Results for 'Matthew Ward'

928 found
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  1. Transformative Embodied Cognition.Dave Ward - forthcoming - Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy.
    How should accounts that stress the embodied, embedded and engaged character of human minds accommodate the role of rationality in human subjectivity? Drawing on Matthew Boyle’s contrast between ‘additive’ and ‘transformative’ conceptions of rationality, I argue that contemporary work on embodied cognition tends towards a problematic ‘additivism’ about the relationship between mature human capacities to think and act for reasons, and sensorimotor capacities to skillfully engage with salient features of the environment. Additivists view rational capacities to reason and reflect (...)
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  2. Attributionist Theories of Moral Responsibility.Matthew Talbert - 2022 - In Dana Kay Nelkin & Derk Pereboom (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Moral Responsibility. New York: Oxford University Press. pp. 50-70.
    This chapter describes the attributionist approach to moral responsibility. Works by Pamela Hieronymi, T.M. Scanlon, Angela Smith, and Matthew Talbert are taken to representative of this approach. On the interpretation given here, attributionism is committed to the following: assessments of moral responsibility are, and ought to be, centrally concerned with the morally significant features of an agent’s orientation toward others that are attributable to her, and an agent is eligible for moral praise or blame solely on the basis of (...)
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  3. The Ethical Significance of Being an Erotic Object.Caleb Ward & Ellie Anderson - 2022 - In David Boonin (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Sexual Ethics. London: Palgrave Macmillan. pp. 55-71.
    Discussions of sexual ethics often focus on the wrong of treating another as a mere object instead of as a person worthy of respect. On this view, the task of sexual ethics becomes putting the other’s subjectivity above their status as erotic object so as to avoid the harms of objectification. Ward and Anderson argue that such a view disregards the crucial, moral role that erotic objecthood plays in sexual encounters. Important moral features of intimacy are disclosed through the (...)
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  4. Theorizing Non-Ideal Agency.Caleb Ward - 2025 - In Hilkje Charlotte Hänel & Johanna M. Müller (eds.), The Routledge handbook of non-ideal theory. New York, NY: Routledge.
    Despite the growing attention to oppression and resistance in social and political philosophy as well as ethics, philosophers continue to struggle to describe and appropriately attribute agency under non-ideal circumstances of oppression and structural injustice. This chapter identifies some features of new accounts of non-ideal agency and then examines a particular problem for such theories, what Serene Khader has called the agency dilemma. Under the agency dilemma, attempts to articulate the agency of subjects living under oppression must on the one (...)
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  5. Audre Lorde’s Erotic as Epistemic and Political Practice.Caleb Ward - 2023 - Hypatia 38 (4):896–917.
    Audre Lorde’s account of the erotic is one of her most widely celebrated contributions to political theory and feminist activism, but her explanation of the term in her brief essay “Uses of the Erotic” is famously oblique and ambiguous. This article develops a detailed, textually grounded interpretation of Lorde’s erotic, based on an analysis of how Lorde’s essay brings together commitments expressed across her work. I describe four integral elements of Lorde’s erotic: feeling, knowledge, power, and concerted action. The erotic (...)
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  6. Feeling, Knowledge, Self-Preservation: Audre Lorde’s Oppositional Agency and Some Implications for Ethics.Caleb Ward - 2020 - Journal of the American Philosophical Association 6 (4):463-482.
    Throughout her work, Audre Lorde maintains that her self-preservation in the face of oppression depends on acting from the recognition and valorization of her feelings as a deep source of knowledge. This claim, taken as a portrayal of agency, poses challenges to standard positions in ethics, epistemology, and moral psychology. This article examines the oppositional agency articulated by Lorde’s thought, locating feeling, poetry, and the power she calls “the erotic” within her avowed project of self-preservation. It then explores the implications (...)
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  7. On stipulation.Matthew Shields - 2021 - European Journal of Philosophy 29 (4):1100-1114.
    When we carry out a speech act of stipulation, it seems that we can shape our language however we see fit. This autonomy, however, also seems to make such acts arbitrary: it is unclear if there are any constraints on what counts as a "correct" or "incorrect" stipulation. In this paper, I offer a novel, detailed account of the pragmatics of stipulation and explain its crucial role in conceptual analysis and articulation. My account shows that stipulation does indeed equip us (...)
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  8. On the Analogy Between Business and Sport: Towards an Aristotelian Response to The Market Failures Approach to Business Ethics.Matthew Sinnicks - 2022 - Journal of Business Ethics 177 (1):49-61.
    This paper explores the notion that business calls for an adversarial ethic, akin to that of sport. On this view, because of their competitive structure, both sport and business call for behaviours that are contrary to ‘ordinary morality’, and yet are ultimately justified because of the goods they facilitate. I develop three objections to this analogy. Firstly, there is an important qualitative difference between harms risked voluntarily and harms risked involuntarily. Secondly, the goods achieved by adversarial relationships in sport go (...)
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  9. Introduction: The Varieties of Enactivism.Dave Ward, David Silverman & Mario Villalobos - 2017 - Topoi 36 (3):365-375.
    This introduction to a special issue of Topoi introduces and summarises the relationship between three main varieties of 'enactivist' theorising about the mind: 'autopoietic', 'sensorimotor', and 'radical' enactivism. It includes a brief discussion of the philosophical and cognitive scientific precursors to enactivist theories, and the relationship of enactivism to other trends in embodied cognitive science and philosophy of mind.
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  10. Explaining individual differences.Zina B. Ward - 2023 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 101 (C):61-70.
    Most psychological research aims to uncover generalizations about the mind that hold across subjects. Philosophical discussions of scientific explanation have focused on such generalizations, but in doing so, have often overlooked an important phenomenon: variation. Variation is ubiquitous in psychology and many other domains, and an important target of explanation in its own right. Here I characterize explananda that concern individual differences and formulate an account of what it takes to explain them. I argue that the notion of actual difference (...)
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  11. Muscles or Movements? Representation in the Nascent Brain Sciences.Zina B. Ward - 2023 - Journal of the History of Biology 56 (1):5-34.
    The idea that the brain is a representational organ has roots in the nineteenth century, when neurologists began drawing conclusions about what the brain represents from clinical and experimental studies. One of the earliest controversies surrounding representation in the brain was the “muscles versus movements” debate, which concerned whether the motor cortex represents complex movements or rather fractional components of movement. Prominent thinkers weighed in on each side: neurologists John Hughlings Jackson and F.M.R. Walshe in favor of complex movements, neurophysiologist (...)
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  12. Es are good. Cognition as enacted, embodied, embedded, affective and extended.Dave Ward & Mog Stapleton - 2012 - In Fabio Paglieri (ed.), Consciousness in Interaction: The role of the natural and social context in shaping consciousness. John Benjamins Publishing.
    We present a specific elaboration and partial defense of the claims that cognition is enactive, embodied, embedded, affective and (potentially) extended. According to the view we will defend, the enactivist claim that perception and cognition essentially depend upon the cognizer’s interactions with their environment is fundamental. If a particular instance of this kind of dependence obtains, we will argue, then it follows that cognition is essentially embodied and embedded, that the underpinnings of cognition are inextricable from those of affect, that (...)
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  13. Trait Self-Control, Inhibition, and Executive Functions: Rethinking some Traditional Assumptions.Matthew C. Haug - 2021 - Neuroethics 14 (2):303-314.
    This paper draws on work in the sciences of the mind to cast doubt on some assumptions that have often been made in the study of self-control. Contra a long, Aristotelian tradition, recent evidence suggests that highly self-controlled individuals do not have a trait very similar to continence: they experience relatively few desires that conflict with their evaluative judgments and are not especially good at directly and effortfully inhibiting such desires. Similarly, several recent studies have failed to support the view (...)
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  14.  24
    Inheriting the Poetry of Survival: Caleb Ward reviews Survival Is a Promise: The Eternal Life of Audre Lorde by Alexis Pauline Gumbs. [REVIEW]Caleb Ward - 2024 - The Philosopher 112 (2):99-104.
    A long-form review essay on Alexis Pauline Gumbs's Survival Is a Promise: The Eternal Life of Audre Lorde (2024) and the task of reading Audre Lorde as a philosopher.
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  15. One Goodness, Many Goodnesses.Thomas M. Ward & Anne Jeffrey - forthcoming - Religious Studies.
    Some theories of goodness are descriptively rich: they have much to say about what makes things good. Neo-Aristotelian accounts, for instance, detail the various features that make a human being, a dog, a bee good relative to facts about those forms of life. Famously, such theories of relative goodness tend to be comparatively poor: they have little or nothing to say about what makes one kind of being better than another kind. Other theories of goodness—those that take there to be (...)
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  16. Downgraded phenomenology: how conscious overflow lost its richness.Emily Ward - 2018 - Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B 373.
    Our in-the-moment experience of the world can feel vivid and rich, even when we cannot describe our experience due to limitations of attention, memory or other cognitive processes. But the nature of visual awareness is quite sparse, as suggested by the phenomena of failures of awareness, such as change blindness and inattentional blindness. I will argue that once failures of memory or failures of comparison are ruled out as explanations for these phenomena, they present strong evidence against rich awareness. To (...)
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  17. Inattentional blindness reflects limitations on perception, not memory: Evidence from repeated failures of awareness.Emily Ward & Brian Scholl - 2015 - Psychonomic Bulletin & Review 22:722-727.
    Perhaps the most striking phenomenon of visual awareness is inattentional blindness (IB), in which a surprisingly salient event right in front of you may go completely unseen when unattended. Does IB reflect a failure of perception, or only of subsequent memory? Previous work has been unable to answer this question, due to a seemingly intractable dilemma: ruling out memory requires immediate perceptual reports, but soliciting such reports fuels an expectation that eliminates IB. Here we introduce a way of evoking repeated (...)
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  18. To Hedge or Not to Hedge: Scientific Claims and Public Justification.Zina B. Ward & Kathleen A. Creel - 2024 - Philosophy of Science.
    Scientific hedges are communicative devices used to qualify and weaken scientific claims. Gregor Betz has argued—unconvincingly, we think—that hedging can rescue the value-free ideal for science. Nevertheless, Betz is onto something when he suggests there are political principles that recommend scientists hedge public-facing claims. In this article, we recast this suggestion using the notion of public justification. We formulate and reject a Rawlsian argument that locates the justification for hedging in its ability to forge consensus. On our alternative proposal, hedging (...)
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  19. William Whewell, Cluster Theorist of Kinds.Zina B. Ward - 2023 - Hopos: The Journal of the International Society for the History of Philosophy of Science 13 (2):362-386.
    A dominant strand of philosophical thought holds that natural kinds are clusters of objects with shared properties. Cluster theories of natural kinds are often taken to be a late twentieth-century development, prompted by dissatisfaction with essentialism in philosophy of biology. I will argue here, however, that a cluster theory of kinds had actually been formulated by William Whewell (1794-1866) more than a century earlier. Cluster theories of kinds can be characterized in terms of three central commitments, all of which are (...)
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  20. Epistemic disagreement in psychopathology research and practice: A procedural model.Tony Ward, Jacqueline Anne Sullivan & Russil Durrant - 2024 - Theory & Psychology.
    Clinical psychology is characterized by persistent disagreement about fundamental aspects of the discipline ranging from what mental disorders are to what constitutes effective treatment. Attempts to address the problem of epistemic disagreement have been frequently based on establishing the correct answer by fiat without identifying and addressing the sources of the disagreement. We argue that this strategy has not worked very well and the result is frequently ongoing and intractable disagreement, with each side in an argument convinced they are correct. (...)
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  21. Assertion is weak.Matthew Mandelkern & Kevin Dorst - 2022 - Philosophers' Imprint 22.
    Recent work has argued that belief is weak: the level of rational credence required for belief is relatively low. That literature has contrasted belief with assertion, arguing that the latter requires an epistemic state much stronger than (weak) belief---perhaps knowledge or even certainty. We argue that this is wrong: assertion is just as weak as belief. We first present a variety of new arguments for this, and then show that the standard arguments for stronger norms are not convincing. Finally, we (...)
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  22. Entering the Modern Areopagus TO CONFRONT A NEW DELPHIC ORACLE.James Noel Ward - 2023 - New Oxford Review 2023 (October 2023):12-14.
    The curious case of Bronze Age Pervert (BAP, for short), of unfortunate name, or “handle,” in his world. Author of the self-published Bronze Age Mindset (2018), BAP is present in 4Chan discussion threads and on YouTube, and he produces weekly subscription-only podcasts with approximately 6,500 paying clients (I am among them). He was banned from Twitter but reinstated in December 2022, and he now has over 100,000 followers. A Google search turns up scores of articles addressing or discussing his work, (...)
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  23. No Coincidence?Matthew S. Bedke - 2014 - Oxford Studies in Metaethics 9:102-125.
    This paper critically examines coincidence arguments and evolutionary debunking arguments against non-naturalist realism in metaethics. It advances a version of these arguments that goes roughly like this: Given a non-naturalist, realist metaethic, it would be cosmically coincidental if our first order normative beliefs were true. This coincidence undermines any prima facie justification enjoyed by those beliefs.
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  24. Authors’ Response: Enactivism, Cognitive Science, and the Jonasian Inference.D. Ward & M. Villalobos - 2016 - Constructivist Foundations 11 (2):228-233.
    Upshot: In our target article we claimed that, at least since Weber and Varela, enactivism has incorporated a theoretical commitment to one important aspect of Jonas’s philosophical biology, namely its anthropomorphism, which is at odds with the methodological commitments of modern science. In this general reply we want to clarify what we mean by anthropomorphism, and explain why we think it is incompatible with science. We do this by spelling out what we call the “Jonasian inference,” i.e., the idea that (...)
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  25. Utopian and Scientific Enactivism: Never Ever Getting Back Together?Dave Ward - 2023 - Constructivist Foundations 19 (1):19-21.
    Meyer and Brancazio make an important distinction between two enactivist projects: “utopian” and “scientific.” I agree that contemporary enactivists would benefit from more clearly distinguishing these projects and their success conditions. However, I wonder whether there are times when letting these projects merge with each other might be helpful, or even necessary.
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  26. Epistemic Norms for Waiting.Matthew McGrath - 2021 - Philosophical Topics 49 (2):173-201.
    Although belief formation is sometimes automatic, there are occasions in which we have the power to put it off, to wait on belief-formation. Waiting in this sense seems assessable by epistemic norms. This paper explores what form such norms might take: the nature and their content. A key question is how these norms relate to epistemic norms on belief-formation: could we have cases in which one ought to believe that p but also ought to wait on forming a belief on (...)
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  27. Moving Stories: Agency, Emotion and Practical Rationality.Dave Ward - 2019 - In Laura Candiotto (ed.), The Value of Emotions for Knowledge. Springer Verlag. pp. 145-176.
    What is it to be an agent? One influential line of thought, endorsed by G. E. M. Anscombe and David Velleman, among others, holds that agency depends on practical rationality—the ability to act for reasons, rather than being merely moved by causes. Over the past 25 years, Velleman has argued compellingly for a distinctive view of agency and the practical rationality with which he associates it. On Velleman’s conception, being an agent consists in having the capacity to be motivated by (...)
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  28. Agency, Responsibility, and the Limits of Sexual Consent.Caleb Ward - 2020 - Dissertation, State University of New York, Stony Brook
    In both popular and scholarly discussions, sexual consent is gaining traction as the central moral consideration in how people should treat one another in sexual encounters. However, while the concept of consent has been indispensable to oppose many forms of sexual violence, consent-based sexual ethics struggle to account for the phenomenological complexity of sexual intimacy and the social and structural pressures that often surround sexual communication and behavior. Feminist structural critique and social research on the prevalence of violation even within (...)
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  29. Selective permeability, multiculturalism and affordances in education.Matthew Crippen - 2024 - Philosophical Psychology 37 (7):1924-1947.
    Selective permeability holds that people’s distinct capacities allow them to do different things in a space, making it unequally accessible. Though mainly applied to urban geography so far, we propose selective permeability as an affordance-based approach for understanding diversity in education. This has advantages. First, it avoids dismissing lower achievements as necessarily coming from “within” students, instead locating challenges in the environment. This implies that settings (not just people) need remedial attention, also raising questions about normative judgments in disability nomenclature. (...)
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  30. Righting domestic wrongs with refugee policy.Matthew Lindauer - 2024 - Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy 27 (2):206-223.
    Discriminatory attitudes towards Muslim refugees are common in liberal democracies, and Muslim citizens of these countries experience high rates of discrimination and social exclusion. Uniting these two facts is the well-known phenomenon of Islamophobia. But the implications of overlapping discrimination against citizens and non-citizens have not been given sustained attention in the ethics of immigration literature. In this paper, I argue that liberal societies have not only duties to discontinue refugee policies that discriminate against social groups like Muslims, but remedial (...)
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  31. Pragmatic Faith in Science and Religion: A Response to New Atheism.Matthew Crippen - 2022 - Quadranti – Rivista Internazionale di Filosofia Contemporanea 8 (1-2):313-337.
    It is a cliché to say science and religion are antagonistic. The outlook is often promoted by religious people uneducated in the workings of science, and equally by scientifically-oriented individuals with little experience of religion. This essay challenges presumptions about the irreconcilability of science and religion, focusing on action organizing metaphysical principles infusing both. The aim, however, is not to evaluate proofs for God’s existence, nor defend young earth creationism, nor the notion that there is one true religion, nor still (...)
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  32. Cudworthian Consciousness.Matthew A. Leisinger - 2022 - Oxford Studies in Early Modern Philosophy 11:163–196.
    Ralph Cudworth’s The True Intellectual System of the Universe (1678) is credited with the first instance of the English word “consciousness” used in a distinctively philosophical sense. While Cudworth says little in the System about the nature of consciousness, he has more to say in his (largely unpublished) freewill manuscripts. I argue that, in these manuscripts, Cudworth distinguishes two kinds of consciousness, which I call “bare consciousness” and “reflective consciousness”. What both have in common is that each is a kind (...)
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  33. Anticipating and Enacting Worlds: Moods, Illness and Psychobehavioral Adaptation.Matthew Crippen - forthcoming - Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences:1-25.
    Predictive processing theorists have claimed PTSD and depression are maladaptive and epistemically distorting because they entail undesirably wide gaps between top-down models and bottom-up information inflows. Without denying this is sometimes so, the “maladaptive” label carries questionable normative assumptions. For instance, trauma survivors facing significant risk of subsequent attacks may overestimate threats to circumvent further trauma, “bringing forth” concretely safer personal spaces, to use enactive terminology, ensuring the desired gap between predicted worries and outcomes. The violation of predictive processing can (...)
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  34. A puzzle about meaning and luck.Matthew Hammerton - 2022 - Ratio 35 (2):123-132.
    This article raises a puzzle about luck and meaning in life. The puzzle shows that, in certain cases involving luck, standard intuitions about the meaningfulness of various lives conflict with basic theoretical assumptions about the nature of meaning. After setting out the puzzle, several options for resolving it are developed and evaluated.
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  35. Wicked Problems in a Post-truth Political Economy: A Dilemma for Knowledge Translation.Matthew Tieu - 2023 - Humanities and Social Sciences Communications 10 (280):1-11.
    The discipline of knowledge translation (KT) emerged as a way of systematically understanding and addressing the challenges of applying health and medical research in practice. In light of ongoing and emerging critique of KT from the medical humanities and social sciences disciplines, KT researchers have become increasingly aware of the complexity of the translational process, particularly the significance of culture, tradition and values in how scientific evidence is understood and received, and thus increasingly receptive to pluralistic notions of knowledge. Hence, (...)
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  36. Being neutral: Agnosticism, inquiry and the suspension of judgment.Matthew McGrath - 2021 - Noûs 55 (2):463-484.
    Epistemologists often claim that in addition to belief and disbelief there is a third, neutral, doxastic attitude. Various terms are used: ‘suspending judgment’, ‘withholding’, ‘agnosticism’. It is also common to claim that the factors relevant to the justification of these attitudes are epistemic in the narrow sense of being factors that bear on the strength or weakness of one’s epistemic position with respect to the target proposition. This paper addresses two challenges to such traditionalism about doxastic attitudes. The first concerns (...)
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  37. Assertion, knowledge and predictions.Matthew Benton - 2012 - Analysis 72 (1):102-105.
    John N. Williams (1994) and Matthew Weiner (2005) invoke predictions in order to undermine the normative relevance of knowledge for assertions; in particular, Weiner argues, predictions are important counterexamples to the Knowledge Account of Assertion (KAA). I argue here that they are not true counterexamples at all, a point that can be agreed upon even by those who reject KAA.
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  38. Faces and situational Agency.Matthew Crippen & Giovanni Rolla - 2022 - Topoi 41 (4):659-670.
    Though there are many challenges to Ekman’s thesis that there are basic emotions with universal corresponding facial expressions, our main criticism revolves around the extent to which grounding situations alter how people read faces. To that end, we recruit testifying experimental studies that show identical faces expressing varying emotions when contextualized differently. Rather than dismissing these as illusions, we start with the position—generally favored by embodied thinkers—that situations are primary: they are where specifiable and hence knowable properties first show up. (...)
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  39. Hurley's Transcendental Enactivism.Dave Ward - 2016 - Journal of Consciousness Studies 23 (5-6):12-38.
    Susan Hurley (1998a, 2003a, 2008) argues that our capacities for perception, agency and thought are essentially interdependent and co-emerge from a tangle of sensorimotor processes that are both cause and effect of the web of interactive and communicative practices they weave us into. In this paper, I reconstruct this view and its main motivations, with a particular focus on three important aspects. First, Hurley argues that an essential aspect of conscious perception – its perspectival unity – constitutively depends on agency. (...)
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  40. Conditional Intentions and Shared Agency.Matthew Rachar - 2024 - Noûs 58 (1):271-288.
    Shared agency is a distinctive kind of sociality that involves interdependent planning, practical reasoning, and action between participants. Philosophical reflection suggests that agents engage in this form of sociality when a special structure of interrelated psychological attitudes exists between them, a set of attitudes that constitutes a collective intention. I defend a new way to understand collective intention as a combination of individual conditional intentions. Revising an initial statement of the conditional intention account in response to several challenges leads to (...)
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  41. When Inferring to a Conspiracy might be the Best Explanation.Matthew R. X. Dentith - 2016 - Social Epistemology 30 (5-6):572-591.
    Conspiracy theories are typically thought to be examples of irrational beliefs, and thus unlikely to be warranted. However, recent work in Philosophy has challenged the claim that belief in conspiracy theories is irrational, showing that in a range of cases, belief in conspiracy theories is warranted. However, it is still often said that conspiracy theories are unlikely relative to non-conspiratorial explanations which account for the same phenomena. However, such arguments turn out to rest upon how we define what gets counted (...)
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  42. Natural Kindness.Matthew H. Slater - 2015 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 66 (2):375-411.
    Philosophers have long been interested in a series of interrelated questions about natural kinds. What are they? What role do they play in science and metaphysics? How do they contribute to our epistemic projects? What categories count as natural kinds? And so on. Owing, perhaps, to different starting points and emphases, we now have at hand a variety of conceptions of natural kinds—some apparently better suited than others to accommodate a particular sort of inquiry. Even if coherent, this situation isn’t (...)
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  43. Causal Inference as Inference to the Best Explanation.Barry Ward - manuscript
    We argue that a modified version of Mill’s method of agreement can strongly confirm causal generalizations. This mode of causal inference implicates the explanatory virtues of mechanism, analogy, consilience, and simplicity, and we identify it as a species of Inference to the Best Explanation (IBE). Since rational causal inference provides normative guidance, IBE is not a heuristic for Bayesian rationality. We give it an objective Bayesian formalization, one that has no need of principles of indifference and yields responses to the (...)
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  44. Resolving the Raven Paradox: Simple Random Sampling, Stratified Random Sampling, and Inference to Best Explanation.Barry Ward - 2022 - Philosophy of Science 89 (2):360-377.
    Simple random sampling resolutions of the raven paradox relevantly diverge from scientific practice. We develop a stratified random sampling model, yielding a better fit and apparently rehabilitating simple random sampling as a legitimate idealization. However, neither accommodates a second concern, the objection from potential bias. We develop a third model that crucially invokes causal considerations, yielding a novel resolution that handles both concerns. This approach resembles Inference to the Best Explanation (IBE) and relates the generalization’s confirmation to confirmation of an (...)
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  45. Conceptual Engineering, Conceptual Domination, and the Case of Conspiracy Theories.Matthew Shields - 2023 - Social Epistemology 37 (4):464-480.
    Using the example of recent attempts to engineer the concept of conspiracy theory, I argue that philosophers should be far more circumspect in their approach to conceptual engineering than we have been – in particular, that we should pay much closer attention to the history behind and context that surrounds our target concept in order to determine whether it is a site of what I have elsewhere called ‘conceptual domination’. If it is, we may well have good reason to avoid (...)
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  46. In Defence Of Wish Lists: Business Ethics, Professional Ethics, and Ordinary Morality.Matthew Sinnicks - 2023 - Business and Professional Ethics Journal 42 (1):79-107.
    Business ethics is often understood as a variety of professional ethics, and thus distinct from ordinary morality in an important way. This article seeks to challenge two ways of defending this claim: first, from the nature of business practice, and second, from the contribution of business. The former argument fails because it undermines our ability to rule out a professional-ethics approach to a number of disreputable practices. The latter argument fails because the contribution of business is extrinsic to business in (...)
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  47. Informational Virtues, Causal Inference, and Inference to the Best Explanation.Barry Ward - manuscript
    Frank Cabrera argues that informational explanatory virtues—specifically, mechanism, precision, and explanatory scope—cannot be confirmational virtues, since hypotheses that possess them must have a lower probability than less virtuous, entailed hypotheses. We argue against Cabrera’s characterization of confirmational virtue and for an alternative on which the informational virtues clearly are confirmational virtues. Our illustration of their confirmational virtuousness appeals to aspects of causal inference, suggesting that causal inference has a role for the explanatory virtues. We briefly explore this possibility, delineating a (...)
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  48. An Evolutionary Argument for a Self-Explanatory, Benevolent Metaphysics.Ward Blondé - 2015 - Symposion: Theoretical and Applied Inquiries in Philosophy and Social Sciences 2 (2):143-166.
    In this paper, a metaphysics is proposed that includes everything that can be represented by a well-founded multiset. It is shown that this metaphysics, apart from being self-explanatory, is also benevolent. Paradoxically, it turns out that the probability that we were born in another life than our own is zero. More insights are gained by inducing properties from a metaphysics that is not self-explanatory. In particular, digital metaphysics is analyzed, which claims that only computable things exist. First of all, it (...)
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  49. (1 other version)Conspiracy theories on the basis of the evidence.Matthew Dentith - 2017 - Synthese:1-19.
    Conspiracy theories are often portrayed as unwarranted beliefs, typically supported by suspicious kinds of evidence. Yet contemporary work in Philosophy argues provisional belief in conspiracy theories is at the very least understandable---because conspiracies occur---and that if we take an evidential approach, judging individual conspiracy theories on their particular merits, belief in such theories turns out to be warranted in a range of cases. -/- Drawing on this work, I examine the kinds of evidence typically associated with conspiracy theories, and show (...)
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  50. Bounded Modality.Matthew Mandelkern - 2019 - Philosophical Review 128 (1):1-61.
    What does 'might' mean? One hypothesis is that 'It might be raining' is essentially an avowal of ignorance like 'For all I know, it's raining'. But it turns out these two constructions embed in different ways, in particular as parts of larger constructions like Wittgenstein's 'It might be raining and it's not' and Moore's 'It's raining and I don't know it', respectively. A variety of approaches have been developed to account for those differences. All approaches agree that both Moore sentences (...)
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