The local as site of integration, though proverbially the site of integration, is entirely vacuous for the purposes of theory and better left to those who live and act it out at their discretion - too much state and policy there can only do harm, as in the notorious burka laws.
Can, and does, natural selection work at levels other than the level of Darwin's focus, individual organisms; is there a non-vacuous way to formulate the theory abstractly; how are we to understand the relationships between the concepts of fitness, selection and adaptation?
Therefore, unless we have a principled way of determining when we should re-describe outcomes or options to make a preference consistent with expected utility theory, the theory becomes normatively vacuous.
We model our ignorance about this mechanism by a vacuous lower prevision, a tool from the theory of imprecise probabilities, and we use only coherence arguments to turn prior into posterior (updated) probabilities.
If cognition is computation simply because cognitive systems, like everything else, may be seen as performing more or less arbitrary computations over the relevant inputs, then it appears that the computational theory of cognition is both trivial and vacuous.
Davidson (1984) claims that reference is a theoretically vacuous notion: it is of absolutely no use in a semantic theory.
In "The Existential Import of Propositions" (Russell 1905a), the theory of denoting concepts is applied to the problem of vacuous singular terms.
The theory would thereby acquire more content and become non-vacuous.
If general or strong theories of restriction are open to the objection stated above, the weaker theories are open to a different objection: they risk being vacuous if their proponents did not have any independent way of identifying paradoxical cases.
In response, one could point out: (a) Definitions like (1) or (2) are "mini-theories"—mini-theories are quite common in philosophy and it is not at all obvious that they are vacuous merely because they are modeled on common usage.
