I summarize John Hick’s pluralistic theory of the world’s great religions, largely in his own voice. I then focus on the core posit of his theory, what he calls “the Real,” but which I less tendentiously call “Godhick”. Godhick is supposed to be the ultimate religious reality. As such, it must be both possible and capable of explanatory and religious significance. Unfortunately, Godhick is, by definition, transcategorial, i.e. necessarily, for any creaturely conceivable substantial property F, it is neither an F (...) nor a non-F. As a result, Godhick is impossible, as shown by the Self-Identity Problem, the Number Problem, and the Pairing Problem. Moreover, even if Godhick is possible, it faces the Insignificance Problem. The upshot is that, so far as I can see, John Hick’s God is unworthy of any further interest. (shrink)

This paper explores early Australasian philosophy in some detail. Two approaches have dominated Western philosophy in Australia: idealism and materialism. Idealism was prevalent between the 1880s and the 1930s, but dissipated thereafter. Idealism in Australia often reflected Kantian themes, but it also reflected the revival of interest in Hegel through the work of ‘absolute idealists’ such as T. H. Green, F. H. Bradley, and Henry Jones. A number of the early New Zealand philosophers were also educated in the idealist tradition (...) and were influential in their communities, but produced relatively little. In Australia, materialism gained prominence through the work of John Anderson, who arrived in Australia in 1927, and continues to be influential. John Anderson had been a student of Henry Jones, who might therefore be said to have influenced both main strands of Australian philosophical thought. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to document Laudan's rejection of the appeal to intuition in the context of his development of normative naturalism. At one point in the development of his methodological thinking, Laudan appealed to pre-analytic intuitions, which might be employed to identify episodes in the history of science against which theories of scientific methodology are to be tested. However, Laudan came to reject this appeal to intuitions, and rejected this entire approach to the evaluation of a theory (...) of method. This is an important stage in the development of his normative naturalist meta-methodology. (shrink)

This paper traces the role of American technocrats in popularizing the notion later dubbed the “technological fix”. Channeled by their long-term “chief”, Howard Scott, their claim was that technology always provides the most effective solution to modern social, cultural and political problems. The account focuses on the expression of this technological faith, and how it was proselytized, from the era of high industrialism between the World Wars through, and beyond, the nuclear age. I argue that the packaging and promotion (...) of these ideas relied on allegorical technological tales and readily-absorbed graphic imagery. Combined with what Scott called “symbolization”, this seductive discourse preached beliefs about technology to broad audiences. The style and conviction of the messages were echoed by establishment figures such as National Lab director Alvin Weinberg, who employed the techniques to convert mainstream and elite audiences through the end of the twentieth century. (shrink)

Some understand Stein’s “Yes, but…” as an entry in the realism—instrumentalism debate (RID) itself, albeit one dissatisfied with then-extant positions. In this paper, however, I argue the opposite: Stein’s conception of science and his approach to its history and philosophy actually preclude the RID. First, I characterize Stein as persistently attending to his own historical and philosophical methods. I then describe his conception of science as both a dialectic and an enterprise, and I draw from this conception (...) several conclusions about the relations between science and its history and philosophy. Finally, I provide a reading of “Yes, but…” that follows from Stein’s conception of science. On this reading, the RID is either irrelevant to or wrong of science and, moreover, distracts from a legitimate inquiry. I conclude by interpreting Stein’s remark that there is ``no difference that makes a difference’’ between a cogent and enlightened realism and a sophisticated instrumentalism. (shrink)

In a recent paper, Howard Stein makes a number of criticisms of an earlier paper of mine ('Are Probabilism and Special Relativity Incompatible?', Phil. Sci., 1985), which explored the question of whether the idea that the future is genuinely 'open' in a probabilistic universe is compatible with special relativity. I disagree with almost all of Stein's criticisms.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Newton's Metaphysics: Essays by Eric SchliesserMarius StanEric Schliesser. Newton's Metaphysics: Essays. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021. Pp. 328. Hardback, $99.90.Newton owes his high regard to the quantitative science he left us, but his overall picture of the world had some robustly metaphysical threads woven in as well. Posthumous judgment about the value of these threads has varied wildly. Christian Wolff thought him a metaphysical rustic, as did Hans (...) Reichenbach some two centuries later ("Die Bewegungslehre bei Newton, Leibniz und Huygens," Kant-Studien 29 [1924]: 416–38). In the 1960s, the tide would turn, as Howard Stein and James Edward McGuire separately began to show that Newton's metaphysics was not just sophisticated, but often more compelling than its early modern alternatives (see respectively "Newtonian Spacetime," Texas Quarterly 10 [1967]: 174–200; and Tradition and Innovation: Newton's Metaphysics of Nature [Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1995]). Eric Schliesser's book unfolds in that same register of appreciative, high scholarship, and it attests to the enduring attraction of its subject.The book grew out of previous discrete papers, to which he added a few more for this occasion. Accordingly, it does not come with a master argument. Rather, it is an in-depth exploration of some key metaphysical themes in Newton. As such, it befits its subject figure, who reflected on themes and concepts while stopping short of working out systems.The first major theme is Newton and Spinozism. The latter does not denote Spinoza's metaphysics. In fact, Schliesser explains, Newton shared with Spinoza some weighty commitments, for example, to space being actually infinite, and to substance monism: "for Newton, there is strictly speaking only one genuine substance," namely, God (33). Rather, "Spinozism" is an interpreter's category for a bundle of three theses: identifying God and nature; denying final causation in the physical world; and the assumption of "blind" metaphysical necessity. Some counted Hobbes and John Toland as Spinozist in this sense, and even Epicurus, avant la lettre. Newton and his followers argued vehemently against this package, as Schliesser shows in chapters 4, 5, and 8. Their chief complaint was that Spinozism is unable to account for the "origin of motion," for a certain type of order, and for the stability of cosmological structure—and to do so in a way that "meets the standards of Newtonian mechanics" (122). This interpretive lens allows Schliesser to draw Kant in, by reading his youthful Theory of Heaven as a possible Spinozist reply to their objections (chapter 3). [End Page 157]A second theme is the metaphysics of mechanics, where Schliesser weaves together several strands. One is the ontology of gravity, for which he offers a novel construal: for Newton, gravity counts as real, but in a qualified sense. Namely, it is not essential and not intrinsic: "even after creation, a lonely partless particle of matter in the universe would not be said to gravitate." And gravity is relational: a "shared quality" of two or more bits of matter, which obtains in virtue of their sharing a nature (19). Another strand is Newton's ontology of time—really, a subtle, difficult topic long neglected. Famously, Newton in Principia defends absolute, true, and mathematical time. The question is what these three qualifiers denote, and whether Newton thought they were synonymous. Schliesser in chapter 7 argues for the provocative view that "absolute" and "true" time are not identical concepts; rather, they pick out different entities. These entities share a common structure, namely, metric and topological. That makes them species of "mathematical" time (179). But, Schliesser contends, Newton has unequal warrant for his two concepts of time.Yet another theme is formal causation. It comes to the fore in chapter 5, which grapples with Newton's opaque idea that space is an "emanative effect." Schliesser explains that here, "emanation picks out a species of formal causation" (147), but in a novel, early modern sense that comes from Bacon, not Aristotle. If space has a formal cause, then so has its twin brother, time, the topic of chapter 7. God is their common formal cause. Then in chapter 6 (coauthored with Zvi Biener) Schliesser adds that, for Newton, laws... (shrink)

Hilary Putnam argued that the special theory of relativity shows that there can be no temporal becoming. Howard Stein replied by defining a becoming relation in Minkowski spacetime. Clifton and Hogarth extended and sharpened Stein’s results. Game over? To the contrary, it has been argued that the Stein-Clifton-Hogarth theorems actually support Putnam’s contention, in that if an apparently minimal condition is put on the becoming relation, then these theorems entail that the becoming relation must be the (...) universal relation. I recount this dialectic in some detail and then try to define and defend a becoming relation based on a present that does indeed consist of more than one point or event but still satisfies the sort of objectivity requirements that Stein-Clifton-Hogarth require of a becoming relation. This present is not a global hyperplane or surface, however; it is a local structure. I close with some methodological remarks about the relation between the present and the real and about the importance of the specious or psychological present. (shrink)

This paper investigates the question of, and the degree to which, Newton’s theory of space constitutes a third-way between the traditional substantivalist and relationist ontologies, i.e., that Newton judged that space is neither a type of substance/entity nor purely a relation among such substances. A non-substantivalist reading of Newton has been famously defended by Howard Stein, among others; but, as will be demonstrated, these claims are problematic on various grounds, especially as regards Newton’s alleged rejection of the traditional (...) substance/accident dichotomy concerning space. Nevertheless, our analysis of the metaphysical foundations of Newton’s spatial theory will strive to uncover its unique and innovative characteristics, most notably, the distinctive role that Newton’s “immaterialist” spatial ontology plays in his dynamics. (shrink)

This paper investigates Newton’s ontology of space in order to determine its commitment, if any, to both Cambridge neo-Platonism, which posits an incorporeal basis for space, and substantivalism, which regards space as a form of substance or entity. A non-substantivalist interpretation of Newton’s theory has been famously championed by Howard Stein and Robert DiSalle, among others, while both Stein and the early work of J. E. McGuire have downplayed the influence of Cambridge neo-Platonism on various aspects of (...) Newton’s own spatial hypotheses. Both of these assertions will be shown to be problematic on various grounds, with special emphasis placed on Stein’s influential case for a non-substantivalist reading. Our analysis will strive, nonetheless, to reveal the unique or forward-looking aspects of Newton’s approach, most notably, his critical assessment of substance ontologies, that help to distinguish his theory of space from his neo-Platonic contemporaries and predecessors. (shrink)

In this paper we discuss a new perspective on the syntax-semantics interface. Semantics, in this new set-up, is not ‘read off’ from Logical Forms as in mainstream approaches to generative grammar. Nor is it assigned to syntactic proofs using a Curry-Howard correspondence as in versions of the Lambek Calculus, or read off from f-structures using Linear Logic as in Lexical-Functional Grammar (LFG, Kaplan & Bresnan [9]). All such approaches are based on the idea that syntactic objects (trees, proofs, fstructures) (...) are somehow prior and that semantics must be parasitic on those syntactic objects. We challenge this idea and develop a grammar in which syntax and semantics are treated in a strictly parallel fashion. The grammar will have many ideas in common with the (converging) frameworks of categorial grammar and LFG, but its treatment of the syntax-semantics interface is radically different. Also, although the meaning component of the grammar is a version of Montague semantics and although there are obvious affinities between Montague’s conception of grammar and the work presented here, the grammar is not compositional, in the sense that composition of meaning need not follow surface structure. (shrink)

Human ecology, it is argued, even when embracing recent developments in the natural sciences and granting a place to culture, tends to justify excessively pessimistic conclusions about the prospects for creating a sustainable world order. This is illustrated through a study of the work and assumptions of Richard Newbold Adams and Stephen Bunker. It is argued that embracing hierarchy theory as this has been proposed and elaborated by Herbert Simon, Howard Pattee, T.F.H. Allen and others enables human ecology to (...) conceive humans both as part of nature and as cultural beings in a way that gives due regard to the ethical development of humanity. That is, ethical constraints need no longer be conceived of as 'unnatural'. Characterizing the nature of such constraints, conceived of as emerging from the Hegelian 'struggle for recognition', this argument is shown to justify some optimism about the future, and to give some idea of how society should be organized if ethical constraints, able to constrain humanity’s relationship to the rest of nature, are to prevail. (shrink)

HISTÓRIA DA SOCIOLOGIA: O DESENVOLVIMENTO DA SOCIOLOGIA I -/- A SOCIOLOGIA CONTEMPORÂNEA -/- HISTORY OF SOCIOLOGY: THE DEVELOPMENT OF SOCIOLOGY I THE SOCIOLOGY CONTEMPORANY -/- Emanuel Isaque Cordeiro da Silva – IFPE-BJ, CAP-UFPE e UFRPE. E-mails: [email protected] e [email protected] WhatsApp: (82)98143-8399. -/- PREMISSA -/- Se até a década de 1960 podia-se falar em uma Sociologia dividida por países, após essa época, tendo em vista um processo significativo de circulação de informações pelos mais variados meios de comunicação, pode-se dizer que os (...) principais cientistas sociais se tornaram globalizados, assim como a literatura sociológica. As questões sociais, que até então podiam estar localizadas em países ou em blocos de países, também se tornaram mundializadas, e vários pensadores passaram a refletir sobre temas chamados de pós-modernos, hipermodernos ou simplesmente contemporâneos, e que afetam um país, uma região ou todo o mundo. A Sociologia contemporânea, porém, mantém uma relação significativa com as grandes vertentes da Sociologia anterior: • a marxista ou histórico-estrutural, com suas variações; • a durkheimiana ou funcionalista, com o desenvolvimento de um neofuncionalismo; • a weberiana ou compreensiva, com o desenvolvimento da fenomenologia e da hermenêutica; • a teórica e pragmática estadunidense, com variadas linhas. Além dessas vertentes, pensadores como Jean-Gabriel de Tarde e Georg Simmel, que estavam um tanto esquecidos, pelo menos no Brasil, em razão da ênfase em Émile Durkheim, num caso, e em Max Weber, em outro, retomaram seus lugares de destaque. Essas vertentes inspiraram outros tantos pensadores, que – refletindo sobre a realidade em que vivem, mesclando ou não contribuições de diferentes linhas teóricas e formulando uma série de conceitos – demonstram as possibilidades e a diversidade do pensamento sociológico e fazem a Sociologia avançar muito no processo de compreensão da realidade contemporânea. A combinação de diversas vertentes teóricas torna difícil fazer qualquer enquadramento ou mesmo tentar classificar determinados autores. Muitos analistas veem nisso uma crise de paradigmas na Sociologia contemporânea. Essa “crise” poderia ser entendida do ponto de vista epistemológico; entretanto, sempre houve diversidade de epistemologias na Sociologia. Acreditamos que essa diversidade epistemológica, de teorias, de objetos e de métodos, concorrentes ou não, na explicação de fenômenos sociais deve ser vista como indicativo de vigor, e não de decadência. Por fim, indico a seguir, em ordem alfabética, alguns dos pensadores e sociólogos contemporâneos cujo trabalho tem dado especial contribuição à Sociologia desenvolvida no Brasil: Alain Touraine (1925-), Anthony Giddens (1938-), Axel Honneth (1949-), Boaventura de Sousa Santos (1940-), David Harvey (1935-), Edgard Morin (1921-), François Dubet (1946), Gilles Lipovetsky (1944-), Howard S. Becker (1928-), Immanuel Wallerstein (1930-), István Mészáros (1930-2017), Jean Baudrillard (1929-2007), Jürgen Habermas (1929-), Manuel Castells (1942-), Marshall Bermann (1940-2013), Michael Löwy (1938-), Michel Maffesoli (1944-), Néstor García Canclini (1939-), Niklas Luhmann (1927-1998), Norbert Elias (1897-1990), Peter Ludwig Berger (1929-2017), Ralph Dahrendorf (1929-2009), Raymond Boudon (1934-2013), Richard Sennett (1943-), Serge Moscovici (1928 -2014), Thomas Luckmann (1927-2016), Ulrich Beck (1944-2015) e Zygmunt Bauman (1925-2017). -/- REFERENCIAL TEÓRICO -/- CUIN, C. H.; GRESLE, F. História da Sociologia. Trad. Roberto Leal Ferreira. São Paulo: Ensaio, 1994. -/- NERY, M. C. R. Sociologia contemporânea. 1ª ed. Curitiba: IESDE, 2007. -/- NOVA, S. V. Introdução a Sociologia. 6ª ed. São Paulo: Atlas, 2004. -/- SILVA, A. et al. Sociologia em movimento. 2ª ed. São Paulo: Moderna, 2016. -/- SBS - Sociedade Brasileira de Sociologia PUCRS - PPG em Ciências Sociais Avenida Ipiranga, 6681 - Partenon CEP: 90619-900 - Porto Alegre, RS [email protected] Emanuel Isaque Cordeiro da Silva © 2019 -/- Estimule a criatividade, respeite o direito autoral. (shrink)

In this dialogue, we discuss the contrast between inexorable physical laws and the semiotic freedom of life. We agree that material and symbolic structures require complementary descriptions, as do the many hierarchical levels of their organizations. We try to clarify our concepts of laws, constraints, rules, symbols, memory, interpreters, and semiotic control. We briefly describe our different personal backgrounds that led us to a biosemiotic approach, and we speculate on the future directions of biosemiotics.

While intimately familiar, gender eludes theorizing. We argue that well-known challenges to gender’s analysis originate in a subtle ambiguity: questions about gender sometimes express questions about gender categories themselves (e.g., womanhood, manhood, and so on), while at other times expressing questions about what makes someone a member of these categories. Distinguishing these questions accentuates gender’s connections to morality, making a novel “antirealist” view of gender, or as we call it, “unrealist” view, especially natural. Gender’s relations to identity, sex, and social (...) position are illuminated along the way. Taking cues from both historical and contemporary debates in metaethics about the roles that attitudes can play in metaphysical and semantic analysis, we introduce and begin developing a comprehensive non-ameliorative framework for explicating gender’s nature and our thought and talk about it. In a slogan, on the view we defend, you belong to the gender category to which you intrinsically desire to belong. (shrink)

Many theistic religions place a high value on faith in God and some traditions regard it as a virtue. However, philosophers commonly assign either very little value to faith in God or significant negative value, or even view it as a vice. Progress in assessing whether and when faith in God can be valuable or disvaluable, virtuous or vicious, rational or irrational, or otherwise apt or inapt requires understanding what faith in God is. This Special Issue on the normative appraisal (...) of faith in God for Religious Studies includes nine articles, from a diverse range of perspectives, which explore issues related to the core questions ‘What is faith in God?’ and ‘What normative questions about faith in God need to be addressed?’ In this Introduction, we briefly introduce each article. (shrink)

Since 1962 Kuhn's concept of incommensurability has undergone a process of transformation. His current account of incommensurability has little in common with his original account of it. Originally, incommensurability was a relation of methodological, observational and conceptual disparity between paradigms. Later Kuhn restricted the notion to the semantical sphere and assimilated it to the indeterminacy of translation. Recently he has developed an account of it as localized translation failure between subsets of terms employed by theories.

This paper brings Sellars’ synoptic vision of philosophy into contact with elements of Quine’s naturalism. The implications of the synoptic view for the method of analysis are presented. Sellars’ metaphysical naturalism is supplemented with the meta-philosophical and epistemological naturalism of Quine. The issue of epistemic normativity is addressed within a naturalistic context. The possibility of a conflict between naturalism and realism is considered.

This brief article intended for undergraduates argues for Experiential Foundationalism, the view that there are basic beliefs and they can be justified by experience.

In this short essay, we sketch a theory of faith that features resilience in the face of challenges to relying on those in whom you have faith. We argue that it handles a variety of both religious and secular faith-data, e.g., the value of faith in relationships of mutual faith and faithfulness, how the Christian and Hebrew scriptures portray pístis and ʾĕmûnāh, and the character of faith as it is often expressed in popular secular venues.

Inflicting harm is generally preferable to inflicting death. If you must choose between the two, you should generally choose to harm. But prenatal harm seems different. If a mother must choose between harming her fetus or aborting it, she may choose either, at least in many cases. So it seems that prenatal harm is particularly objectionable, sometimes on a par with death. This paper offers an explanation of why prenatal harm seems particularly objectionable by drawing an analogy to the all-or-nothing (...) problem. It then argues that this analogy offers independent support for the ‘voluntarist’ view that at least some parental role obligations are grounded in the choice to be a parent. (shrink)

The incommensurability thesis is the thesis that the content of some alternative scientific theories is incomparable due to translation failure between the vocabulary the theories employ. This paper presents an overview of the main issues which have arisen in the debate about incommensurability. It also briefly outlines a response to the thesis based on a modified causal theory of reference which allows change of reference subsequent to initial baptism, as well as a role to description in the determination of reference. (...) On such a view. the content of theories may be compared on the basis of shared reference, despite failure of translation. Two recent developments involving the incomnensurability thesis are also examined: (i) the taxonomic version of the incomensurability thesis found in Kuhn’s later writings. (ii) Hoyningen-Huenc’s neo-Kantian interpretation of Kuhn’s metaphysics. (shrink)

Some facts are objective. Some facts are subjective. Subjective facts are personal facts about individuals. It is the purpose of this short note to suggest that subjective facts are in fact objective facts about us. This applies not just to facts involving relations to entities that are independent of us, but to our tastes. It is an objective fact about us that we have the tastes that we do though there may be no objective matter of fact that our tastes (...) reflect or fail to reflect. (shrink)

Why should we refrain from doing things that, taken collectively, are environmentally destructive, if our individual acts seem almost certain to make no difference? According to the expected consequences approach, we should refrain from doing these things because our individual acts have small risks of causing great harm, which outweigh the expected benefits of performing them. Several authors have argued convincingly that this provides a plausible account of our moral reasons to do things like vote for policies that will reduce (...) our countries’ greenhouse gas emissions, adopt plant-based diets, and otherwise reduce our individual emissions. But this approach has recently been challenged by authors like Bernward Gesang and Julia Nefsky. Gesang contends that it may be genuinely impossible for our individual emissions to make a morally relevant difference. Nefsky argues more generally that the expected consequences approach cannot adequately explain our reasons not to do things if there is no precise fact of the matter about whether their outcomes are harmful. -/- In the following chapter, author Howard Nye defends the expected consequences approach against these objections. Nye contends that Gesang has shown at most that our emissions could have metaphysically indeterministic effects that lack precise objective chances. He argues, moreover, that the expected consequences approach can draw upon existing extensions to cases of indeterminism and imprecise probabilities to deliver the result that we have the same moral reasons to reduce our emissions in Gesang’s scenario as in deterministic scenarios. Nye also shows how the expected consequences approach can draw upon these extensions to handle Nefsky’s concern about the absence of precise facts concerning whether the outcomes of certain acts are harmful. The author concludes that the expected consequences approach provides a fully adequate account of our moral reasons to take both political and personal action to reduce our ecological footprints. (shrink)

This is a brief exploration of the notion of an objective fact. The form of objectivity at issue is distinct from epistemic objectivity or objectivity about truth. It is an ontological form of objectivity. Objective facts may obtain whether or not we know, believe or are aware of them. They depend upon objects, for example, on the properties that objects have or the relationships into which objects enter. Setting scepticism to one side, there is a perfectly mundane sense in which (...) we may come to have knowledge or fail to have knowledge of such facts. We must perceive objective facts from a perspective, but this does not enter into the facts. Nor does the fact that we must describe facts using language mean that facts are language-dependent. (shrink)

Truth in a correspondence sense is objective in two ways. It is objective because the relation of correspondence is objective and because the facts to which truths correspond are objective. Truth about artifacts is problematic because artifacts are intentionally designed to perform certain functions, and so are not entirely mind independent. Against this, it is argued in this paper that truth about artifacts is perfectly objective despite the role played by intention and purpose in the production of artifacts.

We argue that, in order to explain the relative strengths of our reasons to contribute to different collective endeavours, approaches to the ethics of collective action must understand the strengths of our reasons to make a given contribution as proportional to its expected benefits, or its chances of bringing about benefits in proportion to their magnitudes. The view that most clearly meets this proportionality requirement is the expected consequences approach, which identifies our reasons to perform an act with its expected (...) benefits. We contend that views other than the expected consequences approach must similarly proportion the expected degrees of what they take to be reason-giving features of a contribution – such as its virtuousness, appropriate expression, support by considerations of fairness, or helping without making a difference – to the contribution’s expected benefits. The proportionality requirement explains why we should spend more time participating in strategic social, political, and labour movement activities, while avoiding unproductive conflicts and merely performative activities. We conclude that the proportionality requirement, and the ability of views other than the expected consequences approach to meet it, are important for thinking and communicating about the ethics of collective action in ways that are simultaneously most compelling and most strategic. (shrink)

Faith in God conflicts with reason—or so we’re told. We focus on two arguments for this conclusion. After evaluating three criticisms of them, we identify an assumption they share, namely that faith in God requires belief that God exists. Whether the assumption is true depends on what faith is. We sketch a theory of faith that allows for both faith in God without belief that God exists, and faith in God while in belief-cancelling doubt God’s existence. We then argue that (...) our theory, unlike the theory of Thomas Aquinas, makes sense of four central items of faith-data: (i) pístis in the Synoptics, (ii) ʾemunāh in the Hebrew scriptures, (iii) exemplars of faith in God, including Abraham, Jesus, and Mother Teresa, and (iv) the widespread experience of people of faith today. We close by assessing revisions of the two arguments we began with, revisions that align with our theory of faith, and find them dubious, at best. (shrink)

I propose and defend a novel view called “de se consequentialism,” which is noteworthy for two reasons. First, it demonstrates—contra Doug Portmore, Mark Schroeder, Campbell Brown, and Michael Smith, among others—that agent-neutral consequentialism is consistent with agent-centered constraints. Second, it clarifies the nature of agent-centered constraints, thereby meriting attention from even dedicated nonconsequentialists. Scrutiny reveals that moral theories in general, whether consequentialist or not, incorporate constraints by assessing states in a first-personal guise. Consequently, de se consequentialism enacts constraints through the (...) very same feature that nonconsequentialist theories do. (shrink)

In the latter half of the twentieth century, foundationalist approaches to epistemology and philosophy of science were widely rejected in favour of holist and coherentist approaches. Kuhn may be regarded as a contributor to this anti-foundationalist tendency. In this paper, I wish to consider the extent to which Kuhn’s epistemological thinking was coherentist in nature. This is a task that has already begun in the work of Jouni-Matti Kuukkanen. However, I wish to go beyond Kuukkanen by raising a number of (...) questions that he does not address. First, I present Kuukkanen’s coherentist interpretation of Kuhn. In the next section, I argue that the interpretation fails to show that Kuhn rejects non-doxastic justification in favour of coherence relations among beliefs. In the fourth section, I present a standard objection to coherentism that any adequate formulation of the doctrine must confront, the “input objection”. I then frame the objection in terms of Kuhn’s model. In the fifth section, I argue that Kuhn’s account of science is able to satisfactorily deal with the input objection. In the sixth section, I explore the relationship between Kuhn’s treatment of perception and the anti-foundationalist tendency that contributed to the rise of coherentism. (shrink)

This brief reply to McCain and Poston's chapter problematizes both their objections to my chapter on experience justifying belief and their version of epistemological coherentism.

Rational argument doesn't often change minds. I explore the reasons why the usual processes of argument seldom convince people on the other side.

In a recent exchange, John Worrall and Larry Laudan have debated the merits of the model of rational scientific change proposed by Laudan in his book Science and Values. On the model advocated by Laudan, rational change may take place at the level of scientific theory and methodology, as well as at the level of the epistemic aims of science. Moreover, the rationality of a change which occurs at any one of these three levels may be dependent on considerations at (...) the remaining levels. Yet, in spite of the avowedly anti-relativistic motivation of Laudan's model, Worrall criticizes Laudan for irrevocably relativizing scientific rationality to historically variant methodological standards. (shrink)

This book presents a critical analysis of the semantic incommensurability thesis of Thomas Kuhn and Paul Feyerabend. In putting forward the thesis of incommensurability, Kuhn and Feyerabend drew attention to complex issues concerning the phenomenon of conceptual change in science. They raised serious problems about the semantic and logical relations between the content of theories which deploy unlike systems of concepts. Yet few of the more extreme claims associated with incommensurability stand scrutiny. The argument of this book is as follows. (...) The terms of theories with different concepts diverge semantically and the vocabularies of such theories may not be fully intertranslatable. Given the possibility of referential overlap between the terms of conceptually divergent theories, it does not follow that the content of such theories is incomparable. Nor, given the distinction between understanding a language and translation from one language into another, does it follow that the proponents of mutually untranslatable theories are unable to communicate. Neither is it the case that the shift between conceptually divergent theories involves a discontinuous transition between theories which have no common reference or that refer to distinct worlds of their own making. The semantic differences resulting from conceptual variance may be embraced within a thoroughly realist framework on which they are construed as diverse linguistic relations to a fixed and independent reality. -/- The book, which was originally published in 1994, has now been re-issued in the Routledge Revivals series. -/- . (shrink)

An interview about realism conducted in English and translated into Persian by Reza Alizadeh Mamaghani.

In this paper it is argued that the concept of translation failure involved in Kuhn's thesis of incommensurability is distinct from that of translational indeterminacy in Quine's sense. At most, Kuhnian incommensurability constitutes a weak form of indeterminacy, quite distinct from Quine's. There remains, however, a convergence between the two views of translation, namely, that there is no single adequate translation between languages.

I argue that the self is simple metaphysically, whilst being complex psychologically and that the persona that links these moments might be dubbed ”creativity’ or ”imagination’. This theory is trinitarian because it ascribes to the self these three ”features’ or ”moments’ and they bear at least some analogy with the Persons of the Trinity, as understood within the neo- platonic, Augustinian tradition.

Thomas S. Kuhn’s The structure of scientific revolutions is a classic text in the history and philosophy of science. It is one of the best known works in the field outside this area of academic specialization. One need only mention the term ‘paradigm’ to register the extent to which Kuhn’s ideas have entered the vernacular. Traditionally, philosophers of science have tended to focus on questions about the nature of scientific method. Kuhn brought a historical orientation to bear on such questions. (...) Structure opens with the words, ‘History, if viewed as a repository for more than anecdote or chron- ology could produce a decisive transformation in the image of science by which we are now possessed’ (p.1). Kuhn proposed a model of scientific change, that empha- sizes historical development. As Kuhn foresaw, reflection on its history has transformed our image of science. Science is now seen as a developing process, practised by humans in a variety of shifting historical and social circumstances. (shrink)

The year 2012 marks the fiftieth anniversary of the original publication of Thomas Kuhn’s famous book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Kuhn, who taught at Berkeley, Princeton and MIT following studies in physics at Harvard, was a historian of science whose ideas have had a major impact on the philosophy of science. Now in its third edition, Structure has had a lasting influence on our thinking about science. After fifty years, Kuhn’s ideas show signs of wear. But they continue to (...) shape our “image of science”, to echo Kuhn’s own turn of phrase in the opening lines of Structure. The core idea of Structure is that scientific research is based on underlying theoretical structures which provide a framework for research in a field for a sustained period of time. Kuhn’s name for these structures was paradigm. It is Kuhn’s use of the word that inserted ‘paradigm’ into the popular lexicon. His original use of the word was flexible. But he had two key points in mind. First, there is a set of beliefs about a domain of study, including generalizations and a model of how the domain is constituted, that is adopted as the basis for scientific practice in a scientific field at a time. Second, there are a number of important examples of exemplary scientific research which later scientists look back to as guiding inspiration for their own research. Examples include Copernican heliocentric astronomy, Lavoisier’s oxygen-based chemistry and Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection. All of these constituted paradigms for scientists working in these areas for a significant period of time, both in the sense of providing an overarching set of beliefs about the world and in the sense of providing examples of exemplary research. (shrink)

Scientific realism is the position that the aim of science is to advance on truth and increase knowledge about observable and unobservable aspects of the mind-independent world which we inhabit. This book articulates and defends that position. In presenting a clear formulation and addressing the major arguments for scientific realism Sankey appeals to philosophers beyond the community of, typically Anglo-American, analytic philosophers of science to appreciate and understand the doctrine. The book emphasizes the epistemological aspects of scientific realism and contains (...) an original solution to the problem of induction that rests on an appeal to the principle of uniformity of nature. (shrink)

Background: Current practice frequently fails to provide care consistent with the preferences of decisionally-incapacitated patients. It also imposes significant emotional burden on their surrogates. Algorithmic-based patient preference predictors (PPPs) have been proposed as a possible way to address these two concerns. While previous research found that patients strongly support the use of PPPs, the views of surrogates are unknown. The present study thus assessed the views of experienced surrogates regarding the possible use of PPPs as a means to help make (...) treatment decisions for decisionally-incapacitated patients. -/- Methods: This qualitative study used semi-structured interviews to determine the views of experienced surrogates [n=26] who were identified from two academic medical centers and two community hospitals. The primary outcomes were respondents’ overall level of support for the idea of using PPPs and the themes related to their views on how a PPP should be used, if at all, in practice. -/- Results: Overall, 21 participants supported the idea of using PPPs. The remaining five indicated that they would not use a PPP because they made decisions based on the patient’s best interests, not based on substituted judgment. Major themes which emerged were that surrogates, not the patient’s preferences, should determine how treatment decisions are made, and concern that PPPs might be used to deny expensive care or be biased against minority groups. -/- Conclusions: Surrogates, like patients, strongly support the idea of using PPPs to help make treatment decisions for decisionally-incapacitated patients. These findings provide support for developing a PPP and assessing it in practice. At the same time, patients and surrogates disagree over whose preferences should determine how treatment decisions are made, including whether to use a PPP. These findings reveal a fundamental disagreement regarding the guiding principles for surrogate decision-making. Future research is needed to assess this disagreement and consider ways to address it. (shrink)

This article presents a case for human rights feminism as providing us with an effective, but too often under-recognized model for achieving equality in our society. From out of the context of recent feminism, with specific focus on Judith Butler, the author argues that the move to universal human rights is compatible with the critical tradition of identity politics as a means of realizing the goal of gender equality.

Truth about matters of fact is objective. This is not just because truth is objective. It is also because facts are objective. An objective fact makes an assertion of that fact true. The objectivity of the fact adds a further element of objectivity to the objective truth of the assertion. True assertions of fact are true because truth is objective and because the facts that make them true are objective. True assertions of fact are objective twice over. Their objectivity is (...) twofold. Or, at least, that is the point I seek to establish here. (shrink)

Until recently, psychologists have conceptualised and studied trust in God (TIG) largely in isolation from contemporary work in theology, philosophy, history, and biblical studies that has examined the topic with increasing clarity. In this article, we first review the primary ways that psychologists have conceptualised and measured TIG. Then, we draw on conceptualizations of TIG outside the psychology of religion to provide a conceptual map for how TIG might be related to theorised predictors and outcomes. Finally, we provide a research (...) agenda for future empirical work in this area, as well as practical applications for counsellors and religious leaders. (shrink)

Alan Musgrave is one of the foremost contemporary defenders of scientific realism. He is also one of the leading exponents of Karl Popper’s critical rationalist philosophy. In this paper, my main focus will be on Musgrave’s realism. However, I will emphasize epistemological aspects of realism. This will lead me to address aspects of his critical rationalism as well.

Reciprocal Ethics is a novel ethical framework rooted in praxeology, the study of purposeful action. It represents an entirely new paradigm in moral philosophy, placing interaction at the core of universal ethics. Traditional ethical theories often divorce thought from action. Reciprocal Ethics contends that they are two aspects of the same phenomenon in the human experience, removing the traditional boundary between theoretical and practical ethics. The system categorizes all social interaction as either “self-directed” or “other-directed”, and by introducing the concept (...) of "normative signaling" it also exerts legitimate prescriptive power. The theory is a self-consistent, purely descriptive approach to ethics, that suggests that one's actions serve as semiotic signs that signal one's ethical stance in social interaction. Hence actions do not only define individual moral profiles, but also the moral ecosystem within which one actually operates. The theory operates in real time, adapting to the complexity of reality by taking into account uncertainty, incomplete data and social asymmetries. Reconciling elements of consequentialism and deontological theories, Reciprocal Ethics delivers a streamlined, yet comprehensive ethical system for social interaction, offering tangible insights for navigating complex moral dilemmas. By synthesizing descriptive metaethics and normative moral philosophy into one comprehensive formal theory, a bold assertion arises: Reciprocal Ethics becomes the Formal Science of Ethics. (shrink)