Results for 'Matthew Williamson'

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  1. Symmetry arguments against regular probability: A reply to recent objections.Matthew W. Parker - 2019 - European Journal for Philosophy of Science 9 (1):1-21.
    A probability distribution is regular if it does not assign probability zero to any possible event. While some hold that probabilities should always be regular, three counter-arguments have been posed based on examples where, if regularity holds, then perfectly similar events must have different probabilities. Howson and Benci et al. have raised technical objections to these symmetry arguments, but we see here that their objections fail. Howson says that Williamson’s “isomorphic” events are not in fact isomorphic, but Howson is (...)
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  2. Symmetry arguments against regular probability: A reply to recent objections.Matthew W. Parker - 2018 - European Journal for Philosophy of Science 9 (1):8.
    A probability distribution is regular if no possible event is assigned probability zero. While some hold that probabilities should always be regular, three counter-arguments have been posed based on examples where, if regularity holds, then perfectly similar events must have different probabilities. Howson (2017) and Benci et al. (2016) have raised technical objections to these symmetry arguments, but we see here that their objections fail. Howson says that Williamson’s (2007) “isomorphic” events are not in fact isomorphic, but Howson is (...)
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  3. More trouble for regular probabilitites.Matthew W. Parker - 2012
    In standard probability theory, probability zero is not the same as impossibility. But many have suggested that only impossible events should have probability zero. This can be arranged if we allow infinitesimal probabilities, but infinitesimals do not solve all of the problems. We will see that regular probabilities are not invariant over rigid transformations, even for simple, bounded, countable, constructive, and disjoint sets. Hence, regular chances cannot be determined by space-time invariant physical laws, and regular credences cannot satisfy seemingly reasonable (...)
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  4. Law-Abiding Causal Decision Theory.Timothy Luke Williamson & Alexander Sandgren - 2023 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 74 (4):899-920.
    In this paper we discuss how Causal Decision Theory should be modified to handle a class of problematic cases involving deterministic laws. Causal Decision Theory, as it stands, is problematically biased against your endorsing deterministic propositions (for example it tells you to deny Newtonian physics, regardless of how confident you are of its truth). Our response is that this is not a problem for Causal Decision Theory per se, but arises because of the standard method for assessing the truth of (...)
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  5. Chance, ability, and control.Matthew Mandelkern - forthcoming - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research.
    This paper concerns a controversy between two compelling and popular claims in the theory of ability. One is the claim that ability requires control. The other is the claim that success entails ability, that is, that φ-ing entails that you are able to φ. Since actually φ-ing obviously does not entail that φ is in your control, these two claims cannot both be true. I introduce a new form of evidence to help adjudicate this controversy: judgments about the possibility and (...)
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  6. Leadership After Virtue: MacIntyre’s Critique of Management Reconsidered.Matthew Sinnicks - 2018 - Journal of Business Ethics 147 (4):735-746.
    MacIntyre argues that management embodies emotivism, and thus is inherently amoral and manipulative. His claim that management is necessarily Weberian is, at best, outdated, and the notion that management aims to be neutral and value free is incorrect. However, new forms of management, and in particular the increased emphasis on leadership which emerged after MacIntyre’s critique was published, tend to support his central charge. Indeed, charismatic and transformational forms of leadership seem to embody emotivism to a greater degree than do (...)
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  7. The Just World Fallacy as a Challenge to the Business-As-Community Thesis.Matthew Sinnicks - 2020 - Business and Society 59 (6):1269-1292.
    The notion that business organizations are akin to Aristotelian political communities has been a central feature of research into virtue ethics in business. In this article, I begin by outlining this “community thesis” and go on to argue that psychological research into the “just world fallacy” presents it with a significant challenge. The just world fallacy undermines our ability to implement an Aristotelian conception of justice, to each as he or she is due, and imperils the relational equality required for (...)
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  8. Two purposes of knowledge-attribution and the contextualism debate.Matthew McGrath - 2015 - In David K. Henderson & John Greco (eds.), Epistemic Evaluation: Purposeful Epistemology. Oxford: Oxford University Press UK.
    In this chapter, we follow Edward Craig?s advice: ask what the concept of knowledge does for us and use our findings as clues about its application conditions. What a concept does for us is a matter of what we can do with it, and what we do with concepts is deploy them in thought and language. So, we will examine the purposes we have in attributing knowledge. This chapter examines two such purposes, agent evaluation and informant-suggestion, and brings the results (...)
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  9.  45
    Divine Madness in Plato’s Phaedrus.Matthew Shelton - 2024 - Apeiron 57 (2):245-264.
    Critics often suggest that Socrates’ portrait of the philosopher’s inspired madness in his second speech in Plato’s Phaedrus is incompatible with the other types of divine madness outlined in the same speech, namely poetic, prophetic, and purificatory madness. This incompatibility is frequently taken to show that Socrates’ characterisation of philosophers as mad is disingenuous or misleading in some way. While philosophical madness and the other types of divine madness are distinguished by the non-philosophical crowd’s different interpretations of them, I aim (...)
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  10. 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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  11. Looks and Perceptual Justification.Matthew McGrath - 2018 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 96 (1):110-133.
    Imagine I hold up a Granny Smith apple for all to see. You would thereby gain justified beliefs that it was green, that it was apple, and that it is a Granny Smith apple. Under classical foundationalism, such simple visual beliefs are mediately justified on the basis of reasons concerning your experience. Under dogmatism, some or all of these beliefs are justified immediately by your experience and not by reasons you possess. This paper argues for what I call the looks (...)
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  12. How to count biological minds: symbiosis, the free energy principle, and reciprocal multiscale integration.Matthew Sims - 2020 - Synthese 199 (1-2):2157-2179.
    The notion of a physiological individuals has been developed and applied in the philosophy of biology to understand symbiosis, an understanding of which is key to theorising about the major transition in evolution from multi-organismality to multi-cellularity. The paper begins by asking what such symbiotic individuals can help to reveal about a possible transition in the evolution of cognition. Such a transition marks the movement from cooperating individual biological cognizers to a functionally integrated cognizing unit. Somewhere along the way, did (...)
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  13. Quasi-Psychologism about Collective Intention.Matthew Rachar - 2021 - Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 24 (2):475-488.
    This paper argues that a class of popular views of collective intention, which I call “quasi-psychologism”, faces a problem explaining common intuitions about collective action. Views in this class hold that collective intentions are realized in or constituted by individual, mental, participatory intentions. I argue that this metaphysical commitment entails persistence conditions that are in tension with a purported obligation to notify co-actors before leaving a collective action attested to by participants in experimental research about the interpersonal normativity of collective (...)
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  14. Ideology and Intersectionality.Matthew McKeever - 2024 - In Ernest Lepore & Luvell Anderson (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Applied Philosophy of Language. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
    Analytic philosophers increasingly make reference to the concept of ideology to think about how representational structures can lead to oppression, and argue that the distinctively pernicious functioning of things like propaganda and generic generalizations need to be explained in terms of ideology. The aim of this paper is two-fold. First, it aims to serve as an introduction to (some of) the best contemporary work on ideology in the analytic tradition. Second, it proposes a novel challenge for any such theory. The (...)
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  15. Deepfakes, Fake Barns, and Knowledge from Videos.Taylor Matthews - 2023 - Synthese 201 (2):1-18.
    Recent develops in AI technology have led to increasingly sophisticated forms of video manipulation. One such form has been the advent of deepfakes. Deepfakes are AI-generated videos that typically depict people doing and saying things they never did. In this paper, I demonstrate that there is a close structural relationship between deepfakes and more traditional fake barn cases in epistemology. Specifically, I argue that deepfakes generate an analogous degree of epistemic risk to that which is found in traditional cases. Given (...)
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  16. Set Size and the Part–Whole Principle.Matthew W. Parker - 2013 - Review of Symbolic Logic (4):1-24.
    Recent work has defended “Euclidean” theories of set size, in which Cantor’s Principle (two sets have equally many elements if and only if there is a one-to-one correspondence between them) is abandoned in favor of the Part-Whole Principle (if A is a proper subset of B then A is smaller than B). It has also been suggested that Gödel’s argument for the unique correctness of Cantor’s Principle is inadequate. Here we see from simple examples, not that Euclidean theories of set (...)
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  17.  9
    Blameworthiness and Causal Outcomes.Matthew Talbert - forthcoming - Erkenntnis.
    It is widely held that whether a person is morally responsible for an outcome partly depends on whether certain causal relations obtain between that person and the outcome. This paper argues that, regardless of whether the preceding claim about moral responsibility is true, moral blameworthiness is independent of such causal considerations. This conclusion is motivated by considering cases from Carolina Sartorio and Sara Bernstein. The causal structures of these cases are complex. Sartorio and Bernstein believe that reaching conclusions about moral (...)
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  18. Embodied remembering.Kellie Williamson & John Sutton - 2014 - In Lawrence A. Shapiro (ed.), The Routledge Handbook of Embodied Cognition. New York: Routledge. pp. 315--325.
    Experiences of embodied remembering are familiar and diverse. We settle bodily into familiar chairs or find our way easily round familiar rooms. We inhabit our own kitchens or cars or workspaces effectively and comfortably, and feel disrupted when our habitual and accustomed objects or technologies change or break or are not available. Hearing a particular song can viscerally bring back either one conversation long ago, or just the urge to dance. Some people explicitly use their bodies to record, store, or (...)
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  19. Many Paths to Anticipatory Behavior: Anticipatory Model Acquisition Across Phylogenetic and Ontogenetic Timescales.Matthew Sims - 2023 - Biological Theory 1 (2):114-133.
    Under the assumption that anticipatory models are required for anticipatory behavior, an important question arises about the different manners in which organisms acquire anticipatory models. This article aims to articulate four different non-exhaustive ways that anticipatory models might possibly be acquired over both phylogenetic and ontogenetic timescales and explore the relationships among them. To articulate these different model-acquisition mechanisms, four schematics will be introduced, each of which represents a particular acquisition structure that can be used for the purposes of comparison, (...)
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  20. A solution to Karttunen's Problem.Matthew Mandelkern - 2017 - In Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung 21.
    There is a difference between the conditions in which one can felicitously assert a ‘must’-claim versus those in which one can use the corresponding non-modal claim. But it is difficult to pin down just what this difference amounts to. And it is even harder to account for this difference, since assertions of 'Must ϕ' and assertions of ϕ alone seem to have the same basic goal: namely, coming to agreement that [[ϕ]] is true. In this paper I take on this (...)
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  21. Well-Being and Meaning in Life.Matthew Hammerton - 2022 - Canadian Journal of Philosophy 52 (5):573-587.
    Many philosophers now see meaning in life as a key evaluative category that stands alongside well-being and moral goodness. Our lives are assessed not only by how well they go for us and how morally good they are, but also by their meaningfulness. In this article, I raise a challenge to this view. Theories of meaning in life closely resemble theories of well-being, and there is a suspicion that the former collapse into the latter. I develop this challenge showing that (...)
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  22. 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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  23. Embodied collaboration in small groups.Kellie Williamson & John Sutton - 2014 - In C. T. Wolfe (ed.), Brain Theory: Essays in Critical Neurophilosophy. Springer. pp. 107-133.
    Being social creatures in a complex world, we do things together. We act jointly. While cooperation, in its broadest sense, can involve merely getting out of each other’s way, or refusing to deceive other people, it is also essential to human nature that it involves more active forms of collaboration and coordination (Tomasello 2009; Sterelny 2012). We collaborate with others in many ordinary activities which, though at times similar to those of other animals, take unique and diverse cultural and psychological (...)
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  24. On the Pragmatics of Deep Disagreement.Matthew Shields - 2018 - Topoi (5):999-1015.
    In this paper, I present two tools that help shed light on deep disagreements and their epistemological consequences. First, I argue that we are best off construing deep disagreements as disagreements over conflicting understandings of certain concepts. More specifically, I suggest that deep disagreements are disagreements over how to understand concepts that play what Michael Friedman calls a “constitutive” role for speakers. Second, I argue that we need a better understanding of what speakers are doing when they engage in deep (...)
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  25. Normativity in joint action.Javier Gomez-Lavin & Matthew Rachar - 2019 - Mind and Language 34 (1):97-120.
    The debate regarding the nature of joint action has come to a stalemate due to a dependence on intuitional methods. Normativists, such as Margaret Gilbert, argue that action-relative normative relations are inherent in joint action, while non-normativists, such as Michael Bratman, claim that there are minimal cases of joint action without normative relations. In this work, we describe the first experimental examinations of these intuitions, and report the results of six studies that weigh in favor of the normativist paradigm. Philosophical (...)
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  26. Practical reasoning and the concept of knowledge.Matthew Weiner - 2009 - In Adrian Haddock, Alan Millar & Duncan Pritchard (eds.), Epistemic Value. Oxford, GB: Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 163--182.
    Suppose we consider knowledge to be valuable because of the role known propositions play in practical reasoning. This, I argue, does not provide a reason to think that knowledge is valuable in itself. Rather, it provides a reason to think that true belief is valuable from one standpoint, and that justified belief is valuable from another standpoint, and similarly for other epistemic concepts. The value of the concept of knowledge is that it provides an economical way of talking about many (...)
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  27. Remembering trauma in epistemology.Matthew Frise - 2024 - Philosophy and the Mind Sciences.
    This paper explores some surprising effects of psychological trauma on memory and develops the puzzle of observer memory for trauma. Memory for trauma tends to have a third-person perspective, or observer perspective. But it appears observer memory, by having a novel visual point of view, tends to misrepresent the past. And many find it plausible that if a memory type tends to misrepresent, it cannot yield knowledge of, or justification for believing, details of past events. But it is also plausible (...)
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  28. The covid-19 pandemic and the Bounds of grief.Louise Richardson, Matthew Ratcliffe, Becky Millar & Eleanor Byrne - 2021 - Think 20 (57):89-101.
    ABSTRACTThis article addresses the question of whether certain experiences that originate in causes other than bereavement are properly termed ‘grief’. To do so, we focus on widespread experiences of grief that have been reported during the Covid-19 pandemic. We consider two potential objections to a more permissive use of the term: grief is, by definition, a response to a death; grief is subject to certain norms that apply only to the case of bereavement. Having shown that these objections are unconvincing, (...)
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  29. Aristotle on the Utility and Choiceworthiness of Friends.Matthew D. Walker - 2014 - Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie 96 (2):151-182.
    Aristotle’s views on the choiceworthiness of friends might seem both internally inconsistent and objectionably instrumentalizing. On the one hand, Aristotle maintains that perfect friends or virtue friends are choiceworthy and lovable for their own sake, and not merely for the sake of further ends. On the other hand, in Nicomachean Ethics IX.9, Aristotle appears somehow to account for the choiceworthiness of such friends by reference to their utility as sources of a virtuous agent’s robust self-awareness. I examine Aristotle’s views on (...)
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  30. The Functions of Apollodorus.Matthew D. Walker - 2016 - In Mauro Tulli & Michael Erler (eds.), The Selected Papers of the Tenth Symposium Platonicum. pp. 110-116.
    In Plato’s Symposium, the mysterious Apollodorus recounts to an unnamed comrade, and to us, Aristodemus’ story of just what happened at Agathon’s drinking party. Since Apollodorus did not attend the party, however, it is unclear what relevance he could have to our understanding of Socrates’ speech, or to the Alcibiadean “satyr and silenic drama” (222d) that follows. The strangeness of Apollodorus is accentuated by his recession into the background after only two Stephanus pages. What difference—if any—does Apollodorus make to the (...)
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  31. MacIntyre and Business Ethics.Matthew Sinnicks - 2017 - In Alex Michalos and Debora Poff (ed.), Encyclopedia of Business and Professional Ethics. Springer. pp. 1278-1282.
    Entry on MacIntyre and Business Ethics forthcoming in Poff, D. C. & Michalos, A. C. (Eds.) Encyclopedia of Business and Professional Ethics. Springer.
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  32. How Narrow is Aristotle's Contemplative Ideal?Matthew D. Walker - 2017 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 94 (3):558-583.
    In Nicomachean Ethics X.7–8, Aristotle defends a striking view about the good for human beings. According to Aristotle, the single happiest way of life is organized around philosophical contemplation. According to the narrowness worry, however, Aristotle's contemplative ideal is unduly Procrustean, restrictive, inflexible, and oblivious of human diversity. In this paper, I argue that Aristotle has resources for responding to the narrowness worry, and that his contemplative ideal can take due account of human diversity.
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  33. Reconciling the Stoic and the Sceptic: Hume on Philosophy as a Way of Life and the Plurality of Happy Lives.Matthew Walker - 2013 - British Journal for the History of Philosophy 21 (5):879 - 901.
    On the one hand, Hume accepts the view -- which he attributes primarily to Stoicism -- that there exists a determinate best and happiest life for human beings, a way of life led by a figure whom Hume calls "the true philosopher." On the other hand, Hume accepts that view -- which he attributes to Scepticism -- that there exists a vast plurality of good and happy lives, each potentially equally choiceworthy. In this paper, I reconcile Hume's apparently conflicting commitments: (...)
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  34. Pragmatic encroachment: It's not just about knowledge.Jeremy Fantl & Matthew McGrath - 2012 - Episteme 9 (1):27-42.
    There is pragmatic encroachment on some epistemic status just in case whether a proposition has that status for a subject depends not only on the subject's epistemic position with respect to the proposition, but also on features of the subject's non-epistemic, practical environment. Discussions of pragmatic encroachment usually focus on knowledge. Here we argue that, barring infallibilism, there is pragmatic encroachment on what is arguably a more fundamental epistemic status – the status a proposition has when it is warranted enough (...)
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  35. The Epistemology of Interpersonal Relations.Matthew A. Benton - 2024 - Noûs:1-20.
    What is it to know someone? Epistemologists rarely take up this question, though recent developments make such inquiry possible and desirable. This paper advances an account of how such interpersonal knowledge goes beyond mere propositional and qualitative knowledge about someone, giving a central place to second-personal treatment. It examines what such knowledge requires, and what makes it distinctive within epistemology as well as socially. It assesses its theoretic value for several issues in moral psychology, epistemic injustice, and philosophy of mind. (...)
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  36. The Fundamental Divisions in Ethics.Matthew Hammerton - 2022 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy:1-24.
    What are the fundamental divisions in ethics? Which divisions capture the most important and basic options in moral theorizing? In this article, I reject the ‘Textbook View’ which takes the tripartite division between consequentialism, deontology, and virtue ethics to be fundamental. Instead, I suggest that moral theories are fundamentally divided into three independent divisions, which I call the neutral/relative division, the normative priority division, and the maximizing division. I argue that this account of the fundamental divisions of ethics better captures (...)
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  37. Hedged Assertion.Matthew A. Benton & Peter Van Elswyk - 2018 - In Sanford C. Goldberg (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Assertion. Oxford University Press. pp. 245-263.
    Surprisingly little has been written about hedged assertion. Linguists often focus on semantic or syntactic theorizing about, for example, grammatical evidentials or epistemic modals, but pay far less attention to what hedging does at the level of action. By contrast, philosophers have focused extensively on normative issues regarding what epistemic position is required for proper assertion, yet they have almost exclusively considered unqualified declaratives. This essay considers the linguistic and normative issues side-by-side. We aim to bring some order and clarity (...)
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  38. Concern Across Scales: a biologically inspired embodied artificial intelligence.Matthew Sims - 2022 - Frontiers in Neurorobotics 1 (Bio A.I. - From Embodied Cogniti).
    Intelligence in current AI research is measured according to designer-assigned tasks that lack any relevance for an agent itself. As such, tasks and their evaluation reveal a lot more about our intelligence than the possible intelligence of agents that we design and evaluate. As a possible first step in remedying this, this article introduces the notion of “self-concern,” a property of a complex system that describes its tendency to bring about states that are compatible with its continued self-maintenance. Self-concern, as (...)
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  39. Trust of Science as a Public Collective Good.Matthew H. Slater & Emily R. Scholfield - 2022 - Philosophy of Science 89 (5):1044-1053.
    The COVID-19 pandemic and global climate change crisis remind us that widespread trust in the products of the scientific enterprise is vital to the health and safety of the global community. Insofar as appropriate responses to these crises require us to trust that enterprise, cultivating a healthier trust relationship between science and the public may be considered as a collective public good. While it might appear that scientists can contribute to this good by taking more initiative to communicate their work (...)
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  40. Knowledge, Hope, and Fallibilism.Matthew A. Benton - 2021 - Synthese 198:1673-1689.
    Hope, in its propositional construction "I hope that p," is compatible with a stated chance for the speaker that not-p. On fallibilist construals of knowledge, knowledge is compatible with a chance of being wrong, such that one can know that p even though there is an epistemic chance for one that not-p. But self-ascriptions of propositional hope that p seem to be incompatible, in some sense, with self-ascriptions of knowing whether p. Data from conjoining hope self-ascription with outright assertions, with (...)
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  41. Aristotle, Isocrates, and Philosophical Progress: Protrepticus 6, 40.15-20/B55.Matthew D. Walker - 2020 - History of Philosophy & Logical Analysis 23 (1):197-224.
    In fragments of the lost Protrepticus, preserved in Iamblichus, Aristotle responds to Isocrates’ worries about the excessive demandingness of theoretical philosophy. Contrary to Isocrates, Aristotle holds that such philosophy is generally feasible for human beings. In defense of this claim, Aristotle offers the progress argument, which appeals to early Greek philosophers’ rapid success in attaining exact understanding. In this paper, I explore and evaluate this argument. After making clarificatory exegetical points, I examine the argument’s premises in light of pressing worries (...)
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  42. Two more for the knowledge account of assertion.Matthew Benton - 2011 - Analysis 71 (4):684-687.
    The Knowledge Norm or Knowledge Account of Assertion (KAA) has received added support recently from data on prompting assertion (Turri 2010) and from a refinement suggesting that assertions ought to express knowledge (Turri 2011). This paper adds another argument from parenthetical positioning, and then argues that KAA’s unified explanation of some of the earliest data (from Moorean conjunctions) adduced in its favor recommends KAA over its rivals.
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  43. Determinism, Counterfactuals, and Decision.Alexander Sandgren & Timothy Luke Williamson - 2021 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 99 (2):286-302.
    Rational agents face choices, even when taking seriously the possibility of determinism. Rational agents also follow the advice of Causal Decision Theory (CDT). Although many take these claims to be well-motivated, there is growing pressure to reject one of them, as CDT seems to go badly wrong in some deterministic cases. We argue that deterministic cases do not undermine a counterfactual model of rational deliberation, which is characteristic of CDT. Rather, they force us to distinguish between counterfactuals that are relevant (...)
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  44. Epistemology Personalized.Matthew A. Benton - 2017 - Philosophical Quarterly 67 (269):813-834.
    Recent epistemology has focused almost exclusively on propositional knowledge. This paper considers an underexplored area of epistemology, namely knowledge of persons: if propositional knowledge is a state of mind, consisting in a subject's attitude to a (true) proposition, the account developed here thinks of interpersonal knowledge as a state of minds, involving a subject's attitude to another (existing) subject. This kind of knowledge is distinct from propositional knowledge, but it exhibits a gradability characteristic of context-sensitivity, and admits of shifty thresholds. (...)
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  45. Gricean Quality.Matthew A. Benton - 2016 - Noûs 50 (4):689-703.
    Some philosophers oppose recent arguments for the Knowledge Norm of Assertion by claiming that assertion, being an act much like any other, will be subject to norms governing acts generally, such as those articulated by Grice for the purpose of successful, cooperative endeavours. But in fact, Grice is a traitor to their cause; or rather, they are his dissenters, not his disciples. Drawing on Grice's unpublished papers, I show that he thought of asserting as a special linguistic act in need (...)
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  46. 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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  47. Alignment and commitment in joint action.Matthew Rachar - 2018 - Philosophical Psychology 31 (6):831-849.
    Important work on alignment systems has been applied to philosophical work on joint action by Tollefsen and Dale. This paper builds from and expands on their work. The first aim of the paper is to spell out how the empirical research on alignment may be integrated into philosophical theories of joint action. The second aim is then to develop a successful characterization of joint action, which spells out the difference between genuine joint action and simpler forms of coordination based on (...)
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  48. 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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  49.  56
    Morality, Friendship, and Collective Action.Javier Gomez-Lavin & Matthew Rachar - 2024 - Journal of Social Ontology 10.
    This paper uses the tools of experimental philosophy to examine the nature of interpersonal normativity in collective action, focusing on cases of immoral collective action and collective action by friends. The results of our two studies, which expand on recent empirical interventions into longstanding debates in social ontology, demonstrate that according to our everyday judgments there are interpersonal obligations in cases of collective action, even when immoral, and that, while friendship elicits judgments of togetherness, it does not affect the norms (...)
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  50. 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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