Beyond Impossibility

Modal Meinongianism is a form of Meinongianism whose main supporters are Graham Priest and Francesco Berto. The main idea of modal Meinongianism is to restrict the logical deviance of Meinongian non-existent objects to impossible worlds and thus prevent it from “contaminating” the actual world: the round square is round and not round, but not in the actual world, only in an impossible world. In the actual world, supposedly, no contradiction is true. I will show that Priest’s semantics, as originally formulated in Towards Non-being, tell us something different. According to certain models (especially models that are interesting from a Meinongian point of view), there are true contradictions in the actual world. Berto and Priest have noticed this unexpected consequence and have suggested a solution (I would like to thank an anonymous reviewer for pointing out to me the relevant footnotes in Priest and Berto’s work), but I will show that their solution is highly questionable. In the last section of this paper, I will introduce a new and simpler version of modal Meinongianism that avoids the problem.

A Puzzle for Readers of Arthur Danto’s Aesthetic Theory

Worlds, Possible and Impossible

Impossible worlds are regarded with understandable suspicion by most philosophers. Here we are concerned with a modal argument which might seem to show that acknowledging their existence, or more particularly, the existence of some hypothetical (we do not say "possible") world in which everything was the case, would have drastic effects, forcing us to conclude that everything is indeed the case--and not just in the hypothesized world in question. The argument is inspired by a metaphysical (rather than modal-logical) argument of Paul Kabay's which would have us accept this unpalatable conclusion, though its details bear a closer resemblance to a line of thought developed by Jc Beall, in response to which Graham Priest has made some philosophical moves which are echoed in our diagnosis of what goes wrong with the present modal argument. Logical points of some interest independent of the main issue arise along the way.

Noneism a is form of Meinongianism, proposed by Richard Routley and developed and improved by Graham Priest in his widely discussed book Towards Non-Being. Priest's noneism is based upon the double move of (a) building a worlds semantics including impossible worlds, besides possible ones, and (b) admitting a new comprehension principle for objects, differerent from the ones proposed in other kinds of neo-Meinongian theories, such as Parsons' and Zalta's. The new principle has no restrictions on the sets of properties that can deliver objects, but parameterizes the having of properties by objects to worlds. Modality is therefore explicitly built in - so the approach can be conveniently labeled as "modal noneism". In this paper, I put modal noneism to work by testing it against classical issues in modal logic and semantics. It turns out that - perhaps surprisingly - the theory (1) performs well in problems of transworld identity, which are frequently considered to be the difficult ones in the literature; (2) faces a limitation, albeit not a severe one, when one comes to transworld individuation, which is often taken (especially after Kripke's notorious 'stipulation' solution) as an easy issue, if not a pseudo-problem; and (3) may stumble upon a real trouble when dealing with what I shall call 'extensionally indiscernible entities' - particular nonexistent objects modal noneism is committed to.

After seven chapters of seeing how important proposed solutions to the paradoxes can go wrong, several important things learned along the way are pulled together to propose a positive alternative (rooted in a non-standard way of parsing disquotationalism about truth called Content Inheritance Disquotationalism) that retains the full resources of both classical logic and a fully transparent truth predicate. A wide range of possible objections are considered and resolved. The CID-based solution is compared to its paracomplete and paraconsistent rivals on a crucial standard emphasized by Graham Priest—the Principle of Uniform Solution. Finally, several loose ends are tied up through a survey of objections to classical logic rooted in quantum weirdness, borderline applications of vague terms, and Edwin Mares’s claim that predicates can be not only “underdefined” (leading to truth-value gaps) but “overdefined” (leading to truth-value gluts). Some of these, particularly concerns about vagueness, are difficult philosophical problems not resolved by anything said here, but none add up to a good reason to abandon classical logic.KeywordsDisquotationalismLiarsTruthInferentialismVaguenessQuantum

This paper will try to shed light on a very particular angle of Greek political geography after the end of the Asia Minor War. As a result of this conflict almost 1.3 million refugees fled to Greece and changed dramatically its political space. The traditional view among the scholars of the period promotes an “exceptionalism” of the Greek-Orthodox refugees who fled to Greece after 1922. It is argued that the Asia Minor workers did not largely espouse an a priori notion of class, since they had a bourgeoisie economic and social background. However, in the 1930s there was a sharp increase in the support of the Left. Accordingly, the Communist Party pulled 5.76% of the vote, which was the highest in the inter-war period. Although the percentage of the communist vote was not so high all over Greece, Communism had a real electorate appeal for urban refugees. This study will challenge the exceptionalist perspective and will investigate why the same people who voted for Liberals in the 1920s voted for Communists in the 1930s. It will also examine how the Greek political system managed to incorporate the left-wing vote by transforming the division of society from labour and political demands to national ones in the period under examination. The focus will be also on the interplay between Communism and refugees, which is undervalued by most research on the topic, even though the communist threat was used as a reason or pretext for the abolition of parliamentary democracy and the establishment of Ioannis Metaxas’ dictatorship in 1936.

Experts have long questioned the effect of currency undervaluation on overall GDP growth. They have viewed the underlying basis for this policy--intervention in currency markets to keep the price of the home currency cheap--as doomed to failure on both theoretical and empirical grounds. Moreover, the view has been that overvalued currencies hurt economic growth but undervalued currencies cannot help in growth acceleration. A parallel belief has been that the real exchange rate--that is, a country's competitive ranking--cannot be affected by merely changing the nominal exchange rate. This view is grounded in the belief, and expectation, that inflation follows any devaluation of currency. Hence, the conclusion that the real exchange rate cannot be affected by policy. However, given China's remarkable performance in recent decades, this traditional view is being reexamined. China devalued its currency by large amounts in the 1980s and early 1990s; instead of inflation, it achieved high growth. Today, there is near-universal demand for China to significantly revalue its currency. This book examines the veracity of various propositions relating to currency misalignments, and their effect on various items of policy interest. The author subjects more than a century of global exchange rate management and growth outcomes to rigorous empirical analysis and demonstrates convincingly that a country can systematically devalue and yet prosper. The analysis helps in interpreting several phenomena, especially for the last three decades, which have witnessed high economic growth in developing countries, a widening of global imbalances, and a sharp increase in reserve accumulation, particularly among high-growth Asian economies. The book shows that these events are strongly linked via a consistent policy of currency undervaluation in Asian economies.

Most explanations for the evolutionary maintenance of sex depend on the assumption that sex produces variation by recombining parental haplotypes in the offspring. Therefore, meiosis is expected to be useful only in heterozygotes. We tested this assumption by competing sexual strains of yeast against constitutive asexuals in a hot (37 degrees C) culture for 500 generations, in either heterozygous or homozygous genetic backgrounds. We found that there was an initial cost of sex for all the sexual strains, which was indicated by a sharp increase in the proportion of asexuals after the induction of sex. The cost was larger in the heterozygotes than in the homozygotes, probably because of recombinational load. However, in two of the three heterozygote backgrounds, after the initial success of the asexuals, the remaining sexuals eventually drove them out of the population. These two heterozygotes also suffered the largest initial cost of sex. In the other heterozygote and in the three homozygote backgrounds it appeared to be a matter of chance whether sexuals or asexuals won. The average relative fitness increased in all the strains, but the increase was largest in the two strains that showed both the clearest advantage and the largest cost of sex. We conclude that these results are consistent with the traditional view that sex has a short-term cost but a long-term benefit.

Hegel and analytic philosophy

This paper considers two philosophical problems and their relation to science education. The first involves the rationality of science; it is argued here that the traditional view, according to which science is rational because of its adherence to (a non-standard conception of) scientific method, successfully answers one central question concerning science's rationality. The second involves the aims of education; here it is argued that a fundamental educational aim is the fostering of rationality, or its educational cognate, critical thinking. The ramifications of these two philosophical theses for science education are then considered, and a science education which takes reasons in science as its fundamental feature is sketched.

The amount of information encoded by cortical circuits depends critically on the capacity of nearby neurons to exhibit trial-to-trial (noise) correlations in their responses. Depending on their sign and relationship to signal correlations, noise correlations can either increase or decrease the population code accuracy relative to uncorrelated neuronal firing. Whereas positive noise correlations have been extensively studied using experimental and theoretical tools, the functional role of negative correlations in cortical circuits has remained elusive. We addressed this issue by performing multiple-electrode recording in the superficial layers of the primary visual cortex (V1) of alert monkey. Despite the fact that positive noise correlations decayed exponentially with the difference in the orientation preference between cells, negative correlations were uniformly distributed across the population. Using a statistical model for Fisher Information estimation, we found that a mild increase in negative correlations causes a sharp increase in network accuracy even when mean correlations were held constant. To examine the variables controlling the strength of negative correlations, we implemented a recurrent spiking network model of V1. We found that increasing local inhibition and reducing excitation causes a decrease in the firing rates of neurons while increasing the negative noise correlations, which in turn increase the population signal-to-noise ratio and network accuracy. Altogether, these results contribute to our understanding of the neuronal mechanism involved in the generation of negative correlations and their beneficial impact on cortical circuit function.

Evolutionary biology, in the neo-Darwinian tradition, is based on the study of genetic and phenotypic variation and its fate in populations. Thus, the observation that the genetic variability of a trait is itself influenced by the genotype has obvious theoretical implications [49, 55]. It is in this context that the robustness of phenotypic traits was first conceptualized as canalization and became the focus of a significant research effort (reviewed in Scharloo [39]). With increasing awareness of the intricate molecular mechanisms maintaining the life of cells, the ubiquity of buffering and compensatory mechanisms came into focus [18, 37, 63]. Recent years have seen a confluence of the classical concept of canalization and new research in molecular biology that resulted in a sharp increase in the interest in canalization and related phenomena. One can speak of an emerging field of biological robustness research that is able to draw on a sophisticated arsenal of technical and theoretical tools that were developed over the last ten years [8].

Planter Persistence and Social Change: Alabama, 1850-1870 In terms of social mobility, the American South has been seen as a special case. The traditional view emphasizes the discontinuity between antebellum and postwar mobility patterns. Although there is no consensus among historians, the antebellum South is seen by many as a society with a relatively stable, persistent elite of slaveholding aristocrats; in the prevailing view, war and Reconstruction destroyed the elite, and brought about a sharp increase in upward mobility among urban businessmen between the end of the war and the turn of the cen-

Global imbalances and financial stability