This paper synthesizes scholarship from several academic disciplines to identify and analyze five major ethical challenges facing data-driven policing. Because the term “data-driven policing” emcompasses a broad swath of technologies, we first outline several data-driven policing initiatives currently in use in the United States. We then lay out the five ethical challenges. Certain of these challenges have received considerable attention already, while others have been largely overlooked. In many cases, the challenges have been articulated in the context of related discussions, (...) but their distinctively ethical dimensions have not been explored in much detail. Our goal here is to articulate and clarify these ethical challenges, while also highlighting areas where these issues intersect and overlap. Ultimately, responsible data-driven policing requires collaboration between communities, academics, technology developers, police departments, and policy-makers to confront and address these challenges. And as we will see, it may also require critically reexamining the role and value of police in society. (shrink)

In this article, I argue that, contrary to scholarly consensus, Antonio Caso draws inspiration from important principles and ideas from Kant’s philosophy in his critique of positivism. I first examine the prima facie textual reasons why someone might believe that Caso and Kant are philosophical enemies. To contradict this notion, I proceed by noting and developing three core ideas that the two share in common. First, Caso and Kant are both ardent critics of dogmatic philosophizing. Second, both Caso and Kant (...) carve out special room for intuition in their respective accounts of cognition, resisting the idea that the understanding has a more prominent role in the formation of knowledge. Third, Kant’s doctrine of aesthetic judgment paves the way for Caso’s de-intellectualized aesthetics. In the end, we see that Kant and Caso are closer to being philosophical friends than enemies. (shrink)

This book addresses key conceptual issues relating to the modern scientific and engineering use of computer simulations. It analyses a broad set of questions, from the nature of computer simulations to their epistemological power, including the many scientific, social and ethics implications of using computer simulations. The book is written in an easily accessible narrative, one that weaves together philosophical questions and scientific technicalities. It will thus appeal equally to all academic scientists, engineers, and researchers in industry interested in questions (...) related to the general practice of computer simulations. (shrink)

This paper argues for a methodological point that bears on a relatively long-standing debate concerning collective beliefs in the sense elaborated by Margaret Gilbert: are they cases of belief or rather of acceptance? It is argued that epistemological accounts and distinctions developed in individual epistemology on the basis of considering the individual case are not necessarily applicable to the collective case or, more generally, uncritically to be adopted in collective epistemology.

This article aims to develop a new account of scientific explanation for computer simulations. To this end, two questions are answered: what is the explanatory relation for computer simulations? And what kind of epistemic gain should be expected? For several reasons tailored to the benefits and needs of computer simulations, these questions are better answered within the unificationist model of scientific explanation. Unlike previous efforts in the literature, I submit that the explanatory relation is between the simulation model and the (...) results of the simulation. I also argue that our epistemic gain goes beyond the unificationist account, encompassing a practical dimension as well. (shrink)

The studies by Trickey and Topping, which provide empirical support that philosophy produces cognitive gains and social benefits, have been used to advocate the view that philosophy deserves a place in the curriculum. Arguably, the existing curriculum, built around well-established core subjects, already provides what philosophy is said to do, and, therefore, there is no case to be made for expanding it to include philosophy. However, if we take citizenship education seriously, then the development of active and informed citizens requires (...) an emphasis on citizen preparation, but significantly more than the existing curriculum can provide, namely, the acquisition of knowledge and skills to improve students’ social and intellectual capacities and dispositions as future citizens. To this end, I argue for a model of democratic education that emphasises philosophy functioning educationally, whereby students have an integral role to play in shaping democracy through engaging in philosophy as collaborative inquiry that integrates pedagogy, curriculum and assessment. I contend that only philosophy can promote democracy, insofar as philosophical inquiry is an exemplar of the kind of deliberative inquiry required for informed and active democratic citizenship. In this way, philosophy can make a fundamental and much needed contribution to education. (shrink)

GILBERT JEAN FACCARELLO (Paris, 1950) is professor of economics at Université Panthéon-Assas, Paris, and a member of the Triangle research centre (École Normale Supérieure de Lyon and CNRS). He is presently chair of the ESHET Council (European Society for the History of Economic Thought). He completed his doctoral research in economics at Université de Paris X Nanterre. He has previously taught at the Université de Paris-Dauphine, Université du Maine and École Normale Supérieure de Fontenay/Saint-Cloud (now École Normale Supérieure de (...) Lyon). He is a co-founder of The European Journal of the History of Economic Thought, which he co-edited for 20 years with J. L. Cardoso, Heinz D. Kurz, and A. Murphy. With Alain Béraud, he edited the Nouvelle histoire de la pensée économique (La Découverte, 3 volumes, 1992-2000) and, together with Heinz D. Kurz, he is presently editing a Handbook of the History of Economic Analysis (3 volumes, forthcoming with Edward Elgar). -/- EJPE interviewed Gilbert Faccarello about his research career in the history of economic thought, where he has focused especially on old and new classical and Marxian political economy, and French political economy during the 18th and 19th centuries. G. Faccarello discusses his interest not only in the logical structure and context of the economic ideas of past thinkers but also the links between economic thought, philosophy, and religion. (shrink)

The ideas contained in this paper were first formulated as part of a chapter in my doctoral dissertation, which was completed in 1997. Some years later I added to my initial thoughts, scribbled some notes, and presented them at the 12th Annual Philosophy in Schools Conference, held in Brisbane in 2002. This presentation surfaced as a paper in Critical & Creative Thinking: The Australasian Journal of Philosophy in Schools (Burgh 2003a). Soon thereafter I revised the paper (Burgh 2003b) and it (...) appeared in abridged form in the Asia-Pacific Philosophy Education Network for Democracy (APPEND) Philosophy Series, Volume 4: Philosophy, Democracy and Education, edited by Philip Cam. It was once again revised, but also expanded, and appeared in Chapter 5 of Ethics and the community of inquiry: Education for deliberative democracy, a collaborative authorship with Terri Field and Mark Freakley (2006). Some sections have been further revised and appear in other publications (Burgh 2009, 2010; Burgh & Yorshansky 2011). These revisions would suggest that my thoughts on these matters are constantly changing. To some degree this is true, but each time the changes have built on previous ideas rather than new ideas replacing old ones. I welcomed the invitation to revise the original paper, which includes sections not included in later versions. However, with almost 11 years passing since the original publication, I found myself deleting sections and replacing others. Subsequently, this paper is a culmination of all the revisions and incorporates ideas from each. (shrink)

The common view is that no novel IS an argument, though it might be reconstructed as one. This is curious, for we almost always feel the need to reconstruct arguments even when they are uncontroversially given as arguments, as in a philosophical text. We make the points as explicit, orderly, and (often) brief as possible, which is what we do in reconstructing a novel’s argument. The reverse is also true. Given a text that is uncontroversially an explicit, orderly, and brief (...) argument, in order to enhance plausibility, our first instinct is to flesh it out with illustrations and relationships to everyday life. If this process is fictive (e.g., with “thought experiments”) and orderly, it is story-telling. This paper investigates whether there is a principled way of determining a novel’s argument, which should contribute as much to understanding arguments as to understanding novels. (shrink)

An analysis of the counter-intuitive properties of infinity as understood differently in mathematics, classical physics and quantum physics allows the consideration of various paradoxes under a new light (e.g. Zeno’s dichotomy, Torricelli’s trumpet, and the weirdness of quantum physics). It provides strong support for the reality of abstractness and mathematical Platonism, and a plausible reason why there is something rather than nothing in the concrete universe. The conclusions are far reaching for science and philosophy.

In the last decades there has been a great controversy about the scientific status of emotion categories. This controversy stems from the idea that emotions are heterogeneous phenomena, which precludes classifying them under a common kind. In this article, I analyze this claim—which I call the Variability Thesis—and argue that as it stands, it is problematically underdefined. To show this, I examine a recent formulation of the thesis as offered by Scarantino (2015). On one hand, I raise some issues regarding (...) the logical structure of the claim. On the other hand, and most importantly, I show that the Variability Thesis requires a consensus about what counts as a relevant pattern of response in different domains, a consensus that is lacking in the current literature. This makes it difficult to assess what counts as evidence for or against this thesis. As a result, arguments based on the Variability Thesis are unwarranted. This raises serious concerns about some current empirical theories of emotions, but also sheds light on the issue of the scientific status of emotion categories. (shrink)

The ‘community of inquiry’ as formulated by CS Peirce is grounded in the notion of communities of disciplinary-based inquiry engaged in the construction of knowledge. The phrase ‘converting the classroom into a community of inquiry’ is commonly understood as a pedagogical activity with a philosophical focus to guide classroom discussion. But it has a broader application, to transform the classroom into a community of inquiry. The literature is not clear on what this means for reconstructing education and how it translates (...) into schooling practices. Integral to the method of the community of inquiry is the ability of the classroom teacher to actively engage in the theories and practices of discipline-based communities of inquiry so as to become informed by the norms of the disciplines, not only to aspire to competence within the disciplines, but to develop habits of self-correction for reconstructing those same norms when faced with novel problems and solutions, including those in the classroom. (shrink)

If novels can be arguments, that fact should shape logic or argumentation studies as well as literary studies. Two senses the term ‘narrative argument’ might have are (a) a story that offers an argument, or (b) a distinctive argument form. I consider whether there is a principled way of extracting a novel’s argument in sense (a). Regarding the possibility of (b), Hunt’s view is evaluated that many fables and much fabulist literature inherently, and as wholes, have an analogical argument structure. (...) I argue that a better account is that some novels inherently exhibit a transcendental argument structure. (shrink)

This paper is an attempt to highlight significant developments in the history of philosophy in schools in Australia. We commence by looking at the early years when Laurance Splitter visited the Institute for the Advancement for Philosophy for Children (IAPC). Then we offer an account of the events that led to the formation of what is now the Federation of Australasian Philosophy in Schools Associations (FAPSA), the development and production of a diverse range of curriculum and supporting materials for philosophy (...) in schools, the making of the Australasian journal, and more recent events. Our purpose is to create further interest in exploring this complex and rich history. This will achieve a better understanding of the possible future directions for classroom practice and research. (shrink)

Although in some contexts the notions of an ordinary argument’s presumption, assumption, and presupposition appear to merge into the one concept of an implicit premise, there are important differences between these three notions. It is argued that assumption and presupposition, but not presumption, are basic logical notions. A presupposition of an argument is best understood as pertaining to a propositional element (a premise or the conclusion) e of the argument, such that the presupposition is a necessary condition for the truth (...) of e or for a term in e to have a referent. In contrast, an assumption of an argument pertains to the argument as a whole in that it is integral to the reasoning or inferential structure of the argument. A logical assumption of an argument is essentially a proposition that must be true in order for the argument aside from that proposition to be fully cogent. Nothing that is both comparable and distinguishing can be said about presumptions of arguments. Rather, presumptions of arguments are distinctively conventional; they are introduced through conventional rules (e.g., those that concern how to treat promises). So not all assumptions and not all presuppositions of arguments are presumptions of those arguments, although all presumptions of arguments are either assumptions or presuppositions of those arguments. This account avoids making the (monological) notion of presumption vacuous and dissolving the distinction between assumption and presumption, which is a vulnerability of alternative views such as Hansen’s and Bermejo-Luque’s, as is shown. (shrink)

World news can be discouraging these days. In order to counteract the effects of fake news and corruption, scientists have a duty to present the truth and propose ethical solutions acceptable to the world at large. -/- By starting from scratch, we can lay down the scientific principles underlying our very existence, and reach reasonable conclusions on all major topics including quantum physics, infinity, timelessness, free will, mathematical Platonism, happiness, ethics and religion, all the way to creation and a special (...) type of multiverse. -/- This article amounts to a summary of my personal Theory of Everything. -/- DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.36046.31049. (shrink)

Matthew Lipman claims that the community of inquiry is an exemplar of democracy in action. To many proponents the community of inquiry is considered invaluable for achieving desirable social and political ends through education for democracy. But what sort of democracy should we be educating for? In this paper I outline three models of democracy: the liberal model, which emphasises rights and duties, and draws upon pre-political assumptions about freedom; communitarianism, which focuses on identity and participation in the creation of (...) political ends; and deliberative self-governance, whereby citizens deliberatively shape their collective lives in public forums—at various levels of government and in different political and social arenas. I argue that some kind of deliberative democracy is defensible as a preliminary justification for how citizens might shape their lives, and therefore compatible with other forms of democracy, insofar as they can result from democratic deliberations. Acceptance of such a view raises further questions about the purpose or aims of education consistent with this conception of democracy. I contend that it requires an educational model that is committed to aligning curriculum, pedagogy, assessment and school governance to produce a transformational environment that will inform our structures—a commitment to democratic education and not merely education for democracy. Lipman goes part of the way to achieving these ends, but learning how to be proficient at democratic decision-making is like all tasks children and adolescents learn to perform. It involves action, understanding, and awareness of what counts as doing the task adequately. (shrink)

French translation by G. B. Côté and Roger Lapalme of "A Geneticist's Roadmap to Sanity" (G. B. Côté, 2019) with added bibliography. -/- À voir le monde d’aujourd’hui, on pourrait croire que nous avons perdu la raison. Je veux explorer ici les fondements mêmes de notre existence. Je discuterai brièvement du libre arbitre, de l’éthique, de la religion, de la souffrance, du dualisme cartésien et de l’état de conscience, avec un arrière-plan promulguant l’importance de la physique quantique d’aujourd’hui et de (...) l’intemporel. Pour ce faire, je devrai d’abord établir que le platonisme mathématique est une prémisse essentielle pour qu’un univers (ou même un multivers) prenne forme, et j’introduirai les trois modes d’existence abstrait, virtuel et concret (en philosophie) correspondant respectivement aux concepts d’information, d’énergie et de masse (en physique). Cet article constitue un bref exposé de ma théorie du tout. (shrink)

This paper’s main thesis is that in virtue of being believable, a believable novel makes an indirect transcendental argument telling us something about the real world of human psychology, action, and society. Three related objections are addressed. First, the Stroud-type objection would be that from believability, the only conclusion that could be licensed concerns how we must think or conceive of the real world. Second, Currie holds that such notions are probably false: the empirical evidence “is all against this idea…that (...) readers’ emotional responses track the real causal relations between things.” Third, responding with a full range of emotions to a novel surely requires that it be believable. Yet since we know the novel is fiction, we do not believe it. So in what does its believability consist? (shrink)

Can fictional narration yield knowledge in a way that depends crucially on its being fictional? This is the hard question of literary cognitivism. It is unexceptional that knowledge can be gained from fictional literature in ways that are not dependent on its fictionality (e.g., the science in science fiction). Sometimes fictional narratives are taken to exhibit the structure of suppositional argument, sometimes analogical argument. Of course, neither structure is unique to narratives. The thesis of literary cognitivism would be supported if (...) some novels exhibit a cogent and special argument structure restricted to fictional narratives. I contend that this is the case for a kind of transcendental argument. The reason is the inclusion and pattern of occurrence of the predicate ‘believable’ in the schema. Believability with respect to fictional stories is quite a different thing than it is with respect to nonfictional stories or anything else. (shrink)

In their book EVALUATING CRITICAL THINKING Stephen Norris and Robert Ennis say: “Although it is tempting to think that certain [unstated] assumptions are logically necessary for an argument or position, they are not. So do not ask for them.” Numerous writers of introductory logic texts as well as various highly visible standardized tests (e.g., the LSAT and GRE) presume that the Norris/Ennis view is wrong; the presumption is that many arguments have (unstated) necessary assumptions and that readers and test takers (...) can reasonably be expected to identify such assumptions. This paper proposes and defends criteria for determining necessary assumptions of arguments. Both theoretical and empirical considerations are brought to bear. (shrink)

Does self-control require willpower? The question cuts to the heart of a debate about whether self-control is identical with some psychological process internal to the agents or not. Noticeably absent from these debates is systematic evidence about the folk-psychological category of self-control. Here, we present the results of two behavioral studies (N = 296) that indicate the structure of everyday use of the concept. In Study 1, participants rated the degree to which different strategies to respond to motivational conflict exemplify (...) self-control. Participants distinguished between intra-psychic and externally-scaffolded strategies and judged that the former exemplified self-control more than the latter. In Study 2, participants provided various solutions to manage motivational conflict and rated their proposals on effectiveness. Participants produced substantially more intra-psychic strategies, rated them as more effective, and advised them at a higher rate than externally-scaffolded strategies. Taken together, these results suggest that while people recognize a plurality of strategies as genuine instances of self-control, purely internal exercises of self-control are considered more prototypical than their externally-scaffolded counterparts. This implies a hierarchical structure for the folk psychological category of self-control. The concept encompasses a variety of regulatory strategies and organizes these strategies along a hierarchical continuum, with purely intra-psychic strategies at the center and scaffolded strategies in the periphery. (shrink)

In the late 1960s Matthew Lipman and his colleagues at IAPC developed an educational philosophy he called Philosophy for Children. At the heart of Philosophy for Children is the community of Inquiry, with its emphasis on classroom dialogue, in the form of collaborative philosophical inquiry. In this paper we explore the development of educational practice that has grown out of Philosophy for Children in the context of Australia. -/- Australia adapted Lipman’s ideas on the educational value of practicing philosophy with (...) children in order to advance children’s social and intellectual capacities and dispositions. This has subsequently led to its development by both scholars and practitioners in directions that may or may not have been what Lipman had initially intended and to discussions on the nature and educational value of varied approaches that have been implemented in the classroom. To understand fully the effects of these changes requires an understanding of the towering influences that Peirce and especially Dewey were to Lipman. Whilst Lipman developed his own educational philosophy, he freely acknowledged that philosophy for children owes a debt to Peirce for the concept of the community of inquiry and to Dewey for his guidelines on education. -/- We will explore various ways in which the practice of philosophy for children has been implemented and analyse its expansion. This will achieve a better understanding of the possible future directions for classroom practice and research. (shrink)

From our everyday commuting to the gold medalist’s world-class performance, skillful actions are characterized by fine-grained, online agentive control. What is the proper explanation of such control? There are two traditional candidates: intellectualism explains skillful agentive control by reference to the agent’s propositional mental states; anti-intellectualism holds that propositional mental states or reflective processes are unnecessary since skillful action is fully accounted for by automatic coping processes. I examine the evidence for three psychological phenomena recently held to support anti-intellectualism and (...) argue that it supports neither traditional candidate, but an intermediate attention-control account, according to which the top-down, intention-directed control of attention is a necessary component of skillful action. Only this account recognizes both the role of automatic control in skilled action and the need for higher-order cognition to thread automatic processes together into a unified, skillful performance. This applies to bodily skillful action in general, from the world-class performance of experts to mundane, habitual action. The attention-control account stresses that, for intentions to play their role as top-down modulators of attention, agents must sustain the intention’s activation; hence, the need for reflecting throughout performance. (shrink)

This article asks the question, ``what is reliable machine learning?'' As I intend to answer it, this is a question about epistemic justification. Reliable machine learning gives justification for believing its output. Current approaches to reliability (e.g., transparency) involve showing the inner workings of an algorithm (functions, variables, etc.) and how they render outputs. We then have justification for believing the output because we know how it was computed. Thus, justification is contingent on what can be shown about the algorithm, (...) its properties, and its behavior. In this paper, I defend computational reliabilism (CR). CR is a computationally-inspired off-shoot of process reliabilism that does not require showing the inner workings of an algorithm. CR credits reliability to machine learning by identifying reliability indicators external to the algorithm (validation methods, knowledge-based integration, etc.). Thus, we have justification for believing the output of machine learning when we have identified the appropriate reliability indicators. CR is advanced as a more suitable epistemology for machine learning. The main goal of this article is to lay the groundwork for CR, how it works, and what we can expect as a justificatory framework for reliable machine learning. (shrink)

According to Val Plumwood (1995), liberal-democracy is an authoritarian political system that protects privilege but fails to protect nature. A major obstacle, she says, is radical inequality, which has become increasingly far-reaching under liberal-democracy; an indicator of ‘the capacity of its privileged groups to distribute social goods upwards and to create rigidities which hinder the democratic correctiveness of social institutions’ (p. 134). This cautionary tale has repercussions for education, especially civics and citizenship education. To address this, we explore the potential (...) of what Gerard Delanty calls ‘cultural citizenship’ as an alternative to the disciplinary citizenship that permeates Western liberal discourse. Cultural citizenship emphasises citizenship as communication and continual learning processes, rejecting the idea of citizenship as a fixed set of cultural ideals, norms or values defined and enforced by liberal society’s legal, political and cultural institutions, including education and ‘citizenship training’. However, we contend that a critical first step, essential to democratic correctiveness, is to clear away obstacles created by the privileging of a dominant epistemic position. We conclude that Plumwood’s philosophy alongside John Dewey’s work on democracy and education provide a theoretical framework for effective democratic inquiry aimed towards interconnective, deliberative practice and corrective methodology for epistemic accountability. (shrink)

Researchers often claim that self-control is a skill. It is also often stated that self-control exertions are intentional actions. However, no account has yet been proposed of the skillful agency that makes self-control exertion possible, so our understanding of self-control remains incomplete. Here I propose the skill model of self-control, which accounts for skillful agency by tackling the guidance problem: how can agents transform their abstract and coarse-grained intentions into the highly context-sensitive, fine-grained control processes required to select, revise and (...) correct strategies during self-control exertion? The skill model borrows conceptual tools from ‘hierarchical models’ recently developed in the context of motor skills, and asserts that self-control crucially involves the ability to manage the implementation and monitoring of regulatory strategies as the self-control exercise unfolds. Skilled agents are able do this by means of flexible practical reasoning: a fast, context-sensitive type of deliberation that incorporates non-propositional representations into the formation and revision of the mixed-format intentions that structure self-control exertion. The literatures on implementation intentions and motivation framing offer corroborating evidence for the theory. As a surprising result, the skill of self-control that allows agents to overcome the contrary motivations they experience is self-effacing: instead of continuously honing this skill, expert agents replace it with a different one, which minimizes or prevents contrary motivations from arising in the first place. Thus, the more expert you are at self-control, the less likely you are to use it. (shrink)

“Ethical criticism” is an approach to literary studies that holds that reading certain carefully selected novels can make us ethically better people, e.g., by stimulating our sympathetic imagination (Nussbaum). I try to show that this nonargumentative approach cheapens the persuasive force of novels and that its inherent bias and censorship undercuts what is perhaps the principal value and defense of the novel—that reading novels can be critical to one’s learning how to think.

In this paper I argue that many scholars involved in the contemporary free will debates have underappreciated the philosophical appeal of agent causation because the resources of contemporary emergentism have not been adequately introduced into the discussion. Whereas I agree that agent causation’s main problem has to do with its intelligibility, particularly with respect to the issue of how substances can be causally relevant, I argue that the notion of substance causation can be clearly articulated from an emergentist framework. According (...) to my proposal, a free agent is _a causally powerful substance that emerges in an anomic way from her constitutive mental events_, downwardly constraining, selecting and, in this way, having control on them. As we shall see, this particular concept of agent causation not only makes sense of the deep insight behind agent libertarianism, but it also provides us with the resources to solve some of the main objections that have been raised against it. It is true that here I cannot develop a complete defense of the evidential credentials of emergentism. Still, even if the considerations that follow do not serve to convince detractors of agent causal libertarian accounts of free will, they do suggest that libertarian agent causation is more promising than is typically acknowledged. (shrink)

In this paper we will explore how Albert Camus has much to offer philosophers of education. Although a number of educationalists have attempted to explicate the educational implications of Camus’ literary works (Denton, 1964; Oliver, 1965; Götz, 1987; Curzon-Hobson, 2003; Marshall, 2007, 2008; Weddington, 2007; Roberts, 2008, 2013; Gibbons, 2013; Heraud, 2013; Roberts, Gibbons & Heraud, 2013) these analyses have not attempted to extrapolate pedagogical guidelines to develop an educational framework for children’s philosophical practice in the way Matthew Lipman did (...) from John Dewey’s philosophy of education, which informed his philosophy for children curriculum and pedagogy. To this end we offer comparisons and contrasts between Camus and the pragmatist educational discourse centred on communities of philosophical inquiry (or, more broadly, collaborative philosophical inquiry). In particular we focus on the phenomenology of inquiry, namely, that “inquiry must begin with a problem, question, or doubt and must aim at a solution or resolution, both of which are genuinely felt—something in which the inquirer actually has a stake” (Gregory & Granger, 2012: 13). We conclude that what Camus calls lucidity has implications for the notion of reconstruction, prominent in Dewey’s thoughts on education, and central to Lipman’s focus on philosophy functioning educationally. (shrink)

The two main theories of perceptual reasons in contemporary epistemology can be called Phenomenalism and Factualism. According to Phenomenalism, perceptual reasons are facts about experiences conceived of as phenomenal states, i.e., states individuated by phenomenal character, by what it’s like to be in them. According to Factualism, perceptual reasons are instead facts about the external objects perceived. The main problem with Factualism is that it struggles with bad cases: cases where perceived objects are not what they appear or where there (...) is no perceived object at all. The main problem with Phenomenalism is that it struggles with good cases: cases where everything is perfectly normal and the external object is correctly perceived, so that one’s perceptual beliefs are knowledge. In this paper we show that there is a theory of perceptual reasons that avoids the problems for Factualism and Phenomenalism. We call this view Propositionalism. We use ‘proposition’ broadly to mean the entities that are contents of beliefs and other doxastic attitudes. The key to finding a middle ground between Phenomenalism and Factualism, we claim, is to allow our reasons to be false in bad cases. Despite being false, they are about the external world, not our phenomenal states. (shrink)

We provide a Camusian/Peircean notion of inquiry that emphasises an attitude of fallibilism and sustained epistemic dissonance as a conceptual framework for a theory of classroom practice founded on Deep Reflective Thinking (DTR), in which the cultivation of collective doubt, reflective evaluation and how these relate to the phenomenological aspects of inquiry are central to communities of inquiry. In a study by Fynes-Clinton, preliminary evidence demonstrates that if students engage in DRT, they more frequently experience cognitive dissonance and as a (...) result improve their ability to engage in further and more frequent DRT. Sustained intellectual progress occurs when the inquiry reaches a point whereby students can thoughtfully move between the position of disequilibrium (doubt) and equilibrium (belief) whilst understanding the impermanency of any fixed belief, which, in turn, enables reconstruction of thinking and appropriation of learning in the context of collaborative philosophical inquiry. (shrink)

What can make storytelling “evil” in the sense that the storytelling leads to accepting a view for no good reason, thus allowing ill-reasoned action? I mean the storytelling can be argumentatively evil, not trivially that (e.g.) the overt speeches of characters can include bad arguments. The storytelling can be argumentatively evil in that it purveys false premises, or purveys reasoning that is formally or informally fallacious. My main thesis is that as a rule, the shorter the fictional narrative, the greater (...) the potential for argumentative evil. Here, the notion of length is to be understood such that it is generally a proxy for more abstract features such as how complex and nuanced the piece is. In other argumentative contexts, length generally appears to make no comparable difference. This feature would put fictional narrative arguments in a special class beyond what is determined by obvious features, such as the definitional fact that they in some way(s) collapse two of the four traditional types of discourse: exposition, description, narration, and argument. The nonobvious features that distinguish this class have been a source of puzzlement and inquiry. (shrink)

In this paper we delineate the conditions and features of what we call an existential philosophy of history in relation to customary trends in the field of the philosophy of history. We do this by circumscribing what a transgenerational temporality and what our entanglement in ethical relations with temporal others ask of us as existential and responsive selves and by explicating what attitude we need to have when trying to responsibly respond to other vulnerable beings in our historical world of (...) life. (shrink)

The initial one-third of the paper is devoted to exposing the first chapter (“Sense-Certainty”) of Hegel’s PHENOMENOLOGY OF SPIRIT as a thesis about reference, viz., that singular demonstrative reference is impossible. In the remainder I basically argue that such a view commits one to radically undermining our conceptions of space, time, and substance (concrete individuality), and rests on the central mistake of construing <this> on the model of a predicable (or property).

I show that in our theoretical representations of argument, vicious infinite regresses of self-reference may arise with respect to each of the three usual, informal criteria of argument cogency: the premises are to be relevant, sufficient, and acceptable. They arise needlessly, by confusing a cogency criterion with argument content. The three types of regress all are structurally similar to Lewis Carroll’s famous regress, which involves quantitative extravagance with no explanatory power. Most attention is devoted to the sufficiency criterion, including its (...) relation to the view au courant that inferring necessarily involves the thinker taking her premises to support her conclusion. I contend that this view is mistaken and likewise that arguments make no such assumption or inference claim as that the premises support the conclusion. The core of the positive alternative model I propose is that there is commitment to, but not claiming, the proposition that the premises support the conclusion. (shrink)

According to intellectualists, the will is a rational inclination towards apprehended goodness. This conception of the will makes its acts intelligible: they are explained by (i) the nature of the will as a rational inclination, and (ii) the judgement of the intellect that moves the will. From this it follows that it is impossible for an agent to will evil as such or for its own sake. In explaining wrongdoing intellectualists cite cognitive error or the disruptive influences of the passions; (...) these considerations, however, seem involuntary and at least partly exculpatory. The intellectualist needs an account that renders wrongful actions intelligible without undermining their status as responsible. I argue that Leibniz has the theoretical tools to provide at least part of an answer to this problem. In sum, an agent is directly responsible for her wrongdoing if the cognitive error or the disruptive influence of the passions that help explain this wrongdoing do not completely undermine her acting freely; an agent is indirectly responsible for her wrongdoing if she is directly responsible for previous actions which partly resulted in her wrongdoing, even if the presence of cognitive error or disruptive influence of the passions completely undermines her acting freely. (shrink)

Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, EarlyView.

Carlos Vaz Ferreira argues that the problem of freedom is conceptually distinct from the problem of causal determinism. The problem of freedom is ultimately a problem regarding the ontologically independent agency of a being, and the problem of determinism is a problem regarding explanations of events or acts in terms of the totality of their antecedent causal conditions. As Vaz Ferreira sees it, failing to keep these problems apart gives rise to merely apparent but unreal puzzles pertaining to the nature (...) of freedom and its relation to determinism. In this article, I present my interpretation of Vaz Ferreira’s distinctive ideas regarding the nature of freedom and its relation to casual determinism. (shrink)

Many philosophers hold that if an agent acts intentionally, she must know what she is doing. Although the scholarly consensus for many years was to reject the thesis in light of presumed counterexamples by Donald Davidson, several scholars have recently argued that attention to aspectual distinctions and the practical nature of this knowledge shows that these counterexamples fail. In this paper I defend a new objection against the thesis, one modelled after Timothy Williamson’s anti-luminosity argument. Since this argument relies on (...) general principles about the nature of knowledge rather than on intuitions about fringe cases, the recent responses that have been given to defuse the force of Davidson’s objection are silent against it. Moreover, the argument suggests that even weaker theses connecting practical entities with knowledge are also false. Recent defenders of the thesis that there is a necessary connection between knowledge and intentional action are motivated by the insight that this connection is non-accidental. I close with a positive proposal to account for the non-accidentality of this link without appeal to necessary connections by drawing an extended analogy between practical and perceptual knowledge. (shrink)

The nontechnical ability to identify or match argumentative structure seems to be an important reasoning skill. Instruments that have questions designed to measure this skill include major standardized tests for graduate school admission, for example, the United States-Canadian Law School Admission Test (LSAT), the Graduate Record Examinations (GRE), and the Graduate Management Admission Test (GMAT). Writers and reviewers of such tests need an appropriate foundation for developing such questions--they need a proper representation of phenomenological argumentative structure--for legitimacy, and because these (...) tests affect people's lives. This paper attempts to construct an adequate and appropriate representation of such structure, that is, the logical structure that an argument is perceived to have by mature reasoners, albeit ones who are untrained in logic. (shrink)

Translation in Greek of "A Geneticist's Roadmap to Sanity" (2019) by G.B. Côté. Μεταφράστηκε και στα Γαλλικά από τους Gilbert B. Côté και Roger Lapalme και προστέθηκε η βιβλιογραφία στις 28 του Απρίλη 2020: Pour comprendre le monde et revenir à la raison. La théorie du tout d'un généticien. Η ώθηση για τη συγγραφή ήταν η ανήθικη προεδρία του Donald J. Trump. Σε αυτό το κείμενο, θέλω να εξερευνήσω τα θεμέλια της ύπαρξής μας. Θα θίξω σύντομα την ενσυνείδηση, την (...) ελεύθερη βούληση, τη θρησκεία, την ηθική, τα βάσανα της ζωής , το πρόβλημα της δυαδικότητας του νου και του σώματος, την αχρονικότητα, τα πολλαπλά σύμπαντα και το ανθρώπινο πεπρωμένο. Για να διευκολύνω αυτήν την παρουσίαση, θα πρέπει πρώτα να δείξω ότι ο μαθηματικός πλατωνισμός είναι μια λογική αναγκαιότητα για την ύπαρξη οποιουδήποτε σύμπαντος, και θα εισαγάγω τους αφηρημένους, κβαντικούς και υλικούς τρόπους ύπαρξης (στη φιλοσοφία) που αντιστοιχούν στην πληροφόρηση, την ενέργεια και τη μάζα (στη φυσική). Το κείμενο αυτό αποτελεί μια σύνοψη της προσωπικής μου θεωρίας των πάντων. (shrink)

This paper attempts to define indexicality so as to semantically distinguish indexicals from proper names and definite descriptions. The widely-accepted approach that says that indexical reference is distinctive in being dependent on context of use is criticized. A reductive approach is proposed and defended that takes an indexical to be (roughly) an expression that either is or is equivalent to ‘here’ or ‘now’, or is such that a tokening of it refers by relating something to the place and/or time that (...) would have been referred to had ‘here’ and ‘now’ been tokened instead. Alternative reductive approaches are criticized. (shrink)

In this paper, I introduce the narrow-sense and wide-sense conceptions of the community of inquiry (Sprod, 2001) as a way of understanding what is meant by the phrase ‘converting the classroom into a community of inquiry.’ The wide-sense conception is the organising or regulative principle of scholarly communities of inquiry and a classroom-wide ideal for the reconstruction of education. I argue that converting the classroom into a community of inquiry requires more than following a specific procedural method, and, therefore, that (...) the wide-sense conception must inform the narrow-sense community of inquiry, as it provides the pedagogical guidelines for classroom practice. This is followed by a discussion on the dual role of the teacher as facilitator and co-inquirer in mediating between the two conceptions of the community of inquiry. Finally, I look at three different interpretations of John Dewey’s educational theory and practice that underpins philosophy for children. I conclude that without an understanding of the relationship between the two conceptions of the community of inquiry to guide the larger aims of an education that supports democratic ways of life, the teacher’s role remains unclear. (shrink)

I propose a reading of Berkeley's Essay towards a New Theory of Vision in which Molyneux-type questions are interpreted as thought experiments instead of arguments. First, I present the general argumentative strategy in the NTV, and provide grounds for the traditional reading. Second, I consider some roles of thought experiments, and classify Molyneux-type questions in the NTV as constructive conjectural thought experiments. Third, I argue that (i) there is no distinction between Weak and Strong Heterogeneity theses in the NTV; (ii) (...) that Strong Heterogeneity is the basis of Berkeley's theory; and (iii) that Molyneux-type questions act as illustrations of Strong Heterogeneity. (shrink)

Much of our know-how is acquired through practice: we learn how to cook by cooking, how to write by writing, and how to dance by dancing. As Aristotle argues, however, this kind of learning is puzzling, since engaging in it seems to require possession of the very knowledge one seeks to obtain. After showing how a version of the puzzle arises from a set of attractive principles, I argue that the best solution is to hold that knowledge-how comes in degrees, (...) and through practice a person gradually learns how to do something. However, the two standard accounts of know-how in the literature, intellectualism and anti-intellectualism, cannot properly account for the distinctive way in which know-how is gradually acquired by practice, a process in which conceptual representations and practical abilities are intimately interwoven. Drawing on Gareth Evans's work, I outline an account that may do so, and use this account to distinguish between two forms of learning to explain why skill generally cannot be learnt through testimony, and requires practice. (shrink)

This paper considers whether universally—for all (known) rational beings—an argument scheme or pattern can go from being cogent (well-reasoned) to fallacious. This question has previously received little attention, despite the centrality of the concepts of cogency, scheme, and fallaciousness. I argue that cogency has vanished in this way for the following scheme, a common type of impersonal means-end reasoning: X is needed as a basic necessity or protection of human lives, therefore, X ought to be secured if possible. As it (...) stands (with no further elaboration), this scheme is committed to the assumption that the greater the number of human lives, the better. Although this assumption may have been indisputable previously, it is clearly disputable now. It is a fallacy or non sequitur to make a clearly disputable assumption without providing any justification. Although this topic raises critical issues for practically every discipline, my primary focus is on logical (as opposed to empirical or ethical) aspects of the case, and on implications for practical and theoretical logic. I conclude that the profile of vanishing cogency of the scheme may be unique and is determined by a peculiar combination of contingent universality and changing conditions. (shrink)