Quantificational Attitudes

The literature contains a popular argument in favor of the position that conditional attitudes (especially intentions and desires) are not simple attitudes with conditional contents but, rather, have a more complex structure. In this paper I show that an analogous argument applies to what we might call quantificational attitudes—like an intention to follow every bit of good advice I receive or a desire to get rabies shots for each bite I incur from an infected bat. The conditions under which these attitudes are satisfied and thwarted are not captured by claiming that they are simple attitudes with quantificational contents. So, the argument supports a novel position—that quantificational attitudes have a more complex structure. After sketching the form of this extra structure, I show how similar considerations count in favor of the existence of genuinely quantificational speech acts.

Beyond Seeing

Although the focus of this book is primarily on visual verbs and their relation to perception, one cannot help but wonder to what extent any of the lessons for the case of vision carries over to other perceptual verbs. Can we learn something from the semantics of ‘sound’, ‘hear’, ‘smell’, ‘taste’, and ‘feel’ about auditory, olfactory, gustatory, tactile, and bodily experiences? The author thinks that we can. Many of the points that apply to ‘seem’ and ‘see’ seem to carry over to other perceptual verbs. For example, ‘feel’ is different from the other perceptual verbs in a number of ways, perhaps because it can be used to describe such different experiential states as touch, bodily sensation, and emotion. However, as the author explains, there is an analogous argument from the semantics of ‘feel’ to the view that touch, bodily sensation, and emotion are representational.

Alta Presión:

The only survey of migrant farmworkers’ health in California that used clinical exams to collect data found this occupational group had “startlingly” high rates of hypertension and risk factors for cardiovascular disease. Drawing upon the narratives of two migrant farmworking women who were both hospitalized for hypertension, this chapter explores the role of “immigration stress” and “work stress” in producing their chronic disease. While public health researchers have recently pointed to racial minorities’ physiological response to chronic discrimination as an explanation for their higher rates of hypertension, this chapter makes an analogous argument for legal minorities. It suggests that the recent trend towards heightened interior immigration enforcement subjects all noncitizens to forms of “everyday violence,” only increasing their chronic worry and “perseverative stress.” This chapter explores how the stress of being a legal minority gets under migrants’ skin, helping account for migrant farmworkers’ higher rates of chronic morbidity and mortality.

Beyond Objective and Subjective: Assessing the Legitimacy of Religious Claims to Accommodation

There are at present two ways in which to evaluate religiously-based claims to accommodation in the legal context. The first, objective approach holds that these claims should be grounded in « facts of the matter » about the religions in question. The second, subjective approach, is grounded in an appreciation by the courts of the sincerity of the claimant. The first approach has the advantage of accounting for the difference between two constitutional principles : freedom of conscience on the one hand, and freedom of religion on the other. It has the disadvantage of transforming courts into expert bodies on religious matters. The subjective approach has a harder time accounting for the distinction. It also risks giving rise to a proliferation of claims. A plausible synthesis between the two approaches requires that we uncover the normative grounds justifying the granting by liberal democracies of religious accommodation. An analogous argument to that put forward by Kymlicka in the case of minority nations identifies the interest that citizens have in being able to exercise their « cultural agency » : the creative reappropriation and reinterpretation of the rituals, practices and norms of religious traditions.

Time as a Part of Physical Objects: The Modern 'Descartes-Minus Argument' and an Analogous Argument from Fourteenth-Century Logic (William Heytesbury and Albert of Saxony)

I argue in the essay that the fourteenth-century logicians William Heytesbury and Albert of Saxony developed an argument I call the Socrates-Minus Argument. Their analysis and rejection of it indicates a direction towards a pragmatic resolution to the contemporary Descartes-Minus Argument. Their resolution is similar to the view adopted today by Peter van Inwagen, namely, that “arbitrary undetached parts of physical objects,” like 'all of Socrates except his finger' simply do not exist. I conclude the fourteenth-century approach does not run afoul of Leibniz's law of the Indiscernibility of Identicals, but utilizes a form of Leibniz's Identity of Indiscernibles that, when combined with a weak “anthropic principle,” yield a pragmatic resolution to the Descartes-Minus Argument.

Sceptical theism and moral scepticism

Several theists have adopted a position known as ‘sceptical theism’, according to which God is justified in allowing suffering, but the justification is often beyond human comprehension. A problem for sceptical theism is that if there are unknown justifications for suffering, then we cannot know whether it is right for a human being to relieve suffering. After examining several proposed solutions to this problem, I conclude that one who is committed to a revealed religion has a simpler and more effective solution. In particular, according to traditional Judaism, God has permitted us, indeed commanded us, to relieve suffering, so we know that it is right for us to do so. I further show how God's command, according to Judaism, that we save lives provides an answer to an analogous argument put forward by David Hume. Thus, revealed theistic religions can sometimes solve problems more effectively than theism alone.

The natural logic of language and cognition

This paper aims at an explanation of the discrepancies between natural intuitions and standard logic in terms of a distinction between NATURAL and CONSTRUCTED levels of cognition, applied to the way human cognition deals with sets. NATURAL SET THEORY (NST) restricts standard set theory cutting it down to naturalness. The restrictions are then translated into a theory of natural logic. The predicate logic resulting from these restrictions turns out to be that proposed in Hamilton (1860) and Jespersen (1917). Since, in this logic, NO is a quantifier in its own right, different from NOT-SOME, and given the assumption that natural lexicalization processes occur at the level of basic naturalness, single-morpheme lexicalizations for NOT-ALL should not occur, just as there is no single-morpheme lexicalization for NOT-SOME at that level. An analogous argument is developed for the systematic absence of lexicalizations for NOT-AND in propositional logic.