Hubert Dreyfus argues that explicit thought disrupts smooth coping at both the level of everyday tasks and of highly-refined skills. However, Barbara Montero criticises Dreyfus for extending what she calls the ‘principle of automaticity’ from our everyday actions to those of trained experts. In this paper, I defend Dreyfus’ account while refining his phenomenology. I examine the phenomenology of what I call ‘esoteric’ expertise to argue that the explicit thought Montero invokes belongs rather to ‘gaps’ between or above moments of (...) reflexive coping. However, I agree that the ‘principle of automaticity’ does not adequately capture the experience of performing such skills. Drawing on examples of expert performance in sport and improvised music and dance, I argue that esoteric action, at its best, is marked by a distinct state of non-conceptual awareness- an experience of spontaneity, flow and ‘owned-ness’- that distinguishes it from the automaticity of everyday actions. (shrink)

In this paper, I explore the question of agency in spontaneous action via a phenomenology of musical improvisation, drawing on fieldwork conducted with large con- temporary improvising ensembles. I argue that musical improvisation is a form of ‘participatory sense-making’ in which musical decisions unfold via a feedback pro- cess with the evolving musical situation itself. I describe how musicians’ technical expertise is developed alongside a responsive expertise, and how these capacities complicate the sense in which habitual action can be viewed (...) as pre-conscious or ‘automatic.’ Nevertheless, I shall argue that the self-awareness required for expert improvisation does not amount to highly reflective deliberation, arguing instead that the practice of musical improvisation involves an exercise of practical rationality, akin to what Aristotle called phronēsis. Musical decisions – as an expressive form of sense-making – are guided by feelings of ‘rightness’ that are experienced directly and intuitively, responding to the norms and reasons that are embedded in the instruments, sounds, and practices of a particular (sub)culture. (shrink)

Respect for victims requires that we have social systems for punishing and condemning (reproving) serious crimes. But, the conditions of social marginalization and political subordination of the communities from which an overwhelming number of prisoners in the United States come place serious barriers in the face of effective reprobation. Mass incarceration makes this problem worse by disrupting and disrespecting entire communities. While humanities education in the prisons is far from a total solution, it is one way to make reprobation meaningful, (...) so long as the prison classroom is a place where the educators’ values are also put at risk. (shrink)

Klein’s account of epistemic justification, infinitism, supplies a novel solution to the regress problem. We argue that concentrating on the normative aspect of justification exposes a number of unpalatable consequences for infinitism, all of which warrant rejecting the position. As an intermediary step, we develop a stronger version of the ‘finite minds’ objection.

Recent work by Peijnenburg, Atkinson, and Herzberg suggests that infinitists who accept a probabilistic construal of justification can overcome significant challenges to their position by attending to mathematical treatments of infinite probabilistic regresses. In this essay, it is argued that care must be taken when assessing the significance of these formal results. Though valuable lessons can be drawn from these mathematical exercises (many of which are not disputed here), the essay argues that it is entirely unclear that the form of (...) infinitism that results meets a basic requirement: namely, providing an account of infinite chains of propositions qua reasons made available to agents. (shrink)

Public discourse is often caustic and conflict-filled. This trend seems to be particularly evident when the content of such discourse is around moral issues (broadly defined) and when the discourse occurs on social media. Several explanatory mechanisms for such conflict have been explored in recent psychological and social-science literatures. The present work sought to examine a potentially novel explanatory mechanism defined in philosophical literature: Moral Grandstanding. According to philosophical accounts, Moral Grandstanding is the use of moral talk to seek social (...) status. For the present work, we conducted six studies, using two undergraduate samples (Study 1, N = 361; Study 2, N = 356); a sample matched to U.S. norms for age, gender, race, income, Census region (Study 3, N = 1,063); a YouGov sample matched to U.S. demographic norms (Study 4, N = 2,000); and a brief, one-month longitudinal study of Mechanical Turk workers in the U.S. (Study 5, Baseline N = 499, follow-up n = 296), and a large, one-week YouGov sample matched to U.S. demographic norms (Baseline N = 2,519, follow-up n = 1,776). Across studies, we found initial support for the validity of Moral Grandstanding as a construct. Specifically, moral grandstanding motivation was associated with status-seeking personality traits, as well as greater political and moral conflict in daily life. (shrink)

The present work posits that social motives, particularly status seeking in the form of moral grandstanding, are likely at least partially to blame for elevated levels of affective polarization and ideological extremism in the U.S. In Study 1, results from both undergraduates (N = 981; Mean age = 19.4; SD = 2.1; 69.7% women) and a cross-section of U.S. adults matched to 2010 census norms (N = 1,063; Mean age = 48.20, SD = 16.38; 49.8% women) indicated that prestige-motived grandstanding (...) was consistently and robustly related to more extreme ideological views on a variety of issues. In Study 2, results from a weighted, nationally-representative cross-section of U.S. adults (N = 2,519; Mean age = 47.5, SD = 17.8; 51.4% women) found that prestige motivated grandstanding was reliably related to both ideological extremism and affective polarization. (shrink)

The present study aimed to understand how status-oriented individual differences such as narcissistic antagonism, narcissistic extraversion, and moral grandstanding motivations may have longitudinally predicted both behavioral and social media responses during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic. Via YouGov, a nationally representative sample of U.S. adults was recruited in August of 2019 (N = 2,519; Mage = 47.5, SD = 17.8; 51.4% women) and resampled in May of 2020, (N = 1,533). Results indicated that baseline levels of narcissistic antagonism (...) were associated with lower levels of social distancing and lower compliance with public health recommended behaviors. Similarly, dominance oriented moral grandstanding motivations predicted greater conflict with others over COVID-19, greater engagement in status-oriented social media behaviors about COVID-19, and lower levels of social distancing. (shrink)

Background: In prevalence studies of sexually transmitted infections (STIs), investigators often provide syndromic management for symptomatic participants, but may not provide specific treatment for asymptomatic individuals with positive laboratory test results due to the delays between sample collection and availability of results as well as logistical constraints in recontacting study participants. Methods: To characterize the extent of this issue, 80 prevalence studies from the World Health Organization’s Report on global sexually transmitted infection surveillance, 2018, were reviewed. Studies were classified as (...) to whether clinically relevant positive results were returned or if this was not specified. Results: More than half (56%) of the cited studies did not specify if participants were notified of clinically relevant positive STI test results. The percentages were similar for low- and middle-income country populations (57%) and high-income country populations (53%). Conclusions: The absence of documentation of the provision of test results raises the possibility that in some instances, results may not have been communicated, with potential negative effects for participants, their sexual partners, and newborns. From an ethical perspective, clinically relevant results should be returned to study participants and treating clinicians in a timely fashion to ensure appropriate management of identified infections. Study authors should document if they returned test results to study participants and report on numbers lost to follow-up. (shrink)

Background: Recent literature on addiction and judgments about the characteristics of agents has focused on the implications of adopting a ‘brain disease’ versus ‘moral weakness’ model of addiction. Typically, such judgments have to do with what capacities an agent has (e.g., the ability to abstain from substance use). Much less work, however, has been conducted on the relationship between addiction and judgments about an agent’s identity, including whether or to what extent an individual is seen as the same person after (...) becoming addicted. Methods: We conducted a series of vignette-based experiments (total N = 3,620) to assess lay attitudes concerning addiction and identity persistence, systematically manipulating key characteristics of agents and their drug of addiction. Conclusions: In Study 1, we found that US participants judged an agent who became addicted to drugs as being closer to ‘a completely different person’ than ‘completely the same person’ as the agent who existed prior to the addiction. In Studies 2-6, we investigated the intuitive basis for this result, finding that lay judgments of altered identity as a consequence of drug use and addiction are driven primarily by perceived negative changes in the moral character of drug users, who are seen as having deviated from their good true selves. (shrink)

Two studies demonstrate that a dispositional proneness to disgust (“disgust sensitivity”) is associated with intuitive disapproval of gay people. Study 1 was based on previous research showing that people are more likely to describe a behavior as intentional when they see it as morally wrong (see Knobe, 2006, for a review). As predicted, the more disgust sensitive participants were, the more likely they were to describe an agent whose behavior had the side effect of causing gay men to kiss in (...) public as having intentionally encouraged gay men to kiss publicly— even though most participants did not explicitly think it wrong to encourage gay men to kiss in public. No such effect occurred when subjects were asked about heterosexual kissing. Study 2 used the Implicit Association Test (IAT; Nosek, Banaji, & Greenwald, 2006) as a dependent measure. The more disgust sensitive participants were, the more they showed.. (shrink)

Recent research has begun treating the perennial philosophical question, “what makes a person the same over time?” as an empirical question. A long tradition in philosophy holds that psychological continuity and connectedness of memories are at the heart of personal identity. More recent experimental work, following Strohminger & Nichols (2014), has suggested that persistence of moral character, more than memories, is perceived as essential for personal identity. While there is a growing body of evidence supporting these findings, a critique by (...) Starmans & Bloom (2018) suggests that this research program conflates personal identity with mere similarity. To address this criticism, we explore how loss of someone’s morality or memories influence perceptions of identity change, and perceptions of moral duties towards the target of the change. We present participants with a classic ‘body switch’ thought experiment and after assessing perceptions of identity persistence, we present a moral dilemma, asking participants to imagine that one of the patients must die (Study 1) or be left alone in a care home for the rest of their life (Study 2). Our results highlight the importance of the continuity of moral character, suggesting lay intuitions are tracking (something like) personal identity, not just mere similarity. (shrink)

“A Nation of Madame Bovarys” rebuts the notion that literature is improves its readers morally, whether (1) by imparting instruction, (2) by eliciting empathy for non-parochial groups, or (3) by forcibly fine-tuning our capacity to navigate difficult ethical waters. Taking Geoffrey Chaucer’s Nun’s Priest’s Tale as its test case, it argues that the positions taken by Nussbaum, Booth, Rorty, et al.—also including the “imaginative resistance” position—are vastly overblown; that empathy is unreliable as a guide to moral behavior; that readers tend (...) only to “learn” what they already believed going in; and that it is dangerous to expect otherwise, there being a risk, if the contemporary consensus were to hold, of the populace degenerating into a nation of Madame Bovarys. Accordingly, a view of literary engagement as primarily an opportunity for clarification may be not only more accurate but also, in the end, more salutary. (shrink)

In the intersection between eugenics past and present, disability has never been far beneath the surface. Perceived and ascribed disabilities of body and mind were one of the core sets of eugenics traits that provided the basis for institutionalized and sterilization on eugenic grounds for the first 75 years of the 20th-century. Since that time, the eugenic preoccupation with the character of future generations has seeped into what have become everyday practices in the realm of reproductive choice. As Marsha Saxton (...) (2000) and Adrienne Asch (2000, 2003) have forcefully argued, the use of prenatal screening technologies to facilitate the selective abortion of fetuses with features that signify disabling traits—the paradigm here being trisomy 21 in a fetus indicating Down Syndrome in the child—express a negative view of such disabilities sufficient to warrant terminating an otherwise wanted pregnancy. The eliminative structure of what Rosemary Garland Thompson (2012) has called eugenic logic persists in contemporary practices governing reproductive choice, social inclusion, and democratic participation and their relationship to disability. The tie between eugenics and contemporary disability studies suggests that eugenics and reflection on its history can also play a more positive role in disability politics. After focusing on eugenics in the first half of the paper, we will shift in the second half of the paper to eugenic resonances in contemporary thought and practice, concluding with some thoughts about ongoing practices of silencing and the very idea of eradicating disability. (shrink)

Advocates of the use of intuitions in philosophy argue that they are treated as evidence because they are evidential. Their opponents agree that they are treated as evidence, but argue that they should not be so used, since they are the wrong kinds of things. In contrast to both, we argue that, despite appearances, intuitions are not treated as evidence in philosophy whether or not they should be. Our positive account is that intuitions are a subclass of inclinations to believe. (...) Our thesis explains why intuitions play a role in persuasion and inquiry, without conceding that they are evidential. The account also makes predictions about the structure of intuitions that are confirmed by independent arguments. (shrink)

I present an intractable puzzle for the currently popular view that belief is weak—the view that expressions like ‘S believes p’ ascribe to S a doxastic attitude towards p that is rationally compatible with low credence that p. The puzzle concerns issues that arise on considering beliefs in conditionals. I show that proponents of weak belief either cannot consistently apply their preferred methodology when accommodating beliefs in conditionals, or they must deny that beliefs in conditionals can be used in reasoning.

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)

There are several important arguments in metaethics that rely on explanatory considerations. Gilbert Harman has presented a challenge to the existence of moral facts that depends on the claim that the best explanation of our moral beliefs does not involve moral facts. The Reliability Challenge against moral realism depends on the claim that moral realism is incompatible with there being a satisfying explanation of our reliability about moral truths. The purpose of this chapter is to examine these and related arguments. (...) In particular, this chapter will discuss four kinds of arguments – Harman’s Challenge, evolutionary debunking arguments, irrelevant influence arguments, and the Reliability Challenge – understood as arguments against moral realism. The main goals of this chapter are (i) to articulate the strongest version of these arguments; (ii) to present and assess the central epistemological principles underlying these arguments; and (iii) to determine what a realist would have to do to adequately respond to these arguments. (shrink)

Recent empirical research seems to show that emotions play a substantial role in moral judgment. Perhaps the most important line of support for this claim focuses on disgust. A number of philosophers and scientists argue that there is adequate evidence showing that disgust significantly influences various moral judgments. And this has been used to support or undermine a range of philosophical theories, such as sentimentalism and deontology. I argue that the existing evidence does not support such arguments. At best it (...) suggests something rather different: that moral judgment can have a minor emotive function, in addition to a substantially descriptive one. (shrink)

There are many domains about which we think we are reliable. When there is prima facie reason to believe that there is no satisfying explanation of our reliability about a domain given our background views about the world, this generates a challenge to our reliability about the domain or to our background views. This is what is often called the reliability challenge for the domain. In previous work, I discussed the reliability challenges for logic and for deductive inference. I argued (...) for four main claims: First, there are reliability challenges for logic and for deduction. Second, these reliability challenges cannot be answered merely by providing an explanation of how it is that we have the logical beliefs and employ the deductive rules that we do. Third, we can explain our reliability about logic by appealing to our reliability about deduction. Fourth, there is a good prospect for providing an evolutionary explanation of the reliability of our deductive reasoning. In recent years, a number of arguments have appeared in the literature that can be applied against one or more of these four theses. In this paper, I respond to some of these arguments. In particular, I discuss arguments by Paul Horwich, Jack Woods, Dan Baras, Justin Clarke-Doane, and Hartry Field. (shrink)

My topic is the intelligent guidance of action. In this paper I offer an empirically grounded case for four ideas: that [a] cognitive processes of practical reasoning play a key role in the intelligent guidance of action, [b] these processes could not do so without significant enabling work done by both perception and the motor system, [c] the work done by perceptual and motor systems can be characterized as the generation of information specialized for action guidance, which in turn suggests (...) that [d] the cognitive processes of practical reasoning that play a key role in the guidance of intelligent action are not the abstract, syllogistic ones philosophers often treat as the paradigm of practical reasoning. Rather, these cognitive processes are constrained by, and work well with, the specialized concepts outputted by perception and the feedback outputted by sensorimotor processes. (shrink)

Traditionally, philosophers have been skeptical that the imagination can justify beliefs about the actual world. After all, how could merely imagining something give you any reason to believe that it is true? However, within the past decade or so, a lively debate has emerged over whether the imagination can justify empirical belief and, if so, how. This paper provides a critical overview of the recent literature on the epistemology of imagination and points to avenues for future research.

Mill defines utilitarianism as the combination of a “theory of life” and a moral claim: only pleasure and freedom from pain are desirable as ends, and the promotion of happiness is the sole goal of moral action. So defined, utilitarianism is open to ad hominem pessimistic objection: a “theory of life” which entails the impossibility of happiness fits poorly with a morality centered on its promotion. The first two challenges Mill confronts in Utilitarianism share this pessimistic structure. Interestingly, however, these (...) challenges paint inverted pictures of the best utilitarian life: one suggests this life is satisfying but ignoble, the other that it is noble but unsatisfying. I explain Mill's treatment of both challenges as genuinely pessimistic interpretations of utilitarianism's “theory of life.” Read through the lens of Mill's engagement with pessimism, these challenges point to distinctive conceptions of dignity and satisfaction that play a significant role in Mill's ethics. (shrink)

Schopenhauer repeatedly claims that all pleasure is negative, and this view seems to play key roles throughout his work. Nonetheless, many scholars have argued that Schopenhauer actually acknowledges certain positive pleasures. Two major arguments have been offered for this reading, one focused on the link between Schopenhauer's view of pleasure and Plato's, and one focused on Schopenhauer's distinction between two components of aesthetic pleasure. I argue that neither way of motivating the positive pleasure reading succeeds. Both overlook a key aspect (...) of Schopenhauer's account: namely, his suggestion that there are two distinct kinds of negative pleasure, pleasures of satisfaction and pleasures of distraction. When Schopenhauer claims that all pleasure is negative, he means it. (shrink)

Research on dual character concepts has explored cases in which people think that a term applies to an object in a superficial sense but does not apply to that same object in a deeper sense. Most of this research has focused on cases of one particular type, namely, cases in which the object fails to embody the characteristic values of a particular category. However, there are also other types of cases in which we would be inclined to say that a (...) term does not apply in a deeper sense. For example, we might also say this if an object has acquired a certain status but it failed to acquire this status through a morally or legally legitimate process. Or we might say it if a person has certain emotions but these emotions are not rooted in the person’s true self. I argue that these apparently unrelated types of cases are surprisingly similar in a number of important respects. Thus, we should not be seeking a separate account for each separate type of case; we should be seeking an account that explains in a more general way what people mean when they say that a term does not apply in a deeper sense. (shrink)

A debate about whether all children are entitled to an “equal” or an “adequate” education has been waged at the forefront of school finance policy for decades. In an era of budget deficits and harsh cuts in public education, I submit that it is time to move on. Equality of educational opportunity has been thought to require equal spending per pupil or spending adjusted to the needs of differently situated children. Adequacy has been understood as a level of spending sufficient (...) to satisfy some absolute, rather than relative, educational threshold. In practice, however, many courts interpreting their state’s constitutional obligations have fused the equality and adequacy theories. Certain federal laws express principles of both doctrines. And gradually, more advocates and scholars have come to endorse hybrid equality-adequacy approaches. Still, the debate persists over seemingly intractable conceptual precepts and their political and legal ramifications. Tracking the philosophical origins and evolution of equality and adequacy as legal doctrines, I explain the significance of their points of convergence and argue that the few points of divergence are untenable in practice. Equality of educational opportunity should not be interpret-ed as pursuing equal chances for educational achievement for all children, because that ideal is infeasible. Nor should educational adequacy be interpreted as completely indifferent to objectionable inequalities that can be feasibly curtailed. Properly conceived, equality and adequacy are not merely congruent but reciprocal. That is, children are owed an education that is adequately equal and equally adequate. (shrink)

In this chapter, we outline the interdisciplinary contributions that philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience have provided in the understanding of the self and identity, focusing on one specific line of burgeoning research: the importance of morality to perceptions of self and identity. Of course, this rather limited focus will exclude much of what psychologists and neuroscientists take to be important to the study of self and identity (that plethora of self-hyphenated terms seen in psychology and neuroscience: self-regulation, self-esteem, self-knowledge, self-concept, self-perception, (...) and more). We will likewise not engage with many canonical philosophical treatments of self and identity. But we will lay out a body of research that brings together classic themes in philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience to raise empirically tractable philosophical questions, and philosophically rigorous empirical questions about self and identity. More specifically, in section 4.2, we will review some recent research that has treated traditional philosophical questions about self and identity as empirical questions. Within this body of work, we will be primarily concerned with the finding that morality (more so than memory) is perceived to be at the core of self and identity. Then, in section 4.3, we raise and respond to a variety of questions and criticisms: first, about the operationalization of identity concepts in the empirical literature; second, about the generalizability of the moral self effect; third, about the direction of change; fourth, about connections with recent work in neuroscience; and fifth, about the target of evaluation. Finally, in section 4.4, we consider a variety of implications and applications of this work on the moral self. Throughout, we aim to highlight connections between classical themes in philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience, while also suggesting new directions for interdisciplinary collaboration. (shrink)

A review of existing work in experimental philosophy on intuitions about free will. The paper argues that people ordinarily understand free human action, not as something that is caused by psychological states (beliefs, desires, etc.) but as something that completely transcends the normal causal order.

In the present article, the first section recapitulates my “figuration” philosophy of dance, the “dancing-with” interpretive method derived therefrom, and my previous application of figuration to salsa dance as a decolonizing gestural discourse. The second section deepens and modifies this analysis through a reinterpretation of Argentinian philosopher Ernesto Laclau’s concept of hegemony and his dance-resonant interpretations of Derrida. And the final section offers a template for this hegemonic dancing-with in the Birmingham, Alabama Latin dance troupe, Corazon de Alabama (Heart of (...) Alabama), as a new strategy for decolonizing and reconstructing social justice. (shrink)

Trust is commonly defined as a metaphysically-hybrid notion involving an attitude and an action. The action component of trust is defined as a special form of reliance in which the trustor has: (1) heightened expectations of their trustee; and (2) a disposition to justifiably feel betrayed if their trust is broken. The first aim of this paper is to reject the view that trust is a form of reliance. -/- The second aim of this paper is to develop and defend (...) a non-reliance-based variation of Katherine Hawley’s commitment trust account. Roughly, on my variant account, if X trusts Y to ϕ, then X has a belief with the following counterfactual as its content: ‘if I were to rely on Y to keep a commitment to ϕ, then I believe that Y would keep that commitment to ϕ.’ I defend this account against the objection that non-reliance accounts cannot explain the intuition that trust involves heightened expectations, and that it elicits justified betrayal when broken. I also respond to the argument that such accounts can’t provide adequate explanations of therapeutic trust, which is taken to be a counterexample of belief trust insofar as it describes instances where trustors trust trustees despite not believing that they are trustworthy. (shrink)

A material simple is a material object that has no proper parts. Some philosophers have argued for the possibility of extended simples. Some have even argued for the possibility of heterogeneous simples or simples that have intrinsic variations across their surfaces. There is a puzzle, though, that is meant to show that extended, heterogeneous simples are impossible. Although several plausible responses have been given to this puzzle, I wish to reopen the case against extended, heterogeneous simples. In this paper, I (...) briefly canvass responses to this puzzle which may be made in defense of extended, heterogeneous simples. I then present a new version of this puzzle which targets simples that occupy atomic yet extended regions of space. It seems that none of the traditional responses can be used to successfully save this particular kind of extended simple from the new puzzle. I also consider some non-traditional defenses of heterogeneous extended simples and argue that they too are unsuccessful. Finally, I will argue that a substantial case can be made against the possibility of extended heterogeneous simples of any kind. (shrink)

As COVID-19 spread, clinicians warned of mental illness epidemics within the coronavirus pandemic. Funding for digital mental health is surging and researchers are calling for widespread adoption to address the mental health sequalae of COVID-19. -/- We consider whether these technologies improve mental health outcomes and whether they exacerbate existing health inequalities laid bare by the pandemic. We argue the evidence for efficacy is weak and the likelihood of increasing inequalities is high. -/- First, we review recent trends in digital (...) mental health. Next, we turn to the clinical literature to show that many technologies proposed as a response to COVID-19 are unlikely to improve outcomes. Then, we argue that even evidence-based technologies run the risk of increasing health disparities. We conclude by suggesting that policymakers should not allocate limited resources to the development of many digital mental health tools and should focus instead on evidence-based solutions to address mental health inequalities. (shrink)

Richard Watson maintains that deep ecology suffers from an internal contradiction and should therefore be rejected. Watson contends that deep ecology claims to be non-anthropocentric while at the same time is committed to setting humans apart from nature, which is inherently anthropocentric. I argue that Watson’s objection arises out of a fundamental misunderstanding of how deep ecologist’s conceive of the ‘Self.’ Drawing on resources from Buddhism, I offer an understanding of the ‘Self’ that is fully consistent with deep ecology, and (...) does not lead to the anthropocentric contradiction that Watson identifies. The paper will proceed as follows: First, I articulate Watson’s objection, and briefly discuss the traditional deep ecology position. Next, I turn to a discussion of the ‘Self’ and show that there are conceptions of human nature that are not separate from ‘Nature.’ It will thus be shown that deep ecology is not inconsistent and need not be rejected. (shrink)

Since its publication, the Psychopathic Personality Inventory and its revision (Lilien- feld & Andrews, 1996; Lilienfeld & Widows, 2005) have become increasingly popular such that it is now among the most frequently used self-report inventories for the assessment of psychopathy. The current meta-analysis examined the relations between the two PPI factors (factor 1: Fearless Dominance; factor 2: Self-Centered Impulsivity), as well as their relations with other validated measures of psychopathy, internalizing and externalizing forms of psychopathology, general personality traits, and antisocial (...) personality disorder symptoms. Across 61 samples reported in 49 publications, we found support for the convergent and criterion validity of both PPI factor 2 and the PPI total score. Much weaker validation was found for PPI factor 1, which manifested limited convergent validity and a pattern of correlations with central criterion variables that was inconsistent with many conceptualizations of psychopathy. (shrink)

Many contemporary accounts of moral status consider an individual's status to be grounded in some cognitive capacity, e.g. the capacity to experience certain states, to reason morally, etc. One proposed cognitive capacity significant particularly to killing, i.e. having a status that precludes being killed absent cause, is the capacity to value one's own life. I argue that considering this a condition for moral status is a mistake, as it would lead to the exclusion of some individuals with mental health problems (...) who are generally considered clear cases. -/- While a cognitive capacities approach may turn out to be generally feasible, that particular cognitive capacity is not. In the course of this discussion I address two conceptual issues, the first regarding what it means to 'value ones life' and the second regarding what conditions must obtain for something to count as a capacity. These conceptual issues, when resolved pursuant to this account of moral status, lead the account to exclude individuals with major depressive disorder, i.e. deny that it is morally wrong to kill such individuals based on their moral status. I then argue that this is a decisive reason to reject this particular cognitive capacity as implicated in moral status. (shrink)

This paper develops a new framework for combining propositional logics, called "juxtaposition". Several general metalogical theorems are proved concerning the combination of logics by juxtaposition. In particular, it is shown that under reasonable conditions, juxtaposition preserves strong soundness. Under reasonable conditions, the juxtaposition of two consequence relations is a conservative extension of each of them. A general strong completeness result is proved. The paper then examines the philosophically important case of the combination of classical and intuitionist logics. Particular attention is (...) paid to the phenomenon of collapse. It is shown that there are logics with two stocks of classical or intuitionist connectives that do not collapse. Finally, the paper briefy investigates the question of which rules, when added to these logics, lead to collapse. (shrink)

The burgeoning science of ethics has produced a trend toward pessimism. Ordinary moral thought and action, we’re told, are profoundly influenced by arbitrary factors and ultimately driven by unreasoned feelings. This book counters the current orthodoxy on its own terms by carefully engaging with the empirical literature. The resulting view, optimistic rationalism, shows the pervasive role played by reason, and ultimately defuses sweeping debunking arguments in ethics. The science does suggest that moral knowledge and virtue don’t come easily. However, despite (...) the heavy influence of automatic and unconscious processes that have been shaped by evolutionary pressures, we needn’t reject ordinary moral psychology as fundamentally flawed or in need of serious repair. Reason can be corrupted in ethics just as in other domains, but a special pessimism about morality in particular is unwarranted. Moral judgment and motivation are fundamentally rational enterprises not beholden to the passions. (shrink)

While epistemologists routinely employ disbelief talk, it is not clear that they really mean it, given that they often equate disbelieving p with believing ¬p. I argue that this is a mistake—disbelief is a doxastic attitude of rejection and is distinct from belief. I first clarify this claim and its opposition, then show that we must distinguish disbelieving p from believing ¬p in order to account for the fact that we continue to hold doxastic attitudes toward propositions that we reject. (...) After defending this argument against some possible objections, I examine several cases that reveal disbelieving p to be not only non-identical to believing ¬p, but independent of that attitude as well. Finally, I sketch some immediate and potential consequences of recognizing disbelief as a distinct doxastic attitude, particularly for work on epistemic rationality. (shrink)

In defending his interest-relative account of knowledge in Knowledge and Practical Interests (2005), Jason Stanley relies heavily on intuitions about several bank cases. We experimentally test the empirical claims that Stanley seems to make concerning our common-sense intuitions about these bank cases. Additionally, we test the empirical claims that Jonathan Schaffer seems to make in his critique of Stanley. We argue that our data impugn what both Stanley and Schaffer claim our intuitions about such cases are. To account for these (...) results, one must develop a better conception of the connection between a subject's interests and her body of knowledge than those offered by Stanley and Schaffer. (shrink)

Recent work in cognitive science suggests that conscious thought plays a much less central role in the production of human behavior than most think. Partially on the basis of this work, Peter Carruthers has advanced the claim that humans never consciously decide to act. This claim is of independent interest for action theory, and its potential truth poses a problem for theories of free will and autonomy, which often take our capacity to consciously decide to be of central importance. In (...) this article, I examine the nature of conscious deciding and I argue that Carruthers fails to establish the claim that humans never consciously decide to act. (shrink)

This paper develops a theory of analog representation. We first argue that the mark of the analog is to be found in the nature of a representational system’s interpretation function, rather than in its vehicles or contents alone. We then develop the rulebound structure theory of analog representation, according to which analog systems are those that use interpretive rules to map syntactic structural features onto semantic structural features. The theory involves three degree-theoretic measures that capture three independent ways in which (...) a system can be more or less analog. We explain how our theory improves upon prior accounts of analog representation, provides plausible diagnoses for novel challenge cases, extends to hybrid systems that are partially analog and partially symbolic, and accounts for some of the advantages and disadvantages of representing analogically versus symbolically. (shrink)

Building on my previous exploration of the role of dance in the contemporary French political philosopher Jacques Rancière’s Aisthesis: Scenes from the Aesthetic Regime of Art, first published in French in 2011, the present essay turns to another book originally published in the same year, The Intervals of Cinema. Having previously established that the core of Rancière’s philosophical method is an analysis of philosophical homonyms into figurative dancing conceptual partners, I begin by applying that method to the first chapter of (...) Intervals, “Cinematic Vertigo: Hitchcock to Vertov and Back.” There I identify two series of such dancing partners, as follows: Hitchcock’s image-controlling, capitalist vertiginous fall, and Vertov’s movement-equalizing, communist balanced dance. I then critique the implicit marginalizing of women and female bodies in the films and chapter, including Hitchcock’s protagonist’s best friend and ex-fiancé, and Vertov’s cosmetologists and switchboard operators. Finally, I offer a corrective from the proto-feminist life of my grandmother, a onetime cosmetologist, switchboard operator, and Glamour Shots amateur model, my grandmother, Louise Nunnelley, or “Mamaw.” Such are the unacknowledged material basis of Rancière’s radical democratic philosophy, the specifically-embodied and positioned female dancers who continue to get lost in his figurative dance. (shrink)

This article shows that there is a liar-like paradox that arises for rational credence that relies only on very weak logical and credal principles. The paradox depends on a weak rational reflection principle, logical principles governing conjunction, and principles governing the relationship between rational credence and proof. To respond to this paradox, we must either reject even very weak rational reflection principles or reject some highly plausible logical or credal principle.

Many of us are unmoved when it is objected that some morally or intellectually suspect source agrees with our belief. While we may tend to find this kind of guilt by epistemic association unproblematic, I argue that this tendency is a mistake. We sometimes face what I call the problem of unwelcome epistemic company. This is the problem of encountering agreement about the content of your belief from a source whose faults give you reason to worry about the belief's truth, (...) normative status, etiology, or implications. On the basis of an array of cases, I elaborate four distinct kinds of problems that unwelcome epistemic company poses. Two of these are distinctly epistemic, and two are moral. I canvass possible responses, ranging from stubbornness to an epistemic prudishness that avoids unwelcome company at all costs. Finally, I offer preliminary lessons of the problem and distinguish it from the problem of peer disagreement. (shrink)

This article derives from a project attempting to show that Western formal logic, from Aristotle onward, has both been partially constituted by, and partially constitutive of, what has become known as racism. In the present article, I will first discuss, in light of Frege’s honorary role as founder of the philosophy of mathematics, Reuben Hersh’s What is Mathematics, Really? Second, I will explore how the infamous section of Frege’s 1924 diary (specifically the entries from March 10 to April 9) supports (...) Hersh's claim regarding the link between political conservatism and the (historically and currently) dominant school of the philosophy of mathematics (to which Frege undeniably belongs). Third, I will examine Frege’s attempt at a more reader-friendly introduction to his philosophy of mathematics, The Foundations of Arithmetic. And finally, I will briefly analyze Frege’s Begriffsschrift to see how questions of race arise even at the heights of his logical abstraction. (shrink)

Imagination plays a rich epistemic role in our cognitive lives. For example, if I want to learn whether my luggage will fit into the overhead compartment on a plane, I might imagine trying to fit it into the overhead compartment and form a justified belief on the basis of this imagining. But what explains the fact that imagination has the power to justify beliefs, and what is the structure of imaginative justification? In this paper, I answer these questions by arguing (...) that imaginings manifest an epistemic status: they are epistemically evaluable as justified or unjustified. This epistemic status grounds their ability to justify beliefs, and they accrue this status in virtue of being based on evidence. Thus, imaginings are best understood as justified justifiers. I argue for this view by way of showing how it offers a satisfying explanation of certain key features of imaginative justification that would otherwise be puzzling. I also argue that imaginings exhibit a number of markers of the basing relation, which further motivates the view that imaginings can be based on evidence. The arguments in this paper have theoretically fruitful implications not only for the epistemology of imagination, but for accounts of reasoning and epistemic normativity more generally. (shrink)

I argue for the existence of imaginative beliefs: mental states that are imaginative in format and doxastic in attitude. I advance two arguments for this thesis. First, there are imaginings that play the functional roles of belief. Second, there are imaginings that play the epistemic roles of belief. These arguments supply both descriptive and normative grounds for positing imaginative beliefs. I also argue that this view fares better than alternatives that posit distinct imaginative and doxastic states to account for the (...) same phenomena. Along the way, I demonstrate the theoretical significance of imaginative beliefs by showing how they pose a challenge for standard taxonomies of the mind, clarify the sense in which imagination is occurrent and voluntary, explain the justificatory role of the imagination, and point to a deep but underappreciated symmetry between imagistic and non-imagistic thought. (shrink)

This essay argues that literature is neither an intrinsic good (like oxygen) nor a constructed good (like a teddy-bear) but instead a conditional good, like a blueprint. It has immense potential value, but that potential can be actualized only if readers do a certain kind of work; and readers are likely to do that work only if, as a culture, we retain an understanding of what novels and poems both need from us and can give us. This means we need (...) to be wary of theories that are excessively deflationary (all literature is mere entertainment), cynical (all literature is a vehicle for state ideology), or over-optimistic (all literature makes us more altruistic) and instead embrace a pluralism of effect. Some fictions, like The Wire, invite us to reflect on our own beliefs; some, like Plato’s dialogues, help us fine-tune our mental capacities; some, like Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon, offer us a choice of genres; some help us feel our feelings; some offer formal models for the shape of a life. Literature can continue to matter in all of these ways—but only as long as we allow it to. (shrink)

This article is a discussion of the political thought of Huey P. Newton, and by extension, the theory and practice of the Black Panther Party. More specifically, this article will explore a tension that exists between Newton's theory of Intercommunalism and the Black Panther Party Platform. To that end, there is, first, a discussion of the ideological development of the Black Panther Party, which culminated in Newton's theory of Intercommunalism. Second, there is a presentation of what will be broadly construed (...) as the Party Platform, which articulates the basic principles and practices of the Black Panther Party. Finally, there is a discussion of several ways in which there seems to be a conflict between Newton's ideology and his political practice. While some are only apparent contradictions, there does remain a deep conflict between the dialectical basis of Intercommunalism and the foundational basis of the Party Platform. (shrink)

It has often been suggested that people’s ordinary capacities for understanding the world make use of much the same methods one might find in a formal scientific investigation. A series of recent experimental results offer a challenge to this widely-held view, suggesting that people’s moral judgments can actually influence the intuitions they hold both in folk psychology and in causal cognition. The present target article distinguishes two basic approaches to explaining such effects. One approach would be to say that the (...) relevant competencies are entirely non-moral but that some additional factor (conversational pragmatics, performance error, etc.) then interferes and allows people’s moral judgments to affect their intuitions. Another approach would be to say that moral considerations truly do figure in workings of the competencies themselves. It is argued that the data available now favor the second of these approaches over the first. (shrink)