In the philosophy of mind, revelation is the claim that the nature of qualia is revealed in phenomenal experience. In the literature, revelation is often thought of as intuitive but in tension with physicalism. While mentions of revelation are frequent, there is room for further discussion of how precisely to formulate the thesis of revelation and what it exactly amounts to. Drawing on the work of David Lewis, this paper provides a detailed discussion on how the thesis of revelation, as (...) well as its incompatibility with physicalism, is to be understood. (shrink)

Straipsnyje, pasitelkus tiesioginę esaties ontologiją, mėginama apmąstyti Dievo pėdsakus pasaulyje. Pats Dievo pėdsakas dar nėra duotas gamtos dėl daikto tiesioginės intuicijos, bet yra mąstomas tada, kai per tiesioginį patyrimą susikuriama Dievo pėdsako idėja. Pasak R. Otto, žmoguje turi būti aprioriškai įdėtas grožio elementas, kad atpažintų gamtos grožį. Egzistencija yra ne žmogiškasis, bet dieviškasis predikatas: Kūrėjas priskiria egzistenciją daiktams ir taip jie tveria. Straipsnyje atribojami moralės ir religijos dalykai ir teigiama, kad religinis santykis su pasauliu atveria esmišką nesaugumą. Įvedama teogoninės vietovės (...) idėja: šioje vietovėje gimsta pirmapradis Dievo patyrimas, kuris vėliau pridengiamas Dievo veidu. Pagal lietuvių krikščionybę žmonės ir gamtos būtybės yra Dievo vaikai. (shrink)

In this thesis, I will defend a new kind of compatibilist account of free action, indirect conscious control compatibilism (or indirect compatibilism for short), and argue that some of our actions are free according to it. My argument has three components, and involves the development of a brand new tool for experimental philosophy, and the use of cognitive neuroscience. The first component of the argument shows that compatibilism (of some kind) is a conceptual truth. Contrary to the current orthodoxy in (...) the free will literature, which is that our concept of free will is an incompatibilist concept - a concept according to which we have free will only if determinism is false - I will show that our concept of free will is in fact a compatibilist concept - a concept according to which we can have free will even if determinism is true - and I do so using a new experimental philosophy methodology inspired by two-dimensional semantics. -/- Of course, even if our concept of free will is a compatibilist concept, this does not mean that there are any free actions in the world: the current empirical evidence from the brain sciences appears to show that there might be no, or very few, free actions in the world, even on many compatibilist understandings of what it would take for there to be free will. The second component of the argument addresses this concern by extending our understanding of compatibilism. Agents act freely either when their actions are caused by compatibilistically acceptable psychological processes, or are indirectly caused by those same processes. Hence the name of my account: indirect compatibilism. -/- The final component of the argument defends my new account against some interesting objections and provides evidence from cognitive neuroscience that some of our actions count as free by the lights of indirect compatibilism. (shrink)

The paper reconstructs the reception of Descartes's work by the Scottish Enlighteners, from Colin MacLaurin to Dugald Stewart. The Scots' image of Descartes was a byproduct of a scientific controversy; philosophical arguments were brought into the picture more as asides than as a primary focus of interest. As soon as the Cartesian physics withered away as a real alternative to Newtonian physics, only the philosophical arguments were left, with no memory of the context out of which they originated, and the (...) focus of the discussion shifts from physics to the philosophy of mind and the theory of knowledge. (shrink)

Humean constructivists object to Kantian constructivism that by endorsing the constitutivist strategy, which grounds moral obligations in rational agency, this position discounts the impact of cont...

We may distinguish two interpretations of the relation between Newton’s natural philosophy and Hume’s science of human nature. The first interpretation can be called ‘traditional,’ the second ‘critical.’ This article will not side with either readings of Hume’s Newtonianism (or with some middle positions). Instead, essential points of confluence and divergence will be discussed.

Desires matter. What are desires? Many believe that desire is a motivational state: desiring is being disposed to act. This conception aligns with the functionalist approach to desire and the standard account of desire's role in explaining action. According to a second influential approach, however, desire is first and foremost an evaluation: desiring is representing something as good. After all, we seem to desire things under the guise of the good. Which understanding of desire is more accurate? Is the guise (...) of the good even right to assume? Should we adopt an alternative picture that emphasizes desire's deontic nature? What do neuroscientific studies suggest? -/- Essays in the first section of the volume are devoted to these questions, and to the puzzle of desire's essence. In the second part of the volume, essays investigate some implications that the various conceptions of desire have on a number of fundamental issues. For example, why are inconsistent desires problematic? What is desire's role in practical deliberation? How do we know what we want? -/- This volume will contribute to the emergence of a fruitful debate on a neglected, albeit crucial, dimension of the mind. (shrink)

In Self-Constitution, I argue that the principles governing action are “constitutive standards” of agency, standards that arise from the nature of agency itself. To be an agent is to be autonomousl...

Descriptive realism holds that T is true, while normative realism holds that T is warranted. Descriptive pessimism holds that T is false, while normative pessimism holds that T is unwarranted. We should distinguish between descriptive and normative realism because some arguments against scientific realism require that scientific realism be interpreted as descriptive realism, and because scientific realists can retreat from descriptive to normative realism when descriptive realism is under attack. We should also distinguish between descriptive and normative pessimism because some (...) arguments against scientific pessimism require that it be interpreted as descriptive pessimism, and because scientific pessimists can retreat from descriptive to normative pessimism when descriptive pessimism is under attack. -/- . (shrink)

Aristotle took practical wisdom to include cleverness, and something more. The hard question, that he does not explicitly answer, is what this something more is. On my interpretation, the practically wise are not merely more knowledgeable about what is good for people. They are also better able to discern all the values at stake, in whatever circumstances they find themselves. This is an ability that good people develop, typically rather late in life, provided they are masters of their own affairs. (...) According to Aristotle, this development is stunted by wickedness and also by wretchedness. It follows from his account that attempts to teach this virtue are not likely to succeed unless teachers have opportunities for developing practical wisdom through their work. Aristotle’s arguments give us reasons to doubt that teachers can help their students to become virtuous and wise, if their own way to earn a living is not conductive to human flourishing. If we take his message to heart, we should, first and foremost, think about how to steer clear of wretched work conditions, where teachers’ moral agency is narrowly circumscribed. (shrink)

Sometimes you make a choice. Whether or not you made it was up to you. The choice was free. But how can this be? A scientific view of the world may leave no room for free choice. Free will literature continually explodes. Yet experts still focus on control or on a power to do otherwise. Sadly, they neglect another intuitive feature of free will: being an underived source or ultimate originator. When acting freely, one is a self-determined, self-directed, sole author (...) of change. Surprisingly, though the literature is replete with this pre-theoretic feature of free will, virtually no one makes rigorous use of it when constructing arguments. Equipped with fresh research, this book contends that agent-causation—currently an unpopular theory—deserves serious reconsideration. Only agent-causation accounts for ultimate origination, and popular objections fail under rigorous scrutiny. This book is tightly argued. It challenges and deepens recent advances in free will scholarship made by Peter van Inwagen, Robert Kane, Carl Ginet, Randy Clarke, Stewart Goetz, Tim O’Connor, and others. (shrink)

This chapter discusses how justice applies to public health. It begins by outlining three different metrics employed in discussions of justice: resources, capabilities, and welfare. It then discusses different accounts of justice in distribution, reviewing utilitarianism, egalitarianism, prioritarianism, and sufficientarianism, as well as desert-based theories, and applies these distributive approaches to public health examples. Next, it examines the interplay between distributive justice and individual rights, such as religious rights, property rights, and rights against discrimination, by discussing examples such as mandatory (...) treatment and screening. The chapter also examines the nexus between public health and debates concerning whose interests matter to justice (the “scope of justice”), including global justice, intergenerational justice, and environmental justice, as well as debates concerning whether justice applies to individual choices or only to institutional structures (the “site of justice”). The chapter closes with a discussion of strategies, including deliberative and aggregative democracy, for adjudicating disagreements about justice. (shrink)

Karl Popper, as a critical rationalist, was an opponent of all forms of skepticism, conventionalism and relativism in science. A major argument of Popper is Hume's critique of induction, arguing that induction should never be used in science. But he disagrees with the skepticism associated with Hume, nor with the support of Bacon and Newton's pure "observation" as a starting point in the formation of theories, as there are no pure observations that do not imply certain theories. Instead, Popper proposes (...) falsifiability as a method of scientific investigation. DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.11481.36967 . (shrink)

The received view of implicit bias holds that it is associative and unreflective. Recently, the received view has been challenged. Some argue that implicit bias is not predicated on “any” associative process, but it is unreflective. These arguments rely, in part, on debiasing experiments. They proceed as follows. If implicit bias is associative and unreflective, then certain experimental manipulations cannot change implicitly biased behavior. However, these manipulations can change such behavior. So, implicit bias is not associative and unreflective. This paper (...) finds philosophical and empirical problems with that argument. When the problems are solved, the conclusion is not quite right: implicit bias is not necessarily unreflective, but it seems to be associative. Further, the paper shows that even if legitimate non-associative interventions on implicit bias exist, then both the received view and its recent contender would be false. In their stead would be interactionism or minimalism about implicit bias. (shrink)

Hume’s discussion of space in the Treatise addresses two main topics: divisibility and vacuum. It is widely recognized that his discussion of divisibility contains an answer to Bayle, whose Dictionary article “Zeno of Elea” presents arguments about divisibility as support for fideism. It is not so widely recognized that, elsewhere in the same article, Bayle presents arguments about vacuum as further support for fideism. This paper aims to show that Hume’s discussion of vacuum contains an answer to these vacuum-based fideistic (...) arguments. Key to this answer is a distinction between two ways in which vacuum was conceived in the early modern period: i) as a genuine thing that has spatial properties, and yet is immobile, indivisible, and penetrable ; ii) as a mere absence of spatial things. This paper also aims to provide a novel defense of Hume against the long-standing objection that he is inconsistent in denying that we can conceive of a vacuum, while allowing that we can conceive of “invisible and intangible distance.” As I interpret him, Hume consistently denies that we can conceive of a positive vacuum, while allowing that we can conceive of two or more objects’ being arranged so as to have privative vacuum between them. (shrink)

In this essay I try to give some overall statements in order to show that new realism is to be understood as a kind of positive philosophy. Against constructivism, I argue that there is a prevalence of the objects themselves on our understanding of them because reality offers a resistance to our attempt to grasp it depending on its level of dependence from our own understanding, which is different in the case of natural objects, ideal object and social object. This (...) negativity leads to an ontological necessity of facticity. In the second part of this paper I will describe – through the exposition of three key concepts of new realism, i.e. “unamendability”, “interaction” and “affordance” – an ascending path for which the negative and the resistance turn into positivity. (shrink)

Karl Popper, ca raționalist critic, a fost un oponent al tuturor formelor de scepticism, convenționalism și relativism în știință. În 1935 a scris Logica cercetării (Logik der Forschung. Zur Erkenntnistheorie der modernen Naturwissenschaft), traducând ulterior cartea în engleză și publicând-o sub titlul The Logic of Scientific Discovery (1959) considerată ca o lucrare de pionierat în domeniu. Multe dintre argumentele din această carte sunt îndreptate împotriva membrilor "Cercului Vienez", precum Moritz Schlick, Otto Neurath, Rudolph Carnap, Hans Reichenbach, Carl Hempel și Herbert (...) Feigl. Popper este de acord cu aceștia cu privire la aspectele generale ale metodologiei științifice și neîncrederea lor în metodologia filosofică tradițională, dar soluțiile sale au fost semnificativ diferite. Popper a contribuit semnificativ la dezbaterile privind metodologia științifică generală, demarcarea științei de pseudoștiință, natura probabilității și metodologia științelor sociale. (shrink)

The problem of personal problem in philosophy is mostly handled as an identity or a “self” problem. When handled with the identity problem, personal identity means the identification of a person in a certain time point with a person at another time point. When handled together with the “self” problem; however, personal identity is considered a part of a substantive and metaphysical investigation. Hume’s philosophy includes both aspects of the discussions of personal identity in an opposing manner. In the present (...) study, Hume’s thoughts on the problem of personal identity will be examined. Firstly, the meaning of the idea of the self in his epistemology based on perception will be dealt with. Then, identity will be searched. It will be claimed that the thing that formed the theses of Hume about self and identity is his skepticism; and that Hume reinforces his thoughts on metaphysics with this investigation. In addition, it will be defended that in order to better understand the personal identity, it is necessary to consider his views on the nature of belief. (shrink)

In this paper, I develop a comparison between the philosophies of Husserl and James in relation to their concepts of experience. Whereas various authors have acknowledged the affinity between James’ early psychology and Husserl’s phenomenology, the late development of James’ philosophy is often considered in opposition to Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology. This is because James’ radical empiricism achieves a non-dual dimension of experience that precedes the functional division into subject and object, thus contrasting with the phenomenological analysis of the dual structure (...) of intentionality. However, I argue that the later “genetic” development of phenomenology converges with some central aspects of James’ radical empiricism. This is because genetic phenomenology leads us to conceive of the flow of primal impressions as a fundamental dimension of experience that precedes the subject-object duality and is at the base of the process of co-constitution of the subject and the object in reciprocal dependence. At the same time, Husserl conceives of the impressional core of experience as structured by formal conditions that depend on the concrete constitution of an embodied subject. For this reason, I argue that Husserl’s genetic phenomenology can complement James’ radical empiricism, thus leading to the development of the doctrine of pure experience as a form of empirical and not metaphysical realism. (shrink)

Psikoloji, nörobiyoloji, felsefe ve diğer pek çok disiplinde benliğe ilişkin çok sayıda farklı problemler var. Nörobiyolojide, çalışılan benlik problemlerinin pek çoğunun patolojinin çeşitli formlarıyla ilgili olduğu izlenimine sahibim –dürüstlükteki sorunlar, tutarlılık veya benliğin işlevi. Bu patolojiler hakkında söyleyecek hiçbir şeyim yok çünkü neredeyse onlar hakkında hiçbir şey bilmiyorum. Ben bu patolojilere yalnızca ayrık-beyin hastaları gibi doğrudan benliğin problemleriyle ilgiliyseler değineceğim.

Nickles (2016, 2017, forthcoming) raises many original objections against scientific realism. One of them holds that scientific realism originates from the end of history illusion. I reply that this objection is self-defeating and commits the genetic fallacy. Another objection is that it is unknowable whether our descendants will regard our current mature theories as true or false. I reply that this objection entails skepticism about induction, leading to skepticism about the world, which is inconsistent with the appeal to the end (...) of history illusion. Finally, I argue that we have an inductive rationale for thinking that our descendants will regard our current mature theories as true. (shrink)

This book aims to show that recent developments in neuroscience permit a defense of free will. Through language, human beings can escape strict biological determinism.

Drawing on unpublished and published sources from 1926-1932, this chapter builds on John Dewey’s naturalistic pragmatic pluralism in ethical theory. A primary focus is “Three Independent Factors in Morals,” which analyzes good, duty, and virtue as distinct categories that in many cases express different experiential origins. The chapter suggests that a vital role for contemporary theorizing is to lay bare and analyze the sorts of conflicts that constantly underlie moral and political action. Instead of reinforcing moral fundamentalism via an outdated (...) quest for the central and basic source of normative justification, we should foster theories with a range of idioms and emphases which, while accommodating monistic insights, better inform decision-making by opening communication across diverse elements of moral and political life, placing these elements in a wider context in which norms gain practical traction in non-ideal conditions, and expanding prospects for social inquiry and convergence on policy and action. (shrink)

The contemporary debate in the philosophy of literature is strongly shaped by the anticognitivist challenge, according to which works of literary fiction (that contain propositions that are neither literally true nor affirmed by the author) cannot impart (relevant) knowledge to the readers or enrich their worldly understanding. Anti-cognitivists appreciate works of literary fiction for their aesthetic values and so risk to reduce them to mere ornaments that are entertaining, but eventually useless. Many philosophers have reacted to this challenge by pointing (...) at ways in which works of literary fiction can be informative even though they lack worldly reference: it has been argued, for example, that works of fictions are thought experiments; that they add not to our theoretical knowledge, but to our know-how or to our phenomenal knowledge; or that that they help readers to understand the perspectives of others. A stubborn defense of literary cognitivism, however, risks to collapse into an instrumental understanding of literature. In my paper I suggest that both sides in the debate focus too narrowly on semantic features of the works in question that is tied to what I will call the “referential picture” of language. A shift perspective is needed: for one, we ought to fully appreciate that the term “literature” does not refer to a homogeneous phenomenon, but rather to a very heterogeneous and multifarious set of works that are read by many different readers for many different reasons in many different ways. Second, we need to understand that these works have in common much more than the semantic peculiarity of lacking worldly reference: they are a unique means of communication between authors and readers – and in particular the role of the latter is often neglected in contemporary debate. These two points should help us to get a more comprehensive understanding of the practice of literature and the vast range of values we can find works of literary fiction – and the interplay between them. (shrink)

Social contract theorists often take the ideal contract to be the agreement or bargain individuals would make in some privileged choice situation. Recently, experimental philosophers have explored this kind of decision-making in the lab. One rather robust finding is that the exact circumstances of choice significantly affect the kinds of social arrangements experimental subjects unanimously endorse. Yet prior work has largely ignored the question of which of the many competing descriptions of the original position subjects find most compelling. This paper (...) aims to address this gap, exploring how attractive experimental subjects find various characterizations of these circumstances of choice. We find evidence suggesting that no one choice situation can fulfill the role that social contract theorists have hoped it would play. We also find that, contrary to what some prominent social contract theorists have expected, there is no robust relationship between an individual’s ranking of distributive principles and their ranking of various descriptions of the original position. In conclusion, we discuss the broader implications of these results for political philosophy. (shrink)

In artificial intelligence, recent research has demonstrated the remarkable potential of Deep Convolutional Neural Networks (DCNNs), which seem to exceed state-of-the-art performance in new domains weekly, especially on the sorts of very difficult perceptual discrimination tasks that skeptics thought would remain beyond the reach of artificial intelligence. However, it has proven difficult to explain why DCNNs perform so well. In philosophy of mind, empiricists have long suggested that complex cognition is based on information derived from sensory experience, often appealing to (...) a faculty of abstraction. Rationalists have frequently complained, however, that empiricists never adequately explained how this faculty of abstraction actually works. In this paper, I tie these two questions together, to the mutual benefit of both disciplines. I argue that the architectural features that distinguish DCNNs from earlier neural networks allow them to implement a form of hierarchical processing that I call “transformational abstraction”. Transformational abstraction iteratively converts sensory-based representations of category exemplars into new formats that are increasingly tolerant to “nuisance variation” in input. Reflecting upon the way that DCNNs leverage a combination of linear and non-linear processing to efficiently accomplish this feat allows us to understand how the brain is capable of bi-directional travel between exemplars and abstractions, addressing longstanding problems in empiricist philosophy of mind. I end by considering the prospects for future research on DCNNs, arguing that rather than simply implementing 80s connectionism with more brute-force computation, transformational abstraction counts as a qualitatively distinct form of processing ripe with philosophical and psychological significance, because it is significantly better suited to depict the generic mechanism responsible for this important kind of psychological processing in the brain. (shrink)

Cross-cultural differences in argumentation may be explained by the use of different norms of reasoning. However, some norms derive from, presumably universal, mathematical laws. This inconsistency can be resolved, by considering that some norms of argumentation, like Bayes theorem, are mathematical functions. Systematic variation in the inputs may produce culture-dependent inductive biases although the function remains invariant. This hypothesis was tested by fitting a Bayesian model to data on informal argumentation from Turkish and English cultures, which linguistically mark evidence quality (...) differently. The experiment varied evidential marking and informant reliability in argumentative dialogues and revealed cross-cultural differences for both independent variables. The Bayesian model fitted the data from both cultures well but there were differences in the parameters consistent with culture-specific inductive biases. These findings are related to current controversies over the universality of the norms of reasoning and the role of normative theories in the psychology of reasoning. (shrink)

For the larger part of modern western intellectual history, it has been assumed that the study of morality and religion requires special methodology, insulated from, and in some important aspects incongruent with, the scientific method commonly used in the realm of natural sciences. Furthermore, even if it would be granted that moral and religious behavior is amendable to scientific analysis, the prospects of using evolutionary theory in particular to do the heavy lifting in explanation of these phenomena have been bleak, (...) since many scholars doubted that a biological theory could possibly offer any valuable contribution. Recent advances in the fields of Evolutionary Ethics and Cognitive Science of Religion disprove both claims, emphasizing empirically founded explanations, demonstrating extraordinarily high degree of methodological consilience, and revealing utmost importance of the application of evolutionary theory in fields of study once deemed to be exclusive domains of social sciences and philosophy. (shrink)

In their recently published book Nudge (2008) Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein (T&S) defend a position labelled as ‘libertarian paternalism’. Their thinking appeals to both the right and the left of the political spectrum, as evidenced by the bedfellows they keep on either side of the Atlantic. In the US, they have advised Barack Obama, while, in the UK, they were welcomed with open arms by the David Cameron's camp (Chakrabortty 2008). I will consider the following questions. What (...) is Nudge? How is it different from social advertisement? Does Nudge induce genuine preference change? Does Nudge build moral character? Is there a moral difference between the use of Nudge as opposed to subliminal images to reach policy objectives? And what are the moral constraints on Nudge? (shrink)

I know that I could have been where you are right now and that you could have been where I am right now, but that neither of us could have been turnips or natural numbers. This knowledge of metaphysical modality stands in need of explanation. I will offer an account based on our knowledge of the natures, or essencess, of things. I will argue that essences need not be viewed as metaphysically bizarre entities; that we can conceptualise and refer to (...) essences; and that we can gain knowledge of them. We can know about which properties are, and which properties are not, essential to a given entity. This knowledge of essence offers a route to knowledge of the ways those entities must be or could be. (shrink)

There are three theories in the epistemology of modality that have received sustained attention over the past 20 years: conceivability-theory, counterfactual-theory, and deduction-theory. In this paper we argue that all three face what we call the problem of modal epistemic friction. One consequence of the problem is that for any of the three accounts to yield modal knowledge, the account must provide an epistemology of essence. We discuss an attempt to fend off the problem within the context of the internalism (...) versus externalism debate about epistemic justification. We then investigate the effects that the PMEF has on reductive and non-reductive theories of the relation between essence and modality. (shrink)

The theoretical use of representation faces, among others, two types of inconsistencies, namely: a representation requires the figure of the agent to which it will be representative, which leads either to circularity or to infinite return; and the resulting one, which is the difficulty in reconciling a description, in representative terms, with other more fundamental scientific categories. The proposal of the present study for the solution of these problems was the identification of a referential process starting from the correlation between (...) states of a physical system. It will present an inference about how the superposition of causal history moments of a system can result in a self-referential structure. (shrink)

A trope is an abstract particular. Trope theorists maintain that tropes exist and argue that they can solve important philosophical problems, such as explaining the nature of properties. While many contemporary interpreters of Aristotle read him as a trope theorist, few commentators distinguish different versions of trope theory. Which, of any, of these versions did Aristotle hold? Classical trope theorists say that individuals just are bundles of tropes. This essay offers a reading of Categories 2-5 and Metaphysics VII-VIII that aligns (...) Aristotle's view with nonclassical trope theory, according to which objects are more than just bundles of tropes. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThe central hypothesis of this paper is that the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty offers significant philosophical groundwork for an ethics that honours key feminist commitments – embodiment, situatedness, diversity and the intrinsic sociality of subjectivity. Part I evaluates feminist criticisms of Merleau-Ponty. Part II defends the claim that Merleau-Ponty’s non-dualist ontology underwrites leading approaches in feminist ethics, notably Care Ethics and the Ethics of Vulnerability. Part III examines Merleau-Ponty’s analyses of embodied percipience, arguing that these offer a powerful critique of the (...) view from nowhere, a totalizing God’s-eye-view with pretensions to objectivity. By revealing the normative structure of perceptual gestalts in the intersubjective domain, he establishes the view from everywhere. Normativity is no longer deferred to higher authorities such as duty, utility or the valorized virtue, but through the perceptual gestalt it is returned to the perceiving embodied subject. This... (shrink)

În această lucrare argumentez faptul că, în ciuda criticilor teoriei falsificabilității propuse de Karl Popper pentru demarcarea între știință și ne-știință, în principal pseudoștiință, acest criteriu este încă foarte util, și perfect valabil după perfecționarea lui de către Popper și adepții lui. Mai mult, chiar și în versiunea sa inițială, considerată de Lakatos ca ”dogmatică”, Popper nu a afirmat că această metodologie este un criteriu absolut de demarcare: un singur contra-exemplu nu este suficient pentru a falsifica o teorie; mai mult, (...) o teorie poate fi salvată în mod legitim de falsificare prin introducerea unei ipoteze auxiliare. În comparație cu teoria lui Kuhn a revoluțiilor, de care el însuși s-a dezis ulterior transformând-o într-o teorie a ”micro-revoluțiilor”, consider că metodologia de demarcare a lui Popper, împreună cu dezvoltarea ulterioară propusă de acesta, inclusiv coroborarea și verosimilitudinea, deși imperfectă, nu numai că este valabilă și azi, dar este încă cea mai bună metodologie de demarcare. Pentru argumentare, m-am folosit de principalele lucrări ale lui Popper care tratează această problemă, și a principalilor săi critici și susținători. După o scurtă prezentare a lui Karl Popper, și o introducere în problema demarcației și metodologia falsificabilității, trec în revistă principalele critici aduse și argumentele susținătorilor săi, accentuând pe ideea că Popper nu a pus niciodată semnul egalității între falsificare și respingere. În final prezint propriile concluzii în această problemă. -/- DOI: 10.58679/TW55590. (shrink)

People cannot contemplate a proposition without believing that proposition. A model of belief fixation is sketched and used to explain hitherto disparate, recalcitrant, and somewhat mysterious psychological phenomena and philosophical paradoxes. Toward this end I also contend that our intuitive understanding of the workings of introspection is mistaken. In particular, I argue that propositional attitudes are beyond the grasp of our introspective capacities. We learn about our beliefs from observing our behavior, not from introspecting our stock beliefs. -/- The model (...) of belief fixation offered in the dissertation poses a novel dilemma for theories of rationality. One might have thought that the ability to contemplate ideas while withholding assent is a necessary condition on rationality. In short, it seems that rational creatures shouldn‘t just form their beliefs based on whatever they happen to think. However, it seems that we are creatures that automatically and reflexively form our beliefs based on whatever propositions we happen to consider. Thus, either the rational requirement that states that we must have evidence for our beliefs must be jettisoned or we must accept the conclusion that we are necessarily irrational. (shrink)

In recent years an increasing number of psychologists have begun to explore the prevalence, causes and effects of ordinary people’s intuitions about moral realism. Many of these studies have lacked in construct validity, i.e., they have failed to measure moral realism. My aim in this paper accordingly is to motivate and guide methodological improvements. In analysis of prominent existing measures, I develop general recommendations for overcoming ten prima facie serious worries about research on folk moral realism. G1 and G2 require (...) studies’ answer choices to be as metaethically comprehensive as methodologically feasible. G3 and G4 prevent fallacious inferences from intuitions about related debates. G5 and G6 limit first-order moral and epistemic influences. G7 address studies’ instructions. And G8 and G9 suggest tests of important psychological presuppositions. (shrink)

This article addresses three questions concerning Kant’s views on non-rational animals: do they intuit spatio-temporal particulars, do they perceive objects, and do they have intentional states? My aim is to explore the relationship between these questions and to clarify certain pervasive ambiguities in how they have been understood. I first disambiguate various nonequivalent notions of objecthood and intentionality: I then look closely at several models of objectivity present in Kant’s work, and at recent discussions of representational and relational theories of (...) intentionality. I argue ultimately that, given the relevant disambiguations, the answers to all three questions will likely be positive. These results both support what has become known as the nonconceptualist reading of Kant, and make clearer the price the conceptualist must pay to sustain her position. (shrink)

A commentary on Sections XII–XVI of the “Introduction to the Doctrine of Virtue”.

Oliver's and Rodriguez-Pereyra's important interpretation of the problem of universals as one concerning truthmakers neglects something crucial: that there is a numerical identity between numerically distinct particulars. The problem of universals is rather how to resolve the apparent contradiction that the same things are both numerically distinct and numerically identical. Baxter's account of instantiation as partial identity resolves the apparent contradiction. A seeming objection to this account is that it appears to make instantiation symmetric, since partial identity is symmetric. Armstrong's (...) standard reply is that the difference between a particular and a universal is what makes instantiation asymmetric. Brown suggests, though, that the instantiation of a universal by a universal is sometimes symmetric. However, the examples on which he relies are not universals. (shrink)

In this paper, I solve a puzzle generated by three conflicting claims about the relationship between faith, belief, and control: according to the Identity Thesis, faith is a type of belief, and according to Fideistic Voluntarism, we sometimes have control over whether or not we have faith, but according to Doxastic Involuntarism, we never have control over what we believe. To solve the puzzle, I argue that the Identity Thesis is true, but that either Fideistic Voluntarism or Doxastic Voluntarism is (...) false, depending on how we understand "control." I distinguish two notions of control: direct intention-based control and indirect reflective control. I argue that though we have direct intention-based control over neither belief nor faith, we have indirect reflective control over each of them. Moreover, indirect reflective control helps explain how we can be held accountable for each. (shrink)

Empirical research into moral decision-making is often taken to have normative implications. For instance, in his recent book, Greene (2013) relies on empirical findings to establish utilitarianism as a superior normative ethical theory. Kantian ethics, and deontological ethics more generally, is a rival view that Greene attacks. At the heart of Greene’s argument against deontology is the claim that deontological moral judgments are the product of certain emotions and not of reason. Deontological ethics is a mere rationalization of these emotions. (...) Accordingly Greene maintains that deontology should be abandoned. This paper is a defense of deontological ethical theory. It argues that Greene’s argument against deontology needs further support. Greene’s empirical evidence is open to alternative interpretations. In particular, it is not clear that Greene’s characterization of alarm-like emotions that are relative to culture and personal experience is empirically tenable. Moreover, it is implausible that such emotions produce specifically deontological judgments. A rival sentimentalist view, according to which all moral judgments are determined by emotion, is at least as plausible given the empirical evidence and independently supported by philosophical theory. I therefore call for an improvement of Greene’s argument. (shrink)

Can genealogical explanations affect the space of reasons? Those who think so commonly face two objections. The first objection maintains that attempts to derive reasons from claims about the genesis of something commit the genetic fallacy—they conflate genesis and justification. One way for genealogies to side-step this objection is to focus on the functional origins of practices—to show that, given certain facts about us and our environment, certain conceptual practices are rational because apt responses. But this invites a second objection, (...) which maintains that attempts to derive current from original function suffer from continuity failure—the conditions in response to which something originated no longer obtain. This paper shows how normatively ambitious genealogies can steer clear of both problems. It first maps out various ways in which genealogies can involve non-fallacious genetic arguments before arguing that some genealogies do not invite the charge of the genetic fallacy if they are interpreted as revealing the original functions of conceptual practices. However, they then incur the burden of showing that the conditions relative to which practices function continuously obtain. Taking its cue from the genealogies of E. J. Craig, Bernard Williams, and Miranda Fricker, the paper shows how model-based genealogies can avoid continuity failures by identifying bases of continuity in the demands we face. (shrink)

Are we entering a major new phase of modern science, one in which our standard, human modes of reasoning and understanding, including heuristics, have decreasing value? The new methods challenge human intelligibility. The digital revolution inspires such claims, but they are not new. During several historical periods, scientific progress has challenged traditional concepts of reasoning and rationality, intelligence and intelligibility, explanation and knowledge. The increasing intelligence of machine learning and networking is a deliberately sought, somewhat alien intelligence. As such, it (...) challenges the traditional, heuristic foresight of expert researchers. Nonetheless, science remains human-centered in important ways—and yet many of our ordinary human epistemic activities are alien to ourselves. This fact has always been the source of “the discovery problem”. It generalizes to the problem of understanding expert scientific practice. Ironically, scientific progress plunges us ever deeper into complexities beyond our grasp. But how is progress possible without traditional realism and the intelligibility realism requires? Pragmatic flexibility offers an answer. (shrink)