Pure Cognitivism and Beyond

Non-cognitivism and Inconsistency

Wittgenstein's 'Non-Cognitivism' - Explained and Vindicated

The later Wittgenstein advanced a revolutionary but puzzling conception of how philosophy ought to be practised: Philosophical problems are not to be coped with by establishing substantive claims or devising explanations or theories. Instead, philosophical questions ought to be treated ‘like an illness’. Even though this ‘non-cognitivism’ about philosophy has become a focus of debate, the speci...

Cognitivism in Political Philosophy

A constraint on political cognitivism is that it give some basis for responding to certain worries. These worries prompt political liberals such as Rawls to deny that the search for truth can provide a shared basis for a conception of justice in a pluralistic democratic society.2 On this view, a pluralistic democratic state that avoids the authoritarian use of state power should be neutral abou...

Stimulus-specific adaptation beyond pure tones.

Detecting rare and surprising events is a useful strategy for sensory -systems. In the human auditory system, deviance detection is indexed by an important component of the auditory event-related potentials, the mismatch negativity (MMN). Responses of single neurons in the inferior colliculus, medial geniculate body, and auditory cortex of mammals (cats, rats, and mice) show responses that shar...

Beyond Numerics: the Existence of Pure Filtrations

A recent result of Boij-Söderberg and Eisenbud-Schreyer proves that the Betti diagram of any graded module decomposes as a positive rational linear combination of pure diagrams. We consider the follow-up question of whether this numerical decomposition ever corresponds to an actual filtration of the minimal free resolution itself. Our main result is an affirmative answer to this question in man...