On Existential Dependence and Independence in the World of Thoughts and States of Affairs (with Reference to Eugenia Ginsberg-Blaustein’s and Roman Ingarden’s Analyses)

2018 ◽  
pp. 249-262
Author(s):  
Urszula M. Żegleń
Keyword(s):  
States Of Affairs ◽  
The World

Are there Non-Propositional Intentional States?

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
John R. Searle
Keyword(s):  
Intentional State ◽  
States Of Affairs ◽  
Intentional States ◽  
The World ◽  
Essential Idea ◽  
Limited Class ◽  
The Mind

Intentionality is that feature of the mind by which it is directed at or about objects and states of affairs in the world. Intentionality is simply aboutness or directedness. “Proposition” is more difficult, but the essential idea is this: every intentional state has a content. Sometimes it seems that the content just enables a state to refer to an object. So if John loves Sally, then it appears that the content of his love is simply “Sally”. But if John believes that it is raining, then the specification of the content requires an entire “that” clause. “Are there non-propositional intentional states?” amounts to the question, “Are there intentional states whose content does not require specification with a ‘that’ clause?” This chapter explores whether there are any non-propositional states, and suggest that a very limited class, such as boredom, is in fact non-propositional.

Case Studies–Political and Non-Political Cartoons

2020 ◽  
pp. 167-184
Author(s):  
Charles Forceville
Keyword(s):  
Case Studies ◽  
Target Audience ◽  
Critical Discourse ◽  
Political Cartoons ◽  
States Of Affairs ◽  
Verbal Mode ◽  
High Interest ◽  
The World ◽  
Accessible Form ◽  
Ideological Assumptions

The genre of political cartoons purports to present a wittily critical visual or visual-plus-written-verbal commentary on politicians and states of affairs in the world. The genre is thereby of high interest for critical discourse analysts, as it lays bare a community’s ideological assumptions and does so in a pithy, easily accessible form. Moreover, the genre can get away with proposing ideas that, when presented in the verbal mode, would be unacceptably offensive or crude. From an RT perspective, it is clear that since cartoons typically appear in specific newspapers and magazine, cartoonists have a fairly precise idea of the target audience to whom they want to be optimally relevant. The chapter outlines the conventions of the cartoon genre in some detail, then examines four political and two non-political cartoons in the light of their communicative and informative intentions, aspects of reference assignment, implicated premises, and explicatures and implicatures. Other aspects that are briefly addressed are cartoons’ artist-dependent style, need for stereotypical depiction and caricaturization, deployment of metaphors, and loose use of visuals.

scholarly journals Approaches to Realism

2013 ◽  
pp. 23-35 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rom Harre
Keyword(s):  
Scientific Realism ◽  
Empirical Adequacy ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
States Of Affairs ◽  
The World ◽  
Reliable Knowledge ◽  
Design Experiments

Scientific realism asserts that the methods of science, combined with the intellectual powers of human beings can give us reliable knowledge of states of the world beyond the limits of perception. Among the varieties of realism, policy realism is based on the principle that taking plausible theories to be putative descriptions of actual states of affairs is the best way to design experiments and to advance our knowledge. We carve out the umwelt from the welt by the use of our instruments and apparatus. The key procedure in science has been and still is the invention and testing of models---plausibility and empirical adequacy are the marks of a theory based on a model capable of supporting policy realism.

A Plea for a New Nominalism

1982 ◽  
Vol 12 (3) ◽  
pp. 527-537 ◽  
Author(s):  
E.M. Zemach
Keyword(s):  
Semantic Relations ◽  
States Of Affairs ◽  
The World

I believe that the world is a totality of things: there are no properties, or relations, or sets, or states of affairs, or facts, or events; there are only particular things. I also believe that all true statements can be expressed in a canonical language which includes names of things and logical terms only: there will be no predicates in this language. For what is a predicate? Some say that predicates are names of universals which individual things exemplify, or names of sets of which individual things are members. If this is so, it is obvious that a nominalist's canonical language cannot have any predicates. Others say that predicates name nothing, but are satisfied by particular things. What, however, is satisfaction, and how is it different from naming? Semantic relations such as satisfaction, we are told, are not ‘in’ the world. But then a nominalist has no use for them.

scholarly journals Are emotions perceptions of value?

2013 ◽  
Vol 43 (2) ◽  
pp. 227-247 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jérôme Dokic ◽  
Stéphane Lemaire
Keyword(s):  
Emotional Experiences ◽  
States Of Affairs ◽  
Sensory Experiences ◽  
Evaluative Response ◽  
The World ◽  
Response Dependence ◽  
Present Response ◽  
The Way

A popular idea at present is that emotions are perceptions of values. Most defenders of this idea have interpreted it as the perceptual thesis that emotions present (rather than merely represent) evaluative states of affairs in the way sensory experiences present us with sensible aspects of the world. We argue against the perceptual thesis. We show that the phenomenology of emotions is compatible with the fact that the evaluative aspect of apparent emotional contents has been incorporated from outside. We then deal with the only two views that can make sense of the perceptual thesis. On the response–dependence view, emotional experiences present evaluative response-dependent properties (being fearsome, being disgusting, etc.) in the way visual experiences present response-dependent properties such as colors. On the response–independence view, emotional experiences present evaluative response-independent properties (being dangerous, being indigestible, etc.), conceived as ‘Gestalten’ independent of emotional feelings themselves. We show that neither view can make plausible the idea that emotions present values as such, i.e., in an open and transparent way. If emotions have apparent evaluative contents, this is in fact due to evaluative enrichments of the non-evaluative presentational contents of emotions.

Arguments for Truthmaking

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Jago
Keyword(s):  
States Of Affairs ◽  
The World

The theory of truth I’m proposing analyses truth in terms of truthmaking. But why think that truths need to be made true by entities in the world? That’s a key question in this project. There are no quick, easy arguments in favour of truthmaking (§2.2 and §2.3). My strategy will be to argue that properties and relations exist (§2.4), and from there, to argue in favour of states of affairs (§2.5). Once we’ve got these in our ontology, it’s but a short step to argue that they are truthmakers for the corresponding propositions (§2.6).

On the Rationality of Radical Theological Non-Naturalism

1978 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 193-204 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kai Nielsen
Keyword(s):  
Necessary Condition ◽  
States Of Affairs ◽  
Concept Of God ◽  
The Earth ◽  
The World ◽  
Truth Claims ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Time And Being ◽  
Clear Idea ◽  
The Way

In my Contemporary Critiques of Religion and in my Scepticism, I argue that non-anthropomorphic conceptions of God do not make sense. By this I mean that we do not have sound grounds for believing that the central truth-claims of Christianity are genuine truth-claims and that we do not have a religiously viable concept of God. I argue that this is so principally because of three interrelated features about God-talk. (I) While purporting to be factual assertions, central bits of God-talk, e.g. ‘God exists’ and ‘God loves man-kind’, are not even in principle verifiable (confirmable or disconfirmable) in such a way that we can say what experienceable states of affairs would count for these putative assertions and against their denials, such that we could say what it would be like to have evidence which would make either their assertion or their denial more or less probably true. (2) Personal predicates, e.g. ‘loves’, ‘creates’, are at least seemingly essential in the use of God-talk, yet they suffer from such an attenuation of meaning in their employment in religious linguistic environments that it at least appears to be the case that we have in such environments unwittingly emptied these predicates of all intelligible meaning so that we do not understand what we are asserting or denying when we utter ‘God loves mankind’ or ‘God created the heavens and the earth’ and the like. (3) When we make well-formed assertions, it appears at least to be the case that a necessary condition for such wellformedness is that we should be able successfully to identify the subject of that putative statement so that we can understand what it is that we are talking about and thus understand that a genuine statement has actually been made. But, where God is conceived non-anthropomorphically, we have no even tolerably clear idea about how God, an infinite individual, occupying no particular place or existing at no particular time, and being utterly transcendent to the world, can be identified. Indeed we have no coherent idea of what it would be like to identify him and this means we have no coherent idea of what it would be like for God even to be a person or an it. He cannot be picked out and identified in the way persons and things can.

Moralities are a Sign-Language of the Affects

2019 ◽  
pp. 67-83
Author(s):  
Brian Leiter
Keyword(s):  
Moral Judgment ◽  
Empirical Evidence ◽  
Sign Language ◽  
Affective Responses ◽  
Moral Judgments ◽  
States Of Affairs ◽  
Cognitive Component ◽  
The World ◽  
Rule Out

Nietzsche is a sentimentalist about moral judgment, in the manner of Hume and, in the German tradition, Herder: the best explanation of our moral judgments is in terms of our emotional or affective responses to states of affairs in the world, responses that are, themselves, explicable in terms of psychological facts about the judger. Nietzsche understands our basic emotional or affective responses as brute artifacts of our psychological constitution, though there is nothing in Nietzsche’s view to rule out the possibility that more complicated feelings (e.g. “guilt”) might not involve a cognitive component added to the non-cognitive one, even if that is explanatorily otiose. The chapter concludes with a consideration of empirical evidence in support of sentimentalism.

scholarly journals The Explanationist Argument For Moral Realism

2011 ◽  
Vol 41 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-24 ◽  
Author(s):  
Neil Sinclair
Keyword(s):  
Strong Evidence ◽  
Moral Realism ◽  
Roll Call ◽  
States Of Affairs ◽  
Natural Properties ◽  
The World ◽  
Moral Explanations ◽  
Moral Properties

In this paper I argue that the explanationist argument in favour of moral realism fails. According to this argument, the ability of putative moral properties to feature in good explanations provides strong evidence for, or entails, the metaphysical claims of moral realism. Some have rejected this argument by denying that moral explanations are ever good explanations. My criticism is different. I will argue that even if we accept that moral explanations are (sometimes) good explanations the metaphysical claims of realism do not follow.According to moral realists, moral properties such as justice and goodness take their own unique place in nature's ontological roll-call. Although realists disagree about the nature of these moral properties — for example, whether they are reducible or otherwise constituted by non-moral or natural properties — they all agree that such properties are genuine constituents of the world that are sometimes instantiated by objects, events or states of affairs.

scholarly journals Les Allemagnes et la division Est-Ouest : Une ambivalence politique

2005 ◽  
Vol 16 (3) ◽  
pp. 547-559
Author(s):  
Paul Létourneau
Keyword(s):  
International Organizations ◽  
Special Functions ◽  
States Of Affairs ◽  
Concrete Case ◽  
Long Run ◽  
Official Policy ◽  
The World ◽  
Definition Of

This article is about the role of international bureaucracies in the determination of the general policies of international organizations. In this paper it is argued that in general international organizations' Secretariats generally do wield, considerable power over the definition of the institutions' strategies, i.e. those activities, priorities and projects which taken together make up the program of the institution for a given period. Indeed, the international bureaucrats exercise tremendous control over the content of the program. This is so because international organizations have special functions in the world System. They must see to it that, certain states of affairs prevail in the world over the long run. It is, therefore, no surprise that the programs' content be more or less shielded from conjonctural fluctuations. The article then proceeds to test these hypotheses on a concrete case: the analysis of the processus through which Unesco's program goes before becoming the official policy of the organization.

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