Absolutism—the idea that some kinds of acts are absolutely wrong and must never be done—plays an important role in medical ethics. Nicholas Denyer has defended it from some influential consequentialist critics who have alleged that absolutism is committed to “agent-relative constraints” and therefore intolerably complex and messy. Denyer ingeniously argues that, if there are problems with agent-relative constraints, then they are problems for consequentialism, since it contains agent-relative constraints, too. I show that, despite its ingenuity, Denyer’s argument does not succeed. (...) The defense of absolutism must move to other grounds. (shrink)

The work described in this report is motivated by the desire to test the expressive possibilities of action language C+. The Causal Calculator (CCalc) is a system that answers queries about action domains described in a fragment of that language. The Zoo World and the Traffic World have been proposed by Erik Sandewall in his Logic Modelling Workshop—an environment for communicating axiomatizations of action domains of nontrivial size. -/- The Zoo World consists of several cages and the exterior, gates between (...) them, and animals of several species, including humans. Actions in this domain include moving within and between cages, opening and closing gates, and mounting and riding animals. The Traffic World includes vehicles moving continuously between road crossings subject to a number of restrictions, such as speed limits and keeping a fixed safety distance away from other vehicles on the road. We show how to represent the two domains in the input language of CCalc, and how to use CCalc to test these representations. (shrink)

My argument proceeds in two stages. In §I, I sum up the intuitions of a popular argument for 'satisfaction accounts' of Purgatory that I label, TAP. I then offer an argument, taken from a few standard orthodox Christian beliefs and one axiom of Christian theology, to so show that TAP is unsound. In the same section, I entertain some plausible responses to my argument that are prima facie consistent with these beliefs and axiom. I find these responses wanting. In §II, (...) I offer a sorites problem for TAP, given the orthodox Christian understanding of Christ’s parousia, showing that TAP and the intuitions driving it are faulty. To attempt something of a corrective, I end by offering some modest theological suggestions for thinking through “the logic of total transformation.”. (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)

We discuss recent progress in the development of cognitive ontologies and summarize three challenges in the coordinated development and application of these resources. Challenge 1 is to adopt a standardized definition for cognitive processes. We describe three possibilities and recommend one that is consistent with the standard view in cognitive and biomedical sciences. Challenge 2 is harmonization. Gaps and conflicts in representation must be resolved so that these resources can be combined for mark-up and interpretation of multi-modal data. Finally, (...) Challenge 3 is to test the utility of these resources for large-scale annotation of data, search and query, and knowledge discovery and integration. As term definitions are tested and revised, harmonization should enable coordinated updates across ontologies. However, the true test of these definitions will be in their community-wide adoption which will test whether they support valid inferences about psychological and neuroscientific data. (shrink)

The Ontology for Biomedical Investigations (OBI) is an ontology that provides terms with precisely defined meanings to describe all aspects of how investigations in the biological and medical domains are conducted. OBI re-uses ontologies that provide a representation of biomedical knowledge from the Open Biological and Biomedical Ontologies (OBO) project and adds the ability to describe how this knowledge was derived. We here describe the state of OBI and several applications that are using it, such as adding semantic expressivity to (...) existing databases, building data entry forms, and enabling interoperability between knowledge resources. OBI covers all phases of the investigation process, such as planning, execution and reporting. It represents information and material entities that participate in these processes, as well as roles and functions. Prior to OBI, it was not possible to use a single internally consistent resource that could be applied to multiple types of experiments for these applications. OBI has made this possible by creating terms for entities involved in biological and medical investigations and by importing parts of other biomedical ontologies such as GO, Chemical Entities of Biological Interest (ChEBI) and Phenotype Attribute and Trait Ontology (PATO) without altering their meaning. OBI is being used in a wide range of projects covering genomics, multi-omics, immunology, and catalogs of services. OBI has also spawned other ontologies (Information Artifact Ontology) and methods for importing parts of ontologies (Minimum information to reference an external ontology term (MIREOT)). The OBI project is an open cross-disciplinary collaborative effort, encompassing multiple research communities from around the globe. To date, OBI has created 2366 classes and 40 relations along with textual and formal definitions. The OBI Consortium maintains a web resource providing details on the people, policies, and issues being addressed in association with OBI. (shrink)

We discuss recent progress in the development of cognitive ontologies and summarize three challenges in the coordinated development and application of these resources. Challenge 1 is to adopt a standardized definition for cognitive processes. We describe three possibilities and recommend one that is consistent with the standard view in cognitive and biomedical sciences. Challenge 2 is harmonization. Gaps and conflicts in representation must be resolved so that these resources can be combined for mark-up and interpretation of multi-modal data. Finally, (...) Challenge 3 is to test the utility of these resources for large-scale annotation of data, search and query, and knowledge discovery and integration. As term definitions are tested and revised, harmonization should enable coordinated updates across ontologies. However, the true test of these definitions will be in their community-wide adoption which will test whether they support valid inferences about psychological and neuroscientific data. (shrink)

The Adverse Outcome Pathway (AOP) concept is a knowledge assembly and communication tool to facilitate the transparent translation of mechanistic information into outcomes meaningful to the regulatory assessment of chemicals. The AOP framework and associated knowledgebases (KBs) have received significant attention and use in the regulatory toxicology community. However, it is increasingly apparent that the potential stakeholder community for the AOP concept and AOP KBs is broader than scientists and regulators directly involved in chemical safety assessment. In this paper we (...) identify and describe those stakeholders who currently—or in the future—could benefit from the application of the AOP framework and knowledge to specific problems. We also summarize the challenges faced in implementing pathway-based approaches such as the AOP framework in biological sciences, and provide a series of recommendations to meet critical needs to ensure further progression of the framework as a useful, sustainable and dependable tool supporting assessments of both human health and the environment. Although the AOP concept has the potential to significantly impact the organization and interpretation of biological information in a variety of disciplines/applications, this promise can only be fully realized through the active engagement of, and input from multiple stakeholders, requiring multi-pronged substantive long-term planning and strategies. (shrink)

We discuss recent progress in the development of cognitive ontologies and summarize three challenges in the coordinated development and application of these resources. Challenge 1 is to adopt a standardized definition for cognitive processes. We describe three possibilities and recommend one that is consistent with the standard view in cognitive and biomedical sciences. Challenge 2 is harmonization. Gaps and conflicts in representation must be resolved so that these resources can be combined for mark-up and interpretation of multi-modal data. Finally, (...) Challenge 3 is to test the utility of these resources for large-scale annotation of data, search and query, and knowledge discovery and integration. As term definitions are tested and revised, harmonization should enable coordinated updates across ontologies. However, the true test of these definitions will be in their community-wide adoption which will test whether they support valid inferences about psychological and neuroscientific data. (shrink)

Standard linguistic analysis of syntax uses the T-model. This model requires the ordering: D-structure > S-structure > LF, where D-structure is the sentences deep structure, S-structure is its surface structure, and LF is its logical form. Between each of these representations there is movement which alters the order of the constituent words; movement is achieved using the principles and parameters of syntactic theory. Psychological analysis of sentence production is usually either serial or connectionist. Psychological serial models do not accommodate the (...) T-model immediately so that here a new model called the P-model is introduced. The P-model is different from previous linguistic and psychological models. Here it is argued that the LF representation should be replaced by a variant of Frege'sA three qualities (sense, reference, and force), called the FregeA representation or F-representation. In the F-representation the order of elements is not necessarily the same as that in LF and it is suggested that the correct ordering is: F-representation > D-structure > S-structure. This ordering appears to lead to a more natural view of sentence production and processing. Within this framework movement originates as the outcome of emphasis applied to the sentence. The requirement that the F-representation precedes the D-structure needs a picture of the particular principles and parameters which pertain to movement of words between representations. In general this would imply that there is a preferred or optimal ordering of the symbolic string in the F-representation. The standard ordering is retained because the general way of producing such an optimal ordering is unclear. In this case it is possible to produce an analysis of movement between LF and D-structure similar to the usual analysis of movement between S-structure and LF. The necessity of analyzing corrupted data suggests that a maximal amount of information about a language's grammar and lexicon is stored. (shrink)

The semantic theory of expressivism has been applied within metaethics to evaluative words like ‘good’ and ‘wrong’, within epistemology to words like ‘knows’, and within the philosophy of language, to words like ‘true’, to epistemic modals like ‘might’, ‘must’, and ‘probably’, and to indicative conditionals. For each topic, expressivism promises the advantage of giving us the resources to say what sentences involving these words mean by telling us what it is to believe these things, rather than by telling us what (...) it would be for them to be true. This, in turn, absolves these theories of the burden of holding that there is any general answer to what it is for these sentences to be true. However, expressivism is famously subject to a deep and general problem about how to account for the meanings of complex sentences – a problem variously known as the ‘Frege-Geach’ or ‘embedding’ problem. In this paper I will be interested in whether there are reasons to think that the embedding problem looks less difficult for some of these applications for expressivism, than for others. In particular, in this paper I will be interested in the prospects for expressivism about what I will call epistemics – a class which I take to include epistemic modals like ‘might’ and ‘must’, sentential adverbs like ‘probably’, adjectives like ‘likely’ and ‘improbable’, and so-called ‘open’ indicative conditionals like ‘if the Fed doesn’t intervene, then the economy will enter a deflationary spiral’. There are several reasons to be particularly interested in expressivism about epistemics, relating both to the philosophical payoffs of such a view, and relating to the technical prospects for making it work. In other work I’ve touched on the especially interesting philosophical payoffs which make expressivism about epistemics interesting; in this paper I will be interested primarily in evaluating the possibility that there are better prospects for making expressivism about epistemics work than there are for making expressivism work about other topics. There are two main reasons why one might suspect that expressivism about epistemics will have better prospects than expressivism about many other topics, including in metaethics.. (shrink)

Robert Nozick (1981, 172) offers the following analysis of knowledge (where S stands for subject and p for proposition): -/- D1 S knows that p =df (1) S believes p, (2) p is true, (3) if p weren’t true, S wouldn’t believe that p (variation condition), and (4) If p were true, S would believe it (adherence condition). Jointly, Nozick refers to conditions 3 and 4 as the sensitivity condition: for they require that the belief be sensitive to the truth-value (...) of the proposition—such that if the proposition were false, the subject would not have believed it, and if the proposition remains true in a slightly different situation, the subject would have still believed it. In other words, they ask us to consider the status of the belief in close possible situations (those that obtain in close possible worlds); specifically, in situations that would obtain if the proposition is false, and in those in which it remains true. Condition 3 specifies how belief should vary with the truth of what is believed, while condition 4 specifies how belief shouldn’t vary when the truth of the belief does not vary. I will discuss some notable problem cases for Nozick’s analysis and then look at why the sensitivity condition he proposes fails in these cases. (shrink)

A review of Michael's Sandel's book, "What Money Can't Buy" (Allen Lane 2012).

Numerous agricultural wastes are impractically discarded every day, and one of these is rice bran. This study investigated the production of a biodegradable straw made of cassava starch and powdered rice bran. It aimed to determine the effectiveness of the different treatments of Cassava Starch-Rice Bran in terms of water resistance, tensile strength, and biodegradability. An experimental design was used in conducting the study. There were three treatments made in making CSRB straws: the first, with more rice bran; the second, (...) with the same cassava starch and rice bran ratio; and the third, with more cassava starch. These treatments produced three replicates each. The straws were placed in a dehydrating machine for 24 hours at a temperature of 60° Celsius. The straws were then coated with beeswax after being removed from their respective molders. The CSRB straws were found to be water resistant due to the beeswax coating applied, although it had a weak tensile strength even with the presence of beeswax. The rate of biodegradability of the CSRB straw was fast due to it being made up of organic materials. The results revealed that straws made from Cassava Starch and Powdered Rice Bran are effective in terms of water resistance and biodegradability. (shrink)

Stephen Barker presents a novel approach to solving semantic paradoxes, including the Liar and its variants and Curry’s paradox. His approach is based around the concept of alethic undecidability. His approach, if successful, renders futile all attempts to assign semantic properties to the paradoxical sentences, whilst leaving classical logic fully intact. And, according to Barker, even the T-scheme remains valid, for validity is not undermined by undecidable instances. Barker’s approach is innovative and worthy of further consideration, particularly by those of (...) us who aim to find a solution without logical revisionism. As it stands, however, the approach is unsuccessful, as I shall demonstrate below. (shrink)

In this paper I propose a formalization, using modal logic, of the notion of possibility that phoneticians use when they judge speech sounds to be possible or impossible. I argue that the most natural candidate for a modal logic of phonetic possibility is the modal system T.

It is now generally recognized that Earth is at risk of a devastating collision with an asteroid or a comet. Impressive strides in our understanding of this threat have been made in recent decades, and various efforts to deal with it have been undertaken. However, the pace of government action hasn’t kept up with the advance of our knowledge. Despite the daunting dimensions of planetary defense, one intrepid NGO has stepped up to the plate: The B612 Foundation has embarked on (...) a half-billion-dollar project, called Sentinel, to map the estimated one million near-Earth objects that could wipe out a city or even end civilization. This article offers an explanation of how it came to be that private citizens have assumed what is arguably government’s primary mandate to "provide for the common defence." It then examines some of the practical – or, if you will, ethical – risks that may be attendant on such a shift of responsibility. Finally, a new policy emphasis is proposed. (shrink)

In this essay we will consider another basic topic: the problem of the nature of the distinctions between Sitte, Brauch, Wert, Mode, and Recht, on which Weber's discussion relies. These discussions typically involved the untranslatable concept of Sitte, which marks a contrast between practices or customs with normative force and “mere practice.” There is a close parallel to this distinction in American social thought in W. G. Sumner's latinate distinction between the mores and folkways of a society. In what follows (...) we shall simply use the German term as a reminder of its long history in German philosophy. Weber was obviously aware of this history, as was Jhering. Our aim will be to examine Weber's modifications of the received version of these distinctions and to consider the Implications of these modifications. As we shall see, what Weber represents as an innocuous classificatory problem contains a much more significant conceptual transformation, which bears on the general image of modernity as rationalization constructed by Weber. (shrink)

This book is a collection of some of my writings that do not fit the mold of standard philosophical articles. These writings range over several topics, including religion, free will, human dignity, the nature of persons, and a few others. The longest item in the collection is an archive of my blog, The Unfinishable Scroll, as it existed when the book was put together. That blog covers many philosophical topics, including some I haven't discussed elsewhere. Also in the collection are (...) essays (formerly web-based) on topics ranging from progress, to skepticism, to metaphysics - and back again. The book even contains an archive of another, less well-known, blog of mine. (shrink)

forthcoming in reisner and steglich-peterson, eds., Reasons for Belief If I believe, for no good reason, that P and I infer (correctly) from this that Q, I don’t think we want to say that I ‘have’ P as evidence for Q. Only things that I believe (or could believe) rationally, or perhaps, with justification, count as part of the evidence that I have. It seems to me that this is a good reason to include an epistemic acceptability constraint on evidence (...) possessed…1 It is a truism that adopting an unjustified belief does not put you in a better evidential position with respect to believing its consequences. This truism has led many philosophers to assume that there must, at a minimum, be a justification condition (and perhaps even a knowledge condition) on what it takes to count as having evidence. This is the best (or only) possible explanation of the truism, these philosophers have believed. This paper explores an alternative explanation for the truism. According to the alternative explanation that I will offer, unjustified beliefs do not put you in a better evidential position with respect to believing their consequences because any evidence you have in virtue of having an unjustified belief is guaranteed to be defeated. Since the lack of justification for a belief guarantees its defeat, I will suggest, we don't need to postulate a special justification condition (much less a knowledge condition) on what it takes to count as having evidence. Why is this important? It is important because the assumption that there must be a justification condition (or perhaps a knowledge condition) on what it takes to count as having evidence places a high bar on what it takes to have evidence - such a high bar that it is difficult to see how this bar could be met in the case of basic, perceptually justified beliefs. As a result, the high bar set by this condition plays a fundamental role, I will claim, in central features of a core dialectic from the epistemology of basic perceptual belief which plays a central role in the debates between internalism and externalism, foundationalism and coherentism, and rationalism and empiricism.. (shrink)

Philosophers have come to distinguish between ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ kinds of reasons for belief, intention, and other attitudes. Several theories about the nature of this distinction have been offered, by far the most prevalent of which is the idea that it is, at bottom, the distinction between what are known as ‘object-given’ and ‘state-given’ reasons. This paper argues that the object-given/state-given theory vastly overgeneralizes on a small set of data points, and in particular that any adequate account of the distinction (...) between the ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ kinds of reason must allow state-given reasons to be of the right kind. The paper has three main goals, corresponding to its three main parts. In part 1 I set up the problem by introducing the right-kind/wrong-kind distinction, the object-given/state-given distinction, and the object-given/state-given theory, according to which the former distinction simply amounts to the latter. Part 2 presents the main argument of the paper: I argue against the object-given/state-given theory by showing that all of the earmarks of the ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ kinds of reason apply to reasons not to intend and not to believe, but that these cases can’t be captured by the object-given/state-given theory. Finally, in part 3 I use these arguments to motivate and explore a more general hypothesis about the rightkind/wrong-kind distinction, and explore some of the consequences of rejecting the object-given/stategiven theory. (shrink)

Fitting Attitudes accounts of value analogize or equate being good with being desirable, on the premise that ‘desirable’ means not, ‘able to be desired’, as Mill has been accused of mistakenly assuming, but ‘ought to be desired’, or something similar. The appeal of this idea is visible in the critical reaction to Mill, which generally goes along with his equation of ‘good’ with ‘desirable’ and only balks at the second step, and it crosses broad boundaries in terms of philosophers’ other (...) commitments. For example, Fitting Attitudes accounts play a central role both in T.M. Scanlon’s [1998] case against teleology, and in Michael Smith [2003], [unpublished] and Doug Portmore’s [2007] cases for it. And of course they have a long and distinguished history. (shrink)

Expressivists have a problem with negation. The problem is that they have not, to date, been able to explain why ‘murdering is wrong’ and ‘murdering is not wrong’ are inconsistent sentences. In this paper, I explain the nature of the problem, and why the best efforts of Gibbard, Dreier, and Horgan and Timmons don’t solve it. Then I show how to diagnose where the problem comes from, and consequently how it is possible for expressivists to solve it. Expressivists should accept (...) this solution, I argue, because it is demonstrably the only way of avoiding the problem, and because it generalizes. Once we see how to solve the negation problem, I show, it becomes easy to state a constructive, compositional expressivist semantics for a purely normative language with the expressive power of propositional logic, in which we can for the first time give explanatory, formally adequate expressivist accounts of logical inconsistency, logical entailment, and logical validity. As a corollary, I give what I take to be the first real expressivist explanation of why Geach’s original moral modus ponens argument is genuinely logically valid. This proves that the problem with expressivism cannot be that it can’t account for the logical properties of complex normative sentences. But it does not show that the same solution can work for a language with both normative and descriptive predicates, let alone that expressivists are able to deal with more complex linguistic constructions like tense, modals, or even quantifiers. In the final section, I show what kind of constraints the solution offered here would place expressivists under, in answering these further questions. (shrink)

Due to the emergence of ICT in ELT sector, seasoned English teachers find it resistant to such a shift despite having a positive attitude towards its use. This quasi-experimental study aimed to examine the extent to which seasoned English language teachers developed their ICT skills through a Service-Learning Activity (SLA). Using a one-group pre- and post-test design, this study collected the data through a modified Needs Assessment Survey (NAS) distributed to fourteen purposively selected participants. It was administered to examine what (...) professional ICT development would greatly benefit them. The data were analyzed using descriptive statistics and themes according to the Service-Learning Activity (SLA) topics. A Post Evaluation Survey (PES) was administered, and its result was compared to the initial test. The results showed that the seasoned teachers gained significant learning gains in terms of (1) sharing of knowledge from other teachers; (2) being encouraged to use ICT tools; (3) training opportunities; (4) working with other colleagues; and 5) attending professional workshops which include SLA. However, this study unveiled that the English teachers had no significant difference in perceptions regarding the roles of computers in teaching before and after the intervention. Limitations and recommendations for future studies were discussed. (shrink)

The basic idea of expressivism is that for some sentences ‘P’, believing that P is not just a matter of having an ordinary descriptive belief. This is a way of capturing the idea that the meaning of some sentences either exceeds their factual/descriptive content or doesn’t consist in any particular factual/descriptive content at all, even in context. The paradigmatic application for expressivism is within metaethics, and holds that believing that stealing is wrong involves having some kind of desire-like attitude, with (...) world-tomind direction of fit, either in place of, or in addition to, being in a representational state of mind with mind-to-world direction of fit. Because expressivists refer to the state of believing that P as the state of mind ‘expressed’ by ‘P’, this view can also be described as the view that ‘stealing is wrong’ expresses a state of mind that involves a desire-like attitude instead of, or in addition to, a representational state of mind. According to some expressivists - unrestrained expressivists, as I’ll call them - there need be no special relationship among the different kinds of state of mind that can be expressed by sentences. Pick your favorite state of mind, the unrestrained expressivist allows, and there could, at least in principle, be a sentence that expressed it. Expressivists who seem to have been unrestrained plausibly include Ayer in Language, Truth, and Logic, and Simon Blackburn in many of his writings, including his [1984], [1993], and.. (shrink)

Dalawa sa mga hibla ng Pilosopiyang Filipino ay patungkol sa paggamit ng banyagang pilosopiya at pamimilosopiya sa wikang Filipino. Makatutulong ang dalawang ito tungo sa pagsasalin ng mga banyagang kaisipan sa talastasang bayan. Ang dalawang hiblang ito ang nais na ambagan ng kasalukuyang sanaysay, sa pamamagitan ng pagsasagawa ng rebyu sa isang halimbawa ng anime/manga na Hapon: ang Attack on Titan (AOT) ni Hajime Isayama. Gagamitin sa pagbasa ng AOT ang mga pilosopikal na pananaw ng ilang Aleman/Austrianong pilosoper/sikolohista na sina (...) Sigmund Freud, Erich Fromm, Carl Schmitt, at Friedrich Nietzsche. Sa pagbasang ito sa pamamagitan ng apat na banyagang palaisip, tututukan ang tema ng kalayaan at digmaan. Liban dito, maglalatag din ng pagmumuni-muni ukol sa paksa ng pananangkapan sa kasaysayan bilang sandatang pulitikal, isang temang lantad na lantad rin sa AOT. Ang lahat ng ito ay isasagawa sa wikang Filipino, bilang pagtatangka na makapag-ambag sa pagpapasok ng anime/manga na Hapon at pilosopiyang Aleman/Austriano sa talastasang bayan. (shrink)

Bundle theories identify material objects with bundles of properties. On the traditional approach, these are the properties possessed by that material object. That view faces a deep problem: it seems to say that all of an object’s properties are essential to it.Essential bundle theoryattempts to overcome this objection, by taking the bundle as a specification of the object’s essential properties only. In this paper, I show that essential bundle theory faces a variant of the objection. To avoid the problem, the (...) theory must accept the contingency of identity. I show how this can be achieved in a coherent and well-motivated way, a way that isn’t available to traditional bundle theories. (shrink)

In his contribution, Mark Alfano lays out a new (to virtue theory) naturalistic way of determining what the virtues are, what it would take for them to be realized, and what it would take for them to be at least possible. This method is derived in large part from David Lewis’s development of Frank Ramsey’s method of implicit definition. The basic idea is to define a set of terms not individually but in tandem. This is accomplished by assembling all (...) and only the common sense platitudes that involve them (e.g., typically, people want to be virtuous), conjoining those platitudes, and replacing the terms in question by existentially quantified variables. If the resulting sentence is satisfied, then whatever satisfies are the virtues. If it isn’t satisfied, there are a couple of options. First, one could just admit defeat by saying that people can’t be virtuous. More plausibly, one could weaken the conjunction by dropping a small number of the platitudes from it (and potentially adding some others). Alfano suggests that the most attractive way to do this is by dropping the platitudes that deal with cross-situational consistency and replacing them with platitudes that involve social construction: basically, people are virtuous (when they are) at least in part because other people signal their expectations of virtuous conduct, which induces virtuous conduct, which in turn induces further signals of expected virtuous conduct, and so on. (shrink)

Allow me to rehearse a familiar scenario. We all know that which ends you have has something to do with what you ought to do. If Ronnie is keen on dancing but Bradley can’t stand it, then the fact that there will be dancing at the party tonight affects what Ronnie and Bradley ought to do in different ways. In short, (HI) you ought, if you have the end, to take the means. But now trouble looms: what if you have (...) dreadful, murderous ends? Ought you to take the means to them? Seemingly not. But fortunately, an assumption made by deontic logics1 comes to the rescue. Since ‘‘ought’’, according to this assumption, is a sentential operator, HI must really be ambiguous. It could be read either as (Narrow) You have the end ! O(you take the means) or as (Wide) O(you have the end ! you take the means). Now if Narrow is true, then you really ought to take the means to your murderous ends. But this doesn’t follow from Wide. All that follows from Wide is that you ought to either take the means to these ends or else give them up. Conclusions: (1) Since HI is on some reading true, but Narrow isn’t, Wide is true. (2) Wide accounts for the relationship between your ends and what you ought to do. This elegant scenario repeats itself in many other domains in which it seems like something can have a bearing on what some particular agent ought to do. Does what you know affect what you ought to do? Do your beliefs about what you ought to do affect what you ought to do? Do your promises affect what you ought to do? Do your beliefs affect what you ought to believe? On each of these counts, the intuitive answer is ‘‘yes’’. And so each of these questions leaves something for the moral philosopher or the epistemologist to investigate. On each count, it seems that what we all know, is that (Account) you ought, if p, to do A. But on each count, the Narrow-scope reading of the ‘‘ought’’ in this claim yields unintuitive consequences. So since Account is true, it must be true on the Wide-scope reading.. (shrink)

This paper addresses the two extensional objections to the Humean Theory of Reasons—that it allows for too many reasons, and that it allows for too few. Although I won’t argue so here, manyof the other objections to the Humean Theoryof Reasons turn on assuming that it cannot successfully deal with these two objections.1 What I will argue, is that the force of the too many and the too few objections to the Humean Theorydepend on whether we assume that Humeans are (...) committed to a thesis about the weight of reasons—one I call Proportionalism. In particular, I’ll show how a version of the Humean Theorythat rejects Proportionalism can reasonablyhope to escape both the too many and the too few objections. This will constitute my defense of this version of the Humean Theory. But then, separately, I will argue that this defense of the Humean Theoryis not ad hoc. I’ll argue that Humeans have no reason to accept Proportionalism in the first place. Or at least, no weightyone. There are three parts to the paper. In Part 1 we introduce the Humean Theoryand the too few reasons objection. I’ll first layout the objection, and then layout the basis for a response on behalf of myfavored version of the Humean Theory. There will be an obvious objection to my defense— but it will turn out to depend on the assumption of Proportionalism. This will constitute myargument that the susceptibilityof the Humean Theoryto.. (shrink)

It doesn’t seem possible to be a realist about the traditional Christian God while claiming to be able to reduce God talk in naturalistically acceptable terms. Reduction, in this case, seems obviously eliminativist. Many philosophers seem to think that the same is true of the normative—that reductive “realists” about the normative are not really realists about the normative at all, or at least, only in some attenuated sense. This paper takes on the challenge of articulating what it is that makes (...) reductive theological realism look hopeless, with the aim of explaining why we should think that the normative is relevantly different. Although it follows from my diagnosis that reductivists have their work cut out for them, I find nothing which suggests that the prospects for a successful reductive realism about the normative are in any way diminished—particularly for reductive views about reasons. Even reductivists, I argue, can at least aspire to a realism that is robust. (shrink)

Nondescriptivist views in many areas of philosophy have long been associated with the commitment that in contrast to other domains of discourse, there are no propositions in their particular domain. For example, the ‘no truth conditions’ theory of conditionals1 is understood as the view that conditionals don’t express propositions, noncognitivist expressivism in metaethics is understood as advocating the view that there are not really moral propositions,2 and expressivism about epistemic modals is thought of as the view that there is no (...) such thing as the proposition that Jack might be at home, over and above the proposition that Jack is at home.3 Of course, it is nearly always acknowledged that advocates of a nondescriptivist theory need not deny that there are conditional, moral, or modal propositions ‘at the end of the day’ – for if they also endorse a deflationary reading of talk about propositions, as famously advocated by Simon Blackburn, then they can employ such deflationary talk just as much as the rest of us. They just don’t appeal to propositions to do any of the work in their theories. Rather, they ‘earn the right’ to talk about propositions.4 It is the aim of this paper to upset this way of thinking about the proper attitude of nondescriptivists toward propositions, and to advocate a more constructive and in some ways more radical alternative on behalf of the nondescriptivist. I will begin by introducing and developing a set of problems that are faced by any nondescriptivist theory which tries to do without propositions. All of these problems are easily solved by any view which postulates propositions across the board, but none of them are solved by merely deflationary talk about propositions – their most promising solutions require propositions to do real theoretical work, and therefore the problems themselves remind us of and illustrate some of the important reasons why it is worth positing propositions in the first place.. (shrink)

In this paper I explore why one might hope to, and how to begin to, develop an expressivist account of truth – that is, a semantics for ‘true’ and ‘false’ within an expressivist framework. I do so for a few reasons: because certain features of deflationism seem to me to require some sort of nondescriptivist semantics, because of all nondescriptivist semantic frameworks which are capable of yielding definite predictions rather than consisting merely of hand-waving, expressivism is that with which I (...) am most familiar, and because I believe that certain problems about truth and particularly about paradox seem to me to look different, when seen through the lens of an expressivist theory. I don’t mean to defend such a theory in this paper, and indeed I have cast doubts on the ultimate prospects of the framework I will be employing here elsewhere.1 But I do think that seeing what an expressivist theory of truth would look like helps to shed light on both expressivism and on truth. (shrink)

Some authors claim that hate speech plays a key role in perpetuating unjust social hierarchy. One prima facie plausible hypothesis about how this occurs is that hate speech has a pernicious influence on the attitudes of children. Here I argue that this hypothesis has an important part to play in the formulation of an especially robust case for general legal prohibitions on hate speech. If our account of the mechanism via which hate speech effects its harms is built around claims (...) about hate speech’s influence on children, then we will be better placed to acquire evidence that demonstrates the processes posited in our account, and better placed to ascribe responsibility for these harms to individuals who engage in hate speech. I briefly suggest some policy implications that come with developing an account of the harm of hate speech along these lines. (shrink)

We argue that the interaction of biased media coverage and widespread employment of the recognition heuristic can produce epistemic injustices. First, we explain the recognition heuristic as studied by Gerd Gigerenzer and colleagues, highlighting how some of its components are largely external to, and outside the control of, the cognitive agent. We then connect the recognition heuristic with recent work on the hypotheses of embedded, extended, and scaffolded cognition, arguing that the recognition heuristic is best understood as an instance of (...) scaffolded cognition. In section three, we consider the double-edged sword of cognitive scaffolding. On the one hand, scaffolds can reduce the internal processing demands on cognitive agents while increasing their access to information. On the other hand, the use of scaffolding leaves cognitive agents increasingly vulnerable to forming false beliefs or failing to form beliefs at all about particular topics. With respect to the recognition heuristic, agents rely on third parties (such as the media) to report not just what’s true but also what’s important or valuable. This makes cognitive agents relying on these third parties vulnerable to two erroneous influences: 1) because they don’t recognize something, it isn’t important or valuable, and 2) because they do recognize something, it is important or valuable. Call the latter the Kardashian Inference and the former the Darfur Inference. In section four, we use Fricker’s (2007) concept of epistemic injustice to characterize the nature and harm of these false inferences, with special emphasis on the Darfur Inference. In section five, we use data-mining and an empirical study to show how Gigerenzer’s population estimation task is liable to produce Darfur Inferences. We conclude with some speculative remarks on more important Darfur Inferences, and how to avoid them by scaffolding better. One primary way to accomplish this it to shift the burden of embodying the virtue of epistemic justice from the hearer or consumer of media to the media themselves. (shrink)

This paper investigates whether search engines and other new modes of online communication should be covered by free speech principles. It criticizes the analogical reason-ing that contemporary American courts and scholars have used to liken search engines to newspapers, and to extend free speech coverage to them based on that likeness. There are dissimilarities between search engines and newspapers that undermine the key analogy, and also rival analogies that can be drawn which don’t recommend free speech protection for search engines. (...) Partly on these bases, we argue that an analogical approach to questions of free speech coverage is of limited use in this context. Credible verdicts about how free speech principles should apply to new modes of online com-munication require us to re-excavate the normative foundations of free speech. This method for deciding free speech coverage suggests that only a subset of search engine outputs and similar online communication should receive special protection against government regulation. (shrink)

Ang pagpapalaganap ng wikang Filipino ay hindi payak na romantisasyon ng nasyonalismo. Sa halip, ito ay instrumento tungo sa higit na demokratisasyon ng wikang Filipino, at samakatuwid ay may malalim na implikasyon sa usapin ng katarungang panlipunan. Sa kontekstong ito mabibigyang-diin ang dulot na suliranin ng Dambuhalang Pagkakahating Pangkalinangan, na dahilan kung bakit mas namomonopolisa ng elit ang mga daluyan ng kapangyarihan tulad ng edukasyon, komersyo at pulitika. Tungo sa paghahanap ng lunas sa suliraning ito, makatutulong ang pagsasa-Filipino ng agham (...) panlipunan bilang esensyal na bahagi ng sistemang pang-edukasyon. -/- Bilang ambag sa adhikaing ito ng pagsasa-Filipino ng agham panlipunan, naglunsad ang pag-aaral na ito ng isang payak na bahaginan ng best practices para sa pagsasa-Filipino ng pagtuturo at pananaliksik sa antas ng silid-aralan at Departamento/Kolehiyo. Hinalaw ang best practices na ito mula sa iba’t ibang guro, mananaliksik, at institusyon, para makabuo ng isang munting imbentaryo ng mga “armas-panturo.” Binubuo ang imbentaryong ito ng 17 gawi/aktibidad/programa para sa antas ng silid-aralan, at 6 gawi/aktibidad/programa para sa antas ng Departamento/Kolehiyo. Nilalayon na maging munting batis ang imbentaryong ito para sa pagpapainam ng pedagohiya ng mga guro at polisiya ng mga institusyon tungo sa higit na pagsasa-Filipino ng pagtuturo at pananaliksik sa agham panlipunan. (shrink)

The most cursory examination of the history of artificial intelligence highlights numerous egregious claims of its researchers, especially in relation to a populist form of ‘strong’ computationalism which holds that any suitably programmed computer instantiates genuine conscious mental states purely in virtue of carrying out a specific series of computations. The argument presented herein is a simple development of that originally presented in Putnam’s (Representation & Reality, Bradford Books, Cambridge in 1988 ) monograph, “Representation & Reality”, which if correct, has (...) important implications for turing machine functionalism and the prospect of ‘conscious’ machines. In the paper, instead of seeking to develop Putnam’s claim that, “everything implements every finite state automata”, I will try to establish the weaker result that, “everything implements the specific machine Q on a particular input set ( x )”. Then, equating Q ( x ) to any putative AI program, I will show that conceding the ‘strong AI’ thesis for Q (crediting it with mental states and consciousness) opens the door to a vicious form of panpsychism whereby all open systems, (e.g. grass, rocks etc.), must instantiate conscious experience and hence that disembodied minds lurk everywhere. (shrink)

According to the standard view, Kant held that hypothetical imperatives are universally binding edicts with disjunctive objects: take-the-means-or-don't-have-the-end. But Kant thought otherwise. He held that they are edicts binding only on some - those who have an end.

Despite its many advantages as a metaethical theory, moral expressivism faces difficulties as a semantic theory of the meaning of moral claims, an issue underscored by the notorious Frege-Geach problem. I consider a distinct metaethical view, inferentialism, which like expressivism rejects a representational account of meaning, but unlike expressivism explains meaning in terms of inferential role instead of expressive function. Drawing on Michael Williams’ recent work on inferential theories of meaning, I argue that an appropriate understanding of the pragmatic role (...) of moral discourse—the facilitation of coordinated social behavior—suggests the kind of inferences we should expect terms with this function to license. I offer a sketch of the inferential roles the moral ‘ought’ plays, and argue that if we accept that the relevant inferential roles are meaning-constitutive, we will be in a position to solve the Frege-Geach problem. Such an inferentialist solution has advantages over those forwarded by expressivists such as Blackburn and Gibbard. First, it offers a more straightforward explanation of the meaning of moral terms. It also gives simple answers to at least two semantic worries that have vexed contemporary expressivists—the “problem of permissions” and the commitment to “mentalism”, both of which I argue are problems that don’t get traction with an inferentialist approach. I conclude by considering ways in which this approach can be expanded into a more robust semantic account. (shrink)

The problem of religious disagreement between epistemic peers is a potential threat to the epistemic justification of one’s theistic belief. In this paper, I develop a response to this problem which draws on the central epistemological thesis of skeptical theism concerning our inability to make proper judgements about God’s reasons for permitting evil. I suggest that this thesis may extend over to our judgements about God’s reasons for self-revealing, and that when it does so, it can enable theists to remain (...) steadfast amid disagreement with epistemic peers who hold a contrary theistic belief (i.e., atheistic belief). For if we’re unable to make proper judgements about God’s reasons for self-revealing, then for all we know, God has some reason for not revealing Himself to our apparent epistemic peer. Thus, their epistemic credentials needn’t provide reason to reduce one’s confidence to such a degree as to no longer uphold one’s theistic belief. (shrink)

Common-sense allows that talk about moral truths makes perfect sense. If you object to the United States’ Declaration of Independence’s assertion that it is a truth that ‘all men’ are ‘endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights’, you are more likely to object that these rights are not unalienable or that they are not endowed by the Creator, or even that its wording ignores the fact that women have rights too, than that this is not the sort of thing (...) which could be a truth. Whether it is a truth or not seems beside the point, anyway; the writers of the Declaration could just have well written, ‘We hold it to be self-evident that all men are created equal, and also that it is self-evident that all men are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights,’ save only that its cadence would lack some of the poetic resonance of the version which garnered Hancock’s signature. Yet famously, ethical noncognitivists have proclaimed that moral sentences can’t be true or false – that, like ‘Hooray!’ or ‘dammit!’, they are not even the kinds of things to be true or false. Noncognitivism is sometimes even defined as the view that this is so, but even philosophers who define ‘noncognitivism’ more broadly, as consistent with the idea that moral sentences may be true or false, have believed that they needed to do important philosophical spadework in order to make sense of how moral sentences could be true or false. In this article we’ll look at the puzzle about moral truth as it is faced by early noncognitivists and by metaethical expressivists, the early noncognitivists’ contemporary cousins. We’ll look at what it would take for expressivists to ‘earn the right’ to talk about moral truths at all, and in particular at what it would take for them to earn the right to claim that moral truths behave in the ways that we should expect – including that meaningful moral sentences which lack presuppositions are true or false, and that classically valid arguments are truth-preserving.. (shrink)

. This article seeks to outline how a Muslim believer can deflect a defeater for Islamic belief put forward by Erik Baldwin and Tyler McNabb. In doing so, it aims to reject the suggestion that an Islamic religious epistemology is somehow antithetical to a model of Reformed epistemology which is not fully compatible with Plantingian. Taken together with previous work on Islam and RE, the article not only aims to provide reason to think that Baldwin and McNabb’s proposed epistemic defeater (...) for Islamic belief isn’t problematic, it also seeks to show how the concerns raised by Baldwin and McNabb over a Plantingian model of RE in Islamic milieu, are no longer tenable. (shrink)

Although Nietzsche accepted a distant cousin of Brian Leiter’s “Doctrine of Types,” according to which, “Each person has a fixed psycho-physical constitution, which defines him as a particular type of person,” the details of his actual view are quite different from the flat-footed position Leiter attributes to him. Leiter argues that Nietzsche thought that type-facts partially explain the beliefs and actions, including moral beliefs and actions, of the person whom those type-facts characterize. With this much, I agree. However, the Doctrine (...) of Types as formulated by Leiter, is manifestly unsupported both by Nietzsche’s texts and as an empirical hypothesis. Although Leiter has teamed up with Joshua Knobe to shore up the empirical credentials of his version of the Doctrine of Types, and although Knobe is one of the best experimental philosophers currently working in moral psychology, their account of the Doctrine is wrong both textually and empirically. That is to say, Nietzsche did not hold the version of the Doctrine they attribute to him, and it’s a good thing he didn’t, because the version that he actually did hold is better empirically supported than the version that they attribute to him. For Nietzsche – and in reality – types are not immutable or fixed. Although not everyone is endowed with the same type, which type someone belongs to can (though needn’t) evolve over the course of her lifetime. In particular, whereas I agree with Leiter that the neo-Aristotelian account of character development is empirically inadequate, I do so not because I think no character development occurs but because I think that character development occurs in a different way. In addition, for Nietzsche – and in reality – types on their own are not normative. Character, which is normatively evaluable, only arises through the refinement, calibration, and development of temperament. It might seem like I’ve just set myself an ambitious-enough goal, but I want to do more in this paper. The main point I want to argue is that Nietzsche held a person-type-relative unity of virtue thesis, according to which what’s intrinsically good for a particular person is to develop and act from particular character traits that “fit” her type. (shrink)

Explaining genuine moral disagreement is a challenge for metaethical theories. For expressivists, this challenge comes from the plausibility of agents making seemingly univocal claims while expressing incongruent conative attitudes. I argue that metaethical inferentialism – a deflationary cousin to expressivism, which locates meaning in the inferential import of our moral assertions rather than the attitudes they express – offers a unique solution to this problem. Because inferentialism doesn’t locate the source of moral disagreements in a clash between attitudes, but instead (...) in conflicts between the inferential import of ethical assertions, the traditional problem for expressivism can be avoided. After considering two forms of inferentialism that lead to revenge versions of the problem, I conclude by recommending that we understand the semantics of moral disagreements pragmatically: the source of univocity does not come from moral or semantic facts waiting to be described, but instead from the needs that ethical and semantic discourses answer – a solution to the problems of what we are to do and how we are to talk about it. (shrink)

The central aim of this quasi-experimental study was to investigate the efficacy of lyrical and instrumental music in developing the reading comprehension of grade 10 students of Davao City, Philippines using the descriptive statistics and inferential statistics, specifically t-Test significant differences were assessed among groups and scores. The findings revealed that all groups had similar level of reading comprehension at the outset of the experiment. The post experiment revealed that a significant increase of score was evident in the control and (...) experimental group, which utilized instrumental music. On the other hand, the experimental group using lyrical music, had no significant improvement in the reading comprehension scores. Implications for the educational practices and limitations of the study were provided. (shrink)

This paper develops and motivates a unification theory of metaphysical explanation, or as I will call it, Metaphysical Unificationism. The theory’s main inspiration is the unification account of scientific explanation, according to which explanatoriness is a holistic feature of theories that derive a large number of explananda from a meager set of explanantia, using a small number of argument patterns. In developing Metaphysical Unificationism, I will point out that it has a number of interesting consequences. The view offers a novel (...) conception of metaphysical explanation that doesn’t rely on the notion of a “determinative” or “explanatory” relation; it allows us to draw a principled distinction between metaphysical and scientific explanations; it implies that naturalness and fundamentality are distinct but intimately related notions; and perhaps most importantly, it re-establishes the unduly neglected link between explanation and understanding in the metaphysical realm. A number of objections can be raised against the view, but I will argue that none of these is conclusive. The upshot is that Metaphysical Unificationism provides a powerful and hitherto overlooked alternative to extant theories of metaphysical explanation. (shrink)

In his book Knowledge and Practical Interests Jason Stanley offers an argument for the conclusion that it is quite unlikely that an ambiguity theory of ‘knows’ can be “linguistically grounded”. His argument rests on two important assumptions: that linguistic grounding of ambiguity requires evidence of the purported different senses of a word being represented by different words in other languages and that such evidence is lacking in the case of ‘knows’. In this paper, I challenge the conclusion that there isn’t (...) a linguistic grounding for an ambiguity theory of ‘knows’ by making cases against both of Stanley’s major assumptions. I will do this by making a case for a prime facie linguistic grounding for a polysemy theory of ‘knows’ without appealing to word use in other languages. Given that a polysemy theory of ‘knows’ is a type of ambiguity theory of ‘knows’, if I succeed in linguistically grounding a polysemy theory of ‘knows’, then I have shown that at least one type of ambiguity theory of ‘knows’ can be linguistically grounded. (shrink)

This paper presents Elmar Unnsteinsson’s novel theory of Edenic Intentionalism, on which a speaker cannot refer to an object when the speaker is relevantly confused about its identity. A challenge to the theory is presented and several possible responses considered. The challenge is this: According to Edenic Intentionalism, reference often fails even when speakers seem to refer successfully. Elmar therefore supplements Edenic Intentionalism with an explanation of how communication can succeed without reference. If such an explanation is available, it isn’t (...) clear what need there is for Edenic Intentionalism. (shrink)

Nang masakop ng Estados Unidos ang Pilipinas, dumating sa bansa ang isa pang uri ng Kristiyanismo na iba sa bitbit ng mga Espanyol-ang Protestantismo (na nagsimulang isilang noong ika-16 na dantaon sa Europa sa pamumuno nina Luther, Calvin, at Zwingli). Salaysay ni T. Valentino Sitoy (1989, iii, 7-11), 1899 unang dumating ang mga misyonerong Protestante sa Pilipinas, na kinabibilangan ng mga Presbyterian, Baptist, at Methodist. Kalaunan ay sinundan ito ng pagdating ng mga Episcopalian, Seventh-Day Adventist, United Brethren, Disciples, Christian and (...) Missionary Alliance, at iba pa. Ilan sa mga ito ay nagsama-sama upang mabuo ang Evangelical Union. Hinati nila ang Pilipinas sa iba't ibang probinsya ng mission fields (tulad ng ginawa dati ng mga Heswita, Rekoletos, Augustino, Pransiskano, at Dominikano), upang hindi sila magkaagawan sa populasyon na babahaginan ng ebanghelyo. (shrink)