Daniel Bonevac

Prima facie obligation

This paper presents a nonmonotonic deontic logic based on commonsense entailment. It establishes criteria a successful account of obligation should satisfy, and develops a theory that satisfies them. The theory includes two conditional notions of prima facie obligation. One is constitutive; the other is epistemic, and follows nonmonotonically from the constitutive notion. The paper defines unconditional notions of prima facie obligation in terms of the conditional notions.

Free Choice Permission is Strong Permission

Free choice permission, a crucial test case concerning the semantics/ pragmatics boundary, usually receives a pragmatic treatment. But its pragmatic features follow from its semantics. We observe that free choice inferences are defeasible, and defend a semantics of free choice permission as strong permission expressed in terms of a modal conditional in a nonmonotonic logic.

A Systematic Review of Literature About the Genetic Testing of Adolescents

PURPOSE Mapping of the human genome raises interest in and concern about the genetic testing of adolescents. Our purpose was to determine the attitudes and knowledge adolescents and their parents have about genetic testing. DESIGN AND METHOD This paper is a report of a systematic review of the research literature (n = 56) about the attitudes and knowledge adolescents and their parents have about genetic testing. RESULTS The majority of studies, which were descriptive in design, focused on a specific heritable disorder, were conducted in the United States, and over-sampled well-educated White females. PRACTICE IMPLICATIONS Results suggest that adolescents and their families have relatively positive attitudes about genetic testing and may experience both harms and benefits from testing. Nurses may be in positions to assist adolescents and their families in making decisions about genetic testing, remaining sensitive to family dynamics and issues of privacy and autonomy.

Systematic Review of Psychosocial Benefits and Harms of Genetic Testing

Genetic testing can help individuals and families by giving them a sense of control over their futures; however, results of some types of testing cause individuals and their families great distress and anxiety. The purpose of this paper is to report findings from a systematic review of literature about perceived benefits and harms associated with genetic testing. A second purpose was to determine if perceived benefits and harms varied by age and gender. We reviewed a sample of 30 articles published between 1997 and 2009. Most of the articles were other literature reviews. We summarized the benefits and harms associated with each type of genetic testing and made recommendations for future study. As technologies increase, genetic testing will expand and psychiatric mental health nurses must be prepared to meet the challenges of psychosocial disorders that may develop in response to genetic testing.

Pragma-dialectics and Beyond

Pragma-dialectics is dynamic, context-sensitive, and multi-agent; it promises theories of fallacy and argumentative structure. But pragma-dialectic theory and practice are not yet fully in harmony. Key definitions of the theory fall short of explicating the analyses that pragma-dialecticians actually do. Many discussions involve more than two participants with different and mutually incompatible standpoints. Success in such a discussion may be more than success against each opponent. Pragma-dialectics does well at analyzing arguments advanced by one party, directed at another party; it does much less well at analyzing arguments directed at several opponents at once or at convincing an audience. I suggest a strategy of construing fallacies as defeasible arguments relying on reasonable default principles but applying them in circumstances in which they are undercut or overridden.

Against Conditional Obligation

Lennart Aqvist (1984) explains why most contemporary deontic logics use a primitive binary conditional obligation operator. He then points to an account of prima facie obligation as the primary outstanding problem facing these logics. Solving that problem, I hope to show, also solves the puzzles that motivated such theories in the first place. The crucial feature of obligation sentences to which the puzzles point is that such sentences, and evaluative sentences more generally, are defeasible. They may be warranted, given some information, only to be defeated by further information. A theory that recognizes this no longer needs to see conditional obligation as anything more than a simple combination of unary obligation and the conditional. My title may thus be overly provocative. I do not mean to deny that some obligations hold only if some condition is fulfilled. Nor do I mean to deny that sentences Kant would have called hypothetical imperatives, such as If you like Mexican food, you should try Jorges, express such obligations. Finally, I do not mean to deny that there is anything wrong with the common strategy of using a primitive conditional obligation operator such as O(qlp) in a logical or philosophical theory of deontic concepts. It usefully avoids commitments about the relative roles of obligation and the conditional. What I do want to attack is the idea that a theory with a primitive conditional obligation operator-a binary theory, as I shall call it-can be afinal logical or philosophical theory about deontic concepts. At the very least, a theorist using a conditional obligation operator owes us an explanation of how the semantics of the operator depends on the semantics for obligation and the conditional simpliciter. Sentences expressing conditional obligations are intelligible to anyone understanding should (or ought to) and if. The combination of these words is no idiom. The meanings of such sentences, therefore, should be explicable in terms

Common Sense Obligation

To attack the sophists’ conception of weakness of will, Aristotle cites Sophocles’ (Aristotle, 335B.C., Philoctetes VII, 2, 1146a19). Philoctetes had wandered into a forbidden garden, through no fault of his own, and had been punished by the gods with a disfiguring disease. Banishing him to a remote island, they had taken everything from him but his bow. As the play opens, the gods reveal to Odysseus that only that bow can win the Trojan War. So, Odysseus orders Neoptolemus to trick Philoctetes out of his bow.

Semantics for clausally complemented verbs

A wide variety of English verbs accept clausal complements. Some believe, know, promise, cause, mean and prove, for example have aroused great philosophical interest. Others such as persuade, mumble, suggest and ask seem more prosaic. But surely one cannot rest content with a semantics for philosophically exciting verbs that fails to harmonize with an adequate account of their duller cousins. In this paper, therefore, I shall examine a very large group of English verbs and attempt to outline a semantics for them all. My analysis rests on three assumptions which I cannot defend in any detail here. First, I assume that (Chomsky, 1982) is correct that the immense syntactic complexity of clausal complementation is largely irrelevant to semantics. I thus assume the sentences in each of the following sets to coincide in truth-conditions:

Quantity and Quantification

Substitutional interpretations of the quantifiers have succeeded in dealing with finite and even countably infinite domains, but meet their nemeses in nondenumerable universes. Any theory requiring such a universe-set theory, for example-has thus remained immune to substitutional interpretation. The author argues that a slight revision of substitutional semantics enables it to handle domains of any cardinality. He alters the standard valuation recursion by incorporating extensions of substitutional models. He then uses variants of the Koening and Richard paradoxes to show that, though each parametric extension of the language may have only countably many parameters, there are uncountable many distinct parametric extensions. The author concludes by pointing out several other advantages of his new semantics.

Systems of Substitutional Semantics

I investigate substitutional interpretations of quantifiers that count existential sentences true just in case they have true instances in a parametric extension of the language. I devise a semantics meeting four criteria: (1) it accounts adequately for natural language quantification; (2) it provides an account of justification in abstract sciences; (3) it constitutes a continuous semantics for natural and formal languages; and (4) it is purely substitutional, containing no appeal to referential interpretations. The prospects for a purely substitutional theory of quantification are thus no worse than for a referential account.