Value Pluralism and the Challenge of Normativity in the Zhuangzi ______MARK L
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Mind and Social Reality
Masaryk University Faculty of Economics and Administration Study program: Economics METHODOLOGICAL INDIVIDUALISM: MIND AND SOCIAL REALITY Metodologický Individualizmus: Myseľ a Spoločenská Realita Bachelor´s Thesis Advisor: Author: Mgr. Josef Menšík Ph.D. Ján KRCHŇAVÝ Brno 2020 Name and last name of the author: Ján Krchňavý Title of master thesis: Methodological Individualism: Mind and Social Reality Department: Department of Economics Supervisor of bachelor thesis: Mgr. Josef Menšík, Ph.D. Year of defence: 2020 Abstract The submitted bachelor thesis is concerned with the relation between mind and social reality and the role of the mind in the creation of social reality. This relation is examined from the perspective of the social ontology of John Searle, an American philosopher who is considered to be the proponent of methodological individualism. This thesis aims to reconsider the standard, mentalistic interpretation of Searle’s social ontology, one that is centred around the primary role of the mind in the construction of social reality, to examine criticisms of such approach which highlight the professed neglect of the role that social practices have for social reality, and to provide an alternative, practice-based reading of Searle’s social ontology. The thesis thus proceeds first by outlining the standard interpretation of Searle’s theory as put forward mainly in his two monographs on social reality. Subsequently, the objections against such an approach from an alternative, practice-based approach, which highlights the role of social practices for the constitution of society, are raised. Following these objections, the Searle’s social ontology is looked at again in an effort to find an alternative interpretation that would bring it closer to the ideas and principles of the practice-based approach, and thereby provide a response to some objections against the missing role of the social practices in his theory as well as open the way for the novel interpretation of his social ontology. -
How Three Triads Illumine the Authority of the Preached Word
THE WORDS OF THE SPEAKER: HOW THREE TRIADS ILLUMINE THE AUTHORITY OF THE PREACHED WORD By J. D. HERR B.S., Philadelphia Biblical University, 2008 A THESIS Submitted to the faculty in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of MASTER OF ARTS Theological Studies at Reformed Theological Seminary Charlotte, North Carolina February 2019 Accepted: _______________________________________________________ First Reader, Dr. James Anderson _______________________________________________________ Second Reader !ii ABSTRACT According to J. L. Austin’s important work, How to Do Things With Words, the philosophic and linguistic assumption for centuries has been that saying something “is always and simply to state something.”1 For many people today, speech is simply the description of a place or event. It is either true or false, because it either describes an item or event well, or it does not. It either re-states propositional truth or it does not. Austin’s program was to regain an understanding and awareness of the force of speech—what is done in saying something—and came to be known as speech act theory. Similarly, in the discipline of theology, and in the life of the Church, many people tend to think of preaching as the passing of some “truth” from the divine mind to the human mind, or from the preacher’s mind to the hearer’s mind. While it is that, in a very real and meaningful way, in this paper I seek to explore whether there is more. As incarnate creatures, God has made humans to consist of spiritual and physical aspects. If we focus wholly on the “mental truth transfer” aspect of speech, especially in the case of preaching, how does this leave the Church equipped to bridge the divide between the mental information and what they are to do in their bodies? By interacting with and interfacing the triadic framework of speech act theory with the triadic frameworks of Dorothy Sayers and John Frame, I seek to understand preaching in 1 J. -
Moral Relativism and Chinese Philosophy
1 Introduction Yong Huang and Yang Xiao It is only quite recently that moral relativism has become a central topic among moral philosophers. About thirty years ago, in 1979, Philippa Foot had the following to say: Because moral relativism is “one of those natural philosophical thoughts . one might therefore expect that mor- al relativism would be a central topic among those discussed in classes and in the journals. Surprisingly, however, the truth has for long been quite otherwise. Many recent books on moral philosophy ignore the problem or give it perfunctory treatment, and it is only in the last two or three years that strong, interesting articles have begun to appear in print” (Foot 2002, 20). In 1984, David Wong’s Moral Relativity, the first book-length study of moral relativism appeared (Wong 1984). Since then, there have been many books and journal articles on the topic.1 It is a significant fact that, in contrast to most of the people who have aimed at establishing its falsity, Wong is among a handful of contemporary philosophers in the English-speaking world who are willing to defend certain forms of relativism.2 In his second book on moral relativism, Natural Moralities: A Defense of Pluralistic Relativism (Wong 2006), which is the focus of this edited volume, Wong gives new arguments for an ambitious, sophisti- cated, and original version of moral relativism, which was first sketched out in his 1984 book. As one of the reviewers remarks, Wong’s new book is “the most systematic and persuasive defense of moral relativism that has yet been written” (Gowans 2007). -
'History, Method and Pluralism: a Re-Interpretation of Isaiah Berlin's
HISTORY, METHOD, AND PLURALISM A Re-interpretation of Isaiah Berlin’s Political Thought Thesis submitted to the University of London for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy by HAOYEH London School of Economics and Political Science 2005 UMI Number: U205195 All rights reserved INFORMATION TO ALL USERS The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. In the unlikely event that the author did not send a complete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. Dissertation Publishing UMI U205195 Published by ProQuest LLC 2014. Copyright in the Dissertation held by the Author. Microform Edition © ProQuest LLC. All rights reserved. This work is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code. ProQuest LLC 789 East Eisenhower Parkway P.O. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, Ml 48106-1346 S 510 Abstract of the Thesis In the literature on Berlin to date, two broad approaches to study his political thought can be detected. The first is the piecemeal approach, which tends to single out an element of Berlin’s thought (for example, his distinction between negative liberty and positive liberty) for exposition or criticism, leaving other elements unaccounted. And the second is the holistic approach, which pays attention to the overall structure of Berlin’s thought as a whole, in particular the relation between his defence for negative liberty and pluralism. This thesis is to defend the holistic approach against the piecemeal approach, but its interpretation will differ from the two representative readings, offered by Claude J. -
Anthropological Theory
Anthropological Theory http://ant.sagepub.com John Searle on a witch hunt: A commentary on John R. Searle's essay ‘Social ontology: Some basic principles’ Richard A. Shweder Anthropological Theory 2006; 6; 89 DOI: 10.1177/1463499606061739 The online version of this article can be found at: http://ant.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/6/1/89 Published by: http://www.sagepublications.com Additional services and information for Anthropological Theory can be found at: Email Alerts: http://ant.sagepub.com/cgi/alerts Subscriptions: http://ant.sagepub.com/subscriptions Reprints: http://www.sagepub.com/journalsReprints.nav Permissions: http://www.sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav Downloaded from http://ant.sagepub.com at UNIV OF CHICAGO LIBRARY on November 5, 2007 © 2006 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution. Anthropological Theory Copyright © 2006 SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi) http://ant.sagepub.com Vol 6(1): 89–111 10.1177/1463499606061739 John Searle on a witch hunt A commentary on John R. Searle’s essay ‘Social ontology: Some basic principles’ Richard A. Shweder University of Chicago, USA Abstract In this commentary I respond to John Searle’s conceptual framework for the interpretation of ‘social facts’ as a provocation to spell out some of the philosophical foundations of the romantic pluralist tradition in cultural anthropology. Romantic pluralists in anthropology seek to affirm (to the extent such affirmation is reasonably possible) what the philosopher John Gray describes as ‘the reality, validity and human intelligibility of values and forms of life very different from our own’. With special attention to two examples of contemporary social facts (a witchcraft tribunal in Africa and death pollution practices in a Hindu temple town), the commentary raises questions about John Searle’s approach to the mind-body problem and his account of epistemic objectivity and ontological subjectivity with regard to social facts. -
Religious Freedom and Public Argument: John Courtney Murray on “The American Proposition”
Loyola University Chicago Law Journal Volume 50 Issue 1 Fall 2018 Article 6 2018 Religious Freedom and Public Argument: John Courtney Murray on “The American Proposition” Robin W. Lovin Follow this and additional works at: https://lawecommons.luc.edu/luclj Part of the Law Commons Recommended Citation Robin W. Lovin, Religious Freedom and Public Argument: John Courtney Murray on “The American Proposition”, 50 Loy. U. Chi. L. J. 25 (). Available at: https://lawecommons.luc.edu/luclj/vol50/iss1/6 This Symposium Article is brought to you for free and open access by LAW eCommons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Loyola University Chicago Law Journal by an authorized editor of LAW eCommons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Religious Freedom and Public Argument: John Courtney Murray on “The American Proposition” Robin W. Lovin* In his classic essays in We Hold These Truths, John Courtney Murray developed an understanding of “the American proposition” that integrated a theological account of human good with the search for public consensus in a constitutional democracy. While this understanding of the relationship between religious freedom and political life was incorporated into Catholic social teaching at the Second Vatican Council, subsequent developments in both political theory and theology call Murray’s understanding of public discourse into question. This essay examines these challenges and argues that Murray’s reconciliation of moral truth and political choice is still an important resource for discussion of religious freedom and other moral issues in today’s polarized politics. INTRODUCTION ............................................................................... 25 I. MURRAY’S LEGACY .................................................................... 26 II. THE PUBLIC ARGUMENT ........................................................... -
Lawyers, Justice and the Challenge of Moral Pluralism
Scholarly Commons @ UNLV Boyd Law Scholarly Works Faculty Scholarship 2005 Lawyers, Justice and the Challenge of Moral Pluralism Katherine R. Kruse University of Nevada, Las Vegas -- William S. Boyd School of Law Follow this and additional works at: https://scholars.law.unlv.edu/facpub Part of the Legal Ethics and Professional Responsibility Commons Recommended Citation Kruse, Katherine R., "Lawyers, Justice and the Challenge of Moral Pluralism" (2005). Scholarly Works. 36. https://scholars.law.unlv.edu/facpub/36 This Article is brought to you by the Scholarly Commons @ UNLV Boyd Law, an institutional repository administered by the Wiener-Rogers Law Library at the William S. Boyd School of Law. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Article Lawyers, Justice, and the Challenge of Moral Pluralism Katherine R. Kruset Some of the most compelling questions of legal ethics de- fine the lawyer's professional role in the gap between what is legally permitted and what is just.' Perhaps for that reason, professional responsibility hypotheticals are replete with cli- ents who want to use the law for arguably immoral purposes- from criminal defendants who want to avoid punishment to corporate executives who want to avoid government regula- tion. 2 Because these clients do not want to break the law out- right, ethical standards do not clearly indicate whether lawyers should be professionally obligated to represent them or ethi- cally restrained from doing so. Instead, questions about the lawyer's role rest in larger issues of justice. t Associate Professor, William S. Boyd School of Law, University of Ne- vada Las Vegas. -
On Berlin's Liberal Pluralism
On Berlin’s Liberal Pluralism An examination of the political theories of Sir Isaiah Berlin, concentrated around the problem of combining value pluralism and liberalism. Dag Einar Thorsen Cand. Polit. Thesis Department of Political Science, University of Oslo April 2004 2 Table of Contents 1. INTRODUCTION ..................................................................................................................... 4 1.1 Isaiah Berlin’s thought and the ensuing debate..................................................................................... 4 1.2 About this study...................................................................................................................................... 9 1.2.1 Questions – and the reasons for asking them.............................................................................. 9 1.2.2 Theory and method ................................................................................................................... 11 1.2.3 Outline ...................................................................................................................................... 13 2. ISAIAH BERLIN IN POLITICAL THEORY...................................................................... 15 2.1 Introduction: La théorie politique, existe-t-elle? ................................................................................. 15 2.2 Elusive concepts and categories .......................................................................................................... 17 2.2.1 Pluralism ................................................................................................................................. -
Reception of Externalized Knowledge a Constructivistic Model Based on Popper's Three Worlds and Searle's Collective Intentionality
Reception of externalized knowledge A constructivistic model based on Popper's Three Worlds and Searle's Collective Intentionality Winfried Gödert – Klaus Lepsky April 2019 Institute of Information Science TH Köln / University of Applied Sciences Claudiusstraße 1, D-50678 Köln [email protected] [email protected] Summary We provide a model for the reception of knowledge from externalized information sources. The model is based on a cognitive understanding of information processing and draws up ideas of an exchange of information in communication processes. Karl Popper's three-world theory with its orientation on falsifiable scientific knowledge is extended by John Searle's concept of collective intentionality. This allows a consistent description of externalization and reception of knowledge including scientific knowledge as well as everyday knowledge. 1 Introduction It is generally assumed that knowledge is in people's minds and that this knowledge can be com- municated to other people as well as taken over by other people. There is also a general consensus that, in addition to direct communication, this can also be achieved by conveying knowledge through various forms of media presentation, e.g. books, and their reception. The prerequisite for this mediation is the externalization of knowledge by the knowledgeable person, e.g. by writing a book.1 For the consideration of such externalization and reception processes it seems reasonable to make the following distinction between types of knowledge: • Knowledge in one's own head for various purposes, such as problem solving or acting. • Knowledge in other people's minds. • Knowledge in externalized form, e.g. -
Value Pluralism and Liberal Democracy
Value Pluralism and Liberal Democracy Yao Lin Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 2016 © 2016 Yao Lin All rights reserved ABSTRACT Value Pluralism and Liberal Democracy Yao Lin As the title indicates, this three-essay dissertation explores the relations between value pluralism and liberal democracy. The first essay, “Negative versus Positive Freedom: Making Sense of the Dichotomy,” starts with the puzzling appeal of the negative-versus-positive-freedom dichotomy. Why has this distinction, despite forceful criticisms against it, continued to dominate mainstream discourses on freedom in contemporary political theory? Does it grasp something fundamental about the phenomenology of freedom? In this essay I examine four main approaches to making sense of the appeal of this dichotomy, and the challenges they each face. Both the conventional, naive contrast between “freedom from” and “freedom to,” and the revisionist strategy to distinguish between the “opportunity-concept” and the “exercise-concept” of freedom, upon close scrutiny, fail to survive MacCallum’s triadic argument against all dichotomous views on the concept of freedom. The third account, which reduce the negative/positive dichotomy of freedom to the divide between “phenomenal” and “nounemal” conceptions of the self, or of the range of preventing conditions, is both interpretively misleading and conceptually uninformative, as I illustrate by using Berlin’s discussion on self-abnegation as an example. In the fourth place, I analyze why both the historical bifurcation account that take the negative/positive dichotomy of freedom as merely genealogical, on the one hand, and the republican critique of it based on the presumably sublating conception of non-domination, on the other hand, are unsatisfying. -
Having Hands, Even in the Vat: What the Semantic Argument Really Shows About Skepticism by Samuel R Burns
Having Hands, Even in the Vat: What the Semantic Argument Really Shows about Skepticism by Samuel R Burns A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Bachelor of Arts with Honors Department of Philosophy in The University of Michigan 2010 Advisors: Professor Gordon Belot Assistant Professor David Baker ”With relief, with humiliation, with terror, he understood that he also was an illusion, that someone else was dreaming him.” Jorge Luis Borges, “The Circular Ruins” “With your feet in the air and your head on the ground/Try this trick and spin it/ Your head will collapse/But there’s nothing in it/And you’ll ask yourself: ‘Where is my mind?’” The Pixies © Samuel R Burns 2010 To Nami ii Table of Contents Acknowledgements .............................................................................................................................iv 1. The Foundation ............................................................................................1 1.1. The Causal Theory of Reference ........................................................................4 1.2. Semantic Externalism ........................................................................................11 2. The Semantic Argument ...........................................................................16 2.1. Putnam’s Argument ...........................................................................................16 2.2. The Disquotation Principle ..............................................................................19 -
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy) Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy the Chinese Room Argument
5/30/2016 The Chinese Room Argument (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy) Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy The Chinese Room Argument First published Fri Mar 19, 2004; substantive revision Wed Apr 9, 2014 The argument and thoughtexperiment now generally known as the Chinese Room Argument was first published in a paper in 1980 by American philosopher John Searle (1932 ). It has become one of the bestknown arguments in recent philosophy. Searle imagines himself alone in a room following a computer program for responding to Chinese characters slipped under the door. Searle understands nothing of Chinese, and yet, by following the program for manipulating symbols and numerals just as a computer does, he produces appropriate strings of Chinese characters that fool those outside into thinking there is a Chinese speaker in the room. The narrow conclusion of the argument is that programming a digital computer may make it appear to understand language but does not produce real understanding. Hence the “Turing Test” is inadequate. Searle argues that the thought experiment underscores the fact that computers merely use syntactic rules to manipulate symbol strings, but have no understanding of meaning or semantics. The broader conclusion of the argument is that the theory that human minds are computerlike computational or information processing systems is refuted. Instead minds must result from biological processes; computers can at best simulate these biological processes. Thus the argument has large implications for semantics, philosophy of language and mind, theories of consciousness, computer science and cognitive science generally. As a result, there have been many critical replies to the argument.