What Should Realists Say About Honor Cultures?

Richard Nisbett and Dov Cohen’s (1996) influential account of “cultures of honor” speculates that honor norms are a socially-adaptive deterrence strategy. This theory has been appealed to by multiple empirically-minded philosophers, and plays an important role in John Doris and Alexandra Plakias’ (2008) antirealist argument from disagreement. In this essay, I raise four objections to the Nisbett-Cohen deterrence thesis, and offer another theory of honor in its place that sees honor as an agonistic normative system regulating prestige competitions. Since my account portrays honor norms as radically different from liberal ones, it actually strengthens Doris and Plakias’ case in some respects: cultures of honor are not merely superficially different from Western liberal ones. Nonetheless, the persistent appeal of honor’s principles, and their moral plausibility in certain contexts, suggests not antirealism, but pluralism—a reply on behalf of realism that itself has considerable empirical support.     

Salvation and Suicide: What Does Islamic Theology Say?

Abstract : The Islamic soteriological doctrine advocates good deeds and God's mercy as the pre‐requisites for human salvation. This article introduces these two important dimensions of the Muslim belief of salvation. In contemporary settings it addresses some of the motives behind the spate of suicide bombings by Muslims and argues that taking one's own life is totally forbidden in Islam. The moving notion that suicide bombing is an open door to salvation is, therefore, untenable. Whatever the mitigating factors, there is no legitimacy in Islamic Law (shariah) to the crime of suicide or the derived terrorism.     

What Does the Frame Problem Tell us About Moral Normativity?

Within cognitive science, mental processing is often construed as computation over mental representations—i.e., as the manipulation and transformation of mental representations in accordance with rules of the kind expressible in the form of a computer program. This foundational approach has encountered a long-standing, persistently recalcitrant, problem often called the frame problem; it is sometimes called the relevance problem. In this paper we describe the frame problem and certain of its apparent morals concerning human cognition, and we argue that these morals have significant import regarding both the nature of moral normativity and the human capacity for mastering moral normativity. The morals of the frame problem bode well, we argue, for the claim that moral normativity is not fully systematizable by exceptionless general principles, and for the correlative claim that such systematizability is not required in order for humans to master moral normativity.

What Are Emotions About?

This paper discusses the interrelations between three aspects of human emotions: their intentionality, their expressivity and their moral significance. It distinguishes three kinds of philosophical views of emotions: the cognitivist (classically held by the Stoics), the emotivist which reduces emotions to non-intentional bodily sensations and physiological states, and the moral phenomenologist , the latter being held by Annette Baier, whose work is the focus of the discussion. Her view, which represents an original development of ideas found in Descartes and Hume, avoids the reductionism of congitivist and emotivist accounts. The paper gives special attention to her notion of 'deep'objects of emotions and to her account of the expressivity of emotions, arguing that while the first is problematic, the second is a significant contribution to our understanding of the role of emotions in our moral lives.     

Say What? On Grice On What Is Said

Abstract: In this paper I argue that there is a very important, though often neglected, dissimilarity between the two Gricean conceptions of ‘what is said’: the one presented in his William James Lectures and the one sketched in the ‘Retrospective Epilogue’ to his book Studies in the Way of Words. The main problem lies with the idea of speakers' commitment to what they say and how this is to be related to the conventional, or standard, meaning of the sentences uttered in the act of saying. Since the later notion of ‘what is said’, or ‘dictiveness’, is claimed to be logically independent from ‘formality’ (roughly, conventional meaning), Grice seems to maintain that there are cases in which content that is not expressed by a sentence in a context may nevertheless count as what is said. I propose an account of what is said that brings together the two apparently irreconcilable approaches. The price to be paid for a Gricean, however, is to accept a duality of behaviour between (natural language counterparts of) logical constants and logical variables.     

What is Essential About Indexicals?

Philosophical Studies -     

What Research Has to Say About Gender-Linked Differences in CMC and Does Elementary School Children’s E-mail Use Fit This Picture?

This paper first reviews the literature on computer mediated communication (CMC) to examine whether claims about gender-linked differences in specific attitudes, styles and content in CMC have been validated. Empirical studies were limited, with considerable variation in audiences, tasks, and contexts that was related to varied outcomes. The paper next describes an empirical study on the e-mail communication of elementary school children from ten Dutch classrooms. No gender-linked preference for a person or task-oriented attitude was found. Girls significantly more often employed an elaborate style. Differences between boys and girls on content of communication were subtle rather than robust. The conclusion discusses the functional embedding of CMC and the need to examine jointly antecedents, language acts and consequences.     

Life Experiences Throughout the Lifespan: What Do People Say (or Not) About Them?

Life experiences have been a topic of interest for researchers and clinicians for decades. Current knowledge is rooted in two distinct approaches, i.e., personality psychology and psychosomatics. Whereas the first is interested in ordinary life stories of nonclinical individuals, based on a more qualitative, in-depth, and person-driven approach, psychosomatics stresses negative events, mainly in clinical samples, and presents a more quantitative, general, and construct-driven approach. Consequently, available evidence is dispersed and unrelated and many basic questions remain unanswered. This study aimed to explore occurrence, developmental stage, valence, and impact of life experiences and to analyze critical answering patterns (i.e., “I don’t remember,” missingness). Through a cross-sectional retrospective design, 394 adults from the community answered the Lifetime Experiences Scale, which covers 75 life experiences organized in eight domains (i.e., school, job, health, leisure, living conditions, adverse experiences, achievements, and people and relationships). Occurrence of life experiences varied greatly, and the mean number of experiences reported was approximately 30. Regarding developmental stage, most experiences were reported in just one stage—mainly adulthood—however, some could be considered chronic. Globally, life experiences tended to be clearly rated as positive or as negative; additionally, assessed experiences were mainly appraised as positive. Moreover, participants presented their experiences as significant, rating them as high impact. Overall, critical answering patterns were not very expressive: “I don’t remember” and missing answers were below 2 and 5%, respectively, in the majority of experiences. These findings offer several important new insights, suggesting that life experiences are mainly an idiosyncratic topic.     

What Is Rational About Nash Equilibria?

Nash Equilibrium is a central concept ingame theory. It has been argued that playing NashEquilibrium strategies is rational advice for agentsinvolved in one-time strategic interactions capturedby non-cooperative game theory. This essaydiscusses arguments for that position: vonNeumann–Morgenstern's argument for their minimaxsolution, the argument from self-enforcingagreements, the argument from the absence ofprobabilities, the transparency-of-reasons argument,the argument from regret, and the argument fromcorrelated equilibrium. All of these argumentseither fail entirely or have a very limited scope.Whatever the use of Nash Equilibrium is, therefore,it is not useful as a rational recommendation inone-time strategic interactions. This is good newsfor Bayesians: although this discussion does notargue directly for the Bayesian idea of rationalityas expected utility maximization, it argues againsta position that has been regarded as a contender insituations of strategic interaction.     

What Does Taste Represent?

What does vision represent? What does hearing represent? Smell? Touch? Competing answers to each of these questions have been defended. The present paper argues that the issue of what taste represents is categorically more complicated. In particular, it raises two very difficult dilemmas.     

Who Cares What She Thinks, What Does He Say? Links between Masculinity, In-Group Bonding and Gender Harassment

Previous research has linked threats to masculinity and gender harassment, the most pervasive form of sexual harassment. Using a computer harassment paradigm, an ingroup bonding explanation of this link was directly examined. The study was conducted with heterosexual male undergraduate students from an inner city Australian university. Participants received a threat to masculinity before being exposed to an ostensible gender ingroup member whose reaction to sexist jokes was manipulated. Data from 74 participants revealed that men high on conformity to masculine norms altered their behavior to correspond with feedback from the gender ingroup member after a masculinity threat, whereas men low on conformity to masculine norms rejected gender ingroup feedback after a masculinity threat. A variable examining reported liking of the gender ingroup member produced a similar pattern, while no changes were observed in reported liking of a gender outgroup member These results suggest that the perceived response of other members of the gender ingroup, but not members of the gender outgroup, influence men’s proclivity to enact gender harassing behaviors.     

What Should Conceptual Engineering Be All About?

Philosophia - Conceptual engineering is commonly characterized as the method for assessing and improving our representational devices. Little has been said, however, on how best to construe these...