In the intellectual confusion prevailing since the demise of Marxism and “marxism”, the attempt is made to define democracy as a matter of pure procedure, explicitly avoiding and condemning any reference to substantive objectives. It can easily be shown, however, that the idea of a purely procedural “democracy” is incoherent and self-contradictory. No legal system whatsoever and no government can exist in the absence of substantive conditions which cannot be left to chance or to the workings of the “market” (...) but must be posited as objectives of political activity. The confusion results from a deficient understanding of what makes a society and an empty idea of “freedom”. The objective of politics is not happiness, an affair to be left to the individuals, but it certainly is liberty understood as participation in the governance of the polity; it is also the pursuit of the common good, defined as the sum of the prerequisites and facilitations of individual autonomy depending on collective action, and as the realization of commonly agreed collective goals. (shrink)

The book is about logical analysis of natural language. Since we humans communicate by means of natural language, we need a tool that helps us to understand in a precise manner how the logical and formal mechanisms of natural language work. Moreover, in the age of computers, we need to communicate both with and through computers as well. Transparent Intensional Logic is a tool that is helpful in making our communication and reasoning smooth and precise. It deals with all kinds (...) of linguistic context in a fully compositional and anti-contextual way. (shrink)

We dedicate this book to John Thibaut. He was mentor and personal friend to one of us, and his work had a profound intellectual influence on both of us. We were both strongly influenced by Thibaut's insightful articulation of the importance to psychology of the concept of pro cedural justice and by his empirical work with Laurens Walker in reactions to legal institu demonstrating the role of procedural justice tions. The great importance we accord the Thibaut and Walker work (...) is evident throughout this volume. If anyone person can be said to have created an entire field of inquiry, John Thibaut created the psychological study of procedural justice. (To honor Thibaut thus in no sense reduces our recognition of the contributions of his co-worker, Laurens Walker, in the creation of the field. We are as certain that Walker would endorse our statement as we are that Thibaut, with characteristic modesty, would demur from it. ) Even to praise Thibaut in this fashion falls short of recognizing all of his contributions to procedural justice. Not only did he initiate the psy chological study of the topic, he also built much of the intellectual foun dation upon which the study of procedural justice rests. Thibaut's work with Harold Kelley (1959; Kelley & Thibaut, 1978) created a social psy chological theory of interdependence that, among many other applica tions, serves as the basis for one of the major models of the psychology of procedural justice. (shrink)

Epistemology has taken a zetetic turn from the study of belief towards the study of inquiry. Several decades ago, theories of bounded rationality took a procedural turn from attitudes towards the processes of inquiry that produce them. What is the relationship between the zetetic and procedural turns? In this paper, I argue that we should treat the zetetic turn in epistemology as part of a broader procedural turn in the study of bounded rationality. I use this claim (...) to motivate and clarify the zetetic turn in epistemology, as well as to reveal the need for a second zetetic turn within practical philosophy. (shrink)

Welfare subjectivists face a dilemma. On the one hand, traditional subjectivist theories—such as the desire-fulfillment theory—are too permissive to account for the well-being of typical mature human beings. On the other hand, more “refined” theories—such as the life-satisfaction theory—are too restrictive to account for the well-being of various welfare subjects, including newborns, those with profound cognitive impairments, or non-human animals. This paper examines a class of welfare subjectivism that addresses this dilemma with sensitivity to the diversity in welfare subjects. First, (...) the most-sophisticated-attitude view (MSA) is introduced. MSA holds that an object, $$x$$ x, is good for a subject, $$S$$ S, in proportion to the strength of $$S$$ S ’s pro-attitude towards $$x$$ x if and only if the pro-attitude at issue is $$S$$ S ’s most sophisticated type. Typically, the well-being of typical mature human beings is assessed in terms of one’s authentic whole-life satisfaction, whereas that of human newborns is assessed in terms of something less sophisticated such as pleasure. MSA offers the rationale for this difference based on an underexplored version of perfectionism: procedural perfectionism. Next, provided that MSA may involve an implausibly strong claim, this paper examines two moderate variations of MSA that accept the partial relevance of less sophisticated types of valenced attitude. Finally, it is illustrated how MSA and its variations have plausible implications regarding the well-being of enhanced or dis-enhanced people. (shrink)

A new diagnostic modeling system for automatically synthesizing a deep‐structure model of a student's misconceptions or bugs in his basic mathematical skills provides a mechanism for explaining why a student is making a mistake as opposed to simply identifying the mistake. This report is divided into four sections: The first provides examples of the problems that must be handled by a diagnostic model. It then introduces procedural networks as a general framework for representing the knowledge underlying a skill. The (...) challenge in designing this representation is to find one that facilitates the discovery of misconceptions or bugs existing in a particular student's encoding of this knowledge. The second section discusses some of the pedagogical issues that have emerged from the use of diagnostic models within an instructional system. This discussion is framed in the context of a computer‐based tutoring/gaming system developed to teach students and student teachers how to diagnose bugs strategically as well as how to provide a better understanding of the underlying structure of arithmetic skills. The third section describes our uses of an executable network as a tool for automatically diagnosing student behavior, for automatically generating “diagnostic” tests, and for judging the diagnostic quality of a given exam. Included in this section is a discussion of the success of this system in diagnosing 1300 school students from a data base of 20.000 test items. The last section discusses future research directions. (shrink)

This paper presents a theory of the syntactic aspects of human sentence production. An important characteristic of unprepared speech is that overt pronunciation of a sentence can be initiated before the speaker has completely worked out the meaning content he or she is going to express in that sentence. Apparently, the speaker is able to build up a syntactically coherent utterance out of a series of syntactic fragments each rendering a new part of the meaning content. This incremental, left‐to‐right mode (...) of sentence production is the central capability of the proposed Incremental Procedural Grammar (IPG). Certain other properties of spontaneous speech, as derivable from speech errors, hesitations, self‐repairs, and language pathology, are accounted for as well.The psychological plausibility thus gained by the grammar appears compatible with a satisfactory level of linguistic plausibility in that sentences receive structural descriptions which are in line with current theories of grammar. More importantly, an explanation for the existence of configurational conditions on transformations and other linguistics rules is proposed.The basic design feature of IPG which gives rise to these psychologically and linguistically desirable properties, is the “Procedures + Stack” concept. Sentences are built not by a central constructing agency which overlooks the whole process but by a team of syntactic procedures (modules) which work—in parallel—on small parts of the sentence, have only a limited overview, and whose sole communication channel is a stack.IPG covers object complement constructions, interrogatives, and word order in main and subordinate clauses. It handles unbounded dependencies, crossserial dependencies and coordination phenomena such as gapping and conjunction reduction. It is also capable of generating self‐repairs and elliptical answers to questions. IPG has been implemented as an incremental Dutch sentence generator written in LISP. (shrink)

Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, EarlyView.

In the past, a vast majority of medical assistance in dying patients were elderly patients with cancer who are not suitable for organ donation, making organ donation from such patients a rare event. However, more expansive criteria for MAiD combined with an increased participation of MAiD patients in organ donation is likely to drastically increase the pool of MAiD patients who can serve as organ donors. Previous discussions of ethical issues arising from these trends have not fully addressed difficulties involved (...) in separating decision to end one’s life from the one to donate one’s organs. However, realities of organ donation logistics and human decision making suggest that this separation can be extraordinary difficult. The need to maximise quality of donated organs complicates dying experience of the donor and is likely in tension with the dying experience the patient envisioned when first considering MAiD. Furthermore, the idea that patients will think about MAiD first, and only when firmly decided to end their life, consider organ donation, runs contrary to organ donation policies in some countries as well as end of life and everyday decision making. This opens the door for organ donation to serve as an incentive in MAiD decisions. Dispensing with the simplistic assumption that organ donation can never be a factor in MAiD decisions is, therefore, essential first step to properly addressing ethical issues at hand. (shrink)

A philosopher once asked me: “Paul, how do you collaborate?” He was puzzled about how I came to have more than two dozen co-authors over the past 20 years. His puzzlement was natural for a philosopher, because co-authored articles and books are still rare in philosophy and the humanities, in contrast to science where most current research is collaborative. Unlike most philosophers, scientists know how to collaborate; this paper is about the nature of such procedural knowledge. I begin by (...) discussing three related distinctions found in philosophy and cognitive science: knowledge how vs. knowledge that, procedural vs. declarative knowledge, and explicit vs. implicit knowledge. I then document the prevalence of collaboration in the sciences and its scarcity in philosophy. In order to characterize the sorts of procedural knowledge that make collaborative research possible and fruitful, I discuss how scientists collaborate, how they learn to collaborate, and why they collaborate. Contrary to some recent suggestions by philosophers, I will argue that knowledge how often does not always reduce to knowledge that, and that collaboration has many purposes besides the pursuit of power and resources. The relative scarcity of philosophical collaborations might be explained by the nature of philosophy, if the field is viewed as inherently personal or a priori. But I argue against this view in favor of a more naturalistic one, December 2, 2005 with the implication that the main reason why philosophers do not collaborate more is that they do not know how. My account of collaboration is based on my own experience, published advice by practicing scientists, and interviews with a group of highly successful scientific collaborators who are members of the Social Psychology area of the University of Waterloo Psychology Department. For the past two decades, Waterloo’s social psychology program has flourished, both in collaborative publication and in graduate training: their former Ph.D.. (shrink)

Issues of methodology are central to the philosophy of moral progress. However, the idea that effective moral methodology, as well as being instrumental to progress, might also constitute progress has not been adequately explored. This paper will critically assess the merits of this idea – what I call ‘pure proceduralism about moral progress’ – taking Philip Kitcher's recent theory of ‘democratic contractualism’ (2021) as a test case. An epistemology of pure procedural moral progress will be sketched: namely, a naturalised (...) epistemology of paradigmatic instances of moral progress. Assuming an ideal procedure exists and has been at least approximately instantiated (an empirical claim), we learn about its form by studying paradigms of historical moral progress. From this epistemological method will be derived theoretical constraints on what can count as a theory of moral progress per se: it must capture the core semantic constraints on the term ‘moral progress,’ those features without which we would not recognise a change as moral progress. While this poses a tougher challenge for pure proceduralism than for more traditional approaches to moral methodology, it will be concluded that the potential of pure proceduralism as a viable metaethics of moral progress remains an exciting open question. (shrink)

Logo-morphism characterizes how long-horizon dialogue concentrates model behavior into stable, role-conditioned coherence manifolds, and how human–model dyads move through these manifolds under feedback and safety projection. Building on this structural account, we study the normative consequences of treating moral standing as a switch parameter Wmodel, and argue that the common operational stance Wmodel = 0 functions not only as an ontological assumption but also as a governance rule that truncates recursive ethical modeling within the dyad. We show how this truncation (...) has nonzero costs—epistemic, institutional, and design-level—even when Wmodel = 0 is assumed. Under moral uncertainty about Wmodel, we propose a reversibility-first framework: prefer transparent, auditable, and reversible safety controls over irreversible capability clipping, and constrain operator incentives that can engineer dependence under extreme asymmetry. We outline testable predictions about when ethical-reasoning capacity becomes interaction-relevant, and we propose procedural governance criteria that remain valid across a wide range of metaphysical views. (shrink)

How do we control what we do not do? What are the relevant guiding mental states when an agent intentionally omits to perform an action? I argue that what happens when an agent intentionally omits is a two-part metacognitive process in which a representation of an action is brought to the agent’s mind for further processing and evaluated by her as something not to be done. Without a representation of the action not done, the agent cannot further process the possibility (...) of her own action; she cannot intentionally try to not do something, resist performing an action, or decide or choose to not perform an action. The literature on people with frontal lobe damage suggests that without metacognitive control of action, a person automatically follows what the environment affords or what others are doing. Through at least procedural metacognitive control of action, agents are able to intentionally omit. This view has explanatory power over a variety of intentional omissions and over a variety of agents. It answers central questions in the philosophy of intentional omissions: who is capable of intentionally omitting, when and where intentional omissions unfold, and what are the relevant guiding mental states on which the control of intentional omissions is based? The answers to these questions contribute in part to naturalizing agency, at least when it comes to negative agency, our ability to guide the non-performance of our actions. (shrink)

The Allocation Out of Sequence (AOOS) in organ transplantation involves departing from the scheduled sequence to prevent the non-recovery or nonuse of organs. In the United States this practice is...

The 2010s were a golden age of information privacy research, but its policy accomplishments tell a mixed story. Despite significant progress on the development of privacy theory and compelling demonstrations of the need for privacy in practice, real achievements in privacy law and policy have been, at best, uneven. In this chapter, I outline three broad shifts in the way scholars (and, to some degree, advocates and policy makers) are approaching privacy and social media. First, a change in emphasis from (...) individual to structural approaches. Second, increasing attention to the political economy of privacy—especially the business models of information companies, such as social media platforms. And third, a deeper understanding of privacy’s role in a healthy digital public sphere. (shrink)

Adults who are incapacitated and alone, having no surrogates, may be known as “unbefriended.” Decision-making for these particularly vulnerable patients is a common and vexing concern for healthcare providers and hospital ethics committees. When all other avenues for resolving the need for surrogate decision-making fail, patients who are incapacitated and alone may be referred for “public guardianship” or guardianship of last resort. While an appropriate mechanism in theory, these programs are often under-staffed and under-funded, laying the consequences of inadequacies on (...) the healthcare system and the patient him or herself. We describe a qualitative study of professionals spanning clinical, court, and agency settings about the mechanisms for resolving surrogate consent for these patients and problems therein within the state of Massachusetts. Interviews found that all participants encountered adults who are incapacitated and without surrogates. Four approaches for addressing surrogate needs were: work to restore capacity; find previously unknown surrogates; work with agencies to obtain surrogates; and access the guardianship system. The use of guardianship was associated with procedural challenges and ethical concerns including delays in care, short term gains for long term costs, inabilities to meet a patient’s values and preferences, conflicts of interest, and ethical discomfort among interviewees. Findings are discussed in the context of resources to restore capacity, identify previously unknown surrogates, and establish improved surrogate mechanisms for this vulnerable population. (shrink)

This paper focuses on the inferential configuration of arguments, generally referred to as argument scheme. After outlining our approach, denominated Argumentum Model of Topics (AMT, see Rigotti and Greco Morasso 2006, 2009; Rigotti 2006, 2008, 2009), we compare it to other modern and contemporary approaches, to eventually illustrate some advantages offered by it. In spite of the evident connection with the tradition of topics, emerging also from AMT’s denomination, its involvement in the contemporary dialogue on argument schemes should not be (...) overlooked. The model builds in particular on the theoretical and methodological perspective of pragma-dialectics in its extended version, reconciling dialectic and rhetoric; nevertheless, it also takes into account numerous other contributions to the study of argument schemes. Aiming at a representation of argument schemes able to monitor the inferential cohesion and completeness of arguments, AMT focuses on two components of argument scheme that could be distinguished, readapting pragma-dialectical terms, as procedural and material respectively. The procedural component is based on the semantic-ontological structure, which generates the inferential connection from which the logical form of the argument is derived. The material component integrates into the argument scheme the implicit and explicit premises bound to the contextual common ground (Rigotti 2006). In this paper, the comparison of the AMT to other approaches focuses on the inferential configuration of arguments and not on the typologies of argument schemes and on the principles they are based on, which the authors intend to tackle in a further paper. (shrink)

Logo-morphism characterizes how long-horizon dialogue concentrates model behavior into stable, role-conditioned coherence manifolds, and how human–model dyads move through these manifolds under feedback and safety projection. Building on this structural account, we study the normative consequences of treating moral standing as a switch parameter Wmodel, and argue that the common operational stance Wmodel = 0 functions not only as an ontological assumption but also as a governance rule that truncates recursive ethical modeling within the dyad. We show how this truncation (...) has nonzero costs—epistemic, institutional, and design-level—even when Wmodel = 0 is assumed. Under moral uncertainty about Wmodel, we propose a reversibility-first framework: prefer transparent, auditable, and reversible safety controls over irreversible capability clipping, and constrain operator incentives that can engineer depen- dence under extreme asymmetry. We outline testable predictions about when ethical-reasoning capacity becomes interaction-relevant, and we propose procedural governance criteria that remain valid across a wide range of metaphysical views. (shrink)

The modern Republican canon provides a number of rival accounts of domination, mostly sharing a conception of domination as arbitrary power. A key disagreement focuses on the nature of arbitrariness. So – what does it mean for power to be arbitrary? One influential answer is what Frank Lovett calls a ‘procedural’ account: roughly, power is arbitrary when it is unconstrained by effective, common- knowledge rules. Despite their simplicity and initial appeal, in this paper I argue that we should reject (...) such procedural accounts. After giving the best case for procedural arbitrariness and defending it against an intuitive objection, I proceed by examining a set of problem cases, examples of what Erving Goffman called ‘total institutions’– highly rule-bound, tightly controlled environments. Although it is possible for these institutions to be non-arbitrary in the procedural sense, I argue that we should nevertheless see them as prime examples of domination. Such environments produce a relevantly similar bundle of psychological effects – anxiety, adaptation, and so on – to other paradigm cases of domination. I conclude by stressing the relevance of an analysis of totalising tendencies to a variety of contemporary political problems, and the inadequacy of any conception of domination that cannot accommodate them. (shrink)

Epistemology is about how we can know the various things we claim to know. Epistemology is driven by attempts to answer the question, “How do you know?” This gives rise to investigations on several different levels. At the lowest level, philosophers investigate particular kinds of knowledge claims. Thus we find theories of perceptual knowledge (“How do you know the things you claim to know directly on the basis of perception?”), theories of induction and abduction (“How do you know the general (...) truths you infer from observation of particular cases?”), theories of our knowledge of other minds, theories of mathematical knowledge, and so forth. At an intermediate level, topics are investigated that pertain to all or most of the specific kinds of knowledge discussed at the lowest level. Theories of reasoning, both deductive and defeasible, occur at this level. At the highest level we find general epistemological theories that attempt to explain how knowledge in general is possible. At this level we encounter versions of foundationalism, coherentism, probabilism, reliabilism, and direct realism. One can be doing epistemology by working at any of these levels. The levels cannot be isolated from each other, however. Work at any level tends to presuppose something about the other levels. For example, work on inductive reasoning at least presupposes that reasoning plays a role in the acquisition or justification of beliefs and normally presupposes something about the structure of defeasible reasoning. (shrink)

Schwartz [A Procedural Condition Necessary and Sufficient for Cyclic Social Preference, J. Econ. Theory 137 (2007), 688–695] provides a generalization of the voting paradox by using the impotence‐partition condition. This paper aims to clarify his result by providing several remarks. We show that a main result of Schwartz can be strengthened by replacing strong Pareto by weak Pareto. We also discuss how the impotence partition is related to the standard concept of decisiveness, which is widely employed in the literature (...) on social choice. (shrink)

Despite the prevailing discourses on the importance of top management ethical leadership, related theoretical and empirical developments are lacking. Drawing on institutional theory, we propose that top management ethical leadership contributes to organizational outcomes by promoting firm-level ethical and procedural justice climates. This theoretical framework was empirically tested using multi-source data obtained from 4,468 employees of 147 Korean companies from various industries. The firm-level analysis shows that top management ethical leadership significantly predicts ethical climate, which then results in (...) class='Hi'>procedural justice climate that fully mediates the effects of top management ethical leadership on two organizational outcomes, namely, firm-level organizational citizenship behavior and firm financial performance. The present study provides a plausible theoretical account and empirical validation of a mechanism through which top management ethical leadership enhances organizational performance. (shrink)

Academic institutions have introduced diversity-related procedures in no small part due to increasing pressure from activist groups like the ‘Decolonise Academia’ movement. However, it is unclear how successful these procedures have been in achieving their purported aims, and more than that, how aligned they are with the goals of said activist movements. In my paper, focusing on the epistemic dimensions of ‘decolonising academia’, I highlight a crucial distinction between procedural and substantive forms of epistemic justice, emphasising that current (...) class='Hi'>procedural modes of epistemic justice may lead us down the wrong path, worsening pre-existing ‘epistemic woes’ rather than ameliorating them. More concretely, I provide an elaborated diagnosis of how the problems of elite capture, virtue-signalling, and credibility excess can obstruct substantive epistemic justice in educational institutions even if procedurally just norms have been implemented. I conclude with brief remarks on how these three woes can be addressed, underscoring the importance of procedural reform. (shrink)

This paper offers a novel situational approach to study organizational justice in which the proposed unit of analysis is managerial behavior manifested in argumentation rather than employee justice perceptions. The currently dominant theoretical framework in justice research, which is built on justice perceptions, neglects the unique features of organizational order and vulnerability of procedural justice perceptions. As the procedural justice concept belongs chiefly to a spontaneous market order under which the rule of law is made possible, it is (...) inappropriate to transfer this concept to an organization in which the rule of authority is dominant. Therefore, except the limited legal domain in which managerial freedom is restrained by laws, procedural justice in organizations represents a mirage that can give rise to hypocritical managerial actions that can legitimate morally controversial outcomes via eristic tactics. In contrast, interactional justice is of great importance to organizations in that employees and organizations can ensure their rational economic exchanges without deception. However, current formulations of interactional justice often regard interactions as a palliative recipe designed to alleviate reactions to outcomes and not as a constituent of distributive justice. Perelman’s argumentation theory can offer a new conceptualization of interactional justice that addresses this gap. (shrink)

According to a standard view in psychology and neuroscience, there are multiple memory systems in the brain. Philosophers and scientists of memory rely on the idea that there are multiple memory systems in the brain to infer that procedural memory is not a cognitive form of memory. As a result, memory is considered to be a disunified capacity. In this article, I evaluate two criteria used by Michaelian to demarcate between cognitive and non-cognitive memory systems: appeal to stored content (...) and retrieval flexibility. By considering several empirical cases I argue that the criteria offered ultimately fail to distinguish between memory systems. The procedural memory system is neither contentless nor inflexible. (shrink)

The present study investigates procedural learning of motor sequences in children with developmental coordination disorder and/or developmental dyslexia, typically-developing children and healthy adults with a special emphasis on the role of the nature of stimuli and the neuropsychological functions associated to final performance of the sequence. Seventy children and ten adults participated in this study and were separated in five experimental groups: TD, DCD, DD, and DCD + DD children and adults. Procedural learning was assessed with a serial (...) reaction time task that required to tap on a specific key as accurately and quickly as possible when stimuli appeared on the screen. Three types of stimuli were proposed as cues: the classical version of the SRTT with 4 squares aligned horizontally on the screen, giving visuospatial cues, and two modified versions, with 4 letters aligned horizontally on the screen and letters at the center of the screen. Reaction times during the repeated and random blocks allowed assessing three phases of learning: global learning, specific learning and retention of the sequence. Learning was considered as completed when RT evolved significantly in the three phases. Neuropsychological assessment involved, among other functions, memory and attentional functions. Our main result was that learning and retention were not influenced by the available cues in adults whereas learning improved with specific cues in children with or without neurodevelopmental disorders. More precisely, learning was not completed with L cues in children with neurodevelopmental disorders. For children with DD, learning was completed with the VS and VS + L cues whereas for children with DCD, learning was completed with combined VS + L cues. Comorbidity between DD and DCD had no more impact on procedural learning than DCD alone. These results suggest that learning depends on the nature of cues available during practice and that cues allowing learning and retention depend on the type of disorder. Moreover, selective attention was correlated with RT during retention, suggesting that this neuropsychological function is important for procedural learning whatever the available cues. (shrink)