Results for 'Brian Epstein'

635 found
Order:
  1. The Ant Trap: Rebuilding the Foundations of the Social Sciences.Brian Epstein - 2015 - New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
    We live in a world of crowds and corporations, artworks and artifacts, legislatures and languages, money and markets. These are all social objects — they are made, at least in part, by people and by communities. But what exactly are these things? How are they made, and what is the role of people in making them? In The Ant Trap, Brian Epstein rewrites our understanding of the nature of the social world and the foundations of the social sciences. (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   140 citations  
  2. Anchoring versus Grounding: Reply to Schaffer.Brian Epstein - 2019 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 99 (3):768-781.
    In his insightful and challenging paper, Jonathan Schaffer argues against a distinction I make in The Ant Trap (Epstein 2015) and related articles. I argue that in addition to the widely discussed “grounding” relation, there is a different kind of metaphysical determination I name “anchoring.” Grounding and anchoring are distinct, and both need to be a part of full explanations of how facts are metaphysically determined. Schaffer argues instead that anchoring is a species of grounding. The crux of his (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   16 citations  
  3. What are social groups? Their metaphysics and how to classify them.Brian Epstein - 2017 - Synthese 196 (12):4899-4932.
    This paper presents a systematic approach for analyzing and explaining the nature of social groups. I argue against prominent views that attempt to unify all social groups or to divide them into simple typologies. Instead I argue that social groups are enormously diverse, but show how we can investigate their natures nonetheless. I analyze social groups from a bottom-up perspective, constructing profiles of the metaphysical features of groups of specific kinds. We can characterize any given kind of social group with (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   39 citations  
  4. Ontological individualism reconsidered.Brian Epstein - 2009 - Synthese 166 (1):187-213.
    The thesis of methodological individualism in social science is commonly divided into two different claims—explanatory individualism and ontological individualism. Ontological individualism is the thesis that facts about individuals exhaustively determine social facts. Initially taken to be a claim about the identity of groups with sets of individuals or their properties, ontological individualism has more recently been understood as a global supervenience claim. While explanatory individualism has remained controversial, ontological individualism thus understood is almost universally accepted. In this paper I argue (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   43 citations  
  5. Why group mental states are not exhaustively determined by member states.Brian Epstein - 2022 - Philosophical Issues 32 (1):417-433.
    With few exceptions, theorists analyze group attitudes in terms of the attitudes of members. In Epstein 2015, 2019a, 2019b, I argued that this thesis (which I call "MEMBERS ONLY")—and hence any theory that analyzes group attitudes in terms of member attitudes—is mistaken: the attitudes of many groups are ontologically determined by a broader range of factors than member attitudes. My aim in the present paper is to consider new arguments against MEMBERS ONLY. I argue that arguments based on the (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  6. How Many Kinds of Glue Hold the Social World Together.Brian Epstein - 2014 - In Mattia Gallotti & John Michael (eds.), Perspectives on Social Ontology and Social Cognition. Dordrecht: Springer.
    In recent years, theorists have debated how we introduce new social objects and kinds into the world. Searle, for instance, proposes that they are introduced by collective acceptance of a constitutive rule; Millikan and Elder that they are the products of reproduction processes; Thomasson that they result from creator intentions and subsequent intentional reproduction; and so on. In this chapter, I argue against the idea that there is a single generic method or set of requirements for doing so. Instead, there (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   15 citations  
  7. Agent-based modeling and the fallacies of individualism.Brian Epstein - 2011 - In Paul Humphreys & Cyrille Imbert (eds.), Models, Simulations, and Representations. New York: Routledge. pp. 115444.
    Agent-​​based modeling is showing great promise in the social sciences. However, two misconceptions about the relation between social macroproperties and microproperties afflict agent-based models. These lead current models to systematically ignore factors relevant to the properties they intend to model, and to overlook a wide range of model designs. Correcting for these brings painful trade-​​offs, but has the potential to transform the utility of such models.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   7 citations  
  8. Social Objects Without Intentions.Brian Epstein - 2013 - In Anita Konzelmann Ziv & Hans Bernhard Schmid (eds.), Institutions, Emotions, and Group Agents. Dordrecht: Springer. pp. 53-68.
    It is often seen as a truism that social objects and facts are the product of human intentions. I argue that the role of intentions in social ontology is commonly overestimated. I introduce a distinction that is implicit in much discussion of social ontology, but is often overlooked: between a social entity’s “grounds” and its “anchors.” For both, I argue that intentions, either individual or collective, are less essential than many theorists have assumed. Instead, I propose a more worldly – (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   12 citations  
  9. What is Individualism in Social Ontology? Ontological Individualism vs. Anchor Individualism.Brian Epstein - 2014 - In Julie Zahle & Finn Collin (eds.), Rethinking the Individualism-Holism Debate. Cham: Springer.
    Individualists about social ontology hold that social facts are “built out of” facts about individuals. In this paper, I argue that there are two distinct kinds of individualism about social ontology, two different ways individual people might be the metaphysical “builders” of the social world. The familiar kind is ontological individualism. This is the thesis that social facts supervene on, or are exhaustively grounded by, facts about individual people. What I call anchor individualism is the alternative thesis that facts about (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   7 citations  
  10. Grounds, Convention, and the Metaphysics of Linguistic Tokens.Brian Epstein - 2009 - Croatian Journal of Philosophy 9 (1):45-67.
    My aim in this paper is to discuss a metaphysical framework within which to understand “standard linguistic entities” (SLEs), such as words, sentences, phonemes, and other entities routinely employed in linguistic theory. In doing so, I aim to defuse certain kinds of skepticism, challenge convention-based accounts of SLEs, and present a series of distinctions for better understanding what the various accounts of SLEs do and do not accomplish.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   6 citations  
  11. History and the critique of social concepts.Brian Epstein - 2010 - Philosophy of the Social Sciences 40 (1):3-29.
    Many theorists, including Nietzsche, Adorno, and Foucault, have regarded genealogy as an important technique for social criticism. But it has been unclear how genealogy can go beyond the accomplishments of other, more mundane, critical methods. I propose a new approach to understanding the critical potential of history. I argue that theorists have been misled by the assumption that if a claim is deserving of criticism, it is because the claim is false. Turning to the criticism of concepts rather than criticism (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   7 citations  
  12. Biko on non-white and black: improving social reality.Brian Epstein - 2018 - In George Hull (ed.), Debating African Philosophy: Perspectives on Identity, Decolonial Ethics and Comparative Philosophy. New York: Routledge. pp. 97-117.
    This paper examines Steve Biko’s distinction between black and non-white as a project in the “amelioration” of social concepts and categories. Biko himself—it has been persuasively argued by Mabogo More and Lewis Gordon—writes in the tradition of existential phenomenology. More and Gordon explore Biko’s continuity with Frantz Fanon, and in this paper I draw on their interpretations, attempting to complement and elaborate on these continuities. I also, however, attempt to show how Biko moves beyond Fanon in crucial ways, solving problems (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  13. When local models fail.Brian Epstein - 2008 - Philosophy of the Social Sciences 38 (1):3-24.
    Models treating the simple properties of social groups have a common shortcoming. Typically, they focus on the local properties of group members and the features of the world with which group members interact. I consider economic models of bureaucratic corruption, to show that (a) simple properties of groups are often constituted by the properties of the wider population, and (b) even sophisticated models are commonly inadequate to account for many simple social properties. Adequate models and social policies must treat certain (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   4 citations  
  14. Why macroeconomics does not supervene on microeconomics.Brian Epstein - 2014 - Journal of Economic Methodology 21 (1):3-18.
    In recent years, the project of providing microeconomic foundations for macroeconomics has taken on new urgency. Some philosophers and economists have challenged the project, both for the way economists actually approach microfoundations and for more general anti-reductionist reasons. Reductionists and anti-reductionists alike, however, have taken it to be trivial that the macroeconomic facts are exhaustively determined by microeconomic ones. In this paper, I challenge this supposed triviality. I argue that macroeconomic properties do not even globally supervene on microeconomic ones. This (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   3 citations  
  15. The realpolitik of reference.Brian Epstein - 2008 - Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 89 (1):1–20.
    What are the conditions for fixing the reference of a proper name? Debate on this point has recently been rekindled by Scott Soames, Robin Jeshion, and others. In this paper, I sketch a new pragmatic approach to the justification of reference-fixing procedures, in opposition to accounts that insist on an invariant set of conditions for fixing reference across environments and linguistic communities. Comparing reference to other relations whose instances are introduced through "initiation" procedures, I outline a picture in which the (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   3 citations  
  16. (1 other version)The Internal and the External in Linguistic Explanation.Brian Epstein - 2008 - Croatian Journal of Philosophy 8 (22):77-111.
    Chomsky and others have denied the relevance of external linguistic entities, such as E-languages, to linguistic explanation, and have questioned their coherence altogether. I discuss a new approach to understanding the nature of linguistic entities, focusing in particular on making sense of the varieties of kinds of “words” that are employed in linguistic theorizing. This treatment of linguistic entities in general is applied to constructing an understanding of external linguistic entities.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  17. The Diviner and the Scientist: Revisiting the Question of Alternative Standards of Rationality.Brian Epstein - 2010 - Journal of the American Academy of Religion 78 (4):1048-1086.
    Are the standards of reasoning and rationality in divination, religious practice, and textual exegesis different from those in the sciences? Can there be different standards of reasoning and rationality at all? The intense “rationality debate” of the 1960s, 70s, and 80s focused on these questions and the related problems of relativism across cultures and systems of practice. Although philosophers were at the center of these debates at the time, they may appear to have abandoned the question in recent years. On (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  18. Sortals and criteria of identity.Brian Epstein - 2012 - Analysis 72 (3):474-478.
    In a recent article, Harold Noonan argues that application conditions and criteria of identity are not distinct from one another. This seems to threaten the standard approach to distinguishing sortals from adjectival terms. I propose that his observation, while correct, does not have this consequence. I present a simple scheme for distinguishing sortals from adjectival terms. I also propose an amended version of the standard canonical form of criteria of identity.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  19. Review of Millikan, Ruth Garrett, Language: A Biological Model[REVIEW]Brian Epstein - 2006 - Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2006 (5).
    Ruth Mil­likan is one of the most inter­est­ing and influ­en­tial philoso­phers alive. Her work is also hard to pen­e­trate. In this review, I try to present and assess her work on the nature of lan­guage, which is col­lected in this anthol­ogy. I also crit­i­cize her analy­sis of “nat­ural con­ven­tion” as well as her dis­cus­sion of illo­cu­tion­ary acts.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  20. Review of Creations of the Mind, ed. Margolis and Laurence. [REVIEW]Brian Epstein - 2012 - Mind 121 (481):200-204.
    This fascinating collection on artifacts brings together seven papers by philosophers with nine by psychologists, biologists, and an archaeologist. The psychological papers include two excellent discussions of empirical work on the mental representation of artifact concepts – an assessment by Malt and Sloman of a large variety of studies on the conflicting ways we classify artifacts and extend our applications of artifact categories to new cases, and a review by Mahon and Caramazza of data from semantically impaired patients and from (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  21. Etic Theorizing Unanchored.Michael J. Raven - forthcoming - Journal of Social Ontology.
    Etic theorizing uses the theorist’s social notions to theorize about their subject. This theorist may claim that Genghis Khan was a war criminal even though his actions predate the enactment of the Geneva Conventions. Brian Epstein considers a modal etic theorist who claims that Genghis Khan would have been a war criminal even if the Geneva Conventions were never enacted. Epstein argues that this has metaphysical import: it requires postulating a novel metaphysical notion of “anchoring”. Drawing from (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  22.  36
    Large language models belong in our social ontology.Syed AbuMusab - 2024 - In Anna Strasser (ed.), Anna's AI Anthology. How to live with smart machines? Berlin: Xenomoi Verlag.
    The recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) and their deployment in social settings prompt an important philosophical question: are LLMs social agents? This question finds its roots in the broader exploration of what engenders sociality. Since AI systems like chatbots, carebots, and sexbots are expanding the pre-theoretical boundaries of our social ontology, philosophers have two options. One is to deny LLMs membership in our social ontology on theoretical grounds by claiming something along the lines that only organic or X-type (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  23. In defense of the armchair: Against empirical arguments in the philosophy of perception.Peter Fisher Epstein - 2022 - Noûs 57 (4):784-814.
    A recurring theme dominates recent philosophical debates about the nature of conscious perception: naïve realism’s opponents claim that the view is directly contradicted by empirical science. I argue that, despite their current popularity, empirical arguments against naïve realism are fundamentally flawed. The non-empirical premises needed to get from empirical scientific findings to substantive philosophical conclusions are ones the naïve realist is known to reject. Even granting the contentious premises, the empirical findings do not undermine the theory, given its overall philosophical (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   3 citations  
  24. The Fine-Tuning Argument and the Requirement of Total Evidence.Peter Fisher Epstein - 2017 - Philosophy of Science 84 (4):639-658.
    According to the Fine-Tuning Argument, the existence of life in our universe confirms the Multiverse Hypothesis. A standard objection to FTA is that it violates the Requirement of Total Evidence. I argue that RTE should be rejected in favor of the Predesignation Requirement, according to which, in assessing the outcome of a probabilistic process, we should only use evidence characterizable in a manner available before observing the outcome. This produces the right verdicts in some simple cases in which RTE leads (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   8 citations  
  25. Gestalt psychology and the philosophy of mind.William Epstein & Gary Hatfield - 1994 - Philosophical Psychology 7 (2):163-181.
    The Gestalt psychologists adopted a set of positions on mind-body issues that seem like an odd mix. They sought to combine a version of naturalism and physiological reductionism with an insistence on the reality of the phenomenal and the attribution of meanings to objects as natural characteristics. After reviewing basic positions in contemporary philosophy of mind, we examine the Gestalt position, characterizing it m terms of phenomenal realism and programmatic reductionism. We then distinguish Gestalt philosophy of mind from instrumentalism and (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   16 citations  
  26. The outlier paradox: The role of iterative ensemble coding in discounting outliers.Michael Epstein, Jake Quilty-Dunn, Eric Mandelbaum & Tatiana Emmanouil - forthcoming - Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance 1.
    Ensemble perception—the encoding of objects by their group properties—is known to be resistant to outlier noise. However, this resistance is somewhat paradoxical: how can the visual system determine which stimuli are outliers without already having derived statistical properties of the ensemble? A simple solution would be that ensemble perception is not a simple, one-step process; instead, outliers are detected through iterative computations that identify items with high deviance from the mean and reduce their weight in the representation over time. Here (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  27. Experimental Philosophical Bioethics and Normative Inference.Brian D. Earp, Jonathan Lewis, Vilius Dranseika & Ivar R. Hannikainen - 2021 - Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics 42 (3-4):91-111.
    This paper explores an emerging sub-field of both empirical bioethics and experimental philosophy, which has been called “experimental philosophical bioethics” (bioxphi). As an empirical discipline, bioxphi adopts the methods of experimental moral psychology and cognitive science; it does so to make sense of the eliciting factors and underlying cognitive processes that shape people’s moral judgments, particularly about real-world matters of bioethical concern. Yet, as a normative discipline situated within the broader field of bioethics, it also aims to contribute to substantive (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   26 citations  
  28. Multidimensional Concepts and Disparate Scale Types.Brian Hedden & Jacob M. Nebel - forthcoming - Philosophical Review.
    Multidimensional concepts are everywhere, and they are important. Examples include moral value, welfare, scientific confirmation, democracy, and biodiversity. How, if at all, can we aggregate the underlying dimensions of a multidimensional concept F to yield verdicts about which things are Fer than which overall? Social choice theory can be used to model and investigate this aggregation problem. Here, we focus on a particularly thorny problem made salient by this social choice-theoretic framework: the underlying dimensions of a given concept might be (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  29. On statistical criteria of algorithmic fairness.Brian Hedden - 2021 - Philosophy and Public Affairs 49 (2):209-231.
    Predictive algorithms are playing an increasingly prominent role in society, being used to predict recidivism, loan repayment, job performance, and so on. With this increasing influence has come an increasing concern with the ways in which they might be unfair or biased against individuals in virtue of their race, gender, or, more generally, their group membership. Many purported criteria of algorithmic fairness concern statistical relationships between the algorithm’s predictions and the actual outcomes, for instance requiring that the rate of false (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   36 citations  
  30. За игрой в карты с чертиком Визинга.Brian Rabern & Landon Rabern - 2023 - Kvant 2023 (10):2-6.
    We analyze a solitaire game in which a demon rearranges some cards after each move. The graph edge coloring theorems of K˝onig (1931) and Vizing (1964) follow from the winning strategies developed.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  31. (1 other version)Does MITE Make Right?: On Decision-Making under Normative Uncertainty.Brian Hedden - 2016 - Oxford Studies in Metaethics 11:102-128.
    We typically have to act under uncertainty. We can be uncertain about the relevant descriptive facts, but also about the relevant normative facts. However, the search for a theory of decision-making under normative uncertainty is doomed to failure. First, the most natural proposal for what to do given normative uncertainty faces two devastating problems. Second, the motivations for wanting a theory of what to do given descriptive uncertainty do not carry over to normative uncertainty. Descriptive facts may be inaccessible even (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   44 citations  
  32. Deepfake detection by human crowds, machines, and machine-informed crowds.Matthew Groh, Ziv Epstein, Chaz Firestone & Rosalind Picard - 2022 - Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 119 (1):e2110013119.
    The recent emergence of machine-manipulated media raises an important societal question: How can we know whether a video that we watch is real or fake? In two online studies with 15,016 participants, we present authentic videos and deepfakes and ask participants to identify which is which. We compare the performance of ordinary human observers with the leading computer vision deepfake detection model and find them similarly accurate, while making different kinds of mistakes. Together, participants with access to the model’s prediction (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   3 citations  
  33. Racial Justice Requires Ending the War on Drugs.Brian D. Earp, Jonathan Lewis, Carl L. Hart & Walter Veit - 2021 - American Journal of Bioethics 21 (4):4-19.
    Historically, laws and policies to criminalize drug use or possession were rooted in explicit racism, and they continue to wreak havoc on certain racialized communities. We are a group of bioethicists, drug experts, legal scholars, criminal justice researchers, sociologists, psychologists, and other allied professionals who have come together in support of a policy proposal that is evidence-based and ethically recommended. We call for the immediate decriminalization of all so-called recreational drugs and, ultimately, for their timely and appropriate legal regulation. We (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   26 citations  
  34. Can we do without pragmatic encroachment.Brian Weatherson - 2005 - Philosophical Perspectives 19 (1):417–443.
    I consider the problem of how to derive what an agent believes from their credence function and utility function. I argue the best solution of this problem is pragmatic, i.e. it is sensitive to the kinds of choices actually facing the agent. I further argue that this explains why our notion of justified belief appears to be pragmatic, as is argued e.g. by Fantl and McGrath. The notion of epistemic justification is not really a pragmatic notion, but it is being (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   201 citations  
  35. Tree-ring semantics.Brian Rabern - manuscript
    Our aim here is to lay the groundwork for formal tree-ring analysis combining data from dendrochronology with formal techniques from semantics. We will present the basic syntax of, and basic compositional semantics of tree-ring structures.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  36. Dimensions of Value.Brian Hedden & Daniel Muñoz - 2024 - Noûs 58 (2):291-305.
    Value pluralists believe in multiple dimensions of value. What does betterness along a dimension have to do with being better overall? Any systematic answer begins with the Strong Pareto principle: one thing is overall better than another if it is better along one dimension and at least as good along all others. We defend Strong Pareto from recent counterexamples and use our discussion to develop a novel view of dimensions of value, one which puts Strong Pareto on firmer footing. We (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   7 citations  
  37. Pure Quotation in Linguistic Context.Brian Rabern - 2023 - Journal of Philosophical Logic 52 (2):393-413.
    A common framing has it that any adequate treatment of quotation has to abandon one of the following three principles: (i) The quoted expression is a syntactic constituent of the quote phrase; (ii) If two expressions are derived by applying the same syntactic rule to a sequence of synonymous expressions, then they are synonymous; (iii) The language contains synonymous but distinct expressions. In the following, a formal syntax and semantics will be provided for a quotational language which adheres to all (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  38. Intellectual Skill and the Rylean Regress.Brian Weatherson - 2017 - Philosophical Quarterly 67 (267):370-386.
    Intelligent activity requires the use of various intellectual skills. While these skills are connected to knowledge, they should not be identified with knowledge. There are realistic examples where the skills in question come apart from knowledge. That is, there are realistic cases of knowledge without skill, and of skill without knowledge. Whether a person is intelligent depends, in part, on whether they have these skills. Whether a particular action is intelligent depends, in part, on whether it was produced by an (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   29 citations  
  39. Counterfactual Decision Theory.Brian Hedden - 2023 - Mind 132 (527):730-761.
    I defend counterfactual decision theory, which says that you should evaluate an action in terms of which outcomes would likely obtain were you to perform it. Counterfactual decision theory has traditionally been subsumed under causal decision theory as a particular formulation of the latter. This is a mistake. Counterfactual decision theory is importantly different from, and superior to, causal decision theory, properly so called. Causation and counterfactuals come apart in three kinds of cases. In cases of overdetermination, an action can (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   4 citations  
  40. On Becoming Fearful Quickly: A Reinterpretation of Aristotle's Somatic Model of Socratean Akrasia.Brian Lightbody - 2023 - Journal of Ancient Philosophy 17 (2):134-161.
    The Protagoras is the touchstone of Socrates’ moral intellectualist stance. The position in a nutshell stipulates that the proper reevaluation of a desire is enough to neutralize it.[1] The implication of this position is that akrasia or weakness of will is not the result of desire (or fear for that matter) overpowering reason but is due to ignorance. -/- Socrates’ eliminativist position on weakness of will, however, flies in the face of the common-sense experience regarding akratic action and thus Aristotle (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  41. (Almost) all evidence is higher-order evidence.Brian Hedden & Kevin Dorst - 2022 - Analysis 82 (3):417-425.
    Higher-order evidence is evidence about what is rational to think in light of your evidence. Many have argued that it is special – falling into its own evidential category, or leading to deviations from standard rational norms. But it is not. Given standard assumptions, almost all evidence is higher-order evidence.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  42. Moral Uncertainty and Its Consequences.Brian Weatherson - 2002 - Mind 111 (443):693-696.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   56 citations  
  43. Brian O’Connor. (2022). El legado filosófico de Theodor W. Adorno (Trad. Leandro Sánchez Marín).O'Connor Brian & Sánchez Marín Leandro - 2022 - Revista Filosofía (UIS) 21 (2):293-303.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  44. What good are counterexamples?Brian Weatherson - 2003 - Philosophical Studies 115 (1):1-31.
    Intuitively, Gettier cases are instances of justified true beliefs that are not cases of knowledge. Should we therefore conclude that knowledge is not justified true belief? Only if we have reason to trust intuition here. But intuitions are unreliable in a wide range of cases. And it can be argued that the Gettier intuitions have a greater resemblance to unreliable intuitions than to reliable intuitions. Whats distinctive about the faulty intuitions, I argue, is that respecting them would mean abandoning a (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   188 citations  
  45. Disagreements, Philosophical and Otherwise.Brian Weatherson - 2013 - In David Phiroze Christensen & Jennifer Lackey (eds.), The Epistemology of Disagreement: New Essays. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 54.
    The Equal Weight View of disagreement says that if an agent sees that an epistemic peer disagrees with her about p, the agent should change her credence in p to half way between her initial credence, and the peer’s credence. But it is hard to believe the Equal Weight View for a surprising reason; not everyone believes it. And that means that if one did believe it, one would be required to lower one’s belief in it in light of this (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   43 citations  
  46. Luminous margins.Brian Weatherson - 2004 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 82 (3):373 – 383.
    Timothy Williamson has recently argued that few mental states are luminous , meaning that to be in that state is to be in a position to know that you are in the state. His argument rests on the plausible principle that beliefs only count as knowledge if they are safely true. That is, any belief that could easily have been false is not a piece of knowledge. I argue that the form of the safety rule Williamson uses is inappropriate, and (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   43 citations  
  47. The Sensory Core and the Medieval Foundations of Early Modern Perceptual Theory.Gary Hatfield & William Epstein - 1979 - Isis 70 (3):363-384.
    This article seeks the origin, in the theories of Ibn al-Haytham (Alhazen), Descartes, and Berkeley, of two-stage theories of spatial perception, which hold that visual perception involves both an immediate representation of the proximal stimulus in a two-dimensional ‘‘sensory core’’ and also a subsequent perception of the three dimensional world. The works of Ibn al-Haytham, Descartes, and Berkeley already frame the major theoretical options that guided visual theory into the twentieth century. The field of visual perception was the first area (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   52 citations  
  48. Consequentialism and Collective Action.Brian Hedden - 2020 - Ethics 130 (4):530-554.
    Many consequentialists argue that you ought to do your part in collective action problems like climate change mitigation and ending factory farming because (i) all such problems are triggering cases, in which there is a threshold number of people such that the outcome will be worse if at least that many people act in a given way than if fewer do, and (ii) doing your part in a triggering case maximises expected value. I show that both (i) and (ii) are (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   18 citations  
  49. Deontology and Descartes’s Demon.Brian Weatherson - 2008 - Journal of Philosophy 105 (9):540-569.
    In his Principles of Philosophy, Descartes says, Finally, it is so manifest that we possess a free will, capable of giving or withholding its assent, that this truth must be reckoned among the first and most common notions which are born with us.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   103 citations  
  50. Running risks morally.Brian Weatherson - 2014 - Philosophical Studies 167 (1):141-163.
    I defend normative externalism from the objection that it cannot account for the wrongfulness of moral recklessness. The defence is fairly simple—there is no wrong of moral recklessness. There is an intuitive argument by analogy that there should be a wrong of moral recklessness, and the bulk of the paper consists of a response to this analogy. A central part of my response is that if people were motivated to avoid moral recklessness, they would have to have an unpleasant sort (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   89 citations  
1 — 50 / 635