This paper explores the nature of curiosity from an epistemological point of view. First it motivates this exploration by explaining why epistemologists do and should care about what curiosity is. Then it surveys the relevant literature and develops a particular approach.

The award of the 2003 Barwise Prize to Daniel Dennett by the American Philosophical Association signifies Dennett’s importance in the developing area of philosophical inquiry into computing and information. One source of Dennett’s intellectual stature is his command of scientific and engineering ideas, which he effectively applies to philosophical debates over machine intelligence, consciousness, and intentionality. Dennett regards the computer as both a model and a tool that will transform the ways that philosophy is pursued in the 21st century. In (...) order to understand Dennett’s conception of how philosophy changes and fares, if his mechanistic and reductionist conception of the life of the mind succeeds, we turn to an examination of a central idea in Dennett’s thought: the intuition pump. (shrink)

Although we all learn differently, we all need to be able to engage certain fundamental reasoning skills if we are to manoeuvre successfully through life—however we define success. Peirce's philosophy provides us with a framework for helping students (and ourselves) develop and hone the ability for making deliberate and well‐considered choices. For, embedded within Peirce's complete body of work is a design for thinking that provides a sturdy foundation for the development of three important learning capabilities. These capabilities are 1) (...) the ability to identify, compare, and contrast qualities, 2) the ability to perform analyses, and 3) the ability to interpret the meaning of signs. Although these capabilities may seem like the sort of skills that only older and academically inclined students can master, even young children and the intellectually challenged can learn to use them as well. Once teachers learn to develop their own intellectual potential by expanding these capabilities within themselves, they will be able to begin bringing about the development of these capabilities in their students. Once identified, developed, and applied to the mastery of educational skills and subject matter, these three fundamental learning capabilities (qualification, analysis, and interpretation), can form the foundation of a common‐sense approach to educational reform. Peirce asserts that good reasoning must be informed by ethical considerations, which in turn has been informed by the highest of aesthetic impulses. From this, we can extrapolate the importance that an educational model based upon Peirce's philosophy must place upon aesthetic and ethical considerations, as well as logical ones. Once fully understood, the philosophy of education embedded within Peirce's epistemology can revolutionize educational practices at all levels of learning. (shrink)

Josiah Royce, a Johns Hopkins Fellow (1876–1878), polished two manuscripts for publication: "The Spirit of Modern Philosophy" (SMP; 62 pp.), and his dissertation, "The Interdependence of the Principles of Knowledge" (IPK; xi + 332 pp.). Although he penned the texts in blue ink and headers and footnotes in red, he never published either work. SMP—not Royce's 1892 work of the same title—critiqued Francis Bowen's Modern Philosophy from Descartes to Schopenhauer and Hartman, and created a new epistemology. My essay ventures the (...) hypotheses that Royce prudently abstained from publishing SMP to avoid alienating Bowen, a Harvard board-member for faculty admissions, and IPK to avoid advancing an interpretation of Kant he felt unsure of and would later publicly disown. Mainly, however, this paper inquires whether, in drafting SMP, Royce created an outline for IPK. I sketch Royce's life at Hopkins and present context and content of these two MSS. From these I unearth seven philosophical themes running parallel in SMP and IPK. This grounds the paper's major hypothesis that Royce's overriding aim in SMP was less to critique Bowen than to create an outline for the long Introduction and Part One of IPK. (shrink)

Children ask existential questions, that is, questions about death, the meaning of existence, free will, God, the origin of everything, and kindred questions. P4/wC has the aspiration to give to children the occasion to discover and explore their questions in a safe environment, the community of inquiry. Thus, existential questioning should be possible in a community of inquiry. However, it is unclear whether the pedagogy of the community of inquiry can accommodate existential questioning. The chief trouble is that existential questioning (...) might be a cause of suffering: children might be unable to contain the emotional intensity that is experienced when we inquire about topics like death and the meaning of existence. In a community of inquiry, the emphasis over the community and the autonomy that children experience in choosing the questions for their inquiry might create occasions of suffering: some children might not be prepared to discuss existential issues or might be troubled by the candidate answers they explore and eventually end up to endorse. In this paper I highlight some of the main challenges that we need to face if we want to make room for existential questioning in the community of inquiry. (shrink)

According to some Philosophy for Children theorists, the pedagogy of the Community of Inquiry hinges upon the acceptance of a pragmatist epistemology. The underlying idea is that it is possible to participate, and to justify participation, in a community of inquiry only if some pragmatist view of truth and knowledge is true and accepted by the participants engaged in dialogue. In this article we argue that this claim is false. In this way, we want to free the pedagogy of the (...) Community of Inquiry from some epistemological assumptions that we regard as unwarranted. To support our contention, we shall highlight two distinctions that are important in order to appreciate the connection between epistemology and education: first, the distinction between the disposition of intellectual humility and the belief in fallibilism; second, the belief in the existence of Cartesian certainties and the attitude of psychological certainty. Finally, we also argue that to vindicate dialogic inquiry it is neither necessary to adopt a pragmatist theory of truth, nor is it necessary to regard warranted judgement as the primary aim of inquiry. In contrast, we argue that truth is the aim of inquiry, and so is the aim of children when they participate in a dialogic inquiry. In this way we also suggest a justification of philosophy with children that does not instrumentalize it. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that an implication of the so-called ‘death of metaphysics’ is the imbrication of the normative and descriptive understandings of morality. This imbrication gives rise to a paradox, which amounts to the desire to refute both a priori moral justifications, and ‘the tyranny of the real’ or the socialisation and relativisation of our moral assertions and positions. I investigate three responses to this paradox, namely the pragmatic response, Jacques Derrida’s deconstructive response, and the ante-philosophical response, which (...) is based on the work of Jean-Luc Nancy. The reason for focusing on these three philosophical positions is that they all espouse an immanent view of morality. Through means of this analysis, I attempt to highlight the following implications of an immanently-defined moral position: the constitutive, as opposed to the pedagogical or prescriptive, nature of philosophy; the increasing focus on the performative force of doing philosophy and the importance of philosophical skill; the problematic nature of the distinctions between philosophy, moral theory, and applied ethics, and therefore also between the nature and function of morality; and the status of philosophy and moral theory as one type of praxis amongst many, rather than the definitive voice on praxis. (shrink)

Charles Peirce had significant interests in economics. He reworked the mathematical economic models of Cournot and Jevons in the 1870s. He conceived of the transitive axiom of consumer preferences in 1874. Peirce also developed a thesis of the cognitive efficiency of the human mind, abduction. He criticized Newcomb's economic writings. These forays into economics affected the six essays on pragmatism. These interests in economics are integrated with the meaning of the pragmatic maxim in Peirce's 1903 Harvard Lectures.

Consistent with the idea that business ethics is a form of applied ethics, many virtue ethicists make use of an extant (pure) moral philosophy framework, namely, one developed by Alasdair MacIntyre. In doing so, these authors have refined MacIntyre’s work, but have never really challenged it. In here questioning, and developing an alternative to, the MacIntyrean orthdoxy, I illustrate the merit of business ethicists adopting a broader philosophical perspective focused on constructing (new) theory. More specifically—and in referring to action sports (...) (e.g., mountain biking, snowboarding)—I propose that an external good motive is not only much more consistent with virtuous practical excellence than MacIntyreans acknowledge, but that such a motive is fundamental to identifying and explaining how practices can be deliberately created (by businesses). Consequently, and in stark contrast with MacIntyre’s deeply pessimistic outlook on modern business and society, I propose that those who value practices might celebrate our current era. (shrink)

Peirce's study of Kant, and later of Hegel, and Dewey's (1930) retention of much of Hegel's social philosophy are recognised idealist sources of pragmatism. Here I argue that the transition from idealism to pragmatic realism was already achieved by Hegel. Hegel's ‘Objective Logic’ corresponds in part to Kant's ‘Transcendental Logic’ (WdL,GW21:47.1-3). Hegel faults Kant for relegating concepts of reflection to an Appendix to his Transcendental Logic (WdL,GW12:19.34-38), and for treating reason as ‘only dialectical’ and as ‘merely regulative’ (WdL,GW12:23.12,.16-17). I present (...) three important yet neglected features of Kant'sCritique of Pure Reasonwhich are key enthymemes undergirding Hegel's critical reconstruction of Kant's Critical philosophy (§2). I then summarise some features of the philosophical context within which Hegel begins to re-assess and reconstruct Kant's Transcendental Logic (§3), and review several key steps in this direction Hegel undertook in the 1807Phenomenology(§4). (A related paper extends these results to Hegel'sLogicandEncyclopaedia.) These points show that Hegel's reanalysis of Kant's Critical philosophy is the first and still one of the most sophisticated and adequate pragmatic — specifically pragmatic realist — accounts of thea priori. (shrink)

Dans laScience de la logiqueet dans l’Encyclopédie des sciences philosophiques,Hegel reconstruit la philosophie critique de Kant en développant i) une logique transcendantale dans laScience de la logiqueet dans laPhilosophie de la nature; ii) une conception pragmatique de l’a priori; et iii) une caractéristique-clé de l’usage du verbe «réaliser» en relation avec les concepts et les principes. Chacun de ces trois éléments constitue un aspect central de la sémantique spécifiquement cognitive de Hegel, que celui-ci développe, en partant de la thèse kantienne (...) de la référence cognitive singulière, en un réalisme pragmatique systématique. (shrink)

At the centenary of Frank H. Knight’s Risk, Uncertainty, and Profit (1921), we explore the continuing relevance of Knightian uncertainty to the theory and practice of entrepreneurship. There are three challenges facing such assessment. First, RUP is complex and difficult to interpret. The key but neglected element of RUP is that Knight’s account is not solely about risk and uncertainty as states of nature, but about how an agent’s beliefs about uncertain outcomes and confidence in those beliefs guide their choices. (...) Second, RUP is Knight’s only effort in this area. His subsequent career led elsewhere, so he did not engage with subsequent interpretations of this work. Third, much of the current literature emphasizes that decisions must be different under the two states of nature with a consequent misunderstanding of entrepreneurial agency. This paper addresses each challenge in sequence. First, we explicate Knight’s (1921) approach and explain why that approach is murky. Second, as a complement to Knight’s interpretation, we examine Frank P. Ramsey’s approach to subjective probabilities to help clarify Knight’s murky approach. What links Knight and Ramsey is a shared pragmatism about entrepreneurial agency under uncertainty that depends upon the beliefs about, and confidence in, their judgments of possible outcomes. This Knight-Ramsey approach does not require actor’s behaviors to be determined by the class of uncertain environment (whether risk, uncertainty, or ambiguity) they face. We focus on the response by the entrepreneur to the existence of uncertainty in all its forms. We argue that this reductive account provides a foundation to examine common problems in management, including managerial hubris, the interaction between entrepreneurs and venture capitalists, and the need for experimentation (such as prototyping and market research) in advance of new product and venture launches. Third, we critique current literature that favors epistemic purism about the ontology of risk and uncertainty and ignores Knight-Ramsey pragmatism in meeting uncertainty, such as using formal and informal institutions for uncertainty mitigation. Our account locates Frank Knight’s subtleties in entrepreneurial behavior firmly in the literature on entrepreneurial agency a century later. (shrink)

At the centenary of Frank H. Knight’s Risk, Uncertainty, and Profit, we explore the continuing relevance of Knightian uncertainty to the theory and practice of entrepreneurship. There are three challenges facing such assessment. First, RUP is complex and difficult to interpret. The key but neglected element of RUP is that Knight’s account is not solely about risk and uncertainty as states of nature, but about how an agent’s beliefs about uncertain outcomes and confidence in those beliefs guide their choices. Second, (...) RUP is Knight’s only effort in this area. His subsequent career led elsewhere, so he did not engage with subsequent interpretations of this work. Third, much of the current literature emphasizes that decisions must be different under the two states of nature with a consequent misunderstanding of entrepreneurial agency. This paper addresses each challenge in sequence. First, we explicate Knight’s approach and explain why that approach is murky. Second, as a complement to Knight’s interpretation, we examine Frank P. Ramsey’s approach to subjective probabilities to help clarify Knight’s murky approach. What links Knight and Ramsey is a shared pragmatism about entrepreneurial agency under uncertainty that depends upon the beliefs about, and confidence in, their judgments of possible outcomes. This Knight-Ramsey approach does not require actor’s behaviors to be determined by the class of uncertain environment they face. We focus on the response by the entrepreneur to the existence of uncertainty in all its forms. We argue that this reductive account provides a foundation to examine common problems in management, including managerial hubris, the interaction between entrepreneurs and venture capitalists, and the need for experimentation in advance of new product and venture launches. Third, we critique current literature that favors epistemic purism about the ontology of risk and uncertainty and ignores Knight-Ramsey pragmatism in meeting uncertainty, such as using formal and informal institutions for uncertainty mitigation. Our account locates Frank Knight’s subtleties in entrepreneurial behavior firmly in the literature on entrepreneurial agency a century later. (shrink)

The article will argue that Charles Sanders Peirce's concepts of the ‘Dynamics of Belief and Doubt’, the ‘Fixation of Belief’ as well as ‘habits of belief’ taken together comprise a theory of learning. The ‘dynamics of belief and doubt’ are Peirce's explanation for the process of changing from one belief to another. Teaching, then, would be an attempt to control that process. Teaching critical thinking represents an attempt to teach the learner to regulate and discipline his or her own ‘settlement (...) of belief’. The ‘settlement of belief’ takes four different forms based on doubt. Peirce's concept of the ‘habits of belief’ refers to the inner and outer constraints placed both on belief as such and belief as it becomes action. The article may be read as both an exegesis of learning and as a pedagogical guide for teaching critical thinking to college students. (shrink)

Most ethical decisions are conditioned by formidable uncertainty. Decision makers may lack reliable information about relevant facts, the consequences of actions, and the reactions of other people. Resources for dealing with uncertainty are available from standard forms of decision theory, but successful application to decisions under risk requires a great deal of quantitative information: point-valued probabilities of states and point-valued utilities of outcomes. When this information is not available, this paper recommends the use of a form of decision theory that (...) operates on a bare minimum of information inputs: comparative plausibilities of states and comparative utilities of outcomes. In addition, it proposes a comparative strategy for dealing with second-order uncertainty. The paper illustrates its proposal with reference to a well-known ethical dilemma: Kant’s life-saving lie. (shrink)

Differentiates inquiry from interpretation in order to secure a foundation for truth.

This paper offers a new model of belief by embedding the Peircean account of belief into a formal dialogue system that uses argumentation schemes for practical reasoning and abductive reasoning. A belief is characterised as a stable proposition that is derived abductively by one agent in a dialogue from the commitment set (including commitments derived from actions and goals) of another agent. On the model (to give a rough summary), a belief is defined as a proposition held by an agent (...) that (1) is not easily changed (stable), (2) is a matter of degree (held more or less weakly or strongly), (3) guides the goals and actions of the agent, and (4) is habitually or tenaciously held in a manner that indicates a strong commitment to defend it. It is argued that the new model overcomes the pervasive conflict in artificial intelligence between the belief-desire-intention model of reasoning and the commitment model. (shrink)

This paper explores ‘reasonable doubt’ as an enlightening notion to think of reasoning and decision-making generally, beyond the judicial domain. The paper starts from a decision-theoretic understanding of the notion, whereby it can be defined in terms of degrees of belief and a probabilistic confirmation threshold for action. It then highlights some of the limits of this notion, and proposes a richer analysis of epistemic states and reasoning through the lens of ‘reasonable doubt’, which in turn is likely to supplement (...) the DT framework. The strategy consists in fighting on two fronts: with DT, the paper claims that there is no absolute notion of ‘reasonable doubt’ but, pace DT, it shows that reasonable doubt cannot be accounted for only in terms of degrees of belief and probabilistic threshold. We argue that the lens of reasonable doubt sheds light on aspects of belief dynamics, as well as of the nature of epistemic attitudes, which are often obscured by belief-centred approaches. In particular, when it comes to acknowledging the necessary ignorance and irreducible uncertainty that we face in our everyday-life decisions, studying the various facets of doubt rather than focusing on what can be believed, enables one to do justice to the richness and diversity of the mental states in play. (shrink)

The article offers a close reading of chapter 6 of Dewey's 'Experience and Nature'. It explains how Dewey reformulates the classical notion of the subject in pragmatist terms, emphasizing in particular Dewey's idea that 'experience' is not a priori subjective, but rather has to be appropriated by the acting individual in order to become one's own experience in an emphatic sense.

How does doubt come about? What are the mechanisms responsible for our inclinations to reassess propositions and collect further evidence to support or reject them? In this paper, I approach this question by focusing on what might be considered a distorting mirror of unreasonable doubt, namely the pathological doubt of patients with obsessive–compulsive disorder (OCD). Individuals with OCD exhibit a form of persistent doubting, indecisiveness, and over-cautiousness at pathological levels (Rasmussen and Eisen in Psychiatr Clin 15(4):743–758, 1992; Reed in Obsessional (...) experience and compulsive behaviour: a cognitive-structural approach, Academic Press, Cambridge, 1985; Tolin et al. in Cogn Ther Res 27(6):657–669, 2003). I argue that the failure in OCD is of an affective nature, involving both excessive epistemic anxiety and hyperactive feelings of uncertainty. I further argue that our adaptive disposition to inquire about the right matters—that is, about propositions which are both epistemically risky and imply harmful possibilities—might depend on these affective mechanisms. (shrink)

The problem of moral sunk costs pervades decision-making with respect to war. In the terms of just war theory, it may seem that incurring a large moral cost results in permissiveness: if a just goal may be reached at a small cost beyond that which was deemed proportionate at the outset of war, how can it be reasonable to require cessation? On this view, moral costs already expended could have major implications for the ethics of conflict termination. Discussion of sunk (...) costs in moral theorizing about war has settled into four camps: Quota, Prospect, Addition, and Discount. In this paper, I offer a mathematical model that articulates each of these views. The purpose of the mathematisation is threefold. First, to unify the sunk costs problem. Second, to show that these views differ in the nature of their justifications: some are justified qualitatively and others quantitatively. Third, to clarify the differential force of qualitative and quantitative critiques of these four views. (shrink)

This essay explores the methodological contributions of leading ethicist, activist, and mujerista theologian Ada María Isasi-Díaz, for whom the category of lo cotidiano is central. Her work on lo cotidiano begs a basic epistemological question: How does one think critically from the standpoint of the everyday? What does conscientization look like from the perspective of lo cotidiano? In light of such questions, I explore what I find to be one of Isasi-Díaz’s most significant, yet underdeveloped, ideas — her articulation of (...) a ‘conscientized cotidiano.’ I expand this category further, drawing on the work of Agnes Heller, a major influence on Latin American and US Latina feminism, and John Dewey. Conversely, I show how Isasi-Díaz’s attention to issues of religion and gender serves as a constructive counterpoint to the work of these philosophers. (shrink)

Epistemic nihilism for inquiry is the claim that there are no epistemic norms of inquiry. Epistemic nihilism was once the received stance towards inquiry, and I argue that it should be taken seriously again. My argument is that the same considerations which led us away from epistemic nihilism in the case of belief not only cannot refute epistemic nihilism for inquiry, but in fact may well support it. These include the argument from non-existence that there are no non-epistemic reasons for (...) belief; the linguistic argument that epistemic norms of belief are needed to capture the semantics of ordinary epistemic talk; and the argument from theoretical roles that epistemic norms are needed to play key theoretical roles for rational belief. I conclude by sketching an alternative Gibbardian picture on which norms of inquiry are all-things-considered norms governing action. (shrink)

I write this short essay in response to Peirce, as a feminist, pragmatist, and cultural studies scholar, in the hope that it will help to bring feminism and pragmatism together. I suggest that Peirce offers marginalized and colonized people a way to argue for the importance of their input, with his theory of fallibilism, even if he still claims a position of privilege. He also offers assistance through his concept of “a community of inquirers.” It is curious that Peirce’s definition (...) of a university argues for a split between theory and practice that his earlier work sought to heal. Peirce opened a door to help diverse scholars be able to enter the university, and find a way to address issues of power, with his youthful connecting of theory to practice, that his more senior position draws our attention away from and seeks to hold off. Fortunately, it is too late. Peirce’s youthful pragmatism has been developed in important ways by other scholars and now serves as an example of a way to do philosophy that does connect theory to practice and does seek to address real problems in diverse peoples lives, and help to find solutions that effect change. (shrink)

The cognitive science of religion sets out a naturalistic account of religion, in which religious phenomena are grounded in evolved cognitive and moral intuitions. This has important implications f...

Characteristic of neo-pragmatism is a commitment to deflationism about semantic properties, and inferentialism about conceptual content. It is usually thought that deflationism undermines the distinction between realistic discourses and others, and that the neo-pragmatists, unlike the classical pragmatists, cannot recognize that truth is a norm of belief and inquiry. I argue, however, that the distinction between realistic discourses and others can be maintained even in the face of a commitment to deflationism, and that deflationists can recognize that truth is a (...) norm of belief and inquiry. If deflationism is true, realistic discourses, it turns out, are those that are inferentially integrated with a large body of other commitments, whereas those that call for an anti-realist treatment are inferentially isolated. Now, Grimm has persuasively argued that inquiry aims at achieving understanding, and that to understand something is, roughly, to grasp a large body of inferential connections in which it features. So, if he is right, realistic discourses are those in which the aim of inquiry can be achieved. This fact, together with an inferential theory of conceptual content, will, I argue, allow neo-pragmatists to recognize truth as a norm of belief and inquiry, despite their commitment to deflationism. (shrink)

Micro-sociological theory has traditionally stressed interactional pressures towards alignment: actors’ attempts to co-construct a shared definition of the situation. We argue that this model provides an insufficient account of the coordination of action and of the emergence of intersubjectivity among actors. To complement the focus on alignment, we develop a theory of disruption—a perceived misalignment of the dramaturgical structure of interaction in coordinating expected lines of action. We develop a theory of the interaction order that takes the interplay between interactional (...) alignment and disruption as a foundational challenge both for sociology and for actors in their everyday lives. We focus on the practical ways in which actors negotiate both interactional breaches and wider relational ruptures, and how they differentiate between disruptions-of relations and disruptions-for them. By doing so, we connect the interaction order to a wider relational order, providing a bridge between micro-level interactionism and the sociology of culture. (shrink)

Rawls ‘s political liberalism abandons the traditional political‐theory objective of providing a philosophical account of liberal democracy. However, Rawls also aims for a liberal political order endorsed by citizens on grounds deeper than what he calls a “modus vivendi” compromise; he contends that a liberal political order based upon a modus vivendi is unstable. The aspiration for a pluralist and “freestanding” liberalism is at odds with the goal of a liberalism endorsed as something deeper than a modus vivendi compromise among (...) competing comprehensive doctrines. A liberalism that is supported “for its own sake” rather than as a compromise must necessarily be based on some conception of the good, of the sort that political liberalism eschews. (shrink)

Individual rationality, or doing what is best for oneself, is a standard model used to explain and predict human behavior, and von Neumann–Morgenstern game theory is the classical mathematical formalization of this theory in multiple-agent settings. Individual rationality, however, is an inadequate model for the synthesis of artificial social systems where cooperation is essential, since it does not permit the accommodation of group interests other than as aggregations of individual interests. Satisficing game theory is based upon a well-defined notion of (...) being good enough, and does accommodate group as well as individual interests through the use of conditional preference relationships, whereby a decision maker is able to adjust its preferences as a function of the preferences, and not just the options, of others. This new theory is offered as an alternative paradigm to construct artificial societies that are capable of complex behavior that goes beyond exclusive self interest. (shrink)

Given the role consensus is supposed to play in the social aspects of inquiry and deliberation, it is important that we may always identify a consensus as the basis of joint inquiry and deliberation. However, it turns out that if we think of an agent revising her beliefs to reach a consensus, then, on the received view of belief revision, AGM belief revision theory, certain simple and compelling consensus positions are not always available.

Here I craft a case for recognizing the roots and patterns that ground the possibility of contemporary com-posting—as outlined in Donna Haraway’s Staying with the Trouble—by New Materialists and critical pragmatists, especially those who are affected by the social injustices and ill-advised practices of today’s formal education. I explore both Spinozan Ethics and American pragmatism in order to fashion a pattern that affects educational thought and action. That pattern of affect/affecting is one Haraway calls “attunement”, a state of co-relation that (...) makes “unexpected feats possible.” My goal is to encourage those educational theorists who dwell in a critical pragmatist archive and those who dwell in a New Materialist archive to “make kin,” to learn to play string figures with a companion species, as they com-post educational possibility in a world where agency is both more limited and more widely-distributed. (shrink)

In an attempt to address some long-standing issues of epistemology, Hilary Kornblith proposes that knowledge is a natural kind the identification of which is the unique responsibility of one particular science: cognitive ethology. As Kornblith sees it, the natural kind thus picked out is knowledge as construed by reliabilism. Yet the claim that cognitive ethology has this special role has not convinced all critics. The present article argues that knowledge plays a causal and explanatory role within many of our more (...) fruitful current theories, diverging from the reliabilist conception even in disciplines that are closely related to cognitive ethology, and thus still dealing with knowledge as a natural as opposed to a social phenomenon, where special attention will be given to cognitive neuroscience. However, rather than discarding the natural kind approach altogether, it is argued that many of Kornblith’s insights can in fact be preserved within a framework that is both naturalist and pluralist. (shrink)

This essay fills in some historical, conceptual, and pedagogical gaps that appear in the most visible and recent professional efforts to “revive” Philosophy as a Way of Life (PWOL). I present “American Philosophy and Self-Culture” as an advanced undergraduate seminar that broadens who counts in and what counts as philosophy by immersing us in the lives, writings, and practices of seven representative U.S.-American philosophers of self-culture, community-building, and world-changing: Benjamin Franklin (1706–1790), Frederick Douglass (1818–1895), William Ellery Channing (1780–1842), Henry David (...) Thoreau (1817–1862), Margaret Fuller (1810-1850), Henry Bugbee (1915–1999), and Gloria Anzaldúa (1942–2004). Students enter the class with preconceptions about who philosophers are, what they do, how they write, and the languages in which they write. Students walk out with new senses of self, place, and language that emerge through new ways of seeing, doing, and writing philosophy. (shrink)

The generality problem is commonly considered to be a critical difficulty for reliabilism. In this paper, we present a dynamical perspective on the problem in the spirit of naturalized epistemology. According to this outlook, it is worth investigating how token belief-forming processes instantiate specific types in the biological agent’s cognitive architecture and background experience, consisting in the process of attractor-guided neural activation. While our discussion of the generality problem assigns “scientific types” to token processes, it represents a unified account in (...) the sense that it incorporates contextual and common sense features emphasized by other authors. (shrink)

This paper argues that the activist, feminist and pragmatist Jane Addams was an experimental philosopher. To defend this claim, I argue for capacious notions of both philosophical pragmatism and experimental philosophy. I begin in Section 2 with a new defence of Rose and Danks’ [‘In Defense of a Broad Conception of Experimental Philosophy’. Metaphilosophy 44, no. 4 : 512–32] argument in favour of a broad conception of experimental philosophy. Koopman [‘Pragmatist Resources for Experimental Philosophy: Inquiry in Place of Intuition’. Journal (...) of Speculative Philosophy 26, no. 1 : 1–24] argues that many twentieth-century American pragmatists can make important contributions to contemporary experimental philosophy. In Section 3, I argue that while this may be true, it is also true that under the broad conception, many of the pragmatists just were experimental philosophers. In Section 4, I argue that as a pragmatist philosopher in her own right, Jane... (shrink)

The relationship between American pragmatism and logical empiricism is complicated at best. The received view is that by around the late 1930s or early 1940s pragmatism had been replaced, supplanted, or eclipsed by the younger and more logic-oriented form of empiricism developed in interwar Vienna. Recently, however, this picture has been challenged, and this paper offers further reasons for thinking that the received view is inadequate. Through a critical examination of William James's Pragmatism and “The Sentiment of Rationality” and Rudolf (...) Carnap's “Elimination of Metaphysics Through Logical Analysis of Language” and other works, the paper builds a case for the existence of a rather striking correspondence between the work of one of pragmatism's most vaunted figures and the thought of logical empiricism's most famous advocate. Not only were both philosophers interested in what might be called metaphilosophy or the psychology of philosophy, both held very similar deflationary views. (shrink)

Under the general tutelage of Kant, Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914) introduced American pragmatism to yet another philosophical dialectic: between a neglected transcendental instinct and earthly authorities. The dialectic became Peirce’s response to various evolutionary schemes in the 19th century. Guided by the recollected voices of Socrates, Jesus, St. John, Anselm, and Kant, as well as his own brand of pragmatism, Peirce eventually developed a “Neglected Argument for the Reality of God” a century ago, in 1908. Here, Peirce endorsed a more (...) adventurous god than ecclesiastical or theological authorities could imagine, a god of love (agapism) and chance (tychism), but still rife with fallibility. (shrink)

The theory of natural selection is a rich systematization of biological knowledge without a first principle. When formulations of a proposed principle of natural selection are examined carefully, each is seen to be exhaustively analyzable into a proposition about sources of fitness and a proposition about consequences of fitness. But whenever the fitness of an organic variety is well defined in a given biological situation, its sources are local contingencies together with the background of laws from disciplines other than the (...) theory of natural selection; and the consequences of fitness for the long range fate of organic varieties are essentially applications of probability theory. Hence there is no role and no need for a principle of the theory of natural selection, and any generalities that may hold in that theory are derivative rather than fundamental. (shrink)

This paper highlights a central feature of William James’ pragmatism to challenge the conflicting charges that his political and ethical thought amounts to either a Hamlet-like impotence or a Prome...

This paper introduces a model for evidence denial that explains this behavior as a manifestation of rationality and it is based on the contention that social values (measurable as utilities) often underwrite these sorts of responses. Moreover, it is contended that the value associated with group membership in particular can override epistemic reason when the expected utility of a belief or belief system is great. However, it is also true that it appears to be the case that it is still (...) possible for such unreasonable believers to reverse this sort of dogmatism and to change their beliefs in a way that is epistemically rational. The conjecture made here is that we should expect this to happen only when the expected utility of the beliefs in question dips below a threshold where the utility value of continued dogmatism and the associated group membership is no longer sufficient to motivate defusing the counter-evidence that tells against such epistemically irrational beliefs. (shrink)

We come prepared to track events and objects, building our knowledge base while foraging for coherence. Classical pragmatism recognizes that the acquisition of knowledge is in part a contact sport (e.g. Peirce, Dewey). One of the aims of neuroscience is to capture human experience. One route to perhaps achieve this may be through the study of the visual system and its expansion in our evolutionary history. Embodied cephalic systems, as Dewey knew well, are tied to self-corrective inquiry. A philosophy of (...) neuroscience needs to capture how such events are tracked, tested through experience, and subsequently modified in the brain to comprise a knowledge base. (shrink)

Foraging for coherence is a pragmatist philosophy of the brain. It is a philosophy anchored to objects and instrumental in understanding the brain. Our age is dominated by neuroscience. A critical common sense underlies inquiry including that of neuroscience. Thus a pragmatist orientation to neuroscience is about foraging for coherence; not overselling neuroscience. Foraging for coherence is the search for adaptation – diverse epistemic orientation tied ideally to learning about oneself, one’s nature, and one’s history in the context of learning (...) about the brain. Neuroscience is about us: Our desires, habits, styles of reason, human vulnerability, and abuse. The language of the neuron, or the gene, or the systems does not replace the discussion about us as the person, in the social and historical context. (shrink)

This paper is a discussion of the application of democraticand anti-racist educational principles in a college setting.The paper explores both the implications of pedagogical theoryfor anti-racism and the implications of anti-racism forpedagogy. After giving a brief description of the conditionsencountered in an economically and intellectually impoverishedregion of the country, the paper outlines an application ofJohn Dewey's educational theory to college instruction.Then, after an account of what racism is, the paper reappliesDewey's model to the teaching of anti-racism, and with thehelp of (...) Paulo Freire's theory of educational praxis,readapts Deweyan principles to the task of reconstructingour classrooms as models of anti-racist communities. (shrink)