The Language of Ontology

Metaphysical and ontological debates—debates about what exists and the nature of reality—have long been among the most discussed topics in philosophy. However, some argue that ontological debates are non-substantive, pointless, trivial, incoherent, or impossible. Debates about whether tables exist, or about the nature of reality, are taken to be defective in some way. This has led to a burgeoning literature studying the nature of metaphysical and ontological disputes themselves. A prominent line of argument has focused on questions concerning the language in which metaphysical disputes are conducted. Is there a ‘fundamental’ or ‘best’ language for ontology, or does the nature of language render metaphysical and ontological disputes non-substantive? This volume brings together new work from established and emerging authors on questions relating to the relationship between language and ontology. More specifically, essays in this volume consider such topics as whether there can be an ‘objectively best’ or privileged language of ontology; how we might compare languages to see which is the language of ontology; whether positing an ‘objectively best’ language is required of a substantive realist metaphysics; whether metaphysical debates are meaningless; the role of existence and truth in ontological theorizing; whether metaphysical claims should be interpreted as attempts to express truths about the nature of reality; and the relationship between natural language and theoretical metaphysics. Collectively, these essays advance a range of debates in metametaphysics and metaontology, and will be an invaluable resource for students and academics interested in the relationship between metaphysics and language.

Are We Approaching an Economic Singularity? Information Technology and the Future of Economic Growth

What are the prospects for long-run economic growth? One prominent line of economic thinking is the trend toward stagnation. Stagnationism has a long history in economics, beginning prominently with Malthus and occasionally surfacing in different guises. Prominent themes here are the following: Will economic growth slow and perhaps even reverse under the weight of resource depletion? Will overpopulation and diminishing returns lower living standards? Will unchecked CO2 emissions lead to catastrophic changes in climate and human systems? Have we depleted the store of potential great inventions? Will the aging society lead to diminished innovativeness? (JEL D83, E25, O31, O32, O41, O47)

Composition

The activity of composition is little discussed in philosophy, understandably due to its disunity across musical cultures. In the context of the individually composed concert music that has preoccupied the discipline, composing and the composer are often invoked figuratively as objects of a kind of engagement expected of the listener. This figure has survived a reversal of direction in a prominent line of anti-modern musical critique, in which composers can be faulted for not proceeding in ways that match those to which listeners supposedly are bound. In a music-analytical example drawn from the finale of Ruth Crawford Seeger’s String Quartet, alternatives are offered to these views. Explicit compositional procedures, realizing Crawford’s radical conception of dissonance, are regarded as influential upon, not definitive of, audible traits of what they produce; and the utility of these procedures is seen as including idle, indirect, and even counter-productive elements. Awareness of compositional process, and of the conceptions in which it is embedded, may substantially affect audition and appreciation.

Rehabilitating Statistical Evidence

Recently, the practice of deciding legal cases on purely statistical evidence has been widely criticised. Many feel uncomfortable with finding someone guilty on the basis of bare probabilities, even though the chance of error might be stupendously small. This is an important issue: with the rise of DNA profiling, courts are increasingly faced with purely statistical evidence. A prominent line of argument—endorsed by Blome-Tillmann 2017; Smith 2018; and Littlejohn 2018—rejects the use of such evidence by appealing to epistemic norms that apply to individual inquirers. My aim in this paper is to rehabilitate purely statistical evidence by arguing that, given the broader aims of legal systems, there are scenarios in which relying on such evidence is appropriate. Along the way I explain why popular arguments appealing to individual epistemic norms to reject legal reliance on bare statistics are unconvincing, by showing that courts and individuals face different epistemic predicaments (in short, individuals can hedge when confronted with statistical evidence, whilst legal tribunals cannot). I also correct some misconceptions about legal practice that have found their way into the recent literature.

Hell Being Other People in Jean-Paul Sartre’s Play No Exit

In modern world, hell is not the punishment but the society in which we live and the people who surround us. Through their interference in our affairs, those people make our life miserable and look like hell. This research deals with Jean Paul Sartre's play No Exit (1944) illuminating the afterlife of the others. He used three dead characters that are punished by being imprisoned into a room together for eternity. He symbolizes the room as a hell in order to represent the real world around us. Their coming into this small hell shows their indispensability to one another. They represent the essential idea of the play that others are torture for us. By emphasizing on the notion of hell being other people, Sartre shows that man's pain, suffering, depression are due to others. By repeating his prominent line 'Hell is Other People', Sartre concentrates on the relation of people that is always conflict; meaning that other people just being annoying. For him, the mere presence of another person will definitely trouble the others due to his interference in private matters. For that reason, Sartre portrays hell as a room with no torture or flames as the real torture is the presence of others. Through concentrating on the nature of man's existence, Sartre can reveal the problems of both man and society as well.

Dormant Dispositions, Agent Value, and the Trinity

In this paper we argue that the moral value of an agent is determined solely by their dispositions to act intentionally and freely. We then put this conclusion to work. It resolves a putative moral paradox first posed by Saul Smilansky, and it undermines a prominent line of argument for a variety of Trinitarian theology. Finally, we derive our conclusion about the moral worth of agents not only from our initial series of thought experiments, but also from Abrahamic theism itself. This means that Smilansky’s paradox can only possibly be rehabilitated by an atheist, and that the aforementioned line of argumentation for the Trinity is radically self-undermining, since it relies upon the denial of a corollary of Abrahamic theism.

Scene layout priming relies primarily on low-level features rather than scene layout

The ability to perceive and remember the spatial layout of a scene is critical to understanding the visual world, both for navigation and for other complex tasks that depend upon the structure of the current environment. However, surprisingly little work has investigated how and when scene layout information is maintained in memory. One prominent line of work investigating this issue is a scene priming paradigm (e.g., Sanocki & Epstein, 1997), in which different types of previews are presented to participants shortly before they judge which of two regions of a scene is closer in depth to the viewer. Experiments using this paradigm have been widely cited as evidence that scene layout information is stored across brief delays and have been used to investigate the structure of the representations underlying memory for scene layout. In the present experiments, we better characterize these scene priming effects. We find that a large amount of visual detail rather than the presence of depth information is necessary for the priming effect; that participants show a preview benefit for a judgment completely unrelated to the scene itself; and that preview benefits are susceptible to masking and quickly decay. Together, these results suggest that “scene priming” effects do not isolate scene layout information in memory, and that they may arise from low-level visual information held in sensory memory. This broadens the range of interpretations of scene priming effects and suggests that other paradigms may need to be developed to selectively investigate how we represent scene layout information in memory.

Hedging for Better Bets: Power Shifts, Credible Signals, and Preventive Conflict

How can declining states reliably infer the intentions of rising states? One prominent line of argument maintains that because declining states face intractable uncertainty about rising states’ future intentions, preventive war is often unavoidable even between states with truly compatible goals. This article presents a dynamic model of reassurance in which actors are uncertain whether or not their interests conflict. The model shows that by adopting a hedging strategy of limited containment short of war, declining states can reduce risers’ incentives to send dishonest cooperative signals. This, in turn, makes cooperation more credible as a signal of risers’ benign intentions. Moreover, these signals are sufficiently informative to dissuade the decliner from escalating to preventive war even under large power shifts. Thus, although power shifts promote limited competition among states with compatible goals, preventive war rationally occurs only in a bargaining context when the riser’s goals are known to be incompatible.

Parties, Legislators, and the Origins of Proportional Representation

A prominent line of theories holds that proportional representation (PR) was introduced in many European democracies by a fragmented bloc of conservative parties seeking to preserve their legislative seat shares after franchise extension and industrialization increased the vote base of socialist parties. In contrast to this “seat-maximization” account, we focus on how PR affected party leaders’ control over nominations, thereby enabling them to discipline their followers and build more cohesive parties. We explore this “party-building” account in the case of Norway, using roll call data from six reform proposals in 1919. We show that leaders were more likely to vote in favor of PR than rank-and-file members, even controlling for the parties’ expected seat payoffs and the district-level socialist electoral threat facing individual legislators. Moreover, using within-legislator variation, we show that the internal cohesion of parties increased significantly after the introduction of PR.

Value in Very Long Lives

As things currently stand, our deaths are unavoidable and our lifespans short. It might be thought that these qualities leave room for improvement. According to a prominent line of argument in philosophy, however, this thought is mistaken. Against the idea that a longer life would be better, it is claimed that negative psychological states, such as boredom, would be unavoidable if our lives were significantly longer. Against the idea that a deathless life would be better, it is claimed that such a life would be lacking in important sources of value, because death is a precondition for many of our valuing attitudes. I argue that these problems are avoided by very long (and potentially infinite) lives that incorporate fading memory, limited ignorance of future events, and temporal scarcity. I conclude that very long lives are, in principle, desirable, and that death does not play an essential role in our valuing attitudes.