Mark Siebel

The formal part of this chapter is concerned with measures of need-based justice. According to the measures we propose, a distribution is unjust (i) the more it deviates from absolute need satisfaction and equal degrees of need satisfaction, (ii) the more the given undersupply could have been mitigated by transfers, or (iii) the more resources are used for oversupply instead of need satisfaction. These measures are compared, i.e., as to the satisfaction of need-oriented relatives of axioms prominent in poverty measurement; and we have a critical eye on the proposals of Jasso and Miller. The empirical part reports on three vignette studies conducted to find out how people evaluate the justice of given distributions and how they distribute goods when aiming at justice. The main goal was to measure the significance ascribed to need. This significance was compared with the significance ascribed to effort or equality; and it was shown that a need’s influence decreases when the corresponding person is accountable for having a higher amount of it. In the third study, we found out that needs that are not directed at bare survival, such as the need for participation in social life, are attributed lower degrees of importance. The chapter concludes with some implications of our research for a theory of need-based justice.

Paradoxes evoke astonishment, confusion, and delight in the extraordinary. But that is not all: They point to fundamental problems of philosophy, mathematics, and the natural sciences. This volume presents a number of the most important paradoxes from an analytical-philosophical perspective. German abstract: Paradoxien rufen Staunen, Verwirrung und die Lust am Außergewöhnlichen hervor. Aber nicht nur das: Es sind Paradoxien, die bis heute auf Grundprobleme der Philosophie, der Mathematik sowie der Naturwissenschaften hinweisen und uns zu revolutionären Lösungsvorschlägen herausfordern. Einige Paradoxien markieren dabei vielleicht sogar unüberwindbare Grenzen unseres Wissens. Dieser Band stellt eine Reihe der wichtigsten Paradoxien – Paradoxien der Wahrheit, des Infiniten, der Bestätigung, der Vagheit, der Quantenmechanik, der Zeit, des Visuellen und des Auditiven – sowie Überlegungen zu allgemeinen Lösungswegen aus einer analytisch-philosophischen Perspektive vor. Dabei richtet er sich an interessierte Einsteiger in die Thematik, ohne den Gegenstand dabei zu sehr zu verkürzen.

Needs play a key role in many fields of social sciences and humanities, ranging from normative theories of distributive justice to conceptions of the welfare state. Over time, different conceptions of what counts as a need (i. e., what is considered a normatively relevant need) have been proposed. Many of them include (in one way or the other) needs for survival, decency, belonging, and autonomy. Little work has been done on how these kinds of needs are evaluated in terms of their significance for distributive justice. To begin closing this gap, we investigate the role of the four aforementioned kinds of needs for impartial observers. We do so in two empirical studies. The first study asks participants to evaluate the importance of each of the four kinds of needs separately. We find that different levels of importance are attributed to the kinds of needs, which places them in a hierarchy. The second study asks participants to make distributive decisions. Results further support the hierarchy found in the first study and, additionally, reveal that participants tend to make coherent allocation decisions.

Kant distinguishes concept negation from copula negation. While the latter results in a negative judgement, i.e. a judgement denying a property of certain objects, the former gives rise to a negative concept, such as ‘immortal’. Since Kant’s remarks on concept negation are scattered and inconclusive, five interpretations are worked out and put to the test: logical negation, pseudo-negation, attribution of a zero degree, possibility-restricted negation and genus-restricted negation. Whereas the first four interpretations fail for a number of reasons, genus-restricted negation turns out to be tenable.

Der zweite Band der Reihe Philosophische Forschung spannt zwei Kerngebiete der Analytischen Philosophie zusammen: die Semantik und die Ontologie. Was sind die Grundbausteine unserer Ontologie? Wie beziehen wir uns sprachlich bzw. geistig auf sie? Diese und weitere Fragen werden von international renommierten Philosophen aus historischer und systematischer Perspektivediskutiert. Die Beiträge sind in Deutsch und English verfasst. Sie stammen von Christian Beyer, Johannes Brandl, Dagfinn Føllesdal, Dorothea Frede, Rolf George, Gerd Graßhoff, Peter Hacker, Andreas Kemmerling, Edgar Morscher, Kevin Mulligan, Rolf Puster, Richard Schantz, Benjamin Schnieder, Oliver Scholz, Severin Schröder, Peter Simons, Thomas Spitzley, Markus Stepanians, Ralf Stoecker und Daniel von Wachter.

We report the results of a vignette study with an online sample of the German adult population in which we analyze the interplay between need, equity, and accountability in third-party distribution decisions. We asked participants to divide firewood between two hypothetical persons who either differ in their need for heat or in their productivity in terms of their ability to chop wood. The study systematically varies the persons’ accountability for their neediness as well as for their productivity. We find that participants distribute significantly fewer logs of wood to persons who are held accountable for their disadvantage. Independently of being held accountable or not, the needier person is partially compensated with a share of logs that exceeds her contribution, while the person who contributes less is given a share of logs smaller than her need share. Moreover, there is a domain effect in terms of participants being more sensitive to lower contributions than to greater need.

We report the results of a vignette experiment with a quota sample of the German population in which we analyze the interplay between need, equity, and accountability in third-party distributive decisions. We asked subjects to divide firewood between two hypothetical persons who either differ in their need for heat or in their productivity in terms of their ability to chop wood. The experiment systematically varies the persons’ accountability for their neediness as well as for their productivity. We find that subjects distribute significantly fewer logs of wood to persons who are held accountable for their disadvantage. Independently of being held accountable or not, the needier person is always compensated with a share of logs that exceeds her contribution, while the person who contributes less is punished in terms of receiving a share of logs smaller than her need share. Moreover, there is a domain effect in terms of subjects being more sensitive to lower contributions than to greater need.

In his table of judgements, Kant added infinity as a third quality. An infinite judgement ‘All S are non-P’ is said to differ from the affirmative ‘All S are P’ because it ascribes a negative predicate; and it differs from the negative ‘No S is P’ because it has a richer content. The present paper puts three interpretations of this surplus content to six tests. Among other things, it is examined whether these interpretations marry up with Kant’s solution to the first antinomy, his conception of analyticity and the principle of complete determination. The unpleasant conclusion is that none of the interpretations can make its mark as the most adequate one. It thus remains unclear what Kant had in mind when positioning infinite judgements besides affirmative and negative ones.

To remedy the lack of precision attached to the concept of coherence, a plethora of probabilistic measures has been developed. To broaden the perspective, we do not focus on the differences between these quantitative but the differences between qualitative approaches to coherence by comparing three probabilistic definitions for the relation denoted by ‘coheres with’. To reveal the different logics underlying these relations, we introduce a considerable number of formal properties and examine whether the given coherence relations possess them. Among these properties are not only the classics reflexivity, symmetry and transitivity, but also a variety of features that concern propositions containing negation, conjunction and disjunction, as well as features that concern inconsistency, entailment and equivalence.

Inhaltsverzeichnis/Table of Contents: Vorbemerkung/Preface. Dagfin FØLLESDAL: Bolzano's Legacy. Jan BERG: Bolzano, the Prescient Encyclopedist. Jan SEBESTIK: Bolzano, Exner and the Origins of Analytical Philosophy. Paul RUSNOCK: Bolzano and the Traditions of Analysis. Peter SIMONS: Bolzano on Collections. Ali BEHBOUD: Remarks on Bolzano's Collections. Mark SIEBEL: Variation, Derivability and Necessity. Edgar MORSCHER: Bolzano's Method of Variation: Three Puzzles. Rolf GEORGE: Bolzano's Programme andObjects. Mark TEXTOR: Bolzano's Sententialism. Wolfgang KÜNNE: Propositions in Bolzano and Frege. Michael DUMMETT: Comments on Wolfgang Künne's Paper. Carsten Uwe GIESKE: Bolzano's Notion of Testifying.

The debate on probabilistic measures of coherence has focused on evaluating sets of consistent propositions. In this paper we draw attention to the largely neglected question of whether such measures concur with intuitions on test cases involving inconsistent propositions and whether they satisfy general adequacy constraints on coherence and inconsistency. While it turns out that, for the vast majority of measures in their original shape, this question must be answered in the negative, we show that it is possible to adapt many of them in order to improve their performance.

Hommel et al. (2001) try to explain the emergence of distal representations by an evolutionary account which includes their theory of event coding. A closer look at the way the terms “distal representations” and “representations of events” are defined reveals, however, that their hypothesis of a common code for perceived and to-be-produced events is in fact superfluous. Moreover, it shows that they mix up empirical facts with conceptual/definitional facts in the second assumption of their explanation.

In the classic Linguistic Communication and Speech Acts,Kent Bach and Robert M. Harnish advocated the idea that to perform an illocutionary actoften just means to express certain attitudes. The underlying definition of attitudeexpression, however, gives rise to serious problems because it requires intentions of a peculiarkind. Recently, Wayne Davis has proposed a different analysis of attitude expression whichis not subject to these difficulties and thus promises a more plausible account of illocutions.It will be shown, however, that this account is too weak since it does not exclude cases wherethe utterer merely pretends to perform an illocutionary act. Davis' analysis also callsinto question a weaker doctrine widely held among speech act theorists by suggesting that, inorder to perform an illocutionary act, it is not even necessary to express mental states.

In the second volume of his Wissenschaftslehre from 1837, the Bohemian philosopher, theologian, and mathematician Bernard Bolzano introduced his concept of consequence, named derivability, together with a variety of theorems and further considerations. Derivability is an implication relation between sentences in themselves, which are not meant to be linguistic symbols but the contents of declarative sentences as well as of certain mental episodes. When Schmidt utters the sentence ‘Schnee ist weiß’, and Jones judges that snow is white, the sentence in itself expressed by Schmidt is the same as the one to which Jones agrees in thought. This sentence in itself is an abstract entity: in some sense, it exists; but it is unreal insofar as it lacks a position in space and time, does not stand in causal relationships, and is independent of the existence of thinking beings and languages.

In Bolzano's view, a proposition is necessarily true iff it is derivable from true propositions that include no intuition (Anschauung). This analysis is historically important because it displays close similarities to Quine's and Kripke's ideas. Its systematic significance, however, is reduced by the fact that derivability is defined with recourse to the method of variation, which we are allowed to apply even to propositions containing none of the respective variables. This liberality leads to the result that, according to Bolzano's analysis, every truth is necessarily true. Even by introducing his condition of relevance (shared variables), Bolzano cannot avoid that some propositions come out as necessarily true which are merely contingently true.

To have a propositional attitude, a thinker must possess the concepts included in its content. Surprisingly, this rather trivial principle refl ects badly on many theories of concept possession because, in its light, they seem to require too much. To solve this problem, I point out an ambiguity in attributions of the form 'S possesses the concept of Fs'. There is an undemanding sense which is involved in the given principle, whereas the theoretical claims concern a stronger sense which can be brought out by formulations such as 'S has an adequate conception of Fs' or 'S knows what Fs are'

Some philosophers, most notably Hempel and Salmon, have tried to reduce explanation to probability by proposing analyses of explanation in probabilistic terms. Hempel claims, roughly, that a hypothesis H explains a datum D if and only if the conditional probability P is close to 1. It is well known that such an account fails in cases where H is irrelevant for D. Even though it is highly likely that Tom will not become pregnant, given that he regularly takes his wife’s birth control pills, the latter does not explain the former. Neither does an idea work which is in the proximity of Salmon’s, namely, that H explains D if and only if P > P. Suppose Susan swallows a pound of arsenic in order to commit suicide. Shortly after, however, she dies because she is run over by a bus. The probability of dying, given that one ingests a pound of arsenic, is usually higher than the prior probability of dying. Nonetheless, it is not the arsenic but the collision with the bus which explains Susan’s death. The aforementioned objections are directed against …

Der zweite Band der Reihe Philosophische Forschung spannt zwei Kerngebiete der Analytischen Philosophie zusammen: die Semantik und die Ontologie. Was sind die Grundbausteine unserer Ontologie? Wie beziehen wir uns sprachlich bzw. geistig auf sie? Diese und weitere Fragen werden von international renommierten Philosophen aus historischer und systematischer Perspektive diskutiert. Die Beiträge sind in Deutsch und English verfasst. Sie stammen von Christian Beyer, Johannes Brandl, Dagfinn Føllesdal, Dorothea Frede, Rolf George, Gerd Graßhoff, Peter Hacker, Andreas Kemmerling, Edgar Morscher, Kevin Mulligan, Rolf Puster, Richard Schantz, Benjamin Schnieder, Oliver Scholz, Severin Schröder, Peter Simons, Thomas Spitzley, Markus Stepanians, Ralf Stoecker und Daniel von Wachter.