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Topic serio sin imagenes grotescas, a leer!!! (ctm) (ctm) (ctm) (ctm) (ctm) (ctm)

Preface

This document is intended to introduce pointers to beginning programmers in the C programming language. Over several years of reading and contributing to various conferences on C including those on the FidoNet and UseNet, I have noted a large number of newcomers to C appear to have a difficult time in grasping the fundamentals of pointers. I therefore undertook the task of trying to explain them in plain language with lots of examples.

The first version of this document was placed in the public domain, as is this one. It was picked up by Bob Stout who included it as a file called PTR-HELP.TXT in his widely distributed collection of SNIPPETS. Since that original 1995 release, I have added a significant amount of material and made some minor corrections in the original work.

In the HTML version 1.1 I made a number of minor changes to the wording as a result of comments emailed to me from around the world. In version 1.2 I updated the first two chapters to acknowledge the shift from 16 bit compilers to 32 bit compilers on PCs.
Acknowledgements:

There are so many people who have unknowingly contributed to this work because of the questions they have posed in the FidoNet C Echo, or the UseNet Newsgroup comp.lang.c, or several other conferences in other networks, that it would be impossible to list them all. Special thanks go to Bob Stout who was kind enough to include the first version of this material in his SNIPPETS file.
About the Author:

Ted Jensen is a retired Electronics Engineer who worked as a hardware designer or manager of hardware designers in the field of magnetic recording. Programming has been a hobby of his off and on since 1968 when he learned how to keypunch cards for submission to be run on a mainframe. (The mainframe had 64K of magnetic core memory!).
Use of this Material:

Everything contained herein is hereby released to the Public Domain. Any person may copy or distribute this material in any manner they wish. The only thing I ask is that if this material is used as a teaching aid in a class, I would appreciate it if it were distributed in its entirety, i.e. including all chapters, the preface and the introduction. I would also appreciate it if, under such circumstances, the instructor of such a class would drop me a note at one of the addresses below informing me of this. I have written this with the hope that it will be useful to others and since I'm not asking any financial remuneration, the only way I know that I have at least partially reached that goal is via feedback from those who find this material useful.

By the way, you needn't be an instructor or teacher to contact me. I would appreciate a note from anyone who finds the material useful, or who has constructive criticism to offer. I'm also willing to answer questions submitted by email at the addresses shown below.
Other versions of this document:

In addition to this hypertext version of this document, I have made available other versions more suitable for printing or for downloading of the entire document. If you are interested in keeping up to date on my progress in that area, or want to check for more recent versions of this document, see my Web Site at http://www.netcom.com/~tjensen/ptr/cpoint.htm

Ted Jensen
Redwood City, California
tjensen@ix.netcom.com
Feb. 2000
Introduction

If you want to be proficient in the writing of code in the C programming language, you must have a thorough working knowledge of how to use pointers. Unfortunately, C pointers appear to represent a stumbling block to newcomers, particularly those coming from other computer languages such as Fortran, Pascal or Basic.

To aid those newcomers in the understanding of pointers I have written the following material. To get the maximum benefit from this material, I feel it is important that the user be able to run the code in the various listings contained in the article. I have attempted, therefore, to keep all code ANSI compliant so that it will work with any ANSI compliant compiler. I have also tried to carefully block the code within the text. That way, with the help of an ASCII text editor, you can copy a given block of code to a new file and compile it on your system. I recommend that readers do this as it will help in understanding the material.
CHAPTER 1: What is a pointer?

One of those things beginners in C find difficult is the concept of pointers. The purpose of this tutorial is to provide an introduction to pointers and their use to these beginners.

I have found that often the main reason beginners have a problem with pointers is that they have a weak or minimal feeling for variables, (as they are used in C). Thus we start with a discussion of C variables in general.

A variable in a program is something with a name, the value of which can vary. The way the compiler and linker handles this is that it assigns a specific block of memory within the computer to hold the value of that variable. The size of that block depends on the range over which the variable is allowed to vary. For example, on 32 bit PC's the size of an integer variable is 4 bytes. On older 16 bit PCs integers were 2 bytes. In C the size of a variable type such as an integer need not be the same on all types of machines. Further more there is more than one type of integer variable in C. We have integers, long integers and short integers which you can read up on in any basic text on C. This document assumes the use of a 32 bit system with 4 byte integers.

If you want to know the size of the various types of integers on your system, running the following code will give you that information.

#include <stdio.h>

int main()
{
printf("size of a short is %d\n", sizeof(short));
printf("size of a int is %d\n", sizeof(int));
printf("size of a long is %d\n", sizeof(long));
}

When we declare a variable we inform the compiler of two things, the name of the variable and the type of the variable. For example, we declare a variable of type integer with the name k by writing:

int k;

On seeing the "int" part of this statement the compiler sets aside 4 bytes of memory (on a PC) to hold the value of the integer. It also sets up a symbol table. In that table it adds the symbol k and the relative address in memory where those 4 bytes were set aside.

Thus, later if we write:

k = 2;

we expect that, at run time when this statement is executed, the value 2 will be placed in that memory location reserved for the storage of the value of k. In C we refer to a variable such as the integer k as an "object".

In a sense there are two "values" associated with the object k. One is the value of the integer stored there (2 in the above example) and the other the "value" of the memory location, i.e., the address of k. Some texts refer to these two values with the nomenclature rvalue (right value, pronounced "are value") and lvalue (left value, pronounced "el value") respectively.

In some languages, the lvalue is the value permitted on the left side of the assignment operator '=' (i.e. the address where the result of evaluation of the right side ends up). The rvalue is that which is on the right side of the assignment statement, the 2 above. Rvalues cannot be used on the left side of the assignment statement. Thus: 2 = k; is illegal.

Actually, the above definition of "lvalue" is somewhat modified for C. According to K&R II (page 197): [1]

"An object is a named region of storage; an lvalue is an expression referring to an object."

However, at this point, the definition originally cited above is sufficient. As we become more familiar with pointers we will go into more detail on this.

Okay, now consider:

int j, k;

k = 2;
j = 7; <-- line 1
k = j; <-- line 2

In the above, the compiler interprets the j in line 1 as the address of the variable j (its lvalue) and creates code to copy the value 7 to that address. In line 2, however, the j is interpreted as its rvalue (since it is on the right hand side of the assignment operator '='). That is, here the j refers to the value stored at the memory location set aside for j, in this case 7. So, the 7 is copied to the address designated by the lvalue of k.

In all of these examples, we are using 4 byte integers so all copying of rvalues from one storage location to the other is done by copying 4 bytes. Had we been using two byte integers, we would be copying 2 bytes.

Now, let's say that we have a reason for wanting a variable designed to hold an lvalue (an address). The size required to hold such a value depends on the system. On older desk top computers with 64K of memory total, the address of any point in memory can be contained in 2 bytes. Computers with more memory would require more bytes to hold an address. The actual size required is not too important so long as we have a way of informing the compiler that what we want to store is an address.

Such a variable is called a pointer variable (for reasons which hopefully will become clearer a little later). In C when we define a pointer variable we do so by preceding its name with an asterisk. In C we also give our pointer a type which, in this case, refers to the type of data stored at the address we will be storing in our pointer. For example, consider the variable declaration:

int *ptr;

ptr is the name of our variable (just as k was the name of our integer variable). The '*' informs the compiler that we want a pointer variable, i.e. to set aside however many bytes is required to store an address in memory. The int says that we intend to use our pointer variable to store the address of an integer. Such a pointer is said to "point to" an integer. However, note that when we wrote int k; we did not give k a value. If this definition is made outside of any function ANSI compliant compilers will initialize it to zero. Similarly, ptr has no value, that is we haven't stored an address in it in the above declaration. In this case, again if the declaration is outside of any function, it is initialized to a value guaranteed in such a way that it is guaranteed to not point to any C object or function. A pointer initialized in this manner is called a "null" pointer.

The actual bit pattern used for a null pointer may or may not evaluate to zero since it depends on the specific system on which the code is developed. To make the source code compatible between various compilers on various systems, a macro is used to represent a null pointer. That macro goes under the name NULL. Thus, setting the value of a pointer using the NULL macro, as with an assignment statement such as ptr = NULL, guarantees that the pointer has become a null pointer. Similarly, just as one can test for an integer value of zero, as in if(k == 0), we can test for a null pointer using if (ptr == NULL).

But, back to using our new variable ptr. Suppose now that we want to store in ptr the address of our integer variable k. To do this we use the unary & operator and write:

ptr = &k;

What the & operator does is retrieve the lvalue (address) of k, even though k is on the right hand side of the assignment operator '=', and copies that to the contents of our pointer ptr. Now, ptr is said to "point to" k. Bear with us now, there is only one more operator we need to discuss.

The "dereferencing operator" is the asterisk and it is used as follows:

*ptr = 7;

will copy 7 to the address pointed to by ptr. Thus if ptr "points to" (contains the address of) k, the above statement will set the value of k to 7. That is, when we use the '*' this way we are referring to the value of that which ptr is pointing to, not the value of the pointer itself.

Similarly, we could write:

printf("%d\n",*ptr);

to print to the screen the integer value stored at the address pointed to by ptr;.

One way to see how all this stuff fits together would be to run the following program and then review the code and the output carefully.

------------ Program 1.1 ---------------------------------

/* Program 1.1 from PTRTUT10.TXT 6/10/97 */

#include <stdio.h>

int j, k;
int *ptr;

int main(void)
{
j = 1;
k = 2;
ptr = &k;
printf("\n");
printf("j has the value %d and is stored at %p\n", j, (void *)&j);
printf("k has the value %d and is stored at %p\n", k, (void *)&k);
printf("ptr has the value %p and is stored at %p\n", ptr, (void *)&ptr);
printf("The value of the integer pointed to by ptr is %d\n", *ptr);

return 0;
}

Note: We have yet to discuss those aspects of C which require the use of the (void *) expression used here. For now, include it in your test code. We'll explain the reason behind this expression later.

To review:

* A variable is declared by giving it a type and a name (e.g. int k;)
* A pointer variable is declared by giving it a type and a name (e.g. int *ptr) where the asterisk tells the compiler that the variable named ptr is a pointer variable and the type tells the compiler what type the pointer is to point to (integer in this case).
* Once a variable is declared, we can get its address by preceding its name with the unary & operator, as in &k.
* We can "dereference" a pointer, i.e. refer to the value of that which it points to, by using the unary '*' operator as in *ptr.
* An "lvalue" of a variable is the value of its address, i.e. where it is stored in memory. The "rvalue" of a variable is the value stored in that variable (at that address).

References for Chapter 1:

1. "The C Programming Language" 2nd Edition
B. Kernighan and D. Ritchie
Prentice Hall
ISBN 0-13-110362-8

CHAPTER 2: Pointer types and Arrays

Okay, let's move on. Let us consider why we need to identify the type of variable that a pointer points to, as in:

int *ptr;

One reason for doing this is so that later, once ptr "points to" something, if we write:

*ptr = 2;

the compiler will know how many bytes to copy into that memory location pointed to by ptr. If ptr was declared as pointing to an integer, 4 bytes would be copied. Similarly for floats and doubles the appropriate number will be copied. But, defining the type that the pointer points to permits a number of other interesting ways a compiler can interpret code. For example, consider a block in memory consisting if ten integers in a row. That is, 40 bytes of memory are set aside to hold 10 integers.

Now, let's say we point our integer pointer ptr at the first of these integers. Furthermore lets say that integer is located at memory location 100 (decimal). What happens when we write:

ptr + 1;

Because the compiler "knows" this is a pointer (i.e. its value is an address) and that it points to an integer (its current address, 100, is the address of an integer), it adds 4 to ptr instead of 1, so the pointer "points to" the next integer, at memory location 104. Similarly, were the ptr declared as a pointer to a short, it would add 2 to it instead of 1. The same goes for other data types such as floats, doubles, or even user defined data types such as structures. This is obviously not the same kind of "addition" that we normally think of. In C it is referred to as addition using "pointer arithmetic", a term which we will come back to later.

Similarly, since ++ptr and ptr++ are both equivalent to ptr + 1 (though the point in the program when ptr is incremented may be different), incrementing a pointer using the unary ++ operator, either pre- or post-, increments the address it stores by the amount sizeof(type) where "type" is the type of the object pointed to. (i.e. 4 for an integer).

Since a block of 10 integers located contiguously in memory is, by definition, an array of integers, this brings up an interesting relationship between arrays and pointers.

Consider the following:

int my_array[] = {1,23,17,4,-5,100};

Here we have an array containing 6 integers. We refer to each of these integers by means of a subscript to my_array, i.e. using my_array[0] through my_array[5]. But, we could alternatively access them via a pointer as follows:

int *ptr;
ptr = &my_array[0]; /* point our pointer at the first
integer in our array */

And then we could print out our array either using the array notation or by dereferencing our pointer. The following code illustrates this:

----------- Program 2.1 -----------------------------------

/* Program 2.1 from PTRTUT10.HTM 6/13/97 */

#include <stdio.h>

int my_array[] = {1,23,17,4,-5,100};
int *ptr;

int main(void)
{
int i;
ptr = &my_array[0]; /* point our pointer to the first
element of the array */
printf("\n\n");
for (i = 0; i < 6; i++)
{
printf("my_array[%d] = %d ",i,my_array[i]); /*<-- A */
printf("ptr + %d = %d\n",i, *(ptr + i)); /*<-- B */
}
return 0;
}


Compile and run the above program and carefully note lines A and B and that the program prints out the same values in either case. Also observe how we dereferenced our pointer in line B, i.e. we first added i to it and then dereferenced the new pointer. Change line B to read:

printf("ptr + %d = %d\n",i, *ptr++);

and run it again... then change it to:

printf("ptr + %d = %d\n",i, *(++ptr));

and try once more. Each time try and predict the outcome and carefully look at the actual outcome.

In C, the standard states that wherever we might use &var_name[0] we can replace that with var_name, thus in our code where we wrote:

ptr = &my_array[0];

we can write:

ptr = my_array;

to achieve the same result.

This leads many texts to state that the name of an array is a pointer. I prefer to mentally think "the name of the array is the address of first element in the array". Many beginners (including myself when I was learning) have a tendency to become confused by thinking of it as a pointer. For example, while we can write

ptr = my_array;

we cannot write

my_array = ptr;

The reason is that while ptr is a variable, my_array is a constant. That is, the location at which the first element of my_array will be stored cannot be changed once my_array[] has been declared.

Earlier when discussing the term "lvalue" I cited K&R-2 where it stated:

"An object is a named region of storage; an lvalue is an expression referring to an object".

This raises an interesting problem. Since my_array is a named region of storage, why is my_array in the above assignment statement not an lvalue? To resolve this problem, some refer to my_array as an "unmodifiable lvalue".

Modify the example program above by changing

ptr = &my_array[0];

to

ptr = my_array;

and run it again to verify the results are identical.

Now, let's delve a little further into the difference between the names ptr and my_array as used above. Some writers will refer to an array's name as a constant pointer. What do we mean by that? Well, to understand the term "constant" in this sense, let's go back to our definition of the term "variable". When we declare a variable we set aside a spot in memory to hold the value of the appropriate type. Once that is done the name of the variable can be interpreted in one of two ways. When used on the left side of the assignment operator, the compiler interprets it as the memory location to which to move that value resulting from evaluation of the right side of the assignment operator. But, when used on the right side of the assignment operator, the name of a variable is interpreted to mean the contents stored at that memory address set aside to hold the value of that variable.

With that in mind, let's now consider the simplest of constants, as in:

int i, k;
i = 2;

Here, while i is a variable and then occupies space in the data portion of memory, 2 is a constant and, as such, instead of setting aside memory in the data segment, it is imbedded directly in the code segment of memory. That is, while writing something like k = i; tells the compiler to create code which at run time will look at memory location &i to determine the value to be moved to k, code created by i = 2; simply puts the 2 in the code and there is no referencing of the data segment. That is, both k and i are objects, but 2 is not an object.

Similarly, in the above, since my_array is a constant, once the compiler establishes where the array itself is to be stored, it "knows" the address of my_array[0] and on seeing:

ptr = my_array;

it simply uses this address as a constant in the code segment and there is no referencing of the data segment beyond that.

This might be a good place explain further the use of the (void *) expression used in Program 1.1 of Chapter 1. As we have seen we can have pointers of various types. So far we have discussed pointers to integers and pointers to characters. In coming chapters we will be learning about pointers to structures and even pointer to pointers.

Also we have learned that on different systems the size of a pointer can vary. As it turns out it is also possible that the size of a pointer can vary depending on the data type of the object to which it points. Thus, as with integers where you can run into trouble attempting to assign a long integer to a variable of type short integer, you can run into trouble attempting to assign the values of pointers of various types to pointer variables of other types.

To minimize this problem, C provides for a pointer of type void. We can declare such a pointer by writing:

void *vptr;

A void pointer is sort of a generic pointer. For example, while C will not permit the comparison of a pointer to type integer with a pointer to type character, for example, either of these can be compared to a void pointer. Of course, as with other variables, casts can be used to convert from one type of pointer to another under the proper circumstances. In Program 1.1. of Chapter 1 I cast the pointers to integers into void pointers to make them compatible with the %p conversion specification. In later chapters other casts will be made for reasons defined therein.

Well, that's a lot of technical stuff to digest and I don't expect a beginner to understand all of it on first reading. With time and experimentation you will want to come back and re-read the first 2 chapters. But for now, let's move on to the relationship between pointers, character arrays, and strings.
CHAPTER 3: Pointers and Strings

The study of strings is useful to further tie in the relationship between pointers and arrays. It also makes it easy to illustrate how some of the standard C string functions can be implemented. Finally it illustrates how and when pointers can and should be passed to functions.

In C, strings are arrays of characters. This is not necessarily true in other languages. In BASIC, Pascal, Fortran and various other languages, a string has its own data type. But in C it does not. In C a string is an array of characters terminated with a binary zero character (written as '\0'). To start off our discussion we will write some code which, while preferred for illustrative purposes, you would probably never write in an actual program. Consider, for example:

char my_string[40];

my_string[0] = 'T';
my_string[1] = 'e';
my_string[2] = 'd':
my_string[3] = '\0';

While one would never build a string like this, the end result is a string in that it is an array of characters terminated with a nul character. By definition, in C, a string is an array of characters terminated with the nul character. Be aware that "nul" is not the same as "NULL". The nul refers to a zero as defined by the escape sequence '\0'. That is it occupies one byte of memory. NULL, on the other hand, is the name of the macro used to initialize null pointers. NULL is #defined in a header file in your C compiler, nul may not be #defined at all.

Since writing the above code would be very time consuming, C permits two alternate ways of achieving the same thing. First, one might write:

char my_string[40] = {'T', 'e', 'd', '\0',};

But this also takes more typing than is convenient. So, C permits:

char my_string[40] = "Ted";

When the double quotes are used, instead of the single quotes as was done in the previous examples, the nul character ( '\0' ) is automatically appended to the end of the string.

In all of the above cases, the same thing happens. The compiler sets aside an contiguous block of memory 40 bytes long to hold characters and initialized it such that the first 4 characters are Ted\0.

Now, consider the following program:

------------------program 3.1-------------------------------------

/* Program 3.1 from PTRTUT10.HTM 6/13/97 */

#include <stdio.h>

char strA[80] = "A string to be used for demonstration purposes";
char strB[80];

int main(void)
{

char *pA; /* a pointer to type character */
char *pB; /* another pointer to type character */
puts(strA); /* show string A */
pA = strA; /* point pA at string A */
puts(pA); /* show what pA is pointing to */
pB = strB; /* point pB at string B */
putchar('\n'); /* move down one line on the screen */
while(*pA != '\0') /* line A (see text) */
{
*pB++ = *pA++; /* line B (see text) */
}
*pB = '\0'; /* line C (see text) */
puts(strB); /* show strB on screen */
return 0;
}

--------- end program 3.1 -------------------------------------


In the above we start out by defining two character arrays of 80 characters each. Since these are globally defined, they are initialized to all '\0's first. Then, strA has the first 42 characters initialized to the string in quotes.
Now, moving into the code, we declare two character pointers and show the string on the screen. We then "point" the pointer pA at strA. That is, by means of the assignment statement we copy the address of strA[0] into our variable pA. We now use puts() to show that which is pointed to by pA on the screen. Consider here that the function prototype for puts() is:

int puts(const char *s);

For the moment, ignore the const. The parameter passed to puts() is a pointer, that is the value of a pointer (since all parameters in C are passed by value), and the value of a pointer is the address to which it points, or, simply, an address. Thus when we write puts(strA); as we have seen, we are passing the address of strA[0].

Similarly, when we write puts(pA); we are passing the same address, since we have set pA = strA;

Given that, follow the code down to the while() statement on line A. Line A states:

While the character pointed to by pA (i.e. *pA) is not a nul character (i.e. the terminating '\0'), do the following:

Line B states: copy the character pointed to by pA to the space pointed to by pB, then increment pA so it points to the next character and pB so it points to the next space.

When we have copied the last character, pA now points to the terminating nul character and the loop ends. However, we have not copied the nul character. And, by definition a string in C must be nul terminated. So, we add the nul character with line C.

It is very educational to run this program with your debugger while watching strA, strB, pA and pB and single stepping through the program. It is even more educational if instead of simply defining strB[] as has been done above, initialize it also with something like:

strB[80] = "12345678901234567890123456789012345678901234567890"

where the number of digits used is greater than the length of strA and then repeat the single stepping procedure while watching the above variables. Give these things a try!

Getting back to the prototype for puts() for a moment, the "const" used as a parameter modifier informs the user that the function will not modify the string pointed to by s, i.e. it will treat that string as a constant.

Of course, what the above program illustrates is a simple way of copying a string. After playing with the above until you have a good understanding of what is happening, we can proceed to creating our own replacement for the standard strcpy() that comes with C. It might look like:

char *my_strcpy(char *destination, char *source)
{
char *p = destination;
while (*source != '\0')
{
*p++ = *source++;
}
*p = '\0';
return destination;
}

In this case, I have followed the practice used in the standard routine of returning a pointer to the destination.

Again, the function is designed to accept the values of two character pointers, i.e. addresses, and thus in the previous program we could write:

int main(void)
{
my_strcpy(strB, strA);
puts(strB);
}

I have deviated slightly from the form used in standard C which would have the prototype:

char *my_strcpy(char *destination, const char *source);


[book] [book] [book] [book]

esta interesante aprender C, pero...que esto no va en la zona de informatica e internet???

sip, asi es.... o dejemos que Tony haga su propio book informatico jeje
p.d. buena info lugar equivocado

leanse todas estas fuentes hdps (ctm) (ctm) (ctm) (ctm) (ctm) (ctm) (ctm) (ctm)

* Alex Voorhoeve, Heuristics and Biases in a Purported Counterexample to the Acyclicity of “Better Than”
* Anna Szabolcsi, Across-the-board binding meets verb second

In Nespor & Mascaro, Grammar in Progress. GLOW Essays for Henk van Riemsdijk, 1990.

* Antony Eagle, Reply to Stone on Counterpart Theory and Four-Dimensionalism

Recently, Jim Stone has argued that counterpart theory is incompatible with the existence of temporal parts. I demonstrate that there is no such incompatibility.

* Caspar Hare, Voices From Another World: Must We Respect the Interests of People Who Do Not, and Will Never, Exist?

This is about the rights and wrongs of bringing people into existence. In a nutshell: sometimes what matters is not what would have happened to you, but what would have happened to the person who would have been in your position, even if that person never actually exists.

* —-, Self-Bias, Time-Bias, and the Metaphysics of Self and Time

This is about the metaphysics of the self and ethical egoism. It can serve as a preview for my manuscript-in-progress below.

* Chris Pincock, A Role for Mathematics in the Physical Sciences

Conflicting accounts of the role of mathematics in our physical theories can be traced to two principles. Mathematics appears to be both (1) theoretically indispensable, as we have no acceptable non-mathematical versions of our theories, and (2) metaphysically dispensable, as mathematical entities, if they existed, would lack a relevant causal role in the physical world. I offer a new account of a role for mathematics in the physical sciences that emphasizes the epistemic benefits of having mathematics around when we do science. This account successfully reconciles theoretical indispensability and metaphysical dispensability and has important consequences for both advocates and critics of indispensability arguments for platonism about mathematics.

* Christian List (with Franz Dietrich), Judgment aggregation by quota rules: majority voting generalized

Journal of Theoretical Politics 19(4) (in press)

* Dan Haybron, Well-Being and Virtue

A critique of perfectionist accounts of well-being, focusing on Aristotelian theories. While such views have more going for them than most critics have realized, virtue or excellence still forms no fundamental part of well-being. Seeing why illuminates interesting points about the nature of well-being. Draft 6/12/07; in review (comments most welcome; was titled “Aristotelian Virtue and the Nature of Well-Being”).

* Ed Zalta, Reflections on Mathematics
* —- (with Paul Oppenheimer), Relational vs. Functional Type Theory
* Markus Werning (with Werning, M.), Conceptual fingerprints: Lexical decomposition by means of frames – a neuro-cognitive model
* Frank Hofmann, The epistemological role of consciousness for introspective self-knowledge
* Haim Gaifman, Naming and Diagonalization, From Cantor to Gödel to Kleene
* —-, Contextual Logic with Modalities for Time and Space
* Igal Kvart, The Counterfactual Analysis of Cause
* —-, A Probabilistic Theory of Knowledge (light version)
* —-, Can Counterfactuals Save Mental Causation?
* Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Artificial Intelligence
* —-, Sense-Data
* James Kreines, Between the Bounds of Experience and Divine Intuition: Kant’s Epistemic Limits and Hegel’s Ambitions
* Jenann Ismael, Probability in Classical Physics: the Fundamental Measure
* —-, Quantum Probability: Chance
* —-, Being Somewhere
* —-, Freedom and Determinism
* —-, Causation, Perspective and Agency
* —-, Memory
* Jennifer Nagel, Review of Albert Casullo, A Priori Justification) Review of Ralph Cudworth, A Treatise Concerning Eternal and Immutable Morality) John Bell, Cover Schemes, Frame-Valued Sets and Their Potential Uses in Spacetime Physics

Spacetime Physics Research Trends, Horizons in World Physics, Volume 248, Nova Science Publishers, New York, 2007.

* Jordan Howard Sobel, Lotteries and Miracles
* Lisa Bortolotti, Disputes over moral status: philosophy and science in the future of bioethics
* —-, Moral rights and human culture
* —-, Deception in psychology : moral costs and benefits of unsought self-knowledge
* —-, Animal rights, animal minds, and human mindreading
* —-, Intentionality without rationality
* —-, Stem cell research, personhood and sentience
* —-, Delusions and the background of rationality
* —-, Inconsistency and interpretation
* Lutz Antoine (with Slagter HA, Greischar LL, Francis AD, Nieuwenhuis S, Davis JM, Davidson RJ. ), Mental Training Affects Distribution of Limited Brain Resources
* Mark Ereshefsky, Species, Taxonomy, and Systematics
* —-, Where the Wild Things Are: Environmental Preservation and Human Nature
* —-, Foundational Issues Concerning Taxa and Taxon Names
* —-, Defining ‘Health’ and ‘Disease’
* Matthew Smith, Rethinking Revolutions

This paper defends a right to revolution against six objections.

* Matti Eklund, Meaning-Constitutivity
* —-, The Descriptive and the Evaluative
* —-, Vagueness and Second-Level Indeterminacy
* —-, Bad Company and Neo-Fregean Philosophy
* —-, Carnap and Ontological Pluralism
* —-, The Ontological Significance of Inscrutability
* —-, The Liar Paradox, Expressibility, Possible Languages
* —-, The Picture of Reality as an Amorphous Lump
* —-, Deconstructing Ontological Vagueness
* —-, Fictionalism
* Christopher Belshaw, Review of David Benatar, Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence (from Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews)
* Diane Perpich, Review of Rodolphe Calin, Levinas et l’exception du soi (from Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews)
* David Kolb, Review of Jeff Malpas, Heidegger’s Topology: Being, Place, World (from Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews)
* Bosuk Yoon, Review of Tommaso Piazza, A Priori Knowledge: Toward a Phenomenological Explanation (from Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews)
* Christopher Toner, Review of Anthony Kenny and Charles Kenny, Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Utility: Happiness in Philosophical and Economic Thought (from Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews)
* J. L. Schellenberg, Review of Michael Martin (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Atheism (from Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews)
* P. D. Magnus, Draft regarding: Scientific significance

A discussion and qualified defense of Philip Kitcher on scientific significance and ‘well-ordered science.’ (Qualified because I argue that Kitcher’s position is made unstable by his reliance on the largely unanalyzed notion of natural curiosity.)

* Peter Carruthers, Cartesian epistemology: is the theory of the self-transparent mind innate?
* —-, Introspection: divided and partly eliminated
* Nes, Anders, Content in Thought and Perception of (from Philosophy Dissertations Online)
* Galaaen, Øistein Schmidt, The Disturbing Matter of Downward Causation: A Study of the Exclusion Argument and its Causal-Explanatory Presuppositions
* Angner, Erik, Subjective Measures of Well-Being: A Philosophical Investigation
* Mandik, Peter, Objective Subjectivity: Allocentric and Egocentric Representations in Thought and Experience
* Piccinini, Gualtiero, Computations and Computers in the Sciences of Mind and Brain
* McKay, Steve, Biological Rationalism
* J. David Velleman, Improvised Values of (from Philosophy Papers Online)
* —-, Action as Improv of (from Philosophy Papers Online)
* Robert Richards, Darwin’s Theory of Natural Selection and Its Moral Purpose
* Roberto Cordeschi (with G. Tamburrini), Intelligent machines and warfare: historical debates and epistemologically motivated concerns
* Christian Wildberg, Olympiodorus of (from Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
* Elisabeth Schellekens, Conceptual Art of (from Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
* Storrs McCall, Hilbert’s Second Problem
* —-, The Consistency of Arithmetic
* V. Alan White, Freedom and World-Views in The X-Files

in Philosophy and The X-Files ed. by Dean Kowalski, Sept 2007.

* Yoad Winter, Multiple coordination: meaning composition vs. the syntax-semantics interface
* Yujin Nagasawa, Millican on the Ontological Argument

Peter Millican (2004) provides a novel and elaborate objection to Anselm’s ontological argument. Millican thinks that his objection is more powerful than any other because it does not dispute contentious ‘deep philosophical theories’ that underlie the argument. Instead, it tries to reveal the ‘fatal flaw’ of the argument by considering its ‘shallow logical details’. Millican’s objection is based on his interpretation of the argument, according to which Anselm relies on what I call the ‘principle of the superiority of existence’ (PSE). I argue that (i) the textual evidence Millican cites does not provide a convincing case that Anselm relies on PSE and that, moreover, (ii) Anselm does not even need PSE for the ontological argument. I introduce a plausible interpretation of the ontological argument that is not vulnerable to Millican’s objection and conclude that even if the ontological argument fails, it does not fail in the way Millican thinks it does. (Response to this article: Millican, Peter (forthcoming), ‘Reply to Nagasawa’, Mind.)

* Panu Raatikainen, Mental Causation, Interventions, and Contrasts
* —-, Truth, Correspondence, Models, and Tarski
* —-, Philosophical Issues in Meaning and Translation
* —-, Mirage Realism’ or ‘Positivism in Naturalism’s Clothing’?
* David Bain, The Location of Pains

Perceptualists say that having a pain in a body part consists in perceiving the part as instantiating some property. I argue that perceptualism makes better sense of the connections between pain location and the experiences undergone by people in pain than three alternative accounts that dispense with perception. Turning to fellow perceptualists, I also reject ways in which David Armstrong and Michael Tye understand and motivate perceptualism, and I propose an alternative interpretation, one that vitiates a pair of objections—due to John Hyman—concerning the meaning of ‘Amy has a pain in her foot’ and the idea of bodily sensitivity. Perceptualism, I conclude, remains our best account of the location of pains.

* —-, Private Languages and Private Theorists

Simon Blackburn objects that Wittgenstein’s private language argument overlooks the possibility of a private linguist equipping himself with a criterion of correctness by confirming generalisations about the patterns in which his private sensations occur. Crispin Wright responds that appropriate generalisations would be too few to be interesting. But I show that Wright’s calculations are upset by his failure to appreciate both the richness of the data and the range of theories that would be available to the linguist.

* —-, Intentionalism and Pain

The pain case can appear to undermine the radically intentionalist view that the phenomenal character of any experience is entirely constituted by its representational content. That appearance is illusory, I argue. After categorising versions of pain intentionalism along two dimensions, I argue that an “objectivist” and “non-mentalist” version is the most promising, provided it can withstand two objections: concerning what we say when in pain, and the distinctiveness of the pain case. I rebut these objections, in a way that’s available to both opponents and adherents of the view that experiential content is entirely conceptual. In doing so I illuminate peculiarities of somatosensory perception that should interest even those who take a different view of pain experiences.

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June 6, 2007
June 6th, 2007

Enjoy!

* Adrian Piper, The Rationality of Military Service
* —-, Two Conceptions of the Self
* —-, Xenophobia and Kantian Rationalism
* —-, Kant on the Objectivity of the Moral Law
* —-, Kant’s Intelligible Standpoint on Action
* —-, Was Amerikaner von den Deutschen lernen können
* —-, Intuition and Concrete Particularity in Kant’s Transcendental Aesthetic
* Allan Hazlett, Three Objections to Common Sense Ontology
* —-, Color Dualism
* —-, Rear Window Ethics
* —-, False Knowledge
* —-, Impossible Worlds and Knowledge of Necessary Truths
* Anna Szabolcsi (with Raffaella Bernardi), Partially ordered categories: optionality, scope and licensing
* Chris Heathwood, Fitting Attitudes and Welfare
* Christian List (with Franz Dietrich), Judgment aggregation with consistency alone
* Daniel Wegner, Wandering minds: The default network and stimulus-independent thought.
* Daniel Weiskopf, Atomism, pluralism, and conceptual content

Conceptual atomists argue that most of our concepts are primitive. I take up three arguments that have been thought to support atomism and show that they are inconclusive. The evidence that allegedly backs atomism is equally compatible with a localist position on which concepts are structured representations with complex semantic content. I lay out such a localist position and argue that the appropriate position for a non-atomist to adopt is a pluralist view of conceptual structure. I show several ways in which conceptual pluralism provides an advantage in satisfying the empirical and philosophical demands on a theory of conceptual structure and content.

* David Bain, The Location of Pains

Perceptualists say that having a pain in a body part consists in perceiving the part as instantiating some property. I argue that perceptualism makes better sense of the connections between pain location and the experiences undergone by people in pain than three alternative accounts that dispense with perception. Turning to fellow perceptualists, I also reject ways in which David Armstrong and Michael Tye understand and motivate perceptualism, and I propose an alternative interpretation, one that vitiates a pair of objections—due to John Hyman—concerning the meaning of ‘Amy has a pain in her foot’ and the idea of bodily sensitivity. Perceptualism, I conclude, remains our best account of the location of pains.

* David Miller, The Objectives of Science
* Delia Graff Fara, Counterparts within Actuality
* —-, Descriptions with Adverbs of Quantification
* Ernest Lepore, Truth Conditional Semantics and Meaning
* Gyula Klima, Singularity by Similarity vs. Causality in Aquinas, Ockham and Buridan
* Ingo Brigandt, Gestalt experiments and inductive observations: Konrad Lorenz’s early epistemological writings and the methods of classical ethology
* Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Duns Scotus, John
* —-, Wright, Chauncey
* —-, Scotus, John Duns
* —-, Kuo Hsiang
* —-, Guo Xiang
* James Mensch, Embodiments: From the Body to the Body Politic
* John Broome, Should we value population?
* Josh Parsons, Assessment-contextual indexicals

In this paper, I consider whether tenses, temporal indexicals, and other indexicals are contextually dependent on the context of assessment (or a-contextual), rather than, as is usually thought, contextually dependent on the context of utterance (u-contextual). I begin by contrasting two possible linguistic norms, governing our use of context sensitive expressions, especially tenses and temporal indexicals (sections sect:myth and sect:convention-a), and argue that one of these norms would make those expressions u-contextual, while the other would make them a-contextual (section sect:character). I then ask which of these two norms are followed by English speakers (section sect:you). Finally, I argue that the existence of a-contextuality does not in any sense entail “relativism” about truth (section sect:relativism).

* Adam Feltz and Edward Cokely, An Anomaly in Intentional Action Ascription: More Evidence of Folk Diversity of (from Joshua Knobe)
* Luiz Carlos Baptista, Say what? Getting rid of ‘what is said’
* Ned Block, Consciousness, Accessibility and the Mesh between Psychology and Neuroscience

How can we disentangle the neural basis of phenomenal consciousness from the neural machinery of the cognitive access that underlies reports of phenomenal consciousness? We can see the problem in stark form if we ask how we could tell whether representations inside a Fodorian module are phenomenally conscious. The methodology would seem straightforward: find the neural natural kinds that are the basis of phenomenal consciousness in clear cases when subjects are completely confident and we have no reason to doubt their authority, and look to see whether those neural natural kinds exist within Fodorian modules. But a puzzle arises: do we include the machinery underlying reportability within the neural natural kinds of the clear cases? If the answer is ‘Yes’, then there can be no phenomenally conscious representations in Fodorian modules. But how can we know if the answer is ‘Yes’? The suggested methodology requires an answer to the question it was supposed to answer! The paper argues for an abstract solution to the problem and exhibits a source of empirical data that is relevant, data that show that in a certain sense phenomenal consciousness overflows cognitive accessibility. The paper argues that we can find a neural realizer of this overflow if assume that the neural basis of phenomenal consciousness does not include the neural basis of cognitive accessibility and that this assumption is justified (other things equal) by the explanations it allows.

* Nishi Shah (with Jeffrey Kasser), The Metaethics of Belief: An Expressivist Reading of “The Will to Believe”

Social Epistemology, 20:1, 1–17 (2006). This is a special issue devoted to the ethics of belief. Richard Gale’s comments on our paper can also be found in this issue.

* —-, How Action Governs Intention

forthcoming in Philosophers’ Imprint. I argue that the solution to the toxin puzzle lies in the the correct explanation of why we are incapable of concluding deliberation in an intention to perform a certain action unless we answer the question whether to perfom that action.

* Lawrence Solum, Natural Justice of (from Philosophy Papers Online)
* Brie Gertler, Do we look outward to determine what we believe? of (from Philosophy Papers Online)
* —-, Content Externalism and the Epistemic Conception of the Self of (from Philosophy Papers Online)
* Reinhard Muskens, Separating Syntax and Combinatorics in Categorial Grammar
* Roy Sorenson, Empty Quotation
* —-, Permission to Cheat
* —-, Knowledge Beyond the Margin of Errror
* —-, Bald-faced Lies! Lying Without the Intent to Deceive
* —-, Hearing Silence: the Perception and Introspection of Absences

in Sounds and Perception: New Philosophical Essays, ed. by Matthew Nudds and Casey O’Callaghan (Oxford University Press, forthcoming in 2008)

* —-, The Vanishing Point: the Self as an Absence
* —-, Logically Equivalent — but Closer to the Truth
* —-, Can the Dead Speak?

Themes from G. E. Moore: New Essays in Epistemology and Ethics, ed. by Susana Nuccetelli and Gary Seay (Oxford University Press, forthcoming).

* —-, Future Law
* —-, Originless Sin: Rational Dilemmas for Satisficers
* —-, The Disappearing Act
* —-, Meta-conceivabilty and Thought Experiments

in Architecture of the Imagination, ed. Shaun Nichols (Oxford University Press, 2006): 257-272.

* —-, The Ethics of Empty Worlds
* Vaughan Pratt, Algebra of (from Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
* Stefan Linquist (with Paul Griffiths and Edouard Machery), The vernacular concept of innateness
* Stephan Blatti, Animalism Unburdened

Two theories—animalism and Lockeanism—compete for favor in the contemporary debate over personal identity. The aim of this paper is to criticize the Lockean bias that their capacity for self-consciousness renders persons metaphysically unique vis-à-vis other animals—’unique’ in the sense that the conditions whose satisfaction is necessary and sufficient for the persistence of persons differ in kind from the persistence conditions of all other animals. I argue that this uniqueness claim is both philosophically untenable and empirically implausible, and that its failure necessitates a reassessment of the debate between animalism and Lockeanism. The burden, I conclude, should rest with the latter to disprove the former—which is to say, animalism ought to be considered the default position in the debate over personal identity.

* —-, Animalism, Dicephalus, and Borderline Cases

ABSTRACT: The rare condition known as dicephalus occurs when (prior to implantation) a zygote fails to divide completely, resulting in twins who are conjoined below the neck. Human dicephalic twins look like a two-headed person, with each brain supporting a distinct mental life. Jeff McMahan has recently argued that, because they instance two of us but only one animal, dicephalic twins provide a counter-example to the animalist’s claim that each of us is identical with a human animal. To the contrary, I argue that in cases of dicephalus it is obvious neither that there is one animal nor that there are two of us. Consequently, the animalist criterion does not straightforwardly apply to cases of dicephalus. I defend an account of dicephalus that is both sensitive to the complexity of twinning phenomena and not inconsistent with animalism. On my view, dicephalic twins are a borderline case of the concept human animal. I conclude with some speculative remarks about the normative import (if any) of my claim that dicephalic twins are a borderline case.

* —-, No Impediment to Solidity as Impediment

ABSTRACT: Quassim Cassam (1997) accepts the standard account of solidity, according to which, if S feels x as solid, then S feels x as an imediment to his movement. Recently, Martin Fricke and Paul Snowdon (2003) have presented a battery of counter-examples designed to show that S may feel x as solid and as exerting a pressure that supports or facilitates his movement. In this note, I defend the standard account against Fricke and Snowdon’s attack. Integral to this defense is a distinction between two (sometimes overlapping) ways in which S may feel x as an impediment to his movement: as an influence on a movement state of S, or as an obstacle to the achievement of a goal that requires movement. After demonstrating the primacy of the former sense, I argue that Fricke and Snowdon’s counter-examples only undermine a version of the standard account that glosses ‘impediment’ as an obstacle to the achievement of a goal that requires movement.

* Stephen Schiffer, Quandary and Intuitionism: Crispin Wright on Vagueness
* —-, The Two-Stage Theory of Meaning
* —-, Propositions, What Are They Good For?
* —-, Interest-Relative Invariantism
* —-, Evidence = Knowledge: Williamson’s Solution to Skepticism
* Steve Petersen, Minimum message length as a truth-conducive simplicity measure

given at the 2007 Formal Epistemology Workshop at Carnegie Mellon June 2nd. Good compression must track higher vs lower probability of inputs, and this is one way to approach how simplicity tracks truth.

* Timothy Bays, More on Putnam’s Models: A Response to Bellotti

Recently, Luca Bellotti has taken issue with some of the mathematical arguments in 2 above. This paper responds to Bellotti’s concerns, and makes a few, somewhat more general, remarks about the mathematical side of Putnam’s model-theoretic argument.

* —-, The Problem with Charlie: Some Remarks on Putnam, Lewis and Williams
* —-, Two Arguments Against Realism
* Lutz Antoine (with Slagter HA, Lutz A, Greischar LL, Francis AD, Nieuwenhuis S, Davis JM, Davidson RJ.), Mental Training Affects Distribution of Limited Brain Resources
* —- (with Thompson E., Lutz, A. and Cosmelli, D.), Neurophenomenology: An Introduction for Neurophilosophers in Cognition and the Brain : The Philosophy and Neuroscience Movement

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May 25, 2007
May 25th, 2007

Here’s an update for today, May 25. Because it’s been longer than usual since the last update, I did not include all of the new NDPR reviews in this update, as I usually do. So you might want to peruse them here. -Jonathan

* Anthony Greenwald (with Lane, K. A., Banaji, M. R., and Nosek, B. A.), Understanding and using the Implicit Association Test: IV. What we know (so far)
* Barkley Rosser, Live and Dead Issues in the Methodology of Economics
* Baron Reed, Self-Knowledge and Rationality
* Ben Blumson, Depictive Structure?
* Carrie Jenkins, Concepts, Experience and Modal Knowledge

Offers a concept-grounding empiricist account of modal knowledge, arguing that our exercises in conceivability are a way of recovering information from our grounded concepts. The final version will be posted here soon.

* Christian List (with Franz Dietrich), Judgment aggregation on restricted domains
* Christopher Peacocke, Mental Action and Self-Awareness (II)

from Mental Action ed. L. O’Brien and M. Soteriou (Oxford University Press, expected 2008)

* Dale Dorsey, Aggregation, Partiality, and the Strong Beneficence Principle
* Daniel Nolan, A Consistent Reading of Sylvan’s Box

This paper argues that Graham Priest’s story Sylvan’s Box has an attractive, consistent reading. Priest’s hope to use that story as an example of a non-trivial “essentially inconsistent” story is thus threatened. The paper then makes some observations about the role Sylvan’s Box might play in a theory of unreliable narrators.

* —-, Properties and Paradox in Graham Priest’s Towards Non-Being

forthcoming in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research.

* David Braun, Names and Natural Kind Terms
* —-, Now You Know Who Hong Oak Yun Is
* —- (with Theodore Sider), Vague, So Untrue
* Derk Pereboom, A Compatibilist Theory of the Beliefs Required for Rational Deliberation
* Dieter Zeh, Quantum teleportation is a misnomer
* Elliott Sober (with Gregory Mougin), Betting Against Pascal’s Wager
* Ernest Lepore (with K. Ludwig), Davidson

in 12 Modern Philosophers, eds. Gary Kemp and Chris Belshaw, Basil Blackwell, 2007

* Greg Mikkelson, Economic inequality predicts biodiversity loss
* Hartley Slater, Harmonising Natural Deduction
* —-, The De-mathematisation of Logic
* Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Chu His
* —-, Logical Consequence — c. Model-Theoretic Conceptions
* Ioannis Votsis, Review of Kyle Stanford, Exceeding Our Grasp: Science, History, and the Problem of Unconceived Alternatives) Uninterpreted Equations and the Structure-Nature Distinction
* Kyle Johnson, LCA+Alignment=RNR,

talk presented at the Workshop on Coordination, Subordination and Ellipsis, Tubingen, June 2007.

* —-, Determiners,

talk presented at On Linguistic Interfaces, Ulster, June 2007.

* Maribel Romero (with Laura Kallmeyer), Scope and Situation Binding in LTAG using Semantic Unification
* Mark Schroeder, Huemer’s Clarkeanism

(75k .pdf file - 8 pages with references) Forthcoming in a symposium on Michael Huemer’s Ethical Intuitionism in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research

* —-, Having Reasons

(160k .pdf file - 21 pages with references) Forthcoming in Philosophical Studies.

* —-, Finagling Frege

Michael Ridge claims to have ‘finessed’ the Frege-Geach Problem ‘on the cheap’. In this short paper I explain a couple of the reasons why this thought is premature.

* —-, Buck-Passers’ Negative Thesis

In this short paper I explain why it is perfectly fair game to think that facts about value are quantificational facts about reasons, and still think that they can themselves be reasons.

* —-, The Negative Reason Existential Fallacy

This is a simple paper that explains why a very common argumentative strategy in moral philosophy is highly problematic and apt to be used misleadingly, framed in the context of a discussion of the ‘leveling down’ objection to egalitarianism. All of the main arguments in the paper appear elsewhere in my work; this paper merely tries to emphasize the generality of the problem, and that it deserves to be recognized and taken seriously in many different contexts. It is the negative reason existential fallacy.

* Mark Sharlow, As True as ‘You Think’: Preserving the Core of Folk Psychology
* —-, Yes, We Have Conscious Will
* —-, Restoring the Foundations of Human Dignity

critiques the degradation of the person in current philosophical thought. This page points out some challenges to behaviorism, eliminativism, postmodernism, and other antipersonal ideas.

* Martin Stokhof (with Hans Kamp), Information in natural language
* Michael Anderson, Content and action: The guidance theory of representation

Abstract: The current essay introduces the guidance theory of representation, according to which the content and intentionality of representations can be accounted for in terms of the way they provide guidance for action. The guidance theory offers a way of fixing representational content that gives the causal and evolutionary history of the subject only an indirect (non-necessary) role, and an account of representational error, based on failure of action, that does not rely on any such notions as proper functions, ideal conditions, or normal circumstances. Moreover, because the notion of error is defined in terms of failure of action, the guidance theory meets the “meta-epistemological requirement” that representational error should be potentially detectable by the representing system itself. In this essay, we offer a brief account of the biological origins of representation, a formal characterization of the guidance theory, some examples of its use, and show how the guidance theory handles some traditional problem cases for representation: the problems of error and of representation of fictional and abstract entities. Being both representational and action-grounded, the guidance theory may provide some common ground between embodied and cognitivist approaches to the study of the mind.

* —-, A self-help guide for autonomous systems

When things go badly, we notice that something is amiss, figure out what went wrong and why, and attempt to repair the problem. Artificial systems depend on their human designers to program in responses to every eventuality and therefore typically don’t even notice when things go wrong, following their programming over the proverbial, and in some cases literal, cliff. This article describes our work on the Meta-Cognitive Loop, a domain-general approach to giving artificial systems the ability to notice, assess, and repair problems. The goal is to make artificial systems more robust.

* —-, A review of recent research in reasoning and metareasoning

Abstract: Recent years have seen a resurgence of interest in the use of metacognition in intelligent systems. This essay is part of a small section meant to give interested researchers an overview and sampling of the kinds of work currently being pursued in this broad area. The current essay offers a review of recent research in two main topic areas: the monitoring and control of reasoning (metareasoning) and the monitoring and control of learning (metalearning).

* Michael Blome-Tillman, Epistemic Contextualism, Subject-Sensitive Invariantism and the Interaction of ‘Knowledge’-Ascriptions with Modal and Temporal Embeddings
* Patricia Greenspan, Learning Emotions and Ethics
* —-, Reconceiving Practical Reasons
* Philippe Schlenker, Anselm’s Argument and Berry’s Paradox

We argue that Anselm’s ontological argument (or at least one reconstruction of it) is based on an empirical version of Berry’s paradox. It is invalid, but it takes some understanding of trivalence to see why this is so. Under our analysis, Anselm’s use of the notion of existence is not the heart of the matter; rather, trivalence is.

* Mark Greenberg, Naturalism and Normativity in the Philosophy of Law of (from Philosophy Papers Online)
* Roberto Cordeschi, AI turns fifty: revisiting its origins

Applied Artificial Intelligence, 21, 2007, pp. 259-279.

* Stephan Blatti, Animalism Unburdened

Two theories — animalism and Lockeanism — compete for favor in the contemporary debate over personal identity. The aim of this paper is to criticize the Lockean bias that their capacity for self-consciousness renders persons metaphysically unique vis-à-vis other animals — ‘unique’ in the sense that the conditions whose satisfaction is necessary and sufficient for the persistence of persons differ in kind from the persistence conditions of all other animals. I argue that this uniqueness claim is both philosophically untenable and empirically implausible, and that its failure necessitates a reassessment of the debate between animalism and Lockeanism. The burden, I conclude, should rest with the latter to disprove the former — which is to say, animalism ought to be considered the default position in the debate over personal identity.

* —-, Animalism, Dicephalus, and Borderline Cases

The rare condition known as dicephalus occurs when (prior to implantation) a zygote fails to divide completely, resulting in twins who are conjoined below the neck. Human dicephalic twins look like a two-headed person, with each brain supporting a distinct mental life. Jeff McMahan has recently argued that, because they instance two of us but only one animal, dicephalic twins provide a counter-example to the animalist’s claim that each of us is identical with a human animal. To the contrary, I argue that in cases of dicephalus it is obvious neither that there is one animal nor that there are two of us. Consequently, the animalist criterion does not straightforwardly apply to cases of dicephalus. I defend an account of dicephalus that is both sensitive to the complexity of twinning phenomena and not inconsistent with animalism. On my view, dicephalic twins are a borderline case of the concept human animal. I conclude with some speculative remarks about the normative import (if any) of my claim that dicephalic twins are a borderline case.

* Stephan Hartmann (with Gabriella Pigozzi), Aggregation in Multi-Agent Systems and the Problem of Truth-Tracking
* Ted Hinchman, The Assurance of Warrant

Abstract: In “Telling as Inviting to Trust” (PPR, May 2005) I defended a version of what Richard Moran subsequently christened the Assurance View of testimony, according to which the epistemic warrant transmitted through testimony derives from an assurance that the speaker gives her addressee and is therefore unavailable to overhearers. But neither my earlier paper nor Moran’s gives an adequate explanation of how the transmission of warrant depends specifically on the speaker’s mode of address, making it natural to suspect that the interpersonal element is merely psychological or action-theoretic, rather than epistemic. I aim here to fill that explanatory gap: to specify exactly how a testifier’s assurance can create genuine epistemic warrant. One attraction of the Assurance View of testimony is that, properly developed, it allows us to reconceptualize the natures of normativity and responsibility more generally, viewing the assurance as implicating us in normative relations of recognition, and therefore of justice, that are not yet moralized with reactive attitudes. Understanding this dimension of bipolar normative relation thus provides us with a principled basis for resisting broader moralizations of normativity and responsibility.

* Thomas Kelly, Peer Disagreement and Higher Order Evidence

To appear in Richard Feldman and Ted Warfield (eds.) Disagreement, forthcoming from Oxford University Press. A sequel to my earlier paper, “The Epistemic Significance of Disagreement” (2005). How should we respond to the phenomenon of peer disagreement? I criticize ‘The Equal Weight View’ (Elga, Feldman, Christensen) and develop and defend an alternative theory.

* —-, Disagreement, Dogmatism, and Belief Polarization

Suppose that you and I disagree about some non-straightforward matter of fact (say, about whether capital punishment tends to have a deterrent effect on crime). Psychologists have demonstrated the following striking phenomenon: if you and I are subsequently exposed to a mixed body of evidence that bears on the question, doing so tends to increase the extent of our initial disagreement. That is, in response to exactly the same evidence, each of us grows increasingly confident of his or her original view; we thus become increasingly polarized as our common evidence increases. I consider several alternative models of how people reason about newly-acquired evidence which seems to disconfirm their prior beliefs. I then explore the normative implications of these models for the phenomenon in question.

* —-, Moorean Facts and Belief Revision or Can the Skeptic Win?

*

Reasoning: Studies of Human Inference and its Foundations, ed. Jonathan Adler and Lance Rips, Cambridge University Press. This gives an overview of the OSCAR theory of defeasible reasoning.

* —-, Epistemology, Rationality, and Cognition

This is a longer version of a paper by the same title to appear in Companion to Epistemology, second edition, ed. Matthias Steup, Blackwells. It consists of a general sketch of my views on epistemology and how it relates to cognitive science and artificial intelligence.

* —-, Irrationality and Cognition

Presented at the Inland Northwest Philosophy Conference on Knowledge and Skepticism, held April 30-May 2, 2004, in Moscow, ID and Pullman, WA. The strategy of this paper is to throw light on rational cognition and epistemic justification by examining irrationality. I argue that practical irrationality derives from a general difficulty we have in overriding conditioned features likings. Epistemic irrationality is possible because we are reflexive cognizers, able to reason about redirect some aspects of our own cognition. This has the consequence that practical irrationality can affect our epistemic cognition. I argue that all epistemic irrationality can be traced to this single source. The upshot is that one cannot give a theory of epistemic rationality or epistemic justification without simultaneously giving a theory of practical rationality. A consequence of this account is that a theory of rationality is a descriptive theory, describing contingent features of a cognitive architecture, and it forms the core of a general theory of “voluntary” cognition Ñ those aspects of cognition that are under voluntary control. It also follows that most of the so-called “rules for rationality” that philosophers have proposed are really just rules describing default (non-reflexive) cognition. It can be perfectly rational for a reflexive cognizer to break these rules. The “normativity” of rationality is a reflection of a built-in feature of reflexive cognition — when we detect violations of rationality, we have a tendency to desire to correct them. This is just another part of the descriptive theory of rationality. Although theories of rationality are descriptive, the structure of reflexive cognition gives philosophers, as human cognizers, privileged access to certain aspects of rational cognition. Philosophical theories of rationality are really scientific theories, based on inference to the best explanation, that take contingent introspective data as the evidence to be explained.

* John Protevi, Water

Paper presented at the Deleuze Conference at University of South Carolina, April 2007

* —- (with Roger Pippin), Affect, Agency and Responsibility: The Act of Killing in the Age of Cyborgs

Draft 13 April 2007. Under review at Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences.

* —-, Biopolitics and Biopower: Agamben and Foucault

Draft 7 March 2006.

* Jonathan Weisberg, Why Explanationists and (Most) Bayesians Can’t Be Friends
* Martin Stokhof, The architecture of meaning: Wittgenstein’s Tractatus and formal semantics
* Matthew Chrisman, A Dilemma for Moral Fictionalism

in Philosophical Books (forthcoming).

* Matthew Smith, Justificatory Independence

This is paper argues for the view that rules produced by illegitimate authorities may nonetheless be authoritative for those to whom the rules are addressed. (draft only - please do not quote)

* Christopher W. Morris, Review of Christopher Heath Wellman, A Theory of Secession: The Case for Political Self-Determination (from Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews)
* Joseph P. Lawrence, Review of Iain Hamilton Grant, On an Artificial Earth: Philosophies of Nature after Schelling (from Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews)
* Brad Wilburn, Review of Margaret Urban Walker, Moral Repair: Reconstructing Moral Relations after Wrongdoing (from Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews)
* Mark Schroeder, Review of Michael Bratman, Structures of Agency: Essays (from Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews)
* Charles Crittenden, Review of Stephen Mulhall, Wittgenstein’s Private Language: Grammar, Nonsense, and Imagination in Philosophical Investigations, ##243-315 (from Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews)
* Patrick Forber, Forever Beyond Our Grasp?
* Philippe Schlenker, Properties, Plurals and Paradox

It has been argued that an objectual semantics for plurals falls victim to Russell’s paradox, and that a nominalistic semantics should therefore be preferred (Boolos 1984); similar considerations have sometimes been extended to other types of abstract reference, in particular to property talk. We suggest that this line of argument is mistaken: deeply entrenched features of ordinary language guarantee that property and plural talk do give rise to paradoxes. In the case of properties, the grammar of English is untyped, which makes it straightforward to generate a paradox. In the case of plurals, it is badly typed, which means that paradoxes can be generated, but in complicated ways. In both cases, the problem is not to avoid paradoxes but to model them. We conclude that an objectual semantics is entirely in order, but that it must be developed within a trivalent semantics suited to a paradoxical object language.

* Dan Lopez de Sa, Flexible Property Designators of (from Philosophy Papers Online)
* —-, Rigidity, General Terms, and Trivialization of (from Philosophy Papers Online)
* —-, The Over-Generalization Problem: Predicates Rigidly Signifying the “Unnatural” of (from Philosophy Papers Online)
* Robert Koons, Defeasible Reasoning, Special Pleading and the Cosmological Argument

(Paper accepted for the Gifford Conference, University of Aberdeen, May 25-29, 2000)

* Robert Pennock, Models, Simulations, Instantiations and Evidence: The Case of Digital Evolution

Journal of Experimental and Theoretical Artificial Intelligence (Vol. 19, No. 1, 2007) What is the difference between a simulation of X and simply another instance of X? Is there a point at which the ‘‘virtual reality’’ of a model becomes the real thing? This paper examines these questions using cases taken from recent developments in evolutionary engineering and artificial life research. By implementing the Darwinian mechanism and setting it to work on a design problem, scientists and engineers find that evolution not only can improve prior designs, but also produce novel technological solutions. Artificial life systems Tierra and Avida which operate at a higher level of abstraction than evolutionary engineering applications. I analyze simulation as a rational concept ‘‘S simulates R’’ and argue that it always includes some relevant property P, of R, that is captured but that there is always also some other that it omits, and that pragmatic factors fix what counts as relevant. The border between a simulation and an instance can change depending upon the context. I show that in one sense, evo-technology and artificial life simulate organic evolution, but in another relevant sense they are instances of evolution itself. Biologists can use such systems to experimentally test evolutionary hypotheses such as those involving the evolution of complex features and altruism. This analysis suggests lines for future research on broader questions about models classification and confirmation.

* Robert Talisse, From Pragmatism to Perfectionism

Philosophy & Social Criticism, 33.3 (2007): 387-406

* Ronald McIntyre, Naturalizing Phenomenology? Dretske on Qualia

in Naturalizing Phenomenology: Contemporary Phenomenology and Cognitive Science, ed. by Jean Petitot et al. (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), pp. 429-439.

* Solomon Feferman, Harmonious logic: Craig’s interpolation theorem and its descendants

transparencies for the lecture at Interpolations–A Conference in Honor of William Craig, UC Berkeley, 13 May 2007.

* —-, Axioms for determinateness and truth

elaboration of the last part of my Tarski Lecture, “Truth unbound”, UC Berkeley, 3 April 2006, and of the lecture, “A nicer formal theory of non-hierarchical truth”, Workshop on Mathematical Methods in Philosophy, Banff , 18-23 Feb. 2007.

* Thaddeus Metz, The Meaning of Life
* Stephan Blatti, Animalism, Dicephalus, and Borderline Cases

The rare condition known as dicephalus occurs when (prior to implantation) a zygote fails to divide completely, resulting in twins who are conjoined below the neck. Human dicephalic twins look like a two-headed person, with each brain supporting a distinct mental life. Jeff McMahan has recently argued that, because they instance two of us but only one animal, dicephalic twins provide a counter-example to the animalist’s claim that each of us is identical with a human animal. To the contrary, I argue that in cases of dicephalus it is obvious neither that there is one animal nor that there are two of us. Consequently, the animalist criterion does note straightforwardly apply to cases of dicephalus. I defend an account of dicephalus that is both sensitive to the complexity of twinning phenomena and not inconsistent with animalism. On my view, dicephalic twins are a borderline case of the concept human animal. I conclude with some speculative remarks about the normative import (if any) of my claim that dicephalic twins are a borderline case.

* Ted Hinchman, Judging as Inviting Self-Trust

Abstract: Judging is regarded by some (Plato, Sellars) as ‘inner’ assertion. And asserting that p is regarded by some (Williamson, DeRose) as representing yourself as knowing that p. If we combine these theses, we make judging that p representing yourself ‘inwardly’ – i.e. to yourself – as knowing that p. In this paper I pursue that thought. Though I don’t endorse the component theses, I aim to reveal the philosophical attractions of putting them together. These attractions follow from my emphasis on the intrapersonal relations at the core of judgment and belief. Judging manifests two distinct dimensions of self-reliance, I hold, and invites the relation of self-trust. Believing, I hold, is accepting the invitation. This explains why it makes sense to speak of ‘trusting your own judgment’ but not of ‘trusting your own belief.’ And it provides the resources for a novel treatment of epistemic normativity.

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May 8, 2007
May 8th, 2007

Here’s an update for today. Also, ‘hello’ to the several readers I met at the Rutgers Epistemology Conference last weekend. -Jonathan

* Babette Babich, Nietzsche and Eros Between the Devil and God’s Deep Blue Sea: The Erotic Valence of Art and the Artist as Actor - Jew - Woman

Continental Philosophy Review. 33 (2000): 159-188.

* Bryan Frances, Spirituality, Expertise, and Philosophers

Oxford Studies in Philosophy of Religion, 2007 or 2008.

* Carrie Jenkins (with Daniel Nolan), Backwards Explanation

to be presented at the Bellingham Summer Philosophy Conference 2007.

* Chris Heathwood, On What Will Be

Erkenntnis (forthcoming)

* Harvey Friedman, New Borel Independence Results

May 7, 2007, 20 pages, proof sketch.

* Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, God and Time
* Jennifer Nagel, The Psychological Consequences of Changing Stakes

forthcoming in the Australasian Journal of Philosophy.

* Matthias Adam, Two notions of scientific justification
* Matti Eklund, Meaning-Constitutivity

(For special volume of Inquiry, devoted to inconsistency views on the liar and sorites paradoxes, edited by Douglas Patterson.)

* —-, The Descriptive and the Evaluative

(For colloquium talk in Aarhus, Denmark.)

* Michael Jacovides, How is Descartes’s Argument Against Skepticism Better Than Putnam’s?

Philosophical Quarterly (The link is to Blackwell’s ‘Online Early’ site. If you want to read the paper, but you don’t have access, e-mail me, and I’ll send you a copy.)

* —-, Locke’s Construction of the Idea of Power

Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science, 34A (2003): 329-50

* Nicholas Humphrey, The society of selves

Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, 362, 745-754.

* —-, Human hand-walkers: five siblings who never stood up
* Alan Kim, Review of Pierre Hadot, The Veil of Isis: An Essay on the History of the Idea of Nature (from Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews)
* Alexander R. Pruss, Review of Graham Oppy, Arguing about Gods (from Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews)
* Leopold Stubenberg, Review of Galen Strawson et al., Consciousness and Its Place in Nature: Does Physicalism Entail Panpsychism? (from Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews)
* Michael Blake, Review of Seyla Benhabib et al., Another Cosmopolitanism: Hospitality, Sovereignty, and Democratic Iterations (from Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews)
* Nuel Belnap, Notes on the Art of Logic

(2005, pdf format, Unpublished

* Pekka Väyrynen, What Properties Count as Evaluative?
* —-, Some Good and Bad News for Ethical Intuitionism

Forthcoming in Philosophical Quarterly.

* Peter Pagin, Understanding, proofs and compositionality
* —-, Informativeness and Moore’s Paradox
* Dan Lopez de Sa, Lewis vs Lewis on the Problem of the Many of (from Philosophy Papers Online)
* —-, On the Semantic Indecision of Vague Singular Terms of (from Philosophy Papers Online)
* —-, Bivalence and (Tarskian) Truth and Falsity of (from Philosophy Papers Online)
* —-, Is the Problem of the Many a Problem in Metaphysics? of (from Philosophy Papers Online)
* —-, How to Respond to Borderline Cases of (from Philosophy Papers Online)
* Robert Rupert, The Causal Theory of Properties and the Causal Theory of Reference, or How to Name Properties and Why It Matters

forthcoming in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research

* —-, Language Acquisition, Concept Acquisition, and Intuitions about Semantic Properties: Defending the Syntactic Solution to Frege’s Puzzle

written for a special issue of Cognitive Systems Research being edited by Leslie Marsh.

* Ross Cameron, How to be a Truthmaker Maximalist

Noûs (forthcoming)

* Sally Haslanger, Changing the Ideology and Culture of Philosophy: Not by Reason (Alone)

Includes an overview of data on the representation of women authors in seven journals in philosophy (Ethics, Journal of Philosophy, Mind, Nous, Philosophical Review, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Philosophy and Public Affairs). See also: http://web.mit.edu/sgrp following the link “Materials concerning women and minorities in philosophy” for more materials on this topic.

* —-, Philosophical Analysis and Social Kinds

presented at the Joint Sessions of the Aristotelian Society and the Mind Association, Southampton, July 2006.

* Sheldon Goldstein (with W. Struyve), On the Uniqueness of Quantum Equilibrium in Bohmian Mechanics
* —- (with D. Dürr and N. Zanghì), Bohmian Mechanics and Quantum Equilibrium

in Stochastic Processes, Physics and Geometry II, edited by S. Albeverio, U. Cattaneo, D. Merlini (World Scientific, Singapore, 1995) pp. 221-232

* Simon Keller, How Patriots Think and Why It Matters

I restate the view defended in my ‘Patriotism as Bad Faith’, offer a different argument for it, and respond to some objections from Steve Nathanson and Keith Horton.

* —-, Virtue Ethics is Self-Effacing

Forthcoming in Australasian Journal of Philosophy — It is often argued that consequentialism and deontology, but not virtue ethics, are self-effacing, and that this is a reason to prefer virtue ethics. I argue that virtue ethics is self-effacing too.

* —-, Self-Effacement in Ethical Theory

A longer version of the virtue ethics paper. I go on to argue that virtue ethics faces special problems in explaining why self-effacement (even if inevitable) is regrettable, and say that the real worries about self-effacement can be navigated quite nicely by a certain form of consequentialism.

* Susanna Siegel, The Visual Experience of Causation

In this paper I argue that visual experiences can represent causal relations, and I discuss the bearing of Michotte’s results on this claim. An earlier draft of this paper was part of the on-line philosophy conference, which can be viewed here

* Wayne Martin, Inverse Psychologism in the Theory of Judgment
* —-, Hegel’s Failed Confessional Enterprise
* William Bechtel (with Abrahamsen, A.), Mental mechanisms, autonomous systems, and moral agency
* Yael Sharvit, Two Reconstruction Puzzles
* Richard Arneson, What Is Wrongful Discrimination?
* —-, Does Social Justice Matter? Brian Barry’s Applied Political Philosophy
* —-, Just Warfare and Noncombatant Immunity

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May 2, 2007
May 2nd, 2007

Hi everyone, here’s an update for today.

* Adrian Brasoveanu, Structured Anaphora to Quantifier Domains: A Unified Account of Quantificational and Modal Subordination

The paper proposes an account of the contrast (noticed in Karttunen 1976) between the interpretations of the following two discourses: Harvey courts a girl at every convention. {She is very pretty. vs. She always comes to the banquet with him.}. The initial sentence is ambiguous between two quantifier scopings, but the first discourse as a whole allows only for the wide-scope indefinite reading, while the second allows for both. This cross-sentential interaction between quantifier scope and anaphora is captured by means of a new dynamic system couched in classical type logic, which extends Compositional DRT (Muskens 1996) with plural information states (modeled, following van den Berg 1996, as sets of variable assignments). Given the underlying type logic, compositionality at sub-clausal level follows automatically and standard techniques from Montague semantics become available. The paper also shows that modal subordination (A wolf might come in. It would eat Harvey first) can be analyzed in a parallel way, i.e. the system captures the anaphoric and quantificational parallels between the individual and modal domains argued for in Stone (1999) (among others). In the process, we see that modal / individual-level quantifiers enter anaphoric connections as a matter of course, usually functioning simultaneously as both indefinites and pronouns.

* Alan Hájek, Arguments for - or Against? - Probabilism – Or Non-Probabilism?

forthcoming in Degrees of Belief, eds. Franz Huber and Christoph Schmidt-Petri, Oxford University Press, 2006.

* Allan Randall (with Ayuna Borisova-Kidder and Ding-Rong Chen), Toward Benefit Estimates for Conservation

Meta Analyses for Improvements in Wetlands, Terrestrial Habitat, and Surface Water Quality.…

* Ben Caplan (with Kris McDaniel), Mereological Myths

(in progress).

* Berit Brogaard, Transient Truths: an Essay in the Metaphysics of Propositions
* —-, Impossible Thoughts

Monograph on counterpossibles and epistemic modals, with Joe Salerno. Sample chapters available upon request.

* —- (with Joe Salerno), Why Counterpossibles are Non-Trivial

The Reasoner vol. 1, no. 1 (2007). Jon Williamson, ed. Subjunctive conditionals with impossible antecedents (or counterpossibles) are standardly treated as vacuously true, the lore being that if an impossibility were to obtain, anything would follow. Daniel Nolan (1997) and others have argued that there are several good reasons to steer clear of the standard reading. In this note we provide further reasons.

* —-, What Mary Did Yesterday. Reflections on Knowledge-wh

Philosophy Department Colloquium. St. Louis University. March 30, 2007.

* Bryan Frances, Belief Content and Principles of Rationality
* —-, The Indeterminacy and Natural Kind Objections to Externalism
* Christopher Manning (with Ofer Dekel and Yoram Singer), Log-Linear Models for Label Ranking

In Sebastian Thrun, Lawrence K. Saul, and Bernhard Schölkopf (eds), Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 16 (NIPS 2003). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 497-504.

* Dan Lopez de Sa, How to Respond to Borderline Cases
* Eric Schwitzgebel, Human Nature and Moral Development in Mencius, Xunzi, Hobbes, and Rousseau

(2007) History of Philosophy Quarterly. 24, 147-168.

* Ernest Lepore, Meaning and Ontology
* —- (with K. Ludwig), Ontology in the Theory of Meaning
* Gregory Wheeler, Applied Logic without Psychologism

forthcoming in Studia Logica. Draft of February 15, 2007

* —- (with Henry E. Kyburg and Choh Man Teng), Conditionals and Consequences
* Gunnar Björnsson, In Defence of a Contextualist Theory of Conditionals

Jonathan Bennett’s recent A Philosophical Guide to Conditionals collects and sharpens criticism that has been directed at contextualist theories of conditionals. In this paper, I give a new argument for a contextualist analysis of indicative conditionals and argue that it has the resources to reply to the criticism.

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NO ME DEJEN MORIR EL TOPIC

Pongan sus lecturas (jem) (jem) (jem) (jem)

Rights from Wrongs. Alan Dershowitz. Boulder: Perseus Book Group, 2004. ix+261 pages. $24.00 hardback. ISBN 0-465-01713-4.

Alan Dershowitz, the Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, is regarded by many – certainly outside of academia, at least – as one of America’s foremost legal scholars. He has participated in high profile public cases, such as those of O.J. Simpson, Mike Tyson, and Claus von Bülow. He has written numerous books and articles, almost exclusively for a lay audience (i.e., not for professional lawyers or academicians). The present book is no exception; it is written for nonprofessionals. (Indeed, among the laudatory quotes on the book’s back cover is one by Larry David, comedy writer and co-creator of the Seinfeld television show.) The fact that this book is obviously written for a non-professional audience colors the remarks that follow.

This book is rather simple-minded. Though this reviewer is actually quite sympathetic to much of the content of the book and to the project of presenting this material (and the author’s views) to a wide, lay audience, it is not an advancement in rights theory and it is not a work to use in a college classroom.

The book, which the author claims represents a summary of his life’s work, consists of an introduction followed by three sections: “The Sources of Rights,” “Some Challenges to Experience as the Source of Rights,” and “Applying the Experiential Theory of Rights to Specific Controversies.” Each section contains multiple chapters.

The introduction provides the first concern about the book. Dershowitz remarks: “Where do rights come from? The answer to this question is important because the source of our rights determines their status, as well as their content” (page 1). I absolutely disagree! As every philosopher knows, there is a long-standing distinction – ripe with controversy, yes! – between contexts of discovery and contexts of justification, or, if one prefers, between description and prescription. The source of a right (or a belief or a value) is not the same thing as the justification for that right (or belief or value). To give a hackneyed example, if I declare that males are inherently superior to females (or whites to blacks or Americans to Arabs or …), you would properly be aghast. If you asked me why I believe such a view and my reply is that this is what my father taught me, I have given you the source of my belief (or value), but surely I have not given a justification for that belief (or value). I have simply shown that my father is sexist (racist) and so am I! Identifying the source of a belief (or value) or, what is important here, of rights is not the same thing as identifying the justification of that belief (or value) or, what is important here, of rights. Yes, the issues of source and justification might well be interrelated, but that interrelation needs to be spelled out, not presumed or merely asserted. Having said this, I am not claiming that the issue of the source of rights is irrelevant to their justification, but being relevant is not the same as being identical or even co-extensive. And it is certainly not self-evident that the source of rights determines their status! Nevertheless, I am actually quite sympathetic to Dershowitz’s “naturalistic” approach to rights. As he puts it: “It is more realistic to try to build a theory of rights on the agreed-upon wrongs of the past that we want to avoid repeating, than to try to build a theory of rights on idealized conceptions of the perfect society about which we will never agree” (p. 7). I absolutely agree! So, the issue of the source of rights is important, and it will be the focus below, but it is not sufficient to build a theory of rights on clarification and/or consensus regarding the source of rights.

The book’s first section (“The Sources of Rights”) begins with a short chapter on the nature of rights (what are they?). Frankly, Dershowitz doesn’t say much in this chapter. He certainly does not engage with the vast philosophical literature on the nature of rights (e.g., Joel Feinberg on rights as valid claims, Martha Nussbaum on rights as capacities, Rex Martin on rights as recognized entitlements, Joseph Raz on rights as significant interests, etc.). Indeed, at one point Dershowitz seems to contradict himself. After just having claimed that the source of rights is important because it determines their status, in this chapter he says, “Whatever the source or sources of rights, most people see rights as something special, to be respected and not to be treated lightly” (p. 20). This remark certainly makes it sound as if the source of rights is not particularly important, since most people take them to be important regardless of where they come from!

The next four chapters contain suggested sources of rights, all of which Dershowitz rejects: God, nature, logic, civil law. I noted above that I see this book as rather simple minded, even though I am sympathetic with much of Dershowitz’s position. Here is an example: He rejects God as the source of rights (so do I). However, he states: “But if rights were written by ‘the hand of the divinity,’ and if there is only one God, then the content of rights would be consistent over time and place” (p. 23). Well, this is not at all obvious! Try this: If the stars and planets were all created by God and there is only one God, then the features of all stars and planets would be consistent over time and place. Not at all! It is these kinds of remarks that permeate Dershowitz’s book that display an unfortunate simple mindedness to it. This is especially regrettable, since the audience of the book is the general lay public. This kind of sloppy argumentation does not empower the public, which is the author’s very laudable goal. A much better work on exploring this issue is Does Human Rights Need God?, edited by Elizabeth Bucar and Barbra Barnett.

Besides rejecting God as the source of rights, Dershowitz argues that human nature is also not their source. If anything, he notes, rights are not natural, that is, it is not in the nature of most humans to value the rights of others above their own (immediate) interests. In addition, rights do not come from civil laws (i.e., a social, legal system). Civil laws might recognize, enforce, protect, etc. the rights that moral agents have, for Dershowitz, but those laws are not the source of rights, at least of basic rights. (Yes, a legal system might be the source of particular rights, such as the right to drive, but not of general basic rights such as the right to liberty.) This is a very important point and one which the general lay audience does need to address much more fully. Once again, there is a vast body of philosophical literature on these topics, but Dershowitz barely mentions any of it and certainly does not engage with it beyond noting that he agrees or disagrees with particular claims.

Having rejected several candidates as the source of rights, Dershowitz argues that wrongs, suffered injustices, are the real source of rights. In his words: “…rights are those fundamental preferences that experience and history – especially of great injustices – have taught are so essential that the citizenry should be persuaded to entrench them and not make them subject to easy change by shifting majorities” (p. 81). As the book’s title says, rights come from wrongs. Though Dershowitz does not provide any detailed conditions or even characterization for what counts as wrongs or injustices, he takes it that reasonable people can recognize them. This is another source of frustration with this book. I have already remarked that often the argumentation and scholarship in the book is thin. Here, in what I take to be the heart of Dershowitz’s view, there is no recognition of others who have made the same, or very similar claims. To take just one example (and there are others), John Dewey argued at various places for just this “experiential” view of the source and nature of rights. A more recent example is Beth Singer’s Operative Rights. Dershowitz, however, just does not engage with the literature (resulting in the howler in the book’s liner notes: “Rights From Wrongs is the first book to propose a theory of rights that emerges not from some theory of perfect justice but from its opposite: from the bottom up, from trial and error, and from our collective experience of injustice.” Please, if nothing else, read John Dewey!)

The second section of the book (“Some Challenges to Experience as the Source of Rights”) has the author responding to several objections about his take on rights. Most importantly, he asks (in chapter ten) how rights are different from preferences. That is, if rights are not self-evident or do not have some external basis (such as God or human nature), what is the source and nature of their obligatory power in regulating our behavior? Dershowitz’s answer seems to be a straightforward simple utilitarian one: “A society that recognizes and enforces certain basic rights…is preferable to a society that does not. That is my case for rights” (p. 114). I confess that I find this a bit breathtaking. Rather than go into all the aspects of this that are troubling, I will simply point out that this answer speaks to why a society that respects rights is better than one that doesn’t, but that fact doesn’t really shed much light on why or how rights have a different or stronger obligatory power than preferences.

Another challenge to his experiential view of rights that Dershowitz addresses is the question of philosophy vs. sociology (or: in what ways and to what extent is his view descriptive vs. prescriptive). His answer boils down to rejecting a dichotomy between them: “A theory of rights that is based on experiences with wrongs breaks down the high wall between philosophy and sociology, between the ought and the is, between the normative and the empirical” (p. 136). Once again, here is an example of assertion over argumentation, so I will leave this point by saying that I think it would have helped had Dershowitz not addressed philosophy vs. sociology (or ought vs. is, or normative vs. empirical), but rather had specified what elements of his view are descriptive and what elements are prescriptive and why (and why that’s important).

Yet another challenge is the issue of whether or not rights themselves produce wrongs. Good question! And, once again, I wish the author had engaged with the literature on this issue rather than basically making some assertions. For example, there is a large body of literature on the issue of group rights; do groups qua groups have rights separate from the rights of the individuals who constitute those groups? This is especially important if the rights of the group conflict with the rights of the group’s members. So, kudus to Dershowitz for raising this issue, but, unfortunately once again, his treatment is disappointing in its failure to wrestle with what others have written.

The third section of the book (“Applying the Experiential Theory of Rights to Specific Controversies”) displays the author’s attempt to relate his conception of rights to a number of specific controversies about the extension of rights: right to life, animal rights, right to emigration/immigration, etc. If the point of these chapters is to demonstrate to a general lay audience that he has a particular approach to addressing these sorts of issues, he succeeds. If the point of these chapters is to demonstrate any appreciation of the complexity of the issues or the relevance of the already extant literature regarding them, he fails. To take just one example, the chapter on animal rights (“Do animals have rights?”) is seven pages. Not one philosopher who has written on this topic is mentioned, much less discussed, analyzed, or evaluated. The same holds for each of the other topics in this section of the book.

Should you read this book? Sure! (There are worse books you could read!) A better one to read, however, which is also in the spirit of addressing a general lay audience, but in a more substantive way is Mary Ann Glendon’s Rights Talk. In spite of my obvious concerns, the book is clear and concise. It touches on many important issues related to rights. It provides a socially active, legally aware, perspective on rights in society. It actually has, in my view, a generally correct conception of rights (I truly am quite sympathetic with his experiential conception of rights). These genuinely positive features of the book are, however, outweighed by generally simplistic argumentation and a lack of recognition of complexities and an enormous body of literature. So, read the book, but don’t assign it in a class for your students! There are many other works that are much better, such as The Philosophy of Human Rights, edited by Patrick Hayden or Michael Perry’s The Idea of Human Rights.

Theory of Knowledge Paper for IB TOK Class

'Don't give me any more facts! I need to make a decision right now!' Although one can question knowledge endlessly, one cannot forever suspend judgement while researching and reflecting. What would it mean to act responsibly in a situation where one cannot possess certainty? How would one justify the decision?

The question of decisions which must be made without the support of a full array of facts is an interesting one. Such a decision requires an adherence to a moral code, but also an understanding of probability. Also, the consequences of any action taken must be fully understood before one can make the judgement whether or not it is better to go through with the action or not to pursue it at all. Most people are of the inclination that "lack of certainty is due to lack of knowledge and that if we knew the whole situation . . . we should be able to predict the future with certainty." (Emmet 208), but absolute knowledge is impossible, so decisions can rely only on existing facts. The facts which exist can not be disputed, but they must be in a sufficient number if a decision is to be made. In essence, one must respond to the question of what this sufficient number might be, and this number must be determined in a manner such that the likelihood that the facts are a good approximation of the whole picture is high compared to the potential consequences of one being wrong.

In some cases where certainty does not exist, one can employ a simple mathematical probability. For instance, if one were asked the question 'Is it going to rain today?' and the conditions were such that they indicated there would be no rain (ie: not a cloud in the sky), and the weather services had predicted only a 5% chance of rain, it would be a fair and justifiable statement to make to say that it would not rain that day. Of course, this is a statement and not an action, but the action of leading someone to believe that it would not rain of the same conditions existed would also be justifiable. One must take note, though, that in such a case the potential consequences of a wrong decision made (ie: if it did, in fact, rain that very day), are minimal. The consequences must decrease in severity as the mathematical probability decreases from 100%. In such cases of very high probability "we are justified in believing that nothing can count as evidence against the belief" (Olen 289). Often this very high probability which does not equate with certainty is derived from deductive reasoning which is the result of such logic where 'There are many accounts of A being B, and it has never been observed for A not to be B so A must be B". If the repetition of observation is frequent enough, the result of the inductive reasoning is said to be highly probable but not certain. In most cases of such high probability, one is justified in using this very high probability as a fact and pursuing as if it were a certainty.

The moral justification of these actions is dependent on the take on morality does one hold. If one is to take the utilitarian view, which holds that "The right act [is the one] that probably will produce the most good" (Hospers 263), one must return to the definition of what is or is not probable. Others have a different take on utilitarianism, however, whereby the ends justify the means, or the morality of one's actions are justified by the consequences of these actions. When this moral code is that which is being used to judge an action, it is obvious that one is only justified in carrying through with an action if that action produces 'good'. In any other case, one would be morally wrong. If people hold this view, and wish to be morally right, they should not pursue any action without careful consideration. Morality does produce problems in judgement, however, because those who hold that intent is more important can not rightly believe that if one truly intends to help a lady across a busy street, and chooses a time when there is heavy traffic on said street to lead the lady across, that person is right in doing so. In essence, the problem with morality in judging action is that it can easily oversimplify one's decision making process to the point where one does not consider the facts at all, or is overly considerate of facts out of fear of being wrong.

Instead of considering only morality, or only probability, one could also choose to weigh the potential consequences of facts misleading the person taking the action against the degree of certainty one has that their action will have the desired consequences. For instance, in the previous example of a sunny day, there is little harm in saying that it will not rain, and one would be justifiable in leading someone to believe thus even if the probability were lower. However, under different circumstances, the consideration is not so easy. Take for example a doctor who recognized some symptoms of a disease in a patient. If this number was low relative to the total number of symptoms, and the symptoms were of a more generic nature, the doctor would likely not inform the patient of them having such a disease, and would be right in not telling, because the trauma which would be unduly caused does certainly outweighs the certainty of that action being the right one. However, if a series of test results showed a patient to have a disease, and these test results are known to be highly accurate, they should be informed of their disease. The consequences of misleading the patient, and giving them a clean bill of health could be disastrous as the disease would not be known to the patient and therefore would not be treated. In this second example, the potential consequences of the facts misleading the patient are far outweighed by the certainty of the test results being correct. It should be clear that this approach is clearly more reasonable than that which considers only morality or only probability, while not discounting the value of these elements.

Therefore, actions which are justifiable are those which take all these into account. When the potential of being wrong is greater and has more grave consequences than the certainty of the facts being used being a good representation of the whole picture, then an action should probably not be carried out. Those who have a deep reliance on morality must be certain that their moral view does not blind them to the real consequences of their actions or oversimplify their thinking. In cases of little consequence, one is justified in considering merely probability, but this is not the wisest approach when the consequences of one being wrong are great. However, fear of consequences can not be too strong, for decisions must be made, otherwise the world will be brought to a standstill, which is not a good thing, given that our present circumstances are not the most desirable.

A Critique of the Works of Immanuel Kant
Uploaded by sir_richard on Jun 10, 2006
A Critique of the Works of Immanuel Kant

But if the mind actively generates perception, this raises the question whether the result has anything to do with the world, or if so, how much. The answer to the question, unusual, ambiguous, or confusing as it was, made for endless trouble both in Kant's thought and for a posterity trying to figure him out. To the extent that knowledge depends on the structure of the mind and not on the world, knowledge would have no connection to the world and is not even true representation, just a solipsistic or intersubjective fantasy. Kantianism seems threatened with "psychologism," the doctrine that what we know is our own psychology, not external things. Kant did say, consistent with psychologism, that basically we don't know about "things-in-themselves," objects as they exist apart from perception. But at the same time Kant thought he was vindicating both a scientific realism, where science really knows the world, and a moral realism, where there is objective moral obligation, for both of which a connection to external existence is essential. And there were also terribly important features of things-in-themselves that we do have some notion about and that are of fundamental importance to human life, not just morality but what he called the three "Ideas" of reason: God, freedom, and immortality. Kant always believed that the rational structure of the mind reflected the rational structure of the world, even of things-in-themselves -- that the "operating system" of the processor, by modern analogy, matched the operating system of reality. But Kant had no real argument for this -- the "Ideas" of reason just become "postulates" of morality -- and his system leaves it as something unprovable. The paradoxes of Kant's efforts to reconcile his conflicting approaches and requirements made it very difficult for most later philosophers to take the overall system seriously.


Nevertheless, Kant's theory does all sorts of things that seem appropriate for a non-reductionistic philosophical system and that later philosophy has had trouble doing at all. Kant managed to provide, in

phenomenal reality (phaenomena="appearances"), for a sphere for science that was distinct and separate from anything that would relate to morality or religion. The endless confusion and conflict that still

results from people trying to figure out whether or how science and religion should fit together is deftly avoided by Kant, who can say, for instance, that God and divine creation cannot be part of any truly scientific theory because both involve "unconditioned" realities, while science can only deal with conditioned realities. In the world, everything affects everything else, but the traditional view, found even in Spinoza, is that God is free of any external causal influences. Similarly, Kant can be a phenomenal determinist with science yet simultaneously allow for free will, and that in a way that will not be entirely explicable to us -- a virtue when the very idea of a rational and purposive free will, and not just arbitrary choices, has involved obscurities that no one has been able to illuminate. Kant's theory prevents psychological explanations for behavior, however illuminating, being used to excuse moral responsibility and accountability. Thus, the tragic childhood of the defendant, however touching and understandable, cannot excuse crimes commited in full knowledge of their significance.


Kant's approach is also of comparative interest because of the similar ancient Buddhist philosophical distinction between conditioned realities, which mostly means the world of experience, and unconditioned realities ("unconditioned dharmas"), which interestingly include, not only the sphere of salvation, Nirvana, but also space, which of course for Kant was a form imposed a priori on experience by the mind.



The problems that must be sorted out with Kant are at the same time formidable. Most important is the confusion that results from Kant mixing together two entirely different theories in the Critique of Pure Reason (1781). The first theory is that the fundamental activity of the mind, called "synthesis," is an activity of thought that applies certain concepts to a previously given perceptual datum from experience. It is upon this theory that the Critique of Pure Reason was planned with its fundamental division between the "Transcendental Aesthetic," about the conditions of perception (what Kant called empirical "intuition"), and the "Transcendental Logic," about the conditions of thought. Thus, Kant still says, as late as page 91 of the first edition ("A"), "But since intuition [Anschauung] stands in no need whatsoever of the functions of thought, appearances [Erscheinungen] would none the less present objects to our intuition" (A 90-91, Norman Kemp Smith translation, 1929, St. Martin's, 1965), without, that is, any need for mental synthesis.

creo que el montana quiere hacer su fic... solo q no es aqui!!! jaja

Interesante (facefuma)

Al fin un tema serio.

La seriedad no es algo correspondiente de este foro

Dilo por ti.

Bueno x lo menos en este sub-foro

Si.

Tambien opino que debio pegarlo en Soporte Tecnico e Informatica. (cf2)

Buena iniciativa (OK)

muy buen tema solo lo malo es que de tanto leer nos va a dar cancer de ojos @.@

vamos, vamos opinen al respecto

SIGAN LEYENDO ES UNA MALDITA ORDEN Y LA VAN A CUMPLIR

MAS Y MAS LECTURAS DE TEMAS ESCOGIDOS AL AZAR SIN NINGUNA LOGICA JAJAJAJJAAJAJAJAJAJJAJAAJ

Animal Alters (Meant to act like animals)
Although a large share of an alter system is dehumanized, there are
certain alters which will be created to actually hold the body and act like
animals. The alter may even be named "animal." A male or female slave
may have dog alters which bark like a dog and get into the correct
position to allow a Rottweiler/German shepherd/Doberman to penetrate
the slave sexually. This is accomplished by taking menstrual blood from a
dog in heat and smearing it on the victim.
Animal alters are created by the standard dehumanization methods, and
then shown films of what they are to become. Through hypnosis and
behavior modification, the alters eventually accept the role they are
tortured and programmed into taking. It’s hard telling what roles the
programmers have created, it could possibly be any animal, but cats,
dogs, donkeys, horses, rats, and mice are common examples.
Christian Front Alters
Most Illuminati Systems have Christian front alters. Some of the early
splits around 2 years of age are provided the chance to genuinely accept
Christ. From these alters, two things will be done. Front alters who are
Christians will be created, and satanic alters. In order to get dedicated
Satanic alters, Christian alters are severely traumatized and God is
blamed for not helping them. The Satanic alters will be deeply convinced
that God has abandoned them. The Christian alters will dissociate all the
trauma, and will believe that they are normal--nothing has happened out
of the ordinary in their life.
Christian alters will also, like all MPD/DID alters, tend to deal with
overwhelming problems by dissociation. Many Christian alters will deny
such basic things such as that a Satanic conspiracy exists. They often will
be far more zealous than the normal Christian, because they do not have
conflicting ego-states. If any situation calls for compromise of their
religious beliefs they can switch to someone else--and thereby escape
having to compromise.
There are many programmed multiples leading the Christian churches
today. Christian alters are coached via the modern church and their
handlers to only "spiritually minded" and not to challenge evil in the
natural world. Some walk around believing that God will cure everything,
which is true but not in the sense that some of the churches are
explaining. That doesn’t mean that all Systems will be "Pollyanish", but it
can happen. The original Christian alters will be shamed and then hidden
by the programmers. The "host" or "presenting" alter which holds the
body will often be a Christian. This really helps hide the entire mindcontrol.
Interestingly, a system of 20,000 alters may have oniy less than a
dozen Christians alters, but the one or two strong Christian alters will
exert a disproportionate influence on the System.
The Illuminati has had a hard time controlling the Christian alters they
allow. In their zeal to infiltrate, control and destroy the Christian
churches, they have opened many of their top slaves up to the love of
God, which has ended in the slaves trying to break free. Unfortunately,
most ministers know too little to help these people escape.
Clones
The clones are little children who have been put into robot costumes and
are trained to attack parts of the system which are not in compliance
with the programming. The heads of the clones can be unscrewed. The
clones can be taken out by various tactics--but there are hundreds of
clones and they each have been numbered. The serial numbers are
placed on them. An example of a clone’s number at the base of the neck
might be 158.00. This may either be a model or actual serial no. but
often is tied to the birthdate of the victim, which is generally part or all
of the victim’s Monarch serial no.
To create the clones during the 1950s, movie scenes of the divers of the
Nautilus of the movie 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea were shown. (With
later models, such as in Star Wars programming, the robots of these
shows suffice.) Some clones kill with a knife as the divers in the movie
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. When clones surface and take the body
they are cold. Programming is encased in a clone.
Alters, particularly cult alters, may not be able to see the clones. They
may be hidden in almost anything internally, including door knobs and
walls. However, there is the possibility for the therapist that a net made
of cloth woven of light can be dropped and the lumps will reveal the
clones. They may be behind mirrors too. Water has certain properties
that can stop clones, as well as magnets. Microwaves will take care of the