Acta Philosophica Gothoburgensia

Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://gupea-staging.ub.gu.se/handle/2077/4561

Editors: Bengt Brülde, Anna-Sofia Maurin, Graham Leigh and Christian Munthe
ISSN 0283-2380
Published by the Department of Philosophy, Linguistics and Theory of Science of the University of Gothenburg

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Fixed IDs about Truth – Truth and Fixpoints over Intuitionistic Arithmetic
(Acta Universitatis Gothoburgensis, 2025-05-08) Granberg Olsson, Mattias
This dissertation concerns first-order theories of iterated positive truth and fixpoints over intuitionistic arithmetic in three respects: the strength of these theories relative to the arithmetic base theories, relationships between theories of positive fixpoints and compositional and disquotational truth for truth-positive sentences, and a comparison with the classical case. It is known that these theories over classical Peano arithmetic (PA) are mutually interpretable and exceeds the strength of PA. Over intuitionistic Heyting arithmetic (HA), on the other hand, finite iterations of strictly positive fixpoints have been shown to be conservative. After introducing the setting and presenting the earlier results, as well as the technical tools, the main section of the dissertation can be roughly divided into two parts. The first presents a novel proof of the conservativity result above. The proof interprets the theories into the logic of partial terms where a realizability interpretation is used to reduce the problem to fixpoints for almost negative operator forms. A diagonal argument using a hierarchy of almost negative formulae with corresponding partial satisfaction predicates yields the result. The second part generalises the tri-interpretation result from the second paragraph to intuitionistic theories, by proposing a new generalisation of positivity called guarded positivity with the aim to better capture the behaviour of intuitionistic implications and their interplay with transfinite iterations of truth and fixpoint predicates. As a corollary, these transfinite theories are stronger than HA. A discussion of the results and the methods used concludes the dissertation.
Fundamental Dynamicity – A Metaphysics of Time and Process
(Acta Universitatis Gothoburgensis, 2024-05-02) Zachrau, Maximilian
This book continues a long tradition in philosophy going back to the pre-Socratics, who made a rather simple observation that still holds true today: All things flow. We experience this flow, flux, in abundance: the seasons coming and going, the sun rising and setting, plants, trees, children growing, ageing, and in many other respects. However, we also experience things persisting. We meet people again, visit places twice, wear clothes again, or live in the same city all our lives. That things flow, that they persist, and how they do both has been a (persistent) puzzle throughout the history of philosophy. The proposed answers come in abundance, but two central ideas stand out. One is to explain flux by what persists. Namely, flux is explained by change, which typically is understood to be grounded in substances and their properties. Accordingly, this explanation of flux is called substance metaphysics. On the other hand, there is process philosophy, which emphasises the pervasive dynamic character of reality. According to this view, dynamic entities like processes should be the basis for our conceptualisation of the world, especially flux; it claims that dynamic processes are fundamental. Process philosophy, which gained significant traction in the latter half of the 20th century, offers a compelling perspective that integrates scientific findings and everyday experience. However, it raises several crucial questions: What are these fundamental processes? How can we metaphysically understand them? And most importantly, what is dynamicity and how can we distinguish dynamic entities from static ones? I propose and defend answers to these questions, which connect to the philosophy of time, another influential philosophical topic. I advocate a view that posits dynamicity as a forward-directedness, suggesting that dynamic entities are inherently oriented towards the future. While this commits the process philosopher to accept the reality, directedness, and dynamicity of time, I argue vice versa that dynamic time views, in turn, require fundamental processes. What results is dynamic metaphysics—a package deal of process philosophy and dynamic views on the nature of time.
”A social engineer or a parasite on society”: The moral responsibility of enabling (un)ethical business conduct
(Acta Universitatis Gothoburgensis, 2024-02-28) Elliott, Jasmine Christine
Relaxing Normativity: Essays on Relaxed Approaches to Realism about Normativity
(Acta Universitatis Gothoburgensis, 2023-12-14) Karimi, Paiman
Nonhuman Moral Agency: A Practice-Focused Exploration of Moral Agency in Nonhuman Animals and Artificial Intelligence
(2023-12-05) Behdadi, Dorna
Can nonhuman animals and artificial intelligence (AI) entities be attributed moral agency? The general assumption in the philosophical literature is that moral agency applies exclusively to humans since they alone possess free will or capacities required for deliberate reflection. Consequently, only humans have been taken to be eligible for ascriptions of moral responsibility in terms of, for instance, blame or praise, moral criticism, or attributions of vice and virtue. Animals and machines may cause harm, but they cannot be appropriately ascribed moral responsibility for their behavior. This thesis challenges the conventional paradigm by proposing an alternative approach where moral agency is conceived as the competence to participate in moral responsibility practices. By shifting focus from intra-individual to contextual and socially situated features, this practice-focused approach appears to make the attribution of moral agency to nonhuman animals and AI entities more plausible than commonly assumed. Moreover, considering the current and potential future prevalence of nonhuman animals and AI entities in everyday settings and social contexts, a potential extension of moral agency to such entities could very well transform our social, moral, and legal practices. Hence, this thesis proposes that the attribution or withholding of moral agency to different entities should be carefully evaluated, considering the potential normative implications.
Weapons of Mass Destruction: Financial Crises from a Philosophical Perspective
(2022-11-09) Endörfer, Richard
Financial crises are severely destructive events. The Global Financial Crisis of 2008 sent sovereign states into a spiral of political unrest and caused millions of people to lose their homes, their jobs, their life savings, their health, and in many cases even their lives. But financial crises are not unavoidable natural events. They are the consequences of intentional human behaviour. To be more precise, they are unfortunate side-effects of everyday financial practices. If these practices are not carefully monitored and reined in, they can, in words borrowed from Warren Buffet, become “weapons of mass destruction”. This thesis is an attempt at an interdisciplinary investigation of financial crises. It combines arguments from normative ethics, political philosophy, economics and law in order to discuss three questions at the heart of the public debate on financial crises: “Who is responsible for bringing about financial crises?”; “What precisely is wrong with practices that contribute to the risk of financial crises?”, and “What can be done to mitigate the risk of financial crises?”. A few key insights offered in this thesis are as follows: First, financial crises do not emerge because of the misbehaviour and greed of a few “bad apples”, rather, they are the result of “business as usual” within financial markets. Second, there are strong reasons for states to regulate financial markets heavily in order to prevent severe harm. Third, there are few good reasons to believe that consumers can be held morally responsible for contributing to financial crises.
Confluence and Divergence of Emancipatory Healthcare Ideals and Psychiatric Contextual Challenges
(Acta Universitatis Gothoburgensis, 2022-05-09) El-Alti, Leila
Person-centered care (PCC) is generally understood to involve shaping healthcare processes, decisions, and plans according to the individual values, preferences, or goals of each patient. This is in contrast to more traditional approaches which provide care to patients based on standard clinical guidelines. In healthcare and bioethical literature, PCC is often praised as an ideal approach of healthcare provision because it is thought to empower patients and improve their adherence, satisfaction, and overall health outcomes. However, the notion has been defined in different ways, and it is unclear how and whether it can be implemented in all healthcare settings. This dissertation aims to elucidate the concept of PCC and explore the implications of its intersection with psychiatry. The work contextualizes the concept within larger healthcare and social movements, and in that light, analyzes its values, decision-making process, and ambitions. The unique and complex challenges that psychiatric care settings engender are further used to examine how PCC commitments fare when faced with the limitations of mental illness and restrictive conditions of psychiatric facilities.
Giving Executives Their Due: Just Pay, Desert, and Equality
(Acta Universitatis Gothoburgensis, 2021-11-19) Andersson, Alexander
Before, during, and after the global financial crisis of 2008, executive pay practices were widely debated and criticized. Economists, philosophers, as well as the man on the street all seem to have strong feelings towards how much, in what ways, and on what grounds executives are paid. This thesis asks whether it is possible to morally justify current executive pay practices and, if so, on what grounds they are justified. It questions those who find no quarrel with pay practices due to their minimally moralized view of the market and – perhaps more importantly – it asks for a sophisticated critique from those who criticize current pay practices. The discussion on just pay is clearly one of distributive justice. One reason for why some people consider CEO pay practices to be (fairly) unproblematic while others find them objectionable stems from the availability of different understandings of, and principles for, just pay. We tend to associate justice in pay with such things as proper incentivization, being the outcome of a fair procedure, being deserved on the basis of effort or contribution, and/or satisfying the ideal of equality. Parts of this thesis are devoted to these different understandings and what they entail for the moral justification of CEO pay. Another reason for the conflicting views on CEO pay stems from how issues of justice go beyond the confines of economics and applied ethics, extending all the way into the domain of political philosophy. Parts of this thesis explore this connection, in particular how the concept of economic desert relates to the broader concept of moral desert. Lastly, I discuss the criticism that the superrich (including executives) are being paid too much and are in possession of too much wealth. The issue at hand here is how to morally justify the interventions that seem suitable to rectify the situation.
Explorations of the Relationship Between the right to Make Decisions and Moral Responsibility in Healthcare
(2020-11-18) Hartvigsson, Thomas
People intuitively think that there is a strong connection between having a right to make decisions and to be morally responsible for those decisions. This thesis explores the relationship between these notions in the context of healthcare. The exploration particularly focuses on what I call fringe decisional agents, e.g. adolescents and people who suffer from mental disorder, who have uncertain decision-making competence and exist at the intersection of different institutions. I argue that even though the two notions are strongly connected they can come apart. First, even though both notions are concerned with the moral status of a person there is a potential conflict between the appropriate responses to a person who has the right to decide and someone who is morally responsible. Second, even if conditions for having the right to decide and being morally responsible are very similar they can come apart. Moral responsibility requires that a person exercises a certain degree of control over their actions, a condition that has no clear equivalent for the right to decide. Furthermore, even though both have cognitive conditions, the condition for having the right to decide is directed towards information regarding oneself, whereas the condition for moral responsibility is primarily directed towards information about other people. Finally, if an agent is the concern of different institutions, these might have different conditions for assigning the relevant status and may furthermore do so at different times.
Disarming Context Dependence: A Formal Inquiry into Indexicalism and Truth-Conditional Pragmatics
(2019-08-30) Petersson, Stellan
Minds, Brains and Desert: On the relevance of neuroscience for retributive punishment
(2019-08-30) Stråge, Alva
It is a common idea, and an element in many legal systems, that people can deserve punishment when they commit criminal (or immoral) actions. A standard philosophical objection to this retributivist idea about punishment is that if human choices and actions are determined by previous events and the laws of nature, then we are not free in the sense required to be morally responsible for our actions, and therefore cannot deserve blame or punishment. It has recently been suggested that this argument can be backed up by neuroscience, since neuroscientific explanations of human behavior leave no room for non-determined free actions. In this thesis, an argument of this sort is discussed. According to this argument, that I call “the Revision Argument”, we should revise the legal system so that any retributivist justification of punishment is removed. I examine some objections to the Revision Argument according to which compatibilism about free will and responsibility is a morally acceptable basis of retributive punishment. I argue that these objections have difficulties in providing a plausible account of the relevant difference between people who deserve punishment for their actions and people who do not. Therefore, I argue that they fail to refute the conclusion of the Revision Argument.
Modal Empiricism Made Difficult: An Essay in the Meta-Epistemology of Modality
(Acta Universitatis Gothoburgensis, 2019-01-18) Sjölin Wirling, Ylwa
Philosophers have always taken an interest not only in what is actually the case, but in what is necessarily the case and what could possibly be the case. These are questions of modality. Epistemologists of modality enquire into how we can know what is necessary and what is possible. This dissertation concerns the meta-epistemology of modality. It engages with the rules that govern construction and evaluation of theories in the epistemology of mo¬dality, by using modal empiricism – a form of modal epistemology – as a running example. In particular, I investigate the assumption that it is important to be able to meet the integration challenge. Meeting the integration challenge is a source of serious difficulty for many approaches, but modal empiricism is supposed to do well in this respect. But I argue that once we have a better grasp of what the integration challenge is, it is not obvious that it presents no problem for modal empiricism. Moreover, even if modal empiricism could be said to be in a relatively good position with respect to integration, it comes at the cost of a forced choice between far-reaching partial modal scepticism and non-uniformism about the epistemology of modality. Non-uniformism is the view that more than one modal epistemology will be correct. While non-uniformism might not in itself be unpalatable, it must be defined and defended in a way which squares with the modal empiricist’s other commitment. I explore two ways of doing so, both involving a revised idea of the integration challenge and its role for the epistemology of modality. One involves a bifurcation of the integration challenge, and the other a restriction of the integration challenge’s relevance. Both ways are interesting, but neither is, as it turns out, a walk in the park.
Moral Disagreement and the Significance of Higher-Order Evidence
(Acta Universitatis Gothoburgensis, 2018-12-07) Tiozzo, Marco
Recent years have seen an increasing interest in the philosophy of disagreement, especially in epistemology where there is an intense debate over the epistemic significance of disagreement and higher-order evidence more generally. Considerations about disagreement also play an important role in metaethics – most prominently in various arguments that purport to establish moral skepticism. This thesis presents five papers that address moral disagreement and the significance of higher-order evidence. The first two papers develop a view about higher-order defeat that is used in the dissertation. The other three papers consider specific arguments from disagreement. The third paper argues that the Argument from Peer Disagreement fails to make a case for widespread moral skepticism; mainly because higher-order evidence only contingently leads to defeat. The fourth paper examines a recent attempt to epistemically account for faultless moral disagreement without giving up on moral realism. The paper argues that this attempt to accommodate faultless disagreement is unsatisfactory. The fifth paper develops a new argument against cognitivism: the Argument from Dogmatism. The argument holds that the conceivability of moral dogmatists, i.e., agents who stubbornly stick to their moral judgments in the face of putative counterevidence, gives us reason to think that moral judgments are not evidence-sensitive in the way beliefs are.
Self-similarity in the foundations
(Acta Universitatis Gothoburgensis, 2018-05-24) Kindvall Gorbow, Paul
This thesis concerns embeddings and self-embeddings of foundational structures in both set theory and category theory. The first part of the work on models of set theory consists in establishing a refined version of Friedman's theorem on the existence of embeddings between countable non-standard models of a fragment of ZF, and an analogue of a theorem of Gaifman to the effect that certain countable models of set theory can be elementarily end-extended to a model with many automorphisms whose sets of fixed points equal the original model. The second part of the work on set theory consists in combining these two results into a technical machinery, yielding several results about non-standard models of set theory relating such notions as self-embeddings, their sets of fixed points, strong rank-cuts, and set theories of different strengths. The work in foundational category theory consists in the formulation of a novel algebraic set theory which is proved to be equiconsistent to New Foundations (NF), and which can be modulated to correspond to intuitionistic or classical NF, with or without atoms. A key axiom of this theory expresses that its structures have an endofunctor with natural properties.
All There Is: On the Semantics of Quantification over Absolutely Everything
(Acta Universitatis Gothoburgensis, 2017-12-22) Filin Karlsson, Martin
This thesis concerns the problem of providing a semantics for quantification over absolutely all there is. Chapter 2 argues against the common view that Frege understood his quantifiers in Begriffsschrift to range over all objects and discusses Michael Dummett's analysis of the inconsistent system of Grundgesetze, which generalises into his famous argument against absolute quantification from indefinite extensibility. Chapter 3 explores the possibility to adapt Tarski's first definition of truth to hold for sentences with absolute quantification. Taking the concept of logical consequence into account results in an argument for adopting a set-theory with an ill-founded membership relation as a metatheory. Chapter 4 reviews and deflates an influential argument due to Timothy Williamson against the coherence of absolute quantification. Chapter 5 discusses three important contemporary semantic theories for absolute quantification that tackle Williamson's argument in different ways. Chapter 6 challenges the widespread view that it is impossible to give a model-theoretic semantics for absolute quantification simply by providing such a semantics in NFUp. This semantic framework provides models with the universal class as domain. I show, furthermore, that the first-order logical consequence relation stays the same in this setting, by proving the completeness theorem for first-order logic in NFUp.
Contributions to the Metamathematics of Arithmetic: Fixed Points, Independence, and Flexibility
(2017-05-11) Blanck, Rasmus
This thesis concerns the incompleteness phenomenon of first-order arithmetic: no consistent, r.e. theory T can prove every true arithmetical sentence. The first incompleteness result is due to Gödel; classic generalisations are due to Rosser, Feferman, Mostowski, and Kripke. All these results can be proved using self-referential statements in the form of provable fixed points. Chapter 3 studies sets of fixed points; the main result is that disjoint such sets are creative. Hierarchical generalisations are considered, as well as the algebraic properties of a certain collection of bounded sets of fixed points. Chapter 4 is a systematic study of independent and flexible formulae, and variations thereof, with a focus on gauging the amount of induction needed to prove their existence. Hierarchical generalisations of classic results are given by adapting a method of Kripke’s. Chapter 5 deals with end-extensions of models of fragments of arithmetic, and their relation to flexible formulae. Chapter 6 gives Orey-Hájek-like characterisations of partial conservativity over different kinds of theories. Of particular note is a characterisation of partial conservativity over IΣ₁. Chapter 7 investigates the possibility to generalise the notion of flexibility in the spirit of Feferman’s theorem on the ‘interpretability of inconsistency’. Partial results are given by using Solovay functions to extend a recent theorem of Woodin.
Truth and Proof in the Long Run: Essays on Trial and-Error Logics
(2017-03-17) Kaså, Martin
The theme of this book is convergence. For many philosophical representations of the evolution of theories, as well as representations of the meaning of the language used to express these theories, it has been essential that there exists some kind of convergence. This thesis introduces and collects four papers in philosophical logic pertaining to two different aspects of this basic tenet. On one hand, we have theories, their axioms and their rules of inference. We often have reason to revise a theory over time, to delete some axioms, add some new ones, or perhaps even revise our modes of reasoning. A simple model of such activity, providing a definition of what it may mean that something is provable in the long run in such a dynamic setting, is here investigated, and its relevance for the philosophical discussion about mechanism and knowable self-consistency is evaluated. On the other hand, the notion of a convergent concept, a term which, for whatever reason, has a certain tendency to its application over time, gets a precise explication in terms of trial-and-error classifiers. Formal languages, based on these classifiers, are introduced with semantics and proof systems, and are explored using standard logical methods.
Metaphor and Indirect Communication in Nietzsche
(2014-02-10) Georgsson, Peter
The main focus of this theses is indirect communication in Nietzsche's texts. Some concrete examples of how Nietzsche's texts can be read are given.
Concept Formation in Mathematics
(2011-05-19) Sjögren, Jörgen
This thesis consists of three overlapping parts, where the first one centers around the possibility of defining a measure of the power of arithmetical theories. In this part a partial measure of the power of arithmetical theories is constructed, where ''power'' is understood as capability to prove theorems. It is also shown that other suggestions in the literature for such a measure do not satisfy natural conditions on a measure. In the second part a theory of concept formation in mathematics is developed. This is inspired by Aristotle's conception of mathematical objects as abstractions, and it uses Carnap's method of explication as a means to formulate these abstractions in an ontologically neutral way. Finally, in the third part some problems of philosophy of mathematics are discussed. In the light of this idea of concept formation it is discussed how the relation between formal and informal proof can be understood, how mathematical theories are tested, how to characterize mathematics, and some questions about realism and indispensability.
Language and time : an attempt to arrest the thought of Jacques Derrida
(Acta Universitatis Gothoburgensis, 1986) Carlshamre, Staffan, 1952-

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