Results for 'Brian G. Schunck'

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  1. Is There an Ethics of Creativity?Brian G. Henning - 2006 - Chromatikon 2:161-173.
    Is there an ethics of creativity? Though this question appears innocent enough, it proves surprisingly difficult to answer. A survey of the literature on the topic reveals that process ethics has variously been categorized as or seen as compatible with: moral interest theory, ecological virtue ethics, utilitarianism, Confucian virtue ethics, and even deontology. What can account for such divergent and even contradictory conclusions? On one level we might blame Whitehead, whose sporadic comments on morality may appear to be more suggestive (...)
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  2. The Ethics of Food, Fuel, and Feed.Brian G. Henning - 2015 - Daedalus 144 (4):90-98.
    As the collective impact of human activity approaches Earth’s biophysical limits, the ethics of food become increasingly important. Hundreds of millions of people remain undernourished, yet only 60 percent of the global harvest is consumed by humans, while 35 percent is fed to livestock and 5 percent is used for biofuels and other industrial products. This essay considers the ethics of such use of edible nutrition for feedstock and biofuel. How humanity uses Earth’s land is a reflection of its values. (...)
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  3. A holistic approach to language.Brian D. Josephson & David G. Blair - 1982 - International Philsophical Preprint Exchange (IPPE).
    The following progress report views language acquisition as primarily the attempt to create processes that connect together in a fruitful way linguistic input and other activity. The representations made of linguistic input are thus those that are optimally effective in mediating such interconnections. An effective Language Acquisition Device should contain mechanisms specific to the task of creating the desired interconnection processes in the linguistic environment in which the language learner finds himself or herself. Analysis of this requirement gives clear indications (...)
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  4. Moore’s Notes on Wittgenstein’s Lectures, Cambridge 1930-1933: Text, Context, and Content.David G. Stern, Gabriel Citron & Brian Rogers - 2013 - Nordic Wittgenstein Review (1):161-179.
    Wittgenstein’s writings and lectures during the first half of the 1930s play a crucial role in any interpretation of the relationship between the Tractatus and the Philosophical Investigations . G. E. Moore’s notes of Wittgenstein’s Cambridge lectures, 1930-1933, offer us a remarkably careful and conscientious record of what Wittgenstein said at the time, and are much more detailed and reliable than previously published notes from those lectures. The co-authors are currently editing these notes of Wittgenstein’s lectures for a book to (...)
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  5. Multidimensional Concepts and Disparate Scale Types.Brian Hedden & Jacob M. Nebel - 2024 - Philosophical Review 133 (3):265-308.
    Multidimensional concepts are everywhere, and they are important. Examples include moral value, welfare, scientific confirmation, democracy, and biodiversity. How, if at all, can we aggregate the underlying dimensions of a multidimensional concept F to yield verdicts about which things are Fer than which overall? Social choice theory can be used to model and investigate this aggregation problem. Here, we focus on a particularly thorny problem made salient by this social choice-theoretic framework: the underlying dimensions of a given concept might be (...)
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  6. Can we do without pragmatic encroachment.Brian Weatherson - 2005 - Philosophical Perspectives 19 (1):417–443.
    I consider the problem of how to derive what an agent believes from their credence function and utility function. I argue the best solution of this problem is pragmatic, i.e. it is sensitive to the kinds of choices actually facing the agent. I further argue that this explains why our notion of justified belief appears to be pragmatic, as is argued e.g. by Fantl and McGrath. The notion of epistemic justification is not really a pragmatic notion, but it is being (...)
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  7. Addiction, Identity, Morality.Brian D. Earp, Joshua August Skorburg, Jim A. C. Everett & Julian Savulescu - 2019 - AJOB Empirical Bioethics 10 (2):136-153.
    Background: Recent literature on addiction and judgments about the characteristics of agents has focused on the implications of adopting a ‘brain disease’ versus ‘moral weakness’ model of addiction. Typically, such judgments have to do with what capacities an agent has (e.g., the ability to abstain from substance use). Much less work, however, has been conducted on the relationship between addiction and judgments about an agent’s identity, including whether or to what extent an individual is seen as the same person after (...)
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  8. A puzzle about scope for restricted deontic modals.Brian Rabern & Patrick Todd - 2023 - Snippets 44:8-10.
    Deontic necessity modals (e.g. 'have to', 'ought to', 'must', 'need to', 'should', etc.) seem to vary in how they interact with negation. According to some accounts, what forces modals like 'ought' and 'should' to outscope negation is their polarity sensitivity -- modals that scope over negation do so because they are positive polarity items. But there is a conflict between this account and a widely assumed theory of if-clauses, namely the restrictor analysis. In particular, the conflict arises for constructions containing (...)
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  9. The history of the use of ⟦.⟧-notation in natural language semantics.Brian Rabern - 2016 - Semantics and Pragmatics 9 (12).
    In contemporary natural languages semantics one will often see the use of special brackets to enclose a linguistic expression, e.g. ⟦carrot⟧. These brackets---so-called denotation brackets or semantic evaluation brackets---stand for a function that maps a linguistic expression to its "denotation" or semantic value (perhaps relative to a model or other parameters). Even though this notation has been used in one form or another since the early development of natural language semantics in the 1960s and 1970s, Montague himself didn't make use (...)
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  10. Causal Powers, Hume’s Early German Critics, and Kant’s Response to Hume.Brian A. Chance - 2013 - Kant Studien 104 (2):213-236.
    Eric Watkins has argued on philosophical, textual, and historical grounds that Kant’s account of causation in the first Critique should not be read as an attempt to refute Hume’s account of causation. In this paper, I challenge the arguments for Watkins’ claim. Specifically, I argue (1) that Kant’s philosophical commitments, even on Watkins’ reading, are not obvious obstacles to refuting Hume, (2) that textual evidence from the “Disciple of Pure Reason” suggests Kant conceived of his account of causation as such (...)
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  11. Higher-Order Defeat in Realist Moral Epistemology.Brian C. Barnett - 2019 - In Michael Klenk, Higher Order Evidence and Moral Epistemology. New York: Routledge. pp. 117-135.
    On an optimistic version of realist moral epistemology, a significant range of ordinary moral beliefs, construed in realist terms, constitute knowledge—or at least some weaker positive epistemic status, such as epistemic justification. The “debunking challenge” to this view grants prima facie justification but claims that it is “debunked” (i.e., defeated), yielding the final verdict that moral beliefs are ultima facie unjustified. Notable candidate “debunkers” (i.e., defeaters) include the so-called “evolutionary debunking arguments,” the “Benacerraf-Field Challenge,” and persistent moral disagreement among epistemic (...)
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  12. Consciousness and the physical world: edited proceedings of an interdisciplinary symposium on consciousness held at the University of Cambridge in January 1978.Brian David Josephson & V. S. Ramachandran (eds.) - 1980 - New York: Pergamon Press.
    Edited proceedings of an interdisciplinary symposium on consciousness held at the University of Cambridge in January 1978. Includes a foreword by Freeman Dyson. Chapter authors: G. Vesey, R.L. Gregory, H.C. Longuet-Higgins, N.K. Humphrey, H.B. Barlow, D.M. MacKay, B.D. Josephson, M. Roth, V.S. Ramachandran, S. Padfield, and (editorial summary only) E. Noakes. A scanned pdf is available from this web site (philpapers.org), while alternative versions more suitable for copying text are available from https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/245189. -/- Page numbering convention for the pdf version (...)
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  13. Index, context, and the content of knowledge.Brian Rabern - 2017 - In Jonathan Jenkins Ichikawa, The Routledge Handbook of Epistemic Contextualism. New York: Routledge. pp. 465-479.
    The verb 'knows' is often taken to be context-sensitive in an interesting way. What 'knows' means seems to be sensitive to the epistemic features of the context, e.g. the epistemic standard in play, the set of relevant alternatives, etc. There are standard model-theoretic semantic frameworks which deal with both intensional operators and context-sensitive expressions. In this chapter, we provide a brief overview of the various moving parts of these frameworks, the roles of context and index, the need for double indexing, (...)
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  14. Illusions of Commutativity: The Case for Conditional Excluded Middle Revisited.Patrick Todd, Brian Rabern & Wolfgang Schwarz - manuscript
    The principle of Conditional Excluded Middle has been a matter of longstanding controversy in both semantics and metaphysics. The principle suggests (among other things) that for any coin that isn't flipped, there is a fact of the matter about how it would have landed if it had been flipped: either it would have landed heads, or it would have landed tails. This view has gained support from linguistic evidence indicating that ‘would’ commutes with negation (e.g., ‘not: if A, would C’ (...)
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  15. Why do evaluative judgments affect emotion attributions? The roles of judgments about fittingness and the true self.Michael Prinzing, Brian D. Earp & Joshua Knobe - 2023 - Cognition 239 (C):105579.
    Past research has found that the value of a person's activities can affect observers' judgments about whether that person is experiencing certain emotions (e.g., people consider morally good agents happier than morally bad agents). One proposed explanation for this effect is that emotion attributions are influenced by judgments about fittingness (whether the emotion is merited). Another hypothesis is that emotion attributions are influenced by judgments about the agent's true self (whether the emotion reflects how the agent feels “deep down”). We (...)
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  16. Dogmatism, Probability, and Logical Uncertainty.David Jehle & Brian Weatherson - 2012 - In Greg Restall & Gillian Kay Russell, New waves in philosophical logic. New York: Palgrave-Macmillan. pp. 95--111.
    Many epistemologists hold that an agent can come to justifiably believe that p is true by seeing that it appears that p is true, without having any antecedent reason to believe that visual impressions are generally reliable. Certain reliabilists think this, at least if the agent’s vision is generally reliable. And it is a central tenet of dogmatism (as described by James Pryor) that this is possible. Against these positions it has been argued (e.g. by Stewart Cohen and Roger White) (...)
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  17. Accuracy and the Imps.James M. Joyce & Brian Weatherson - 2019 - Logos and Episteme 10 (3):263-282.
    Recently several authors have argued that accuracy-first epistemology ends up licensing problematic epistemic bribes. They charge that it is better, given the accuracy-first approach, to deliberately form one false belief if this will lead to forming many other true beliefs. We argue that this is not a consequence of the accuracy-first view. If one forms one false belief and a number of other true beliefs, then one is committed to many other false propositions, e.g., the conjunction of that false belief (...)
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  18. Social Ontology and Social Normativity.Brian Donohue - 2020 - Dissertation, University at Buffalo
    Many recent accounts of the ontology of groups, institutions, and practices have touched upon the normative or deontic dimensions of social reality (e.g., social obligations, claims, permissions, prohibitions, authority, and immunity), as distinct from any specifically moral values or obligations. For the most part, however, the ontology of such socio-deontic phenomena has not received the attention it deserves. In what sense might a social obligation or a claim exist? What is the ontological status of such an obligation (e.g., is it (...)
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  19. Review: The Powers of the Universe by Brian Swimme.Z. G. ma - 2018 - Asian Research Journal of Arts and Social Sciences 5 (2):01-08.
    This essay presents a review on Brian Swimme’s 3-DVD set of lecture series in the interdisciplinary field of philosophy, cosmology and consciousness. In the eleven 45-minute episodes of a systematic 9-hour immersive program, a set of 12 intercorrelated cosmological powers is proposed on the basis of modern scientific theory. A positive and life-affirming vision of human potential is attained together with a new level of ecological responsibility and relatedness. The interwoven cosmological paradigm compromises with two ancient eastern wisdoms.
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  20.  48
    Epistemic Modals in Context.Andy Egan, John Hawthorne & Brian Weatherson - 2005 - In Gerhard Preyer & Georg Peter, Contextualism in philosophy: knowledge, meaning, and truth. New York: Oxford University Press. pp. 131-168.
    A very simple contextualist treatment of a sentence containing an epistemic modal, e.g. a might be F, is that it is true iff for all the contextually salient community knows, a is F. It is widely agreed that the simple theory will not work in some cases, but the counterexamples produced so far seem amenable to a more complicated contextualist theory. We argue, however, that no contextualist theory can capture the evaluations speakers naturally make of sentences containing epistemic modals. If (...)
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  21. (1 other version)Epistemic Modals in Context.Andy Egan, John Hawthorne & Brian Weatherson - 2005 - In Gerhard Preyer & Georg Peter, Contextualism in philosophy: knowledge, meaning, and truth. New York: Oxford University Press. pp. 131-168.
    A very simple contextualist treatment of a sentence containing an epistemic modal, e.g. a might be F, is that it is true iff for all the contextually salient community knows, a is F. It is widely agreed that the simple theory will not work in some cases, but the counterexamples produced so far seem amenable to a more complicated contextualist theory. We argue, however, that no contextualist theory can capture the evaluations speakers naturally make of sentences containing epistemic modals. If (...)
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  22. Mental files and belief: A cognitive theory of how children represent belief and its intensionality.Josef Perner, Michael Huemer & Brian Leahy - 2015 - Cognition 145 (C):77-88.
    We provide a cognitive analysis of how children represent belief using mental files. We explain why children who pass the false belief test are not aware of the intensionality of belief. Fifty-one 3½- to 7-year old children were familiarized with a dual object, e.g., a ball that rattles and is described as a rattle. They observed how a puppet agent witnessed the ball being put into box 1. In the agent’s absence the ball was taken from box 1, the child (...)
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  23. Ampliative Transmission and Deontological Internalism.Luis R. G. Oliveira - 2018 - Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 99 (2):174-185.
    Deontological internalism is the family of views where justification is a positive deontological appraisal of someone's epistemic agency: S is justified, that is, when S is blameless, praiseworthy, or responsible in believing that p. Brian Weatherson discusses very briefly how a plausible principle of ampliative transmission reveals a worry for versions of deontological internalism formulated in terms of epistemic blame. Weatherson denies, however, that similar principles reveal similar worries for other versions. I disagree. In this article, I argue that (...)
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  24. The effect of negative polarity items on inference verification.Anna Szabolcsi, Lewis Bott & Brian McElree - 2008 - Journal of Semantics 25 (4):411-450.
    The scalar approach to negative polarity item (NPI) licensing assumes that NPIs are allowable in contexts in which the introduction of the NPI leads to proposition strengthening (e.g., Kadmon & Landman 1993, Krifka 1995, Lahiri 1997, Chierchia 2006). A straightforward processing prediction from such a theory is that NPI’s facilitate inference verification from sets to subsets. Three experiments are reported that test this proposal. In each experiment, participants evaluated whether inferences from sets to subsets were valid. Crucially, we manipulated whether (...)
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  25. CIDO: The Community-Based Coronavirus Infectious Disease Ontology.Yongqun He, Hong Yu, Edison Ong, Yang Wang, Yingtong Liu, Anthony Huffman, Hsin-hui Huang, Beverley John, Asiyah Yu Lin, Duncan William D., Sivaram Arabandi, Jiangan Xie, Junguk Hur, Xiaolin Yang, Luonan Chen, Gilbert S. Omenn, Brian Athey & Barry Smith - 2021 - Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Biomedical Ontologies (ICBO) and 10th Workshop on Ontologies and Data in Life Sciences (ODLS).
    Current COVID-19 pandemic and previous SARS/MERS outbreaks have caused a series of major crises to global public health. We must integrate the large and exponentially growing amount of heterogeneous coronavirus data to better understand coronaviruses and associated disease mechanisms, in the interest of developing effective and safe vaccines and drugs. Ontologies have emerged to play an important role in standard knowledge and data representation, integration, sharing, and analysis. We have initiated the development of the community-based Coronavirus Infectious Disease Ontology (CIDO). (...)
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  26. Counterepistemic indicative conditionals and probability.J. R. G. Williams - manuscript
    *This work is no longer under development* Two major themes in the literature on indicative conditionals are that the content of indicative conditionals typically depends on what is known;1 that conditionals are intimately related to conditional probabilities.2 In possible world semantics for counterfactual conditionals, a standard assumption is that conditionals whose antecedents are metaphysically impossible are vacuously true.3 This aspect has recently been brought to the fore, and defended by Tim Williamson, who uses it in to characterize alethic necessity by (...)
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  27. Review of G.E.Moore’s Ethical Theory by Brian Hutchinson. [REVIEW]Charles Pigden - 2004 - International Philosophical Quarterly:543-547.
    The history of philosophy can be seen either as a contribution to history or a contribution to philosophy or perhaps as a bit of both. Hutchinson fail on both counts. The book is bad: bad in itself (since it quite definitely ought not to be) and bad as a companion to Principia (since it sets students a bad example of slapdash, lazy and pretentious philosophizing and would tend to put them off reading Moore). As a conscientious reviewer I ploughed through (...)
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  28. Determinism and attributions of consciousness.Gunnar Björnsson & Joshua Shepherd - 2020 - Philosophical Psychology 33 (4):549-568.
    The studies we report indicate that it is possible to manipulate explicit ascriptions of consciousness by manipulating whether an agent’s behavior is deterministically caused. In addition, we explore whether this impact of determinism on consciousness is direct, or mediated by notions linked to agency – notions like moral responsibility, free will, deliberate choice, and sensitivity to moral reasons. We provide evidence of mediation. This result extends work on attributions of consciousness and their connection to attributions of agency by Adam Arico, (...)
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  29. Why Humean Causation Is Extrinsic.Daniel Pallies - 2019 - Thought: A Journal of Philosophy 8 (2):139-148.
    According to a view that goes by “Humeanism,” causal facts supervene on patterns of worldly entities. The simplest form of Humeanism is the constant conjunction theory: a particular type-F thing causes a particular type-G thing iff (i) that type-Fis conjoined with that type-G thing and (ii) all F’s are conjoined with G’s. The constant conjunction theory implies that all causation is extrinsic, in the following sense: for all positive causal facts pertaining to each possible region,it’s extrinsic to that region that (...)
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  30. Bodily Self-Knowledge as a Special Form of Perception.Hao Tang - 2022 - Disputatio 11 (20).
    We enjoy immediate knowledge of our own limbs and bodies. I argue that this knowledge, which is also called proprioception, is a special form of perception, special in that it is, unlike perception by the external senses, at the same time also a form of genuine self-knowledge. The argument has two parts. Negatively, I argue against the view, held by G. E. M. Anscombe and strengthened by John McDowell, that this knowledge, bodily self-knowledge, is non-perceptual. This involves, inter alia, rescuing (...)
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  31. Nonconceptual content and the "space of reasons".Richard G. Heck - 2000 - Philosophical Review 109 (4):483-523.
    In Mind and World, John McDowell argues against the view that perceptual representation is non-conceptual. The central worry is that this view cannot offer any reasonable account of how perception bears rationally upon belief. I argue that this worry, though sensible, can be met, if we are clear that perceptual representation is, though non-conceptual, still in some sense 'assertoric': Perception, like belief, represents things as being thus and so.
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  32. Impermissive Bayesianism.Christopher J. G. Meacham - 2013 - Erkenntnis 79 (Suppl 6):1185-1217.
    This paper examines the debate between permissive and impermissive forms of Bayesianism. It briefly discusses some considerations that might be offered by both sides of the debate, and then replies to some new arguments in favor of impermissivism offered by Roger White. First, it argues that White’s (Oxford studies in epistemology, vol 3. Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp 161–186, 2010) defense of Indifference Principles is unsuccessful. Second, it contends that White’s (Philos Perspect 19:445–459, 2005) arguments against permissive views do not (...)
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  33. Fundamental and Derivative Truths.J. R. G. Williams - 2010 - Mind 119 (473):103 - 141.
    This article investigates the claim that some truths are fundamentally or really true — and that other truths are not. Such a distinction can help us reconcile radically minimal metaphysical views with the verities of common sense. I develop an understanding of the distinction whereby Fundamentality is not itself a metaphysical distinction, but rather a device that must be presupposed to express metaphysical distinctions. Drawing on recent work by Rayo on anti-Quinean theories of ontological commitments, I formulate a rigourous theory (...)
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  34. Sleeping beauty and the dynamics of de se beliefs.Christopher J. G. Meacham - 2008 - Philosophical Studies 138 (2):245-269.
    This paper examines three accounts of the sleeping beauty case: an account proposed by Adam Elga, an account proposed by David Lewis, and a third account defended in this paper. It provides two reasons for preferring the third account. First, this account does a good job of capturing the temporal continuity of our beliefs, while the accounts favored by Elga and Lewis do not. Second, Elga’s and Lewis’ treatments of the sleeping beauty case lead to highly counterintuitive consequences. The proposed (...)
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  35. Ur-Priors, Conditionalization, and Ur-Prior Conditionalization.Christopher J. G. Meacham - 2016 - Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 3.
    Conditionalization is a widely endorsed rule for updating one’s beliefs. But a sea of complaints have been raised about it, including worries regarding how the rule handles error correction, changing desiderata of theory choice, evidence loss, self-locating beliefs, learning about new theories, and confirmation. In light of such worries, a number of authors have suggested replacing Conditionalization with a different rule — one that appeals to what I’ll call “ur-priors”. But different authors have understood the rule in different ways, and (...)
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  36. Deference and Uniqueness.Christopher J. G. Meacham - 2019 - Philosophical Studies 176 (3):709-732.
    Deference principles are principles that describe when, and to what extent, it’s rational to defer to others. Recently, some authors have used such principles to argue for Evidential Uniqueness, the claim that for every batch of evidence, there’s a unique doxastic state that it’s permissible for subjects with that total evidence to have. This paper has two aims. The first aim is to assess these deference-based arguments for Evidential Uniqueness. I’ll show that these arguments only work given a particular kind (...)
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  37. The Consistency of predicative fragments of Frege’s Grundgesetze der Arithmetik.Richard G. Heck - 1996 - History and Philosophy of Logic 17 (1-2):209-220.
    As is well-known, the formal system in which Frege works in his Grundgesetze der Arithmetik is formally inconsistent, Russell's Paradox being derivable in it. This system is, except for minor differences, full second-order logic, augmented by a single non-logical axiom, Frege's Axiom V. It has been known for some time now that the first-order fragment of the theory is consistent. The present paper establishes that both the simple and the ramified predicative second-order fragments are consistent, and that Robinson arithmetic, Q, (...)
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  38. Understanding Conditionalization.Christopher J. G. Meacham - 2015 - Canadian Journal of Philosophy 45 (5):767-797.
    At the heart of the Bayesianism is a rule, Conditionalization, which tells us how to update our beliefs. Typical formulations of this rule are underspecified. This paper considers how, exactly, this rule should be formulated. It focuses on three issues: when a subject’s evidence is received, whether the rule prescribes sequential or interval updates, and whether the rule is narrow or wide scope. After examining these issues, it argues that there are two distinct and equally viable versions of Conditionalization to (...)
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  39. Difference Minimizing Theory.Christopher J. G. Meacham - 2019 - Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 6.
    Standard decision theory has trouble handling cases involving acts without finite expected values. This paper has two aims. First, building on earlier work by Colyvan (2008), Easwaran (2014), and Lauwers and Vallentyne (2016), it develops a proposal for dealing with such cases, Difference Minimizing Theory. Difference Minimizing Theory provides satisfactory verdicts in a broader range of cases than its predecessors. And it vindicates two highly plausible principles of standard decision theory, Stochastic Equivalence and Stochastic Dominance. The second aim is to (...)
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  40. Three proposals regarding a theory of chance.Christopher J. G. Meacham - 2005 - Philosophical Perspectives 19 (1):281–307.
    I argue that the theory of chance proposed by David Lewis has three problems: (i) it is time asymmetric in a manner incompatible with some of the chance theories of physics, (ii) it is incompatible with statistical mechanical chances, and (iii) the content of Lewis's Principal Principle depends on how admissibility is cashed out, but there is no agreement as to what admissible evidence should be. I proposes two modifications of Lewis's theory which resolve these difficulties. I conclude by tentatively (...)
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  41. Fine-Tuning, Multiple Universes, and Self-Locating Beliefs.Christopher J. G. Meacham - forthcoming - In Daniel Rubio & Klaas J. Kraay, The Blackwell Companion to Philosophy and the Multiverse. Blackwell.
    Does the evidence that our universe contains fine-tuned life confirm the multiverse hypothesis? The answer depends on our approach to self-locating beliefs. In a recent paper, Isaacs, Hawthorne, and Russell (2022) offer two arguments for thinking that such evidence does confirm the multiverse hypothesis. First, they argue that the three leading approaches to self-locating beliefs all entail that such evidence confirms the multiverse hypothesis. Second, they present a pair of theorems showing that any approach to self-locating beliefs that satisfies certain (...)
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  42. In Favor of Logarithmic Scoring.Randall G. McCutcheon - 2019 - Philosophy of Science 86 (2):286-303.
    Shuford, Albert and Massengill proved, a half century ago, that the logarithmic scoring rule is the only proper measure of inaccuracy determined by a differentiable function of probability assigned the actual cell of a scored partition. In spite of this, the log rule has gained less traction in applied disciplines and among formal epistemologists that one might expect. In this paper we show that the differentiability criterion in the Shuford et. al. result is unnecessary and use the resulting simplified characterization (...)
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  43. Too much of a good thing: decision-making in cases with infinitely many utility contributions.Christopher J. G. Meacham - 2020 - Synthese 198 (8):7309-7349.
    Theories that use expected utility maximization to evaluate acts have difficulty handling cases with infinitely many utility contributions. In this paper I present and motivate a way of modifying such theories to deal with these cases, employing what I call “Direct Difference Taking”. This proposal has a number of desirable features: it’s natural and well-motivated, it satisfies natural dominance intuitions, and it yields plausible prescriptions in a wide range of cases. I then compare my account to the most plausible alternative, (...)
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  44. Can All-Accuracy Accounts Justify Evidential Norms?Christopher J. G. Meacham - 2018 - In Kristoffer Ahlstrom-Vij & Jeff Dunn, Epistemic Consequentialism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
    Some of the most interesting recent work in formal epistemology has focused on developing accuracy-based approaches to justifying Bayesian norms. These approaches are interesting not only because they offer new ways to justify these norms, but because they potentially offer a way to justify all of these norms by appeal to a single, attractive epistemic goal: having accurate beliefs. Recently, Easwaran & Fitelson (2012) have raised worries regarding whether such “all-accuracy” or “purely alethic” approaches can accommodate and justify evidential Bayesian (...)
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  45. A Liar Paradox.Richard G. Heck - 2012 - Thought: A Journal of Philosophy 1 (1):36-40.
    The purpose of this note is to present a strong form of the liar paradox. It is strong because the logical resources needed to generate the paradox are weak, in each of two senses. First, few expressive resources required: conjunction, negation, and identity. In particular, this form of the liar does not need to make any use of the conditional. Second, few inferential resources are required. These are: (i) conjunction introduction; (ii) substitution of identicals; and (iii) the inference: From ¬(p (...)
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  46. Arbitrariness and Uniqueness.Christopher J. G. Meacham - 2021 - Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 102 (4):665-685.
    Evidential Uniqueness is the thesis that, for any batch of evidence, there’s a unique doxastic state that a subject with that evidence should have. One of the most common kinds of objections to views that violate Evidential Uniqueness are arbitrariness objections – objections to the effect that views that don’t satisfy Evidential Uniqueness lead to unacceptable arbitrariness. The goal of this paper is to examine a variety of arbitrariness objections that have appeared in the literature, and to assess the extent (...)
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  47. Ramified Frege Arithmetic.Richard G. Heck - 2011 - Journal of Philosophical Logic 40 (6):715-735.
    Øystein Linnebo has recently shown that the existence of successors cannot be proven in predicative Frege arithmetic, using Frege’s definitions of arithmetical notions. By contrast, it is shown here that the existence of successor can be proven in ramified predicative Frege arithmetic.
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  48. Protasis in Prior Analytics: Proposition or Premise.J. Corcoran & G. Boger - 2011 - Bulletin of Symbolic Logic 17 (1):151 - 2.
    The word pro-tasis is etymologically a near equivalent of pre-mise, pro-position, and ante-cedent—all having positional, relational connotations now totally absent in contemporary use of proposition. Taking protasis for premise, Aristotle’s statement (24a16) -/- A protasis is a sentence affirming or denying something of something…. -/- is not a definition of premise—intensionally: the relational feature is absent. Likewise, it is not a general definition of proposition—extensionally: it is too narrow. This paper explores recent literature on these issues.
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  49. The Ant Trap: Rebuilding the Foundations of the Social Sciences.Brian Epstein - 2015 - New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
    We live in a world of crowds and corporations, artworks and artifacts, legislatures and languages, money and markets. These are all social objects — they are made, at least in part, by people and by communities. But what exactly are these things? How are they made, and what is the role of people in making them? In The Ant Trap, Brian Epstein rewrites our understanding of the nature of the social world and the foundations of the social sciences. Epstein (...)
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  50. Caring as the unacknowledged matrix of evidence-based nursing.Victoria Min-Yi Wang & Brian Baigrie - 2023 - Journal of Medical Ethics.
    In this article, we explicate evidence-based nursing (EBN), critically appraise its framework and respond to nurses’ concern that EBN sidelines the caring elements of nursing practice. We use resources from care ethics, especially Vrinda Dalmiya’s work that considers care as crucial for both epistemology and ethics, to show how EBN is compatible with, and indeed can be enhanced by, the caring aspects of nursing practice. We demonstrate that caring can act as a bridge between ‘external’ evidence and the other pillars (...)
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