We are immersed within an odorous sea of chemical currents that we parse into individual odors with complex structures. Odors have been posited as determined by the structural relation between the molecules that compose the chemical compounds and their interactions with the receptor site. But, naturally occurring smells are parsed from gaseous odor plumes. To give a comprehensive account of the nature of odors the chemosciences must account for these large distributed entities as well. We offer a focused review of (...) what is known about the perception of odor plumes for olfactory navigation and tracking, which we then connect to what is known about the role odorants play as properties of the plume in determining odor identity with respect to odor quality. We end by motivating our central claim that more research needs to be conducted on the role that odorants play within the odor plume in determining odor identity. (shrink)

Radical democratic thinking is becoming intrigued by the material situatedness of its political agents and by the role of nonhuman participants in political interaction. At stake here is the displacement of narrow anthropocentrism that currently guides democratic theory and practice, and its repositioning into what we call ‘the nonhuman condition’. This Critical Exchange explores the nonhuman condition. It asks: What are the implications of decentering the human subject via a new materialist reading of radical democracy? Does this reading dilute political (...) agency? Or should this be seen, on the contrary, as an invitation for new voices and demands to enter into democratic assemblages? How might engagement with the more-than-human disrupt or extend theories of radical democracy? Hans Asenbaum and Amanda Machin discuss the human democratic subject both through radical democratic and new materialist lenses. They suggest that a new materialist decentred subject does not lose agency but further gains political responsibility in radical democracy. Jean-Paul Gagnon highlights the possibility of becoming through loss. In losing our anthropocentric arrogance—our understanding of being other and better than animal—we become more connected and discover our place in human-nonhuman assemblages. Melissa Orlie agrees that something can be gained through renouncing dominant human fantasies and presents a ‘radical democratic naturalism’. By renouncing land violence and acknowledging nature’s subjectivity, we can further nonexploitative radical democratic politics. This is where the notion of ‘tidalectic’ processes introduced by James L. Smith is helpful. Focusing on water and the Indigenous knowledges around rivers, he considers how democracy and community can be reimagined as plural, cyclical and attentive to the nonhuman with which the human is inevitably entangled. Diana Leong offers a different approach. Considering the nonhuman from the perspective of Black Studies demands an awareness to how blackness has long been constituted as non- or partially human. (shrink)

If the reliability of a source of testimony is open to question, it seems epistemically illegitimate to verify the source’s reliability by appealing to that source’s own testimony. Is this because it is illegitimate to trust a questionable source’s testimony on any matter whatsoever? Or is there a distinctive problem with appealing to the source’s testimony on the matter of that source’s own reliability? After distinguishing between two kinds of epistemically illegitimate circularity—bootstrapping and self-verification—I argue for a qualified version of (...) the claim that there is nothing especially illegitimate about using a questionable source to evaluate its own reliability. Instead, it is illegitimate to appeal to a questionable source’s testimony on any matter whatsoever, with the matter of the source’s own reliability serving only as a special case. (shrink)

The doctrine of the resurrection says that God will resurrect the body that lived and died on earth—that the post-mortem body will be numerically identical to the pre-mortem body. After exegetically supporting this claim, and defending it from a recent objection, we ask: supposing that the doctrine of the resurrection is true, what are the implications for the mind-body relation? Why would God resurrect the body that lived and died on earth? We compare three accounts of the mind-body relation that (...) have been applied to the doctrine of the resurrection: substance dualism, constitutionalism, and animalism. We argue that animalism offers a superior explanation for the necessity of the resurrection: since human persons just are their bodies, life after death requires resurrection of one’s body. We conclude that those endorsing the doctrine of the resurrection should be animalists. (shrink)

Little is known with regard to the precise cognitive tools the self uses in acquiring and processing information about itself. In this article, we underline the possibility that inner speech might just represent one such cognitive process. Duval and Wicklund’s theory of self-awareness and the selfconsciousness, and self-knowledge body of work that was inspired by it are reviewed, and the suggestion is put forward that inner speech parallels the state of self-awareness, is more frequently used among highly self-conscious persons, and (...) represents an effective, if not indispensable, tool involved in the formation of the self-concept. The possibility is also raised that the extent to which one uses inner speech could partially explain individual differences in self-consciousness and self-knowledge. A selective review of the private and inner speech literature is presented, and some possible ways of testing the hypothesis by using pre-existing techniques are proposed in the hope of stimulating empirical investigations. Some implications are outlined in conclusion. (shrink)

The study focused on the Digital Technology (DT) Competency of Certified Public Accountants (CPAs) in Ilocos Sur. This study will be beneficial for the upskilling of CPAs in Ilocos Sur and serve as a guide to development of competency-based curriculum for accounting students and intervention programs by accounting professional organizations. Using a validated survey instrument, the researcher considered 107 CPAs that responded. Total enumeration was used. The survey investigated the CPAs’ level of digital technology along five competency domains. Descriptive method (...) of research was utilized Their level of DT Competency is interpreted as “Proficient”. The study hints that they are not so far behind in terms of digital competency, and they have an enormous potential in relation to IT utilization, management, administration, and risk management. Reassessment of the BS Accountancy curriculum, encouraging CPAs to take advance studies and future research in this line is recommended. CPAs in Ilocos Sur can optimistically adapt to the ever-changing demands of the workplace. (shrink)

SummaryIn this paper, two different theoretical problems of induction are delineated. The first problem is addressed; the second problem is deferred to the sequel to this paper. The first problem of induction is taken to be the seemingly unformalizable nature of traditional inductive arguments. It is shown that the problem does not arise out of some particularly dubious argument form , but rather from the presupposition that inductive “logic” is, like deductive logic, assertoric. Rather , inductive logic is dialectical in (...) nature.RésuméDans cet article, deux problèmes théoriques de l'induction sont formulés. Le premier est traité, le second le sera dans une suite à cet article. Le premier problème de l'induction est ici la nature apparemment non formalisable des arguments inductifs traditionnels. L'auteur montre que le problème ne provient pas d'une forme d'argumentation particulièrement douteuse , mais au contraire de la présupposition que la «logique» inductive est, comme la logique déductive, assertorique. Il soutient au contraire qu'elle est par nature dialectique.ZusammenfassungIn der vorliegenden Arbeit werden zwei theoretische Probleme der Induktion formuliert, wovon das zweite in einem anderen Artikel behandelt werden soll. Das erste Problem betrifft die scheinbar nicht formalisierbare Natur der üblichen induktiven Argumente. Der Verfasser zeigt dass das Problem nicht von einer besonders zweifelhaften Argumentationsform herrührt , sondern von der Voraussetzung, dass die induktive «Logik» — wie die deduktive Logik — assertorisch sei. Es wird dagegen gezeigt, dass die induktive Logik dialektischer Natur ist. (shrink)

Formal semantic analyses often take words to be minimal building blocks for the purposes of compositionality. But various recent theories of morphology and syntax have converged on the view that there is no demarcation line corresponding to the word level. The same conclusion has emerged from the compositional semantics of superlatives. In the spirit of extending compositionality below the word level, this paper explores how a small set of particles (Japanese KA and MO, Chinese DOU, and Hungarian VALA/VAGY, MIND, and (...) IS) form quantifier words and serve as connectives, additive and scalar particles, question markers, and existential verbs. The main question is whether the meanings of these particles across the varied environments are highly regular, or they are lexicalized with a variety of different meanings that bear a family resemblance. This paper does not reach definitive conclusions, but it raises analytical possibilities using Boolean semantics and the semantics of alternatives. It also draws attention to systematic similarities and some differences between MO and DOU that have not been studied in the literature. (shrink)

Aesthetic internalism claims a link between judgement and motivation: aesthetic judgements bring with them motivations to act in characteristic ways. Critics object that there is a difference between merely liking something and judging it to be aesthetically good, and that it is our likings, not our aesthetic judgements, that motivate us. This paper develops a version of aesthetic internalism that can respond to this criticism. Wholehearted aesthetic judgements are characterized by stability, attention, and motivation. Making such judgements is an important (...) part of a good life, and so at least some aesthetic judgements are motivating. So we have reason to think that this version of aesthetic internalism is true. This paper defends wholehearted aesthetic internalism against objections, and assesses an argument from aesthetic internalism to aesthetic non-cognitivism. While wholehearted aesthetic internalism can only offer qualified support to non-cognitivism, it nonetheless offers a number of fruitful avenues for further work. (shrink)

Various studies show moral intuitions to be susceptible to framing effects. Many have argued that this susceptibility is a sign of unreliability and that this poses a methodological challenge for moral philosophy. Recently, doubt has been cast on this idea. It has been argued that extant evidence of framing effects does not show that moral intuitions have an unreliability problem. I argue that, even if the extant evidence suggests that moral intuitions are fairly stable with respect to what intuitions we (...) have, the effect of framing on the strength of those intuitions still needs to be taken into account. I argue that this by itself poses a methodological challenge for moral philosophy. (shrink)

European Journal of Philosophy, Volume 30, Issue 2, Page 709-724, June 2022.

In How We Get Along, philosopher David Velleman compares our social interactions to the interactions among improvisational actors on stage. He argues that we play ourselves - not artificially but authentically, by doing what would make sense coming from us as we really are. And, like improvisational actors, we deal with one another in dual capacities: both as characters within the social drama and as players contributing to the shared performance. In this conception of social intercourse, Velleman finds rational grounds (...) for morality, though not a rational guarantee. He maps a middle course between skepticism and rationalism, arguing that practical reasoning is 'pro-moral' without requiring moral action. The result is what he calls a 'Kinda Kantian metaethics'. How We Get Along is the summation of Velleman's thinking to date, incorporating and unifying previous work on agency, the self, the emotions, narrative and Kantian moral theory. (shrink)

Are philosophers’ intuitions more reliable than philosophical novices’? Are we entitled to assume the superiority of philosophers’ intuitions just as we assume that experts in other domains have more reliable intuitions than novices? Ryberg raises some doubts and his arguments promise to undermine the expertise defence of intuition-use in philosophy once and for all. In this paper, I raise a number of objections to these arguments. I argue that philosophers receive sufficient feedback about the quality of their intuitions and that (...) philosophers’ experience in philosophy plausibly affects their intuitions. Consequently, the type of argument Ryberg offers fails to undermine the expertise defence of intuition-use in philosophy. (shrink)

Descartes’ first book, 1618’s Compendium of Music, focuses on biomechanical reactions in the human body but also claims that the purpose of art is to arouse emotions. By the end of the 1630s, however, he had given up on precisely predicting how that arousal may occur. This article contends, though, that Descartes’ abandonment of that project is a result of using an inappropriate psychological model for such predictions. An appropriate model is developed in his last book, 1649’s The Passions of (...) the Soul. Especially by attending to generosity and desire, the probability of predicting aesthetic judgments is at least increased. In increasing it, Descartes’ abandonment need not be total. (shrink)

For many years there has been a debate about the role of the parietal lobe in the generation of behavior. Does it generate movement plans (intention) or choose objects in the environment for further processing? To answer this, we focus on the lateral intraparietal area (LIP), an area that has been shown to play independent roles in target selection for saccades and the generation of visual attention. Based on results from a variety of tasks, we propose that LIP acts as (...) a priority map in which objects are represented by activity proportional to their behavioral priority. We present evidence to show that the priority map combines bottom-up inputs like a rapid visual response with an array of top-down signals like a saccade plan. The spatial location representing the peak of the map is used by the oculomotor system to target saccades and by the visual system to guide visual attention. (shrink)

People have sought ways to improve their physical and mental capabilities for thousands of years. For those of us who believe that human enhancement technologies include clothes, tools and weapons, the politics of enhancement started in prehistory. The norms of pre-industrial societies that only certain castes or genders could touch specific tools or wear certain clothes were preliminary politics of enhancement. Prosthetic limbs are thousands of years old, and by the 15th century, there were multiple experiments with vaccination around the (...) world. Although it would be appropriate to write a history of the various forms of empowerment that have taken place since the dawn of civilisation, this volume – that now we can present to the lectors – will be on the debates about human enhancement that began in the early 20th century, once modern medicine had begun to suggest actual technologies for human augmentation. Before examining the relationship between human enhancement and biopolitics (the subject of our work), it is helpful to say a few words about the series in which this volume appears, a series that bears the same title as this first text and which opens with contributions from the best scientific experts on the subject. (shrink)

ABSTRACT: Central to both James’s earlier psychology and his later philosophical views was a recurring distinction between percepts and concepts. The distinction evolved and remained fundamental to his thinking throughout his career as he sought to come to grips with its fundamental nature and significance. In this chapter, I focus initially on James’s early attempt to articulate the distinction in his 1885 article “The Function of Cognition.” This will highlight a key problem to which James continued to (...) return throughout his later philosophical work on the nature of our cognition, including in his famous “radical empiricist” metaphysics of “pure experience” around the turn of the century. We shall find that James grappled insightfully but ambivalently with the perceptual and conceptual dimensions of the “knowledge relation” or the “cognitive relation,” as he called it—or what, following Franz Brentano, philosophers would later call our object-directed thought or intentionality more generally. Some philosophers have once again returned to James’s work for crucial insights on this pivotal topic, while others continue to find certain aspects of his account to be problematic. What is beyond dispute is that James’s inquiries in this domain were both innovative and of lasting significance. (shrink)

Hegel defends the reality and the priority of immanent teleology. He does so by accepting Kant’s analysis of immanent teleology, but arguing against Kant’s subjectivist position. Key to Hegel’s argument is the idea that a general kind—in Hegel’s terms, a “concept” of a form of life—can be the substance or nature of the individual organism, or determine what it is to be that organism. In some ways Hegel here follows his own interpretation of Aristotle, while also trying to turn modern (...) arguments against immanent teleology to his own opposing purposes. And we can approach in these terms the way in which Hegel tries to build his broader metaphysics around teleology. (shrink)

An Aristotelian Philosophy of Mathematics breaks the impasse between Platonist and nominalist views of mathematics. Neither a study of abstract objects nor a mere language or logic, mathematics is a science of real aspects of the world as much as biology is. For the first time, a philosophy of mathematics puts applied mathematics at the centre. Quantitative aspects of the world such as ratios of heights, and structural ones such as symmetry and continuity, are parts of the physical world and (...) are objects of mathematics. Though some mathematical structures such as infinities may be too big to be realized in fact, all of them are capable of being realized. Informed by the author's background in both philosophy and mathematics, but keeping to simple examples, the book shows how infant perception of patterns is extended by visualization and proof to the vast edifice of modern pure and applied mathematical knowledge. (shrink)

Significant attention as been devoted to the problem of ‘divine hiddenness’ proposed by JL Shellenberg. I propose a novel response that involves denying part of the empirical premise in divine hiddenness arguments, which holds that nonresistant nonbelievers are capable of relationship with God. While Plantinga and others in ‘reformed’ epistemology have at times appealed to original sin as an explanation for divine hiddenness, such responses might seem outlandish to many, given the way that many find nonbelievers to be no more (...) or less epistemically or morally blameworthy than believers. Further, such appeals to original sin seem to give a ‘just-so’ story that at least leaves the situation dialectically balanced. I show that a classically Augustinian notion of original sin can provide a sufficient response to those objections, and that appeal to original sin can form an empirically grounded response to the divine hiddenness problem, beyond a simple defense. If the possibility of original sin-type scenarios is compatible with God’s perfect love, then the phenomenon of apparently nonresistant nonbelievers would push us toward considering the possibility that humans have lost those capacities for relationship with God by a Fall-like event in the past. (shrink)

This essay examines the different positions between non-dualism and existentialism when it comes to the self-negation of absolute void and its ontological validity.

I elaborate and defend a "necessitarian" interpretation of Kant's account of laws.

It is widely supposed that if there is to be a plausible connection between the truth of a de re attitude report about a subject and that subject’s possession of a singular thought, then ‘acquaintance’-style requirements on singular thought must be rejected. I show that this belief rests on poorly motivated claims about how we talk about the attitudes. I offer a framework for propositional attitude reports which provides both attractive solutions to recalcitrant puzzle cases and the key to preserving (...) acquaintance constraints. The upshot is that there is an independently motivated response to the principal argument against acquaintance. (shrink)

There is a general presumption against arming outlaw states. But can that presumption sometimes be overturned? The argument considered here maintains that outlaw states can have legitimate security interests and that transferring weapons to these states can be an appropriate way of promoting those interests. Weapons enable governments to engage in wrongful oppression and aggression, but they also enable them to fend off predators in a manner that can be beneficial to their citizens. It clearly does not follow from the (...) fact that a state is oppressive or aggressive that it will never be a victim of wrongful aggression itself, and while an outlaw state’s primary aim in repelling such aggression will often be the preservation of its own power, its defensive manoeuvres will sometimes also serve its citizens’ interests. In short, supplying weapons to outlaw states may sometimes contribute to the protection of innocents. (shrink)

Keith Lehrer has put forward an argument for skepticism which trades on the possibility that a group of creatures in another galaxy (Googols) may be rendering our beliefs about reality largely false (this is ‘Lehrer’s Skeptical Hypothesis’). Since there are no arguments against the Lehrer-Googol hypothesis, it cannot be rejected as unjustified. But since we can be completely justified in believing that p only when hypotheses which conflict with our belief are unjustified, we cannot be completely justified in believing that (...) p. Hence, we can never know that p. I argue that Lehrer’s argument fails in so far as believers on both sides of a question may be completely justified in their beliefs. Since this is so, one can be completely justified in believing p, and thereby know that p, even when an opposing view is itself completely justified. (shrink)

There are three main accounts of the proper function of the low mood system (LMS): the social risk theory, the disease theory, and the propitiousness theory. Adjudicating between these accounts has proven difficult, as there is little agreement in the literature about what a theory of the LMS’s proper function is supposed to explain. In this article, drawing upon influential work on the evolution of other affective systems, such as the disgust system and the fear system, I argue that a (...) theory of the proper function of the low mood system should: (i) account for the reliable, distal causes and effects of the system’s activation, and (ii) explain how having a system that performed such a function increased fitness in ancestral environments. On this basis, I show that the proper function of the low mood system is to limit resource expenditure in relatively unpropitious circumstances, exactly as hypothesised by the propitiousness theory. (shrink)

Various studies have reported that moral intuitions about the permissibility of acts are subject to framing effects. This paper reports the results of a series of experiments which further examine the susceptibility of moral intuitions to framing effects. The main aim was to test recent speculation that intuitions about the moral relevance of certain properties of cases might be relatively resistent to framing effects. If correct, this would provide a certain type of moral intuitionist with the resources to resist challenges (...) to the reliability of moral intuitions based on such framing effects. And, fortunately for such intuitionists, although the results can’t be used to mount a strident defence of intuitionism, the results do serve to shift the burden of proof onto those who would claim that intuitions about moral relevance are problematically sensitive to framing effects. (shrink)

Experimental philosophy brings empirical methods to philosophy. These methods are used to probe how people think about philosophically interesting things such as knowledge, morality, and freedom. This paper explores the contribution that qualitative methods have to make in this enterprise. I argue that qualitative methods have the potential to make a much greater contribution than they have so far. Along the way, I acknowledge a few types of resistance that proponents of qualitative methods in experimental philosophy might encounter, and provide (...) reasons to think they are ill-founded. (shrink)

Ethical naturalism is sometimes accused of problematic metaphysics or epistemology. Some argue that naturalists rely on concepts of ‘nature’ indefensible in the light of modern evolutionary biology. There is also an epistemological worry that has been raised recently that strong normative evaluation, such as meaning in human life, is empirically inaccessible or even in conflict with what we know in scientific contexts. While the critics have targeted Aristotelian and Neo-Aristotelian views, I will appeal to an argument from the Neo- Confucian (...) Zhu Xi as one potential way that we can respond to skeptics. If we can know that human beings are capable of moral goodness, and it is comprehensible for us to take moral goodness as a final or unifying goal of our lives, then we can respond to the skeptical objections which allege that we cannot sustain rich normative judgments about meaning in life in the face of scientific evidence. (shrink)

Political leaders engage in alarmism when they inflate threats to the commonweal in order to influence citizens' behavior. A range of democratic theorists argue that alarmism is necessary to maintain political order, with some even contending that alarmism is particularly necessary in democratic polities. Yet there appear to be strong grounds for thinking that alarmism is incompatible with the democratic ethos, namely insofar as it contravenes the principle of collective self-determination. Prima facie, alarmism seems to violate this principle because it (...) involves deception and emotional manipulation, both of which are incompatible with a commitment to autonomous, collective decision-making. However, almost none of the democratic theorists who posit alarmism as a political necessity acknowledge this tension, let alone explore how it might be overcome. In this paper, I rebut the claim that alarmism is essentially anti-democratic and argue that under the right institutional conditions it is broadly compatible with the principle of collective self-determination. I argue that if leaders obtain community consent for their use of alarmism, then the apparent tension with collective autonomy dissolves. In the final section of the paper, I briefly sketch how this consent might feasibly be obtained. (shrink)

The pandemic significantly raised the stakes for the translation of bioethics insights into policy. The novelty, range and sheer quantity of the ethical problems that needed to be addressed urgently within public policy were unprecedented and required high‐bandwidth two‐way transfer of insights between academic bioethics and policy. Countries such as the United Kingdom, which do not have a National Ethics Committee, faced particular challenges in how to facilitate this. This paper takes as a case study the brief career of the (...) Ethics Advisory Board (EAB) for the NHS Covid‐19 App, which shows both the difficulty and the political complexity of policy‐relevant bioethics in a pandemic and how this was exacerbated by the transience and informality of the structures through which ethics advice was delivered. It analyses how and why, after EAB's demise, the Westminster government increasingly sought to either take its ethics advice in private or to evade ethical scrutiny of its policies altogether. In reflecting on EAB, and these later ethics advice contexts, the article provides a novel framework for analysing ethics advice within democracies, defining four idealised stances: the pure ethicist, the advocate, the ethics arbiter and the critical friend. (shrink)

A problem for Aristotelian realist accounts of universals (neither Platonist nor nominalist) is the status of those universals that happen not to be realised in the physical (or any other) world. They perhaps include uninstantiated shades of blue and huge infinite cardinals. Should they be altogether excluded (as in D.M. Armstrong's theory of universals) or accorded some sort of reality? Surely truths about ratios are true even of ratios that are too big to be instantiated - what is the truthmaker (...) of such truths? It is argued that Aristotelianism can answer the question, but only a semi-Platonist form of it. (shrink)

According to Kantians, coercion and deception are the two fundamental kinds of wrongdoing. Although this may be true, I wish to argue against two other related assumptions about coercion and deception held by Kantians as well as non-Kantians. One is the assumption that coercion is morally worse than deception, all things being equal. The other is the assumption that whenever coercion is morally permissible, deception is morally permissibe, all things being equal. Both of these assumptions, I argue, are false. Deception (...) is morally worse than coercion, and deception is never morally permissible in virtue of the fact that coercion is morally permissible, whenever coercion is morally permissible. (shrink)

This project has been supported by the Australian Government through the Australian Research Council (project number CS170100008); the Department of Industry, Innovation and Science; and the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet. ACOLA collaborates with the Australian Academy of Health and Medical Sciences and the New Zealand Royal Society Te Apārangi to deliver the interdisciplinary Horizon Scanning reports to government. The aims of the project which produced this report are: 1. Examine the transformative role that artificial intelligence may play in (...) different sectors of the economy, including the opportunities, risks and challenges that advancement presents. 2. Examine the ethical, legal and social considerations and frameworks required to enable and support broad development and uptake of artificial intelligence. 3. Assess the future education, skills and infrastructure requirements to manage workforce transition and support thriving and internationally competitive artificial intelligence industries. (shrink)

The modifier effect is the reduction in perceived likelihood of a generic property sentence, when the head noun is modified. We investigated the prediction that the modifier effect would be stronger for mutable than for central properties, without finding evidence for this predicted interaction over the course of five experiments. However Experiment 6, which provided a brief context for the modified concepts to lend them greater credibility, did reveal the predicted interaction. It is argued that the modifier effect arises primarily (...) from a general lack of confidence in generic statements about the typical properties of unfamiliar concepts. Neither prototype nor classical models of concept combination receive support from the phenomenon. 2010 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. (shrink)

In the past decade, a number of empirical researchers have suggested that laypeople have compatibilist intuitions. In a recent paper, Feltz and Millan have challenged this conclusion by claiming that most laypeople are only compatibilists in appearance and are in fact willing to attribute free will to people no matter what. As evidence for this claim, they have shown that an important proportion of laypeople still attribute free will to agents in fatalistic universes. In this paper, we first argue that (...) Feltz and Millan’s error-theory rests on a conceptual confusion: it is perfectly acceptable for a certain brand of compatibilist to judge free will and fatalism to be compatible, as long as fatalism does not prevent agents from being the source of their actions. We then present the results of two studies showing that laypeople’s intuitions are best understood as following a certain brand of source compatibilism rather than a “free-will-no-matter-what” strategy. (shrink)

Much recent work on philosophical methodology has focused on whether we should accept evidence: the claim that philosophers use intuitive judgments about cases as evidence for/against philosophical theories. This paper outlines a new way of thinking about the philosophical method of appealing to cases such that evidence is true but not as it is typically understood. The idea proposed is that, when philosophers appeal to cases, they are engaged in a project of conceptual engineering and that, within that project, intuitions (...) about cases provide evidence as to the normative constraints which are relevant within that project. The paper demonstrates that this is a feasible interpretation of the way that cases are appealed to in recent journal issues, and makes the case that this would be a better way to think of what philosophers are doing when they appeal to cases. (shrink)

Experimental philosophers have investigated various ways in which non‐epistemic evaluations can affect knowledge attributions. For example, several teams of researchers (Beebe and Buckwalter 2010; Beebe and Jensen 2012; Schaffer and Knobe 2012; Beebe and Shea 2013; Buckwalter 2014b; Turri 2014) report that the goodness or badness of an agent’s action can affect whether the agent is taken to have certain kinds of knowledge. These findings raise important questions about how patterns of folk knowledge attributions should influence philosophical theorizing about knowledge.

Aristotle divided arguments that persuade into the rhetorical (which happen to persuade), the dialectical (which are strong so ought to persuade to some degree) and the demonstrative (which must persuade if rightly understood). Dialectical arguments were long neglected, partly because Aristotle did not write a book about them. But in the sixteenth and seventeenth century late scholastic authors such as Medina, Cano and Soto developed a sound theory of probable arguments, those that have logical and not merely psychological force but (...) fall short of demonstration. Informed by late medieval treatments of the law of evidence and problems in moral theology and aleatory contracts, they considered the reasons that could render legal, moral, theological, commercial and historical arguments strong though not demonstrative. At the same time, demonstrative arguments became better understood as Galileo and other figures of the Scientific Revolution used mathematical proof in arguments in physics. Galileo moved both dialectical and demonstrative arguments into mathematical territory. (shrink)

Th e present article reports a series of experiments designed to extend the empirical investigation of folk metaethical intuitions by examining how different kinds of ethical disagreement can impact attributions of objectivity to ethical claims.

I bet you don’t practice your philosophical intuitions. What’s your excuse? If you think philosophical training improves the reliability of philosophical intuitions, then practicing intuitions should improve them even further. I argue that philosophers’ reluctance to practice their intuitions highlights a tension in the way that they think about the role of intuitions in philosophy.

This work has two major goals. The first is to reframe the problem of political authority from its Conservative framing to a Reformist framing. This change creates a new benchmark for the success of a theory. Rather than justifying a pre-existing intuition, a theory can be successful if it could establish political authority whenever the state itself or an individual’s relationship to it changes. This change also shifts the focus from the state’s right to rule to moral housekeeping. In other (...) words, the main goal is not to see when the state can use coercion against its citizens but rather to determine what political obligations citizens could have under different scenarios so that citizens can more accurately keep track of their moral reasons for action. The second major goal is to call into question epistemic theories of democratic authority through a critical examination of David Estlund’s theory of normative consent. Normative consent cannot establish political authority. Even granting that it could, normative consent would bind individuals to epistemic procedures rather than democratic procedures given that epistemic procedures better solve the moral problems that generate normative consent. However, this then raises worries from the public reason perspective that epistemic procedures would impose a procedure on some citizens which they could reject from a qualified position. To overcome this worry, it is shown that epistemic procedures based on reducing the power of the ignorant rather than raising the power of the experts are not open to such qualified rejection, and democratic procedures in the real world will do no better than a coin flip at selecting correct policies. In the end, one branch of epistemic conceptions of democratic authority are proven untenable. (shrink)

The default theory of aesthetic value combines hedonism about aesthetic value with strict perceptual formalism about aesthetic value, holding the aesthetic value of an object to be the value it has in virtue of the pleasure it gives strictly in virtue of its perceptual properties. A standard theory of aesthetic value is any theory of aesthetic value that takes the default theory as its theoretical point of departure. This paper argues that standard theories fail because they theorize from the default (...) theory. (shrink)

Expressivism is the view that normative claims express nondescriptive, practical attitudes. It is widely assumed that this involves denying that normative claims express beliefs, except in a minimal or deflationary sense. However, this assumption is increasingly being called into question. Instead, it is argued, expressivists can and should provide a robust, nondescriptive theory of belief in general which can explain the difference between ordinary descriptive beliefs and nondescriptive normative beliefs. This paper examines one such an attempt due to Mark Schroeder (...) who provides a theory of belief as being for. I argue that the theory fails to deliver on its primary aim: to distinguish between descriptive and nondescriptive beliefs. Accordingly, I conclude that the theory should be rejected as it stands. (shrink)

James Hopkins; IX*—Wittgenstein and Physicalism, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 75, Issue 1, 1 June 1975, Pages 121–146, https://doi.org/10.109.

The articles examines how failure, especially in so-called 'stochastic' arts or sciences like medicine and navigation stimulated reflections about the nature of the knowledge required of a genuine art (techne) or science.