The popularity of conspiracy theories poses a clear challenge for contemporary liberal democracies. Conspiracy theories undermine rational debate, spread dangerous falsehoods and threaten social cohesion. However, any possible public policy response, which would try to contain their spread, needs to respect the liberal commitment to protect pluralism and free speech. A successful justification of such a policy must therefore: 1) clearly identify the problematic class of conspiracy theories; and 2) clarify the grounds on which the state is justified in acting (...) against them. This article argues that the prevailing epistemic approaches to conspiracy theorizing cannot fulfil these criteria. Defining conspiracy theories by their flaws in reasoning, questionable coherence or factual mistakes can neither sharply distinguish problematic conspiracy theories from other, non-problematic worldviews nor justify state action. Thus, we propose to understand conspiracy theories through their ethical unreasonableness. We hold that containment of conspiracy theories is justifiable insofar as they undermine the liberal-democratic ideals of mutual respect, freedom and equality. We then show that such ‘ethical’ criteria for conspiracy theories can be sufficiently robust and clear-cut so that they can serve as a useful guide for public policy. (shrink)

The popularity of conspiracy theories poses a clear challenge for contemporary liberal democracies. Conspiracy theories undermine rational debate, spread dangerous falsehoods and threaten social co...

The actual or potential epistemic vices of a given discipline or field of study are its disciplinary vices. This paper identifies three actual or potential disciplinary vices of vice epistemology. Vice epistemology explains people's epistemic misconduct by reference to their supposed epistemic vices. Such vice explanations are contrasted with attempts to achieve Verstehen of people's epistemic conduct and understand it from their point of view. Although vice explanations do not preclude Verstehen, vice epistemology is in danger of overlooking alternatives to (...) its preferred mode of explanation. In some cases, Verstehen calls into question the assumption that a person is guilty of epistemic misconduct. Vice explanations also risk attaching insufficient weight to politico‐strategic factors in the explanation of political action. Care needs to be taken by vice epistemologists to avoid intellectual myopia, political naivety, and overconfidence in attributing vices. (shrink)

This paper addresses the following three claims that Frankfurt makes about the concept of bullshit:1. Bullshit requires the intention to deceive others.2. Bullshit does not constitute lying.3. The essence of bullshit is lack of concern with the truth of what one says.I offer counterexamples to all three claims. By way of defending my counterexamples, I examine Cohen’s distinction between bullshiting and bullshit and argue that my examples are indeed cases of bullshiting that Frankfurt’s analysis is intended to cover. My examples (...) of bullshitters who are very concerned to say only things that are true show that Frankfurt is mistaken in claiming that the “essence” of bullshit is lack of concern with the truth of what one says. (shrink)

This paper discusses the virtue epistemology literature on epistemic emotions and challenges the individualist, unworldly account of epistemic emotions. It argues that epistemic emotions can be truth-motivating if embedded in co-inquiry epistemic cultures, namely virtuous epistemic cultures that valorise participatory processes of inquiry as truth-conducive. Co-inquiry epistemic cultures are seen as playing a constitutive role in shaping, developing, and regulating epistemic emotions. Using key references to classical Pragmatism, the paper describes the bridge between epistemic emotions and co-inquiry culture in terms (...) of habits of co-inquiry that act as the scaffolding of epistemic emotions. The result is a context-sensitive and practice-oriented approach to epistemic emotions that conceives of those emotions as being shaped by co-inquiry epistemic cultures. (shrink)

In this paper I discuss the ethical justifiability of the limitation of freedom of movement, in particular of the ban on running outdoors, enforced in Italy as a response to the COVID-19 outbreak in the spring of 2020. I argue that through the lens of public health ethics literature, the ban on running falls short of the criterion of proportionality that public health ethics scholars and international guidelines for the ethical management of infectious disease outbreak recommend for any measure that (...) restricts essential individual freedoms, such as the freedom of movement. The public health ethics framework, however, falls short of explaining the widespread public support that the running ban has had in Italy. I discuss possible factors which could explain the public support for the ban in Italy. Finally, I raise the question of what societal implications the abandonment of the public health ethics framework based on proportionality might have. I conclude that if it is the case, as the history of pandemics teaches us, we will experience further waves of COVID-19 outbreaks, it becomes very important to raise these questions now, with an eye towards informing public health policies for the management of future COVID-19 outbreaks. This discussion should not become politicized along the lines of liberal pro-lockdown/conservative anti-lockdown. Instead, we should reflect on the trade-offs of lockdown policies according to a pluralist framework, in which COVID-19 related deaths are not the only possible value to pursue. (shrink)

Negotiating clinical knowledge: a field study of psychiatric nurses’ everyday communication Nursing practices at psychiatric hospitals have changed significantly over the last decades. In this paper, everyday nursing practices were interpreted in light of these institutional changes. The objective was to examine how mental health nurses’ production of clinical knowledge was influenced by the particular social relations on hospital wards. Empirical data stemming from an extended fieldwork at two Danish psychiatric hospital wards were interpreted using interactionistic theory and the metaphor: (...) ‘the game of clinical knowledge’. The results indicated that the nurses’ production of clinical knowledge was highly dependent on the individual nurses’ practical ability to participate in the game. Furthermore, the nurses colluded in their mutual communication to enable the collective display and sense of knowing that protected them against explicit signs of uncertainty about the clinic. The game of clinical knowledge influenced processes of clinical decision‐making among the nurses as the game added to a distorted widening of a ‘fictional distance’ between patients and the representations produced by the nurses. (shrink)

This article rejects the received view that Post-Truth is a new, unprecedented political phenomenon. By showing that Truth and Post-Truth share the same genesis, this article will submit the idea of a Consensus Theory of Post-Truth. Part 1 looks at the difference between Post-Truth, lies and bullshit. Part 2 suggests reasons behind the current preoccupation with Post-Truth. Part 3 focuses on Habermas’s influential consensus theory of truth to suggest that truth and Post-Truth have more in common than is generally assumed. (...) Part 4 puts forward the Consensus Theory of Post-Truth. Part 5 suggests three ways to emasculate the potentially destructive effect of Post-Truth on democratic society. (shrink)

After contrasting obscurantism with bullshit, we explore some ways in which obscurantism is typically justified by investigating a notorious test-case: defences of Lacanian psychoanalysis. Obscurantism abuses the reader's natural sense of curiosity and interpretive charity with the promise of deep and profound insights about a designated subject matter that is often vague or elusive. When the attempt to understand what the speaker means requires excessive hermeneutic efforts, interpreters are reluctant to halt their quest for meaning. We diagnose this as a (...) case of psychological loss aversion, in particular, the aversion to acknowledging that there was no hidden meaning after all, or that whatever meaning found was projected onto the text by the reader herself. (shrink)

The 35 commentaries cover a wide range of topics and take many different stances on the issues explored by the target article. We have organised our response to the commentaries around three central questions: Are Friston blankets just Pearl blankets? What ontological and metaphysical commitments are implied by the use of Friston blankets? What kind of explanatory work are Friston blankets capable of? We conclude our reply with a short critical reflection on the indiscriminate use of both Markov blankets and (...) the free energy principle. (shrink)

Recent AI ethics has focused on applying abstract principles downward to practice. This paper moves in the other direction. Ethical insights are generated from the lived experiences of AI-designers working on tangible human problems, and then cycled upward to influence theoretical debates surrounding these questions: 1) Should AI as trustworthy be sought through explainability, or accurate performance? 2) Should AI be considered trustworthy at all, or is reliability a preferable aim? 3) Should AI ethics be oriented toward establishing protections for (...) users, or toward catalyzing innovation? Specific answers are less significant than the larger demonstration that AI ethics is currently unbalanced toward theoretical principles, and will benefit from increased exposure to grounded practices and dilemmas. (shrink)

Many philosophers, following Williamson (The Philosophical Review 105(4): 489–523, 1996), Williamson (Knowledge and its Limits, Oxford, Oxford Univer- sity Press, 2000), subscribe to the constitutive rule account of assertion (CRAA). They hold that the activity of asserting is constituted by a single constitutive rule of assertion. However, in recent work, Maitra (in: Brown & Cappelen (ed). Assertion: new philosophical essays, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2011), Johnson (Acta Analytica 33(1): 51–67, 2018), and Kelp and Simion (Synthese 197(1): 125–137, 2020a), Kelp and (...) Simion (in: Goldberg (ed) The Oxford Handbook of Assertion, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2020b) aim to show that, for all the most popular versions of the constitutive rule of assertion proposed in the literature, asserting is not an activity constituted by a single constitutive rule and that therefore CRAA is very likely false. To reach this conclusion, they all present a version of what can be dubbed the engagement condition objection. That is, they each propose a necessary condition on engaging in rule-constituted activities. Then they argue that, for all the most popular versions of the constitutive rule of assertion proposed in the literature, one can make assertions without satisfying this condition. In response, I present a counterexample that shows that the proposed engagement conditions lead to coun- terintuitive results, and I propose an alternative that better captures our intuitions. Then I argue that this alternative engagement condition is compatible with all the most popular versions of the constitutive rule of assertion. (shrink)

Bioethicists often draw sharp distinctions between hope and states like denial, self-deception, and unrealistic optimism. But what, exactly, is the difference between hope and its more suspect cousins? One common way of drawing the distinction focuses on accuracy of belief about the desired outcome: Hope, though perhaps sometimes misplaced, does not involve inaccuracy in the way that these other states do. Because inaccurate beliefs are thought to compromise informed decision making, bioethicists have considered these states to be ones where intervention (...) is needed either to correct the person’s mental state or to persuade the person to behave differently, or even to deny the person certain options. In this article, we argue that it is difficult to determine whether a patient is really in denial, self-deceived, or unrealistically optimistic. Moreover, even when we are confident that beliefs are unrealistic, they are not always as harmful as critics contend. As a result, we need to be more permissive in our approach to patients who we believe are unrealistically optimistic, in denial, or self-deceived—that is, unless patients significantly misunderstand their situation and thus make decisions that are clearly bad for them, we should not intervene by trying to change their mental states or persuade them to behave differently, or by paternalistically denying them certain options. (shrink)

Opponents of abortion are commonly said to be inconsistent in their beliefs or actions, and to fail in their obligations to prevent the deaths of embryos and fetuses from causes other than induced...

The concept of lying is generally assumed to be closely related to the concept of assertion. However, the literature on lying has focused almost exclusively on lies expressed by unqualified assertions. Sometimes a speaker chooses to qualify her assertion by hedging, making her utterance a hedged declarative. This paper defends the thesis that lies can be expressed by untruthful hedged declaratives, and explores the implications of this thesis for the definition of lying. Many standard approaches to the definition of lying (...) allow lies to be expressed by untruthful hedged declaratives, which may explain why these cases have been ignored in the literature. However, untruthful hedged declaratives present a problem for a recently-proposed theory that analyzes lying in terms of the Knowledge Norm of Assertion. According to this theory, a necessary condition on lying is that in asserting that p, the speaker represents herself as knowing that p; however, in making an untruthful hedged declarative a speaker represents herself as having an epistemic attitude weaker than knowledge. The fact that such a theory fails to adequately explain untruthful hedged declaratives provides a reason to prefer alternative theories of lying. The discussion draws out some important observations about the concepts of lying, assertion, belief, and the relations between them. (shrink)

Why do people share or publicly engage with fake stories? Two possible answers come to mind: (a) people are deeply irrational and believe these stories to be true; or (b) they intend to deceive their audience. Both answers presuppose the idea that people put the stories forward as true. But I argue that in some cases, these outlandish (yet also very popular) stories function as signals of one's group membership. This signaling function can make better sense of why, despite their (...) unusual nature or lack of a factual basis, some of these stories are so widespread. (shrink)

Resumen En este artículo propongo un análisis crítico de varias tendencias filosóficas contrarias al uso de la noción de verdad en el ámbito epistemológico, especialmente la de Rorty. En particular, sostengo que la verdad es un concepto clave para el estudio del conocimiento, especialmente el científico, en cuanto toma una forma concisa en los procedimientos experimentales de carácter probatorio-empírico. Gracias a este enfoque, busco socavar varias tesis de los enfoques de la ‘posverdad’ por medio del uso de un conjunto de (...) procedimientos científicos de obtención de evidencias en varios campos vinculados a la disciplina práctica de la medicina.In thispaper, I present a critical analysis of several philosophical tendencies that go against the use of the notion of truth in epistemology, especially Rorty’s one. Particularly, I claim that truth is a key conceptfor the study of knowledge, especially the scientific knowledge, as it takes a concise form through the experimentalprocedures for eliciting evidences. With the help of this analysis, I seek to undermine some ‘post-truth’ theses by means of analyying some scientific procedures to get evidences in severalfields related to the practical discipline of medicine. (shrink)

In recent years, the post-truth phenomenon has dominated public and political discourse. This article offers a functional analysis of its mechanisms based on the category of narrative. After providing a brief definition of post-truth as a conceptual foundation, I trace the meaning of the term ‘narrative’ in the works of Jean-François Lyotard, focusing on the elusive category of small narrative. Utilizing terms and concepts of contemporary narrative theory, I propose a general definition of cultural narrative and reconceptualize Lyotard’s petit récit (...) as a particular case of this superordinate category. Drawing on Lyotard’s phrase linguistics as set out in The Differend, I develop the category of epistemic sphere to analyze Donald Trump’s MAGA movement as an example of post-truth politics, the rise of populism and the epistemic fragmentation of society. (shrink)

Recognizing that truth is socially constructed or that knowledge and power are related is hardly a novelty in the social sciences. In the twenty-first century, however, there appears to be a renewed concern regarding people’s relationship with the truth and the propensity for certain actors to undermine it. Organizations are highly implicated in this, given their central roles in knowledge management and production and their attempts to learn, although the entanglement of these epistemological issues with business ethics has not been (...) engaged as explicitly as it might be. Drawing on work from a virtue epistemology perspective, this paper outlines the idea of a set of epistemic vices permeating organizations, along with examples of unethical epistemic conduct by organizational actors. While existing organizational research has examined various epistemic virtues that make people and organizations effective and responsible epistemic agents, much less is known about the epistemic vices that make them ineffective and irresponsible ones. Accordingly, this paper introduces vice epistemology, a nascent but growing subfield of virtue epistemology which, to the best of our knowledge, has yet to be explicitly developed in terms of business ethics. The paper concludes by outlining a business ethics research agenda on epistemic vice, with implications for responding to epistemic vices and their illegitimacy in practice. (shrink)

An influential suggestion from David Lewis is that we should think of assertions in terms of how they affect the conversational score. This note outlines a way to model conversational scores in such a way that two assertoric effects are brought together: that to assert is to propose to add information to the common ground, and that to assert is to undertake commitments. Rather than being seen as rivals, they should be viewed as complementary descriptions of our practises of making (...) assertions. (shrink)

Fake news is a worrying phenomenon which is growing increasingly widespread, partly because of the ease with which it is disseminated online. Combating the spread of fake news requires a clear understanding of the nature of fake news. However, the use of the term in everyday language is heterogenous and has no fixed meaning. Despite increasing philosophical attention to the topic, there is no consensus on the correct definition of “fake news” within philosophy either. This paper aims to bring clarity (...) to the philosophical debate of fake news in two ways: Firstly, by providing an overview of existing philosophical definitions and secondly, by developing a new account of fake news. This paper will identify where there is agreement within the philosophical debate of definitions of “fake news” and isolate four key questions on which there is genuine disagreement. These concern the intentionality underlying fake news, its truth value, the question of whether fake news needs to reach a minimum audience, and the question of whether an account of fake news needs to be dynamic. By answering these four questions, I provide a novel account of defining “fake news”. This new definition hinges upon the fact that fake news has the function of being deliberately misleading about its own status as news. (shrink)

Although scholars have long known that entrepreneurship involves the interaction of countless individuals beyond the entrepreneur, traditional performance metrics are limited to capturing the economic value that is created for shareholders. Multiple scholars have suggested that it should be possible to develop a more complete assessment that is able to simultaneously capture both the economic and non-economic consequences of entrepreneurship that exist for the broader network of firm stakeholders. The purpose of this paper is to provide a more nuanced understanding (...) of entrepreneurial performance by operationalizing the concept of stakeholder capabilities. Building on concepts from stakeholder theory and the human development and capability approach in welfare economics, we argue that the pursuit of entrepreneurial opportunities can either create or destroy value for multiple stakeholders, and that this value is best conceived in terms of increases and decreases in individual capabilities. Approaching entrepreneurial performance from a stakeholder capabilities lens has implications for how we view entrepreneurs’ impact on society, what we mean by the creation and destruction of “value,” and how we define failure and success in entrepreneurship. (shrink)

I argue that popular understandings of white nationalist double speak strategies do not fully represent the practice of these strategies, and identify a linguistic tactic used by white nationalists that I call sugar-coating. Sugar-coating works by packing an otherwise unacceptable utterance together with some kind of reward, thereby promoting uptake. I contrast this with existing notions of double speak, such as figleaves (Saul 2017, 2021), dogwhistles (Haney-López 2014), and bullshit (Kenyon and Saul 2022). I argue that sugar-coating more accurately reflects (...) the practice of white nationalist recruitment rhetoric, as described in the Daily Stormer Style Guide. (shrink)

This book addresses how our revisionary practices account for relations between texts and how they are read. It offers an overarching philosophy of revision concerning works of fiction, fact, and faith, revealing unexpected insights about the philosophy of language, the metaphysics of fact and fiction, and the history and philosophy of science and religion. It will be of interest to a wide range of scholars and advanced students working in philosophy of language, metaphysics, philosophy of literature, literary theory and criticism, (...) and history and philosophy of science and religion. (shrink)

John Cook Wilson (1849–1915) was Wykeham Professor of Logic at New College, Oxford and the founder of ‘Oxford Realism’, a philosophical movement that flourished at Oxford during the first decades of the 20th century. Although trained as a classicist and a mathematician, his most important contribution was to the theory of knowledge, where he argued that knowledge is factive and not definable in terms of belief, and he criticized ‘hybrid’ and ‘externalist’ accounts. He also argued for direct realism in perception, (...) criticizing both empiricism and idealism, and argued for a moderate nominalist view of universals as being in rebus and only ‘apprehended’ by their particulars. His influence helped swaying Oxford away from idealism and, through figures such as H. A. Prichard, Gilbert Ryle, or J. L. Austin, his ideas were also to some extent at the origin of ‘moral intuitionism’ and ‘ordinary language philosophy’ which defined much of Oxford philosophy until the second half of the twentieth-century. Nevertheless, his name and legacy were all but forgotten for generations after World War II. Still, his views on knowledge are with us today, being in part at work in the writings of philosophers as diverse as John McDowell, Charles Travis, and Timothy Williamson. (shrink)

Twitter makes conversation into something like a game. It scores our communication, giving us vivid and quantified feedback, via Likes, Retweets, and Follower counts. But this gamification doesn’t just increase our motivation to communicate; it changes the very nature of the activity. Games are more satisfying than ordinary life precisely because game-goals are simpler, cleaner, and easier to apply. Twitter is thrilling precisely because its goals have been artificially clarified and narrowed. When we buy into Twitter’s gamification, then our values (...) shift from the complex and pluralistic values of communication, to the narrower quest for popularity and virality. Twitter’s gamification bears some resemblance with the phenomena of echo chambers and moral outrage porn. In all these phenomena, we are instrumentalizing our ends for hedonistic reasons. We have shifted our aims in an activity, not because the new aims are more valuable, but in exchange for extra pleasure. (shrink)

Politics abounds with bad language: lying and bullshitting, grandstanding and virtue signaling, code words and dogwhistles, and more. But why is there so much bad language in politics? And what, if anything, can we do about it? In this paper I show how these two questions are connected. Politics is full of bad language because existing social and political institutions are structured in such a way that the production of bad language becomes rational. In principle, by modifying these institutions we (...) can reduce the prevalence of bad language. However, as I show, such practical efforts are fraught with difficulties. After first outlining an account of bad language (Section 1), I examine the rationality of three different types of bad language: inaccurate language, insincere language, and unclear language (Section 2). Next, I discuss the possibility of implementing institutional reforms to improve the quality of political discourse (Section 3). However, I then outline and discuss two serious complications for institutional reforms—namely, they create risk of abuse, and they could preclude instances of seemingly bad language that, in fact, are socially beneficial (Section 4). I conclude with some thoughts about how to pursue institutional reform in an appropriately circumspect manner (Section 5). (shrink)

What words we use, and what meanings they have, is important. We shouldn't use slurs; we should use 'rape' to include spousal rape (for centuries we didn’t); we should have a word which picks out the sexual harassment suffered by people in the workplace and elsewhere (for centuries we didn’t). Sometimes we need to change the word-meaning pairs in circulation, either by getting rid of the pair completely (slurs), changing the meaning (as we did with 'rape'), or adding brand new (...) word-meaning pairs (as with 'sexual harassment'). A problem, though, is how to do this. One might worry that any attempt to change language in this way will lead to widespread miscommunication and confusion. I argue that this is indeed so, but that's a feature, not a bug of attempting to change word-meaning pairs. The miscommunications and confusion such changes cause can lead us, via a process I call transformative communicative disruption, to reflect on our language and its use, and this can be further, rather than hinder, our goal of improving language. (shrink)

In the philosophical literature on the definition of lying, the analysis is generally restricted to cases of flat-out belief. This chapter considers the complex phenomenon of lies involving partial beliefs – beliefs ranging from mere uncertainty to absolute certainty. The first section analyses lies uttered while holding a graded belief in the falsity of the assertion, and presents a revised insincerity condition, requiring that the liar believes the assertion to be more likely to be false than true. The second section (...) analyses assertions that express graded beliefs, exploring how mitigation and reinforcement can alter the insincerity conditions for lying. The last section considers the case of lies that attack certainty (knowledge-lies), understood as attempt to alter the hearer's graded beliefs. (shrink)

Heute gibt es kaum jemanden mehr, der nicht mit Fake News und Verschwörungstheorien in Berührung gekommen wäre. Mit dem globalen Aufstieg des modernen Populismus und besonders seit Donald Trumps US-Präsidentschaft konnten sie von obskuren Internetfo-ren und dem Rand der Gesellschaft weiter als je zuvor in die öffentliche Debatte vordringen. Mit der zunehmenden Nutzung sozialer Medien und Messenger-Apps wie Telegram oder WhatsApp findet scheinbares Wissen ungehindert Verbreitung und direkten Zugang zu den Smartphones und Köpfen der Menschen. Vor diesem Hintergrund ist es (...) nicht verwunderlich, dass Verschwörungstheorien und Fake News auch Einzug ins Klassenzimmer halten. Dabei stehen Lehrer*innen vor vielen offenen Fragen. Wie sind diese Behauptungen im Einzelnen zu bewerten? Was zeichnet Fake News und Verschwörungstheorien aus und was genau macht sie problematisch? Wie, selbst wenn sie klarerweise falsch und unbegründet sind, sollte damit im Klassenzimmer umgegangen werden? Sollte man sie offen diskutieren? Oder sollte man die Diskussion darüber unterbinden? Hier werden grundlegende und komplexe Fragen der freien Meinungsbildung und -äußerung berührt, zu denen Grundgesetz, Beamten- und Schulrecht nur begrenzt Auskunft geben. In diesem Beitrag wollen uns zuerst ein klares Bild davon machen, was Fake News und Verschwörungstheorien eigentlich sind, warum manche Menschen sie für wahr halten und was daran problematisch ist. Vor diesem Hintergrund soll anschließend die Frage diskutiert werden, wie aus demokratie- und bildungstheoretischer Sicht mit Fake News und Verschwörungstheorien im Unterricht umgegangen werden sollte. (shrink)

In diesem Open-Access-Sammelband setzen sich Autor*innen aus unterschiedlichsten Disziplinen mit der Auswirkung einer digitalisierten Öffentlichkeit für die Politische Bildung auseinander. Sie erörtern, wie sich die Formen digitaler politischer Kommunikation auswirken, wie der Politikunterricht mit der veränderten Ausgangslage umgehen könnte und welche Kompetenzen Schüler*innen benötigen, um in der digitalen Öffentlichkeit selbstbestimmt und -ermächtigt politisch teilzuhaben. Die Komplexität und die Interdependenzen digitaler Kommunikation verlangen nach einer multiperspektivischen und transdisziplinären Perspektive, der dieser Band verpflichtet ist.

Survey of different definitions of lying and deceiving, with an emphasis on the contemporary debate between Thomas Carson, Roy Sorensen, Don Fallis, Jennifer Saul, Paul Faulkner, Jennifer Lackey, David Simpson, Andreas Stokke, Jorg Meibauer, Seana Shiffrin, and James Mahon, among others, over whether lies always aim to deceive. Related questions include whether lies must be assertions, whether lies always breach trust, whether it is possible to lie without using spoken or written language, whether lies must always be false, whether lies (...) that are unsuccessful are still lies, and whether deception must aim at creating false beliefs as opposed to preventing people from acquiring true beliefs. (shrink)

This inaugural handbook documents the distinctive research field that utilizes history and philosophy in investigation of theoretical, curricular and pedagogical issues in the teaching of science and mathematics. It is contributed to by 130 researchers from 30 countries; it provides a logically structured, fully referenced guide to the ways in which science and mathematics education is, informed by the history and philosophy of these disciplines, as well as by the philosophy of education more generally. The first handbook to cover the (...) field, it lays down a much-needed marker of progress to date and provides a platform for informed and coherent future analysis and research of the subject. -/- The publication comes at a time of heightened worldwide concern over the standard of science and mathematics education, attended by fierce debate over how best to reform curricula and enliven student engagement in the subjects There is a growing recognition among educators and policy makers that the learning of science must dovetail with learning about science; this handbook is uniquely positioned as a locus for the discussion. -/- The handbook features sections on pedagogical, theoretical, national, and biographical research, setting the literature of each tradition in its historical context. Each chapter engages in an assessment of the strengths and weakness of the research addressed, and suggests potentially fruitful avenues of future research. A key element of the handbook’s broader analytical framework is its identification and examination of unnoticed philosophical assumptions in science and mathematics research. It reminds readers at a crucial juncture that there has been a long and rich tradition of historical and philosophical engagements with science and mathematics teaching, and that lessons can be learnt from these engagements for the resolution of current theoretical, curricular and pedagogical questions that face teachers and administrators. (shrink)

Contemporary epistemologists of education have raised concerns about the distorting effects of some of the processes and structures of contemporary academia on the epistemic practice and character of academic researchers. Such concerns have been articulated using the concept of epistemic corruption. In this paper, we lend credibility to these theoretically-motivated concerns using the example of the research impact agenda during the period 2012-2014. Interview data from UK and Australian academics confirms the impact agenda system, at its inception, facilitated the development (...) and exercise of epistemic vices. As well as vindicating theoretically-motivated claims about epistemic corruption, inclusion of empirical methods and material can help us put the concept to work in ongoing critical scrutiny of evolving forms of the research impact agenda. (shrink)

In his essay “The Human Prejudice” Bernard Williams presented a sophisticated defense of the moral relevance of the concept “human being”. Here I offer both an analysis of his essay and a defense of his conclusions against criticisms made by Julian Savulescu and Peter Singer. After a discussion of the structure of Williams’s argument, I focus on several complaints from Savulescu: that Williams underestimates the similarities between speciesism and racism or sexism, that Williams relies on a disputable internalism about reasons (...) to make his case, that Williams ignores the arbitrariness of species membership, and (a complaint also made by Singer) that Williams attacks a straw man in considering only negative utilitarianism when criticizing the idea of an Impartial Observer. I defend Williams against these charges and end with a brief discussion of how his alien invasion example illustrates the fundamentally different philosophical sensibility of Bernard Williams in comparison to critics like Savulescu and Singer. (shrink)

In the philosophical debate on lying, there has generally been agreement that either the speaker believes that his statement is false, or he believes that his statement is true. This article challenges this assumption, and argues that lying is a scalar phenomenon that allows for a number of intermediate cases – the most obvious being cases of uncertainty. The first section shows that lying can involve beliefs about graded truth values (fuzzy lies) and graded beliefs (graded-belief lies). It puts forward (...) a new definition to deal with these scalar parameters, that requires that the speaker asserts what he believes more likely to be false than true. The second section shows that statements are scalar in the same way beliefs are, and accounts for a further element of scalarity, illocutionary force. (shrink)

This thesis addresses philosophical problems concerning improper assertions. The first part considers the issue of defining lying: here, against a standard view, I argue that a lie need not intend to deceive the hearer. I define lying as an insincere assertion, and then resort to speech act theory to develop a detailed account of what an assertion is, and what can make it insincere. Even a sincere assertion, however, can be improper (e.g., it can be false, or unwarranted): in the (...) second part of the thesis, I consider these kinds of impropriety. An influential hypothesis maintains that proper assertions must meet a precise epistemic standard, and several philosophers have tried to identify this standard. After reviewing some difficulties for this approach, I provide an innovative solution to some known puzzles concerning the permissibility of false assertions. In my view, assertions purport to aim at truth, but they are not subject to a norm that requires speakers to assert a proposition only if it is true. (shrink)

In this thesis, I focus on two undervalued aspects of Nietzsche’s admiration of the ancient Greeks: the healthy psychology of the Greeks, and the origins of this health in Homeric poetry. I argue that Homer was a cultural physician for the ancient Greeks and is responsible for creating a new, healthy set of values through his epic poetry. In turn, these Homeric values brought Greece into its “tragic age”—a time during which Greek culture was “the highest authority for what we (...) may term cultural health”. Moreover, Homer’s success as a cultural physician comes from his ability to lie poetically lie. So, I also give an account of how Nietzsche thinks this kind of lying is psychologically possible through what I call Nietzschean dissimulation. (shrink)

L’objectivité permettrait d’assurer la supériorité de la science par rapport à d’autres modes de connaissance. Elle doit donc être défendue, surtout en cette « ère de post-vérité » où les « faits alternatifs » remplacent les faits avérés, en politique comme ailleurs. Or les attaques proviennent autant de l’extérieur que de l’intérieur de la sphère philosophique. Il convient donc de tenter d’opérer la réconciliation la plus large possible avec deux représentants de clans (très) opposés, Mario Bunge et Bruno Latour. Réinvestissant (...) les grandes conceptions de la notion d’objectivité, je propose ici trois chantiers pour cette réconciliation : la mise au rancart des conceptions naïves et parfois insincères de la science, la réévaluation des contextes de découverte et de justification, et celle de la distinction faits-valeurs. (shrink)

Ordinary Language Philosophy has largely fallen out of favour, and with it the belief in the primary importance of analyses of ordinary language for philosophical purposes. Still, in their various endeavours, philosophers not only from analytic but also from other backgrounds refer to the use and meaning of terms of interest in ordinary parlance. In doing so, they most commonly appeal to their own linguistic intuitions. Often, the appeal to individual intuitions is supplemented by reference to dictionaries. In recent times, (...) Internet search engine queries for expressions of interest have become quite popular. Apparently, philosophers attempt to surpass the limits of their own linguistic intuitions by appealing to experts or to factual uses of language. I argue that this attempt is commendable but that its execution is wanting. Instead of appealing to dictionaries or Internet queries, philosophers should employ computer-based linguistic corpora in order to confirm or falsify hypotheses about the factual use of language. This approach also has some advantages over methods employed by experimental philosophers. If the importance of ordinary language is stressed, the use of linguistic corpora is hardly avoidable. (shrink)

In this paper, a particular case of deceptive use of images – namely, misattributions – will be taken in consideration. An explicitly wrong attribution (“This is a picture of the event X”, this not being the case) is obviously a lie or a mistaken description. But there are less straightforward and more insidious cases in which a false attribution is held to be acceptable, in particular when pictures are also used in their exemplary, general meaning, opposed to their indexical function (...) in referring to a specific event. In fact, the boundary between referential use and symbolic-exemplificative use is not always clear-cut, and it often becomes the subject of ideological dispute. The main point that this paper would like to do is that in some circumstances there is a deep-seated belief that images that are clearly misattributed could still be legitimately used to refer to the fact, even if this is not the case. This twisted epistemological stance, that I will summarize under the oxymoronic concept of “emblematic evidence”, is both the product of political and tribal polarization in the ideological debate, and the result of a shift in our understanding of what photographic images should do. (shrink)

In this essay I analyze a passage from Ludwig Wittgenstein’s On Certainty. This excerpt contains the expression “O, rubbish!” (Ach Unsinn), which I consider to be closely related to the notions of “bullshit” developed by Harry Frankfurt and Gerald A. Cohen. The relevance of this essay is illustrated with lively examples, both related to contemporary society and identified by Wittgenstein about 70 years ago. The paper is organized in six sections containing 1) an introduction to the topic, 2) an explanation (...) of “bullshit” as found in the works of Frankfurt and Cohen, 3) an explanation of Wittgenstein’s work on certainty and propositions beyond doubt, 4) an identification of reasonable and unreasonable doubt and their connection to “bullshit”, 5) an explanation of the different kinds of “bullshit” with the intention of mapping them in relation to each other, and 6) a summarizing conclusion. The main purpose of this paper is to expound on Wittgenstein’s views on “bullshit” and relate them to contemporary philosophy of nonsense. (shrink)

Two varieties of constructivism are distinguished. In part 1, the psychological or “radical” constructivism of von Glasersfeld is discussed. Despite its dominant influence in science education, radical constructivism has been controversial, with challenges to its principles and practices. In part 2, social constructivism is discussed in the sociology of scientific knowledge. Social constructivism has not been primarily concerned with education but has the most direct consequences in view of its challenge to the most fundamental, traditional assumptions in the philosophy of (...) science and to the practice of science itself. (shrink)