A. C. Mukerji on the Problem of Skepticism and Its Resolution in Neo-Vedānta

This paper examines the work of the unsung modern Indian Philosopher A. C. Mukerji, in his major works Self, Thought and Reality (1933) and The Nature of Self (1938). Mukerji constructs a skeptical challenge that emerges from the union of ideas drawn from early modern Europe, neo-Hegelian philosophy, and classical Buddhism and Vedānta. Mukerji’s worries about skepticism are important in part because they illustrate many of the creative tensions within the modern, synthetic period of Indian philosophy, and in part because they are truly profound, anticipating in interesting ways the worries that Feyerabend was to raise a few decades later. Arguing that Humean, Kantian, neo-Hegelian, and Buddhist philosophy each fail to provide an adequate account of self-knowledge, Mukerji leverages this finding to further argue that these systems fail to offer a proper account of knowledge more generally. His solution to skepticism centers on a distinctively modern interpretation of Śaṅkara’s Vedānta.

Why is Generative Grammar Recursive?

A familiar argument goes as follows: natural languages have infinitely many sentences, finite representation of infinite sets requires recursion; therefore any adequate account of linguistic competence will require some kind of recursive device. The first part of this paper argues that this argument is not convincing. The second part argues that it was not the original reason recursive devices were introduced into generative linguistics. The real basis for the use of recursive devices stems from a deeper philosophical concern; a grammar that functions merely as a metalanguage would not be explanatorily adequate as it would merely push the problem of explaining linguistic competence back to another level. The paper traces this concern from Zellig Harris and Chomsky’s early work in generative linguistics and presents some implications.

Arabic Lexical Phrases

The Arabic traditional grammar as well as Chomsky’s mainstream theory may not be able to provide a good analysis of some fixed Arabic phrases. The challenge of such data directly stems from the fact that the general syntactic rules assumed by the two opposing theories cannot explain the syntactic and the semantic aspects of the fixed Arabic data. I argue that the Construction Grammar provides an adequate account that does not rely on syntactic structure alone, as assumed by the mainstream theory or the Arabic traditional grammar, but rather it links phonological, syntactic, and semantic information together in one basic construction by means of some correspondence rules. The Arabic data proves that there is a strong need for a linguistic theory that takes into consideration all data of different range of productivity.

Control

This chapter begins relating the rather abstract issues considered so far to the issue of moral responsibility. It introduces the notion of guidance control in the first section, before examining some influential analyses that have been offered of this form of control. In particular, the chapter examines both reasons-sensitivity and hierarchical analyses of this notion. It is argued that there is reason to be sceptical of the claim that such analyses can offer an adequate account independent of considerations regarding abilities to do otherwise. This discussion, in addition to a counterexample offered, challenges the view that we can cleanly divorce the concepts of regulative and guidance control as is often proposed. The chapter ends by sketching an alternative, unified ability analysis of control, which combines elements associated with both regulative and guidance analyses of control.

Natural Goodness, Sex, and the Perverted Faculty Argument

There is a longstanding and widely held view, often associated with Catholicism, that intrinsically nonprocreative human sex acts are intrinsically immoral. Some philosophers who hold this view, such as Edward Feser, claim that they can defend the view on purely philosophical grounds by relying on the perverted faculty argument. This paper argues that Feser's defense of the perverted faculty argument does not work because Feser fails to recognize the full implications of the species-dependence of natural goodness. By drawing on the work of Peter Geach and Philippa Foot, this paper presents a view of natural goodness that adequately accounts for the species-dependence of such goodness. Using this adequate account, the paper argues that at least some intrinsically nonprocreative human sex acts contribute to human flourishing.

Burdens of Proof

This chapter provides a brief introduction to the scholarly conversation concerning burdens of persuasion. An adequate account of burdens must first explain what case-related facts the burden draws upon to produce outcomes. I review a variety of answers to this question, including probability threshold, likelihood ratio, belief function, weight-of-evidence, explanatory, and story-based approaches. I then identify several key questions that theories must answer with respect to inputs and show that the best answer on any given question must depend on whether the theory is advanced as a psychological, doctrinal, or normative account. The remainder of the chapter considers varying methods of transforming these inputs into case outcomes, including fixed thresholds, variable thresholds, multi-stepped, and continuous approaches. With respect to these choices, the problem of describing current practices is much easier, but the normative debates are harder to resolve.

Perceptual capacities, discrimination, and the senses

In this paper, I defend a new theory of the nature and individuation of perceptual capacities. I argue that we need a theory of perceptual capacities to explain modal facts about what sorts of perceptual phenomenal states one can be in. I defend my view by arguing for three adequacy constraints on a theory of perceptual capacities: perceptual capacities must be individuated at least partly in terms of their place in a hierarchy of capacities, where these capacities include the senses themselves; an adequate account of perceptual capacities must be sensitive to empirical considerations; and an adequate account should accommodate the nature of the capacity to perceive. I arrive at these constraints by considering how Schellenberg’s view fails, before defending and developing my alternative in line with the constraints. I defend a view on which there are few, coarse-grained perceptual capacities which can fulfil complex explanatory roles because they are evaluatively gradable on many axes. Finally, on my view, perceptual capacities bear a particularly close relation to the sensory modalities themselves.

Ancillary-Care Obligations

Medical researchers’ ancillary-care obligations have, until recently, been ignored by the authoritative guidelines on the ethics of medical research. Ancillary care is medical care, often unrelated to what is under study, that is not required by sound science, safe trial conduct, morally optional promises, or redressing research injuries. The question is when medical researchers have moral responsibilities to provide such care if their study participants need it. This question shows up insistently in studies done in resource-poor areas and—as the question of whether to return incidental findings—in genomic and imaging studies. After laying out six desiderata for a fully adequate account of medical researchers’ ancillary-care obligations, this chapter critically evaluates six potential grounds for such obligations—the duty of rescue, human rights, rectificatory justice, professional-role obligations, the researcher–participant relationship, and partial entrustment. It closes by suggesting the possibility of combining two or more of these grounds.

God, New Natural Law Theory, and Human Rights

Critics of the “New” Natural Law (NNL) theory have raised questions about the role of the divine in that theory. This paper considers that role in regard to its account of human rights: can the NNL account of human rights be sustained without a more or less explicit advertence to “the question of God’s existence or nature or will”? It might seem that Finnis’s “elaborate sketch” includes a full theory of human rights even prior to the introduction of his reflections on the divine in the concluding chapter of Natural Law and Natural Rights. But in this essay, I argue that an adequate account of human rights cannot, in fact, be sustained without some role for God’s creative activity in two dimensions, the ontological and the motivational. These dimensions must be distinguished from the epistemological dimension of human rights, that is, the question of whether epistemological access to truths about human rights is possible without reference to God’s existence, nature, or will. The NNL view is that such access is possible. However, I will argue, the epistemological cannot be entirely cabined off from the relevant ontological and motivational issues and the NNL framework can accommodate this fact without difficulty.

A Cognitive Approach to Semantic Disorientation in Mandarin I —Theoretical Prerequisites and a Case Study

Semantic disorientation refers to the phenomenon where sentence constituents with direct syntactic relations have no direct semantic linkage. The phenomenon is ubiquitous in Mandarin and related structures have been frequent research topics in the field of Chinese language study. However, there’s no systemic description of their syntactic and semantic features, nor in-depth exploration of the linguistic and non-linguistic motivations. From the perspective of cognitive linguistics, the current study approaches this phenomenon with a usage-based and non-derivational language view. The phenomenon is defined and categorized on the cognitive and psychological basis and a descriptive and explanative frame-work is built for a more accurate and adequate account of the phenomenon. The syntactic and semantic features, as well as the linguistic and non-linguistic motivations of the disoriented verb-complement constructions are addressed as a case study.