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Some-things-considered desire
No full textConflicting desire ascriptions—of the form ⌜S wants p⌝ and ⌜S wants ¬p⌝—falsify every extant semantics that takes the orthodox, and theoretically powerful, belief-based approach to desire ascriptions: these semantics often wrongly predict that conflicting desire ascriptions can't both be true. In response, I propose a semantics of some-things-considered desire, which I model with questions, lending further evidence to the view that questions are central in our cognitive lives
The Legacy of Colonialism in the Recognition of Religions
No full textDuring the New Imperialism (1884–1920) period, an attitude pervaded the Western mindset that non-Christian religions were inferior and unsophisticated. At the heart of the colonialist view was ‘the white man’s burden’ of civilising primitive societies, including converting Indigenous peoples to Christianity. This aim escalated into a conscious effort among colonial powers to exert dominance over their subjects by othering and stereotyping non-Christians by presenting their religions through the prism of exoticism and orientalism. This article explores how colonialism accelerated modern recognition and registration issues for religious communities and continues to influence state-religion relations today, including how governments restrict religious freedom
Psychology of ownership versus renting: Brief research review
No full textOwnership encompasses psychological, social, and identity-related dimensions that significantly influence how humans interact with objects and systems. In contrast, renting or borrowing removes many of these antecedents; while renting provides access to functionality, it often fails to provide long-term attachment, identity reinforcement, or moral engagement with the object. This dichotomy was investigated within a psychological framework and the rise of the sharing economy has made it particularly salient.
The current review synthesizes theoretical and empirical findings from multiple domains contributing to the exploration of the psychological mechanisms differentiating ownership from rental or borrowing. It integrates insights from behavioral economics, consumer psychology, organizational behavior, and sustainability studies. The review also identifies gaps, research limitations, and directions for future inquiry, emphasizing how the investigated concepts operate as a lens for understanding identity, behavior, and well-being in modern consumption contexts
The Pure Commodity Theory of Money
No full textOnce widely accepted among economists and philosophers, the commodity theory of money—the idea that money is fundamentally a commodity used as a medium of exchange—has since fallen out of favor due to strong objections raised against it. This paper argues for a refined version of the commodity theory—the pure commodity theory—which strips away the excess baggage of the standard commodity theory and thereby avoids these objections. Three main takeaways of the paper are: (i) the origin of money is not essential to its nature; (ii) some commodities, including some forms of money, are immaterial continuants and should not be conflated with services; and (iii) the claim or credit theory of money, insofar as it solves the problem of the double coincidence of wants, ultimately collapses into a version of the commodity theory of money
The information-processing perspective on representation
No full textI introduce a novel framework for theorizing about representations in cognitive science, which relies on two theses. First, representations are, primarily, signals for information transmission, not as a side effect of other functions these signals may have, but for its own sake. Second, these signals aim at efficiently trading-off three cognitive budgets: rate (or transmission and storage costs), distortion (or faithfulness of the transmitted information), and computational complexity of coders. The way to provide empirical evidence that some entity is a representation—and hence that it is involved in information transmission for the sake of information transmission, as per the first thesis—is to show that it present adaptations for efficient information transmission—as per the second thesis. The kinds of properties that cognitive scientists routinely associate with paradigmatic instances of representations are generated by adaptations for rate-distortion-complexity efficiency
Ibn Sina’s Revenge: From Modal Necessity to Ontological Necessity
No full textHow far can we take Contingency Arguments? I intend the argument I present in this paper to be a minimal (or incomplete) version of a stage (II) contingency argument. I shall be demonstrating that one can argue from the existence of at least one merely modally necessary being to a being who is ontologically necessary (necessary in itself). Consequently, I shall be defending a dichotomy originally presented by Muslim philosopher Ibn Sina (Avicenna), who states that a modally necessary being is either ontologically necessary or its necessity is derived
The Group Agent Account and the Pluralistic Ignorance Problem
No full textIn this article, I present a potential counterexample to Lackey’s Group Agent Account of group beliefs. I argue that cases of pluralistic ignorance pose a problem for Lackey’s Group Agent Account because, in such cases, it systematically yields the wrong ascriptions of belief. I then discuss two ways to improve the Group Agent Account, which I call the Group Agent Account with Open Expression and the Group Agent Account with Sincere Open Expression, that make it immune to the pluralistic ignorance problem. However, I argue that the Group Agent Account with Open Expression and the Group Agent Account with Sincere Open Expression face their own problems that cannot be straightforwardly solved. I conclude by arguing that pluralistic ignorance is not a minor problem but one that generally affects summative approaches, such as the Group Agent Account, and provides evidence in support of nonsummative accounts of group beliefs
