Results for 'Conor Mckeown'

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  1. What is Good Reasoning?Conor McHugh & Jonathan Way - 2018 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research:153-174.
    What makes the difference between good and bad reasoning? In this paper we defend a novel account of good reasoning—both theoretical and practical—according to which it preserves fittingness or correctness: good reasoning is reasoning which is such as to take you from fitting attitudes to further fitting attitudes, other things equal. This account, we argue, is preferable to two others that feature in the recent literature. The first, which has been made prominent by John Broome, holds that the standards of (...)
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  2. Value and Idiosyncratic Fitting Attitudes.Conor McHugh & Jonathan Way - 2023 - In Chris Howard & Rach Cosker-Rowland (eds.), Fittingness. OUP.
    Norm-attitude accounts of value say that for something to be valuable is for there to be norms that support valuing that thing. For example, according to fitting-attitude accounts, something is of value if it is fitting to value, and according to buck-passing accounts, something is of value if the reasons support valuing it. Norm-attitude accounts face the partiality problem: in cases of partiality, what it is fitting to value, and what the reasons support valuing, may not line up with what’s (...)
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  3. All Reasons are Fundamentally for Attitudes.Conor McHugh & Jonathan Way - 2022 - Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy 21 (2).
    As rational agents, we are governed by reasons. The fact that there’s beer at the pub might be a reason to go there and a reason to believe you’ll enjoy it. As this example illustrates, there are reasons for both action and for belief. There are also many other responses for which there seem to be reasons – for example, desire, regret, admiration, and blame. This diversity raises questions about how reasons for different responses relate to each other. Might certain (...)
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  4. The Normativity of Belief.Conor McHugh & Daniel Whiting - 2014 - Analysis 74 (4):698-713.
    This is a survey of recent debates concerning the normativity of belief. We explain what the thesis that belief is normative involves, consider arguments for and against that thesis, and explore its bearing on debates in metaethics.
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  5. Fittingness First.Conor McHugh & Jonathan Way - 2016 - Ethics 126 (3):575-606.
    According to the fitting-attitudes account of value, for X to be good is for it to be fitting to value X. But what is it for an attitude to be fitting? A popular recent view is that it is for there to be sufficient reason for the attitude. In this paper we argue that proponents of the fitting-attitudes account should reject this view and instead take fittingness as basic. In this way they avoid the notorious ‘wrong kind of reason’ problem, (...)
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  6. What is Reasoning?Conor McHugh & Jonathan Way - 2018 - Mind 127 (505):167-196.
    Reasoning is a certain kind of attitude-revision. What kind? The aim of this paper is to introduce and defend a new answer to this question, based on the idea that reasoning is a goodness-fixing kind. Our central claim is that reasoning is a functional kind: it has a constitutive point or aim that fixes the standards for good reasoning. We claim, further, that this aim is to get fitting attitudes. We start by considering recent accounts of reasoning due to Ralph (...)
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  7. Against the Taking Condition.Conor McHugh & Jonathan Way - 2016 - Philosophical Issues 26 (1):314-331.
    According to Paul Boghossian and others, inference is subject to the taking condition: it necessarily involves the thinker taking his premises to support his conclusion, and drawing the conclusion because of that fact. Boghossian argues that this condition vindicates the idea that inference is an expression of agency, and that it has several other important implications too. However, we argue in this paper that the taking condition should be rejected. The condition gives rise to several serious prima facie problems and (...)
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  8. Conjuring Ethics from Words.Jonathan McKeown-Green, Glen Pettigrove & Aness Webster - 2012 - Noûs 49 (1):71-93.
    Many claims about conceptual matters are often represented as, or inferred from, claims about the meaning, reference, or mastery, of words. But sometimes this has led to treating conceptual analysis as though it were nothing but linguistic analysis. We canvass the most promising justifications for moving from linguistic premises to substantive conclusions. We show that these justifications fail and argue against current practice (in metaethics and elsewhere), which confuses an investigation of a word’s meaning, reference, or competence conditions with an (...)
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  9. Objectivism and Perspectivism about the Epistemic Ought.McHugh Conor - 2017 - Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 4.
    What ought you believe? According to a traditional view, it depends on your evidence: you ought to believe (only) what your evidence supports. Recently, however, some have claimed that what you ought to believe depends not on your evidence but simply on what is true: you ought to believe (only) the truth. In this paper, we present and defend two arguments against this latter view. We also explore some of the parallels between this debate in epistemology, and the debate in (...)
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  10. Moral Judgements: The Pursuit of Comfort and its Justification.Conor Sullivan - manuscript
    This paper explores how the three most common ethical theories, utilitarianism, deontology (specifically Kantianism), and Aristotelian virtue ethics seem to fail to adequately account for what justifies the obligations that our moral judgments hold on us, and where these moral judgements arise. This is because it appears that each of the three theories seems to be a different justification for the narcissistic pursuit of one’s own individual comfort, meaning that, people only act in a way that gives them the most (...)
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  11. The Independence Thesis: When Individual and Social Epistemology Diverge.Conor Mayo-Wilson, Kevin J. S. Zollman & David Danks - 2011 - Philosophy of Science 78 (4):653-677.
    In the latter half of the twentieth century, philosophers of science have argued (implicitly and explicitly) that epistemically rational individuals might compose epistemically irrational groups and that, conversely, epistemically rational groups might be composed of epistemically irrational individuals. We call the conjunction of these two claims the Independence Thesis, as they together imply that methodological prescriptions for scientific communities and those for individual scientists might be logically independent of one another. We develop a formal model of scientific inquiry, define four (...)
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  12. Burdens of Proof and the Case for Unevenness.Imran Aijaz, Jonathan McKeown-Green & Aness Webster - 2013 - Argumentation 27 (3):259-282.
    How is the burden of proof to be distributed among individuals who are involved in resolving a particular issue? Under what conditions should the burden of proof be distributed unevenly? We distinguish attitudinal from dialectical burdens and argue that these questions should be answered differently, depending on which is in play. One has an attitudinal burden with respect to some proposition when one is required to possess sufficient evidence for it. One has a dialectical burden with respect to some proposition (...)
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  13. The Growing Visibility of Creationism in Northern Ireland: Are New Science Teachers Equipped to Deal with the Issues?Conor McCrory & Colette Murphy - 2009 - Evolution: Education and Outreach 2 (3).
    The growing visibility of various forms of creationism in Northern Ireland raises issues for science education. Attempts have been made at political levels to have such “alternatives” to evolution taught in the science classroom, and the issue has received coverage in local press and media. A sample of 112 pre-service science teachers answered a survey on attitudes toward evolution. Preliminary analysis revealed many of these new teachers held views contrary to scientific consensus—over one fifth doubt the evidence for human evolution, (...)
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  14. Scoring Imprecise Credences: A Mildly Immodest Proposal.Conor Mayo-Wilson & Gregory Wheeler - 2016 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 92 (1):55-78.
    Jim Joyce argues for two amendments to probabilism. The first is the doctrine that credences are rational, or not, in virtue of their accuracy or “closeness to the truth” (1998). The second is a shift from a numerically precise model of belief to an imprecise model represented by a set of probability functions (2010). We argue that both amendments cannot be satisfied simultaneously. To do so, we employ a (slightly-generalized) impossibility theorem of Seidenfeld, Schervish, and Kadane (2012), who show that (...)
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  15. Wisdom of the Crowds vs. Groupthink: Learning in Groups and in Isolation.Conor Mayo-Wilson, Kevin Zollman & David Danks - 2013 - International Journal of Game Theory 42 (3):695-723.
    We evaluate the asymptotic performance of boundedly-rational strategies in multi-armed bandit problems, where performance is measured in terms of the tendency (in the limit) to play optimal actions in either (i) isolation or (ii) networks of other learners. We show that, for many strategies commonly employed in economics, psychology, and machine learning, performance in isolation and performance in networks are essentially unrelated. Our results suggest that the appropriateness of various, common boundedly-rational strategies depends crucially upon the social context (if any) (...)
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  16. Epistemic Decision Theory's Reckoning.Conor Mayo-Wilson & Gregory Wheeler - manuscript
    Epistemic decision theory (EDT) employs the mathematical tools of rational choice theory to justify epistemic norms, including probabilism, conditionalization, and the Principal Principle, among others. Practitioners of EDT endorse two theses: (1) epistemic value is distinct from subjective preference, and (2) belief and epistemic value can be numerically quantified. We argue the first thesis, which we call epistemic puritanism, undermines the second.
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  17. The Problem of Piecemeal Induction.Conor Mayo-Wilson - 2011 - Philosophy of Science 78 (5):864-874.
    It is common to assume that the problem of induction arises only because of small sample sizes or unreliable data. In this paper, I argue that the piecemeal collection of data can also lead to underdetermination of theories by evidence, even if arbitrarily large amounts of completely reliable experimental and observational data are collected. Specifically, I focus on the construction of causal theories from the results of many studies (perhaps hundreds), including randomized controlled trials and observational studies, where the studies (...)
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  18. Teaching Logic to blind students.Patrick Girard & Jonathan McKeown-Green - manuscript
    This paper is about teaching elementary logic to blind or visually impaired students. The targeted audience are teachers who all of sudden have a blind or visually impaired student in their introduction to logic class, find limited help from disability centers in their institution, and have no idea what to do. We provide simple techniques that allow direct communication between a teacher and a visually impaired student. We show how the use of what is known as Polish notation simplifies communication, (...)
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  19. Structural Chaos.Conor Mayo-Wilson - 2015 - Philosophy of Science 82 (5):1236-1247.
    A dynamical system is called chaotic if small changes to its initial conditions can create large changes in its behavior. By analogy, we call a dynamical system structurally chaotic if small changes to the equations describing the evolution of the system produce large changes in its behavior. Although there are many definitions of “chaos,” there are few mathematically precise candidate definitions of “structural chaos.” I propose a definition, and I explain two new theorems that show that a set of models (...)
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  20. Academic and Social Integration Experiences of Papuan Studying in University Students in Java.Cahya Wulandari & Shelley McKeown Jones - 2022 - Jurnal Psikologi 49 (3):229–254.
    Following the Special Autonomy Law in 2001, the number of Papuan students studying out of town soared, resulting integration into a new culture becomes inevitable. The authors were interested in exploring academic and social integration experiences amongst Papuan university students in Java. Semi-structured interview was used to collect data from six Papuan students (four males and two females). Data was analyzed using thematic analysis to identify factors influencing integration strategy and to explore how stereotypes affect the minority student’s acculturation strategy. (...)
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  21. Russell on Logicism and Coherence.Conor Mayo-Wilson - 2011 - Russell: The Journal of Bertrand Russell Studies 31 (1):63-79.
    According to Quine, Charles Parsons, Mark Steiner, and others, Russell’s logicist project is important because, if successful, it would show that mathematical theorems possess desirable epistemic properties often attributed to logical theorems, such as aprioricity, necessity, and certainty. Unfortunately, Russell never attributed such importance to logicism, and such a thesis contradicts Russell’s explicitly stated views on the relationship between logic and mathematics. This raises the question: what did Russell understand to be the philosophical importance of logicism? Building on recent work (...)
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  22. Review of Conor McHugh and Jonathan Way's Getting Things Right and Daniel Whiting's The Range of Reasons in Ethics and Epistemology[REVIEW]Antti Kauppinen - forthcoming - Mind.
    This is a review of two books from Southampton, Conor McHugh and Jonathan Way's Getting Things Right (OUP 2023) and Daniel Whiting's The Range of Reasons in Ethics and Epistemology (OUP 2022).
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  23. Reasons or Fittingness First?Rach Cosker-Rowland - 2017 - Ethics 128 (1):212-229.
    Conor McHugh and Jonathan Way argue that we should put fittingness rather than reasons first because we can provide an account of the evaluative in terms of the normative only if we put fittingness rather than reasons first. I argue that it is no more difficult to provide an account of the evaluative in terms of the normative if we put reasons rather than fittingness first.
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