Defenders of pragmatic encroachment in epistemology (or what I call practicalism) need to address two main problems. First, the view seems to imply, absurdly, that knowledge can come and go quite easily—in particular, that it might come and go along with our variable practical interests. We can call this the stability problem. Second, there seems to be no fully satisfying way of explaining whose practical interests matter. We can call this the “whose stakes?” problem. I argue that both problems can (...) be addressed in roughly the same terms. More exactly, I argue that by first clarifying the whose stakes? problem an answer to the stability problem naturally falls out. (shrink)

In this paper I elucidate various ways in which understanding can be seen as an excellence of the mind or intellectual virtue. Along the way, I take up the neglected issue of what it might mean to be an “understanding person”—by which I mean not a person who understands a number of things about the natural world, but a person who steers clear of things like judgmentalism in her evaluation of other people, and thus is better able to take up (...) different perspectives and view them with a sympathetic eye. Being an understanding person in this sense seems to be a character-level virtue that interestingly combines moral and epistemic elements; it also seems to be a virtue particularly needed in our age of deep political division, where it is commonly said that failures of mutual understanding are partly to blame for this problem. (shrink)

In this article, from the 2009 Oxford University Press collection Epistemic Value, I criticize existing accounts of epistemic normativity by Alston, Goldman, and Sosa, and then offer a new view.

I explore the extent to which the epistemic state of understanding is transparent to the one who understands. Against several contemporary epistemologists, I argue that it is not transparent in the way that many have claimed, drawing on results from developmental psychology, animal cognition, and other fields.

The paper is replaced by a new version (12-2019): DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.3572846 -/- Physical phenomena emerge from the quantum fields everywhere in space. However, not only the phenomena emerge from the quantum fields, the law of the conservation of energy must have its origin from the same spatial structure. This paper describes the relations between the main law of physics and the mathematical structure of the “aggregated” quantum fields.

This essay presents an account of what it takes to live a philosophical way of life: practitioners must be committed to a worldview, structure their lives around it, and engage in truth‐directed practices. Contra John Cooper, it does not require that one’s life be solely guided by reason. Religious or tradition‐based ways of life count as truth directed as long as their practices are reasons responsive and would be truth directed if the claims made by their way of life are (...) correct. The essay argues that these three conditions can be met by progressors as well as sages. Making progress in how one acts in the world, and improving one’s understanding and direction through being part of a community is living a philosophical way of life. The offered view acknowledges more ways to develop the art of living and enables a broader range of people to count as living philosophically. (shrink)

In this chapter I will present, in a general way, Millikan's biosemantic theory of the phenomenon of intentionality. For this purpose, the text will take the following path. First, I will present the problem of intentionality and an overview of the dominant theories of intentional content during the twentieth century and part of the twenty-first century. Then, I will present a general version of Millikan's biosemantic theory, appearing in 1984, which will allow us to see what the relevance and originality (...) of his proposal consists in. Finally, in keeping with one of the central purposes of Las filósofas que nos formaron, I will share a brief interview that Millikan very kindly agreed to give for this publication, in which she tells us some non-theoretical aspects of her history as a philosopher. (shrink)

In Philosophy, it is well known that of the total faculty population, the proportion of women is significantly lower than men. This disproportion is odd for a discipline within the humanities; these numbers seem more compatible with what is found in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics) careers. These proportions are in turn a product of the low female presence that exists from the previous levels of academic training in philosophy. What happens in the case of the philosophy student body? For (...) example, the report presented by BeeBee and Saul (2011), on women in philosophy in the United Kingdom, in the period 2008 and 2009, points out that in the first degrees of academic training, in the bachelor's degree, women occupy 45% of the student population, in the master's degree 38% and in the doctorate 35%. Thus, "it is notable that there is a reduction in the proportion of women from the bachelor's degree to the doctorate [...]. This has as a consequence that at the professional level women holding positions as professors represent only 19%" (BeeBee & Saul, 2011, p. 11). Recently, Torres González (2018), based on European Union studies, points out that in Spain, with respect to gender disparity in students, "the data yield as a result masculinized studies, where, contrary to what happens in the branch of the humanities to which it [philosophy] belongs, males outnumber females by 28 percentage points" (2018, p. 328). This disparity is reflected in philosophy at the professional level, "the indicators of vertical segregation show a reinforced glass ceiling, which presents one of the worst data of hierarchical discrimination in the university: the percentage of female professors in philosophy is 12% compared to 21% of female professors in higher education" (Idem). Although it is a fact that there are fewer women than men studying philosophy and, therefore, fewer women than men working professionally in this discipline, we do not yet have possible explanations for this phenomenon of gender disparity in the student body in philosophy. In some cases, even if the number of women entering the philosophy degree program is already low, the number of women graduating is even lower, which indicates that there is attrition along the way; the initial numbers of women entering the program tend to decrease by the time they graduate. Thus we come to the question that is the subject of this paper: What causes female students to drop out of the philosophy program? In this article we answer this question from the philosophy of science and supported by local empirical data, so we do not give a complete or even less exhaustive answer. We review two explanatory models that purport to answer the question of why there are fewer women in philosophy, both formatively and professionally. These are the Different Voices Model (DVM) and the Perfect Storm Model (PSM); we opt for the latter and give reasons for it. Regarding the empirical aspect of our research, our source of statistical data belongs to the undergraduate program in philosophy at the Facultad de Estudios Superiores Acatlán-UNAM, Mexico (FES Acatlán), obtained in the framework of the SWIP-Analytic Mexico workshops. Our analysis of these data shows that even when female students have better GPAs than male students and take fewer subjects while enrolled, female students graduate less than male students in the FES Acatlan degree program. (shrink)

In this paper, we tackle the widely held view that practice-oriented approaches to ethics are conservative, preserving the moral status quo, and, in particular, that they do not promote any change in our dealings with animals or formulate clear principles that help us to achieve such change. We shall challenge this view with reference to Wittgensteinian ethics. As a first step, we show that moral thought and action rest on basic moral certainties like: equals are to be treated equally and (...) unequals unequally. We then explore the relations between this insight and the notion of the difficulty of reality elaborated by Cora Diamond. Our goal is to show that a Wittgensteinian-Diamondian approach to animal ethics is not necessarily morally conservative. Indeed, it offers a profound practice-oriented approach to animal ethics that is capable of promoting change in human dealings with animals because it is compatible with radical critique. (shrink)

La tesis aborda uno de los temas centrales en la filosofía de la mente y las ciencias cognitivas: los conceptos como unidades básicas de la cognición humana. La tesis central que se defiende es que el contenido de los conceptos es determinado parcialmente por las comunidades a las que pertenecen los sujetos cognitivos, en la medida en la que dichas comunidades guían y constriñen las interacciones entre el sistema cognitivo conceptual y el entorno del que forma conceptos. La novedad de (...) la tesis es doble. Por una parte, cuestiona las teorías dominantes sobre el contenido de los conceptos —las teorías descriptivistas y las teorías naturalistas—, no solamente a partir de desafíos filosóficos que muestran sus limitaciones, sino también a partir de evidencia empírica sobre el efecto de las interacciones sociales en el contenido de los conceptos y, por tanto, en la cognición. Por otra parte, proporciona evidencia empírica sobre infantes ferales (i.e. niños salvajes), cuyo sistema cognitivo conceptual no ha recibido la guía de ninguna comunidad humana en sus interacciones con el entorno. Dicha evidencia permite sugerir que una explicación puramente naturalizada del contenido, sin la presencia de las comunidades, no puede explicar el desarrollo cognitivo conceptual de dichos infantes. Así, la tesis logra proponer un papel no trivial de las comunidades en el debate sobre la determinación del contenido semántico de los conceptos. (shrink)

In this paper, we analyse the Wittgensteinian critique of the orthodoxy in animal ethics that has been championed by Cora Diamond and Alice Crary. While Crary frames it as a critique of “moral individualism”, we show that their criticism applies most prominently to certain forms of moral individualism (namely, those that follow hedonistic or preference-satisfaction axiologies), and not to moral individualism in itself. Indeed, there is a concrete sense in which the moral individualistic stance cannot be escaped, and we believe (...) that it is this particular limitation that justified Crary’s later move to a qualified version of moral individualism. At the same time, we also argue that there are significant merits to the Wittgensteinian critique of moral individualism, which pertain to its attack on the rationalism, naturalism, and reductionism that characterise orthodox approaches to animal ethics. We show that there is much of value in the Wittgensteinians’ call for an ethics that is more human; an ethics that fully embraces the capacities we are endowed with and one that pays heed to the richness and complexity of our moral lives. (shrink)

I should like to offer my greatest thanks to Paul Griffiths for providing the opportunity for this exchange, and to commentators Gillian Brown, Steven Fuller, Stefan Linquist, and Erika Milam for their generous and thought-provoking comments. I shall do my best in this space to respond to some of their concerns.

This entry offers a critical overview of the contemporary literature on understanding, especially in epistemology and the philosophy of science.

According to ‘orthodox’ epistemology, it has recently been said, whether or not a true belief amounts to knowledge depends exclusively on truth-related factors: for example, on whether the true belief was formed in a reliable way, or was supported by good evidence, and so on. Jason Stanley refers to this as the ‘intellectualist’ component of orthodox epistemology, and Jeremy Fantl and Matthew McGrath describe it as orthodox epistemology’s commitment to a ‘purely epistemic’ account of knowledge — that is, an account (...) of knowledge where only truth-related factors figure in whether or not a person knows. In the first part of this paper I try to clarify the intellectualist thesis and to distinguish what I take to be its two main strains. In the remainder of the paper I then take a more critical turn and argue that even if, as a matter of fact, traditional epistemology has endorsed intellectualism in both of its strains, this is a mistake on the part of the tradition. At least one way of understanding intellectualism should be rejected and its practicalist counterpart should be accepted instead. (shrink)

Cet article s’intéresse aux injustices épistémiques à l’œuvre dans le milieu médical et en particulier dans la pratique du diagnostic. Il s’inscrit dans la continuité des discussions philosophiques liées aux injustices épistémiques, et résonne en particulier avec le travail de Miranda Fricker sur l’injustice herméneutique1. Le but principal est de montrer que l’accès au diagnostic est un enjeu de justice épistémique. Les critiques de la médicalisation dénoncent depuis longtemps des torts épistémiques causés par le milieu médical – par exemple la (...) pathologisation liée au diagnostic. Tout en reconnaissant ces dangers, nous montrons, à travers une analyse de témoignages et de contenus produits par des personnes diagnostiquées de différentes conditions, que des bénéfices épistémiques peuvent aussi découler d’un diagnostic. Ainsi, nous proposons de distinguer entre bienfait thérapeutique et bienfait herméneutique du diagnostic. Ensuite, nous défendons que certains déficits de diagnostics constituent des injustices herméneutiques structurelles. Nous avançons finalement l’idée qu’une approche reconnaissant et valorisant les bienfaits épistémiques du diagnostic peut avoir un impact positif sur nos pratiques médicales, et peut également jeter un éclairage nouveau, plus charitable, sur les pratiques d’autodiagnostic. (shrink)

Among contemporary epistemologists and scholars of ancient philosophy, one often hears that transmitting propositional knowledge by testimony is usually easy and straightforward, but transmitting understanding and know-how by testimony is usually difficult or simply impossible. Further provocative conclusions are then sometimes drawn from these claims: for instance, that know-how and understanding are not types of propositional knowledge. In contrast, I argue that transmitting propositional knowledge is sometimes easy and sometimes hard, just as transmitting know how and understanding is sometimes easy (...) and sometimes hard. No general lessons can be drawn about the relationships among propositional knowledge, know how, and understanding by considering the case of testimony alone. (shrink)

What is it that makes someone wise, or one person wiser than another? I argue that wisdom consists in knowledge of how to live well, and that this knowledge of how to live well is constituted by various further kinds of knowledge. One concern for this view is that knowledge is not needed for wisdom but rather some state short of knowledge, such as having rational or justified beliefs about various topics. Another concern is that the emphasis on knowing how (...) to live well fails to do justice to the ancient tradition of ‘theoretical wisdom’. I address both of these concerns in filling out the account. (shrink)

Despite a recent surge of interest in philosophy as a way of life, it is not clear what it might mean for philosophy to guide one's life, or how a “philosophical” way of life might differ from a life guided by religion, tradition, or some other source. We argue against John Cooper that spiritual exercises figure crucially in the idea of philosophy as a way of life—not just in the ancient world but also today, at least if the idea is (...) to be viable. In order to make the case we attempt to clarify the nature of spiritual exercises, and to explore a number of fundamental questions, such as “What role does reason have in helping us to live well?” Here we distinguish between the discerning and motivational powers of reason, and argue that both elements have limitations as guides to living well. (shrink)

I try to return the focus of the philosophy of history to the nature of understanding, with a particular emphasis on Louis Mink’s project of exploring how historical understanding compares to the understanding we find in the natural sciences. On the whole, I come to a conclusion that Mink almost certainly would not have liked: that the understanding offered by history has a very similar epistemic profile to the understanding offered by the sciences, a similarity that stems from the fact (...) that both are concerned with grasping how the objects of their study are structured, or how the various elements of the things they study depend upon and relate to one another. At the same time, however, I claim that historical inquiry naturally puts us in a position to acquire further epistemic goods, including the old-fashioned epistemic good of wisdom, which is plausibly constituted by knowledge of how to live well. This is something the natural sciences cannot offer, and it is part of the reason why history is such an important form of inquiry. (shrink)

In this paper I consider what it is that makes certain topics or questions epistemically interesting. Getting clear about this issue, I argue, is not only interesting in its own right, but also helps to shed light on increasingly important and perplexing questions in the epistemological literature: e.g., questions concerning how to think about ‘the epistemic point of view,’ as well as questions concerning what is most worthy of our intellectual attention and why.

Physical phenomena emerge from the quantum fields everywhere in space. However, not only the phenomena emerge from the quantum fields, the law of the conservation of energy must have its origin from the same spatial structure. This paper describes the relations between the main law of physics, the universal constants and the mathematical structure of the “aggregated” quantum fields.

The work of Emmanuel Levinas has been both abundantly recognized and criticized in moral philosophy. This Janus-faced attitude is also present in ecological theories, which find fertile ground in Levinas’ thought without being able to explain its apparent anthropocentrism. Opposing hermeneutical paths tend to focus either on otherness as an absolute alterity, implying a potentially unlimited responsibility for all alterities, or on otherness as a re-foundation of humanism, leading to the conclusion that responsibility is unlimited only among humans. Here I (...) seek to disentangle Levinas from these two extreme interpretations, first by reviewing ecological readings of his philosophy, in both the Francophone and Anglophone spheres, and second by analyzing specific Levinasian terms that might be particularly helpful for a non-anthropocentric or deep ecology. The main results of this investigation are a distinction between the ethics of responsibility and the ethics of vulnerability, an explanation of Levinasian compulsory or methodological humanism, and a schematic model of sensibility as enjoyment/vulnerability capable of supporting deep ecology without the traditional notions of free will, rights, or values. (shrink)

The main concept of quantum field theory is the conviction that all the phenomena in the universe are created by the underlying structure of the quantum fields. Fields represent dynamical spatial properties that can be described with the help of geometrical concepts. Therefore it is possible to describe the mathematical origin of the structure of the creating fields and show the mathematical origin of the law of conservation of energy, Planck’s constant and the constant speed of light within a non-local (...) universe. (shrink)

I argue that mystical experience essentially involves two aspects: an element of direct encounter with God, and an element of union with God. The framework I use to make sense of is taken largely from William Alston’s magisterial book Perceiving God. While I believe Alston’s view is correct in many essentials, the main problem with the account is that it divorces the idea of encountering or perceiving God from the idea of being united with God. What I argue, on the (...) contrary, is that because our experience of God is an experience of a relationship-seeking, personal being, it brings with it an important element of union that Alston overlooks. (shrink)

This study analyses behavioral psychological facilitators and barriers to using different carsharing business models. It identifies the most preferable carsharing business models for different trip purposes as well as the main motivators for using it. Users of carsharing services (N=1,121) in German cities completed a questionnaire distributed by five operators representing three different business models: freefloating (FF), round-trip station-based (RTSB), and peer-to-peer (P2P). All analyses are performed from a Bayesian perspective and further discussion of the statistical analyses is included. The (...) main results indicate that there are different preferences for carsharing business models depending on the trip purpose, with a trade-off between free-floating and round-trip station-based business models. The peer-to-peer business model stood out for short holiday trips. Age, educational level, and income affected the probability of selecting different carsharing operators. Users of FF and RTSB differ regarding driving habits and trust in the services. (shrink)

Among epistemologists and philosophers of science, one often hears that someone with understanding is able to “see” or “grasp” how the elements of a subject “cohere” or “fit together”—but just what is involved in the seeing or the grasping is usually left to the imagination. I argue that the most productive way to make progress on this issue is by first identifying the kind of explanation-seeking why-questions that drive the search for understanding in the first place. In particular, I suggest (...) that if we can get a good grip on why a situation stands in need of explanation for us in the first place, then we will in turn be in a good position to determine how we might satisfy that need. In this respect, I argue that a situation stands in need of explanation for us, and therefore inspires our why-questions, in virtue of our sense that there are various ways that we think the situation might have been. If a situation stands in need of explanation for this reason, moreover, then in order to satisfy the need for explanation our objective will be to identify what the difference between these alternatives depends on. To say only this much still leaves a great deal underdetermined, however, for we might “identify” what the difference depends on in a number of different ways: for example, by having a true belief about what the difference depends on, by knowing this on the basis of testimony, and so on. What is distinctive about the state of understanding, I suggest, is the particular way in which we identify what the difference depends on: namely, by grasping what the difference depends on. I explore at length what exactly this grasping amounts to. (shrink)

Our universe shows to be local and non-local. The concept is confusing because in daily live we are not aware of the non-locality of our universe. Actually, in daily live local reality seems to be quite orderly and understandable. But we don’t know why everything is in motion and all our theories in physics are still approximations of physical reality. At least that is what they supposed to be.

Recently there is some new interest in understanding the physical reality behind the formalism of quantum mechanics. This paper relates the known “quantum mysteries” of QM with the properties of the underlying structure of discrete space. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.5236617.

The proposed existence of relative time and the curvature of space – both combined into the concept of spacetime – influences the search for an adequate theoretical model that can describe the structure of space in an accurate way. The aim of building space is to develop a quantum theory of gravitation. This paper investigate the theoretical problems that have their origin in the concepts that are at the basis of phenomenological physics.

The paper is about the basic properties of the structure of space and time. I wrote the very short paper to show that logic and mathematics are enough to determine the basic properties of the field structure of our universe.

In physics there are different opinions about the conceptual interpretation of Einstein’s famous equation that describes the equivalence between mass and energy. It is understandable that the equation has different interpretations because of the different points of view to interpret phenomenological reality. This paper is about the meaning of the equation in relation to the general concept of quantum field theory. In other words, reality is created by the underlying structure of the basic quantum fields.

The paper describes the wav-particle duality with the help of the concept of discrete space (also termed "quantized space").

Paper about the origin of the wave-particle duality.

Modern physics describes the observable – and proposed – relations between the phenomena in the microcosm and macrocosm. Unfortunately we cannot observe non-local space itself. Therefore we can only determine the dynamics of the mathematical structure of space with the help of the universal properties of phenomenological reality. It has consequences too.

Many differences exist between the logical relations “equality” and “equivalence”. In this monograph I point out differences that concern definition, linguistics, computational gates and tables, denotation, application, negation of terms, negation of the relation, relations to other relations, the laws of symmetry, transitivity and reflexivity, the laws of commutation and permutation, the law of tautology, the law of distribution, the law of association, propositional meaning, and “genesis”. I also point out a form of “symmetry breaking”: the negation of some equality (...) may yield some non-equality, while the negation of that non-equality might not yield the same equality. (For full access: use the website link of the title page. -- Copyright License: CC BY-NC-ND. -- DOI: 10.17026/dans-zh3-h2b2 --). (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)

As far as we know the scientific search for the nature of reality in Europe started about 2500 years ago in ancient Greek. It was the ancient Greek philosopher Parmenides who reasoned that observable reality is created by an underlying reality. There are indications that the ancient Greek concept of the atom was (also) related to the proposed units of the structure of the underlying creating reality of Parmenides. However, an invisible underlying creating reality suggests that we cannot determine its (...) existence with the help of experimental physics. This paper describes an experiment that will show that Parmenides concept about an underlying reality is correct. (shrink)

Changes within observable reality at the lowest level of reality seem to occur in accordance with the probabil­ity theory in mathematics. It is quite remarkable that nature itself has chosen the probability theory to ar­range all the changes within the structure of the basic quantum fields. This rises a question about the distri­bution of properties in space and time. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.5515861.

The ancient Greek philosopher Parmenides reasoned that observable reality is created by an underlying reality. However, an invisible underlying creating reality suggests that we cannot determine its existence with the help of experimental physics. This paper describes an experiment to measure absolute motion that will show that Parmenides concept about an underlying reality is correct. This in spite of Albert Einstein’s theory of special relativity that is founded on the assumption that it is impossible to detect the absolute motion of (...) objects. (shrink)

The concept of discrete space can be termed as “the ex­ternal mathematical reality hypothesis”. The concept was already known among the ancient Greek philosophers (≈ 500 BC). Unfortunately the phenomenological point of view has dominated science during more than 2000 years and it is only recently that the concept of discrete space gets “tangible” attention again in philosophy and theoretical physics. Although the model de­scribes the existence of the universal conservation laws, constants and principles in a convincing way, the re­lation (...) between phenomenological reality and the geo­metrical description of discrete space is difficult to ima­gine for everyone who is only familiar with phenomeno­logical reality. The purpose of this paper is to describe some easy to imagine properties of discrete space. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.5498120. (shrink)