I submit that epistemic progress in key areas of contemporary academic philosophy has been compromised by politically correct ideology. First, guided by an evolutionary account of ideology, results from social and cognitive psychology and formal philosophical methods, I expose evidence for political bias in contemporary Western academia and sketch a formalization for the contents of beliefs from the PC worldview taken to be of core importance, the theory of social oppression and the thesis of anthropological mental egalitarianism. Then, aided by (...) discussions from contemporary epistemology on epistemic values, I model the problem of epistemic appraisal using the frameworks of multi-objective optimization theory and multi-criteria decision analysis and apply it to politically correct philosophy. I conclude that philosophy guided by politically correct values is bound to produce constructs that are less truth-conducive and that spurious values which are ideologically motivated should be abandoned. Objections to my framework stemming from contextual empiricism, the feminine voice in ethics and political philosophy are considered. I conclude by prescribing the epistemic value of empirical adequacy, the contextual value of political diversity and the moral virtue of moral courage to reverse unwarranted trends in academic philosophy due to PC ideology. (shrink)

Algebraic theories for extensive measurement are traditionally framed in terms of a binary relation $\lesssim $ and a concatenation (x,y)→ xy. For situations in which the data is "noisy," it is proposed here to consider each expression $y\lesssim x$ as symbolizing an event in a probability space. Denoting P(x,y) the probability of such an event, two theories are discussed corresponding to the two representing relations: p(x,y)=F[m(x)-m(y)], p(x,y)=F[m(x)/m(y)] with m(xy)=m(x)+m(y). Axiomatic analyses are given, and representation theorems are proven in detail.

In this paper I examine Field’s account of the applicability of mathematics from a measurementtheoretic perspective. Within this context, I object to Field’s instrumentalism, arguing that it depends on an incomplete analysis of applicability. I show in particular that, once the missing piece of analysis is provided, the role played by numerical entities in basic empirical theories must be revised: such revision implies that instrumentalism should be rejected and mathematical entities be regarded not merely as useful tools but also as (...) conceptual schemata by means of which we can articulate our understanding of experience. (shrink)