It is commonly held that our intuitive judgements about imaginary problem cases are justified a priori, if and when they are justified at all. In this paper I defend this view — ‘rationalism’ — against a recent objection by Timothy Williamson. I argue that his objection fails on multiple grounds, but the reasons why it fails are instructive. Williamson argues from a claim about the semantics of intuitive judgements, to a claim about their psychological underpinnings, to the denial of rationalism. (...) I argue that the psychological claim — that a capacity for mental simulation explains our intuitive judgements — does not, even if true, provide reasons to reject rationalism. (More generally, a simulation hypothesis, about any category of judgements, is very limited in its epistemological implications: it is pitched at a level of explanation that is insensitive to central epistemic distinctions.) I also argue that Williamson’s semantic claim — that intuitive judgements are judgements of counterfactuals — is mistaken; rather, I propose, they are a certain kind of metaphysical possibility judgement. Several other competing proposals are also examined and criticized. (shrink)

Some psychological states—paradigmatically, beliefs and intentions—are rationally evaluable: they can be rational or irrational, justified or unjustified. Other states—e.g. sensations and gastrointestinal states—aren’t: they’re a-rational. On a familiar but hard-to-make-precise line of thought, at least part of what explains this difference is that we’re somehow responsible for (having/being in) states of the former sort, in a way we’re not for the others. But this responsibility can’t be modeled on the responsibility we have for our (free, intentional) actions. So how should (...) it be understood? In this paper I address that question. The overall shape of my answer is in line with tradition: I take the responsibility to be grounded in certain capacities for reflection and control. Answers in this family have recently been subjected to an interesting challenge. But the version I defend meets that challenge. (shrink)

According to a widely shared generic conception of inferential justification—‘the standard conception’—an agent is inferentially justified in believing that p only if she has antecedently justified beliefs in all the non-redundant premises of a good argument for p. This conception tends to serve as the starting-point in contemporary debates about the nature and scope of inferential justification: as neutral common ground between various competing, more specific, conceptions. But it’s a deeply problematic starting-point. This paper explores three questions that haven’t been (...) given the attention they deserve, that complicate the application of the standard conception to cases, and that reveal it to be underspecified at the core—in ways that aren’t resolved but inherited by more specific (extant) versions of it. The goal isn’t to answer the questions, but to articulate them, explain what turns on them, and invite a critical re-examination of the standard conception. (shrink)

Haben sich Buchverlage und ihre Produkt-Manager von der Gesellschaft verabschiedet? Glaubt man den verbreiteten theoretischen Grundlegungen, die bei der Auflagenproduktion ansetzen und in verschiedene Ausrichtungen und Wirtschaftsprinzipien differenziert werden, ist eine gesellschaftliche Relevanz kaum auszumachen. -/- In diesem Band wird ein alternativer Weg eingeschlagen: das Gewicht liegt auf der gesellschaftlichen Vermittlung zwischen Autoren und Lesern, unabhängig von historischen Buchformen. Mit den Essays gelangt das Interesse für Buchverlage in die Mitte der Gesellschaft, in die ‚digitale Revolution‘. Weil sich der Investitionsaufwand für (...) eBooks in Grenzen hält, bietet diese Buchform eine besondere Chance für Klein- und Mikroverlage. -/- Es bleibt nicht aus, die Politik einbeziehen zu müssen, denn in Europa gelten eBooks bislang nicht als Bücher, sondern als Dienstleistung, als Konvertierungsresultat, dem weiter keine Beachtung zu schenken ist. Ein solches Verhalten ist nicht nur borniert, sondern auch geschäftsschädigend! (shrink)

Identity politics is subject to similar critiques in contemporary public debate and political theory. A central topos of this critique is that identity politics is essentializing: it fixes subjects to their social position and resorts to a politics of particularity that leads to divisions in national citizenship and democratic discourse (the communitarian and liberal position) and to divisions within social movements (the critical position). Contrary to this one-sided critique, we propose a different interpretation with the concept of “constructivist identity politics.” (...) We show that political identities are not essentialistically given, but emerge from processes of social and political construction; that they are actively produced, learned, and practiced by political (sub)cultures and movements. In these processes of construction, political articulation and agency are produced, enabling subjects to critique relations of domination and discrimination. Following radical democratic theory, we argue that the particular political perspectives of identity politics thus enabled do not endanger democracy or solidarity in social movements, but contribute to their further democratization by actualizing the universal principles of democracy in particular disputes. While the construction processes of identity politics tend to essentialize and produce exclusions, critical reflection on such tendencies is also inherent to identity politics. This understanding also enables a critique of such identity politics that is not oriented towards the democratic values of equality and freedom and blocks critical self-reflection. After an overview of contemporary identity politics critique, we elaborate this constructivist understanding following debates in feminist and postcolonial theory since the 1980s. Building on this, we systematically develop the notion of constructivist identity politics by differentiating three aspects of it: subjectification, articulation, and representation. We refer to approaches by Foucault, Rancière, Laclau/Mouffe, and Hall and illustrate the respective aspects through examples of migrant self-organizations as well as gay culture and queer critique. (shrink)

Neuroenhancement involves the use of neurotechnologies to improve cognitive, affective or behavioural functioning, where these are not judged to be clinically impaired. Questions about enhancement have become one of the key topics of neuroethics over the past decade. The current study draws on in-depth public engagement activities in ten European countries giving a bottom-up perspective on the ethics and desirability of enhancement. This informed the design of an online contrastive vignette experiment that was administered to representative samples of 1000 respondents (...) in the ten countries and the United States. The experiment investigated how the gender of the protagonist, his or her level of performance, the efficacy of the enhancer and the mode of enhancement affected support for neuroenhancement in both educational and employment contexts. Of these, higher efficacy and lower performance were found to increase willingness to support enhancement. A series of commonly articulated claims about the individual and societal dimensions of neuroenhancement were derived from the public engagement activities. Underlying these claims, multivariate analysis identified two social values. The Societal/protective highlights counter normative consequences and opposes the use enhancers. The Individual/proactionary highlights opportunities and supports use. For most respondents these values are not mutually exclusive. This suggests that for many neuroenhancement is viewed simultaneously as a source of both promise and concern. (shrink)

Neuroenhancement involves the use of neurotechnologies to improve cognitive, affective or behavioural functioning, where these are not judged to be clinically impaired. Questions about enhancement have become one of the key topics of neuroethics over the past decade. The current study draws on in-depth public engagement activities in ten European countries giving a bottom-up perspective on the ethics and desirability of enhancement. This informed the design of an online contrastive vignette experiment that was administered to representative samples of 1000 respondents (...) in the ten countries and the United States. The experiment investigated how the gender of the protagonist, his or her level of performance, the efficacy of the enhancer and the mode of enhancement affected support for neuroenhancement in both educational and employment contexts. Of these, higher efficacy and lower performance were found to increase willingness to support enhancement. A series of commonly articulated claims about the individual and societal dimensions of neuroenhancement were derived from the public engagement activities. Underlying these claims, multivariate analysis identified two social values. The Societal/Protective highlights counter normative consequences and opposes the use enhancers. The Individual/Proactionary highlights opportunities and supports use. For most respondents these values are not mutually exclusive. This suggests that for many neuroenhancement is viewed simultaneously as a source of both promise and concern. (shrink)

The aim of this book, written by a researcher at the Tatarstan Academy of Sciences, is to examine how and why theories change in science. Nugayev’s analysis, and his many examples, are confined to mathematically formalized theories of physics. Nugayev’s ideas are inspired by, and relate to, Russian scholars. His approach is primarily philosophical and clearly in the analytical tradition of Popper, Kuhn, Lakatos, Feyerabend, Stegmuller and others. Although Nugayev’s book is primarily addressed to philosophers, it is also of interest (...) to the philosophically inclined historian of science. (shrink)

Tyler Burge famously argues in his 1993 paper "Content Preservation" that it is not only a priori true that we enjoy a prima facie warrant to take what others assert as true, but also that there our warrant to believe what we are told in certain special cases is a priori. So just as our warrant for believing certain mathematical truths might be a priori, so too there are cases of belief through testimony that are a priori. Then in a (...) 2013 Postscript to "Content Preservation" he took it all back. All of Burge's ideas and arguments for and against are interesting and important, and deepen our understanding of testimony, comprehension, warrant, and the a priori. But his ideas and arguments are hard to understand. This paper explains all of ideas and arguments, both for and against, in a clear and comprehensive way. Along the way, Anna-Sara Malmgren's interpretation and criticism of Burge's position is also expounded and criticized. (shrink)

The practice of thought experimentation plays a central role in contemporary philosophical methodology. Many philosophers rely on thought experimentation as their primary and even sole procedure for testing theories about the natures of properties and relations. This test procedure involves entertaining hypothetical cases in imaginative thought and then undergoing intuitions about the distribution of properties and relations in them. A theory’s comporting with an intuition is treated as evidence in favour of it; but a clash is treated as evidence against (...) the theory and may even be regarded as falsifying it. -/- The epistemic power of thought experimentation is mysterious. How can experiments carried out within the mind enable us to discover truths about the natures of properties and relations like knowledge, causation, personal identity, reference, meaning, consciousness, beauty, justice, morality, and free will? This epistemological challenge is urgent, but a model of philosophical thought experimentation would seem to be a necessary propaedeutic to any serious discussion of it. An adequate model would make the relevant test procedure explicit, thereby assisting in the identification of points of potential epistemic vulnerability. -/- In this monograph I advance the propaedeutical model-building work already done by Timothy Williamson, Anna-Sara Malmgren, and Jonathan Ichikawa and Benjamin Jarvis. Following the lead of these philosophers, I focus on a single Gettier-style thought experiment and the problem of identifying the real content of the Gettier intuition. My first contribution is to establish the inadequacy of all of the existing models. Each of them, I argue, fails to solve the content problem. It emerges from my discussion, however, that Ichikawa and Jarvis’s truth in fiction approach holds out the prospect of a solution. -/- My second contribution is to develop and defend a new way of implementing the general idea behind the truth in fiction approach. The model I put forward does a better overall job of modelling Gettier-style thought experiments than any of the existing models. It has none of the defects which render those models inadequate and Iam unable to find any major defects peculiar to it. This should make us feel confident that my model is adequate. Moreover, since the Gettier-style thought experiment I focus on is paradigmatic, we should also feel confident that my model will generalise naturally to other philosophical thought experiments. (shrink)

Many contemporary epistemologists take rational inference to be a conscious action performed by the thinker (Boghossian 2014; 2018; Valaris 2014; Malmgren 2018). It is tempting to think that rational evaluability requires responsibility, which in turn requires conscious action. In that case, unconscious cognition involves merely associative or otherwise arational processing. This paper argues instead for deep rationalism: unconscious inference often exhibits the same rational status and richly structured logical character as conscious inference. The central case study is rationalization, in (...) which people shift their attitudes in logically structured, reason-responsive ways in response to evidence of their own incompetence or immorality. These attitude shifts are irrational in a way that reflects on the thinker. Thus rationally evaluable inference extends downward into the unconscious. Many take the sole aim of belief to be truth (Velleman 2000) or knowledge (Williamson 2000), but the prevalence of rationalization suggests that belief updating often aims instead at preserving our positive conceptions of ourselves—that is, belief updating is part of a psychological immune system (Gilbert 2006; Mandelbaum 2019). This paper argues that the psychological immune system comprises a suite of distinct cognitive mechanisms, some (ir)rational and some arational, which are united by a common function of avoiding the maladaptive predomination of negative affect and maintaining stable motivation. Other aspects of the psychological immune system include (i) a domain-general positive bias in evaluative attitudes and (ii) “terror management,” i.e., the systematic strengthening of meaning-conferring beliefs to avoid death anxiety. The multiplicity of processes underlying the psychological immune system point toward an irrational but adaptive function of cognition to keep us motivated in a world rife with negativity and death. (shrink)

There can be no doubt that discrimination based on sex, race, ethnicity, religion or beliefs should not be tolerated in academia. Surprisingly, however, in recent years, policies of Diversity, Inclusion and Equity(DIE), officially introduced to counteract discrimination, have increasingly led to quite the opposite result: the exclusion of individuals who do not share a radical 'woke' ideology on identity politics (feminism, other gender activisms, critical race theory, etc.), and to the suppression of the academic freedom to discuss such dogmas. This (...) subversion of academia ― disguised Trojan-horse style as universal human rights advocacy ― is unacceptable because academia must be politically neutral and protect freedom of speech, a cornerstone of professional scholarly activity without which universities as we know them will slowly but surely suffocate. -/- Our purpose here is to put together some particularly illustrative cases of such repression in a single book, testifying to a ubiquitous trend within western culture, irreducible to a few isolated complaints. The essays contained here illustrate the abuse of power, censorship and witch-hunts at many universities and research centres in the name of DIE. -/- List of coauthors in alphabetical order: Dorian Abbot, Tomonori Agoh, Gerhard Amendt, Ivar Arpi, David Benatar, Peter Boghossian, Civitas Research Team, David Díaz Pardo de Vera, Pedro Domingos, Janice Fiamengo, Étienne Forest, Jorge Gibert Galassi, Norman Goldstuck, José L. González Quirós, Lawrence M. Krauss, Patrick LaBelle, Martín López Corredoira, Heather Mac Donald, Martin Malmgren, Erik. J. Olsson, Jordan Peterson, Constantin Polychronakos, Philip C. Salzman, Alessandro Strumia, Tom Todd, Andrei Yafaev. (shrink)

Short review of Helge Kragh's excellent book on the contest between big bang and steady state theories of the universe.

This article investigates the convergence between Kierkegaard’s concept of despair and Nietzsche’s concept of nihilism. The piece argues that (1) both Kierkegaard and Nietzsche rely on an internal critique of ways of life which collapse on their own terms; (2) both despair and nihilism involve a radical, existential aporia and double-mindedness which can be (3) either conscious or non-conscious; (4) there is some overlap between the main types of nihilism and the different types of inauthentic (non-conscious) despair; (5) finally, a (...) comparison with Nietzsche makes it possible to make sense of inauthentic despair without resorting to theological presuppositions or a twentieth century depth psychology notion of the unconscious. (shrink)