Results for 'Melissa K. Ward'

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  1. Understanding “Understanding” in Public Understanding of Science.Joanna K. Huxster, Matthew Slater, Jason Leddington, Victor LoPiccolo, Jeffrey Bergman, Mack Jones, Caroline McGlynn, Nicolas Diaz, Nathan Aspinall, Julia Bresticker & Melissa Hopkins - 2017 - Public Understanding of Science 28:1-16.
    This study examines the conflation of terms such as “knowledge” and “understanding” in peer-reviewed literature, and tests the hypothesis that little current research clearly distinguishes between importantly distinct epistemic states. Two sets of data are presented from papers published in the journal Public Understanding of Science. In the first set, the digital text analysis tool, Voyant, is used to analyze all papers published in 2014 for the use of epistemic success terms. In the second set of data, all papers published (...)
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  2.  73
    Searching for the Divine in Plato and Aristotle: Philosophical Theoria and Traditional Practice. By Julie K. Ward[REVIEW]Nevim Borçin - 2024 - Classical World: A Quarterly Journal on Antiquity 117 (4):452-454.
    In this book, Julie K. Ward examines the concept of theoria within both philosophical and what she terms ‘traditional’ frameworks. Her primary objective is to enhance the ongoing philosophical discussion surrounding Plato and Aristotle’s accounts of theoria by situating them within the context of the earlier practice of traditional theoria. By understanding the cultural ground from which these philosophical accounts spring, Ward rightly asserts that her work enables a deeper and more sustained critical analysis of both philosophers’ theories (...)
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  3. O Pensamento Social dos Estados Unidos: uma abordagem histórica.Emanuel Isaque Cordeiro da Silva - manuscript
    HISTÓRIA DA SOCIOLOGIA: O DESENVOLVIMENTO DA SOCIOLOGIA I -/- A SOCIOLOGIA NOS ESTADOS UNIDOS -/- -/- HISTORY OF SOCIOLOGY: THE DEVELOPMENT OF SOCIOLOGY I -/- SOCIOLOGY IN UNITED STATES -/- -/- Emanuel Isaque Cordeiro da Silva – IFPE-BJ, CAP-UFPE e UFRPE. E-mails: [email protected] e [email protected] WhatsApp: (82)9.8143-8399. -/- -/- PREMISSA -/- A Sociologia nos Estados Unidos desenvolveu-se no contexto de dois grandes eventos que marcaram profundamente a história do país. -/- O primeiro foi a Guerra de Secessão (também conhecida como (...)
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  4. Considerações legais e forenses do aborto infeccioso bovino na “Saúde Única”: Revisão (18th edition).Jackson Barros Do Amaral, Vinícius José Moreira Nogueira & Wendell da Luz Silva (eds.) - 2024 - Londrina: Pubvet.
    In Brazil, the social demand for veterinary expertise is growing. However, there is still a shortage of professionals trained in this area to apply specific knowledge to each case. Studies and research into forensic veterinary medicine are necessary for veterinary experts to assist in investigations and legal proceedings. Veterinary medicine has subjects on its curriculum that cover the knowledge needed to apply in the fields of animal health, public health and the environment. The interaction between human and veterinary medicine, as (...)
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  5.  53
    Claims of Need in Property Law and Politics.Patrick Cockburn - 2016 - Theoria: A Journal of Social and Political Theory 63 (146):56-74.
    Both courts of law and political theorists have grappled with the problem of giving the concept of ‘need’ a place in our reasoning about the rights and wrongs of property regimes. But in the U.K., legal changes in the last fifteen years have eroded the legal possibilities for striking some compromise between the claims of the needy and the rights of property owners. Against this backdrop this article compares three theoretical accounts of how the fact of human need should impact (...)
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  6. Deontic Modality and the Semantics of Choice.Melissa Fusco - 2015 - Philosophers' Imprint 15.
    I propose a unified solution to two puzzles: Ross's puzzle and free choice permission. I begin with a pair of cases from the decision theory literature illustrating the phenomenon of act dependence, where what an agent ought to do depends on what she does. The notion of permissibility distilled from these cases forms the basis for my analysis of 'may' and 'ought'. This framework is then combined with a generalization of the classical semantics for disjunction — equivalent to Boolean disjunction (...)
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  7. Reflection, Enlightenment, and the Significance of Spontaneity in Kant.Melissa McBay Merritt - 2009 - British Journal for the History of Philosophy 17 (5):981-1010.
    Existing interpretations of Kant’s appeal to the spontaneity of the mind focus almost exclusively on the discussion of pure apperception in the Transcendental Deduction. The risk of such a strategy lies in the considerable degree of abstraction at which the argument of the Deduction is carried out: existing interpretations fail to reconnect adequately with any ground-level perspective on our cognitive lives. This paper works in the opposite direction. Drawing on Kant’s suggestion that the most basic picture we can have of (...)
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  8. 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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  9. "Everyone has a price at which he sells himself": Epictetus and Kant on Self-Respect.Melissa Merritt - forthcoming - In Kant and Stoic Ethics. Cambridge University Press.
    “Everyone has a price at which he sells himself”: Immanuel Kant quotes this remark in the 1793 _Religion within the Bounds of Reason Alone_, attributing it to “a member of English Parliament”. I argue, however, that the context of the quotation in the _Religion_ alludes to the arresting pedagogical practices of the Stoic philosopher Epictetus, who famously said that “different people sell themselves at different prices” (Discourses 1.2). I argue that there are two sides of Epictetus’s pedagogical strategies: a jolting (...)
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  10.  96
    The Ancient Background of Kant's Conception of Virtue.Melissa Merritt - forthcoming - In Wolfram Gobsch & Thomas Land (eds.), The Aristotelian Kant, ed. by W. Gobsch and T. Land, Cambridge University Press. Cambridge UK: Cambridge UP.
    Scholars have widely assumed that the aspects of Kant’s virtue theory that nod to ancient ethics must be cashed out with reference to Aristotle. Interpreters then worry that Kant's conception of virtue as a “moral strength of will” (Doctrine of Virtue, 6:405) must be tantamount to Aristotle’s notion of “continence” (enkrateia) — the state of a person who knows the good, and acts accordingly, but must overcome strong countervailing impulses in order to do so. The result plays into caricatures of (...)
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  11. Kant and Stoic Ethics.Melissa Merritt (ed.) - forthcoming - Cambridge University Press.
    The volume brings together ancient-philosophy specialists and Kant scholars to advance our understanding of the significance of Stoicism for Immanuel Kant's ethical thought. Kant and Stoic Ethics -/- Contents: -/- Introduction -/- 1 Ethical Formulae in Ancient Stoicism — Brad Inwood -/- 2 Duties and Permissible Actions in the Early Stoics and Kant — Iakovos Vasiliou -/- 3 The Stoics and Kant on the Motive of Duty — Jacob Klein -/- 4 Kant on the Unity and Plurality of the Virtues (...)
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  12. 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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  13. Kant on Reflection and Virtue.Melissa Merritt - 2018 - Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
    There can be no doubt that Kant thought we should be reflective: we ought to care to make up our own minds about how things are and what is worth doing. Philosophical objections to the Kantian reflective ideal have centred on concerns about the excessive control that the reflective person is supposed to exert over her own mental life, and Kantians who feel the force of these objections have recently drawn attention to Kant’s conception of moral virtue as it is (...)
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  14. Science and the Synthetic Method of the Critique of Pure Reason.Melissa McBay Merritt - 2006 - Review of Metaphysics 59 (3):517-539.
    Kant maintains that his Critique of Pure Reason follows a “synthetic method” which he distinguishes from the analytic method of the Prolegomena by saying that the Critique “rests on no other science” and “takes nothing as given except reason itself”. The paper presents an account of the synthetic method of the Critique, showing how it is related to Kant’s conception of the Critique as the “science of an a priori judging reason”. Moreover, the author suggests, understanding its synthetic method sheds (...)
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  15. 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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  16. 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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  17. Patient autonomy and withholding information.Melissa Rees - 2023 - Bioethics 37 (3):256-264.
    Disclosure in clinical practice is aimed at promoting patient autonomy, usually culminating in patient choice (e.g., to consent to an operation or not, or between different medications). In medical ethics, there is an implicit background assumption that knowing more about (X) automatically translates to greater, or more genuine, autonomy with respect to one's choices involving (X). I challenge this assumption by arguing that in rare cases, withholding information can promote a patient's autonomy (understood as the capacity for rational choice in (...)
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  18. 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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  19. 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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  20. Phenomenology as Radical Reflection.Dave Ward - 2021 - In Heather Logue & Louise Richardson (eds.), Purpose and Procedure in Philosophy of Perception. New York: Oxford University Press. pp. 234-257.
    What does it mean to adopt a phenomenological approach when doing philosophy of perception? And what form should such an approach take? I address these questions by first distinguishing three different ways of drawing philosophical conclusions based on phenomenological reflection: 'Humean' phenomenology, which attempts to discern the structure of perceptual experience via reflection on its surface properties; 'Kantian' phenomenology, which aims to provide a priori arguments about the structure perceptual experience must have if it is to possess universally agreed upon (...)
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  21. Mendelssohn and Kant on Virtue as a Skill.Melissa McBay Merritt - 2020 - In Ellen Fridland & Carlotta Pavese (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Skill and Expertise. New York, NY: Routledge. pp. 88-99.
    The idea that virtue can be profitably conceived as a certain sort of skill has a long history. My aim is to examine a neglected episode in this history — one that focuses on the pivotal role that Moses Mendelssohn played in rehabilitating the skill model of virtue for the German rationalist tradition, and Immanuel Kant’s subsequent, yet significantly qualified, endorsement of the idea. Mendelssohn celebrates a certain automatism in the execution of skill, and takes this feature to be instrumental (...)
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  22. 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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  23. 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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  24. Absolution of a Causal Decision Theorist.Melissa Fusco - 2024 - Noûs 58 (3):616-643.
    I respond to a dilemma for Causal Decision Theory (CDT) under determinism, posed in Adam Elga's paper “Confessions of a Causal Decision Theorist”. The treatment I present highlights (i) the status of laws as predictors, and (ii) the consequences of decision dependence, which arises natively out of Jeffrey Conditioning and CDT's characteristic equation. My argument leverages decision dependence to work around a key assumption of Elga's proof: to wit, that in the two problems he presents, the CDTer must employ subjunctive‐suppositional (...)
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  25. Active Sympathetic Participation: Reconsidering Kant's Duty of Sympathy.Melissa Seymour Fahmy - 2009 - Kantian Review 14 (1):31-52.
    In the Doctrine of Virtue Kant divides duties of love into three categories: beneficent activity , gratitude and Teilnehmung – commonly referred to as the duty of sympathy . In this paper I will argue that the content and scope of the third duty of love has been underestimated by both critics and defenders of Kant's ethical theory. The account which pervades the secondary literature maintains that the third duty of love includes only two components: an obligation to make use (...)
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  26. The Moral Source of the Kantian Sublime.Melissa McBay Merritt - 2012 - In Timothy M. Costelloe (ed.), The sublime: from antiquity to the present. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
    A crucial feature of Kant's critical-period writing on the sublime is its grounding in moral psychology. Whereas in the pre-critical writings, the sublime is viewed as an inherently exhausting state of mind, in the critical-period writings it is presented as one that gains strength the more it is sustained. I account for this in terms of Kantian moral psychology, and explain that, for Kant, sound moral disposition is conceived as a sublime state of mind.
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  27. Agential Free Choice.Melissa Fusco - 2020 - Journal of Philosophical Logic 50 (1):57-87.
    The Free Choice effect—whereby \\) seems to entail both \ and \—has traditionally been characterized as a phenomenon affecting the deontic modal ‘may’. This paper presents an extension of the semantic account of free choice defended by Fusco to the agentive modal ‘can’, the ‘can’ which, intuitively, describes an agent’s powers. On this account, free choice is a nonspecific de re phenomenon that—unlike typical cases—affects disjunction. I begin by sketching a model of inexact ability, which grounds a modal approach to (...)
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  28. 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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  29. Kant on the Pleasures of Understanding.Melissa McBay Merritt - 2014 - In Alix Cohen (ed.), Kant on Emotion and Value. London: Palgrave-Macmillan. pp. 126-145.
    Why did Kant write the Critique of Judgment, and why did he say that his analysis of the judgment of taste — his technical term for our enjoyment of beauty — is the most important part of it? Kant claims that his analysis of taste “reveals a property of our faculty of cognition that without this analysis would have remained unknown” (KU §8, 5:213). The clue lies in Kant’s view that while taste is an aesthetic, and non-cognitive, mode of judgment, (...)
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  30. Analysis in the critique of pure reason.Melissa McBay Merritt - 2007 - Kantian Review 12 (1):61-89.
    The paper argues that existing interpretations of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason as an "analysis of experience" (e.g., those of Kitcher and Strawson) fail because they do not properly appreciate the method of the work. The author argues that the Critique provides an analysis of the faculty of reason, and counts as an analysis of experience only in a derivative sense.
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  31. Kant on Enlightened Moral Pedagogy.Melissa Mcbay Merritt - 2011 - Southern Journal of Philosophy 49 (3):227-53.
    For Kant, the ideal of enlightenment is most fundamentally expressed as a self-developed soundness of judgment. But what does this mean when the judgment at issue is practical, i.e., concerns the good to be brought about through action? I argue that the moral context places special demands on the ideal of enlightenment. This is revealed through an interpretation of Kant’s prescription for moral pedagogy in the Critique of Practical Reason. The goal of the pedagogy is to cultivate the moral disposition, (...)
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  32. Love, Respect, and Individuals: Murdoch as a Guide to Kantian Ethics.Melissa McBay Merritt - 2017 - European Journal of Philosophy 25 (4):1844-1863.
    I reconsider the relation between love and respect in Kantian ethics, taking as my guide Iris Murdoch's view of love as the fundamental moral attitude and a kind of attention to individuals. It is widely supposed that Kantian ethics disregards individuals, since we don't respect individuals but the universal quality of personhood they instantiate. We need not draw this conclusion if we recognise that Kant and Murdoch share a view about the centrality of love to virtue. We can then see (...)
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  33. ΛCDM and MOND: A debate about models or theory?Melissa Jacquart - 2021 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 89 (C):226-234.
    The debate between ΛCDM and MOND is often cast in terms of competing gravitational theories. However, recent philosophical discussion suggests that the ΛCDM–MOND debate demonstrates the challenges of multiscale modeling in the context of cosmological scales. I extend this discussion and explore what happens when the debate is thought to be about modeling rather than about theory, offering a model-focused interpretation of the ΛCDM–MOND debate. This analysis shows how a model-focused interpretation of the debate provides a better understanding of challenges (...)
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  34. Nature, corruption, and freedom: Stoic ethics in Kant's Religion.Melissa Merritt - 2021 - European Journal of Philosophy 29 (1):3-24.
    Kant’s account of “the radical evil in human nature” in the 1793 Religion within the Bounds of Reason Alone is typically interpreted as a reworking of the Augustinian doctrine of original sin. But Kant doesn’t talk about Augustine explicitly there, and if he is rehabilitating the doctrine of original sin, the result is not obviously Augustinian. Instead Kant talks about Stoic ethics in a pair of passages on either end of his account of radical evil, and leaves other clues that (...)
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  35. Are Clusters Races? A Discussion of the Rhetorical Appropriation of Rosenberg et al.’s “Genetic Structure of Human Populations”.Melissa Wills - 2017 - Philosophy, Theory, and Practice in Biology 9 (12).
    Noah Rosenberg et al.'s 2002 article “Genetic Structure of Human Populations” reported that multivariate genomic analysis of a large cell line panel yielded reproducible groupings (clusters) suggestive of individuals' geographical origins. The paper has been repeatedly cited as evidence that traditional notions of race have a biological basis, a claim its authors do not make. Critics of this misinterpretation have often suggested that it follows from interpreters' personal biases skewing the reception of an objective piece of scientific writing. I contend, (...)
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  36. 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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  37. Free choice permission and the counterfactuals of pragmatics.Melissa Fusco - 2014 - Linguistics and Philosophy 37 (4):275-290.
    This paper addresses a little puzzle with a surprisingly long pedigree and a surprisingly large wake: the puzzle of Free Choice Permission. I begin by presenting a popular sketch of a pragmatic solution to the puzzle, due to Kratzer and Shimoyama, which has received a good deal of discussion, endorsement and elaboration in recent work :535–590, 2006; Fox, in: Sauerland and Stateva Presupposition and implicature in compositional semantics, 2007; Geurts, Mind Lang 24:51–79, 2009; von Fintel, Central APA session on Deontic (...)
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  38. Varieties of Reflection in Kant's Logic.Melissa McBay Merritt - 2015 - British Journal for the History of Philosophy 23 (3):478-501.
    For Kant, ‘reflection’ is a technical term with a range of senses. I focus here on the senses of reflection that come to light in Kant's account of logic, and then bring the results to bear on the distinction between ‘logical’ and ‘transcendental’ reflection that surfaces in the Amphiboly chapter of the Critique of Pure Reason. Although recent commentary has followed similar cues, I suggest that it labours under a blind spot, as it neglects Kant's distinction between ‘pure’ and ‘applied’ (...)
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  39. 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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  40. Practical Reason and Respect for Persons.Melissa McBay Merritt - 2017 - Kantian Review 22 (1):53-79.
    My project is to reconsider the Kantian conception of practical reason. Some Kantians think that practical reasoning must be more active than theoretical reasoning, on the putative grounds that such reasoning need not contend with what is there anyway, independently of its exercise. Behind that claim stands the thesis that practical reason is essentially efficacious. I accept the efficacy principle, but deny that it underwrites this inference about practical reason. My inquiry takes place against the background of recent Kantian metaethical (...)
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  41. Kant and Psychological Monism: the Case of Inclination.Melissa Merritt - forthcoming - In James Conant & Jonas Held (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of German Idealism and Analytic Philosophy. Palgrave MacMillan.
    It is widely assumed that Kant’s moral psychology draws from the dualist tradition of Plato and Aristotle, which takes there to be distinct rational and non-rational parts of the soul. My aim is to challenge the air of obviousness that psychological dualism enjoys in neo-Kantian moral psychology, specifically in regard to Tamar Schapiro’s account of the nature of inclination. I argue that Kant’s own account of inclination instead provides evidence of his commitment to psychological monism, the idea that the mentality (...)
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  42. Psychopathic Personality Traits and Iowa Gambling Task Performance in Incarcerated Offenders.Melissa A. Hughesa, Mairead C. Dolan, Jennifer S. Trueblood & Julie C. Stout - 2015 - Psychiatry, Psychology and Law 22 (1):134-144.
    There is a paucity of research on how psychopathy relates to decision-making. In this study, we assessed the relationship between affective decision-making and psychopathic personality. A sample of prisoners (n D 49) was characterized in terms of psychopathic traits using the Psychopathic Checklist: Screening Version (PCL:SV). Decision-making was assessed using the Iowa Gambling Task (IGT). Higher levels of psychopathy related to more advantageous choices (p D .003). Also counter-intuitively, higher levels of antisocial traits (facet 4) predicted advantageous choices during the (...)
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  43. The Social Epistemology of Clinical Placebos.Melissa Rees - 2024 - Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 49 (3):233-245.
    Many extant theories of placebo focus on their causal structure wherein placebo effects are those that originate from select features of the therapy (e.g., client expectations or “incidental” features like size and shape). Although such accounts can distinguish placebos from standard medical treatments, they cannot distinguish placebos from everyday occurrences, for example, when positive feedback improves our performance on a task. Providing a social-epistemological account of a treatment context can rule out such occurrences, and furthermore reveal a new way to (...)
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  44. Feeling and Orientation in Action: A Reply to Alix Cohen.Melissa M. Merritt - 2021 - Kantian Review 51 (5):329-350.
    Alix Cohen argues that the function of feeling in Kantian psychology is to appraise and orient activity. Thus she sees feeling and agency as importantly connected by Kant’s lights. I endorse this broader claim, but argue that feeling, on her account, cannot do the work of orientation that she assigns to it.
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  45. 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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  46. Kant and Stoic Affections.Melissa Merritt - 2021 - Canadian Journal of Philosophy 51 (5):329-350.
    I examine the significance of the Stoic theory of pathē for Kant’s moral psychology, arguing against the received view that systematic differences block the possibility of Kant’s drawing anything more than rhetoric from his Stoic sources. More particularly, I take on the chronically underexamined assumption that Kant is committed to a psychological dualism in the tradition of Plato and Aristotle, positing distinct rational and nonrational elements of human mentality. By contrast, Stoics take the mentality of an adult human being to (...)
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  47.  84
    A two-dimensional logic for diagonalization and the a priori.Melissa Fusco - 2020 - Synthese 198 (9):8307-8322.
    Two-dimensional semantics, which can represent the distinction between a priority and necessity, has wielded considerable influence in the philosophy of language. In this paper, I axiomatize the dagger operator of Stalnaker’s “Assertion” in the formal context of two-dimensional modal logic. The language contains modalities of actuality, necessity, and a priority, but is also able to represent diagonalization, a conceptually important operation in a variety of contexts, including models of the relative a priori and a posteriori often appealed to Bayesian and (...)
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  48. Kant on Evil.Melissa McBay Merritt - 2024 - In Andrew Stephenson & Anil Gomes (eds.), Oxford Handbook of Kant. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
    The chapter examines Kant’s thesis about the ‘radical evil in human nature’ developed in his Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason. According to this thesis, the human moral condition is corrupt by default and yet by own deed; and this corruption is the origin (root, radix) of human badness in all its variety, banality, and ubiquity. While Kant clearly takes radical evil to be endemic in human nature, controversy reigns about how to understand this. Some assume this can only (...)
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  49. Kant's Argument for the Apperception Principle.Melissa McBay Merritt - 2011 - European Journal of Philosophy 19 (1):59-84.
    Abstract: My aim is to reconstruct Kant's argument for the principle of the synthetic unity of apperception. I reconstruct Kant's argument in stages, first showing why thinking should be conceived as an activity of synthesis (as opposed to attention), and then showing why the unity or coherence of a subject's representations should depend upon an a priori synthesis. The guiding thread of my account is Kant's conception of enlightenment: as I suggest, the philosophy of mind advanced in the Deduction belongs (...)
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  50. Attention and Synthesis in Kant's Conception of Experience.Merritt Melissa & Markos Valaris - 2017 - Philosophical Quarterly 67 (268):571-592.
    In an intriguing but neglected passage in the Transcendental Deduction, Kant appears to link the synthetic activity of the understanding in experience with the phenomenon of attention (B156-7n). In this paper, we take up this hint, and draw upon Kant's remarks about attention in the Anthropology to shed light on the vexed question of what, exactly, the understanding's role in experience is for Kant. We argue that reading Kant's claims about synthesis in this light allows us to combine two aspects (...)
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