Mats Gustafsson
Biographic Data
| ID | 268565 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Mats Gustafsson |
| GIVEN NAMES | Mats |
| FAMILY NAME | Gustafsson |
| SIGNATURE | GUSTAFSSON M |
| AFFILIATIONS | Åbo Akademi University |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-9784-6317 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 14 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 18 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 14 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2001 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
On the distinction between uptake and perlocutionary object
This essay investigates and criticizes Austin’s distinction between uptake and perlocutionary object, focusing on the speech act of ordering someone to do something. Pace Austin’s analysis, it is argued that in central and typical cases of ordering, uptake and perlocutionary object merge. In such cases, understanding and obeying an order amount to the same thing. By contrast, in cases where the order is subject to critical scrutiny or disobeyed, …
Marginalized Learners in International and Regional Test Data
International assessments inform education policy debates, yet little is known about their floor effects: To what extent do they fail to differentiate between the lowest performers, and what are the implications of this? TIMSS, SACMEQ, and LLECE data are analyzed to answer this question. In TIMSS, floor effects have been reduced through the introduction of a greater number of easy items. SACMEQ and LLECE, despite being specifically designed for d…
Taking truth seriously
By discussing a large number of different examples, this paper argues that the class of so-called generic statements is much more heterogeneous that is usually recognized in the contemporary debate. It is claimed that the theoretical tendency towards overgeneralization or homogenization makes it impossible to adequately understand how generic statements function in language and to handle the dangers involved in generics that express and promote s…
Engaging Kripke with Wittgenstein
In this chapter, I argue, with reference to Wittgenstein’s discussion of the standard meter in the Philosophical Investigations, that Kripke’s introduction of the epistemological-metaphysical category of contingent a priori in Naming and Necessity fails, due to his overlooking certain important distinctions in the use of relevant expressions and due to his unrecognized or unacknowledged wavering between different uses of relevant sentences. If th…
Eliminating global learning poverty
This paper explores the quantitative relationships between average levels of learning achievement across countries, changes in average levels of learning achievement, the inequality of distribution of achievement (akin to income or wealth inequality in general development analysis), and the proportion of students learning at or below an absolute minimum (akin to poverty in general development analysis). The paper uses a variety of data from cross…
Category Mistakes and Ordinary Language
Finite but Unbounded
World-leading anthropologists and philosophers pursue the perplexing question fundamental to both disciplines: What is it to think of ourselves as human? A common theme is the open-ended and context-dependent nature of our notion of the human, one upshot of which is that perplexities over that notion can only be dealt with in a piecemeal fashion, and in relation to concrete real-life circumstances. Philosophical anthropology, understood as the ex…
Enrolment ratios and related puzzles in developing countries
Seeing the Facts and Saying What You Like
In chapter 17 of his book, Rewriting the Soul: Multiple Personality and the Sciences of Memory, Ian Hacking makes the disquieting claim that "perhaps we should best think of past human actions as being to a certain extent indeterminate."1 Against what may appear like the self-evident conception of the past as fixed and unalterable, Hacking suggests that when it comes to human conduct and experience, there are reasons to adopt a more flexible view…
The Bronze Age landscape of the Bjäre peninsula, southern Sweden, and its relationship to burial mounds
The rule-follower and his community
On Rawls’s Distinction between Perfect and Imperfect Procedural Justice
Rawls’s distinction between perfect and imperfect procedural justice relies on the notion of a procedure that is guaranteed to lead to a certain independently specifiable result. Clarification of this notion shows that it makes the distinction between perfect and imperfect procedural justice unreal, in the following sense: whether, in a particular case, we have an instance of perfect or imperfect procedural justice depends only on how we choose t…
The cultural background of the sustainability of the traditional farming system in the Ghouta the oasis of Damascus, Syria
Rorty and His Critics
The Bronze Age landscape of the Bjäre peninsula, southern Sweden, and its relationship to burial mounds
Eliminating global learning poverty
This paper explores the quantitative relationships between average levels of learning achievement across countries, changes in average levels of learning achievement, the inequality of distribution of achievement (akin to income or wealth inequality in general development analysis), and the proportion of students learning at or below an absolute minimum (akin to poverty in general development analysis). The paper uses a variety of data from cross…
The cultural background of the sustainability of the traditional farming system in the Ghouta the oasis of Damascus, Syria
Seeing the Facts and Saying What You Like
In chapter 17 of his book, Rewriting the Soul: Multiple Personality and the Sciences of Memory, Ian Hacking makes the disquieting claim that "perhaps we should best think of past human actions as being to a certain extent indeterminate."1 Against what may appear like the self-evident conception of the past as fixed and unalterable, Hacking suggests that when it comes to human conduct and experience, there are reasons to adopt a more flexible view…
Rorty and His Critics
The cultural background of the sustainability of the traditional farming system in the Ghouta the oasis of Damascus, Syria
The rule-follower and his community
On Rawls’s Distinction between Perfect and Imperfect Procedural Justice
Rawls’s distinction between perfect and imperfect procedural justice relies on the notion of a procedure that is guaranteed to lead to a certain independently specifiable result. Clarification of this notion shows that it makes the distinction between perfect and imperfect procedural justice unreal, in the following sense: whether, in a particular case, we have an instance of perfect or imperfect procedural justice depends only on how we choose t…
The Bronze Age landscape of the Bjäre peninsula, southern Sweden, and its relationship to burial mounds
Seeing the Facts and Saying What You Like
In chapter 17 of his book, Rewriting the Soul: Multiple Personality and the Sciences of Memory, Ian Hacking makes the disquieting claim that "perhaps we should best think of past human actions as being to a certain extent indeterminate."1 Against what may appear like the self-evident conception of the past as fixed and unalterable, Hacking suggests that when it comes to human conduct and experience, there are reasons to adopt a more flexible view…
Enrolment ratios and related puzzles in developing countries
Finite but Unbounded
World-leading anthropologists and philosophers pursue the perplexing question fundamental to both disciplines: What is it to think of ourselves as human? A common theme is the open-ended and context-dependent nature of our notion of the human, one upshot of which is that perplexities over that notion can only be dealt with in a piecemeal fashion, and in relation to concrete real-life circumstances. Philosophical anthropology, understood as the ex…
Category Mistakes and Ordinary Language
Eliminating global learning poverty
This paper explores the quantitative relationships between average levels of learning achievement across countries, changes in average levels of learning achievement, the inequality of distribution of achievement (akin to income or wealth inequality in general development analysis), and the proportion of students learning at or below an absolute minimum (akin to poverty in general development analysis). The paper uses a variety of data from cross…
Marginalized Learners in International and Regional Test Data
International assessments inform education policy debates, yet little is known about their floor effects: To what extent do they fail to differentiate between the lowest performers, and what are the implications of this? TIMSS, SACMEQ, and LLECE data are analyzed to answer this question. In TIMSS, floor effects have been reduced through the introduction of a greater number of easy items. SACMEQ and LLECE, despite being specifically designed for d…
Taking truth seriously
By discussing a large number of different examples, this paper argues that the class of so-called generic statements is much more heterogeneous that is usually recognized in the contemporary debate. It is claimed that the theoretical tendency towards overgeneralization or homogenization makes it impossible to adequately understand how generic statements function in language and to handle the dangers involved in generics that express and promote s…
Engaging Kripke with Wittgenstein
In this chapter, I argue, with reference to Wittgenstein’s discussion of the standard meter in the Philosophical Investigations, that Kripke’s introduction of the epistemological-metaphysical category of contingent a priori in Naming and Necessity fails, due to his overlooking certain important distinctions in the use of relevant expressions and due to his unrecognized or unacknowledged wavering between different uses of relevant sentences. If th…
On the distinction between uptake and perlocutionary object
This essay investigates and criticizes Austin’s distinction between uptake and perlocutionary object, focusing on the speech act of ordering someone to do something. Pace Austin’s analysis, it is argued that in central and typical cases of ordering, uptake and perlocutionary object merge. In such cases, understanding and obeying an order amount to the same thing. By contrast, in cases where the order is subject to critical scrutiny or disobeyed, …
Epistemology (8 works) · Philosophy (8 works) · Political science (5 works) · Sociology (5 works) · Economics (4 works) · Linguistics (4 works) · Geography (3 works) · Philosophy (3 works) · Wittgensteinian philosophy and applications (3 works) · Computer Science (2 works)