In this paper, I shall defend two main claims. First, Friedman’s famous paper “On the methodology of positive economics” (“F53”) cannot be properly understood without taking into account the influence of three authors who are neither cited nor mentioned in the paper: Max Weber, Frank Knight, and Karl Popper. I shall trace both their substantive influence on F53 and the historical route by which this influence took place. Once one has understood these ingredients, especially Weber’s ideal types, many of F53’s (...) astonishing sentences like “the more significant the theory, the more unrealistic the assumptions”, make good sense. Second, I shall claim that the much-discussed question whether Friedman’s essay espouses an instrumentalist or a realist position, is the wrong question to be asked. I shall illustrate that by a comparison with examples from physics in which also unrealistic assumptions are made. Also there, the question whether these assumptions are indicators of instrumentalism or realism is not appropriate. Cleared from these misunderstandings, F53 presents itself as an interesting and reasonable but much less controversial contribution to the methodology of economics. (shrink)

It is now widely accepted that a scientifically credible conception of human nature must reject the folkbiological idea of a fixed, inner essence that makes us human. We argue here that to understand human nature is to understand the plastic process of human development and the diversity it produces. Drawing on the framework of developmental systems theory and the idea of developmental niche construction we argue that human nature is not embodied in only one input to development, such as the (...) genome, and that it should not be confined to universal or typical human characteristics. Both similarities and certain classes of differences are explained by a human developmental system that reaches well out into the 'environment'. We point to a significant overlap between our account and the ‘Life History Trait Cluster’ account of Grant Ramsey, and defend the developmental systems account against the accusation that trying to encompass developmental plasticity and human diversity leads to an unmanageably complex account of human nature. (shrink)

We describe an approach to measuring biological information where ‘information’ is understood in the sense found in Francis Crick’s foundational contributions to molecular biology. Genes contain information in this sense, but so do epigenetic factors, as many biologists have recognized. The term ‘epigenetic’ is ambiguous, and we introduce a distinction between epigenetic and exogenetic inheritance to clarify one aspect of this ambiguity. These three heredity systems play complementary roles in supplying information for development. -/- We then consider the evolutionary significance (...) of the three inheritance systems. Whilst the genetic inheritance system was the key innovation in the evolution of heredity, in modern organisms the three systems each play important and complementary roles in heredity and evolution. -/- Our focus in the earlier part of the paper is on ‘proximate biology’, where information is a substantial causal factor that causes organisms to develop and causes offspring to resemble their parents. But much philosophical work has focused on information in ‘ultimate biology’. Ultimate information is a way of talking about the evolutionary design of the mechanisms of development and inheritance. We conclude by clarifying the relationship between the two. Ultimate information is not a causal factor that acts in development or heredity, but it can help to explain the evolution of proximate information, which is. (shrink)

Special divine action is an integral part of the Christian worldview. In fact, the plausibility of the Christian worldview depends on and is grounded in the putative reality, and therefore possibility, of special divine action. Without special divine action, Scripture does not make sense, and without Scripture, Christianity neither. However, the possibility of special divine action is highly contested in almost every field of human enquiry. In what follows, I briefly suggest a minimal definition of special divine action and show (...) its indispensability for the internal plausibility of Christian faith. I then argue against the very possibility of special divine action. I end by way of identifying ways in which Christian theologians can respond to the arguments in order to justify the possibility of special divine action. It turns out that special divine action neither contradicts science nor metaphysics. (shrink)

Text classification is one of the most important task in natural language processing, In this research, we carried out several experimental research on three (3) of the most popular Text classification NLP classifier in Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), Multinomial Naive Bayes (MNB), and Support Vector Machine (SVN). In the presence of enough training data, Deep Learning CNN work best in all parameters for evaluation with 77% accuracy, followed by SVM with accuracy of 76%, and multinomial Bayes with least performance of (...) 69% accuracy. CNN has the best performance in the presence of large enough training dataset because of the presence of filter/ kernels which help to indentify patterns in text data regardless of their position in the sentence. We repeated the training again with just one-third of our data, at this point SVM comes with the best performance, the performance of CNN noticeably drops but still better than Multinomial Naive Bayes, the reason why SVM works best when we reduce the training data was because of its ability to look for a hyper-plane that creates a boundary between different classes of data so as to properly classify them, so we believed that getting the hyper-plane was more efficient when we reduce the dataset, hence reason for the good performance. Multinomial Naive Bayes have the least performance which we attributed to its assumption of independency between the features which sometimes does not hold true. We concluded that availability of data should be an important factor when choosing classifier for Natural Language Processing Text Classification task. CNN should be use in the presence of enough dataset, and SVM should be use when data is not enough. Multinomial Naive Bayes must not be trusted with state of the art NLP task due to its assumption of independency between the features . (shrink)

In this essay, we consider the formal and ontological implications of one specific and intensely contested dialectical context from which Deleuze’s thinking about structural ideal genesis visibly arises. This is the formal/ontological dualism between the principles, ἀρχαί, of the One (ἕν) and the Indefinite/Unlimited Dyad (ἀόριστος δυάς), which is arguably the culminating achievement of the later Plato’s development of a mathematical dialectic.3 Following commentators including Lautman, Oskar Becker, and Kenneth M. Sayre, we argue that the duality of the One and (...) the Indefinite Dyad provides, in the later Plato, a unitary theoretical formalism accounting, by means of an iterated mixing without synthesis, for the structural origin and genesis of both supersensible Ideas and the sensible particulars which participate in them. As these commentators also argue, this duality furthermore provides a maximally general answer to the problem of temporal becoming that runs through Plato’s corpus: that of the relationship of the flux of sensory experiences to the fixity and order of what is thinkable in itself. Additionally, it provides a basis for understanding some of the famously puzzling claims about forms, numbers, and the principled genesis of both attributed to Plato by Aristotle in the Metaphysics, and plausibly underlies the late Plato’s deep considerations of the structural paradoxes of temporal change and becoming in the Parmenides, the Sophist, and the Philebus. After extracting this structure of duality and developing some of its formal, ontological, and metalogical features, we consider some of its specific implications for a thinking of time and ideality that follows Deleuze in a formally unitary genetic understanding of structural difference. These implications of Plato’s duality include not only those of the constitution of specific theoretical domains and problematics, but also implicate the reflexive problematic of the ideal determinants of the form of a unitary theory as such. We argue that the consequences of the underlying duality on the level of content are ultimately such as to raise, on the level of form, the broader reflexive problem of the basis for its own formal or meta-theoretical employment. We conclude by arguing for the decisive and substantive presence of a proper “Platonism” of the Idea in Deleuze, and weighing the potential for a substantive recuperation of Plato’s duality in the context of a dialectical affirmation of what Deleuze recognizes as the “only” ontological proposition that has ever been uttered. This is the proposition of the univocity of Being, whereby “being is said in the same sense, everywhere and always,” but is said (both problematically and decisively) of difference itself. (shrink)

A brief introduction to the life and work of William Paley, including a discussion of the structure of his famous design argument.

This paper investigates whether practical interests affect knowledge attributions in cases of testimony. It is argued that stakes impact testimonial knowledge attributions by increasing or decreasing the requirements for hearers to trust speakers and thereby gain the epistemic right to acquire knowledge via testimony. Standard, i.e. invariantist, reductionism and non-reductionism fail to provide a plausible account of testimony that is stakes sensitive, while non- invariantist versions of both traditional accounts can remedy this deficiency. Support for this conceptual analysis of stakes (...) is found through a review of the experimental philosophy literature on stakes effects on knowledge attribution. Finally, a diagnosis is offered for what is needed to provide a more robust defense of the paper’s primary claims in terms of future experimental study. (shrink)

Our computational metaphysics group describes its use of automated reasoning tools to study Leibniz’s theory of concepts. We start with a reconstruction of Leibniz’s theory within the theory of abstract objects (henceforth ‘object theory’). Leibniz’s theory of concepts, under this reconstruction, has a non-modal algebra of concepts, a concept-containment theory of truth, and a modal metaphysics of complete individual concepts. We show how the object-theoretic reconstruction of these components of Leibniz’s theory can be represented for investigation by means of automated (...) theorem provers and finite model builders. The fundamental theorem of Leibniz’s theory is derived using these tools. (shrink)

Text classification is one of the most important task in natural language processing, In this research, we carried out several experimental research on three (3) of the most popular Text classification NLP classifier in Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), Multinomial Naive Bayes (MNB), and Support Vector Machine (SVN). In the presence of enough training data, Deep Learning CNN work best in all parameters for evaluation with 77% accuracy, followed by SVM with accuracy of 76%, and multinomial Bayes with least performance of (...) 69% accuracy. CNN has the best performance in the presence of large enough training dataset because of the presence of filter/ kernels which help to indentify patterns in text data regardless of their position in the sentence. -/- We repeated the training again with just one-third of our data, at this point SVM comes with the best performance, the performance of CNN noticeably drops but still better than Multinomial Naive Bayes, the reason why SVM works best when we reduce the training data was because of its ability to look for a hyper-plane that creates a boundary between different classes of data so as to properly classify them, so we believed that getting the hyper-plane was more efficient when we reduce the dataset, hence reason for the good performance. Multinomial Naive Bayes have the least performance which we attributed to its assumption of independency between the features which sometimes does not hold true. We concluded that availability of data should be an important factor when choosing classifier for Natural Language Processing Text Classification task. CNN should be use in the presence of enough dataset, and SVM should be use when data is not enough. Multinomial Naive Bayes must not be trusted with state of the art NLP task due to its assumption of independency between the features. (shrink)

One of the few points of unquestioned agreement in virtue theory is that the virtues are supposed to be excellences. The best way to understand the project of "virtue ethics" is to understand this claim as the idea that the virtues always yield correct moral action and, therefore, that we cannot be “too virtuous”. In other words, the virtues cannot be had in excess or “to a fault”. If we take this seriously, however, it yields the surprising conclusion that many (...) traits which have been traditionally thought of as “virtues” fail to make the grade. The most prominent solution to the problem, reminiscent of Aristotle's view, is found to generate more problems than it solves. -/- Ratio, Volume 35, Issue 1, Page 49-60, March 2022. (shrink)

Nature is complex, exceedingly so. A repercussion of this “complex world constraint” is that it is, in practice, impossible to connect words to the world in a foolproof manner. In this paper I explore the ways in which the complex world constraint makes vagueness, or more generally imprecision, in language in practice unavoidable, illuminates what vagueness comes to, and guides us to a sensible way of thinking about truth. Along the way we see that the problem of ceteris paribus laws (...) is exactly the problem of vagueness and susceptible to similar treatment. (shrink)

What was René Girard’s attitude towards philosophy? What philosophers influenced him? What stance did he take in the philosophical debates of his time? What are the philosophical questions raised by René Girard’s anthropology? In this interview, Paul Dumouchel sheds light on these issues.

Excerpt: In this essay I explore the nature of the necessity of historical development in Nietzsche’s genealogy of Judeo-Christian moral values. I argue that the progression of moral stages in Nietzsche’s study is ordered in such a way that the failure of each stage is logically and structurally necessary, that each failure structures the resultant system or paradigm, but that the historical manifestation of moral paradigms coinciding with predicted or projected theoretical structures is contingent upon a multitude of other historical (...) factors. Therefore, the systematic internal failures of moral stages allow for, but do not cause, successive events. (shrink)

This study investigated the consumption pattern of wild edible green leafy vegetables found in Osogbo Local Government Area of Osun State using a descriptive survey research design. The sample size for this study was two hundred and eleven (211) respondents. A four-likert scale structured questionnaire containing twenty-four (24) items was used for data collection. Data were analysed using mean scores and standard deviation. The findings of the study revealed that ”Yarin,” “Worowo,” “Gbure,” and “Ebolo" are major wild edible green leafy (...) vegetables found in the study area, and their consumption is quite low. The finding showed that wild edible green leafy vegetables have benefits such as alleviating malnutrition at no cost and can be a good source of income. The findings also showed that urbanisation's preference for cultivated vegetables over wild edible green leafy vegetables, as well as uncultured ideas like ignorance and poverty and well-researched information about cultivated leafy vegetables, are among the factors influencing the intake of wild edible green leafy vegetables. The findings of this study asserted that wild edible green leafy vegetables, when compared with cultivated ones, can alleviate malnutrition, prevent micronutrient deficiency, and equally serve as a source of income at little or no cost. Therefore, it was recommended that there is a need to explore, analyse, and document that wild green edible leafy vegetables are nutritious, health-promoting, and easy to cultivate, and bring out substantial yields even under difficult climatic and edaphic conditions. (shrink)

Das letzte halbe Jahrhundert hat einen unvergleichlichen Siegeszug der Molekularbiologie erlebt, zu dem die Genomik, die molekulare Zell- und Entwicklungsbiologie, die Epigenetik sowie Erkenntnisse der Stammzellbiologie als tragende Säulen beigetragen und die Biowissenschaften insgesamt in die sogenannte postgenomische Ära geführt haben. Anstelle eines verengten Blicks in den Kern der Zelle und seiner DNA hat sich das Visier von Biologen auf eine sich dynamisch verändernde Zellumgebung hin geöffnet. Wechselwirkungen zwischen molekularen, zellulären, organismischen bis hin zu ökologischen Hierarchieebenen, stets aufwärts und abwärts (...) interagierend (bottom-up und top-down), bestimmen das Bild postgenomischer Naturbetrachtung. Dieses erweiterte Gesichtsfeld führte einerseits weg von einem strikten Gen-gesteuerten Determinismus hin zu Systemdenken und zur Systembiologie. Zum anderen rückten auf diesem Weg wieder Lücken in der klassischen neodarwinistischen Lehre in den Fokus, die nach einer erweiterten Synthese der Standardlehre der Evolution rufen. So hat das neue Forschungsfeld Evo-Devo (Akronym für Evolutionary Developmental Biology) erstmals molekulare Mechanismen für die sprunghafte Entstehung von Merkmalen aufgezeigt, die die Grundlage für die Entstehung neuer Baupläne (Makroevolution) bildeten. (shrink)

The significance of hair is deeply rooted in African ontology. It depicts leadership status and when shaved off completely, may sometimes signify mourning or lack of dignity. In Benin-city of Edo state in Nigeria, Chiefs who are mostly men are identified by their unique hair-styles. It shows their position of leadership in the society and when a king dies, all the men in the kingdom are expected to shave off their hair as a sign of respect for the departed king. (...) In the culture of the Yoruba people of Nigeria, hair is highly celebrated by the women as it is seen as a crown of glory upon their heads. With advancement in globalisation and cross-cultural relationships, the culture of hair and its ontological significances are gradually being eroded as expressed in Chimamanda Adichie‟s „Americanah‟. For this reason, the hair, being a very important symbol of cultural identity has become a key role in understanding the issues with identity crises in Africa. The paper analyses the ontological significances of hair in Africa, evaluates the issues involved in the misrepresentation of African hair as presented in some African literature as well as interrogates the issues of identity crises occasioned by African hair. (shrink)

There is a profound difference between asking a 'hard problem' and asking a 'hard problem' that has qualia in the question. There are plausible answers to the former that are nevertheless clearly not answers to the latter. I give a method by which hard problems will be able to be solved, if possible. I speculate on the (possible) causal efficaciousness of consciousness in evolution and in quantum mechanics.

This brief note gives a modest argument that there may be states-of-affairs that require fewer (weaker) assumptions than the assumption or 'default state' of Nothingness. It is meant as an add-on to the paper "Existence and the Big Bang" and to work in concert with several other papers on PhilPapers. This is meant to modestly help the idea that the Big Bang could have happened in the first place.

In the replies to my critics that follow I offer a more detailed account of the specific papers that they discuss or examine. The papers that they are especially concerned with are: “The Material World and Natural Religion in Hume’s Treatise” (Ryan) [Essay 3], “Hume’s Skepticism and the Problem of Atheism” (Fosl) [Essay 12], and “Hume’s Philosophy of Irreligion and the Myth of British Empiricism (Gautier) [Essay 16].

We give an apparently new possible explanation for why there might be something rather than nothing—the weakest assumptions coupled with a kind of perspectivalism. Within a Fragmentalist interpretation of quantum mechanics (each quantum mechanics system forms a fragment), McTaggart’s A-series of time has this kind of perspectivalism. We then use the A-series and the B-series to differentiate between how far in the past the big bang was vs. how much earlier than now the big bang was. In one example model, (...) the former goes to infinity while the latter stays finite. This implies the number of quantum interactions per unit 4-volume goes up to infinity as we approach the big bang from the present epoch. (shrink)

Recasting Hume and Early Modern Philosophy is a collection of essays that are all concerned with major figures and topics in the early modern philosophy. Most of the essays are concerned, more specifically, with the philosophy of David Hume (1711-1776). The sixteen essays included in this collection are divided into five parts. These parts are arranged under the headings of: (1) Metaphysics and Epistemology; (2) Free Will and Moral Luck; (3) Ethics, Virtue and Optimism; (4) Skepticism, Religion and Atheism; and (...) (5) Irreligion and the Unity of Hume’s Thought. A particularly important theme running through many of these essays is the subject of Hume’s irreligious aims and intentions. The fifth and final part of the collection is devoted to an articulation and defence of this specific understanding of Hume’s philosophical thought. (shrink)

Alongside existing research into the social, political and economic impacts of the Web, there is a need to study the Web from a cognitive and epistemic perspective. This is particularly so as new and emerging technologies alter the nature of our interactive engagements with the Web, transforming the extent to which our thoughts and actions are shaped by the online environment. Situated and ecological approaches to cognition are relevant to understanding the cognitive significance of the Web because of the emphasis (...) they place on forces and factors that reside at the level of agent–world interactions. In particular, by adopting a situated or ecological approach to cognition, we are able to assess the significance of the Web from the perspective of research into embodied, extended, embedded, social and collective cognition. The results of this analysis help to reshape the interdisciplinary configuration of Web Science, expanding its theoretical and empirical remit to include the disciplines of both cognitive science and the philosophy of mind. (shrink)

ABSTRACTWhat conditions must be satisfied if a group is to count as having a justified belief? Jennifer Lackey has recently argued that any adequate account of group justification must be sensitive to both the evidence actually possessed by enough of a group's operative members as well as the evidence those members should have possessed. I first draw attention to a range of objections to Lackey's specific view of group justification and a range of concrete case intuitions any plausible view of (...) group justification must explain. I then offer an alternative view of group justification where the basic idea is that group justification is a matter of groups responsibly responding to their total evidence. This view both avoids the problems facing Lackey's account and also explains the relevant concrete case intuitions. (shrink)

[This papers explores a novel case for the normativity of knowledge for belief – something that is compatible with the knowledge/factual awareness distinction I've explored elsewhere.] There are two different kinds of enkratic principles for belief: evidential enkratic principles and normative enkratic principles. It’s frequently taken for granted that there’s not an important difference between them. But evidential enkratic principles are undermined by considerations that gain no traction at all against their normative counterparts. The idea that such an asymmetry exists (...) between evidential and normative enkratic principles is surprising all on its own. It is also something that calls out for explanation. Similarly, the considerations that undermine evidential enkratic principles also undermine certain narrow-scope evidential principles. This too generates explanatory questions. I show how a knowledge-first view of rationality can easily address these explanatory questions. Thus we have one more reason to put knowledge first in [some areas of] epistemology. (shrink)

Various sexist and racist beliefs ascribe certain negative qualities to people of a given sex or race. Epistemic allies are people who think that in normal circumstances rationality requires the rejection of such sexist and racist beliefs upon learning of many counter-instances, i.e. members of these groups who lack the target negative quality. Accordingly, epistemic allies think that those who give up their sexist or racist beliefs in such circumstances are rationally responding to their evidence, while those who do not (...) are irrational in failing to respond to their evidence by giving up their belief. This is a common view among philosophers and non-philosophers. But epistemic allies face three problems. First, sexist and racist beliefs often involve generic propositions. These sorts of propositions are notoriously resilient in the face of counter-instances since the truth of generic propositions is typically compatible with the existence of many counter-instances. Second, background beliefs can enable one to explain away counter-instances to one’s beliefs. So even when counter-instances might otherwise constitute strong evidence against the truth of the generic, the ability to explain the counter-instances away with relevant background beliefs can make it rational to retain one’s belief in the generic despite the existence of many counter-instances. The final problem is that the kinds of judgements epistemic allies want to make about the irrationality of sexist and racist beliefs upon encountering many counter-instances is at odds with the judgements that we are inclined to make in seemingly parallel cases about the rationality of non-sexist and non-racist generic beliefs. Thus epistemic allies may end up having to give up on plausible normative supervenience principles. All together, these problems pose a significant prima facie challenge to epistemic allies. In what follows I explain how a Bayesian approach to the relation between evidence and belief can neatly untie these knots. The basic story is one of defeat: Bayesianism explains when one is required to become increasingly confident in chance propositions, and confidence in chance propositions can make belief in corresponding generics irrational. (shrink)

The question I want to explore is whether experience supports an antireductionist ontology of time, that is, whether we should take it to support an ontology that includes a primitive, monadic property of nowness responsible for the special feel of events in the present, and a relation of passage that events instantiate in virtue of literally passing from the future, to the present, and then into the past.

A basic challenge to naturalistic moral realism is that, even if moral properties existed, there would be no way to naturalistically represent or track them. Here, the basic structure for a tracking account of moral epistemology is given in empirically respectable terms, based on a eudaimonist conception of morality. The goal is to show how this form of moral realism can be seen as consistent with the details of evolutionary biology as well as being amenable to the most current understanding (...) of representationalist or correspondence theories of truth. (shrink)

According to the Guise of the Good, an agent only does for a reason what she sees as good. One of the main motivations for the view is its apparent ability to explain why action for a reason must be intelligible to its agent, for on this view, an action is intelligible just in case it seems good. This motivation has come under criticism in recent years. Most notably, Kieran Setiya has argued that merely seeing one’s action as good does (...) not suffice to make the action intelligible. In this paper, I show that this objection has bite only because the Guise of the Good’s theory of intelligibility has yet seen little sustained articulation. Properly understood, this theory holds that an action is intelligible to an agent only if it appears to them to possess some substantive evaluative property. I then argue that this response to the objection has a significant implication for contemporary Guise of the Good theories, for it shows that the currently ascendant version of the theory, the attitudinal theory, cannot avail itself of the intelligibility motivation. (shrink)

I challenge the common picture of the “Standard Story” of Action as a neutral account of action within which debates in normative ethics can take place. I unpack three commitments that are implicit in the Standard Story, and demonstrate that these commitments together entail a teleological conception of reasons, upon which all reasons to act are reasons to bring about states of affairs. Such a conception of reasons, in turn, supports a consequentialist framework for the evaluation of action, upon which (...) the normative status of actions is properly determined through appeal to rankings of states of affairs as better and worse. This covert support for consequentialism from the theory of action, I argue, has had a distorting effect on debates in normative ethics. I then present challenges to each of these three commitments, a challenge to the first commitment by T.M. Scanlon, a challenge to the second by recent interpreters of Anscombe, and a new challenge to the third commitment that requires only minimal and prima facie plausible modifications to the Standard Story. The success of any one of the challenges, I demonstrate, is sufficient to block support from the theory of action for the teleological conception of reasons and the consequentialist evaluative framework. I close by demonstrating the pivotal role that such arguments grounded in the theory of action play in the current debate between evaluator-relative consequentialists and their critics. (shrink)

Teleological theories of reason and value, upon which all reasons are fundamentally reasons to realize states of affairs that are in some respect best, cannot account for the intuition that victims in non-identity cases have been wronged. Many philosophers, however, reject such theories in favor of alternatives that recognize fundamentally non-teleological reasons, second-personal reasons that reflect a moral significance each person has that is not grounded in the teleologist’s appeal to outcomes. Such deontological accounts appear to be better positioned to (...) identify the wrong committed against non-identity victims because a person wrongs another on such accounts if she violates his second-personal claims -- overall benefit to victims presents no obstacle to the identification of second-personal wrongdoing. Derek Parfit argues that non-identity is a problem for these deontological theories as well because the alleged victims are properly understood as consenting to the action in question, thereby waiving any such second-personal claim. But his arguments misrepresent the role of consent on such theories by articulating it through appeal to the very teleological theory of reasons that their advocates dismiss as inadequate. Properly understood, Parfit’s appeal to consent understood as retroactive endorsement only provides the answer on such deontological accounts to the question of whether, given that the non-identity victim is second-personally wronged, he is nonetheless better off existing. Indeed, it becomes clear that it is teleological theories for which non-identity poses a particular problem: they cannot -- while their deontological counterparts can – account for the intuition that non-identity victims have been wronged. (shrink)

In the 6th century, Paul the Persian used his own pen to write a summary of Aristotle's Peri Hermeneias in the Persian language. Severus Sebokht translated it into Syriac. This book is a transcription and translation of the Syriac manuscript of Paul the Persian's Peri Hermeneias and a comparison of it with Aristotle's original Greek text.

Papers, Please, by Lucas Pope (2013), explores the story of a customs inspector in the fictional political regime of Arstotzka. In this paper we explore the stories, systems and moral themes of Papers, Please in order to illustrate the systemic approach to designing videogames for moral engagement. Next, drawing on the Four Component model of ethical expertise from moral psychology, we contrast this systemic approach with the more common scripted approach. We conclude by demonstrating the different strengths and weaknesses that (...) these two approaches have when it comes to designing videogames that engage the different aspects of a player’s moral expertise. (shrink)

Proponents of public reason views hold that the exercise of political power ought to be acceptable to all reasonable citizens. This article elucidates the common structure shared by all public reason views, first by identifying a set of questions that all such views must answer and, second, by showing that the answers to these questions stand in a particular relationship to each other. In particular, we show that what we call the ‘rationale question’ is fundamental. This fact, and the common (...) structure more generally, are often overlooked or distorted within the literature. As a result, we argue, several prominent argumentative moves made by both critics and defenders of public reason are unsuccessful. Our overall conclusion is that discussions of public reason views would be more fruitful if they made consistent use of the common structure we identify. (shrink)

The Limits of Free Will presents influential articles by Paul Russell concerning free will and moral responsibility. The problems arising in this field of philosophy, which are deeply rooted in the history of the subject, are also intimately related to a wide range of other fields, such as law and criminology, moral psychology, theology, and, more recently, neuroscience. These articles were written and published over a period of three decades, although most have appeared in the past decade. Among the (...) topics covered: the challenge of skepticism; moral sentiment and moral capacity; necessity and the metaphysics of causation; practical reason; free will and art; fatalism and the limits of agency; moral luck, and our metaphysical attitudes of optimism and pessimism. (shrink)

Many of our most important goals require months or even years of effort to achieve, and some never get achieved at all. As social psychologists have lately emphasized, success in pursuing such goals requires the capacity for perseverance, or "grit." Philosophers have had little to say about grit, however, insofar as it differs from more familiar notions of willpower or continence. This leaves us ill-equipped to assess the social and moral implications of promoting grit. We propose that grit has an (...) important epistemic component, in that failures of perseverance are often caused by a significant loss of confidence that one will succeed if one continues to try. Correspondingly, successful exercises of grit often involve a kind of epistemic resilience in the face of failure, injury, rejection, and other setbacks that constitute genuine evidence that success is not forthcoming. Given this, we discuss whether and to what extent displays of grit can be epistemically as well as practically rational. We conclude that they can be (although many are not), and that the rationality of grit will depend partly on features of the context the agent normally finds herself in. In particular, grit-friendly norms of deliberation might be irrational to use in contexts of severe material scarcity or oppression. (shrink)

It is one thing to hold that merely statistical evidence is _sometimes_ insufficient for rational belief, as in typical lottery and profiling cases. It is another thing to hold that merely statistical evidence is _always_ insufficient for rational belief. Indeed, there are cases where statistical evidence plainly does justify belief. This project develops a dispositional account of the normativity of statistical evidence, where the dispositions that ground justifying statistical evidence are connected to the goals (= proper function) of objects. There (...) are strong intuitive motivations for doing this. For we can turn almost any case of _non-justifying_ merely statistical evidence into a case of _justifying_ merely statistical evidence by adding information about the dispositions and goals of the objects involved. The resulting view not only helps us understand when and why merely statistical evidence is normatively significant, but it also helps us understand how statistical evidence relates to more standard forms of evidence (perceptual, testimonial). The emerging view also has surprising applications, as it imposes limitations on the epistemic value of fine-tuning arguments for theism as well as undermines a standard class of case-based arguments for moral encroachment. (shrink)

For Kant, we cannot understand how to approach moral education without confronting the radical evil of humanity. But if we start out, as Kant thinks we do, from a morally corrupt state, how...

Public shaming plays an important role in upholding valuable social norms. But, under what conditions, if any, is it morally justifiable? Our aim in this paper is systemically to investigate the morality of public shaming, so as to provide an answer to this neglected question. We develop an overarching framework for assessing the justifiability of this practice, which shows that, while shaming can sometimes be morally justifiable, it very often is not. In turn, our framework highlights several reasons to be (...) concerned about the increasingly widespread phenomenon of online public shaming. (shrink)

The paper looks at three big ideas that have been associated with the term “relativism.” The first maintains that some property has a higher-degree than might have been thought. The second that the judgments in a particular domain of discourse are capable only of relative truth and not of absolute truth And the third, which I dub with the oxymoronic label “absolutist relativism,” seeks to locate relativism in our acceptance of certain sorts of spare absolutist principles. -/- The first idea (...) is well illustrated by the famous cases drawn from physics, but is ill suited for providing a model for the sorts of relativism about normative domains that have most interested philosophers. -/- The second idea – according to which it is the truth of certain judgments that is relative – seems subject to a very difficult dilemma. -/- The final idea provides a coherent model of cases like etiquette but is not plausibly applied to the moral or epistemic domains. (shrink)

This paper explores the question: What would conceptual engineering have to be in order to promote social justice? Specifically, it argues that to promote social justice, conceptual engineering must deliver the following: it needs to be possible to deliberately implement a conceptual engineering proposal in large communities; it needs to be possible for a conceptual engineering proposal to bring about change to extant social categories; it needs to be possible to bring a population to adopt a conceptual engineering proposal for (...) the right reasons; and it needs to be possible to do – without producing harmful consequences. I show that, of the three dominant approaches to conceptual engineering in the literature, only one of them seems amenable to the idea that it is possible and legitimate to promote social justice in accordance with –. (shrink)

: This paper examines a claim defended by an unlikely pair: Friedrich Nietzsche and Iris Murdoch. The claim is that perceptual experience itself—as distinct from perceptually based judgments and beliefs—can be morally significant. In particular, Nietzsche and Murdoch hold that two agents in the same circumstances attending to the same objects can have experiences with different contents, depending on the concepts that they possess and employ. Moreover, they maintain that this renders perception an object of moral concern. This paper explicates (...) these claims, examines the way in which we might distinguish between better and worse perceptual experiences, and argues that if some version of the Murdochian/Nietzschean claim is accepted, then certain influential accounts of moral epistemology and agency must be rejected. (shrink)

The idea of epistemic temperance is introduced and explicated through a discussion of Plato's understanding of it. A variety of psychological and epistemic phenomena are presented which arise due to epistemic intemperance, or the inappropriate influence of conations on cognition. Two cases familiar to philosophers, self-deception and racial prejudice, are discussed as the result of epistemic intemperance though they are not typically seen as having a common cause. Finally, epistemic temperance is distinguished from epistemic justice, as these have been conflated.