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Humor (88:1 January 2005)<br><br>
Deadline for submissions: January 31, 2004. <br>
Advisory Editor: Laurence Goldstein (Hong Kong University)
<laurence@hkusua.hku.hk><br><br>
‘An unarmed man has been shot dead by police in London for the second
time this week.' Interesting. Both Russellians, who give a
quantificational analysis of sentences containing indefinite
descriptions, and anti-Russellians, who say that such descriptions
typically pick out an individual, seem to be wrong about the indefinite
description occurring in the quoted sentence. And talking of the police,
I got knocked down by a bus the other day, and there I was, lying injured
in the road, when a policeman came up to me and said, ‘Let me have your
name, sir, and I'll inform your relatives.' I said ‘But my relatives
already know my name.' Here the policeman's utterance invites
misinterpretation, yet it does not contain any ambiguous expressions. The
policeman was optimistically relying on my having mastered those
principles of interpretation, on which all competent speakers depend,
which would have delivered his intended meaning. The theoretical
challenge is to identify those principles. Nonsense and absurdity are
frequently amusing, and a certain kind of nonsense springs from
conceptual (‘grammatical') error of just the sort that philosophy aims to
expose. Wittgenstein went so far as to identify the depth of philosophy
with the depth of a grammatical joke (Philosophical Investigations, 111).
He himself made much of utterances such as ‘It is raining and I don t
believe it' (op. cit., p. 192), and ‘I know that I am in pain' - which,
he held, can't be said, except perhaps as a joke (op. cit., 246). But
Wittgenstein aside, there has until now been little investigation of
humor as a stimulus to philosophy, and little investigation of the forms
and varieties of humor and of how these relate to the forms and varieties
of language-use in general. <br>
Contributors will include Kent Bach, Noel Carroll, Ernie
Lepore.<br><br>
<br>
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Conformism (88:2 April 2005)<br><br>
Deadline for submissions: April 30, 2004 <br>
Advisory Editor: Francisco Gil-White (University of
Pennsylvania) <fjgil@psych.upenn.edu><br><br>
This issue of The Monist is devoted to the phenomenon of conformism. It
will focus especially on the effects of conformism on social processes,
which have been brought to light in recent years through game-theoretic
analyses (summarized in
<font color="#0000FF"><u>http://monist.buffalo.edu/conformism.htm)</u></fo=
nt>.
It matters little whether we drive on the right, or on the left, but it
matters greatly that we all drive on the same side. All sorts of social
interactions are likewise maximally beneficial when the players involved
share the same signaling system and expectations. Conformism allows us to
profit from the convergence upon solutions reached by those who have gone
before through trial-and-error learning, by allowing us to simply copy
their solutions. It allows us also to maximize the number of our
potential interactants by adopting the interactional norms that are most
common in the local population. Conformism is thus adaptive; it saves us
time in learning and it improves our chances of reproductive (and other
types of) success. But conformism also has its price: it will tend to
sustain even suboptimal patterns of behavior. <br>
Issues to be dealt with may include: How do conformist
processes help to determine social (including ethnic) boundaries and how
do they contribute to the associated phenomena of ethnic prejudice and
xenophobia? What is the role of conformism in our susceptibility to
propaganda? Can a better understanding of conformism lead to
institutional improvements in the organization of modern democratic
societies that may mitigate the negative effects of silent majorities
remaining quiescent in the face of political activity by
extremists?<br><br>
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Time Travel (88:3 July 2005)<br><br>
Deadline for Submissions: July 31, 2004 <br>
Advisory Editor: Achille Varzi (Columbia University)
<av72@columbia.edu><br><br>
Might we some day be in a position to move about in time, just as we can
already move about in space? Few would question that deliberate change in
temporal location is logically possible. But is it also metaphysically
possible? Is there a possible world in which one might freely change
one's location in time? Here is where puzzlement and bewilderment lead to
philosophical controversy. Someone traveling into the past could shoot
her grandfather's identical twin but not her own grandfather. Someone
traveling from the future could help you win your next game of poker, but
not the one you have just lost. To some philosophers asymmetries such as
these must be unacceptable, and so they conclude that time travel is
impossible, physically as well as metaphysically. To others the paradoxes
of time travel are only apparent. Time travel would be peculiar, to be
sure, but not absurd; it would be strange, but not impossible. <br>
Quarrels on these matters are gaining new interest today as
a result of recent work in cosmology and on the theory of causation. They
bear also on recent discussions of the problems of free will and personal
identity. The present number of The Monist aims to promote further
progress in this debate, with emphasis on questions such as the
following. Would travel to the past require reverse causation? Would
travel to the future entail determinism? Is the apparent asymmetry
between a fixed past and an open future merely an epistemic illusion?
Does the possibility of time travel entail a realist attitude toward past
and future facts? Does it entail commitment to entities that do not
presently exist? Does it entail that things may be wholly present in
several places at once?<br><br>
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<br><br>
Ordinary Objects (88:4 October 2005)<br><br>
Deadline for submissions: October 31, 2005 <br>
Advisory Editor: Laurie Paul
<lapaul@arizona.edu><br><br>
Ordinary objects such as apples, statues and cats can be understood
philosophically in different ways: as bundles of properties, as
Aristotelian substances, as substrates having attributes, or as hunks of
matter. There are familiar puzzles associated with each of these
alternative conceptions. Consider: Is my apple identical to the matter it
is made of? My apple could not, after all, survive being squashed, yet
its matter could. This difference in modal properties suggests that the
apple and its matter are not identical. Some have suggested that the
matter constitutes, but is not identical to, the apple. But what, then,
is the apple? If it is merely a bundle of properties, does it have all
its properties essentially? And if so, then how does this square with the
common-sense opinion that the apple could have had a slightly different
color or shape? And if the apple is a bundle of properties or a substrate
that has properties, then are these properties themselves universals, or
tropes, or something else? Perhaps we must find out what concept my apple
falls under before these questions can be answered. But would then our
concept of the apple determine what the apple is? Or would the apple
still exist independently of whatever concepts we apply to it? <br>
Papers are invited on the metaphysics of objects which
provide an analysis of what objects such as apples, statues and cats are
in a way which will yield solutions to problems of these sorts, including
problems concerning material constitution, the identity of
indiscernibles, essentialism, and the role of ordinary objects in
cognition.<br><br>
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For further details see:
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color="#0000FF"><u>http://monist.buffalo.edu/<br><br>
<br>
</a></font></u></html>
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