Frederick Kroon

This paper presents a theory and computational model of the role of emotions in group decision making. After reviewing the role of emotions in individual decision making, it describes social and psychological mechanisms by which emotional and other information is transmitted between individuals. The processes by which these mechanisms can contribute to group consensus are modeled computationally using a program, HOTCO 3, which has been used to simulate simple cases of emotion-based group decision making

Brentano famously changed his mind about intentionality between the 1874 and 1911 editions of Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint (PES). The 1911 edition repudiates the 1874 view that to think about something is to stand in a relation to something that is within in the mind, and holds instead that intentionality is only like a relation (it is ‘quasi-relational’). Despite this, Brentano still insists that mental activity involves ‘the reference to something as an object’, much as he did in the 1874 edition of PES. The question is what Brentano might have meant by this, given that he rejects a relational account of intentionality. The present paper suggests an answer. It draws on recent work on pretence theory to provide a model of Brentano’s notion of the quasi-relational nature of mental phenomena, as well as of the notion of mental reference to an object, and argues that the model helps to explain why Brentano might have been able discern a clear continuity between the views of the 1874 and 1911 editions of PES, despite the differences.

Using ideas proposed in Aboutness and developed in ‘If-thenism’, Stephen Yablo has tried to improve on classical if-thenism in mathematics, a view initially put forward by Bertrand Russell in his Principles of Mathematics. Yablo’s stated goal is to provide a reading of a sentence like ‘The number of planets is eight’ with a sort of content on which it fails to imply ‘Numbers exist’. After presenting Yablo’s framework, our paper raises a problem with his view that has gone virtually unnoticed in the literature. If we are right, then Yablo’s version of if-thenism cannot succeed.

This paper begins with a puzzle about certain temporal expressions: phrases like ‘Jones as he was ten years ago’ and ‘the Jones of ten years ago’. There are reasons to take these as substantival, to be interpreted as terms for temporal parts. But it seems that the same reifying strategy would also force us to countenance a host of less attractive posits, among them fictional counterparts of real things (to correspond to such phrases as ‘Garrison as he was in the movie JFK') and much more. I argue that there is a better way: we need only the idea of pretense or make‐believe to make sense of claims embedding such phrases, leaving us with no reason, so far, to accept an ontology of temporal parts.

Consider predicates like 'is a fictional character' and 'is a mythical object'. Since their ascription entails a corresponding Negative Existential claim, call these 'NE-characterizing predicates'. Objectualists such as Parsons, Sylvan, van Inwagen, and Zalta think that NE-characterizing properties are genuine properties of genuinely non-existent objects. But how, then, to make room for statements like 'Vulcan is a failed posit' and 'that little green man is a trick of the light'? The predicates involved seem equally NE-characterizing yet on the surface fail to mark a genuine property o f things. Instead, the truth of such predications strongly supervenes on types of referential failure. Kendall Walton's anti-objectualist account of talk about fiction provides a neat solution to this supervenience problem by invoking special games of make-believe. The present paper claims that while Walton's view thereby gains an important advantage over objectualism, the solution faces problems of its own. The rest of the paper desribes another solution, one that assigns a large role to the idea of metaphor.

God, by definition, is all-powerful, all-good, all-wise, and all-knowing. Therein lies a problem for the theist, of course, for every one of these attributes has been the subject of fierce debate. In this paper I want to return to the debate by introducing a new problem for the idea that anyone could have the kind of perfect knowledge God is supposed to have. What distinguishes my problem from others is that the sort of knowledge it focuses on is self-knowledge, hence knowledge of a particularly intimate kind. My claim is that God cannot have infallible knowledge of at least some of his own perfections, in particular his being all-wise or ideally rational. Such ignorance is not only inconsistent with the usual conception of God's omniscience, given that whatever knowledge God possesses is traditionally thought to be be a priori and infallible, but, more importantly, is inconsistent with the fundamental idea that God at least knows infallibly or incorrigibly that he has what it takes to be God: qualities such as omnibenevolence, omnipotence, and supreme wisdom. In short, my claim is that God must have a deep “blindspot” about his own nature, something which is inconsistent with a traditional picture of that nature.

Identity claims often look nonsensical because they apparently declare distinct things to be identical. I argue that this appearance is not just an artefact of grammar. We should be fictionalists about such claims, seeing them against the background of speakers' pretense that their words secure reference to a plurality of objects that are then declared to be identical from within the pretense. I argue that it is the resulting interpretative tension – arising from the fact that two things can never be identical – that allows us to understand the real point of such statements. This view also offers a new solution to Fege's puzzle of the informativeness of identity statements.

Let g E(m, n)=o mean that n is the Gödel-number of the shortest derivation from E of an equation of the form (m)=k. Hao Wang suggests that the condition for general recursiveness mn(g E(m, n)=o) can be proved constructively if one can find a speedfunction s s, with s(m) bounding the number of steps for getting a value of (m), such that mn s(m) s.t. g E(m, n)=o. This idea, he thinks, yields a constructivist notion of an effectively computable function, one that doesn't get us into a vicious circle since we intuitively know, to begin with, that certain proofs are constructive and certain functions effectively computable. This paper gives a broad possibility proof for the existence of such classes of effectively computable functions, with Wang's idea of effective computability generalized along a number of dimensions.

This paper deals with a philosophical question that arises within the theory of computational complexity: how to understand the notion of INTRINSIC complexity or difficulty, as opposed to notions of difficulty that depend on the particular computational model used. The paper uses ideas from Blum's abstract approach to complexity theory to develop an extensional approach to this question. Among other things, it shows how such an approach gives detailed confirmation of the view that subrecursive hierarchies tend to rank functions in terms of their intrinsic, and not just their model-dependent, difficulty, and it shows how the approach allows us to model the idea that intrinsic difficulty is a fuzzy concept.

In their recent ‘The ethical case for non-directed postmortem sperm donation’, Hodson and Parker outline and defend the concept of voluntary non-directed postmortem sperm donation, the idea that men should be able to register their desire to donate their sperm after death for use by strangers since this would offer a potential means of increasing the quantity and heterogeneity of donor sperm. In this response, we raise some concerns about their proposal, focusing in particular on the fact that current methodologies do not make for a reliable way of ensuring that sperm retrieved postmortem has a good chance of leading to conception, which is in turn likely to make potential recipients reluctant to use such sperm. These concerns add to the ethical doubts that attend aspects of the proposal, making the prospect of implementation of such a policy unlikely at best.