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Mathematical modeling of the electrocrystallization processes and its applications has long been a subject dear to Martin Fleischmann. The study of nucleation is fundamental to the understanding of crystallization. In the context of electrocrystallization, the terms can be applied to phase formation at preferred sites on the electrode surface and phase formation at surfaces without such sites. Two models of nucleation are presented: a heterogeneous model (nucleation on an indent); and a spherical-cap model representing homogeneous nucleation. The transients are recorded by applying a two-step potential profile to the working electrode. This procedure ensures the reduction of the initial falling background/charging current, so that the magnitude of this initial current cannot mask the very early stages of electrocrystallization. Martin sought to establish an approach to nucleation based on quantum electrodynamics.

This paper explores Spinoza's therapy of passions and method of salvation through knowledge and love of God. His optimism about this method is perplexing: it is not even clear how his God, who is unlike any traditional notion of divinity, can be loved. Sorting out Spinoza's view involves distinguishing an ethics of bondage from another of freedom, and two corresponding notions of love of God. The paper argues that the highest kind of love-'pure intellectual love of God'-should not be understood as an affect at all, but instead as unimpeded intellectual activity. This suggestion requires reconsidering Spinoza's account of cognition, particularly his use of the Cartesian notions of objective and formal reality which are not only central to his theory of ideas but constitute the foundations of his salvation project.

In his correspondence with Princess Elizabeth and Queen Christina, as well as in parts of the Passions of the Soul, Descartes provides the beginnings of a theory of ethics. Descartes argues that the supreme good, or the end that one ought to pursue in all of one’s actions, is virtue. The latter is understood by Descartes as a matter of using one’s absolutely free will as well as one can. In the paper we try to shed some light on what this Cartesian notion of virtue more specifically entails.

For many decades there has been an ongoing feud between the fields of behaviorism and cognitive science. This feud is not about specific scientific findings, it is about deep philosophical convictions, and about what terms and methods it makes sense to use when studying psychology. In the late 1950’s, behaviorism was declared dead when it was convincingly argued that behaviorism could not explain the nature of language, a centerpiece of human psychology. But since then behaviorism has slowly risen from its grave, as a new behaviorist theory of language emerged. The new behaviorist theory of language is called Relational Frame Theory (RFT), and it is part of a new behaviorist paradigm called Contextual Behavioral Science (CBS). This paradigm also includes a behaviorist psychotherapy called Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), which in the last decade has become popular across the world. Thus, the feud has once again become active, and the question about which philosophical principles are most suitable for the science of psychology is yet again something that needs an answer. But things have changed since the mid-1900’s when the discussion was last active. The philosophy of CBS is not exactly like that of earlier versions of behaviorism, having developed into a more explicit and coherent set of philosophical principles, summarized under the name functional contextualism. Old arguments against behaviorism do not apply to the same degree. So it is time for a new look at this debate, taking into consideration what functional contextualism and RFT has to offer.

According to Contextual behavioral science, cognitive science generally entails a commitment to the correspondence theory of truth, the idea that something is true if it corresponds with reality, or a worldly fact. CBS, on the other hand, makes an explicit commitment to a pragmatic theory of truth, which focuses on the consequences (i.e. usefulness) of a statement or theory, instead of its correspondence with reality. Because of the supposed centrality of these theories of truth for the divide between cognitive science and behaviorism, I will focus on what exactly this divide is about, and whether there is any way that the differences can be reconciled. I will argue that the divide isn’t as big as it may seem when we take a closer look at the philosophical principles and empirical theories of CBS, and that it may in fact be possible to bridge this divide by formulating a version of the correspondence theory that is compatible with CBS.

In part 1 I present a quick sketch of behaviorism as contrasted with cognitive science, and the connection between behaviorism and the pragmatic theory of truth, as well as the connection between cognitive science and the correspondence theory of truth. In part 2 I give a more detailed description of the philosophy and science of Contextual behavioral science, including the tools for understanding language in CBS terms. In part 3 I present a more detailed description of the correspondence theory of truth, giving an overview of the different versions of this theory that have been proposed throughout the history of philosophy. In part 4 I make a careful evaluation of the CBS objections towards the correspondence theory of truth, and arrive at a version of the correspondence theory that can be expressed in CBS terms. I will conclude that this version is compatible with the underlying philosophy of CBS, even though the CBS pragmatic theory of truth claims otherwise. I call it a behaviorist correspondence theory of truth.

The essay is an attempt to make sense of the apparently special relation between self-knowledge and agency. To achieve that goal, the essay translates the account of what it is like to be a human self offered by Sartre into the language of evolutionary psychology. In L’être et le néant, Sartre describes the phenomenology of the self as a series of inescapable choices in a contingent set of circumstances. This essay identifies Sartre’s description with what Baumeister, Maranges and Sjåstad call a matrix of maybe: the mechanism of nonfactual pragmatic prospection found in humans. Consequently, it defines the self as a matrix of maybe operating within a contingency matrix and reflecting on its own operation. Self-knowledge, the essay concludes, seems special because we routinely and erroneously ascribe to the self features of its contingency matrix. Most of our true first-person claims should not be read as I PREDICATE. Instead, they can be explicated as I have to act in a world where C PREDICATE, where C is the relevant part of the contingency matrix.

In this paper I examine how Merleau-Ponty develops Husserl’s genetic phenomenology through an elaboration of language, largely influenced by Saussure’s linguistics. Specifically, my focus will be on the unpublished notes to the course Sur le problème de la parole (On the Problem of Speech). I show how Merleau-Ponty recasts Husserl’s notion of the historicity of truth by means of an inquiry into the relation between truth and its linguistic expression. The account that Merleau-Ponty offers differs from Husserl’s in two important respects. Firstly, whereas Husserl describes a regressive inquiry of truth, Merleau-Ponty describes a regressive movement of truth, where every acquired truth seizes the tradition that precedes it. Secondly, this new notion of truth, and its dependency on its proper expression, opens up for a new understanding of literature.

In recent work, Bengson, Cuneo, and Shafer-Landau (2020) develop a new social version of moral intuitionism that promises to explain why our moral intuitions are trustworthy. In this paper, we raise several worries for their account and present some general challenges for the broader class of views we call Social Moral Intuitionism. We close by reflecting on Bengson, Cuneo, and Shafer-Landau's comparison between what they call the “perceptual practice” and the “moral intuition practice”, which we take to raise some difficult normative and meta-normative questions for theorists of all stripes.

In social-ecological systems (SES), where social and ecological processes are intertwined, phenomena are usually complex and involve multiple interdependent causes. Figuring out causal relationships is thus challenging but needed to better understand and then affect or manage such systems. One important and widely used tool to identify and communicate causal relationships is visualization. Here, we present several common visualization types: diagrams of objects and arrows, X-Y plots, and X-Y-Z plots, and discuss them in view of the particular challenges of visualizing causation in complex systems such as SES. We use a simple demonstration model to create and compare exemplary visualizations and add more elaborate examples from the literature. This highlights implicit strengths and limitations of widely used visualization types and facilitates adequate choices when visualizing causation in SES. Thereupon, we recommend further suitable ways to account for complex causation, such as figures with multiple panels, or merging different visualization types in one figure. This provides caveats against oversimplifications. Yet, any single figure can rarely capture all relevant causal relationships in an SES. We therefore need to focus on specific questions, phenomena, or subsystems, and often also on specific causes and effects that shall be visualized. Our recommendations allow for selecting and combining visualizations such that they complement each other, support comprehensive understanding, and do justice to the existing complexity in SES. This lets visualizations realize their potential and play an important role in identifying and communicating causation.

Models are widely used for investigating cause-effect relationships in complex systems. However, often different models yield diverging causal claims about specific phenomena. Therefore, critical reflection is needed on causal insights derived from modeling. As an example, we here compare ecological models dealing with the dynamics and collapse of cod in the Baltic Sea. The models addressed different specific questions, but also vary widely in system conceptualization and complexity. With each model, certain ecological factors and mechanisms were analyzed in detail, while others were included but remained unchanged, or were excluded. Model-based causal analyses of the same system are thus inherently constrained by diverse implicit assumptions about possible determinants of causation. In developing recommendations for human action, awareness is needed of this strong context dependence of causal claims, which is often not entirely clear. Model comparisons can be supplemented by integrating findings from multiple models and confronting models with multiple observed patterns.

Det moderna forskningsuniversitetet var tänkt att förkroppsliga och företräda förnuftets primat. Tanken var att universitetet, genom sin oberoende status, skulle bidra till samhällets välgång, genom att underkasta all kunskap rigoröst och förbehållslös granskning. Många oroas idag över hur politiska krav, kulturella strömningar, ideologiska motsättningar och ekonomiska krafter undan för undan har demonterat det sakliga argumentets primat vid våra lärosäten. Om inte ens universitetet kan förvalta det rationella tänkandets former och kunskapsalstrande praktiker, vart är då vetenskapen, och det samhälle den tjänar, på väg?

I denna uppsats förfäktas argumentet att den hårda press som universiteten idag onekligen utsätts för idag, och den kris det tycks befinna sig i, inte nödvändigtvis måste innebära förfall och förlust. Universitetets vitalitet och motståndskraft visar sig snarare i hur frågor om vad förnuftet kan och inte kan acceptera ständigt blir föremål för reflektion. Detta leder till framväxten av nya former av förnuftsbruk, vilket i sig är ett utövande av det rationella tänkandets förmåga att alstra ny kunskap och nya insikter. Vad vi ser är ett förnuft som mångfaldigas och upprättar kopplingar till hittills främmande delar av samhället. Det akademiska tänkandets rationalitet visar sig, så att säga, i att det ständigt finner nya former och uttryck – i att det modifierar sig i förhållande till nya former av interna och externa hot. Det är i denna aktivitet, när förnuftet mångfaldigas och samtidigt underkastar dessa nya uttryck kritik, som förnuftet uppvisar sitt sanna väsen; som något som inte kan naglas fast, utan som kommer till uttryck i försöken att skilja vad som är förnuftigt från vad som inte är det. Detta är en aktivitet som i allra högsta grad är levande inom dagens universitetsvärld, och som på många sätt intensifieras genom de olika samhällstendenser som inverkar på, och förändrar, universitetet.

In this paper I criticize James Conant’s account of the ”austere conception of nonsense”. 1) Conant tells us that no distinctions are made within nonsense, according to the “austere conception of nonsense”. I argue that this is not the case. 2) Conant claims that there can be no fixed answers to whether a remark is nonsensical or not. He also provides a list of remarks that must be understood as meaningful. 3) I argue that it follows from Conant’s account that the success of the philosophical project of the Tractatus depends on the reader undergoing a certain psychological process. It is however crucial for Wittgenstein, according to Conant, to follow Frege in the separation between philosophy and psychology.

In this paper, I identify an assumption at play in anti-semantic interpretative approaches to Frege: the notion that translatability to Frege’s concept script functions as a criterion for deciding whether a thought is expressed in a sentence or utterance. I question the viability of this assumption by pointing to Frege’s accounts of the aim and character of his logical language and scientific discourse more generally, and by looking at his remarks on poetic forms of language, literature and fiction (Dichtung). Since it seems clear that the sentences used in poetic and literary forms of language that Frege discusses, have Sinn and are possible to understand, in his view, I argue that the translatability criterion for thoughts is flawed. A discussion of Frege’s appeal to an approach of willingness to understand in a reader, and the relation between Frege’s use of elucidatory discourse and his conception of Dichtung is central to my exposition in this paper.

“Simple, forceful, strict” are the words Georg Henrik von Wright uses to describe Gottlob Frege’s style of writing (von Wright 1993, 60). He adds that it often contains an element of ice-cold irony, and this description seems to capture well the style that had such a great impact on Ludwig Wittgenstein’s sentences (cf. Wittgenstein 1981, § 712). In a later essay, von Wright (1994) borrows a distinction between two different human intellectual approaches from Friedrich Waismann (1940), and gives it a central role in an outline of the origin and development of analytic philosophy. The distinction is between a scientific approach that has the search for knowledge and true propositions as a primary guideline, and a philosophical approach that views clarity as the ultimate goal. Those guided by a philosophical approach seek to make clear what propositions mean. Characteristic of this approach is the conception that philosophy is distinct from science, as it neither is directed at the construction of theories, nor guided by a search for knowledge in the form of true proposition. The scientific approach, on the other hand, is characterized by a unified view of science according to which philosophy forms a part of it. Interaction and conflict between these two approaches characterize the development of analytic philosophy, according to the picture von Wright presents. Without hesitation, von Wright lets Bertrand Russell represent the first approach and G. E. Moore the second. Frege is spoken of much more cautiously. It is as if von Wright does not quite know what to say or where to place Frege with regard to the distinction between the two different intellectual approaches.

Drawing  has  been  seen  as  the  most  intellectual  in  character  among  the  forms of art, and croquis drawing has been taught within an academic and scientific framework, as theoretical knowledge about the human body was considered nec-essary to become a master of depiction. Knowledge of this kind may nevertheless become a hindrance when trying to capture the appearance of a model in a drawing: to be able to rely on eye and hand, suppressing knowledge may be required. I discuss this paradox with regard to croquis drawing and the conception of seeingin Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations

Teleosemantics is the view that mental content depends on etiological function. Moral adaptationism is the view that human morality is an evolved adaptation. Jointly, these two views offer new venues for naturalist metaethics. Several authors have seen, in the conjunction of these views, the promise of assigning naturalistically respectable descriptive content to moral judgments. One such author is Neil Sinclair, who has offered a blueprint for how to conduct teleosemantic metaethics with the help of moral adaptationism. In this paper, I argue that the prospects for assigning descriptive content to moral judgments on the basis of teleosemantics are bad. I develop my argument in dialogue with Sinclair’s paper and argue that, although Sinclair’s account of the evolution of morality is plausible, the teleosemantic account of the descriptive content of moral judgments which he bases thereon suffers from crucial shortcomings. I argue further that, given some minimal plausible assumptions about the evolution of morality made by Sinclair, no assignment of descriptive content is possible. Contrary to prevailing assumptions, the combination of moral adaptationism and teleosemantics suggests that moral judgments lack descriptive content.

This thesis offers a teleosemantic account of moral discourse and judgment. It develops a number of views about the function and content of moral judgments and the nature of moral discourse based on Ruth Millikan’s theory of intentional content and the functions of intentional attitudes.

Non-cognitivists in meta-ethics have argued that moral judgments are more akin to desires and other motivational attitudes than to descriptive beliefs. I argue that teleosemantics allows us to assign descriptive content to motivational attitudes and hence that even if the non-cognitivist is correct, moral judgments can be said to describe the world. Moreover, given further teleosemantic assumptions, this conclusion has consequences that are both surprising and interesting. First of all, while moral judgments have descriptive content, moral statements do not. The purpose of moral discourse is not to convey beliefs that are true simpliciter, but to convey attitudes that are descriptively correct when tokened by the addressee. Consequently, moral discourse requires speakers to adapt to hearers in order to secure their assent and bring them into "community of judgment" with themselves.

Secondly, the descriptive content of a motivational attitude is partly a matter of the subject’s own preferences and circumstances. In particular, the descriptive correctness of a moral judgment is partly a function of the degree to which it is shared with others. Since a moral judgment also motivates the subject to spread it, it has the ability to, in a certain sense, make itself true. If regular descriptive beliefs are supposed to adapt the subject to the world, a moral judgment also has the capacity to adapt the world to the subject.

According to internalism about rationality, the ir/rationality of a subject depends only on how things appear from her subjective perspective. According to culpabilism, rationality is a normative standard such that violations of rationality are (at least sometimes) blameworthy. According to a classical line of reasoning, culpabilism entails internalism. I argue that, to the contrary, culpabilism entails that internalism is false. The internalist cannot accommodate the possibility of culpable irrationality.

Teleosemantics has an indeterminacy problem. In an earlier publication, I argued that teleosemanticists may afford to be realists about indeterminacy, pointing to the phenomenon of vagueness as a case of really-existing semantic indeterminacy. Here, I continue that project by proposing two criteria of adequacy that a semantically indeterminate theory should meet: a criterion of theoretical adequacy and a criterion of extensional adequacy. I present reasons to think that indeterminate versions of teleosemantics can meet these criteria. I end by discussing vagueness, concluding that it most likely is not the same kind of phenomenon as the semantic indeterminacy afflicting teleosemantics.

Consider the opening sentence of Tolkien's The Hobbit: (1) In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. By writing this sentence, Tolkien is making a fictional statement. There are two influential views of the nature of such statements. On the pretense view, fictional discourse amounts to pretend assertions. Since the author is not really asserting, but merely pretending, a statement such as Tolkien's is devoid of illocutionary force altogether. By contrast, on the alternative make-believe view, fictional discourse prescribes that the reader make-believe the content of the statement. In this paper, we argue that neither of these views is satisfactory. They both fail to distinguish the linguistic act of creating the fiction, for instance Tolkien writing the sentence above, from the linguistic act of reciting it, such as reading The Hobbit out loud for your children. As an alternative to these views, we propose that the essential feature of the author's speech act is its productive character, that it makes some state of affairs obtain in the fiction. Tolkien's statement, we argue, has the illocutionary force of a declaration.

This paper examines Foucault’s attempt to displace the constitutive role of the subject of knowledge and to replace it with the concrete practices that constitute subjects. The prevalent tendency to transform discourse analysis into a new form of epistemology, here exemplified through the works of Paul Veyne, is criticized. It is suggested that Veyne’s reading of Foucault is subject to an illusion similar to what Kant once called “transcendental illusion,” and gives rise to a new form of metaphysics which repeats the problematic that Foucault originally aimed to overcome.

Modern philosophy is often seen as characterized by a shift of focus from the things themselves to our knowledge of them, i.e., by a turn to the subject and subjectivity. The philosophy of Immanuel Kant is seen as the site of the emergence of the idea of a subject that constitutes the object of knowledge, and thus plays a central role in this narrative. This study examines Kant’s theory of knowledge at the intersection between the history of science and the history of the modern subject, on the one hand, and in the tension between modern experimental and mathematical science and more traditional Aristotelian conceptions of epistemic perfection, on the other.

The dissertation consists of four chapters. In the first chapter, I examine Kant’s concept of experience, and its relation both to Early Modern experimentalism and to the Wolffian tradition. In the second chapter, I argue that Kant adheres to a broadly Aristotelian conception of epistemic perfection – the ideal of understanding – but transforms this ideal into the self-understanding of reason, where reason can only have insight into the products of its own activity. In the third chapter, I use Kant’s conception of space and time to exemplify such products of reason, and argue that, for Kant, space and time are constructively generated representations that function as principles for ordering empirical knowledge. In the fourth and final chapter, I examine Kant’s conception of the subject, and situate it in relation to both the long history of the modern subject and German Enlightenment philosophy. Whereas the modern philosophical conception of the subject is usually taken to combine an ‘I’ functioning as the subject to which mental acts are attributed and an ‘I’ that has the ability to immediately perceive itself as the subject of these acts, I argue that Kant reconceives this relation between the ‘I’ and its acts as a purely intellectual self-relation. The unity of the ‘I’ is not a perceived unity, but a unity brought about by the intellect.