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The possibility of considering the ethical domain as cognitive is a principal concern of contemporary moral philosophy. Following an analysis of Hilary Putnam's internal realism, I discuss how our usual conceptions of truth and factuality should be modified in order to render philosophical discourse free of the fact/value distinction. I then present a response to Gilbert Harman's argument for non-cognitivism in ethics and argue that, within an internal realism that incorporates such modified conceptions, the non-cognitive argument no longer carriers any weight.

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Studien undersökte hur realismen i vittnens konfidensbedömningar av sina identifikationsminnen påverkas av att vittnena diskuterar rapporterade signalementen med varandra innan de, var för sig, gör utpekanden i en vittneskonfrontation. Deltagarna fick se en filmatisering av ett fingerat bilinbrott och därefter avge ett skriftligt signalement. Hälften av deltagarna (n=32) fick sedan diskutera sig fram till ett gemensamt signalement (parvillkor) medan andra hälften (n=32) fick avge ett muntligt signalement (individvillkor). Därefter fick deltagarna individuellt göra utpekanden i en sekventiell bildkonfrontation och göra konfidensbedömningar. Realismen i konfidensbedömningarna beräknades enligt kalibreringsmetodik och resultaten för de båda villkoren jämfördes med t-tester. Vi fann att realismen för parvillkoret var signifikant bättre än för individvillkoret för måttet kalibrering. Vi fann också att konfidensen i parvillkoret var signifikant högre i de fall de avgett samma svar än i de fall de avgett olika svar. Olika möjliga förklaringar till resultaten presenterades.

Within linguistics, the dominant truth-conditional approach to semantics belongs to the Tarskian, model-theoretic tradition. Theories in this tradition offer an abstract, mathematical description of the truth conditions of natural language expressions in terms of their correspondence with the world. This thesis takes issue with existing modeltheoretic accounts of quantification on the basis that the specific abstract relations that they describe could not plausibly be models of natural language-to-world relations. Recent decades have seenmuch philosophical interest in naturalistic theories of reference and mental content. In one sense, these theories address the above concern by trying to identify something naturalistic for semantic correspondence to consist in, such as causalhistorical chains or ceteris paribus laws. In another sense, they fail to address the problem, since no account is given of either the semantic structure or the truth conditions of even the tiniest fragment of a natural language. Crucially, it is far from clear that modeltheoretic semantics, in anything like its present form, can accommodate the solutions proposed by naturalistic theories of content. If correspondence truth and naturalism are both to be retained, a new theory is needed. I begin by arguing that the class nominalism underlying model-theoretic semantics is unsuited to this naturalistic project, and propose that a variant of Armstrong’s realist metaphysic, incorporating Donald Baxter’s theory of aspects, provides the ideal ontology. I revise and extend Baxter’s theory for a more complete and precise account of the instantiation of properties and relations, and show that the theory of aspects allows for an appealing treatment of both numbers and general facts. Against the background of this realist metaphysic, and drawing on insights from naturalistic theories of mental content, I propose an original theory of mentally represented semantic structures and their truth-conditional analysis. Within this framework, I treat the core semantic phenomena of predication, negation, conjunction, and disjunction, and devote considerable attention to relations. I also develop a detailed theory of quantification, which includes a fully naturalistic account of both universal quantification and numerals.

Creative Portion abstract (75%): Literary Fiction Manuscript Souvenirs of the Revolution Against the backdrop of the Mexican Revolution of 1910, betrayal, sexual deviance, rigid morality and a fatal subservience to moral correctness drives the Montelejos clan: complex and self-serving, innocent and deluded, larger than life, an illustrious family line in its final decline. Mariabella Montelejos, who tries to sell her only daughter for the price of a new carriage during the bloodiest part of the Revolution. Her daughter, Portensia Montelejos, who leaves her mother’s body to moulder in the front room after soldiers come at the point of a gun. Gloria Vasquez, celebrated beauty, practising witch, and tormentor of her step-sister, Teresa: ill, gullible, naive, awoken to her destiny by the surreal birth of her daughter. Paulina, a child who once communed with the holy, made an empty vessel by the abuse of her father – and revered as a living saint as she lies dying in a Pueblano convent. The men of the family, weak and susceptible to the mandates of their dying class, are no match for the machinations of such women. Evil abuser Ebner Collins, paralyzed by a jealous man’s bullet in the middle of the Sinai desert. Hernando Vasquez, cowed into marriage by the longing for his dead wife, Evelyn Cuthbert. Guiermo Fuentes de Solis, cuckolded husband. Jaime Vasquez, who hears voices and lives at the bottom of a bottle, unable to save his cousin Paulina. The Revolution is the beginning of the end for Montelejos, and the miraculous will be its undoing. Analytical Portion abstract (25%): An Outsized Reality: How “Magical Realism” Hijacked Modern Latin American Literature With the publication of Gabriel García Márquez’s Cien Anos de Soledad in 1967, Latin American writing captured the world’s attention. Critics, readers, and imitators rushed to discuss and emulate this astounding novel. A whole genre of literature, “magical realism”, was popularized, and with it, critical discussion of its influences, history, genre limitations, and the sheer “imagination” it brought to the forefront of literary debate. In this thesis I will discuss the problems associated with “Western” critical analysis of Latin American writing, specifically as it seeks to define, without a proper context, the literature which draws life from the history and culture of Latin America and categorizes its literature without the cultural understanding required.

This thesis defends the Quine-Putnam indispensability argument for mathematical realism and introduces a new indispensability argument for a substantial conception of truth. Chapters 1 and 2 formulate the main components of the Quine-Putnam argument, namely that virtually all scientific laws quantify over mathematical entities and thus logically presuppose the existence thereof. Chapter 2 contains a detailed discussion of the logical structure of some scientific theories that incorporate or apply mathematics. Chapter 3 then reconstructs the central assumptions of Quine's argument, concluding (provocatively) that "science entails platonism". Chapter 4 contains a brief discussion of some major theories of truth, including deflationary views (redundancy, disquotation). Chapter 5 introduces a new argument against such deflationary views, based on certain logical properties of truth theories. Chapter 6 contains a further discussion of mathematical truth. In particular, non-standard conceptions of mathematical truth such as "if-thenism" and "hermeneuticism". Chapter 7 introduces the programmes of reconstrual and reconstruction proposed by recent nominalism. Chapters 8 discusses modal nominalism, concluding that modalism is implausible as an interpretation of mathematics (if taken seriously, it suffers from exactly those epistemological problems allegedly suffered by realism). Chapter 9 discusses Field's deflationism, whose central motivating idea is that mathematics is (pace Quine and Putnam) dispensable in applications. This turns on a conservativeness claim which, as Shapiro pointed out in 1983, must be incorrect (using Godel's Theorems). I conclude in Chapter 10 that nominalistic views of mathematics and deflationist views of truth are both inadequate to the overall explanatory needs of science.

This thesis, presented as a theoretical contribution to the discipline of International Relations, describes the intellectual origins of the idea of the territorial state. The idea of the territorial state has a privileged place in International Relations for it is an integral element of Realism, the discipline's dominant intellectual tradition. Realism assumes that the primary actors in the modern international system are states, as identified by their exercise of sovereignty over a delimited space or territory. In Realist history, the territorial state and the modern territorial international order emerged together, twin products of seventeenth century political theory and practice, as signified by political settlement of the Peace of Westphalia in 1648. This thesis challenges the Realist narrative of the idea of the territorial state on two counts: methodologically and historically. First, it rejects the view that it is possible to account for the idea of the territorial state exclusively in terms of political practice and knowledge. It argues that the Realist idea of the territorial state needs to be understood as one expression of a much broader and more complex matrix of narratives - social, political, philosophical and cultural - about man's capacity to know, represent and order the spaces of modernity. Second, the thesis rejects the Realist history that dates the emergence of the territorial state to the seventeenth century. An alternative chronology is put forward that dates the origins of the idea of the territorial state to fifteenth and sixteenth century Renaissance Italy. The thesis argues that the first signs of the idea of the territorial state can be identified in various Renaissance spatial discourses: political, cosmological, artistic and cartographic. These spatial discourses and the practices they led to established the templates for thinking about and representing space in modernity, including those underlying the articulation of the idea of the modern territorial state.

One of the most immediately compelling arguments against the disjunctivist position within the philosophy of perception points to the well-accepted fact that hallucinations can have the same neural cause as veridical perceptions; this is known as the causal argument. Since the main motivation for disjunctivism is to preserve naive realism, critics claim that naive realism is then incompatible with certain, well-accepted claims of neuropsychology, and, thus, disjunctivism is false. After surveying the general arguments for disjunctivism offered by Hinton, Snowden, and Martin, the causal argument is split into a stronger version and a weaker version. The strong argument relies on a narrow conception of the ‘same cause, same effect’ principle and this narrow conception is extremely controversial, ultimately entailing that mental events supervene only on the total brain state of an individual. The weak argument, which embraces a wider conception of the ‘same cause, same effect’ principle finds the disjunctivist position explanatorily redundant. The two major camps within disjunctivism, positive disjunctivism and negative disjunctivism, offer different approaches to the weak argument, and what emerges from the discussion of these two theories is that negative disjunctivism has a major dialectical advantage against positive disjunctivism, and that negative disjunctivism offers a satisfying response to the weak causal argument. M. G. F. Martin offers an insightful analysis of ‘indistinguishability’ and in doing so clarifies the disjunctivist thesis, sets limits to our understanding of our own mental states, and places the burden with the common-kind theorist.