Ill persons suffer from a variety of epistemically-inflected harms and wrongs. Many of these are interpretable as specific forms of what we dub pathocentric epistemic injustices, these being ones that target and track ill persons. We sketch the general forms of pathocentric testimonial and hermeneutical injustice, each of which are pervasive within the experiences of ill persons during their encounters in healthcare contexts and the social world. What’s epistemically unjust might not be only agents, communities and institutions, but the theoretical (...) conceptions of health that structure our responses to illness. Thus, we suggest that although such pathocentric epistemic injustices have a variety of interpersonal and structural causes, they are also sustained by a deeper naturalistic conception of the nature of illness. (shrink)

In this paper, we argue that certain theoretical conceptions of health, particularly those described as ‘biomedical’ or ‘naturalistic’, are viciously epistemically unjust. Drawing on some recent work in vice epistemology, we identity three ways that abstract objects (such as theoretical conceptions, doctrines, or stances) can be legitimately described as epistemically vicious. If this is right, then robust reform of individuals, social systems, and institutions would not be enough to secure epistemic justice: we must reform the deeper conceptions of health that (...) underlie them. (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)

I introduce the concept pathophobia, to capture the range of morally objectionable forms of treatment to which somatically ill persons are subjected. After distinguishing this concept from sanism and ableism, I argue that the moral wrongs of pathophobia are best analysed using a framework of vice ethics. To that end I describe five clusters of pathophobic vices and failings, illustrating each with examples from three influential illness narratives.

I argue that a main theme Feyerabend's philosophical work was a critique of scientism. This devolves into two sub-critiques - a critique of conceptions of science's self-understanding and a critique of scientific cultures. The former is more compelling and more aligned with mainstream themes in Anglophone analytical philosophy of science, the latter is less developed but more resonant with themes in feminist, postcolonial and 'continental' forms of philosophy of science.

A rhetoric of refuge and escape is a consistent feature of the world’s great garden traditions. The connections between a desire for escape, need for refuge and disquieting sense that life is no longer what it ought to be gestures to a complex conception of garden appreciation. I explore these connections using Christian, Islamic, and Chinese garden traditions. In them one finds a conception of certain gardens as places of moral refuge from the corruption and failings of the mainstream world.

In this chapter we suggest that many experiences of suffering can be further illuminated as forms of transformative experience, using the term coined by L.A. Paul. Such suffering experiences arise from the vulnerability, dependence, and affliction intrinsic to the human condition. Such features can create a variety of positively, negatively, and ambivalently valanced forms of epistemically and personally transformative experiences, as we detail here. We argue that the productive element of suffering experiences can be articulated as transformative, although suffering experiences (...) are not the type mostly discussed in the transformative experience literature. We correct for this here by developing a taxonomy of negatively valenced transformative experiences. We suggest three features that make such experiences ones of suffering, following Michael Brady’s definition: intensity, novelty, and attentional focus. Finally, we suggest that one possible explanation for the edifying capacity of suffering comes from it requiring more transformation than positive experiences. (shrink)

I argue that misanthropy is systematic condemnation of the moral character of humankind as it has come to be. Such condemnation can be expressed affectively and practically in a range of different ways, and the bulk of the paper sketches the four main misanthropic stances evident across the history of philosophy. Two of these, the Enemy and Fugitive stances, were named by Kant, and I call the others the Activist and Quietist. Without exhausting the range of ways of being a (...) philosophical misanthrope, these four suffice to justify my main claim that misanthropy should not be seen specifically in terms of hatred and violence. We should attend to the varieties of philosophical misanthropy, especially since doing so reveals a deeper phenomenon I call the misanthropic predicament. (shrink)

One way to think about the philosophical significance of hatred is to consider doctrines that are characterised by feelings of hatred. A good candidate is misanthropy, which is often conceived as an attitude of hatred directed at humankind at large. I start by sketching a working account of misanthropy as a critical verdict or judgment on the contemporary condition of humankind as it has become. The criticism is directed at the array of vices and failings that are ubiquitous and entrenched (...) within the wider structures of human life, rather than those of individual persons. In one of its forms, misanthropy manifests itself in feelings of hatred for those entrenched failings and the patterns of awful behaviour which they motivate and sustain - for instance, the figure that Kant called the "enemy of mankind", or the radical eco-misanthropes who populated much American radical environmentalism of the 1980s, with their calls to 'tear down' the 'whole human world'. I then argue that such hateful 'enemies of mankind' represent only one among a set of modes of misanthropy. These have more peaceable affective and practical profiles that offer us forms of misanthropy without hatred. If so, we can think philosophically about hate in relation to misanthropy and about the potential scope of hatred. Thinking about the entrenched vices and failings constitutive of our life as it has become offers a way of intelligibly hating something as large as 'humanity'. But there are other responses to those vices and failings than hatred. I end by speculating that although hateful misanthropy tends to dominate discussions of misanthropy, historically it is the least common. That, itself, might tell us something about the sustainability of hatred. (shrink)

Linda Martín Alcoff and others have emphasised that the discipline of philosophy suffers from a ‘demographic problem’. The persistence of this problem is partly the consequence of various forms of resistance to efforts to address the demographic problem. Such resistance is complex and takes many forms and could be responded to in different ways. In this paper, I argue that our attempts to explain and understand the phenomenon of resistance should use a kind of explanatory pluralism that, following Quassim Cassam, (...) I call multidimensionalism. I describe four general kinds of resistance and consider varying explanations, focusing on those focused on vices and social structures. I argue that vice-explanations and structural- explanations are both mutually consistent and mutually entailing. If so, there is no need to choose between vice explanations and structural explanations or any other kinds of explanation. We can and should be multidimensionalists: using many together is better. (shrink)

Scholars are divided on the relationship between cynicism and political life. In this chapter, I describe and endorse what I call 'institutional cynicism' and suggest it can feature within kinds of virtuous civic stances in democratic societies. I accept that some forms of cynicism can be as destructive and as anti-democratic as critics insist. Institutional cynicism, of the sort I describe, can actually make us better citizens. It turns our attention towards sub-optimal aspects of the political institutions of democratic societies, (...) teaching us things about those institutions we need to know, without necessarily leading us into fatalism or despair. (shrink)

An essay review of Rutger Bregman's "Humankind: A Hopeful History" (2020).

This paper proposes that spiritual persons are an excellent focus for the study of 'living religion' and offers a methodology for doing so. By ‘spiritual persons’, I have in mind both exemplary figures – like Jesus or the Buddha – and the multitude of ‘ordinary’ spiritual persons whose lives are led in aspiration to the spiritual goods the exemplars manifest (enlightenment, say, or holiness). I start with Linda Zagzebski's recent argument that moral persuasion primarily occurs through encounters with exemplars of (...) moral qualities, of a sort that invite admiration and emulation. A plurality of modes of spiritual exemplarity is distinguished, each reflecting a distinct form of spiritual aspiration, which will show in the lives of the members of different traditions. I develop this claim by focusing on the ways that spiritual aspirants can encounter exemplars through their depictions in spiritual narrative. It emerges that narrative encounters can activate certain forms of admiration and enable certain forms of emulation if they depict the suffering of exemplars. (shrink)

The main part of the paper describes the deep connections between the concepts of vices, corruption, and misanthropy. I argue that the full significance of the concept of human vices or failings is only fully appreciated when it is connected to an account of the ways that our social practices and institutions are corrupting, in the sense of facilitating or encouraging the development and exercise of those failings. Moreover, reflection on failings and corruption can lead us to misanthropy, defined in (...) a revisionary sense as a negative, critical verdict on the collective moral character and performance of humankind as it has come to be. At the end of the paper, I tentatively ask if there can be forms of Christian misanthropy. (shrink)

This chapter describes some of the varieties of philosophical humanism and different conceptions of, and attitudes towards, the natural sciences. I focus on three kinds of humanism evident in 20th century European philosophy – humanism as essentialism, humanism as rational subjectivity, and existential humanism. Some are strongly allied to the sciences, others are antipathetic to them, while others offer subtler positions. By emphasising this diversity, I want to oppose claims about the inevitability of an 'alliance' of science to humanism, and (...) that claim that to be a humanist is something we must approve or applaud. At best, those 'alliances' and that praiseworthiness will only be true of certain varieties of humanism. (shrink)

A short piece on philosophy and misanthropy.

Although Cottingham and Holland make a persuasive case for the claim that it is difficult to situate a meaningful life within a Darwinian naturalistic cosmology, this paper argues that their case should be modified in response to the apparent fact that certain persons seem genuinely not to experience the ‘bleakness’ that they describe. Although certain of these cases will reflect an incomplete appreciation of the existential implications of Darwinian naturalism, at least some of those cases may be genuine. The resulting (...) possibility that certain persons can embrace Darwinian naturalism and live meaningful lives in apparent immunity to the ‘bleakness charge’ therefore poses new puzzles for Cottingham and Holland, and for wider questions about the meaningfulness of human life. I consider that possibility in light of the work of David E. Cooper and Paul Feyerabend and offer a set of three suggestions for further developing these debates. (shrink)

I sketch out a specific form of vice epistemology that I call critical character epistemology.

Creating and caring for a garden is a long-term project whose success requires commitment and devotion and love and proper performance of a range of activities that involve virtues and sensibilities like attentiveness, carefulness, humility, imaginativeness, and sensitivity to the natures and needs of plants and animals. In this chapter, I elaborate this conception of gardens and explore its relationship to artistic activities, like composing poetry or performing music. My focus are Confucianism and Daosim and their accounts of the relationships (...) between cultured practices, ethics and the arts, and garden-practices. (shrink)

Mary Midgley argued that philosophy was a necessity, not a luxury. It's difficulties lie partly in the fact that, when doing it, we are struggling not only against the difficulty of the subject matter, but also certain tendencies within ourselves. I focus on two - one-way reductionism and myopic specialisation.

I discuss the famous 'happiness for a fish' exchange between Zhuāngzǐ and Huizi.

A review of Nicolas Bommarito's book, "Inner Virtue", which argues persuasively that our "inner states" - emotions, pleasures, attentional habits - can be virtuous if they manifest what he calls our "moral concerns".

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)

A review of David E. Cooper's book, "Animals and Misanthropy", which argues that reflection on awful treatment of animals justifies a negative critical judgment on human life and culture.

Direct epistemic consequentialism is the idea that X is epistemically permissible iff X maximizes epistemic value. It has received lots of attention in recent years and is widely accepted by philosophers to have counterintuitive implications. There are various reasons one might suspect that the relevant intuitions will not be widely shared among non-philosophers. This paper presents an initial empirical study of ordinary intuitions. The results of two experiments demonstrate that the counterintuitiveness of epistemic consequentialism is more than a philosophers' worry---the (...) folk seem to agree! (shrink)

It has generally been assumed that rapid visual search is based on simple features and that spatial relations between features are irrelevant for this task. Seven experiments involving search for line drawings contradict this assumption; a major determinant of search is the presence of line junctions. Arrow- and Y-junctions were detected rapidly in isolation and when they were embedded in drawings of rectangular polyhedra. Search for T-junctions was considerably slower. Drawings containing T-junctions often gave rise to very slow search even (...) when distinguishing arrow- or Y-junctions were present. This sensitivity to line relations suggests that preattentive processes can extract 3-dimensional orientation from line drawings. A computational model is outlined for how this may be accomplished in early human vision. (shrink)

Ancient Chinese and Greek thinkers alike were preoccupied with the moral value of music; they distinguished between good and bad music by looking at the music’s effect on moral character. The idea can be understood in terms of two closely related questions. Does music have the power to affect the ethical character of either listener or performer? If it does, is it better as music for doing so? I argue that an affirmative answers to both questions are more plausible than (...) it might seem at first. (shrink)

The formal sciences - mathematical as opposed to natural sciences, such as operations research, statistics, theoretical computer science, systems engineering - appear to have achieved mathematically provable knowledge directly about the real world. It is argued that this appearance is correct.

What responsibilities do audiences have in engaging with artworks? Certain audience responses seem quite clear: for example, audiences should not vandalize or destroy artworks; they should not disrupt performances. This paper examines other kinds of resisting responses that audiences sometimes engage in, including petitioning the artist to change their works, altering copies of artworks, and creating new artworks in another artist’s fictional world. I argue for five claims: (1) while these actions can sometimes infringe on the rights of artists, the (...) rights of artists are not absolute; (2) the fact that such actions are based on mistaken interpretations of the artworks has no normative weight; (3) there can be reason to object to additions and alterations whose conception of the artwork is morally worse than the original (and so, there can be reason to support additions and alterations whose conception is morally better); (4) petitioning raises special moral problems; and, most important, (5) some of these actions are valuable because they involve creative and aesthetic activity. Those acts of audience resistance that are creative, morally improve on the original work, and that minimize the infringement of the artists’ rights are good, and should be encouraged. (shrink)

In this paper, I defend an epistemic requirement on fitting hopes and worries: it is fitting to hope or to worry that p only if one’s epistemic position makes it rational to suspend judgment as to whether p. This view, unlike prominent alternatives, is ecumenical; it retains its plausibility against a variety of different background views of epistemology. It also has other important theoretical virtues: it is illuminating, elegant, and extensionally adequate. Fallibilists about knowledge have special reason to be friendly (...) to my view; it can help them explain why it can be unfitting to hold on to hope and worry in the face of overwhelming evidence, and it can also help them explain the sense in which knowledge that p and hope that –p are in tension with one another. (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)

What is it to be clear? And will that question have the same answer in science, poetry, and philosophy? This paper offers a taxonomy of clarity, before focusing on two notions that are pertinent to the notions of clarity in science, poetry, and, in particular, philosophy. It argues that “scientific clarity,” which is marked by its reliance on technical terms, is, though often appropriate, not the only way in which something can be clear. In particular, poetry entirely eschews technical terms—but (...) can nonetheless be crystal clear. Poetry achieves this clarity by sensitivity to the richness of language: rhythm, ambiguity, and so on. The paper argues that some philosophy uses language in this same way to achieve its philosophical ends. Accordingly, we should allow that this is a legitimate philosophical method and should not judge the clarity of such philosophy by the standards of scientific clarity. (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)

Arrival offers a useful thought experiment in the philosophy of mind and language. Assessing human linguists' interpretive efforts to understand the alien heptapod form of life in both the movie and the novella from which it was adapted (Ted Chiang’s “Story of Your Life”) teach us how our understanding of selfhood shapes our conception of agency. Arrival’s reflexive commentary on the cinematic experience is also an argument for the value of learning to communicate in cinematic language.

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)

Some films scare us; some make us cry; some thrill us. Some of the most interesting films, however, leave us suspended between feelings – both joyous and sad, or angry and serene. This paper attempts to explain how this can happen and why it is important. I look closely at one film that creates and exploits these conflicted responses. I argue that cases of conflict in film illuminate a pair of vexing questions about emotion in film: (1) To what extent (...) are emotional responses rational, or in need of rationalization?; and (2) What relationship is there between emotional response and value (moral, filmic, or otherwise)? Conflict, I argue, can be revealing, and can help us better understand emotional responses to narrative film1 in general. The paper is divided into four sections. First, I sketch a theory of emotional engagement that makes sense of the notion of a “conflicted emotional response” to a film. Second, I turn to a particular case of a film that produces this sort of conflict, Fritz Lang’s M (1931), and show that the conflict engendered by that film is both more significant and less unusual than it may appear. In the final two sections, I argue that there is no need to rationalize or make consistent such mixed emotional responses, and that there is real moral, aesthetic, and cognitive value to be had from such conflict. (shrink)

Abstract The rapid growth of Indonesian Heavy Metal music, especially the Death Metal subgenre, since around the turn of the millennium, has been quite remarkable. Indonesia is now numerically the largest scene in the world. Man, the vocalist of Jasad, told the author that the provincial West Javanese city of Bandung had 128 active Death Metal bands as at February 2011. This chapter will discuss the cancellation of an April 2012 music festival held in the Bandung hinterland by police halfway (...) through the festival, and explain how and why it took place. Police became nervous and worried about Heavy Metal shows following the deaths of eleven concertgoers, due to a crowd crush, at a Beside album launch in Bandung in 2008. The chapter analyses the “maternal rage” of a band member’s mother (also a policewoman at the scene) from the perspective of grounded gendered cosmopolitanism. Lastly, a short case study of Sickles, a young band from the religiously-conservative Madura Island, shows the problems that young bands experience plus the type of global underground support which they can attract. (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)

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

Many philosophers accept with certainty that we are morally responsible but take it to be an open question whether determinism holds. They treat determinism as epistemically compatible with responsibility. Should one who accepts this form of epistemic compatibilism also hold that determinism is metaphysically compatible with responsibility—that it is metaphysically possible for determinism and responsibility to coexist? John Martin Fischer gives two arguments that appear to favor an affirmative answer to this question. He argues that accounts of responsibility, such as (...) his, that are neutral with respect to whether responsible actions are determined have a "resiliency" that counts in their favor. Furthermore, he criticizes libertarians who argue on a priori grounds that determinism cannot coexist with responsibility and who admit that they would retract their argument if determinism were shown to hold; this "metaphysical flip-flopping" is said to render their positions implausible. I assess the merits of these arguments. (shrink)

© British Society of Aesthetics 2018. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the British Society of Aesthetics. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: [email protected] adaptation of literary works into films has been almost completely neglected as a philosophical topic. I discuss two questions about this phenomenon:What do we mean when we say that a film is faithful to its source?Is being faithful to its source a merit in a film adaptation?In response to, I set out two distinct (...) senses of fidelity: story fidelity and thematic fidelity. I then argue, in response to, that thematic fidelity, but not story fidelity, is an aesthetic merit in a film adaptation. The key steps in this argument involve showing that merely preserving the story from one medium to another does not typically involve an aesthetically... (shrink)

The questions asked by Saier and Trevors are being asked over and over again in a burgeoning body of literature. It is a sign that the social sciences are striking out on a road that may eventually lead them to join the other sciences in a truly comprehensive understanding of human behavior.

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)

There is a meaning crisis correlated with the exponential rate of technology; As it disrupts our lives and forces society and its individuals to adapt increasingly quickly, we lose meaning. The challenge to deal with this immediately becomes philosophical, as we have never before needed to define and understand what “meaning” is on such a conscious level.

This paper investigates the ethics of regarding others as epistemically hopeless. To regard a person as epistemically hopeless with respect to p is, roughly, to regard her as unable to see the truth of p through rational means. Regarding a person as epistemically hopeless is a stance that has surprising and nuanced moral implications. It can be a sign of respect, and it can also be a way of giving up on someone. Whether it is morally problematic to take up (...) this stance, I argue, depends on the choices that one faces (or is likely to face). I close the paper by arguing against the view that there are standing moral reasons against regarding others as epistemically hopeless. (shrink)

The objective Bayesian view of proof (or logical probability, or evidential support) is explained and defended: that the relation of evidence to hypothesis (in legal trials, science etc) is a strictly logical one, comparable to deductive logic. This view is distinguished from the thesis, which had some popularity in law in the 1980s, that legal evidence ought to be evaluated using numerical probabilities and formulas. While numbers are not always useful, a central role is played in uncertain reasoning by the (...) ‘proportional syllogism’, or argument from frequencies, such as ‘nearly all aeroplane flights arrive safely, so my flight is very likely to arrive safely’. Such arguments raise the ‘problem of the reference class’, arising from the fact that an individual case may be a member of many different classes in which frequencies differ. For example, if 15 per cent of swans are black and 60 per cent of fauna in the zoo is black, what should I think about the likelihood of a swan in the zoo being black? The nature of the problem is explained, and legal cases where it arises are given. It is explained how recent work in data mining on the relevance of features for prediction provides a solution to the reference class problem. (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)