scholarly journals In Defense of the Wide-Scope Instrumental Principle

2017 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-22 ◽  
Author(s):  
Simon Rippon
Keyword(s):  
Logical Form ◽  
Logical Connective ◽  
Wide Scope ◽  
Instrumental Reason ◽  
Narrow Scope ◽  
Joseph Raz ◽  
The One ◽  
Close Relatives ◽  
Instrumental Principle ◽  
Instrumental Reasons

I make the observation that English sentences such as 添ou have reason to take the bus or to take the train� do not have the logical form that they superficially appear to have. I find in these sentences a conjunctive use of 登r,� as found in sentences like 添ou can have milk or lemon in your tea,� which gives you a permission to have milk, and a permission to have lemon, though no permission to have both. I argue that a confusion of genuine disjunctions with sentences of the above form has motivated the mistaken acceptance by some philosophers of principles like the one I call 鏑iberal Transmission.� This is the principle that if you have a reason to do something, then you have a reason to do it in each of the possible ways in which it can be done (though not more than one of them). I argue that Liberal Transmission and its close relatives are false. Wide-scope reasons are defined as reasons that have a conditional or other logical connective within the scope of the reason operator. For example, a wide-scope instrumental reason might be: reason(if you have an end, take the means). By refuting Liberal Transmission, I show that you could have wide-scope instrumental reasons like this while nevertheless lacking any narrow-scope reason to take the means, or narrow-scope reason to not have the end. This enables me to respond to two major objections to the wide-scope approach to the instrumental principle that have been developed by Joseph Raz and by Niko Kolodny.

Instrumental Reasons

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Niko Kolodny
Keyword(s):  
Wide Scope ◽  
Instrumental Reason ◽  
Narrow Scope ◽  
Instrumental Reasons

Often our reason for doing something is an “instrumental reason”: that doing that is a means to doing something else that we have reason to do. What principles govern this “instrumental transmission” of reasons from ends to means? Negatively, I argue against principles often invoked in the literature, which focus on necessary or sufficient means. Positively, I propose a principle, “General Transmission,” which answers to two intuitive desiderata: that reason transmits to means that are “probabilizing” and “nonsuperfluous” with respect to the relevant end. I then apply General Transmission to the debate over “detachment”: whether “wide-scope” reason for a material conditional or disjunction implies “narrow-scope” reason for the consequent or disjuncts.

The Myth of Structural Rationality

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Benjamin Kiesewetter
Keyword(s):  
Wide Scope ◽  
Structural Requirements ◽  
Rational Requirements ◽  
Narrow Scope ◽  
Scope Interpretation

While Chapters 4 and 5 suggest that structural requirements of rationality cannot be normative, Chapter 6 argues for the stronger conclusion that there are no such requirements to begin with. The argument is that both narrow- and wide-scope interpretations of structural requirements face problems independently of whether these requirements are understood as being normative. Starting with the narrow-scope interpretation, the chapter discusses the problem that it licenses bootstrapping of rational requirements (6.1), that it entails inconsistent requirements (6.2), and that it entails requirements that undermine each other in a counterintuitive way (6.3). Turning to the wide-scope interpretation, the chapter discusses the charge that wide-scope requirements cannot capture an important asymmetry involved in structural irrationality (6.4–6.5), and that they are incapable of guiding our responses (6.6). It is argued that all of these objections pose serious problems for the respective accounts. This supports the conclusion that there are no structural requirements of rationality (6.7).

scholarly journals Mytens tvang

1999 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lars Albinus
Keyword(s):  
Blind Spot ◽  
The Other ◽  
Instrumental Reason ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Self Reflection ◽  
Negative Dialectics ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The One

The purpose of the article is to show how the negative dialectics of Adorno gets involved with a concept of myth that is questionable in several respects. First of all, Adorno tries to combine, but rather conflates, two understandings of myth. On the one hand, the concept of myth is defined as the ancient Greek mythos, in which the subject of man is projected on to nature; on the other hand, myth is defined as the backfire of enlightenment, in which self-reflection becomes the blind spot of instrumental reason. Along these lines of argument, Adorno’s interpretation of Homer, which, at any rate, is highly inspiring, attempts to demonstrate that Odysseus is already enlightened in that he keeps the myth at bay in order to gain his self. The point is, as a matter of dialectic necessity, that he just ends up in myth once again, albeit in the second sense, namely by being a victim of his own self-denial. A question that seems to remain unanswered, though, is how the two kinds of myth are related. Further, Adorno draws on a problematic distinction between myth and literature in order to claim that Homer separates himself from the realm of myth. By adopting Adorno’s own game of interpretation, however, it is possible to regard myth as such, including the Homeric one, as being contingently open-ended rather than just a matter of dialectic determination.

scholarly journals From holism to compositionality: memes and the evolution of segmentation, syntax, and signification in music and language

2015 ◽  
Vol 8 (4) ◽  
pp. 463-500 ◽  
Author(s):  
STEVEN JAN
Keyword(s):  
Homo Sapiens ◽  
Logical Form ◽  
Semantic Content ◽  
Information Encoding ◽  
Modern Language ◽  
Conceptual Structures ◽  
Music And Language ◽  
Initial Support ◽  
The One ◽  
Universal Darwinism

abstractSteven Mithen argues that language evolved from an antecedent he terms “Hmmmmm, [meaning it was] Holistic, manipulative, multi-modal, musical and mimetic”. Owing to certain innate and learned factors, a capacity for segmentation and cross-stream mapping in early Homo sapiens broke the continuous line of Hmmmmm, creating discrete replicated units which, with the initial support of Hmmmmm, eventually became the semantically freighted words of modern language. That which remained after what was a bifurcation of Hmmmmm arguably survived as music, existing as a sound stream segmented into discrete units, although one without the explicit and relatively fixed semantic content of language. All three types of utterance – the parent Hmmmmm, language, and music – are amenable to a memetic interpretation which applies Universal Darwinism to what are understood as language and musical memes. On the basis of Peter Carruthers’ distinction between ‘cognitivism’ and ‘communicativism’ in language, and William Calvin’s theories of cortical information encoding, a framework is hypothesized for the semantic and syntactic associations between, on the one hand, the sonic patterns of language memes (‘lexemes’) and of musical memes (‘musemes’) and, on the other hand, ‘mentalese’ conceptual structures, in Chomsky’s ‘Logical Form’ (LF).

The Grammar of Subjectivity

2020 ◽  
pp. 59-65
Author(s):  
Jonardon Ganeri
Keyword(s):  
Logical Form ◽  
Conscious State ◽  
Careful Examination ◽  
Human Being ◽  
Phenomenological Interpretation ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The One ◽  
Affected Subject

There is a commonly agreed way to articulate the logical form of a conscious state: it a state such that there is something it is like for a subject to be in it. This formula has the important virtue that it enables us to separate out two distinct aspects in the phenomenology of an experience: what is experienced, the ‘quality’ of the experience; and how it is experienced, that it is experienced as being for-a-subject. A careful examination of the syntax of the ‘what it’s like …’ construction reveals that the colloquial phrase ‘subject of experience’ is polysemic. On the one hand it might mean the subject in whom the experience is occurring. Let me call this the ‘locative of manifestation’. This host self, an inhabited self, is more commonly identified with the physical human being, or the human being’s brain or neuropsychological state, but Pessoa gives instead a phenomenological interpretation of the notion. The phrase might also mean the subject affected by the experience. The affected subject is the one to whom the experience is addressed, so I will call this the ‘accusative of manifestation’. The accusative of manifestation is, evidently, conceptually distinct from the locative of manifestation. Finally, the phrase might mean the subject who is undergoing the experience, the one who lives through the experience, the ‘dative of manifestation.’

Requirements of Structural Rationality

2021 ◽  
pp. 165-195
Author(s):  
Alex Worsnip
Keyword(s):  
Wide Scope ◽  
Rational Requirements ◽  
Narrow Scope

This chapter turns to the nature and form of requirements of structural rationality. It presents a recipe for generating requirements of structural rationality from verdicts about which states are incoherent (by the account defended in the previous chapter). On the resulting view, requirements of structural rationality are prohibitions on (incoherent) combinations of states. The chapter compares this with the closely related view that the requirements of rationality are “wide-scope” before reframing the debate over the scope of rational requirements and arguing for a view that is wide-scope, rather than narrow-scope, in spirit. It also argues that requirements of structural rationality are synchronic rather than diachronic. Finally, it defends the view that the demands of structural rationality are best thought of as requirements at all against a recent challenge.

Prosodic disambiguation of scopally ambiguous quantificational sentences in a discourse context

2014 ◽  
Vol 50 (2) ◽  
pp. 453-493 ◽  
Author(s):  
KRISTEN SYRETT ◽  
GEORGIA SIMON ◽  
KIRSTEN NISULA
Keyword(s):  
Language Acquisition ◽  
Wide Scope ◽  
Correct Interpretation ◽  
Subsequent Work ◽  
Auditory Cues ◽  
Discourse Context ◽  
Narrow Scope ◽  
One To One

Researchers have long sought to determine the strength of the relation between prosody and the interpretation of scopally ambiguous sentences in English involving quantification and negation (e.g. All the men didn't go). While Jackendoff (1972) proposed a one-to-one mapping between sentence-final contour and the scope of negation (falling contour: narrow scope, fall-rise contour: wide scope), in subsequent work, researchers (e.g. Ladd 1980; Ward & Hirschberg 1985; Kadmon & Roberts 1986) disentangled the link between prosody and scope. Even though these pragmatic accounts predict variability in production, they still allow for some correlation between scope and prosody. To date, we lack systematic evidence to bear on this discussion. Here, we present findings from two perception experiments aimed at investigating whether prosodic information – including, but not limited to, sentence-final contour – can successfully disambiguate such sentences. We show that when speakers provide consistent auditory cues to sentential interpretation, hearers can successfully recruit these cues to arrive at the correct interpretation as intended by the speaker. In light of these results, we argue that psycholinguistic studies (including language acquisition studies) investigating participants’ ability to access multiple interpretations of scopally ambiguous sentences – quantificational and otherwise – should carefully control for prosody.

The Autonomy-Based Liberalism of Joseph Raz

1989 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 151-162 ◽  
Author(s):  
W. J. Norman
Keyword(s):  
Good Life ◽  
Liberal Theory ◽  
Recent Book ◽  
The Good Life ◽  
Political Morality ◽  
Philosophical Aspect ◽  
History Of ◽  
Joseph Raz ◽  
The One ◽  
Conception Of The Good

Ask a practising liberal to define her political creed, and more likely than not she will begin by describing the wonderful life of the free person. That is, in the parlance of modern political philosophers, she will begin with a conception of the good. The good life is the free life, and the good society is the one where people are as free as possible. By contrast, recent liberal philosophers have for the most part grounded their theories in principles of right or rights. Indeed, some have argued that what is unique about liberalism as a political doctrine is that it is not committed to the advancement of any particular conception of the good, let alone to that of the free person. In his celebrated recent book, The Morality of Freedom, Joseph Raz sides with the practitioner and confronts the pedlars of right-based or deontological liberalism head-on. Believing the history of liberal theory to be against them, he labels his opponents ‘revisionists’. The Morality of Freedom has already been hailed as the most significant new statement of liberal principles since Mill’s On Liberty. And while this may be a bit over-enthusiastic, Raz would welcome at least one philosophical aspect of the comparison with Mill. Both are teleologists who ground their theories of political morality on considerations of the value of the free or autonomous life. I shall dub such theories ‘autonomarian’. And I shall examine Raz’s autonomarian reaction in detail here, for it may well be the most important such theory in the post-Rawlsian era.

scholarly journals Multi-scale Simulations of Dry Friction Using Network Simulation Method

2016 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 559-580 ◽  
Author(s):  
F. Marín ◽  
F. Alhama ◽  
J. Solano ◽  
P.A. Meroño ◽  
J.F. Sánchez
Keyword(s):  
Initial Conditions ◽  
Network Simulation ◽  
Network Models ◽  
Simulation Method ◽  
Atomic Scale ◽  
Scale Model ◽  
Narrow Scope ◽  
The One ◽  
High Level ◽  
Network Simulation Method

AbstractThe study of everyday phenomena involving friction continues to maintain a high level of difficulty despite its long history. The causes of this problem lie in the different scale of the characteristics of the phenomenon, macroscopic and microscopic. Thus, very different models, valid in a narrow scope which prevents generalization, have been appearing. This survey presents the application of network simulation method to the numerical solution to the study of friction at very different scales. On the one hand, on a microscopic scale an atomic force microscope model has been studied, related to the analysis of soft surfaces at the atomic scale. Furthermore, on a macroscopic scale model related to the analysis of an industrial device, such as a brake mechanism has been studied. After presenting herein is a review of the different formulations of the friction force, the nature of the surfaces involved in the phenomenon, as well as the definition of the problems to be analyzed. The design of network models and the implementation of the initial conditions are explained. The results of the application of network models to selected problems are presented. In order to verify the reliability of the proposed models, their results are compared with the solutions obtained by other numerical methods or experimental results, one from a device developed during the preparation of this report.

scholarly journals Rozumowanie prawnicze jako rozumowanie praktyczne w świetle nowej teorii prawa naturalnego Johna M. Finnisa

2020 ◽  
pp. 84-98
Author(s):  
Michał Sopiński
Keyword(s):  
Natural Law ◽  
Practical Reasoning ◽  
Legal Reasoning ◽  
Legal Positivism ◽  
Contemporary Philosophy ◽  
Critical Approach ◽  
New Approach ◽  
Joseph Raz ◽  
Natural Law Theory ◽  
The One

This paper presents practical reasoning in the light of John M. Finnis’ new natural law theory. Finnis’ views were shaped by Aquinas’ thoughts on natural law but he was also strongly inspired by Germain Grisez’ new approach, so his theory could be named a new natural law theory. The aim of this paper is to analyse the concept of legal reasoning as practical reasoning, which Finnis intended mainly as a strong critique of Ronald Dworkin’s theory of legal reasoning based on the concept of the one right answer. According to the author of this paper, Finnis’ critical approach to Dworkin leads to a gradual extension of the former’s concept of legal reasoning to include positivistic aspects (rapprochement with Joseph Raz’ views) and institutional aspects (rapprochement with Neil MacCormick’s views). Therefore, Finnis’ theory of legal reasoning seems to be a model example of the rapprochement between natural law and legal positivism in contemporary philosophy of law.

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