Metaphors can give life meaning

Conceptual metaphor theory offers a perspective on how and when people find meaning in life. Whereas life’s meaning can be difficult to grasp, metaphor compares life to a relatively more concrete and structured concept. Supporting this account, American adults (Study 1) and German undergraduates (Study 2) who framed life as a journey reported more meaning in life. The journey metaphor was particularly beneficial for individuals with low levels of perceived coherence in life (Study 2). Study 3 further explored this pattern of moderation: An accessible metaphor, compared to other life framings, benefited participants who lack a strong meaning framework. Study 4 focused on the mechanism behind metaphor’s influence. Participants who imagined events from their life journey perceived stronger interrelatedness among those events as measured with an analog spatial organization task. Perceived interrelatedness in turn predicted meaning in life, particularly for individuals with a strong preference for well-structured knowledge. Finally, participants who applied their own metaphor to life expressed greater meaning (Study 5), especially those high in personal need for structure (Study 6). An internal meta-analysis of these findings provides cumulative evidence for metaphor’s influence on perceived meaning in life and reveals moderating features of the individual.     

Justification and legitimacy in global civil society

As some thinkers have sought in the concept of global civil society an ethically driven site of deliberation and even resistance, so others have criticized global civil society for its lack of legitimacy and representativeness. This article attempts to answer these criticisms – at least in part – by invoking a moral commitment to the value of justification. I argue that the idea of justification, when examined, offers us a particular understanding of legitimacy which would be attainable for global civil society actors. The article begins by setting out the case for concern about the legitimacy of global civil society. I then outline a certain understanding of justification, showing how a commitment to this conception provides both a response to critics of global civil society and an ethical baseline for humane actors within global civil society. I move on to trace the significance of the moral relevance of justification for actors' strategies. Lastly, however, I highlight the difficulty of justification in a diverse world. This is to say that the issues of legitimacy and strategy facing global civil society are only made more tractable, not dissolved, by an appeal to the importance of justification.     

Partial Monotonic Protothetics

This paper has four parts. In the first part, I present Leniewski's protothetics and the complete system provided for that logic by Henkin. The second part presents a generalized notion of partial functions in propositional type theory. In the third part, these partial functions are used to define partial interpretations for protothetics. Finally, I present in the fourth part a complete system for partial protothetics. Completeness is proved by Henkin's method [4] using saturated sets instead of maximally saturated sets. This technique provides a canonical representation of a partial semantic space and it is suggested that this space can be interpreted as an epistemic state of a non-omniscient agent.     

Democracy,Deliberation and Disobedience

This paper develops a theory of civil disobedience informed by a deliberative conception of democracy. In particular, it explores the justification of illegal, public and political acts of protest in constitutional deliberative democracies. Civil disobedience becomes justifiable when processes of public deliberation fail to respect the principles of a deliberative democracy in the following three ways: when deliberation is insufficiently inclusive; when it is manipulated by powerful participants; and when it is insufficiently informed. As a contribution to ongoing processes of public deliberation, civil disobedience should be carried out in a way that respects the principles of deliberative democracy, which entails a commitment to persuasive, non-violent forms of protest.Civil disobedience is understood in this paper as public, illegal and political protest carried out against state laws or policies. Justification here is understood as a moral or political justification -- where civilly disobedient citizens claim that they are morally or politically entitled to disobey law. It does not imply legal justification.John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972); Ronald Dworkin, A Matter of Principle (London: Harvard University Press, 1985).     

Introduction: Law and Disobedience

This essay considers some major questions raised by civil and other forms of conscientious disobedience. What distinguishes that form of dissent? Can we recognise the legitimacy of a political system yet defy its laws? Is disobeying a democratic decision especially or entirely unacceptable, or can disobedience be an instrument of democracy? If a regime recognises rights, how should we regard disobedience that appeals to those rights in challenging the regime’s laws? How should reasons for obedience figure in our thinking about justified disobedience? The essay locates the contributions that make up this special issue of Res Publica within these debates about disobedience. It questions whether any general theory of justified disobedience can command agreement: the conditions that give rise to conscientious disobedience -- conflicting values and judgements -- seem to preclude consensus on when its use is justified.     

Cooperation,Knowledge, and Time: Alternating-time Temporal Epistemic Logic and its Applications

Branching-time temporal logics have proved to be an extraordinarily successful tool in the formal specification and verification of distributed systems. Much of their success stems from the tractability of the model checking problem for the branching time logic CTL, which has made it possible to implement tools that allow designers to automatically verify that systems satisfy requirements expressed in CTL. Recently, CTL was generalised by Alur, Henzinger, and Kupferman in a logic known as Alternating-time Temporal Logic (ATL). The key insight in ATL is that the path quantifiers of CTL could be replaced by cooperation modalities, of the form , where is a set of agents. The intended interpretation of an ATL formula is that the agents can cooperate to ensure that holds (equivalently, that have a winning strategy for ). In this paper, we extend ATL with knowledge modalities, of the kind made popular in the work of Fagin, Halpern, Moses, Vardi and colleagues. Combining these knowledge modalities with ATL, it becomes possible to express such properties as group can cooperate to bring about iff it is common knowledge in that . The resulting logic — Alternating-time Temporal Epistemic Logic (ATEL) — shares the tractability of model checking with its ATL parent, and is a succinct and expressive language for reasoning about game-like multiagent systems.     

Plugging the Leaks in Neurath's Ship: A Defense of Naturalistic Epistemology

This paper examines the question whether foundational epistemology (“FE”) can be replaced by naturalized epistemology (“NE”). First, it argues that Quine's defense of NE is inadequate since it is only based on arguments showing the impossibility of the logical empiricist version of FE rather than on arguments for the impossibility of FE as such. Second, it proposes that a more promising argument for the impossibility of FE can be found in the Münchhausen-trilemma which aims at showing that ultimate foundations (and, hence, FE) are unattainable. However, Karl-Otto Apel has shown that this trilemma is unconclusive since it uncritically presupposes the premise that all argumentation is deductive in nature. Apel's argument implies that FE is possible if and only if it is possible to devise a non-deductive foundation (“NDF”). It is argued, however, that the possibility of NDF cannot be demonstrated. This leads to a situation called the Multatuli-dilemma: we cannot prove the possibility of ultimate foundations nor can we prove the impossibility of ultimate foundations. This dilemma shows that the discussion about the possibility of FE is pointless. Thus, it suggests that it is legitimate to replace FE by NE. Barry Stroud and Henri Lauener, however, argue that this replacement is not feasible since NE is not capable of refuting scepticism (Stroud) or justifying methodological rules (Lauener). But these objections are shown to be mistaken: First, epistemological scepticism is practically impossible and, hence, does not pose a serious threat to NE. Second, NE is capable of justifying methodological norms if and only if it makes use of so-called internal justifications. Thus, the final conclusion of this paper is that FE can be replaced by NE. This revised version was published online in August 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

WHAT EPISTEMIC VALUES SHOULD WE RECLAIM FOR RELIGION AND SCIENCE? A RESPONSE TO J. WESLEY ROBBINS

Abstract. Postmodernism in science rejects and deconstructs the cultural dominance of especially the natural sciences in our time. Although it presents the debate between religion and science with a promising epistemological holism, it also seriously challenges attempts to develop a meaningful relationship between science and religion. A neopragmatist perspective on religion and science is part of this important challenge and eminently reveals the problems and reduction that arise when pragmatist criteria alone are used to construct a holism that renounces any demarcation between different areas of rationality. In this pragmatist vision for a holist culture, the cognitive resources of rationality are bypassed in such a way that a meaningful interaction between theology and science becomes impossible.     

What is an expert?

Experts play an important role in society, but there has been little investigation about the nature of expertise. I argue that there are two kinds of experts: those whose expertise is a function of what theyknow (epistemic expertise), or what theydo (performative expertise). Epistemic expertise is the capacity to provide strong justifications for a range of propositions in a domain, while performative expertise is the capacity to perform a skill well according to the rules and virtues of a practice. Both epistemic and performative experts may legitimately disagree with one another, and the two senses are conceptually and logically distinct.