Results for 'Relevant alternatives'

947 found
Order:
  1. Relevant Alternatives and Missed Clues: Redux.Peter Hawke - 2024 - Journal of Philosophy 121 (5):245-276.
    I construe Relevant Alternatives Theory (RAT) as an abstract combination of anti-skepticism and epistemic modesty, then re-evaluate the challenge posed to it by the missed clue counterexamples of Schaffer. The import of this challenge has been underestimated, as Schaffer’s specific argument invites distracting objections. I offer a novel formalization of RAT, accommodating a suitably wide class of concrete theories of knowledge. Then, I introduce ‘abstract missed clue cases’ and prove that every RA theory, as formalized, admits such a (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  2. Fake News, Relevant Alternatives, and the Degradation of Our Epistemic Environment.Christopher Blake-Turner - forthcoming - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 1.
    This paper contributes to the growing literature in social epistemology of diagnosing the epistemically problematic features of fake news. I identify two novel problems: the problem of relevant alternatives; and the problem of the degradation of the epistemic environment. The former arises among individual epistemic transactions. By making salient, and thereby relevant, alternatives to knowledge claims, fake news stories threaten knowledge. The problem of the degradation of the epistemic environment arises at the level of entire epistemic (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   19 citations  
  3. A Relevant Alternatives Solution to the Bootstrapping and Self-Knowledge Problems.Darren Bradley - 2014 - Journal of Philosophy 111 (7):379-393.
    The main argument given for relevant alternatives theories of knowledge has been that they answer scepticism about the external world. I will argue that relevant alternatives also solve two other problems that have been much discussed in recent years, a) the bootstrapping problem and b) the apparent conflict between semantic externalism and armchair self-knowledge. Furthermore, I will argue that scepticism and Mooreanism can be embedded within the relevant alternatives framework.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   5 citations  
  4. The Politics of Relevant Alternatives.William Tuckwell - 2022 - Hypatia 37 (4):743-764.
    The main aim of this article is to use the resources of relevant-alternatives contextualism to provide an account of an unrecognized form of epistemic injustice that I call irrelevance-injustice. Irrelevance-injustice occurs either when a speaker raises an alternative that is not taken seriously when it should be, or when a speaker raises an alternative that is taken seriously when it should not be. Irrelevance-injustice influences what alternatives are perceived to be relevant and patterns of knowledge ascriptions (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  5. Relevant Alternatives in Epistemology and Logic.Peter Hawke - 2016 - In Ángel Nepomuceno Fernández, Olga Pombo Martins & Juan Redmond (eds.), Epistemology, Knowledge and the Impact of Interaction. Cham, Switzerland: Springer Verlag.
    The goal of the current paper is to provide an introduction to and survey of the diverse landscape of relevant alternatives theories of knowledge. Emphasis is placed throughout both on the abstractness of the relevant alternatives approach and its amenability to formalization through logical techniques. We present some of the important motivations for adopting the relevant alternatives approach; briefly explore the connections and contrasts between the relevant alternatives approach and related developments in (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  6. Relevance and risk: How the relevant alternatives framework models the epistemology of risk.Georgi Gardiner - 2020 - Synthese 199 (1-2):481-511.
    The epistemology of risk examines how risks bear on epistemic properties. A common framework for examining the epistemology of risk holds that strength of evidential support is best modelled as numerical probability given the available evidence. In this essay I develop and motivate a rival ‘relevant alternatives’ framework for theorising about the epistemology of risk. I describe three loci for thinking about the epistemology of risk. The first locus concerns consequences of relying on a belief for action, where (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   25 citations  
  7. Relevant Alternatives Contextualism and Ordinary Contingent Knowledge.Franck Lihoreau - 2008 - Disputatio 2 (24):281-294.
    According to David Lewis’s contextualist analysis of knowledge, there can be contexts in which a subject counts as knowing a proposition just because every possibility that this proposition might be false is irrelevant in those contexts. In this paper I argue that, in some cases at least, Lewis’ analysis results in granting people non-evidentially based knowledge of ordinary contingent truths which, intuitively, cannot be known but on the basis of appropriate evidence.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  8. Practical Interests, Relevant Alternatives, and Knowledge Attributions: An Empirical Study.Joshua May, Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, Jay G. Hull & Aaron Zimmerman - 2010 - Review of Philosophy and Psychology 1 (2):265–273.
    In defending his interest-relative account of knowledge in Knowledge and Practical Interests (2005), Jason Stanley relies heavily on intuitions about several bank cases. We experimentally test the empirical claims that Stanley seems to make concerning our common-sense intuitions about these bank cases. Additionally, we test the empirical claims that Jonathan Schaffer seems to make in his critique of Stanley. We argue that our data impugn what both Stanley and Schaffer claim our intuitions about such cases are. To account for these (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   81 citations  
  9. The New Relevant Alternatives Theory.Jonathan Vogel - 1999 - Noûs 33 (s13):155-180.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   70 citations  
  10. The Reasonable and the Relevant: Legal Standards of Proof.Georgi Gardiner - 2019 - Philosophy and Public Affairs 47 (3):288-318.
    According to a common conception of legal proof, satisfying a legal burden requires establishing a claim to a numerical threshold. Beyond reasonable doubt, for example, is often glossed as 90% or 95% likelihood given the evidence. Preponderance of evidence is interpreted as meaning at least 50% likelihood given the evidence. In light of problems with the common conception, I propose a new ‘relevant alternatives’ framework for legal standards of proof. Relevant alternative accounts of knowledge state that a (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   39 citations  
  11. Unifying morality’s influence on non-moral judgments: The relevance of alternative possibilities.Jonathan Phillips, Jamie B. Luguri & Joshua Knobe - 2015 - Cognition 145 (C):30-42.
    Past work has demonstrated that people’s moral judgments can influence their judgments in a number of domains that might seem to involve straightforward matters of fact, including judgments about freedom, causation, the doing/allowing distinction, and intentional action. The present studies explore whether the effect of morality in these four domains can be explained by changes in the relevance of alternative possibilities. More precisely, we propose that moral judgment influences the degree to which people regard certain alternative possibilities as relevant, (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   45 citations  
  12. Some Difficulties for the Problem of Unconceived Alternatives.Samuel Ruhmkorff - 2011 - Philosophy of Science 78 (5):875-886.
    P. Kyle Stanford defends the problem of unconceived alternatives, which maintains that scientists are unlikely to conceive of all the scientifically plausible alternatives to the theories they accept. Stanford’s argument has been criticized on the grounds that the failure of individual scientists to conceive of relevant alternatives does not entail the failure of science as a corporate body to do so. I consider two replies to this criticism and find both lacking. In the process, I argue (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   24 citations  
  13. The philosophy of alternative logics.Andrew Aberdein & Stephen Read - 2009 - In Leila Haaparanta (ed.), The development of modern logic. New York: Oxford University Press. pp. 613-723.
    This chapter focuses on alternative logics. It discusses a hierarchy of logical reform. It presents case studies that illustrate particular aspects of the logical revisionism discussed in the chapter. The first case study is of intuitionistic logic. The second case study turns to quantum logic, a system proposed on empirical grounds as a resolution of the antinomies of quantum mechanics. The third case study is concerned with systems of relevance logic, which have been the subject of an especially detailed reform (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   13 citations  
  14. Independent alternatives: Ross’s puzzle and free choice.Richard Jefferson Booth - 2022 - Philosophical Studies 179 (4):1241-1273.
    Orthodox semantics for natural language modals give rise to two puzzles for their interactions with disjunction: Ross’s puzzle and the puzzle of free choice permission. It is widely assumed that each puzzle can be explained in terms of the licensing of ‘Diversity’ inferences: from the truth of a possibility or necessity modal with an embedded disjunction, hearers infer that each disjunct is compatible with the relevant set of worlds. I argue that Diversity inferences are too weak to explain the (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  15. When is an alternative possibility robust?Simon Kittle - 2019 - European Journal of Philosophy 27 (1):199-210.
    According to some, free will requires alternative possibilities. But not any old alternative possibility will do. Sometimes, being able to bring about an alternative does not bestow any control on an agent. In order to bestow control, and so be directly relevant qua alternative to grounding the agent's moral responsibility, alternatives need to be robust. Here, I investigate the nature of robust alternatives. I argue that Derk Pereboom's latest robustness criterion is too strong, and I suggest a (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   6 citations  
  16. A cognitive view of relevant implication.Daniele Porello & Claudio Masolo - 2015 - In Antonio Lieto, Cristina Battaglino, Daniele P. Radicioni & Manuela Sanguinietti (eds.), Proceedings of the 3rd International Workshop on Artificial Intelligence and Cognition, Turin, Italy, September 28-29, 2015. pp. 40--53.
    Relevant logics provide an alternative to classical implication that is capable of accounting for the relationship between the antecedent and the consequence of a valid implication. Relevant implication is usually explained in terms of information required to assess a proposition. By doing so, relevant implication introduces a number of cognitively relevant aspects in the de nition of logical operators. In this paper, we aim to take a closer look at the cognitive feature of relevant implication. (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  17. Motivating the Relevance Approach to Conditionals.Niels Skovgaard-Olsen - 2016 - Mind and Language 31 (5):555-579.
    The aim is to motivate theoretically a relevance approach to conditionals in a comparative discussion of the main alternatives. In particular, it will be argued that a relevance approach to conditionals is better motivated than the suppositional theory currently enjoying wide endorsement. In the course of this discussion, an argument will be presented for why failures of the epistemic relevance of the antecedent for the consequent should be counted as genuine semantic defects. Furthermore, strategies for dealing with compositionality and (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   17 citations  
  18. An Alternative to Relativism.John K. Davis - 2010 - Philosophical Topics 38 (2):17-37.
    Some moral disagreements are so persistent that we suspect they are deep : we would disagree even when we have all relevant information and no one makes any mistakes. The possibility of deep disagreement is thought to drive cognitivists toward relativism, but most cognitivists reject relativism. There is an alternative. According to divergentism, cognitivists can reject relativism while allowing for deep disagreement. This view has rarely been defended at length, but many philosophers have implicitly endorsed its elements. I will (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   3 citations  
  19. Frankfurt Cases and Alternate Deontic Categories.Samuel Kahn - 2023 - Dialogue 62 (3):539-552.
    In Harry Frankfurt’s seminal “Alternate Possibilities and Moral Responsibility,” he advances an argument against the Principle of Alternate Possibilities: if an agent is responsible for performing some action, then she is able to do otherwise. However, almost all of the Frankfurt cases in this literature involve impermissible actions. In this article, I argue that the failure to consider other deontic categories exposes a deep problem, one that threatens either to upend much current moral theorizing or to upend the relevance of (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  20. What kinds of alternative possibilities are required of the folk concept(s) of choice?Jason Shepard & Aneyn O’Grady - 2017 - Consciousness and Cognition 48:138-148.
    Our concept of choice is integral to the way we understand others and ourselves, especially when considering ourselves as free and responsible agents. Despite the importance of this concept, there has been little empirical work on it. In this paper we report four experiments that provide evidence for two concepts of choice—namely, a concept of choice that is operative in the phrase having a choice and another that is operative in the phrase making a choice. The experiments indicate that the (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  21. Marxian Meritocracy: A Development Alternative of Econometrics.Pratama Angga - manuscript
    This analysis examines economic collectivization, which is one of the problems in modern economic studies, and reconstruction efforts through a Marxian economic approach with an emphasis on meritocracy. This analysis highlights criticism of modern economic approaches which tend to be abstract, ignore practical aspects of economics, and ignore social problems. The Marxian economic approach is seen as an alternative that prioritizes use-value in economics rather than simply exchange-value. Through Marxian meritocracy, it is hoped that collaboration between econometrics analysts and human (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  22. Are Indirect Benefits Relevant to Health Care Allocation Decisions?Jessica Du Toit & Joseph Millum - 2016 - Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 41 (5):540-557.
    When allocating scarce healthcare resources, the expected benefits of alternative allocations matter. But, there are different kinds of benefits. Some are direct benefits to the recipient of the resource such as the health improvements of receiving treatment. Others are indirect benefits to third parties such as the economic gains from having a healthier workforce. This article considers whether only the direct benefits of alternative healthcare resource allocations are relevant to allocation decisions, or whether indirect benefits are relevant too. (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   5 citations  
  23. Relever le défi déterministe une défense à la fois.Simon Pierre Chevarie-Cossette - forthcoming - Chroniques Universitaires.
    In this leçon inaugurale (inaugural lecture) at the University of Neuchâtel, I explain how we can tackle the problem of determinism by asking whether it would give us a justification, an excuse, or an exemption. This strategy builds on Peter Strawson's in Freedom and Resentment, but completes it by (1) proposing a theory of excuses ; (2) proposing that lacking alternatives might give a weak justification--i.e. it might exclude wrongdoing. This forces us to make the best of two philosophical (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  24. Banal Skepticism and the Errors of Doubt: On Ephecticism about Rape Accusations.Georgi Gardiner - 2021 - Midwest Studies in Philosophy 45:393-421.
    Ephecticism is the tendency towards suspension of belief. Epistemology often focuses on the error of believing when one ought to doubt. The converse error—doubting when one ought to believe—is relatively underexplored. This essay examines the errors of undue doubt. I draw on the relevant alternatives framework to diagnose and remedy undue doubts about rape accusations. Doubters tend to invoke standards for belief that are too demanding, for example, and underestimate how farfetched uneliminated error possibilities are. They mistake seeing (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   6 citations  
  25. A Permissivist Alternative to Encroachment.Z. Quanbeck & Alex Worsnip - forthcoming - Philosophers' Imprint.
    As a slew of recent work in epistemology has brought out, there is a range of cases where there's a strong temptation to say that prudential and (especially) moral considerations affect what we ought to believe. There are two distinct models of how this can happen. On the first, “reasons pragmatist” model, the relevant prudential and moral considerations constitute distinctively practical reasons for (or against) belief. On the second, “pragmatic encroachment” model, the relevant prudential and moral considerations affect (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   8 citations  
  26. Stanford’s Unconceived Alternatives from the Perspective of Epistemic Obligations.Matthew S. Sample - 2015 - Philosophy of Science 82 (5):856-866.
    Kyle Stanford’s reformulation of the problem of underdetermination has the potential to highlight the epistemic obligations of scientists. Stanford, however, presents the phenomenon of unconceived alternatives as a problem for realists, despite critics’ insistence that we have contextual explanations for scientists’ failure to conceive of their successors’ theories. I propose that responsibilist epistemology and the concept of “role oughts,” as discussed by Lorraine Code and Richard Feldman, can pacify Stanford’s critics and reveal broader relevance of the “new induction.” The (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   5 citations  
  27. Evidence, Risk, and Proof Paradoxes: Pessimism about the Epistemic Project.Giada Fratantonio - 2021 - International Journal of Evidence and Proof:online first.
    Why can testimony alone be enough for findings of liability? Why statistical evidence alone can’t? These questions underpin the “Proof Paradox” (Redmayne 2008, Enoch et al. 2012). Many epistemologists have attempted to explain this paradox from a purely epistemic perspective. I call it the “Epistemic Project”. In this paper, I take a step back from this recent trend. Stemming from considerations about the nature and role of standards of proof, I define three requirements that any successful account in line with (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   9 citations  
  28. How (not) to think about the sense of ‘able’ relevant to free will.Simon Kittle - 2022 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 65 (10):1289-1307.
    This essay is an investigation into the sense of ‘able’ relevant to free will, where free will is understood as requiring the ability to do otherwise. I argue that van Inwagen's recent functional specification of the relevant sense of ‘able’ is flawed, and that explicating the powers involved in free will shall likely require paying detailed attention to the semantics and pragmatics of ‘can’ and ‘able’. Further, I argue that van Inwagen's promise-level ability requirement on free will is (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   4 citations  
  29. Fischer on the Fragilist Account of Alternative Possibilities.Huiyuhl Yi - 2013 - Dialogue 52 (4):1-14.
    One response to the Frankfurtian attack on the Principle of Alternate Possibilities is to advert to the observation that the agent’s actual action (or the particular event resulting from that action) is numerically distinct from the corresponding action (or the resultant event) he would have generated in the relevant counterfactual scenario. Since this response is based on taking actions and events to be fragile, I shall call it the fragilist account of alternative possibilities. This paper addresses an anti-fragilist argument (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  30. Legal evidence and knowledge.Georgi Gardiner - 2024 - In Maria Lasonen-Aarnio & Clayton Littlejohn (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of the Philosophy of Evidence. New York, NY: Routledge.
    This essay is an accessible introduction to the proof paradox in legal epistemology. -/- In 1902 the Supreme Judicial Court of Maine filed an influential legal verdict. The judge claimed that in order to find a defendant culpable, the plaintiff “must adduce evidence other than a majority of chances”. The judge thereby claimed that bare statistical evidence does not suffice for legal proof. -/- In this essay I first motivate the claim that bare statistical evidence does not suffice for legal (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   4 citations  
  31. Conservation of Energy is Relevant to Physicalism.Ole Koksvik - 2007 - Dialectica 61 (4):573-582.
    I argue against Barbara Montero's claim that Conservation of Energy has nothing to do with physicalism. I reject her reconstruction of the argument for physicalism from CoE, and offer an alternative reconstruction that better captures the intuitions of those who believe that there is a conflict between interactionist dualism and CoE.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   6 citations  
  32. Eugene Freeman , "The Relevance of Charles Peirce". [REVIEW]Peter Ochs - 1985 - Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 21 (1):121-138.
    No reader of The Relevance of Charles Peirce will fail to be impressed by what Max Fisch calls "The Range of Peirce's Relevance.' This exciting volume invites scholars in many of the fields of contemporary philosophy to see what Peirce has to contribute to their methods and their conclusions. Articles in the collection offer a more divided interpretation, however, of the meaning of Peirce's relevance. For some, Peirce's relevance is "extensive": like a Renaissance genius, his intellect surveys the universe of (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  33. The Epistemology of Understanding. A contextualist approach.Marcus Bachmann - 2020 - Kriterion - Journal of Philosophy 34 (1):75-98.
    This paper aims to provide a unifying approach to the analysis of understanding coherencies and understanding subject matters by highlighting the contextualist nature of understanding. Inspired by the relevant alternatives contextualism about knowledge, I will argue that understanding inherently has context-sensitive features and that a theory of understanding that highlights those features can incorporate our intuitions towards understanding as well as consolidate the different accounts of how to analyse understanding. In developing a contextualist account of understanding, I will (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  34. Close calls and the confident agent: Free will, deliberation, and alternative possibilities.Eddy Nahmias - 2006 - Philosophical Studies 131 (3):627-667.
    Two intuitions lie at the heart of our conception of free will. One intuition locates free will in our ability to deliberate effectively and control our actions accordingly: the ‘Deliberation and Control’ (DC) condition. The other intuition is that free will requires the existence of alternative possibilities for choice: the AP condition. These intuitions seem to conflict when, for instance, we deliberate well to decide what to do, and we do not want it to be possible to act in some (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   8 citations  
  35. Philosophy’s Relevance and the Pattern of Inquiry.David L. Hildebrand - 1999 - Teaching Philosophy 22 (4):377-389.
    The undergraduate philosophy major is often seen as an irrelevant degree. While this may be attributed to a number of causes, it is also occasion for academic philosophers to reevaluate pedagogical methods at the undergraduate level. The author evaluates typical pedagogical methods and argues that overemphasizing epistemological goals of philosophical investigation (e.g. truth and justification) instrumentalizes the process of inquiry and stifles students’ philosophical imagination, resulting in the impression of philosophy’s irrelevance. An alternative model is offered on the basis of (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  36. The scientific relevance of an individual factor needs more than a case presentation.Nicolo' Gaj - 2015 - Dialogues in Philosophy, Mental and Neuro Sciences 8 (2):87-88.
    Recently on this journal, Alaqeel and Assalian reported a successful psychodynamic interpretation at the very beginning of a treatment of a 22-year-old male suffering from sexual dysfunction. In the critical analysis of the essay, Trafimow maintains that several alternative explanations can be detected in order to account for Alaqeel and Assalian’s positive outcomes.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  37.  22
    The physiology of coordination: self‐resolving diverse affinities via the sparse order in relevant noise.J. Augustus Bacigalupi - 2023 - Journal of Physiology 602 (11).
    Living systems at any given moment enact a very constrained set of end‐directed and contextually appropriate actions that are self‐initiated from among innumerable possible alternatives. However, these constrained actions are not necessarily because the system has reduced its sensitivities to themselves and their surroundings. Quite the contrary, living systems are continually open to novel and unanticipated stimulations that require a physiology of coordination. To address these competing demands, this paper offers a novel heuristic model informed by neuroscience, systems theory, (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  38. Both Materialist & non-Materialist are correct - about themselves: A brain’s self-identification as "Materialist" or “Non-Materialist” (dualist, panpsychist, idealist etc) as reflecting the absence or presence of an associated real non-material awareness/consciousness, rather than merely as a statement of a philosophical stance. A survey will identify relevant candidates of both types for a proposed brain-experiment to determine a possible correlation to the brain’s deep structure/neural wiring.Avi Rabinowitz - manuscript
    We contest the unsubstantiated assumption of both materialists and non-materialist that the ontological status they propose applies to all humans and that the competing claim is false for all - ie we reject both the claim of non-materialists that all humans share the same fundamental aspect of having a "non-material consciousness" (nmc), as well as the contrasting claim of materialists that none do (being fully material as according to eliminative materialists/reductive physicalists etc). Instead, the basic proposition of this paper, our (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  39. Reason Trumps All: Rationality of Minority Views in Relevant Expert Consensus (2021).David Klier - manuscript
    Expert consensus is crucial for those who are not relevant experts in the field in which they are studying. However, for those who are a relevant expert in the field of a philosophic subject, there is a debate that asks if a minority view can ever be considered rational. Bryan Frances argues that if one is a relevant expert in a field, and is in the minority, their views must be irrational. In this essay I will be (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  40. Saving the Many or the Few: The Moral Relevance of Numbers.Theron Pummer - 2022 - 1000-Word Philosophy 2022.
    To your left, three strangers are drowning. To your right, one other stranger is drowning. You can effortlessly save the three by throwing a lifebuoy to your left. Alternatively, you can save the one by throwing the lifebuoy to your right. You cannot save all four. What should you do? It’s wrong to do nothing, but is it wrong to save just the one stranger? Are you morally required to save the three? Many claim that, when those you can help (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  41. Epistemic and Deontic Should.Fabrizio Cariani - 2013 - Thought: A Journal of Philosophy 2 (1):73-84.
    Probabilistic theories of “should” and “ought” face a predicament. At first blush, it seems that such theories must provide different lexical entries for the epistemic and the deontic interpretations of these modals. I show that there is a new style of premise semantics that can avoid this consequence in an attractively conservative way.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   9 citations  
  42. Black the libertarian.David P. Hunt - 2007 - Acta Analytica 22 (1):3-15.
    The most serious challenge to Frankfurt-type counterexamples to the Principle of Alternate Possibilities (PAP) comes in the form of a dilemma: either the counterexample presupposes determinism, in which case it begs the question; or it does not presuppose determinism, in which case it fails to deliver on its promise to eliminate all alternatives that might plausibly be thought to satisfy PAP. I respond to this challenge with a counterexample in which considering an alternative course of action is a necessary (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  43. On Intellectual Skepticism: A Selection of Skeptical Arguments and Tusi's Criticisms, with Some Comparative Notes.Pirooz Fatoorchi - 2013 - Philosophy East and West 63 (2):213-250.
    This essay deals with a selected part of an epistemological controversy provided by Tūsī in response to the skeptical arguments reported by Rāzī that is related to what might be called "intellectual skepticism," or skepticism regarding the judgments of the intellect, particularly in connection with self-evident principles. It will be shown that Rāzī has cited and exposed a position that seems to be no less than a medieval version of empiricism. Tūsī, in contrast, has presented us with a position that (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   12 citations  
  44. The sensitivity of legal proof.Guido Melchior - 2024 - Synthese 203 (5):1-23.
    The proof paradox results from conflicting intuitions concerning different types of fallible evidence in a court of law. We accept fallible individual evidence but reject fallible statistical evidence even when the conditional probability that the defendant is guilty given the evidence is the same, a seeming inconsistency. This paper defends a solution to the proof paradox, building on a sensitivity account of checking and settling a question. The proposed sensitivity account of legal proof not only requires sensitivity simpliciter but sensitivity (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  45. The Attitudes We Can Have.Daniel Drucker - 2020 - Philosophical Review 129 (4):591-642.
    I investigate when we can (rationally) have attitudes, and when we cannot. I argue that a comprehensive theory must explain three phenomena. First, being related by descriptions or names to a proposition one has strong reason to believe is true does not guarantee that one can rationally believe that proposition. Second, such descriptions, etc. do enable individuals to rationally have various non-doxastic attitudes, such as hope and admiration. And third, even for non-doxastic attitudes like that, not just any description will (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   13 citations  
  46. Solving the Moorean Puzzle.Michael Blome-Tillmann - 2015 - Philosophical Studies 172 (2):493-514.
    This article addresses and resolves an epistemological puzzle that has attracted much attention in the recent literature—namely, the puzzle arising from Moorean anti-sceptical reasoning and the phenomenon of transmission failure. The paper argues that an appealing account of Moorean reasoning can be given by distinguishing carefully between two subtly different ways of thinking about justification and evidence. Once the respective distinctions are in place we have a simple and straightforward way to model both the Wrightean position of transmission failure and (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   6 citations  
  47. Weight for Stephen Finlay.Daan Evers - 2013 - Philosophical Studies 163 (3):737-749.
    According to Stephen Finlay, ‘A ought to X’ means that X-ing is more conducive to contextually salient ends than relevant alternatives. This in turn is analysed in terms of probability. I show why this theory of ‘ought’ is hard to square with a theory of a reason’s weight which could explain why ‘A ought to X’ logically entails that the balance of reasons favours that A X-es. I develop two theories of weight to illustrate my point. I first (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  48. Moral responsibility and unavoidable action.David P. Hunt - 2000 - Philosophical Studies 97 (2):195-227.
    The principle of alternate possibilities (PAP), making the ability to do otherwise a necessary condition for moral responsibility, is supposed by Harry Frankfurt, John Fischer, and others to succumb to a peculiar kind of counterexample. The paper reviews the main problems with the counterexample that have surfaced over the years, and shows how most can be addressed within the terms of the current debate. But one problem seems ineliminable: because Frankfurt''s example relies on a counterfactual intervener to preclude alternatives (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   83 citations  
  49. The Permissibility of Aiding and Abetting Unjust Wars.Saba Bazargan - 2011 - Journal of Moral Philosophy 8 (4):513-529.
    Common sense suggests that if a war is unjust, then there is a strong moral reason not to contribute to it. I argue that this presumption is mistaken. It can be permissible to contribute to an unjust war because, in general, whether it is permissible to perform an act often depends on the alternatives available to the actor. The relevant alternatives available to a government waging a war differ systematically from the relevant alternatives available to (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   4 citations  
  50. When a Skeptical Hypothesis Is Live.Bryan Frances - 2005 - Noûs 39 (4):559–595.
    I’m going to argue for a set of restricted skeptical results: roughly put, we don’t know that fire engines are red, we don’t know that we sometimes have pains in our lower backs, we don’t know that John Rawls was kind, and we don’t even know that we believe any of those truths. However, people unfamiliar with philosophy and cognitive science do know all those things. The skeptical argument is traditional in form: here’s a skeptical hypothesis; you can’t epistemically neutralize (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   17 citations  
1 — 50 / 947