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Reactive Commitments: Reasoning Dialectically about Responsibility
No full textPhilosophy has recently been presented with, and started to take seriously, sociological studies in which our ‘folk concepts’ are elaborated. The most interesting concepts studied are moral concepts, and results have been achieved that seem to sharply contradict the speculation of philosophers and to threaten the very way in which moral philosophy has been done in the past. In this paper, I consider certain results in empirical studies of the folk concept of responsibility. I will then sketch a version of a reactive attitude theory that allows for a genuine sense in which our intuitions about responsibility may be incoherent in a certain sense but without making moral reasoning radically contextual
The Theory of the Formal Discipline and the Possible Interpretations of Conditionals: Material Versus Defective Conditionals
No full textAttridge and Inglis try to check whether or not the ‘Theory of Formal Discipline’ is correct. This theory states that learning mathematics improves logical reasoning, and Attridge and Inglis review it by means of an experiment. Their conclusion is that, indeed, learning mathematics improves conditional inferences causing that conditionals are interpreted as defective. In this paper, I analyze Attridge and Inglis´s experiment and hold that it has a methodological problem and that hence does not really prove that learning mathematics lead to defective interpretations of conditionals. Equally, the paper includes a brief reflection on how the mental models theory can explain the results achieved by Attridge and Inglis
Uma análise fregeana de expressões para eventos e resultados dos eventos
No full textThis paper makes a Fregean analysis of certain expressions which, according to the way they are constructed, can refer, firstly, to events (A tradução da Bíblia por João demorou dois anos) and, secondly, to the results of these events (A tradução da Bíblia de João está sob a mesa). This paper intends to show that –if we take into account the above mentioned expressions and use Fregean notions such as meaning, reference, function, argument and concept– it is possible to consider events as objects. To do this we need to articulate developments made both from a linguistic perspective and a philosophical one. In this particular case, we take into account the Fregean ontology; we try to analyze ontologically the linguistic phenomena called nominalization and arrive to interesting conclusions about the ontological and semantic behavior of the expressions that contain event and result nominalizations
Editorial
No full textIn the last few years, the philosophical community has witnessed an interest in highlighting the role of social factors in cognition and its development. This gave rise to new interdisciplinary research projects not only in philosophy, but also in social and psychological sciences. The introduction of theoretical notions such as “shared worldviews” or “shared intentionality” blurred the classical demarcation lines between social and psychological phenomena, and urged a more permissive interpretation of the relation between their respective ontologies. This special issue of Abstracta aims to contribute to this emerging field of research with contributions that approach the relation between psychological and social phenomena from a variety of perspectives
Being and Becoming in the Theory of Group Agency
No full textThis paper explores a bootstrapping puzzle which appears to afflict Philip Pettit’s theory of group agency. Pettit claims that the corporate persons recognised by his theory come about when a set of individuals ‘gets its act together’ by undertaking to reason at the collective level. But this is puzzling, because it is hard to see how the step such a collective must take to become a group agent – the collectivisation of reason – can be taken without them already being an agent. I explore this puzzle by recounting Pettit’s account of the emergence of group agents. According to Pettit this process has two stages: a first stage in which a collective incurs the distinctive pressure exemplified by the Doctrinal Paradox, and a second in which the collective responds to that pressure by instituting decision-making mechanisms designed to secure collective rationality. After arguing that this second, response stage in Pettit’s account is not coherent, I conclude with the tentative suggestion that the personhood of groups should be seen as depending not only on the efforts of group members but also on the recognitive attitudes of other persons in a wider discursive community
Mental Causation and the New Compatibilism
No full textTwenty years ago Stephen Yablo developed his original theory of mental causation, which has drawn much attention ever since. By providing a detailed reconstruction of Yablo’s approach, this paper first demonstrates that a certain line of critique that has repeatedly been brought forward against Yablo over the last two decades misconstrues the core idea of the model. At the same time, the reconstruction reveals that Yablo’s approach is probably the first explicit version of the “new compatibilism” within the philosophy of mind. This fairly young family of theories essentially claims a non-identity as well as a non-distinctness of mental and physical phenomena. The second part of the paper then demonstrates that the new compatibilist approaches in general, and Yablo’s theory in particular, even though they can resist much of the popular criticism, fall prey to a new theoretical trilemma once the nature of the respective analysantia is made explicit. Finally, a model of the psychophysical relation is developed that may allow the new compatibilists to escape the mentioned trilemm
New Criteria for Pain: Ordinary Language, Other Minds, and the Grammar of Sensation
No full textWhat does ordinary language philosophy contribute to the solution of the problems it diagnoses as violations of linguistic use? One of its biggest challenges has been to account for the epistemic asymmetry of mental states experienced by the subject of those states and the application of psychological properties to others. The epistemology of other minds appears far from resolved with reference to how sensation words are used in everyday language. In this paper, I revisit the Wittgensteinian arguments and show how they engage the ordinary language method (in the modified form of grammatical investigation) to ‘dissolve’ the problem. Several important results are generated by way of this reconstruction. An expressive view of the vocabulary of sensation is defended which facilitates a discussion of sensation discourse emphasising the normative grammatical conditions for the communication of psychological states. This motivates a reassessment of criterial justification for the ascription of psychological concepts in the third person. In the final sections, I mobilise a normative approach to expose the moral relevance of the epistemology of other minds. Even if it is conceded that belief in other minds lacks warrant from an epistemological standpoint, this does not justify adopting the skeptical attitude from an ethical standpoint. In light of this, a normative justification for the a priori belief that others are subjects of consciousness is defended
Nietzsche ou MacIntyre: Duas Alternativas à Moralidade Moderna?
No full textThis paper aims to show that by confronting the ethical alternatives proposed by Nietzsche and MacIntyre as resulting of their critical analyses of the modern moral condition respectively done in Genealogy of the Morals and After Virtue, we can find shared theoretical presumptions that point to those alternatives as convergent in many cases and not simply as excluding each other, even in a opposed direction to the MacIntyre’s point of view concerning that issue
An Inductive Modal Approach for the Logic of Epistemic Inconsistency
No full textThe purpose of this paper is twofold. First we want to extent a specific paranormal modal logic in such a way as obtain a paraconsistent and paracomplete multimodal logic able to formalize the notions of plausibility and certainty. With this logic at hand, and this is our second purpose, we shall use a modified version of Reiter‘s default logic to build a sort of inductive logic of plausibility and certainty able to represent some basic principles of epistemic inductive reasoning, such as a negative autoepistemic principle, an `error-prone feature of induction\u27 principle and a confirmation by enumeration principle
