Exploratory factor analysis (EFA) of the Psychopathic Personality Inventory (PPI; S. O. Lilienfeld, 1990; S. O. Lilienfeld & B. P. Andrews, 1996) with a community sample has suggested that the PPI subscales may comprise 2 higher order factors (S. D. Benning, C. J. Patrick, B. M. Hicks, D. M. Blonigen, & R. F. Krueger, 2003). However, substantive and structural evidence raises concerns about the viability of this 2-factor model, particularly in offender populations. The authors attempted to replicate the S. D. (...) Benning et al. 2-factor solution using a large (N= 1,224) incarcerated male sample. Confirmatory factor analysis of this model resulted in poor model fit. Similarly, using the same EFA procedures as did S. D. Benning et al., the authors found little evidence for a 2-factor model. When they followed the recommendations of J.-W. van Prooijen and W. A. van der Kloot (2001) for recovering EFA solutions, model fit results provided some evidence that a 3-factor EFA solution could be recovered via confirmatory factor analysis. (shrink)

Psychopathy refers to a range of complex behaviors and personality traits, including callousness and antisocial behavior, typically studied in criminal populations. Recent studies have used self-reports to examine psychopathic traits among noncriminal samples. The goal of the current study was to examine the underlying factor structure of the Self-Report of Psychopathy Scale–Short Form (SRP-SF) across complementary samples and examine the impact of gender on factor structure. We examined the structure of the SRP-SF among 2,554 young adults from three undergraduate samples (...) and a high-risk young adult sample. Using confirmatory factor analysis, a four-correlated factor model and a four-bifactor model showed good fit to the data. Evidence of weak invariance was found for both models across gender. These findings highlight that the SRP-SF is a useful measure of low-level psychopathic traits in noncriminal samples, although the underlying factor structure may not fully translate across men and women. (shrink)

Public health care interventions—regarding vaccination, obesity, and HIV, for example—standardly take the form of information dissemination across a community. But information networks can vary importantly between different ethnic communities, as can levels of trust in information from different sources. We use data from the Greater Pittsburgh Random Household Health Survey to construct models of information networks for White and Black communities--models which reflect the degree of information contact between individuals, with degrees of trust in information from various sources correlated with (...) positions in that social network. With simple assumptions regarding belief change and social reinforcement, we use those modeled networks to build dynamic agent-based models of how information can be expected to flow and how beliefs can be expected to change across each community. With contrasting information from governmental and religious sources, the results show importantly different dynamic patterns of belief polarization within the two communities. (shrink)

Psychopathic individuals display a callous-coldhearted approach to interpersonal and affective situations and engage in impulsive and antisocial behaviors. Despite early conceptualizations suggesting that psychopathy is related to enhanced cognitive functioning, research examining executive functioning (EF) in psychopathy has yielded few such findings. It is possible that some psychopathic trait dimensions are more related to EF than others. Research using a 2-factor or 4-facet model of psychopathy highlights some dimension-specific differences in EF, but this research is limited in scope. Another complicating (...) factor in teasing apart the EF–psychopathy relationship is the tendency to use different psychopathy assessments for incarcerated versus community samples. In this study, an EF battery and multiple measures of psychopathic dimensions were administered to a sample of male prisoners (N. (shrink)

Vaccination complacency occurs when perceived risks of vaccine-preventable diseases are sufficiently low so that vaccination is no longer perceived as a necessary precaution. Disease outbreaks can once again increase perceptions of risk, thereby decrease vaccine complacency, and in turn decrease vaccine hesitancy. It is not well understood, however, how change in perceived risk translates into change in vaccine hesitancy. -/- We advance the concept of vaccine propensity, which relates a change in willingness to vaccinate with a change in perceived risk (...) of infection—holding fixed other considerations such as vaccine confidence and convenience. (shrink)

This book review of Lieber and Press's “The myth of the nuclear revolution: Power politics in the atomic age" challenges the authors' position that nuclear weapons essentially have the same properties of conventional weapons. We argue that nuclear weapons alter warfare because they can end human civilization, and they pose a shared risk of mutual destruction.

Ordinary cases of object seeing involve the visual perception of space and spatial location. But does seeing an object require such spatial perception? An empirical challenge to the idea that it does comes from reflection upon Bálint's syndrome, for some suppose that in Bálint's syndrome subjects can see objects without seeing space or spatial location. In this article, I question whether the empirical evidence available to us adequately supports this understanding of Bálint's syndrome, and explain how the aforementioned empirical challenge (...) can be resisted. (shrink)

Drunk drivers and other culpably incapacitated wrongdoers are often taken to pose a problem for reasons-responsiveness accounts of moral responsibility. These accounts predicate moral responsibility upon an agent having the capacities to perceive and act upon moral reasons, and the culpably incapacitated wrongdoers lack exactly those capacities at the time of their wrongdoing. Many reasons-responsiveness advocates thus expand their account of responsibility to include a tracing condition: The culpably incapacitated wrongdoer is blameworthy despite his incapacitation precisely because he is responsible (...) for becoming incapacitated. As some skeptics have suggested, it is not clear that we need tracing. Here, however, I make a stronger case against tracing: I show that tracing gets things wrong. I consider a new sort of case, the case of the Odysseus agent, whose incapacitation is non-culpable (sometimes merely permissible and sometimes praiseworthy). Tracing would have us hold responsible and therefore blame unlucky Odysseus agents, Odysseus agents who commit a wrongdoing in the throes of their non-culpably induced incapacitation. But we should not hold these unlucky Odysseus agents responsible for their incapacitated wrongdoing. Because tracing gets these cases wrong, we should reject tracing. (shrink)

This paper attempts to show how Adorno’s thought can illuminate our reflections on the future of work. It does so by situating Adorno’s conception of genuine activity in relation to his negativist critical epistemology and his subtle account of the distinction between true and false needs. What emerges is an understanding of work that can guide our aspirations for the future of work, and one we illustrate via discussions of creative work and care work. These are types of work which (...) cater to persistent human needs, albeit ones that are distorted under present social conditions. Adorno’s thought helps us to understand why this is the case. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that Theodor W. Adorno 's philosophy of freedom needs an ontological picture of the world. Adorno does not make his view of natural order explicit, but I suggest it could be neither the chaotic nor the strictly determined ontological images common to idealism and positivism, and that it would have to make intelligible the possibility both of human freedom and of critical social science. I consider two possible candidates, Nancy Cartwright 's ‘patchwork of laws’, and (...) Roy Bhaskar 's critical realism. Arguing that Cartwright 's position conflicts with the spirit of Adorno 's philosophy, I suggest that Bhaskar 's realism is compatible with and to a significant extent implicit in Adorno 's position. Whilst Adorno is clearly not a critical realist, Bhaskar 's position does provide the best overall account of the ontological commitments of Adorno 's critical theory. It becomes possible in turn to locate Bhaskar 's arguments in a broader critical tradition and give fuller expression to the concerns that structure his work, in particular by locating the epistemic fallacy in the narrative account of the natural history of subjective reason and its tendency towards ‘identity thinking ’. The discussion goes on to consider the interdependence of reason, nature and freedom in the idea of emancipatory critique, confirming the deeper affinities between critical realism and critical theory. (shrink)

This paper aims to demonstrate the contemporary relevance of Adorno’s thought for business ethicists working in the critical tradition by showing how his critique of modern social life anticipated, and ofers continuing illumination of, recent technological transformations of capitalism. It develops and extrapolates Adorno’s thought regarding three central spheres of modern society, which have seen radical changes in light of recent technological developments: work, in which employee monitoring has become ever more sophisticated and intrusive; leisure consumption, in which the algorithmic (...) developments of the culture industry have paved the way for entertainment products to dominate us; and political discourse, in which social media has exacerbated the anti-democratic tendencies Adorno warned of in the mid-twentieth century. We conclude by presenting, as a rejoinder to these developments, the contours of an Adornian ethics of resistance to the reifcation and dehumanisation of such developments. (shrink)

Jaakko Nevasto has offered a number of thoughtful criticisms of our attempt to show that Adorno’s work can fruitfully be brought to bear on topics in business ethics. After welcoming his constructive clarifications, we attempt to defuse Nevasto’s main objections and defend our application of Adorno, focusing in particular on the topics of moral epistemology, needs, and the possibility of genuine activity – and thus good work – within capitalist society.

When Adam Smith published his celebrated writings on economics and moral philosophy he famously referred to the operation of an invisible hand. Adam Smith's Political Philosophy makes visible the invisible hand by examining its significance in Smith's political philosophy and relating it to similar concepts used by other philosophers, revealing a distinctive approach to social theory that stresses the significance of the unintended consequences of human action. This book introduces greater conceptual clarity to the discussion of the invisible hand and (...) the related concept of unintended order in the work of Smith and in political theory more generally. By examining the application of spontaneous order ideas in the work of Smith, Hume, Hayek and Popper, Adam Smith's Political Philosophy traces similarities in approach and from these builds a conceptual, composite model of an invisible hand argument. While setting out a clear model of the idea of spontaneous order the book also builds the case for using the idea of spontaneous order as an explanatory social theory, with chapters on its application in the fields of science, moral philosophy, law and government. (shrink)

Amie Thomasson’s work provides numerous ways to rethink and improve our approach to metaphysics. This chapter is my attempt to begin to sketch why I still think the easy approach leaves room for substantive metaphysical work, and why I do not think that metaphysics need rely on any ‘epistemically metaphysical’ knowledge. After distinguishing two possible forms of deflationism, I argue that the easy ontologist needs to accept (implicitly or explicitly) that there are worldly constraints on what sorts of entities could (...) exist, and could co-exist. I argue this leaves room for a substantive role for metaphysics if (following the work of E.J. Lowe) we take metaphysics to be concerned with the possible ways that reality could be. I explain how this conception does not need to appeal to any ‘epistemically metaphysical’ knowledge, and need only make use of conceptual and/or empirical means to arrive at views on what could exist (and co-exist). Thus, the answer I propose to the question posed in the title, at least in my view, is no-one. Or, at least, no-one should be afraid of conceptual analysis. Not even metaphysicians. (shrink)

Given his view that the modern world is ‘radically evil’, Adorno is an unlikely contributor to business ethics. Despite this, we argue that his work has a number of provocative implications for the field that warrant wider attention. Adorno regards our social world as damaged, unfree, and false and we draw on this critique to outline why the achievement of good work is so rare in contemporary society, focusing in particular on the ethical demands of roles and the ideological nature (...) of management’s self-understanding. Nevertheless, we show that Adorno’s comments on activities such as art and philosophy mean that it is possible to draw on his work in a way that contributes constructively to the conversation about good and meaningful work within business ethics. (shrink)

Duress is a defense in both law and morality. The bank teller who provides an armed robber with the bank vault combination, the innocent suspect who fabricates a story after hours of interrogation, the Good Samaritan who breaks into a private cabin in the woods to save a stranded hiker, and the father who drives at high speed to rush his injured child to the hospital—in deciding how to respond to agents like these, we should take into account that they (...) have acted under duress. In this paper, I offer a new duress defense, which I call “distinctive duress.” The distinctive-duress defense is neither ordinary justification nor ordinary excuse. Rather, it is a defense available to agents who act wrongly because they are appropriately insensitive to certain reasons. In the distinctive-duress cases, an agent’s normative sensitivities are rightly directed elsewhere, leading them awry. (shrink)

Since its publication, the Psychopathic Personality Inventory and its revision (Lilien- feld & Andrews, 1996; Lilienfeld & Widows, 2005) have become increasingly popular such that it is now among the most frequently used self-report inventories for the assessment of psychopathy. The current meta-analysis examined the relations between the two PPI factors (factor 1: Fearless Dominance; factor 2: Self-Centered Impulsivity), as well as their relations with other validated measures of psychopathy, internalizing and externalizing forms of psychopathology, general personality traits, and antisocial (...) personality disorder symptoms. Across 61 samples reported in 49 publications, we found support for the convergent and criterion validity of both PPI factor 2 and the PPI total score. Much weaker validation was found for PPI factor 1, which manifested limited convergent validity and a pattern of correlations with central criterion variables that was inconsistent with many conceptualizations of psychopathy. (shrink)

ABSTRACTRational agents have consistent beliefs. Bayesianism is a theory of consistency for partial belief states. Rational agents also respond appropriately to experience. Dogmatism is a theory of how to respond appropriately to experience. Hence, Dogmatism and Bayesianism are theories of two very different aspects of rationality. It's surprising, then, that in recent years it has become common to claim that Dogmatism and Bayesianism are jointly inconsistent: how can two independently consistent theories with distinct subject matter be jointly inconsistent? In this (...) essay I argue that Bayesianism and Dogmatism are inconsistent only with the addition of a specific hypothesis about how the appropriate responses to perceptual experience are to be incorporated into the formal models of the Bayesian. That hypothesis isn't essential either to Bayesianism or to Dogmatism, and so Bayesianism and Dogmatism are jointly consistent. That leaves the matter of how experiences and credences are related, a... (shrink)

In the bitcoin whitepaper, Satoshi Nakamoto (2008: 2) defines an electronic coin as a chain of digital signatures. Many have since defined a bitcoin as a chain of digital signatures. This latter definition continues to appear in reports from central banks, advocacy centers, and governments, as well as in academic papers across the disciplines of law, economics, computer science, cryptography, management, and philosophy. Some have even used it to argue that what we now call bitcoin is not the real bitcoin. (...) The definition fails, however. This is important because the Chain Definition obscures Satoshi’s solution to a dilemma in the design of electronic cash, as well as the truth about bitcoin’s privacy and fungibility. In this article, I explain why the Chain Definition fails and what Satoshi likely endorsed instead. Along the way, I untangle some issues around bitcoin fungibility and clarify some others around the ontology of digital assets. (shrink)

The counterfactual mental state of negligent criminal activity invites skepticism from those who see mental states as essential to responsibility. Here, I offer a revision of the mental state of criminal negligence, one where the mental state at issue is actual and not merely counterfactual. This revision dissolves the worry raised by the skeptic and helps to explain negligence’s comparatively reduced culpability.

In this article I present an original interpretation of Roy Bhaskar’s project in Dialectic: The Pulse of Freedom. His major move is to separate an ontological dialectic from a critical dialectic, which in Hegel are laminated together. The ontological dialectic, which in Hegel is the self-unfolding of spirit, becomes a realist and relational philosophical anthropology. The critical dialectic, which in Hegel is confined to retracing the steps of spirit, now becomes an active force, dialectical critique, which interposes into the ontological (...) dialectic at the ‘fourth dimension’ of a naturalistically reconfigured account of relational human nature, agency. This account allows Bhaskar to explain and vindicate the crucial role social criticism must play in any realistic project of self-emancipation, and to create a space that didn’t exist in Hegel for an open-ended concrete utopianism. Freedom is thus the actualization of human nature, but is not automatic: the relation of human nature to freedom is mediated historically through dialectical critique, which, informed by concrete utopianism, can have emancipatory power. Content Type Journal Article Category Article Pages 13-44 Authors Craig Reeves, Brunel University Journal Journal of Critical Realism Online ISSN 1572-5138 Print ISSN 1476-7430 Journal Volume Volume 12 Journal Issue Volume 12, Number 1 / 2013. (shrink)

Hypotheses about the shape of causal reality admit of both theistic and non-theistic interpretations. I argue that, on the simplest hypotheses about the causal shape of reality—infinite regress, contingent initial boundary, necessary initial boundary—there is good reason to suppose that non-theism is always either preferable to, or at least the equal of, theism, at least insofar as we restrict our attention merely to the domain of explanation of existence. Moreover, I suggest that it is perfectly proper for naturalists to be (...) undecided between these simple hypotheses about the causal shape of reality: contrary to the proponents of cosmological arguments, there are no decisive objections to any of these simple hypotheses. (I argue this case in detail in connection with objections offered by William Lane Craig; however, I believe that the case holds quite generally.). (shrink)

The natural name theory, recently discussed by Johnson (2018), is proposed as an explanation of pure quotation where the quoted term(s) refers to a linguistic object such as in the sentence ‘In the above, ‘bank’ is ambiguous’. After outlining the theory, I raise a problem for the natural name theory. I argue that positing a resemblance relation between the name and the linguistic object it names does not allow us to rule out cases where the natural name fails to resemble (...) the linguistic object it names. I argue that to avoid this problem, we can combine the natural name theory with a type-realist metaphysics of language, and hold that the name is natural because the name is an instance of the kind that it names. I conclude by reflecting on the importance of the metaphysics of language for questions in the philosophy of language. (shrink)

According to Ian Hacking’s Entity Realism, unobservable entities that scientists carefully manipulate to study other phenomena are real. Although Hacking presents his case in an intuitive, attractive, and persuasive way, his argument remains elusive. I present five possible readings of Hacking’s argument: a no-miracle argument, an indispensability argument, a transcendental argument, a Vichian argument, and a non-argument. I elucidate Hacking’s argument according to each reading, and review their strengths, their weaknesses, and their compatibility with each other.

I show how the two great Humean ways of understanding laws of nature, projectivism and systems theory, have unwittingly reprised developments in metaethics over the past century. This demonstration helps us explain and understand trends in both literatures. It also allows work on laws to “leap- frog” over the birth of many new positions, the nomic counterparts of new theories in metaethics. However, like leap-frogging from agriculture to the internet age, it’s hardly clear that we’ve landed in a good place. (...) My reactionary advice is to return to Hume and work on the central insights that motivated Humeanism about modality in the first place. When updated with contemporary insights, there we will find an attractive naturalistic theory of laws, or so I’ll argue, and along the way we’ll see how projectivism and systems theory both get something right about this overall theory. (shrink)

In a 2010 article Turri puts forward some powerful considerations which suggest that Williamson's view of knowledge as the most general factive mental state is false. Turri claims that this view is false since it is false that if S sees that p, then S knows that p. Turri argues that there are cases in which (A) S sees that p but (B) S does not know that p. In response I offer linguistic evidence to suppose that in propositional contexts (...) “see” does not have the sort of meaning (a purely perceptual meaning) which would sustain Turri's claims about the cases he offers (specifically, the (A) verdicts). (shrink)

In a recent paper, Barry Loewer attempts to defend Humeanism about laws of nature from a charge that Humean laws are not adequately explanatory. Central to his defense is a distinction between metaphysical and scientific explanations: even if Humeans cannot offer further metaphysical explanations of particular features of their “mosaic,” that does not preclude them from offering scientific explanations of these features. According to Marc Lange, however, Loewer’s distinction is of no avail. Defending a transitivity principle linking scientific explanantia to (...) their metaphysical grounds, Lange argues that a charge of explanatory inadequacy resurfaces once this intuitive principle is in place. This paper surveys, on behalf of the Humean, three strategies for responding to Lange’s criticism. The ready availability of these strategies suggests that Lange’s argument may not bolster anti-Humean convictions, since the argument rests on premises that those not antecedently sharing these convictions may well reject. The three strategies also correspond to three interesting ways of thinking about relations of grounding linking Humean laws and their instances, all of which are consistent with theses of Humean supervenience, and some of which have been heretofore overlooked. (shrink)

David Lewis is a natural target for those who believe that findings in quantum physics threaten the tenability of traditional metaphysical reductionism. Such philosophers point to allegedly holistic entities they take both to be the subjects of some claims of quantum mechanics and to be incompatible with Lewisian metaphysics. According to one popular argument, the non-separability argument from quantum entanglement, any realist interpretation of quantum theory is straightforwardly inconsistent with the reductive conviction that the complete physical state of the world (...) supervenes on the intrinsic properties of and spatio-temporal relations between its point-sized constituents. Here I defend Lewis's metaphysical doctrine, and traditional reductionism more generally, against this alleged threat from quantum holism. After presenting the non-separability argument from entanglement, I show that Bohmian mechanics, an interpretation of quantum mechanics explicitly recognized as a realist one by proponents of the non-separability argument, plausibly rejects a key premise of that argument. Another holistic worry for Humeanism persists, however, the trouble being the apparently holistic character of the Bohmian pilot wave. I present a Humean strategy for addressing the holistic threat from the pilot wave by drawing on resources from the Humean best system account of laws. (shrink)

Orthodox epistemological disjunctivism involves the idea that paradigm cases of visual perceptual knowledge are based on visual perceptual states which are propositional, and hence representational. Given this, the orthodox version of epistemological disjunctivism takes on controversial representational commitments in the philosophy of perception. Must epistemological disjunctivism involve these commitments? I don’t think so. Here I argue that we can take epistemological disjunctivism in a new direction and develop a version of the view free of these representational commitments. The basic idea (...) is that instead of conceiving of knowledge grounding perceptions as states in which one sees that such-and-such is the case, we should instead conceive of them as states or episodes in which one sees a thing, we should conceive of them as thing-seeings. I’ll suggest that we can cast such seeings in a knowledge grounding role without conceiving of them as representational. But this is because we can put thing-seeings to epistemological work, in the framework of epistemological disjunctivism, whilst remaining neutral on whether or not they are propositional, or representational at all. The point, then, is not to replace epistemological disjunctivism’s controversial representational commitments with controversial non-representational commitments. The point is, rather, that epistemological disjunctivism can be developed with fewer commitments in the philosophy of perception than is usually appreciated. (shrink)

In this paper I develop a version of universalism that is non-mereological. Broadly speaking, non-mereological universalism is the thesis that for any arbitrary set of objects and times, there is a persisting object which, at each of those times, will be constituted by those of the objects that exist at that time. I consider two general versions of non-mereological universalism, one which takes basic simples to be enduring objects, and the other which takes simples to be instantaneous objects. This yields (...) three versions of endurantism, of which I ultimately defend the version I call universalist endurantism. Universalist endurantism is the thesis that for any arbitrary set S of instantaneous simples that exist at the same instant, there exists a fusion of the members of S, and for any arbitrary set S* of instantaneous fusions each of which exist at a different instant, there exists an enduring object O that is constituted by those fusions at those instants. Universalist endurantism is ‘non-mereological’ in that the relation that holds between instantaneous fusions and persisting objects is not the part/whole relation, but rather, is the relation of constitution, thus allowing that the persisting objects are three rather than four dimensional. I argue that universalist endurantism not only has the various benefits of mereological universalism in allowing vagueness to be explicated as semantic indeterminacy, but in addition allows the endurantist to hold that some properties are genuinely intrinsic and are exemplified simpliciter. (shrink)

Throughout its history, Bohm's interpretation of quantum mechanics has been systematically misunderstood and ignored. It was often dismissed for reasons having more to do with politics, religion, positivism, and sloppy thought, than for reasons central to physics. Still, like any physical theory, Bohm's theory faces challenges of varying degrees of severity. Here we review and evaluate some of these challenges.

In Eichmann in Jerusalem , Hannah Arendt struggled to defend the possibility of judgment against the obvious problems encountered in attempts to offer legally valid and morally meaningful judgments of those who had committed crimes in morally bankrupt communities. Following Norrie, this article argues that Arendt’s conclusions in Eichmann are equivocal and incoherent. Exploring her perspectival theory of judgment, the article suggests that Arendt remains trapped within certain Kantian assumptions in her philosophy of history, and as such sees the question (...) of freedom in a binary way. The article argues that Adorno’s philosophy of freedom provides the resources to diagnose and overcome Arendt’s shortcomings. Adorno’s position provides a way of embracing the antinomical character of judgment, by emphasising the need for elements of reason and nature in the phenomenon of freedom. In Adorno’s lights, judgment becomes an attempt to express a ‘spirit of solidarity’ with the tragic status of the potentially free but actually unfree subject of modernity. (shrink)

This paper is the product of an interdisciplinary, interreligious dialogue aiming to outline some of the possibilities and rational limits of supernatural religious belief, in the light of a critique of David Hume’s familiar sceptical arguments -- including a rejection of his famous Maxim on miracles -- combined with a range of striking recent empirical research. The Humean nexus leads us to the formulation of a new ”Common-Core/Diversity Dilemma’, which suggests that the contradictions between different religious belief systems, in conjunction (...) with new understandings of the cognitive forces that shape their common features, persuasively challenge the rationality of most kinds of supernatural belief. In support of this conclusion, we survey empirical research concerning intercessory prayer, religious experience, near-death experience, and various cognitive biases. But we then go on to consider evidence that supernaturalism -- even when rationally unwarranted -- has significant beneficial individual and social effects, despite others that are far less desirable. This prompts the formulation of a ”Normal/Objective Dilemma’, identifying important trade-offs to be found in the choice between our humanly evolved ”normal’ outlook on the world, and one that is more rational and ”objective’. Can we retain the pragmatic benefits of supernatural belief while avoiding irrationality and intergroup conflict? It may well seem that rationality is incompatible with any wilful sacrifice of objectivity. But in a situation of uncertainty, an attractive compromise may be available by moving from the competing factions and mutual contradictions of ”first-order’ supernaturalism to a more abstract and tolerant ”second-order’ view, which itself can be given some distinctive intellectual support through the increasingly popular Fine Tuning Argument. We end by proposing a ”Maxim of the Moon’ to express the undogmatic spirit of this second-order religiosity, providing a cautionary metaphor to counter the pervasive bias endemic to the human condition, and offering a more cooperation- and humility-enhancing understanding of religious diversity in a tense and precarious globalised age. (shrink)

People increasingly form beliefs based on information gained from automatically filtered Internet ‎sources such as search engines. However, the workings of such sources are often opaque, preventing ‎subjects from knowing whether the information provided is biased or incomplete. Users’ reliance on ‎Internet technologies whose modes of operation are concealed from them raises serious concerns about ‎the justificatory status of the beliefs they end up forming. Yet it is unclear how to address these concerns ‎within standard theories of knowledge and justification. (...) To shed light on the problem, we introduce a ‎novel conceptual framework that clarifies the relations between justified belief, epistemic responsibility, ‎action, and the technological resources available to a subject. We argue that justified belief is subject to ‎certain epistemic responsibilities that accompany the subject’s particular decision-taking circumstances, ‎and that one typical responsibility is to ascertain, so far as one can, whether the information upon which ‎the judgment will rest is biased or incomplete. What this responsibility comprises is partly determined by ‎the inquiry-enabling technologies available to the subject. We argue that a subject’s beliefs that are ‎formed based on Internet-filtered information are less justified than they would be if she either knew how ‎filtering worked or relied on additional sources, and that the subject may have the epistemic ‎responsibility to take measures to enhance the justificatory status of such beliefs.‎. (shrink)

Heil's vision of the relationship between the manifest and scientific images is compelling. Central to his vision are the convictions that ordinary truths do not impose substantive constraints on the natures of their underlying truthmakers and, relatedly, that one and the same subject can be represented truly and aptly in different ways. But what exactly are the grounds or arguments for these convictions?

Hypotheses about the shape of causal reality admit of both theistic and non-theistic interpretations. I argue that, on the simplest hypotheses about the causal shape of reality—infinite regress, contingent initial boundary, necessary initial boundary—there is good reason to suppose that non-theism is always either preferable to, or at least the equal of, theism, at least insofar as we restrict our attention merely to the domain of explanation of existence. Moreover, I suggest that it is perfectly proper for naturalists to be (...) undecided between these simple hypotheses about the causal shape of reality: contrary to the proponents of cosmological arguments, there are no decisive objections to any of these simple hypotheses. (I argue this case in detail in connection with objections offered by William Lane Craig; however, I believe that the case holds quite generally.). (shrink)

I argue that William Craig’s defence of the moral argument is internally inconsistent. In the course of defending the moral argument, Craig criticizes non-theistic moral realism on the grounds that it posits the existence of certain logically necessary connections but fails to provide an adequate account of why such connections hold. Another component of Craig’s defence of the moral argument is an endorsement of a particular version of the divine command theory. Craig’s version of DCT posits (...) certain logically necessary connections but Craig fails to provide an adequate account of why these connections hold. Thus, Craig’s critique of non-theistic moral realism is at odds with his DCT. Since the critique and DCT are both essential elements of his defence of the moral argument, that defence is internally inconsistent. (shrink)

This article attempts to make sense of property contingentism, the view that the metaphysical nature of properties is contingent. That is, it is contingent whether properties are universals or tropes or some other kind of entity. The article argues that even if one thinks that necessities are exhausted by conceptual truths and a posteriori necessities, the sort of methodology that can lead one to endorse contingentism in various domains in metaphysics does not give us good grounds to suppose that the (...) nature of properties is contingent. (shrink)

Quassim Cassam offers a conception of ways of knowing which he argues is preferable to rival accounts such as the account we find in Williamson. The correct way to think about ways of knowing matters for philosophers, such as Cassam and Williamson, who want to understand knowledge itself in terms of ways of knowing. So is Cassam right that his conception of ways of knowing is preferable to Williamson's? The discussion to follow is irenic in spirit: I will argue that (...) in fact Cassam and Williamson don't offer competing accounts of the same phenomenon, but consistent accounts of subtly different phenomena. It is then open that ways of knowing in both senses are relevant to elucidating knowledge itself. (shrink)

In this chapter I seek to examine the credibility of Finnis’s basic stance on Aquinas that while many neo-Thomists are meta-ethically naturalistic in their understanding of natural law theory (for example, Heinrich Rommen, Henry Veatch, Ralph McInerny, Russell Hittinger, Benedict Ashley and Anthony Lisska), Aquinas’s own meta-ethical framework avoids the “pitfall” of naturalism. On examination, the short of it is that I find Finnis’s account (while adroit) wanting in the interpretation stakes vis-à-vis other accounts of Aquinas’s meta-ethical foundationalism. I think (...) that the neo-Thomists are basically right to argue that for Aquinas we cannot really understand objective truths about moral standards unless we derive them from our intellective knowledge of natural facts as given to us by the essential human nature that we have. While I find Finnis’s interpretative position on Aquinas wanting, I go on to argue that his own attachment to non-naturalism is justified and should not be jettisoned. Because I think non-naturalism important to the future tenability of a viable natural law ethics (an ethics that is both cognitive and objectivist), I argue that Finnis should, so to speak, “beef up” his “fundamental option” for non-naturalism and more fully avail himself of certain argumentative strategies available in its defense, argumentative strategies that are inspired by the analytical philosophy of G.E. Moore. (shrink)

In 1866 J.C. Maxwell thought he had discovered a Maxwellian demon—though not under that description, of course [1]. He thought that the temperature of a gas under gravity would vary inversely with the height of the column. From this he saw that it would then be possible to obtain energy for work from a cooling gas, a clear violation of Thompson’s statement of the second law of thermodynamics. This upsetting conclusion made him worry that “there remains as far as I (...) can see a collision between Dynamics and thermodynamics.” Later, he derived the Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution law that made the temperature the same throughout the column. However, he continued to think about the relationship between dynamics and thermodynamics, and in 1867, he sent Tait a note with a puzzle for him to ponder. The puzzle was his famous “neat-fingered being” who could make a hot system hotter and a cold system colder without any work being done. Thompson in 1874 christened this being a “demon”; Maxwell unsuccessfully tried to rename it “valve.” However named, the demon’s point was to “show that the second law of thermodynamics has only a statistical validity.” Since that time a large physics literature has arisen that asks a question similar to that asked in theology, namely, does the devil exist? Beginning with Popper, philosophers examining the literature on Maxwell’s demon are typically surprised—even horrified [2,3,4,5,6,7]. As a philosopher speaking at a physics conference exactly 100 yrs after Popper’s birth, I want to explain why this is so. The organizers of this conference instructed me to offend everyone, believers and non-believers in demons. Thus my talk, apart from an agnostic middle section, contains a section offending those who believe they have exorcized the demon and a section offending those who summon demons. Throughout the central idea will be to clearly distinguish the various second laws and the various demons.. (shrink)

This chapter offers an interpretation of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz’s idealism. Despite Leibniz’s frequent claim that the universe ultimately boils down to monads, he also sometimes appears to say that the world’s fundamental furniture includes extended, corporeal substances. Here, I examine Leibniz’s views about the relationship between monads and the material world, especially in connection with material bodies and corporeal substances.

At the United Nations climate change conference in 2011, parties decided to launch the “Durban Platform” to work towards a new long-term climate agreement. The decision was notable for the absence of any reference to “equity”, a prominent principle in all previous major climate agreements. Wealthy countries resisted the inclusion of equity on the grounds that the term had become too closely yoked to developing countries’ favored conception of equity. This conception, according to wealthy countries, exempts developing countries from making (...) commitments that are stringent enough for the collective effort needed to avoid dangerous climate change. In circumstances where even mentioning the term equity has become problematic, a critical question is whether scope for a fair agreement is being squeezed out of negotiations. To address this question we set out a conceptual framework for normative theorizing about fairness in international negotiations, accompanied by a set of minimal standards of fairness and plausible feasibility constraints for sharing the global climate change mitigation effort. We argue that a fair and feasible agreement may be reached by (i) reforming the current binary approach to differentiating developed and developing country groups, in tandem with (ii) introducing a more principled approach to differentiating the mitigation commitments of individual countries. These two priorities may provide the basis for a principled bargain between developed and developing countries that safeguards the opportunity to avoid dangerous climate change without sacrificing widely acceptable conceptions of equity. (shrink)

Aquinas’s characterization of sacra doctrina has received sustained engagement addressing its relation to contemporary conceptions of theology and Aristotelian conceptions of science. More recently, attention has been paid to Aquinas’s neo-Platonist influences, and the way they lead him to subvert purely Aristotelian categories. I therefore combine these themes by introducing the first study of whether sacra doctrina counts as a technê in Plato’s sense. After examining how Platonic technê relate to their ergon. epistasthai, gignôskein, and epistêmê and examining sacra doctrina’s (...) relationship to each of these Platonic categories, I suggest that sacra doctrina is an unqualified Platonic technê. (shrink)

In On What Matters, Derek Parfit enters the debate between actualists and possibilists. This debate concerns mere possibilia, possible but non-actual things such as golden mountains and talking donkeys. Roughly, possibilism says that there are such things, and actualism says that there are not. Parfit not only argues for possibilism but also argues that some self-proclaimed actualists are, in fact, unwitting possibilists. -/- I argue that although Parfit’s arguments do not fully succeed, they do highlight a tension within the frameworks (...) of many actualists. Many actualists conscript abstract objects into the role of "possible worlds" to avoid quantifying over mere possibilia. But, in doing so, actualists must quantify over mere possibilia anyway. When we alleviate this tension, a Parfit-friendly form of actualism arguably remains. This form of actualism says that while everything that exists is actual, it is also true in some sense that there are mere possibilia. (shrink)

We discuss misinformation about “the liar antinomy” with special reference to Tarski’s 1933 truth-definition paper [1]. Lies are speech-acts, not merely sentences or propositions. Roughly, lies are statements of propositions not believed by their speakers. Speakers who state their false beliefs are often not lying. And speakers who state true propositions that they don’t believe are often lying—regardless of whether the non-belief is disbelief. Persons who state propositions on which they have no opinion are lying as much as those who (...) state propositions they believe to be false. Not all lies are statements of false propositions—some lies are true; some have no truth-value. People who only occasionally lie are not liars: roughly, liars repeatedly and habitually lie. Some half-truths are statements intended to mislead even though the speakers “interpret” the sentences used as expressing true propositions. Others are statements of propositions believed by the speakers to be questionable but without revealing their supposed problematic nature. The two “formulations” of “the antinomy of the liar” in [1], pp.157–8 and 161–2, have nothing to do with lying or liars. The first focuses on an “expression” Tarski calls ‘c’, namely the following. -/- c is not a true sentence -/- The second focuses on another “expression”, also called ‘c’, namely the following. -/- for all p, if c is identical with the sentence ‘p’, then not p -/- Without argumentation or even discussion, Tarski implies that these strange “expressions” are English sentences. [1] Alfred Tarski, The concept of truth in formalized languages, pp. 152–278, Logic, Semantics, Metamathematics, papers from 1923 to 1938, ed. John Corcoran, Hackett, Indianapolis 1983. -/- https://www.academia.edu/12525833/Sentence_Proposition_Judgment_Statement_and_Fact_Speaking_about_th e_Written_English_Used_in_Logic. (shrink)

This paper defends a view that falls somewhere between the two extremes of inflationary and deflationary accounts of holes, and it does so by rejecting the initial conceptualisation of holes in terms of absences. Once we move away from this conception, I argue, we can see that there are no special metaphysical problems associated with holes. Rather, whatever one’s preferred metaphysics of paradigm material objects, that account can equally be applied to holes. This means that like the deflationist, I am (...) entity monist: I reject the idea that there are any immaterial beings. On the other hand, like the inflationist I reject the idea that we should identify holes with parts or surfaces of paradigm objects. Like the inflationist, I hold that there exist entities in roughly the regions of space-time where pre-theoretically we would say there exist holes, and those entities are holes. Call this latter part of the view—that where the folk are apt to claim there is a hole, that hole has roughly the dimensions that the folk attribute to it—hole-instinctivism (the view that our instincts about hole location/dimension are roughly right). Ultimately I embrace hole conventionalism, a view that includes commitment to both entity monism and hole-instinctivism. According to hole conventionalism, holes are no more ontologically problematic than statues, nor are they of a fundamentally different ontological kind from statues. (shrink)