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This paper is made up of responses to the papers in this volume. The first section is concerned with the philosophy of linguistics, particularly with the linguistic conception of grammars and the psychological reality of language. The second section is concerned with the theory of reference for proper names, including issues of reference borrowing, grounding, the qua-problem, and causal descriptivism. The third section is concerned with the theory of meaning, particularly the matters of direct reference, the contingent a priori, rigidity for kind terms, narrow meaning, and the use theory. The fourth section is concerned with methodology, particularly with “putting metaphysics first”, the role of intuitions, and the contribution of experimental semantics. The fifth section tackles two issues in metaphysics: the definition of scientific realism and biological essentialism.

This paper explores, develops, and evaluates Waismann’s six papers on the analytic/synthetic distinction, which were published in Analysis between 1949 and 1953. Although the sequence is unfinished, Waismann develops a view of analyticity on which it can be defined in terms of definitions. Definitions, however, are a diverse group of things which cannot be given a definition themselves. Much like a family resemblance expression, definitions are irregular, incomplete, and their extensions are subject to our choices. Analyticity—being defined in terms of definitions—inherits these properties. Given the foundational importance of analyticity in the linguistic approach to philosophy popular at the time Waismann was writing, the view turns out to have far-reaching consequences for Positivism, for Ordinary Language Philosophy, for the epistemology of logic, and for the way we pursue philosophy.

This chapter argues that many of the conventions that determine the form and scope of Literary Studies have evolved to serve the interests of academic critics as a professional community rather than their subject as an intellectual discipline. These conventions serve to entrench that community’s power relations and justify Literary Studies’ existence as a subject suitable for incarnation in a university setting. The contradictions, omissions and repressions of Literary Studies should be understood in terms of the subject’s professional contexts, including those imposed “from above” (e.g. by governments and funders) and “from below” (by its constitution as a subject to be taught and assessed in universities). The chapter illustrates this thesis with brief examples and sets out the structure of the book.

Everyone has experienced emotions and everybody knows what they are – at least, we think we know. Asked for an explanation, the response will likely be something along the lines of “happiness is an emotion” or “if I’m scared of something, it is also an emotion.” Such imprecise and in the narrower sense incorrect definitions are entirely sufficient for everyday use. But this is obviously not the case in science as well as in corporate practice. After all, important recommendations for the economy should be derived from well-founded studies. As a first step, this requires that the term “emotions” means the same to everybody. At the present time, this is wishful thinking. A steadily rising number of publications are produced within the HCI community, in which in part elaborate measuring techniques are used to account for emotions with different study designs. However, this approach appears to be problematic, because a standard definition of “emotions” has yet to be established. The purpose of this publication is to draw the attention of the HCI community to this issue and to start a worthwhile conversation with an attempt at providing a definition. It concludes with a specific recommendation as to which physiological measuring methods would be conducive for answering corporate research questions.

All spatio-temporal events or happenings or states or properties of things or things themselves, of whatever event or duration without exception, are effects or lawful correlates. That is to say each has a fundamental explanation. Furthermore, both the historical doctrines of traditional Compatibilism and Incompatibilism about determinism and freedom, after some centuries of philosophical and other attention, have been falsified, demonstrably so. I claim a little old credit here. Hume was wrong in taking our freedom as we understand it to be consistent with causation. Kant was wrong in taking our freedom as we understand it to be inconsistent with causation. There is both incompatible freedom (origination, free will where that doesn’t just mean freedom, lawless and unexplainable control and responsibility) and compatible freedom (voluntariness—choice and action according to desire, embraced desires, not being in jail, etc., and, thus, quite unfated). There is a related, but alternative, true-enough story called Attitudinism, about our life-hopes. The real problem of determinism has been that of accommodating ourselves to the frustration of certain attitudes—at bottom, certain desires and things within Affective Consciousness. Here, I remark on comments and criticisms of my views by Derk Pereboom, Paul Russell, Kevin Timpe, and Gregg D. Caruso.

Anyone who has written one knows how frustratingly difficult it can be to perfect a computer program. Some of the founding fathers of computing set out ideas for reasoning about software — one would say today ‘techniques for proving that a program satisfies its specification’. Alan Turing presented a paper entitled Checking a Large Routine that laid out a workable method for reasoning about programs. Sadly his paper had little impact. Understanding the problem faced, Turing’s proposal and what followed provides insight into how ideas evolve. Comparing three contributions from the 1940s with the current state of the art clarifies a problem that still costs society a fortune each year.

Naples, “a city where a splendid school of mathematics once flourished, but whose only link with physics was its regret for the disappearance of Ettore Majorana”.

R. M. Chisholm begins by reporting that Lucey has expounded his views perfectly accurately. Chisholm says that Lucey has attributed to him a view that he did not intend to endorse. The key issue lies in Chisholm's characterization of what it is to be “purely psychological”. Lucey has provided a counter-example to Chisholm's theory, and Chisholm basically accepts the counter-example and abandons the terminology of calling any states “purely psychological”. Chisholm uses the occasion of his response to Lucey for further developing his theory to distinguish three types of psychological property which he calls “Cartesian properties”. Chisholm stresses that Cartesian properties are properties to which we have privileged access but that he is not defining them in terms of such access. Chisholm concludes his response by giving a characterization of what it is for a person to be in a conscious state.

Our paper aims at bringing to the fore the crucial role that habits play in Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution by means of natural selection. We have organized the paper in two steps: first, we analyse value and functions of the concept of habit in Darwin's early works, notably in his Notebooks, and compare these views to his mature understanding of the concept in the Origin of Species and later works; second, we discuss Darwin’s ideas on habits in the light of today’s theories of epigenetic inheritance, which describe the way in which the functioning and expression of genes is modified by the environment, and how these modifications are transmitted over generations. We argue that Darwin’s lasting and multifaceted interest in the notion of habit, throughout his intellectual life, is both conceptually and methodologically relevant. From a conceptual point of view, intriguing similarities can be found between Darwin’s (early) conception of habit and contemporary views on epigenetic inheritance. From a methodological point of view, we suggest that Darwin’s plastic approach to habits, from his early writings up to the mature works, can provide today’s evolutionary scientists with a viable methodological model to address the challenging task of extending and expanding evolutionary theory, with particular reference to the integration of epigenetic mechanisms into existing models of evolutionary change. Over his entire life Darwin has modified and reassessed his views on habits as many times as required by evidence: his work on this notion may represent the paradigm of a habit of good scientific research methodology.

This chapter takes an on-going reconciliation process in Sweden, the case of the Church of Sweden and its historical relations to the indigenous Sami people, as a point of departure for analysing official white paper projects and truth commissions from the perspective of generating and disseminating historical knowledge. What happens with historical knowledge when historical problems are formulated, researched, and published within a reconciliation process driven by an ideological agenda? How can such a process be analysed from a theoretical point of view? This chapter argues that the examined process follows a general pattern that can be divided into at least three distinguishable phases. Each phase is marked by distinctly different characteristics with regards to the (scientific) shape of historical knowledge, the main agents and audiences involved in the process, and the specific media that history is filtered through. All phases also display different characteristics concerning their educational scopes. Through this analysis, the authors aim to contribute to a deeper understanding of how historical knowledge is generated within official historical justice processes and how it is transformed through processes of educationalisation, recontextualisation, and remediation.

COVID-19 has substantially affected our lives during 2020. Since its beginning, several epidemiological models have been developed to investigate the specific dynamics of the disease. Early COVID-19 epidemiological models were purely statistical, based on a curve-fitting approach, and did not include causal knowledge about the disease. Yet, these models had predictive capacity; thus they were used to ground important political decisions, in virtue of the understanding of the dynamics of the pandemic that they offered. This raises a philosophical question about how purely statistical models can yield understanding, and if so, what the relationship between prediction and understanding in these models is. Drawing on the model that was developed by the Institute of Health Metrics and Evaluation, we argue that early epidemiological models yielded a modality of understanding that we call descriptive understanding, which contrasts with the so-called explanatory understanding which is assumed to be the main form of scientific understanding. We spell out the exact details of how descriptive understanding works, and efficiently yields understanding of the phenomena. Finally, we vindicate the necessity of studying other modalities of understanding that go beyond the conventionally assumed explanatory understanding.

The brief reviews and essays that make up this final chapter are intended to provide some detailed information and reference material on recent research topics in astronomy and astrophysics. It is hoped that the material will be of use with respect to term paper ideas. References are given to full research papers, not so much because their content is readily accessible to the reader (at this stage), but because they will give some idea of how science communication works. Indeed, one of the most important aspects of being (and becoming) an astronomer is to know the literature—what are other researchers doing, where are their arguments weak, where are they strong; where have other researchers gone wrong in the interpretation of the data, where have they made the right choices, etc.

This essay considers how scholarly approaches to the development of molecular biology have too often narrowed the historical aperture to genes, overlooking the ways in which other objects and processes contributed to the molecularization of life. From structural and dynamic studies of biomolecules to cellular membranes and organelles to metabolism and nutrition, new work by historians, philosophers, and STS scholars of the life sciences has revitalized older issues, such as the relationship of life to matter, or of physicochemical inquiries to biology. This scholarship points to a novel molecular vista that opens up a pluralist view of molecularizations in the twentieth century and considers their relevance to current science.

The final chapter is, of course, not a final conclusion concerning the “fruition” of the mathematics of paper folding: this domain is in a process of continuous development, and its interweaving with computer sciences and computer modeling becomes more and more apparent and prominent. This, of course, raises the question as to how materiality, which earlier functioned partially as a hindering element, is considered; one may wonder, for example, as to the epistemological implications and differences between the twenty-first century mathematical computer models and the nineteenth century mathematical material folded models, but this discussion is beyond the scope of this chapter. What this chapter will attempt to describe is that which can be called the first step of this new, modern movement concerning mathematics and folding-based geometry: the complete axiomatization of this geometry. Though not the single modern point of view with which the mathematics of paper folding has been considered, the attempt to find axioms or basic operations for this geometry, started at the beginning of the twentieth century, bore fruit only towards the end of the 1980s. If Beloch’s interest lay in proving that folding-based geometry is at least as powerful as straightedge and compass geometry, from an algebraic point of view as well as construction-wise, during the mid-1980s, one was interested in finding the basic, fundamental operations from which a folded figure was composed, and by this means, giving this geometry a logical sound basis, the same that straightedge and compass geometry had for centuries.

Niche construction refers to the modification of selective environments by organisms. Theoretical and empirical studies of niche construction are increasing in importance as foci in evolutionary ecology. This special edition presents theoretical and empirical research that illustrates the significance of niche construction to the field. Here we set the scene for the following papers by (1) discussing the history of niche construction research, (2) providing clear definitions that distinguish niche construction from related concepts such as ecosystem engineering and the extended phenotype, (3) providing a brief summary of the findings of niche construction research, (4) discussing the contribution of niche construction and ecological inheritance to (a) expanded notions of inheritance, and (b) the extended evolutionary synthesis, and (5) briefly touching on some of the issues that underlie the controversies over niche construction. Publisher PDF

We present a position paper advocating the notion that Stoic philosophy and ethics can inform the development of ethical A.I. systems. This is in sharp contrast to most work on building ethical A.I., which has focused on Utilitarian or Deontological ethical theories. We relate ethical A.I. to several core Stoic notions, including the dichotomy of control, the four cardinal virtues, the ideal Sage, Stoic practices, and Stoic perspectives on emotion or affect. More generally, we put forward an ethical view of A.I. that focuses more on internal states of the artificial agent rather than on external actions of the agent. We provide examples relating to near-term A.I. systems as well as hypothetical superintelligent agents.

This position paper offers an answer to the question about the difference between artificial and natural. By building up a dichotomy between physis and logos, it argues that this difference is given by language and by what can be grasped with words. It concludes with an assertion that Good Old-Fashioned AI (GOFAI) cannot create anything natural, whereas emergent AI can, because emergent phenomena are intrinsically natural, which is a very important fact for the AI field. The paper also offers a view on the difference between the roles of an AI engineer in GOFAI and in emergent AI.

This short paper was originally published in the Annalen der Physik, 36 (1939). I include it here because it is the first and most systematic discussion of an idea to which the other essays often allude: the idea of basing irreversibility on the structure of time. When I wrote the paper I was under the impression of having stated a fairly obvious matter, obvious especially to every empiricist or positivist, since I merely pose the question of in what manner temporal processes are given to us. I was somewhat astonished to find that the idea seemed rather foreign to most physicists. It plays a decisive role in the course of our further arguments (cf. II.5b).

This short paper is a rather personal account on the process, which in the end led to the effect that the author moved from a scholar of an influential person to a colleague of him. It tries to tell the story how a new organizational backbone for the Institute of Informatics at LMU was created by predictive thinking, and it is a hommage to the ability to switch from technical detail to a very broad but nevertheless precise analysis of development opportunities for an organization.

This commentary addresses the two basic premises of the argument made by Dixon et al (2015) concerning quality metrics for behavior analytic graduate training programs. Taken together, these premises assert that the practice of behavior analysis will be more effective if practitioners are research savvy and that becoming research savvy is more likely to occur in a circumstance in which research is ongoing. I support both of these assumptions, the former by examining the impact of group circumstances on values, and the latter by considering the repertorial elements likely to be established under conditions of contingency shaping.

Structural Realism (SR) is typically rated as a moderate realist doctrine about the ultimate entities of nature described by fundamental physics. Whether it must be extended to the higher-level special sciences is not so clear. In this short paper I argue that there is no need to ‘structuralize’ the special sciences. By mounting concrete examples I show that structural descriptions and structural laws certainly play a role in the special sciences, but that they don’t play any exclusive role nor that they give us any reason to believe that all that there is on the various levels is structure. I fortify my points by arguing that structures are global entities (in order for SR not to collapse into a bundle ontology) and that the assumption of higher-level structures as genuinely global or holistic entities is even more arcane.

This is a response to the Ask the Experts question regarding whether students in behavior analysis programs should respond to misrepresentations made by others about the field.

Skepticism that normally focuses on pseudoscientific claims can also be directed at “established” principles of behavior. After discussing some ways in which empirically-derived principles can potentially mislead, as an illustrative example I describe some reasons to wonder whether our understanding of punishment is as established as sometimes assumed.