This study aimed to enhance the mastery level of the campus journalists of Cuyo Central School, Division of Palawan in basic news writing through (CEB) Contextualized Error – Based Worktext. It used mixed methods, the quantitative approach was utilized to know the common errors committed by the participants of the study in writing news articles, their level of achievement and the testing of significant difference of their scores in pre-test and post – test. The challenges they met in utilizing the (...) intervention material was also presented through quantitative method. The qualitative method was utilized in presenting the changes to be done to further enhance the material based from the challenges met by the participants of the study. Interview method and Focus Group Discussion were used as instruments. The common errors committed by the pupil-journalists in content is Following the correct news writing format or style that gained a score of 31.7, in technical Showing the news writers ability with a mean of 27.4, while in ethics most news writers did not cited sources properly and observed copyright laws with a mean of 7.6. There is a significant difference between the scores of pre-tests and post-test as revealed by paired-t test, a p-value of almost 0.00 at 0.05 and 0.01 level of significance moved the researcher to reject the null hypothesis. The great challenges that the respondents posted is No sufficient and concrete examples to create meaningful learning with a frequency score of 10 or 100%. The challenges they met were the bases of the enhanced intervention material. It can be concluded that CEB Worktext is effective as intervention material and the enhanced worktext as output of this study will be more appropriate as review material for campus journalists. (shrink)

This study aimed to enhance the mastery level of the campus journalists of Cuyo Central School, Division of Palawan in basic news writing through (CEB) Contextualized Error – Based Worktext. It used mixed methods, the quantitative approach was utilized to know the common errors committed by the participants of the study in writing news articles, their level of achievement and the testing of significant difference of their scores in pre-test and post – test. The challenges they met in utilizing the (...) intervention material was also presented through quantitative method. The qualitative method was utilized in presenting the changes to be done to further enhance the material based from the challenges met by the participants of the study. Interview method and Focus Group Discussion were used as instruments. The common errors committed by the pupil-journalists in content is Following the correct news writing format or style that gained a score of 31.7, in technical Showing the news writers ability with a mean of 27.4, while in ethics most news writers did not cited sources properly and observed copyright laws with a mean of 7.6. There is a significant difference between the scores of pre-tests and post-test as revealed by paired-t test, a p-value of almost 0.00 at 0.05 and 0.01 level of significance moved the researcher to reject the null hypothesis. The great challenges that the respondents posted is No sufficient and concrete examples to create meaningful learning with a frequency score of 10 or 100%. The challenges they met were the bases of the enhanced intervention material. It can be concluded that CEB Worktext is effective as intervention material and the enhanced worktext as output of this study will be more appropriate as review material for campus journalists. (shrink)

This qualitative study utilized the narrative approach to determine the advantages and disadvantages of printed modular distance learning in terms of lesson preparation and assessment of students’ outputs based on the experiences of six teachers in a public elementary school in Negros Occidental in the School Year 2021-2022, the strategies they employed in lesson preparation and assessment of students’ outputs, and the insights they gained into their strategies when they engaged in printed modular distance learning modality. The findings reveal the (...) following: (a) Modules are readily available for the only advantage of the printed modular distance learning in terms of lesson preparation; (b) Students’ outputs are well-thought-out for the only advantage of the printed modular distance learning in terms of assessment of students’ outputs; (c) Lessons are inappropriate and lesson preparation is delayed for the disadvantages of printed modular distance learning in terms of lesson preparation; (d) The authenticity of students’ outputs is dubitable for the only disadvantage of printed modular distance learning; (e) Be creative and flexible for the strategies employed by teachers in lesson preparation; (f) Verify the authenticity for the only strategy employed by teachers in the assessment of students’ outputs; (g) Flexibility and creativity may make lesson preparation easy for the insights gained by teachers into their strategies in terms of lesson preparation; and (h) Time management and appropriate assessment tools may facilitate assessment of students’ outputs for the insights gained by teachers into their strategies in terms of assessment of students’ outputs. The teachers were able to prepare their lessons and assess their students’ outputs despite the drawbacks of printed modular distance learning with effective strategies. (shrink)

We lay out the fatalist’s argument, making sure to clarify which dialectical moves are available to the libertarian. We then offer a more robust presentation of Ockhamism, responding to obvious objections and teasing out the implications of the view. At this point, we discuss presentism and eternalism in more detail. We then present our argument for the claim that the libertarian cannot take Ockham’s way out of the fatalism argument unless she rejects presentism. Finally, we consider and dispense with objections (...) to our argument. In the end, it ought to be clear that the libertarian must make a choice between Ockham’s way out and presentism. (shrink)

Goldman, though still a reliabilist, has made some recent concessions to evidentialist epistemologies. I agree that reliabilism is most plausible when it incorporates certain evidentialist elements, but I try to minimize the evidentialist component. I argue that fewer beliefs require evidence than Goldman thinks, that Goldman should construe evidential fit in process reliabilist terms, rather than the way he does, and that this process reliabilist understanding of evidence illuminates such important epistemological concepts as propositional justification, ex ante justification, and defeat.

En la obra dramática A puerta cerrada (1944), el filósofo y literato Jean-Paul Sartre plantea la relación interpersonal como plena de conflicto e imposibilidad para llevar a cabalidad los ideales dialógicos. Las conclusiones a las que llega Sartre serán confrontadas con la propuesta del filósofo judío Emmanuel Levinas, con el fin de vislumbrar sus tesis en torno a la alteridad, mostrando cómo, en vez de acuerdos racionales que superen lo diverso y lo engloben en la totalidad, habrá que recibir al (...) Otro y responderle en la trascendencia que exige su infinitud. The Philosopher and Writer Jean-Paul Sartre, in the dramatic work No Exit (1944), claims the inter-subjective relationship is full of conflict and that it is impossible to reach the dialogical ideal. We will confront Sartre´s conclusions from the proposal of the jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas in order to see his thesis about otherness. We will explain how, instead of some rational agreements that overcome the diversity inside totality, it is necessary to receive the other and respond to him in the transcendence that Infinity requires. (shrink)

Extension is probably the most general natural property. Is it a fundamental property? Leibniz claimed the answer was no, and that the structureless intuition of extension concealed more fundamental properties and relations. This paper follows Leibniz's program through Herbart and Riemann to Grassmann and uses Grassmann's algebra of points to build up levels of extensions algebraically. Finally, the connection between extension and measurement is considered.

Resumen: Este trabajo se propone revisar la tesis de la proliferación de alternativas, expuesta por Boaventura de Sousa Santos, a la luz de algunas críticas a la tesis de la proliferación de teorías, expuesta por Paul Feyerabend. Se defiende que, aunque no de modo explícito, hay una afinidad entre ambas tesis y, en consecuencia, las debilidades de la segunda afectan a la primera. No obstante, el objetivo básico consiste en mostrar cómo propuestas emergentes, como la ecología de los saberes, antes (...) que insistir en su carácter contraepistemológico, podrían beneficiarse de una discusión epistemológica amplia.: In this paper I review the thesis about the proliferation of alternatives by Boaventura de Sousa Santos, from some criticisms to the thesis of the proliferation of theories by Paul Feyerabend. I claim that, though not in explicit way, there is an affinity between them, therefore the weakness from the second one affects the first one. However, the point is to show how some emergent proposals, as the ecology of knowledges, could benefit from a full epistemological discussion, instead of insisting on its counter-epistemological nature. (shrink)

Attempts to evaluate a belief or argument on the basis of its cause or origin are usually condemned as committing the genetic fallacy. However, I sketch a number of cases in which causal or historical factors are logically relevant to evaluating a belief, including an interesting abductive form that reasons from the best explanation for the existence of a belief to its likely truth. Such arguments are also susceptible to refutation by genetic reasoning that may come very close to the (...) standard examples given of supposedly fallacious genetic reasoning. (shrink)

The paper presents a paradoxical feature of computational systems that suggests that computationalism cannot explain symbol grounding. If the mind is a digital computer, as computationalism claims, then it can be computing either over meaningful symbols or over meaningless symbols. If it is computing over meaningful symbols its functioning presupposes the existence of meaningful symbols in the system, i.e. it implies semantic nativism. If the mind is computing over meaningless symbols, no intentional cognitive processes are available prior to symbol grounding. (...) In this case, no symbol grounding could take place since any grounding presupposes intentional cognitive processes. So, whether computing in the mind is over meaningless or over meaningful symbols, computationalism implies semantic nativism. (shrink)

Warning: includes two somewhat graphic images. This paper is an effort to lay out a taxomony of conceptual relations between the domains of the sublime and the religious. -/- .

Fictionalism in ontology is a mixed bag. Here I focus on three main variants—which I label after the names of Pascal, Berkeley, and Hume—and consider their relative strengths and weaknesses. The first variant is just a version of the epistemic Wager, applied across the board. The second variant builds instead on the fact that ordinary language is not ontologically transparent; we speak with the vulgar, but deep down we think with the learned. Finally, on the Humean variant it’s the structure (...) of the ontological inventory, not its content, that may turn out to involve fictional elements. That is, for the Humean the fiction lies, not in the reality of common-sense ontology, but in the laws—of unity, identity, causation, etc.—in terms of which we articulate our experience of that reality. In the end, this is the kind of fictionalism that I find most interesting, sensible, and tenable. And I argue that it is even compatible with the sort of “naive” realism we have all come to appreciate in the work of Paolo Bozzi, to whom the paper is dedicated. (shrink)

The way we farm, the kinds of backyards and landscapes we favor, and the way we control patterns of development are creating an invisible crisis through their affects upon soil ecology. The invisibility of soil ecosystems, the seemingly alien properties of the organisms that inhabit them, and the specialized knowledge required to understand them create obstacles to moral concern for these fountains of life. Our treatment of soils has reached the point of crisis. Obstacles to moral thinking about soils might (...) be overcome by supplying the moral imagination with a deeper understanding of our own biological identity as ecosystems analogous in organization and functions to soil ecosystems. Not only have microbes created the conditions necessary for human life, but they have shaped our evolutionary history and helped constitute the human genome. Our biological identity encompasses communities of microbes, such that humans (and all organisms) are most properly understood as ecosystems. For this reason, moral concern for humans implies moral concern for ecosystems. (shrink)

Global climate change is one of the most widely discussed problems of our time. However, many libertarian thinkers have not participated in the ethical dimensions of this discussion due to a narrow focus on the scientific basis for concern about climate change. In this paper, I reject this approach and explore the kind of response libertarians should be offering instead. I frame the climate change problem as one which concerns potential rights-infringements and explore different ways in which climate change might (...) be thought to infringe upon rights. I conclude that there are some ways in which climate change might be expected to result in rights-infringements, but that some of the current concern about climate change cannot be reconciled with a rights-oriented paradigm. I close by outlining future directions for research, emphasizing that much remains to be done in order to formulate a complete libertarian perspective on climate change. (shrink)

Resumen: Este artículo trata del método y su relación con la investigación educativa. El objetivo es analizar la relevancia del método en ciencias humanas y sociales, en especial, en educación. Para ello, dividimos este artículo en tres secciones: 1. ¿Hay método? 2. ¿Hay uno o varios métodos? 3. La discusión sobre el método en la investigación educativa. A la primera pregunta, respondemos que hay método. Respondemos a la segunda señalando la necesidad de adoptar un pluralismo metodológico. La tercera sección defiende (...) que las discusiones sobre el método de investigación educativa implican dimensiones ontológicas, epistemológicas y éticas que se han tornado críticas, y se hace una revisión de cada una de ellas. En el apartado conclusivo, sugerimos algunas vías para desanudar esos asuntos críticos en la investigación educativa.: This article deals with method and its relation to educational research. The objective is to analyze the relevance of method in human and social sciences, especially in education. To this end, we divide this article into three sections: 1. Is there a method? 2. Is there one or more methods? 3. The discussion on method in educational research. To the first question, we answer that there is a method. We answer the second question by pointing out the need to adopt methodological pluralism. The third section argues that discussions on the method of educational research involve ontological, epistemological, and ethical dimensions that have become critical, and a review is made of each of them. In the concluding section, we suggest some ways to disentangle these critical issues in educational research. (shrink)

The U.S. Supreme Court regards parental rights as fundamental. Such a status should subject any legal procedure that directly and substantively interferes with the exercise of parental rights to strict scrutiny. On the contrary, though, despite their status as fundamental constitutional rights, parental rights are routinely suspended or revoked as a result of procedures that fail to meet even minimal standards of procedural and substantive due process. This routine and cavalier deprivation of parental rights takes place in the context of (...) divorce where, during the pendency of litigation, one parent is routinely deprived of significant parental rights without any demonstration that a state interest exists—much less that there is a compelling state interest that cannot be achieved in any less restrictive way. In marked contrast to our current practice, treating parental rights as fundamental rights requires a presumption of joint legal and physical custody upon divorce and during the pendency of divorce litigation. The presumption may be overcome, but only by clear and convincing evidence that such an arrangement is harmful to the children. (shrink)

The theory and philosophy of artificial intelligence has come to a crucial point where the agenda for the forthcoming years is in the air. This special volume of Minds and Machines presents leading invited papers from a conference on the “Philosophy and Theory of Artificial Intelligence” that was held in October 2011 in Thessaloniki. Artificial Intelligence is perhaps unique among engineering subjects in that it has raised very basic questions about the nature of computing, perception, reasoning, learning, language, action, interaction, (...) consciousness, humankind, life etc. etc. – and at the same time it has contributed substantially to answering these questions. There is thus a substantial tradition of work, both on AI by philosophers and of theory within AI itself. - The volume contains papers by Bostrom, Dreyfus, Gomila, O'Regan and Shagrir. (shrink)

For a long time critics of modern and postmodern art have relied on the "Isn't that disgusting" strategy. By that I mean the strategy of pointing out that given works of art are ugly, trivial, or in bad taste, that "a five-year-old could have made them," and so on. And they have mostly left it at that. The points have often been true, but they have also been tiresome and unconvincing—and the art world has been entirely unmoved. -/- Of course, (...) the major works of the twentieth-century art world are ugly. Of course, many are offensive. Of course, a five-year old could in many cases have made an indistinguishable product. Those points are not arguable—and they are entirely beside the main question. The important question is: Why has the art world of the twentieth-century adopted the ugly and the offensive? Why has it poured its creative energies and cleverness into the trivial and the self-proclaimedly meaningless? (shrink)

In this article, responding to assertions that the principle of double effect has no place in legal analysis, I explore the overlap between double effect and negligence analysis. In both, questions of culpability arise in situations where a person acts with no intent to cause harm but where reasonable foreseeability of unintended harm exists. Under both analyses, the determination of whether such conduct is permissible involves a reasonability test that balances that foreseeable harm against the good intended by the actor's (...) conduct. In both, absent a finding that the foreseeable harm is unreasonable in light of that intended good, no liability will be imposed upon the actor. Even conceding, however, such general similarity between double effect and negligence analysis - disagreement over the proper interpretation of the reasonability criterion at play in negligence poses an additional challenge for the attempt to correlate negligence with double effect. Economic efficiency interpretations of negligence, for example, purportedly based on the Learned Hand Formula and the RESTATEMENT (SECOND) OF THE LAW OF TORTS, propose that culpability depends upon a utilitarian balancing of good effects of conduct (utility) versus its harmful foreseeable consequences (magnitude of risk of injury). Based on such an interpretation of negligence, however, contrasts between actors' states of mind, and normative differences between kinds of goods and harms, ultimately fade into the background and become irrelevant as essential conditions for properly assessing liability. This article elaborates and defends the view that double effect analysis lies at the heart of negligence theory. Part I elucidates in more detail the principle of double effect and describes its prima facie operation in negligence analysis. Part II considers and rejects the economic efficiency interpretation that has been offered as a theory of negligence, overcoming the challenge that such an interpretation presents for the effort to locate double effect analysis in the law. Part III illustrates and confirms the overlap between double effect and negligence by consideration of a series of case applications. The Article proposes that the weighing of conflicting values in double effect analysis and negligence is not achieved - as proposed by law and economics theory with respect to negligence - by imposing a consequentialist-utilitarian reduction of all value to a single concept of good and eliminating the relevance of traditional state of mind distinctions between intention and foreseeability. Instead, each mode of analysis recognizes that distinct culpability determinations flow naturally and plausibly from an appreciation of the traditional legal distinctions made between various types of goods and harms, and upon whether such goods and harms come about as result of an actor's intention or mere foreseeability. Keywords: Double effect, negligence, intention, foreseeability, choice, law and economics, utilitarianism, consequentialism, weighing of values. (shrink)

CATEGORY: Philosophy play; historical fiction; comedy; social criticism. -/- STORYLINE: Katherine, a neurotic American lawyer, meets Christianus for a philosophy session at The Late Victorian coffee shop in London, where they also meet Wendy the waitress and Baldy the player. Will Katherine be able to overcome her deep depression by adopting some of Christianus’s satisfactionist ideas? Or will she stay unsatisfied and unhappy by stubbornly sticking to her own neti-neti nothingness philosophy? And what roles do Baldy, Wendy, and the Okefenokee (...) Man-Monster have in this connexion? -/- TOPICS: In the course of this philosophy play, Katherine and Christianus discuss many things: friendship, a Renoir painting, global warming, elephant conservation, freemasons, Prince of Wales and his tiger-hunting experience in Nepal, Victorian Chartism and a Kennington Common daguerreotype, a Mortality Proof, and, last but not least, Baldy, Wendy, and the gory plot of the Okefenokee Man-Monster. -/- NOTES: This work features elaborate footnotes and comments (including full bibliographical references) by the author, to enhance the reader's experience of the play and its philosophizing characters. (shrink)

I offer a diagnosis of the parallelism between the Doctrine of Potential Parts and the Doctrine of Potential Wholes and briefly examine its bearing on Johansson’s account of the Tibbles-Tib Problem.

Abstract: In Vacco v. Quill, 521 U.S. 793 (1997), the Supreme Court for the first time in American case law explicitly applied the principle of double effect to reject an equal protection claim to physician-assisted suicide. Double effect, traced historically to Thomas Aquinas, proposes that under certain circumstances it is permissible unintentionally to cause foreseen evil effects that would not be permissible to cause intentionally. The court rejected the constitutional claim on the basis of a distinction marked out by the (...) principle, i.e., between directly intending the death of a terminally ill patient as opposed to merely foreseeing that death as a consequence of medical treatment. The Court held that the distinction comports with fundamental legal principles of causation and intent. Id. at 802. -/- Critics allege that the principle itself is intrinsically flawed and that, in any event, its employment in Vacco is without legal precedent. I argue in response to contemporary objections that double effect is a valid principle of ethical reflection (Part II); claims to the contrary notwithstanding, double effect analysis is a pervasive, albeit generally unacknowledged principle employed regularly in American case law (Part III); and drawing on the preceding two sections, Vacco's application of the principle of double effect is appropriate (Part IV). -/- My conclusion is that [o]peration of some form of the principle, by whatever name, is inevitable. In an imperfect world where duties and interests collide, the possibility of choices of action foreseen to have both good and evil consequences cannot be avoided. In rare circumstances, ethics and the law require that a person refrain from acting altogether. More often, however, they provide that a determination of whether an actor may pursue a good effect although knowing it will or may unintentionally cause an harmful effect requires a more complex analysis - a double effect analysis. -/- Keywords: Equal protection, double effect, intention, physician-assisted suicide, Constitutional Law, Bioethics. (shrink)

Review essay covering Godehard Link, ed. One Hundred Years of Russell’s Paradox (de Gruyter 2004).

In this essay, I argue that an immortal existence could be desirable. Taking the accounts of Williams and Smuts under careful consideration, I agree with Fischer that an immortal existence could be gratifying. When Fischer argues that it is unfair for Williams to posit that an immortal life must have self-exhausting pleasures and, overall, a better experience than mortal life, he gets to the crux of the argument for immortality: as long as there are positive categorical desires for the individual, (...) then such life-affirming desires will provide an impetus to carry on. In moving past the Teiresias model of a phenomenon that retains memories while changing characters, I argue that a life of intellectual inquiry – which essentially alters the character of the individual while maintaining memories – offers an outward looking existence which provides internal pleasures. Accordingly, with the use of technology, computer simulations have the potential to provide pleasures and experiences that escape reality. In this sense, technology has the potential to supplement an immortal life. We cannot say whether there will be a pinnacle of such learning and pleasure which leads to decreasing returns, but it seems plausible that an immortal being who incorporates learning and pleasure that could potentially lead to innovation and discovery would seek to continue such intellectual inquiry and varied experiences until all learning potentials were exhausted. (shrink)

Are people with flawed faces regarded as having flawed moral characters? An “anomalous-is-bad” stereotype is hypothesized to facilitate negative biases against people with facial anomalies (e.g., scars), but whether and how these biases affect behavior and brain functioning remain open questions. We examined responses to anomalous faces in the brain (using a visual oddball paradigm), behavior (in economic games), and attitudes. At the level of the brain, the amygdala demonstrated a specific neural response to anomalous faces—sensitive to disgust and a (...) lack of beauty but independent of responses to salience or arousal. At the level of behavior, people with anomalous faces were subjected to less prosociality from participants highest in socioeconomic status. At the level of attitudes, we replicated previously reported negative character evaluations made about individuals with facial anomalies, and further identified explicit biases directed against them as a group. Across these levels of organization, the specific amygdala response to facial anomalies correlated with stronger just-world beliefs (i.e., people get what they deserve), less dispositional empathic concern, and less prosociality toward people with facial anomalies. Characterizing the “anomalous-is-bad” stereotype at multiple levels of organization can reveal underappreciated psychological burdens shouldered by people who look different. (shrink)

Readers familiar with the workhorse of cosmology, the hot big bang model, may think that cosmology raises little of interest about time. As cosmological models are just relativistic spacetimes, time is understood just as it is in relativity theory, and all cosmology adds is a few bells and whistles such as inflation and the big bang and no more. The aim of this chapter is to show that this opinion is not completely right...and may well be dead wrong. In our (...) survey, we show how the hot big bang model invites deep questions about the nature of time, how inflationary cosmology has led to interesting new perspectives on time, and how cosmological speculation continues to entertain dramatically different models of time altogether. Together these issues indicate that the philosopher interested in the nature of time would do well to know a little about modern cosmology. (shrink)

Recent conversation has blurred two very different social epistemic phenomena: echo chambers and epistemic bubbles. Members of epistemic bubbles merely lack exposure to relevant information and arguments. Members of echo chambers, on the other hand, have been brought to systematically distrust all outside sources. In epistemic bubbles, other voices are not heard; in echo chambers, other voices are actively undermined. It is crucial to keep these phenomena distinct. First, echo chambers can explain the post-truth phenomena in a way that epistemic (...) bubbles cannot. Second, each type of structure requires a distinct intervention. Mere exposure to evidence can shatter an epistemic bubble, but may actually reinforce an echo chamber. Finally, echo chambers are much harder to escape. Once in their grip, an agent may act with epistemic virtue, but social context will pervert those actions. Escape from an echo chamber may require a radical rebooting of one's belief system. (shrink)

Hostile epistemology is the study of how environmental features exploit our cognitive vulnerabilities. I am particularly interested in those vulnerabilities arise from the basic character of our epistemic lives. We are finite beings with limited cognitive resources, perpetually forced to reasoning a rush. I focus on two sources of unavoidable vulnerability. First, we need to use cognitive shortcuts and heuristics to manage our limited time and attention. But hostile forces can always game the gap between the heuristic and the ideal. (...) Second, we need to trust others, and trust makes us vulnerable. In particular, we need to trust experts whose expertise lies beyond our individual ability to vet. So we must rely on various imperfect signals and proxies, like institutional affiliation, to manage our trust. We are forced to use these imperfect and exploitable forms of reasoning, in order to cope with a cognitively overwhelming world. I present the hostile epistemology framework as a counterbalance to vice epistemology, which tends to locate responsibility for bad beliefs in the character of the believer. I draw two conclusions from my analysis. First: suppose we accept that that only communities and institutions can know about the world. This deeply social approach doesn’t solve the problem of expert identification. The individual still faces a problem: given their incomplete understanding, how should the individual pick which group to trust? Second: we might have hoped to get some kind of static picture of the right principles of reasoning — but hostile epistemology presents a different picture. We have to use risky heuristics and shortcuts, which hostile forces can game and exploit. We can respond by shifting to a different set of heuristics, but this simply shifts the location of our vulnerabilities. These new heuristics are also exploitable. There is no end to this, only a constant struggle to adapt. Limited beings in a hostile epistemic environment are locked in an unending epistemic arms race. (shrink)

The impetus theory of motion states that to be in motion is to have a non-zero velocity. The at-at theory of motion states that to be in motion is to be at different places at different times, which in classical physics is naturally understood as the reduction of velocities to position developments. I first defend the at-at theory against the criticism raised by Arntzenius that it renders determinism impossible. I then develop a novel impetus theory of motion that reduces positions (...) to velocity developments. As this impetus theory of motion is by construction a mirror image of the at-at theory of motion, I claim that the two theories of motion are in fact epistemically on par—despite the unfamiliar metaphysical picture of the world furnished by the impetus version. (shrink)

De uma perspectiva comportamentalista radical, o eu é um repertório verbal complexo, que, como tal, tem uma gênese social. O reconhecimento da origem social do “eu” abre caminho para uma análise política, incluindo uma discussão do pa- pel das relações de poder na constituição do eu. Entretanto, uma concepção radicalmente social do “eu”, como a proposta pelo comportamentalismo, suscita um problema político: se o eu é integralmente produto do ambiente social, de onde viria uma eventual “vontade” de romper com esse (...) sistema? Parece que para reconhecer a possibilidade de ação política transformadora seria preciso preservar uma noção descontextualizada de “eu”. Considerando essa dificuldade, o objetivo deste artigo é propor uma interpretação política da constituição do “eu” no âmbito do comportamentalismo radical, mantendo no horizonte a possibilidade de uma ação política transformadora. Para tanto, destacamos como “eus” oprimidos são tornados submissos, mas também como de certas contingências podem emergir “eus” subversivos, que se opõem a um sistema social opressivo. Esse “eu” subversivo é caracterizado por um repertório de autoconhecimento mais amplo, que inclui a discriminação do papel das relações de poder e do controle promovido por instituições. Concluímos, com isso, que um “eu” socialmente constituído pode ser politicamente ativo. (shrink)

According to most accounts of trust, you can only trust other people (or groups of people). To trust is to think that another has goodwill, or something to that effect. I sketch a different form of trust: the unquestioning attitude. What it is to trust, in this sense, is to settle one’s mind about something, to stop questioning it. To trust is to rely on a resource while suspending deliberation over its reliability. Trust lowers the barrier of monitoring, challenging, checking, (...) and questioning. Trust sets up open pipelines between yourself and parts of the external world. Trust permits external resources to have a similar relationship to one as one’s internal cognitive faculties. This creates efficiency, but at the price of exquisite vulnerability. We must trust in this way because we are cognitively limited beings in a cognitively overwhelming world. Crucially, we can hold the unquestioning attitude towards objects and technologies. When I trust my climbing rope, I stop worrying about its reliability. When I trust my online calendaring system, I simply go to the events indicated, without question. But, one might worry, how could one ever hold such a normatively loaded attitude as trust towards mere objects? How could it ever make sense to feel betrayed by an object? Trust is our engine for expanding and outsourcing our agency — for binding external processes into our practical selves. Thus, we can be betrayed by our smartphones in the same way that we can be betrayed by our memory. When we trust, we try to make something a part of our agency, and we are betrayed when our part lets us down. To unquestioningly trust something is to let it in—to attempt to bring it inside one’s practical functioning. This suggests a new form of gullibility: agential gullibility, which occurs when agents too hastily and carelessly integrate external resources into their own agency. (shrink)

Ecological economics is an interdisciplinary science that is primarily concerned with developing interventions to achieve sustainable ecological and economic systems. While ecological economists have, over the last few decades, made various empirical, theoretical, and conceptual advancements, there is one concept in particular that remains subject to confusion: critical natural capital. While critical natural capital denotes parts of the environment that are essential for the continued existence of our species, the meaning of terms commonly associated with this concept, such as ‘non-substitutable’ (...) and ‘impossible to substitute,’ require a clearer formulation then they tend to receive. With the help of equations and graphs, this article develops new definite account of critical natural capital that makes explicit what it means for objective environmental conditions to be essential for continued existence. The second main part of this article turns to the question of formally modeling the priority of conserving critical natural capital. While some ecological economists have maintained that, beyond a certain threshold, critical natural capital possesses absolute infinite value, absolute infinite utility models encounter significant problems. This article shows that a relative infinite utility model provides a better way to model the priority of conserving critical natural capital. (shrink)

Games occupy a unique and valuable place in our lives. Game designers do not simply create worlds; they design temporary selves. Game designers set what our motivations are in the game and what our abilities will be. Thus: games are the art form of agency. By working in the artistic medium of agency, games can offer a distinctive aesthetic value. They support aesthetic experiences of deciding and doing. -/- And the fact that we play games shows something remarkable about us. (...) Our agency is more fluid than we might have thought. In playing a game, we take on temporary ends; we submerge ourselves temporarily in an alternate agency. Games turn out to be a vessel for communicating different modes of agency, for writing them down and storing them. Games create an archive of agencies. And playing games is how we familiarize ourselves with different modes of agency, which helps us develop our capacity to fluidly change our own style of agency. (shrink)

Games may seem like a waste of time, where we struggle under artificial rules for arbitrary goals. The author suggests that the rules and goals of games are not arbitrary at all. They are a way of specifying particular modes of agency. This is what make games a distinctive art form. Game designers designate goals and abilities for the player; they shape the agential skeleton which the player will inhabit during the game. Game designers work in the medium of agency. (...) Game-playing, then, illuminates a distinctive human capacity. We can take on ends temporarily for the sake of the experience of pursuing them. Game play shows that our agency is significantly more modular and more fluid than we might have thought. It also demonstrates our capacity to take on an inverted motivational structure. Sometimes we can take on an end for the sake of the activity of pursuing that end. (shrink)

Twitter makes conversation into something like a game. It scores our communication, giving us vivid and quantified feedback, via Likes, Retweets, and Follower counts. But this gamification doesn’t just increase our motivation to communicate; it changes the very nature of the activity. Games are more satisfying than ordinary life precisely because game-goals are simpler, cleaner, and easier to apply. Twitter is thrilling precisely because its goals have been artificially clarified and narrowed. When we buy into Twitter’s gamification, then our values (...) shift from the complex and pluralistic values of communication, to the narrower quest for popularity and virality. Twitter’s gamification bears some resemblance with the phenomena of echo chambers and moral outrage porn. In all these phenomena, we are instrumentalizing our ends for hedonistic reasons. We have shifted our aims in an activity, not because the new aims are more valuable, but in exchange for extra pleasure. (shrink)

There seems to be a deep tension between two aspects of aesthetic appreciation. On the one hand, we care about getting things right. On the other hand, we demand autonomy. We want appreciators to arrive at their aesthetic judgments through their own cognitive efforts, rather than deferring to experts. These two demands seem to be in tension; after all, if we want to get the right judgments, we should defer to the judgments of experts. The best explanation, I suggest, is (...) that aesthetic appreciation is something like a game. When we play a game, we try to win. But often, winning isn’t the point; playing is. Aesthetic appreciation involves the same flipped motivational structure: we aim at the goal of correctness, but having correct judgments isn’t the point. The point is the engaged process of interpreting, investigating, and exploring the aesthetic object. Deferring to aesthetic testimony, then, makes the same mistake as looking up the answer to a puzzle, rather than solving it for oneself. The shortcut defeats the whole point. This suggests a new account of aesthetic value: the engagement account. The primary value of the activity of aesthetic appreciation lies in the process of trying to generate correct judgments, and not in having correct judgments. -/- *There is an audio version available: look for the Soundcloud link, below.*. (shrink)

The feeling of clarity can be dangerously seductive. It is the feeling associated with understanding things. And we use that feeling, in the rough-and-tumble of daily life, as a signal that we have investigated a matter sufficiently. The sense of clarity functions as a thought-terminating heuristic. In that case, our use of clarity creates significant cognitive vulnerability, which hostile forces can try to exploit. If an epistemic manipulator can imbue a belief system with an exaggerated sense of clarity, then they (...) can induce us to terminate our inquiries too early — before we spot the flaws in the system. How might the sense of clarity be faked? Let’s first consider the object of imitation: genuine understanding. Genuine understanding grants cognitive facility. When we understand something, we categorize its aspects more easily; we see more connections between its disparate elements; we can generate new explanations; and we can communicate our understanding. In order to encourage us to accept a system of thought, then, an epistemic manipulator will want the system to provide its users with an exaggerated sensation of cognitive facility. The system should provide its users with the feeling that they can easily and powerfully create categorizations, generate explanations, and communicate their understanding. And manipulators have a significant advantage in imbuing their systems with a pleasurable sense of clarity, since they are freed from the burdens of accuracy and reliability. I offer two case studies of seductively clear systems: conspiracy theories; and the standardized, quantified value systems of bureaucracies. (shrink)

Hermann Weyl was one of the most important figures involved in the early elaboration of the general theory of relativity and its fundamentally geometrical spacetime picture of the world. Weyl’s development of “pure infinitesimal geometry” out of relativity theory was the basis of his remarkable attempt at unifying gravitation and electromagnetism. Many interpreters have focused primarily on Weyl’s philosophical influences, especially the influence of Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology, as the motivation for these efforts. In this article, I argue both that these (...) efforts are most naturally understood as an outgrowth of the distinctive mathematical-physical tradition in Göttingen and also that phenomenology has little to no constructive role to play in them. (shrink)

In her BBC Reith Lectures on Trust, Onora O’Neill offers a short, but biting, criticism of transparency. People think that trust and transparency go together but in reality, says O'Neill, they are deeply opposed. Transparency forces people to conceal their actual reasons for action and invent different ones for public consumption. Transparency forces deception. I work out the details of her argument and worsen her conclusion. I focus on public transparency – that is, transparency to the public over expert domains. (...) I offer two versions of the criticism. First, the epistemic intrusion argument: The drive to transparency forces experts to explain their reasoning to non-experts. But expert reasons are, by their nature, often inaccessible to non-experts. So the demand for transparency can pressure experts to act only in those ways for which they can offer public justification. Second, the intimate reasons argument: In many cases of practical deliberation, the relevant reasons are intimate to a community and not easily explicable to those who lack a particular shared background. The demand for transparency, then, pressures community members to abandon the special understanding and sensitivity that arises from their particular experiences. Transparency, it turns out, is a form of surveillance. By forcing reasoning into the explicit and public sphere, transparency roots out corruption — but it also inhibits the full application of expert skill, sensitivity, and subtle shared understandings. The difficulty here arises from the basic fact that human knowledge vastly outstrips any individual’s capacities. We all depend on experts, which makes us vulnerable to their biases and corruption. But if we try to wholly secure our trust — if we leash groups of experts to pursuing only the goals and taking only the actions that can be justified to the non-expert public — then we will undermine their expertise. We need both trust and transparency, but they are in essential tension. This is a deep practical dilemma; it admits of no neat resolution, but only painful compromise. (shrink)

BĪRŪNĪ, ABŪ RAYḤĀN MOḤAMMAD b. Aḥmad (362/973- after 442/1050), scholar and polymath of the period of the late Samanids and early Ghaznavids and one of the two greatest intellectual figures of his time in the eastern lands of the Muslim world, the other being Ebn Sīnā.

In our life with science, we trust experts; we form judgements by inference from past evidence. We conduct ourselves very differently in the aesthetic domain. We avoid deferring to aesthetic experts. We form our judgements through direct perception of particulars rather than through inference. Why the difference? I suggest that we avoid aesthetic testimony and aesthetic inference, not because they’re unusable, but because we have adopted social norms to avoid them. Aesthetic appreciation turns out to be something like a game. (...) We have laid down certain rules and restrictions in order to shape a kind of activity we cherish. And aesthetic properties turn out to be a kind of social construct. Much like the goal of a game, they are constituted in part by our obedience to certain rules. The norms of aesthetic life are different from those of science because our purposes are different. We engage in science to get the right answers; we engage in aesthetic appreciation to be absorbed in the activity of the sensuous perception of particulars. Our aesthetic practices are a constructed shelter from science; they restore to us a small domain where we may once again engage in our own sensuous perception of particulars. (shrink)

I propose to study one problem for epistemic dependence on experts: how to locate experts on what I will call cognitive islands. Cognitive islands are those domains for knowledge in which expertise is required to evaluate other experts. They exist under two conditions: first, that there is no test for expertise available to the inexpert; and second, that the domain is not linked to another domain with such a test. Cognitive islands are the places where we have the fewest resources (...) for evaluating experts, which makes our expert dependences particularly risky. -/- Some have argued that cognitive islands lead to the complete unusability of expert testimony: that anybody who needs expert advice on a cognitive island will be entirely unable to find it. I argue against this radical form of pessimism, but propose a more moderate alternative. I demonstrate that we have some resources for finding experts on cognitive islands, but that cognitive islands leave us vulnerable to an epistemic trap which I will call runaway echo chambers. In a runaway echo chamber, our inexpertise may lead us to pick out bad experts, which will simply reinforce our mistaken beliefs and sensibilities. (shrink)