The Agential Point of View

Agentialist accounts of self‐knowledge seek to do justice to the connection between our identities as rational agents and our capacity to know our own minds. There are two strategies that agentialists have employed in developing their position: substantive and non‐substantive. My aim is to explicate and defend one particular example of the non‐substantive strategy, namely, that proposed by Tyler Burge. In particular, my concern is to defend Burge's claim that critical reasoning requires a relation of normative directness between reviewing and reviewed perspectives. My defence will involve supplementing Burge's view with a substantive agentialist account of self‐knowledge.     

The Rawls–Harsanyi Dispute: A Moral Point of View

Central to the Rawls–Harsanyi dispute is the question of whether the core modeling device of Rawls' theory of justice, the original position, justifies Rawls' principles of justice, as Rawls suggests, or whether it justifies the average utility principle, as Harsanyi suggests. Many commentators agree with Harsanyi and consider this dispute to be primarily about the correct application of normative decision theory to Rawls' original position. I argue that, if adequately conceived, the Rawls–Harsanyi dispute is not primarily a dispute about the correct application of normative decision theory to Rawls' original position. Instead, Rawls and Harsanyi aim to model different moral ideals, and this difference in their moral assumptions leads them to significantly different conclusions about justice. There is no winner in the Rawls–Harsanyi dispute. Instead, the dispute merely clarifies the moral ideals and their formal representations that need to be assumed in order to justify either Rawls' contractualist principles of justice or the average utility principle. Thus understood, the Rawls–Harsanyi dispute offers a promising starting point for future research that can deepen and enrich our understanding of the demands of justice.     

The Soul: An Existentialist Point of View

The debate in relation to the soul suffers nowadays from a great lack of clarity. At least part of this cloudiness stems from a confusion among three different viewpoints that are not always reconcilable or mutually intelligible: the scientific point of view (natural sciences and empirical psychology), the therapeutic point of view (especially psychoanalysis) and the philosophical point of view. The goal of this paper is to blow away a little this cloudiness, and to introduce into the discussion a view that has not yet received its proper place in it: existentialism. The scientific approach investigates the soul as if it were an object in the world, a fact. This approach gives priority to objective observations over subjective ones, and steps in the direction of materialization of the soul (the soul becomes the mind and the mind becomes the brain). Transcendental philosophy and psychological therapies explain the relation between the subject and its objects, and by this reveal the subjective dimension of our reality as the ground not only for our objective knowledge but for our ethical life as well. Existentialism, I suggest, makes a further and important step in this direction by focusing on individualistic aspects of human existence, which science could not know and general theories of the subject do not see.     

一个维特根斯坦主义者眼中的框架问题

框架问题的核心命意乃是：在对智能体的行动进行表征之时,如何能够在有效地表征出行动的效果之时,避免对于其非效果的表征？对于符号主义路数的人工智能研究来说,框架问题的确非常棘手,因为它的存在使得对于行动的知识刻画必须引入大量的框架公理,并由此使得系统的计算负荷剧增。从历史上看,人工智能界赖以解决这个问题的基本路径主要有两条。第一条是诉诸于＂关于惯性的常识律＂或缺省逻辑,即在行动表征中预设：没有被表征式牵涉到的＂世界其余部分＂都将保持惯性。另一条路径则采纳了海耶斯的＂素朴物理学＂表征方案,即试图把日常物理学知识全部用谓词逻辑公理化,让系统自动推算出哪些动作会导致哪些结果。本文将论证,这两条道路其实都走不通。在此基础上,本文将从维特根斯坦的《论确定性》中寻找灵感,建立一个关于信念网动力学模型——在这个模型中,某些知识节点的激发只会导致某些与之毗邻的节点的激发,因此,对于特定问题求解路径的表征,就能够避免对于一个更大范围内的知识网络的牵涉。框架问题也有望借助于这个模型得到解决。最后,我将利用＂非公理推演系统＂（NARS）为这个模型提供一种尽量逼真的工程学模拟。     

A Religious Point of View

The purpose of this paper is to show connections between Wittgenstein's approach to philosophy and the writings on religion of two authors whom we know Wittgenstein read and admired: William James and Leo Tolstoy. Wittgenstein stresses certain attitudes toward philosophical ‘problems’ which resemble the attitudes that James and Tolstoy connect with religious faith. There are also similarities of phrases and expressions. It is not possible to say that these writers influenced the way Wittgenstein regarded philosophy, but it suggests that he recognized the similarities between their approaches and his despite the differences in subject. Consequently it helps to clarify why he would speak of his approach to problems as being from ‘a religious point of view’ even though its orientation is not specifically religious.     

From the Victim's Point of View

In this keynote speech to the American Society for Bioethics and Humanities in October, 1999, Hilfiker suggests that the underlying goal of teaching ethics should be to develop in those who care for others an empathy with the outsider. Unless care givers cannot see the world from the victim's point of view, they will have a difficult time developing an ethical framework in which to work. In this paper, Hilfiker tells the story of how he came to find the victim's point of view through his own experiences as a physician and through the work of Dorothee Sölle, René Girard, and John Rawls.     

从本体-历史的观点看

一、科学哲学的岔路半个多世纪前问世的奎因的那本《从逻辑的观点看》(1953),至今还影响着我们:从整体主义的观点出发启迪了诸多后实证主义的灵感。与奎因的本体-逻辑的与认识-逻辑的观点不同,本文想要阐述的是一种本体-历史的观点。这是两类不同性质的理论。我认为,本体-历史的观点同样也适     

Extensions of the Finitist Point of View

Hilbert developed his famous finitist point of view in several essays in the 1920s. In this paper, we discuss various extensions of it, with particular emphasis on those suggested by Hilbert and Bernays in Grundlagen der Mathematik (vol. I 1934, vol. II 1939). The paper is in three sections. The first deals with Hilbert's introduction of a restricted ω -rule in his 1931 paper ‘Die Grundlegung der elementaren Zahlenlehre’. The main question we discuss here is whether the finitist (meta-)mathematician would be entitled to accept this rule as a finitary rule of inference. In the second section, we assess the strength of finitist metamathematics in Hilbert and Bernays 1934. The third and final section is devoted to the second volume of Grundlagen der Mathematik. For preparatory reasons, we first discuss Gentzen's proposal of expanding the range of what can be admitted as finitary in his esssay ‘Die Widerspruchsfreiheit der reinen Zahlentheorie’ (1936). As to Hilbert and Bernays 1939, we end on a ‘critical’ note: however considerable the impact of this work may have been on subsequent developments in metamathematics, there can be no doubt that in it the ideals of Hilbert's original finitism have fallen victim to sheer proof-theoretic pragmatism.     

从全球化看当代社会创新

从80年代中后期开始,全球化与社会创新这两个话题几乎同时成为话语热点,被人们广泛地运用于当代社会历史新趋势的描述和分析当中。“创新”是一个相对概念而不是绝对概念。从历时性的角度看,相对于传统而言,前所未有的就是创新;从共时性的角度看,相对于同一或单一化而言,与众不同的就是创新;从方法论的角度看,相对于新的问题和挑战而言,解决问题、迎接挑战必然需要创新性的手段和方法。对社会创新来说也是如此。从全球化的角度来看,当代社会创新在这三个意义上都具有充分的内涵。     

Physicalism from a Probabilistic Point of View

Philosophical Studies -     

旧证据问题：一种动态的消解方案

旧证据问题是指贝叶斯确证理论在讨论旧证据确证新理论（假说）的问题上将出现不合理的结果,它的消解是贝叶斯确证理论辩护的一个非常重要的环节。本文倡导一种基于Levi理论的动态方案来消解这一问题。在这种方案下,知识汇集的动态性使得旧证据在新理论引入前后的置信概率可能是不相同的,在此基础上我们证明,经新理论扩充后而得到的知识汇集无论是一致扩充还是不一致扩充,均存在一个旧证据E,它对该新理论具有确证作用。     

Reasonable Partiality from a Biological Point of View

Speculation about the evolutionary origins of morality has yet to show how a biologically based capacity for morality might be connected to moral reasoning. Applying an evolutionary approach to three kinds of cases where partiality may or may not be morally reasonable, this paper explores a possible connection between a psychological capacity for morality and processes of wide reflective moral equilibrium. The central hypothesis is that while we might expect a capacity for morality to include aspects of partiality, we might also expect these same aspects of the capacity to produce systemic forms of performance-based error. Understanding these errors helps point the way toward a theory of moral competence that includes aspects of both partiality and impartiality.     

Youth at Risk: Another Point of View

In this rejoinder to Tidwell and Corona Garrett (1994), the authors discuss three important aspects of the term at risk that help to clarify its meaning.