Should we believe our controversial philosophical views? Recently, several authors have argued from broadly conciliationist premises that we should not. If they are right, we philosophers face a dilemma: If we believe our views, we are irrational. If we do not, we are not sincere in holding them. This paper offers a way out, proposing an attitude we can rationally take toward our views that can support sincerity of the appropriate sort. We should arrive at our views via a certain (...) sort of ‘insulated’ reasoning – that is, reasoning that involves setting aside certain higher-order worries, such as those provided by disagreement – when we investigate philosophical questions. (shrink)

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 (...) simple, systematic and largely successful theory in favour of a complicated, disjunctive and idiosyncratic theory. So maybe respecting the Gettier intuitions was the wrong reaction, we should instead have been explaining why we are all so easily misled by these kinds of cases. (shrink)

You have higher-order uncertainty iff you are uncertain of what opinions you should have. I defend three claims about it. First, the higher-order evidence debate can be helpfully reframed in terms of higher-order uncertainty. The central question becomes how your first- and higher-order opinions should relate—a precise question that can be embedded within a general, tractable framework. Second, this question is nontrivial. Rational higher-order uncertainty is pervasive, and lies at the foundations of the epistemology of disagreement. Third, the answer is (...) not obvious. The Enkratic Intuition---that your first-order opinions must “line up” with your higher-order opinions---is incorrect; epistemic akrasia can be rational. If all this is right, then it leaves us without answers---but with a clear picture of the question, and a fruitful strategy for pursuing it. (shrink)

What are hallucinations? A common view in the philosophical literature is that hallucinations are degenerate kinds of perceptual experience. I argue instead that hallucinations are degenerate kinds of sensory imagination. As well as providing a good account of many actual cases of hallucination, the view that hallucination is a kind of imagination represents a promising account of hallucination from the perspective of a disjunctivist theory of perception like naïve realism. This is because it provides a way of giving a positive (...) characterisation of hallucination—rather than characterising hallucinations in negative, relational, terms as mental events that are subjectively indistinguishable from veridical perceptual experiences. (shrink)

Structural requirements of rationality prohibit various things, like having inconsistent combinations of attitudes, having means-end incoherent combinations of attitudes, and so on. But what is the distinctive feature of structural requirements of rationality? And do we fall under an obligation to be structurally rational? These issues have been at the heart of significant debates over the past fifteen years. Some philosophers have recently argued that we can unify the structural requirements of rationality by analyzing what is constitutive of our attitudes (...) (Lee, 2020; Worsnip, 2018a). It has also been suggested that, in the course of good first-personal deliberation, agents should treat structurally irrational combinations of attitudes as off-limits (Worsnip, 2021). In this paper, I raise a worry for these two theses concerning structural rationality. Roughly, I argue that some imperfect epistemic agents (like us) can be disposed to have structurally irrational combinations of attitudes. Also, when these imperfect agents deliberate, they should not treat structurally irrational combinations of attitudes as off-limits. Given our imperfections, being structurally irrational can very well be the best option we have. More generally, these observations reveal that structural rationality should not always be theorized independently from more “substantive” norms, like responsiveness to reasons or expected value optimization. (shrink)

We argue that philosophers ought to distinguish epistemic decision theory and epistemology, in just the way ordinary decision theory is distinguished from ethics. Once one does this, the internalist arguments that motivate much of epistemic decision theory make sense, given specific interpretations of the formalism. Making this distinction also causes trouble for the principle called Propriety, which says, roughly, that the only acceptable epistemic utility functions make probabilistically coherent credence functions immodest. We cast doubt on this requirement, but then argue (...) that epistemic decision theorists should never have wanted such a strong principle in any case. (shrink)

It has been argued that an epistemically rational agent’s evidence is subjectively mediated through some rational epistemic standards, and that there are incompatible but equally rational epistemic standards available to agents. This supports Permissiveness, the view according to which one or multiple fully rational agents are permitted to take distinct incompatible doxastic attitudes towards P (relative to a body of evidence). In this paper, I argue that the above claims entail the existence of a unique and more reliable epistemic standard. (...) My strategy relies on Condorcet’s Jury Theorem. This gives rise to an important problem for those who argue that epistemic standards are permissive, since the reliability criterion is incompatible with such a type of Permissiveness. (shrink)

The new field of meta-research investigates industry bias, publication bias, contradictions between studies, and other trends in medical research. I argue that its findings should be used as meta-evidence for evaluating therapies. ‘Meta-evidence’ is evidence about the support that direct ‘first-order evidence’ provides the hypothesis. I consider three objections to my proposal: the irrelevance objection, the screening-off objection, and the underdetermination objection. I argue that meta-research evidence works by rationally revising our confidence in first-order evidence and, consequently, in the hypothesis—typically, (...) downward. (shrink)

I argue that what evidence an agent has does not supervene on how she currently is. Agents do not always have to infer what the past was like from how things currently seem; sometimes the facts about the past are retained pieces of evidence that can be the start of reasoning. The main argument is a variant on Frank Arntzenius’s Shangri La example, an example that is often used to motivate the thought that evidence does supervene on current features.

To explain why we should be structurally rational – or mentally coherent – is notoriously difficult. Some philosophers argue that the normativity of structural rationality can be explained in terms of substantive rationality, which is a matter of correct response to reason. I argue that the psychological phenomena – positive illusions – are counterexamples to the substantivist approach. Substantivists dismiss the relevance of positive illusions because they accept evidentialism that reason for belief must be evidence. I argue that their evidentialist (...) stance would imply that we are caught in unsolvable dilemmas arising from positive illusions. (shrink)

How are justified belief and rational belief related? Some philosophers think that justified belief and rational belief come to the same thing. Others take it that justification is a matter of how well a particular belief is supported by the evidence, while rational belief is a matter of how well a belief coheres with a person’s other beliefs. In this paper, I defend the view that justification is a dimension of rationality, a view that can make sense of both of (...) these conflicting accounts. When it modifies belief, ‘rational’ is a multidimensional adjective, as there are multiple dimensions along which a belief can be rational. I will argue that one of these dimensions is justification, an account that can not only explain why philosophers give diverging theories of the relationship between justified belief and rational belief, but can also reveal why rational belief and justified belief are closely related despite being distinct. (shrink)

Calls for diversity in higher education have been ongoing for, at least, a century. Today, the diversity movement in higher education is in danger of being co-opted in the US by a move to make ‘intellectual diversity,’ i.e. the diversity of political opinion, on par with the cultural and historical diversity that one finds within differently racialized populations. Intellectual diversity is thought to track different modes of thinking between conservatives and progressives that need policy interventions to promote and protect. Here (...) I offer an account of a mode of thinking to probe what conservative, libertarian, progressive, and critical theory orientations, as modes of thinking, should show in order to present themselves as tokens of ‘intellectual diversity.’ Ultimately, I gesture to the conclusion that intellectual diversity as a mode of thinking degrades into either infinite particularity or impossible singularity that do little establish a call for policy intervention. (shrink)

System effects often stand in the way of attempts to come up with simple explanations of politics. Systems are often characterized by nonlinearities, where an effect is more than the sum of the effects of the actions taken by multiple actors. Another system effect is feedback, where the effect of actions is to amplify the problem the actions are intended to solve. There may also be indirect effects, where an incidental aspect of an action becomes more important (to other actors) (...) than the primary intention; contingencies, such that an effect is not inevitable but depends on idiosyncratic or even anti-strategic initial actions; interaction effects, where the behavior of an actor changes the environment of action, so that other actors do not respond as anticipated; and unintended consequences, where the long-term or secondary effects of an action differ from the intended effect. Each of these system effects can frustrate scholarly attempts to understand political behavior using simple models of action, and, even more, can frustrate the attempts of political decision makers to predict the effects of their actions. (shrink)

ABSTRACT The Swedish case bears out Lewin's contention, in Self-Interest and Public Interest in Western Politics, that public spiritedness is much more important than is suggested by public-choice theories positing the universal dominance of self-interestedness. However, in Sweden we find that public spiritedness on the part of the public—as evidenced, for example, in sociotropic voting—was cultivated by political institutions, policies, and rhetoric that transformed a divided, conflictual society into one in which the “public interest” was both coherent and desirable. In (...) turn, this cultivation was the result of decisions by politicians that were, in the most simplistic sense, self-interested, because they secured the politicians’ election and re-election. But the goal of election and re-election was to create a just society. In short, the politicians, too, were public spirited. (shrink)

Ancient Greek drama became the driving force in the Western theatrical revolution of the 1920s with Leopold Jessner's famous staging of King Oedipus in 1919. Once again theatre defined itself as the public tribune: the Athenian polis with its direct democracy giving way to the concept of a new social collective for the scientific age. The urgency of the impulse for social change coupled with the experience of World War I led to the investigation of images and action as forces (...) of internal necessity arising from the existentielle Angst of a whole generation of artists who found themselves face to face with the spiritual bankruptcy of the bourgeois social order. The long-term effects of the new dramatists’ radical re-viewings of the Greek theatre's potential as a progressive social undertaking—revealing its use value—may be detected in current-day rehearsal practices. Some of these effects are the subject of this article, which presents the author's experience of directing Sophocles’ Antigone in 1986 at the ancient Greek theatre of Oeniades. (shrink)

The notions 'worldview' and 'social identity' are examined to consider whether they contribute substantively to causal sequences or networks or thought clusters that result in group acts executed intentionally. ... Three proposed explanaitons of sectarian conflict or ethnic violence are analysed as examples of theories that causally link intenitonal group behaivour to the worldviews and social identities of the individual agents directly involved. But as will be shown, it is not a priori features of worldivews and identities as such, but (...) historically specific facts and contingent circumstances that need to be examined in order to explain group-motivated behaviour. Reference to worldviews and identities detract from adequate explanation. (shrink)

Michel Seymour | : Dans ce texte, j’examine sur un mode programmatique la relation qui existe entre les peuples et les territoires. Les frontières des peuples souverains sont-elles sacrées, naturelles et absolues, voire irréfragables ? Le territoire a-t-il une importance identitaire ? Si oui, cette relation identitaire repose-t-elle sur l’attachement sentimental des citoyens ou sur une préférence rationnelle ? Doit-on plutôt l’expliquer par un rapport historique ? Le territoire est-il un élément constitutif de l’identité d’un peuple ? Le principe de (...) l’intégrité du territoire a-t-il une priorité absolue sur le principe affirmant le droit à l’autodétermination des peuples ? Tel est l’éventail de questions qui peuvent être posées en ce qui concerne la relation entre les peuples et leurs territoires. Je veux présenter une perspective qui me semble être originale. Dans la perspective du libéralisme politique, je pars d’une conception institutionnelle du peuple. Je me propose d’indiquer ensuite comment cette approche permet d’envisager des réponses à ces questions. | : In this paper, I examine in a programmatic fashion the relationship between peoples and territories. Are the borders of sovereign peoples sacred, natural and absolute, or even irrebuttable ? Does territory plays an important role for identity ? If so, is this relationship based on the sentimental attachment of citizens or on a rational preference ? Should it be explained instead by a historical relationship ? Is territory even constitutive of the identity of a people ? Does the principle of territorial integrity have priority over the principle asserting the right to self-determination of peoples ? Such are the issues that can be raised concerning the relationship between peoples and their territories. I want to present an account that I take to be original. In accordance with political liberalism, I start from an institutional conception of peoples. I then indicate how this approach allows to consider answers to some of these questions. (shrink)