An important moral category—dishonest speech—has been overlooked in theoretical ethics despite its importance in legal, political, and everyday social exchanges. Discussion in this area has instead been fixated on a binary debate over the contrast between lying and ‘merely misleading’. Some see lying as a distinctive wrong; others see it as morally equivalent to deliberately omitting relevant truths, falsely insinuating, or any other species of attempted verbal deception. Parties to this debate have missed the relevance to their disagreement of the (...) notion of communicative dishonesty. Communicative dishonesty need not take the form of a lie, yet its wrongness does not reduce to the wrongness of seeking to deceive. This paper therefore proposes a major shift of attention away from the lying/misleading debate and towards the topic of communicative dishonesty. Dishonesty is not a simple notion to define, however. It presupposes a difficult distinction between what is and is not expressed in a given utterance. This differs from the more familiar distinction between what is and is not said, the distinction at the heart of the lying/misleading debate. This paper uses an idea central to speech act theory to characterize dishonesty in terms of the utterer’s communicative intentions, and applies the resulting definition to a variety of contexts. (shrink)

When a novel scientific theory conflicts with otherwise plausible moral assumptions, we do not treat that as evidence against the theory. We may scrutinize the empirical data more keenly and take extra care over its interpretation, but science is in some core sense immune to moral refutation. Can the same be said of philosophical theories (or the non-ethical, ‘metaphysical’ ones at least)? If a position in the philosophy of mind, for example, is discovered to have eye-widening moral import, does that (...) count against it at all? Actual responses by philosophers to the question of whether unanticipated moral consequences of metaphysical theories have evidential force are scattered, implicit, divergent, under-argued, and sometimes even self-undermining. The present discussion is, most immediately, an attempt to sort out the confusion. Beyond that, it exploits the new perspective this question gives us on a familiar topic: the relation of philosophy to science. (shrink)

This article emphasises the academic possibilities of autoethnography using a philosophical and theoretical framework to underpin it. The author uses a proposed research project to illustrate how and why autoethnography should be considered an academic methodology appropriate for a Doctor of Philosophy study. Crotty’s research paradigm model informs the author’s theoretical framework with a focus on Social Constructionism and Symbolic Interactionism as it’s foundations. The intention of the article is to encourage other doctoral candidates to consider the scholarly attributes of (...) autoethnography for their own research endeavours through the utilisation of an interpretivist research paradigm. (shrink)

Alvin I. Goldman has argued that since one must count epistemic rules among the factors that help to fix the justificational status of agents (generally called J-factors), not all J-factors are internalist, that is, intrinsic to the agent whose justificational status they help to fix. After all, for an epistemic rule to count as a genuine J-factor, it must be objectively correct and, therefore, “independent of any and all minds.” Consequently, it cannot be intrinsic to any particular epistemic agent. In (...) this brief commentary, I will argue that Goldman’s argument misunderstands what it takes for epistemic justification to be internalist and, therefore, fails to guarantee his externalist conclusion. In particular, I want to demonstrate that Goldman’s argument trivializes the difference between intrinsic and extrinsic properties that lays at the basis of the internalist/externalist debate. I will show that, if sound, simple variations on Goldman’s argument could be used to prove the absurd conclusion that all properties are extrinsic. Now, since the intrinsic/extrinsic distinction is fundamental to debates in several areas of philosophy, not only the internalist/externalist debate in epistemology, I conclude that Goldman’s argument cannot be sound. (shrink)