When Cheap Isn't the Same as Not Expensive: Generic Price Terms and Their Negations

Generic price terms such as cheap, not expensive, not cheap, and expensive are used frequently in marketing, but little is known about how consumers interpret them. In typical consumer contexts, in which lower prices are preferred, we find that not cheap means essentially the same as expensive (i.e., not cheap = expensive). In contrast, not expensive does not mean the same as cheap, in that cheap is associated with lower prices (i.e., cheap < not expensive). As an implication, in a consumer survey we find different response distributions for rating scales that are anchored with endpoint labels of not expensive versus expensive as compared to cheap versus expensive or cheap versus not cheap (the latter two are equivalent). Furthermore, although cheap is associated with lower prices than not expensive, this does not necessarily translate into higher preferences for options that are described as cheap (vs. not expensive), because cheap may also evoke negative quality perceptions. Finally, we demonstrate an interesting reversal in the way price terms are interpreted: when higher prices are preferred, cheap is equal to not expensive (i.e., cheap = not expensive), whereas not cheap is associated with lower prices than expensive (i.e., not cheap < expensive).     

FENGSHUI: SCIENCE,RELIGION, SUPERSTITION,OR TRADE?

Fengshui (also called Chinese geomancy) is a pre-modern tradition rooted in Chinese civilization. Chinese civilization is pre-modern and practice-oriented due to the domination of political power in China. In contrast, Western civilization is modernized. It witnessed the development of religion in ancient times, and the growth of science through reason (logic) and experiment in modern times. It is both rational and transcendental. It seems that Fengshui is an intermediate between science and religion. It is not science although its focus is on this world, for it does not seek knowledge and truth. It is not religion although it is mystical, for it does not seek transcendence and good. It is not only superstition (or magic), but also a mystical trade that centers on secular benefits.     

Lie-toe-tease: double negatives and unexcluded middles

Litotes, “a figure of speech in which an affirmative is expressed by the negative of the contrary” (OED) has had some tough reviews. For Pope and Swift (“Scriblerus” 1727), litotes—stock examples include “no mean feat”, “no small problem”, and “not bad at all”—is “the peculiar talent of Ladies, Whisperers, and Backbiters”; for Orwell (1946), it is a means to affect “an appearance of profundity” that we can deport from English “by memorizing this sentence: A not unblack dog was chasing a not unsmall rabbit across a not ungreen field.” But such ridicule is not without equivocation, given that litotes, or “logical” (non-concordial) double negation, may or may not be semantically redundant. When the negation of a logical contrary yields an unexcluded middle, it contributes to expressive power: someone who is not unhappy may not be happy either, and an occurrence may not be infrequent without being frequent. But if something is not possible, what can it be but possible? Why does Crashaw’s “not impossible she” survive rhetorically while Orwell’s “not unsmall rabbit” is doomed? How is Robbie being “not not friends” with Mary on 7th Heaven distinct from being friends with her, if not not-p reduces to p? The key is recognizing in litotes a corollary of MaxContrary, the tendency for contradictory (wide-scope) sentential negation ¬p to strengthen (at least) pragmatically to a contrary ©p, as when the formal contradictory Fr. “Il ne faut pas partir” (lit. ‘It is not necessary to leave’) is reinterpreted as expressing a contrary (‘one must not-leave’). Just as the Law of Excluded Middle can apply where it “shouldn’t”, resulting in pragmatically presupposed disjunctions between semantic contraries, so that “p v ©p” amounts to an instance of “p v ¬p”, the Law of Double Negation can fail to apply where it “should”. When not not-p conveys ¬©p, the negation of a virtual contrary, the middle between p and not-p is no longer excluded, rendering the Fregean dictum that “Wrapping up a thought in double negation does not alter its truth value” not unproblematic.     

III—Non-Distributive Blameworthiness

I adapt an old example of Frank Jackson's, in order to show that it is not only possible that actions with different individual agents are sub-optimal when each is not, but that they are impermissible when each is not, and blameworthy when each is not.     

What is so Good about Moral Freedom?

Many Christian philosophers believe that it is a great good that human beings are free to choose between good and evil, so good indeed that God is justified in putting up with a great many evil choices for the sake of it. But many of the same Christian philosophers also believe that God is essentially good – good in every possible world. Unlike his sinful human creatures, God cannot choose between good and evil. In that sense, he is not 'morallyFree'. It is not easy to see how to fit these two theses into a single coherent package. If moral freedom is such a great good in human beings, why is it not a grave defect in God that he lacks it? And if the lack of moral freedom does not detract in any way from God's greatness, would it not have been better for us not to have it? I develop, but ultimately reject, what I take to be the most initially promising strategy for resolving this dilemma.     

Reality and Existence in Anselm

It is a premise of a widely endorsed putative refutation of Anselm's ontological argument that 'exists' is not a predicate. This Note argues that although 'exists' has the superficial grammatical appearance of a predicate in the Proslogion , Anselm does not in fact rely on the premise that 'exists' is a logical predicate (or that existing is a property) in his putative proof. It follows that even if some argument for the conclusion that 'exists' is not a predicate is sound, that argument is not a refutation of Anselm's argument.     

Do the bishops have it right on health care reform?

The National Conference of Catholic Bishops has argued for significant government involvement in health care in order to assure respect for what they regard as the right to health care. Critics charge that the bishops are wrong because health care is not a right. In this article, it is argued that these critics are correct in their claim that health care is not a right. However, it is also argued that the premise that health care is not a right does not imply that the market is the most equitable and just system for providing health care. Natural law arguments in the tradition of Roman Catholic social teaching lead to the conclusion that a just and prosperous society has a moral obligation to provide health care even if there is no such right. Further, there are strong moral grounds for concluding that the bishops are correct in their claim that health care ought not to be considered a market commodity. It is argued that if health care ought not to be considered a commodity, then national health insurance is the best available alternative for fulfilling the social obligation to distribute health care resources justly and fairly at this time in American history. The bishops' case for government involvement can be made on the strength of the Catholic tradition in theological argumentation, independent of the claim that health care is a right.     

The Perspectival Nature of Probability and Inference

It is argued that two observers with the same information may rightlydisagree about the probability of an event that they are both observing. This is a correct way of describing the view of a lottery outcome from the perspective of a winner and from the perspective of an observer not connected with the winner - the outcome is improbable for the winner and not improbable for the unconnected observer. This claim is both argued for and extended by developing a case in which a probabilistic inference is supported for one observer and not for another, though they relevantly differ only in perspective, not in any information that they have. It is pointed out, finally, that all probabilities are in this way dependent on perspective.     

Laws,chances and properties

The paper develops a unified account of both deterministic and indeterministic laws of nature which inherits the merits but not the defects of the best existing accounts. As in Armstrong's account, laws are embodied in facts about universals; but not in higher‐order relations between them, and the necessity of laws is not primitive but results from their containing chances of 0 or 1. As in the Ramsey‐Lewis account, law statements would be the general axioms and theorems of the simplest deductive theory of everything; but because laws are not so defined, simplicity of statement is not a criterion of law‐hood.     

On the Nature of Philosophy

This paper claims that what philosophy primarily does is interpret our notions, offer ways of understanding these notions that are not scientific in nature but not contrary to science either. The paper draws a distinction between conceptual analysis, a highly constrained enterprise that is supposed to bring to light what was in the concept all along, and the interpretation of notions, a creative enterprise that offers ways of understanding notions that were not already prefigured by the content of these notions—philosophy consists in the latter, not the former. It explains how these interpretations are justified and what the difference is between better and worse interpretations. The remainder of the paper is organized around three headings: philosophy and science, philosophy and language, and philosophy and progress. It claims that in philosophy there is no real progress, but that philosophy does move forward because the notions at issue are endlessly interpretable.     

道德运气

康德主义者认为,道德只跟动机相关,不受运气影响。威廉斯以未尽基于真实历史事实的高更和小说人物安娜为例展开讨论。高更这位画家为了自己的艺术追求,背逆、冲撞了社会的道德要求。如果他最后成功了,他将能为自己提供理性辩护,失败了则不能。而最初,没谁(包括他自己)知道他的追求是否结出正果——这有一部分依赖于运气。威廉斯对这一阐论中的几个关键概念做出辨析,运气(指的不是意外受伤之类,而是内在于其计划的运气),成功(不是功效主义意义上的,而是指他最终成为他曾希望会是的那个人),辩护(理性辩护可以回溯性的,且不一定能为所有人接受)。他尤其详细地阐发了行为者憾恨的概念。本文的结论是:道德并不免受运气影响。     

The reticence of visual phenomenal character: A spatial interpretation of transparency

It is often claimed that the phenomenal character of visual experience is ‘transparent’ in that the phenomenal features of visual experience do not seem ‘mental’. It is then claimed that this transparency speaks in favour of some theories of experience while speaking against others. In this paper, I advance both a negative and a positive thesis about transparency. My negative thesis is that visual phenomenal character is reticent in that it does not reveal whether it is mental or non-mental in nature. This, in turn, means that, by itself, transparency does not speak in favour of (and against) the theories it is often thought to speak in favour of (and against). My positive thesis is that the phenomenon referred to as the ‘transparency’ of visual phenomenal character is best characterized in spatial, not mental, terms.     

Philosophy and the Search for Truth

Philosophy, as it is understood and practiced in the West, is and has been generally considered to be the search for truth. But even if philosophy is the search for truth, it does not automatically follow that those who are identified as ‘philosophers’ are themselves actually engaged in that search. And indeed, in this paper I argue that many philosophers have in fact not been genuinely engaged in the search for truth (in other words, many philosophers have not been doing philosophy) and as such much of what passes for philosophy is in fact not really philosophy at all.     

Gender and Trust in Science

It is now recognized that relations of trust play an epistemic role in science. The contested issue is under what conditions trust in scientific testimony is warranted. I argue that John Hardwig's view of trustworthy scientific testimony is inadequate because it does not take into account the possibility that credibility does not reliably reflect trustworthiness, and because it does not appreciate the role communities have in guaranteeing the trustworthiness of scientific testimony.     

Rotting with their rights on: why the criteria for ending commitment or restraint of liberty need not be the same as the criteria for initiating commitment or restraint of liberty, and how the restraint may sometimes justifiably continue after its prerequisites are no longer satisfied

That coerced treatment must end when the criteria for initiating coerced treatment cease to apply appears to be universally accepted by courts and commentators.2 Moreover, the consensus appears to be justified by a steel-trap argument. If coercion is justified only when the patient is mentally ill and incapable, because then the patient lacks autonomous capacities, or lacks practical reasoning abilities that undercut autonomous capacities, then these justifications have no force when the patient either is not mentally ill or is capable. A parallel claim holds for civil commitment. This received wisdom, or in = out thesis, rests upon a conceptual confusion: a failure to distinguish the criteria for initiation of intervention, those for cessation of intervention, and the purpose of the commitment or coerced treatment. If the criteria for commitment were mental illness and dangerousness, and the criteria for release were the same, then the purpose of commitment would be to restore persons to the point where they are either just barely not mentally ill, or just barely not dangerous. That is a silly and self-defeating purpose for that large class of patients who, because of lack of insight, or otherwise, do not become treatment compliant until they are substantially healthier than being barely not mentally ill or barely not dangerous. It sets them up to become revolving-door patients. The purpose of commitment is rather to maximize the patient's mental health, and minimize her dangerousness without unduly burdening her liberty. If society is going to violate a patient's liberty, it should do so in a way that will resolve the problem that justified the restriction on liberty in the first place, so long as the restriction of liberty is not too great in relation to the expected gains from the intervention. The criteria for releasing a patient from commitment are in this way responsive to the purpose of the commitment. For some revolving-door patients, this entails that the criteria for their release from commitment should be stricter than the criteria for initiating commitment in the first place. The criteria for release from commitment for revolving-door patients should be that the criteria for initiation for commitment is not met plus it being more likely than not that the patient will be treatment compliant after release, assuming the additional restriction on liberty is less than the gains from the additional restraint, and the restriction is not unduly burdensome. Spelling this out, the criteria for release should be either not mentally ill, or else not dangerous, or capable, and more likely than not to be treatment compliant after release. For those patients for whom such a test is overly optimistic, we might substitute that there is a reasonable probability of treatment compliance after release, or that the probability of treatment compliance has been enhanced. These criteria are to be thought of as rough and ready rules of thumb, and not as analytically precise tests.     

Inner light

Neural impulses from the senses to the brain convey information, not sensation. The direct electrical stimulation of the cortex produces sensations. Hence, such sensations are evoked in the brain, and not received from the senses, nor from the outside world through the senses. More specifically, the experience of light is evoked in the brain and not received from the eyes. Consequently, the born blind, too, would experience light in response to electrical brain stimulation. The luminosity of light is not a property of electromagnetic radiation. If the experience of light is private, then so are the visual observations it makes possible.     

Can ‘Big’ Questions be Begged?

Traditionally, logicians construed fallacies as mistakes in inference, as things that looked like good (i.e., deductively valid) arguments but were not. Two fallacies stood out like a sore thumb on this view of fallacies: the fallacy of many questions (because it does not even look like a good argument, or any kind of argument) and the fallacy of petitio principii (because it looks like and is a good argument). The latter is the concern of this paper. One possible response is to say that the tradition is right about the concept of fallacy but wrong about its extension: petitio principii is not a fallacy. If the only proper ways to criticize an argument are to say that it is invalid or that it is unsound, and petitio principii is not criticisable on either of these counts, then calling it a fallacy is tantamount to saying we should prefer invalid or unsound arguments Robinson (Analysis, 31(4): 114 ,1971). I will present a third way to logically criticize arguments and show that fallacious instances of petitio principii are so criticisable while other instances of petitio principii are non-fallacious; hence, this fallacy is not a reductio of the Standard Treatment. It is not my intention in this paper to come out on the side of any of the competing theories—the Standard Treatment, the dialectical theories, and the epistemic theories—as general theories of fallacy. I show only that petitio principii can be handled by something closely resembling the Standard Treatment in so far as that, on entirely logistical principles, there can be made a distinction such that circular arguments form at best a degenerate kind of argument. Circular arguments look like good arguments but are not, not because they are deductively invalid (which they are not) but because they do not deserve to be called arguments at all.     

Philosophy versus Literature? Against the Discontinuity Thesis

According to what I call the ‘Discontinuity Thesis,’ literature can never count as genuine philosophizing: there is an impermeable barrier separating it from philosophy. While philosophy presents logically valid arguments in favor of or against precisely formulated statements, literature gives neither precisely formulated theses nor arguments in favor of or against them. Hence, philosophers do not lose out on anything if they do not read literature. There are two obvious ways of questioning the Discontinuity Thesis: first, arguing that literature can indeed do what philosophy is generally taken to do, and, second, arguing that philosophy is not, in fact, the presentation of logically valid arguments in favor of or against precisely formulated statements—what it does is closer to what literature is generally taken to do. I use a combination of these two strategies to argue that philosophy is not as intellectually straightforward as it is advertised to be, and literature is not as intellectually impoverished as it is generally taken to be.     

Intentions and Causes, Actions and Right Actions

I argue in this essay that belief/desire explanations are not logically true and not causal, and further that the antecedent of a true belief/desire conditional cannot be strengthened in such a way as to transform it into a true causal statement. I also argue that belief/desire explanations are not dispensable: they are presupposed in our justifications of scientific claims. The proposal is not that psychological determinism is false, but that some at least of our activities are not describable in causal terms. These arguments prepare the ground for a puzzle. If all human intentional behaviour is caused, then all actual linkages between psychological states and behaviour should be expressed in causal statements. But neither the action of asserting a causal statement nor the action of justifying the assertion can be described as the result of a cause. Therefore if one accepts that scientific claims can be justified, not all linkages between psychological states and subsequent action are expressible in causal statements. I do not offer a solution to this puzzle.     

On the Question 'Do Numbers Exist?'

Since we know that there are four prime numbers less than 8 we know that there are numbers. This 'short argument' is correct but it is not an ontological claim or part of philosophy of mathematics. Both realists (Quine) and nominalists (Field) reject the short argument and adopt the idea that the existence of numbers might be posited to explain known mathematical truths. Philosophers operate with a negative conception of what numbers are: they are not in space and time, not related causally to us, not perceivable, etc. This preliminary outlook does not actually characterize a kind of existing thing at all. It creates the atmosphere of weirdness characteristic of both fictionalism and Platonism. Positing things for the sake of explanation makes sense in empirical contexts, but the intelligibility of positing cannot not survive the move to philosophy of mathematics. Modal realism is a model for the unsatisfactory thinking that generates ontological commitment in mathematics.