fighting? A view of the “great war” from across the ocean

This article examines the dispute concerning the meaning of World War I among leading American intellectuals in the period 1915–1918. Taking center stage here are the views of one of the founding fathers of American pragmatism, John Dewey (1859–1952), on the causes of the “Great War,” its higher meaning and goals which led to America’s entry into the War and also its influence on the social reconstruction of American society and the post-War world order. The final section of the article is devoted to a critique of Dewey’s position towards American participation in the War by another famous American intellectual, Randolph Bourne (1886–1918), who laid the foundations for a tradition of social criticism in the U.S. in the twentieth century.