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

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

Over the last few decades, virtue has become increasingly important in philosophy, psychology, cognitive science, and education. However, as each of these disciplines approaches virtue from a decidedly different perspective, it has proven difficult to come up with an understanding of virtue that satisfies the standards of all four disciplines. In their book, Jennifer Wright, Michael Warren, and Nancy Snow attempt to put forward such an understanding.

We face reality presented with the data of conscious experience and nothing else. The project of early modern philosophy was to build a complete theory of the world from this starting point, with no cheating. Crucial to this starting point is the data of conscious sensory experience – sense data. Attempts to avoid this project often argue that the very idea of sense data is confused. But the sense-data way of talking, the sense-data language, can be freed from every blemish (...) using ideas from contemporary metaontology. We can adopt a sense-data framework that vindicates the traditional claims of sense-data theories and leads to plausible theories of perception and color. We can, we should, and in a sense, we must. Yet when we do, we face the traditional problem of external world skepticism, head-on. The real challenge of skepticism is forced upon us; it cannot honestly be avoided using externalist tricks, burden of proof shifting, or other razzle dazzle. But the challenge can be met: we are rational to posit the external world as the best explanation of the many synchronic and diachronic patterns over our sense-data. This paper argues for all of these points and ends with a plea for analytic empiricism – a traditional sense-data version of empiricism that uses all of the tools of analytic philosophy while avoiding the more questionable doctrines of the Vienna Circle (phenomenalism, verificationism). Analytic empiricism is our last best hope for completing the great philosophical project of early modern philosophy. (shrink)

Once upon a time, logical conventionalism was the most popular philosophical theory of logic. It was heavily favored by empiricists, logical positivists, and naturalists. According to logical conventionalism, linguistic conventions explain logical truth, validity, and modality. And conventions themselves are merely syntactic rules of language use, including inference rules. Logical conventionalism promised to eliminate mystery from the philosophy of logic by showing that both the metaphysics and epistemology of logic fit into a scientific picture of reality. For naturalists of all (...) stripes, this was paradise. Alas, paradise was lost. By the end of the twentieth century, logical conventionalism had been almost universally abandoned. But more recently, it has been revitalized. This chapter provides an overview of logical conventionalism and its history, clears away misunderstandings, and briefly responds to both the canonical objections to conventionalism (from Quine, Dummett, Boghossian, and many others) as well as new objections (from Field and Golan). From paradise lost, to paradise regained: logical conventionalism is back. (shrink)

Quantifier variance is a well-known view in contemporary metaontology, but it remains very widely misunderstood by critics. Here we briefly and clearly explain the metasemantics of quantifier variance and distinguish between modest and strong forms of variance (Section I), explain some key applications (Section II), clear up some misunderstandings and address objections (Section III), and point the way toward future directions of quantifier-variance-related research (Section IV).

In his arguments that science itself can answer moral questions, Sam Harris often appeals to our intuitions about the badness of suffering. If we share these intuitions, Harris argues, we’ve taken a significant step in conceding to a basically utilitarian worldview. In this chapter, I critically assess Harris’ arguments and find them deeply wanting.

Plato claimed that morality exits to control conflict. Business people increasingly are called upon to resolve moral conflicts between various stakeholders who maintain opposing ethical positions or principles. Attempts to resolve these moral conflicts within business discussions may be exacerbated if disputants have different communicative styles. To better understand the communication process involved in attempts to resolve a moral dilemma, we investigate the "discourse ethics" procedure of Jürgen Habermas. Habermas claims that an individual's level of moral reasoning parallels the type (...) of communication which that individual typically uses in attempts to resolve conflict. Our research focuses upon the relationship between the communicative style used by participants attempting to resolve a particular moral dilemma involving workplace safety and the level of moral reasoning possessed by those participants. The results of our study suggest that, contrary to Habermas' views, participants with "higher" levels of moral reasoning do not use "discursive" communicative tactics more frequently than participants that possessed "lower" moral reasoning. (shrink)

While philosophers hold that it is patently absurd to blame robots or hold them morally responsible [1], a series of recent empirical studies suggest that people do ascribe blame to AI systems and robots in certain contexts [2]. This is disconcerting: Blame might be shifted from the owners, users or designers of AI systems to the systems themselves, leading to the diminished accountability of the responsible human agents [3]. In this paper, we explore one of the potential underlying reasons for (...) robot blame, namely the folk's willingness to ascribe inculpating mental states or "mens rea" to robots. In a vignette-based experiment (N=513), we presented participants with a situation in which an agent knowingly runs the risk of bringing about substantial harm. We manipulated agent type (human v. group agent v. AI-driven robot) and outcome (neutral v. bad), and measured both moral judgment (wrongness of the action and blameworthiness of the agent) and mental states attributed to the agent (recklessness and the desire to inflict harm). We found that (i) judgments of wrongness and blame were relatively similar across agent types, possibly because (ii) attributions of mental states were, as suspected, similar across agent types. This raised the question - also explored in the experiment - whether people attribute knowledge and desire to robots in a merely metaphorical way (e.g., the robot "knew" rather than really knew). However, (iii), according to our data people were unwilling to downgrade to mens rea in a merely metaphorical sense when given the chance. Finally, (iv), we report a surprising and novel finding, which we call the inverse outcome effect on robot blame: People were less willing to blame artificial agents for bad outcomes than for neutral outcomes. This suggests that they are implicitly aware of the dangers of overattributing blame to robots when harm comes to pass, such as inappropriately letting the responsible human agent off the moral hook. (shrink)

What role should religion play in public discourse? Not long ago Richard Rorty argued, in more than one place, that religion is a "conversation stopper" which polite people refer to only in private conversations. Religious believers complain, however, that this practice renders it impossible for them to participate in public discourse. They ask whether a democratic community is worthy of the name if it effectively forbids (by custom or legislation) a significant segment of its citizens from acknowledging and drawing upon (...) their own traditions to help justify their moral and political claims? This paper draws upon the work of Jeffrey Stout, Robert Brandom, and importantly a Confucian understanding of ritual to argue that Rorty goes too far in arguing that religious assumptions have no place in public discourse. (shrink)

The theoretical underpinnings and practical worth of content-based, intentional, or "folk" psychology have been challenged by three distinct groups of philosophical critics in the past 15 years or so. The first group, comprised by Hilary Putnam, Tyler Burge, and other advocates of "wide" or "externalist" theories of meaning, claims that traditional psychologists have been mistaken in assuming that our beliefs, desires, and other content-laden states supervene on or inhere in our individual minds or brains. The other two groups are both (...) "eliminative materialists," who charge that the intentional approach is inadequate and that it can or will be replaced by a completely non-interpretive discipline: either neuropsychology, in the view of Patricia and Paul Churchland, or a strictly syntactic computational psychology, according to Stephen Stich. ;This dissertation defends "notional world" or narrow intentional psychology against these charges, primarily on the strength of its practical merits, in contrast to the limitations and adverse effects of the proposed alternatives. Psychology is at least partly an applied science with a mandate to help understand and treat concrete psychological problems such as Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and depression, I argue, so any theorist who proposes to reconfigure or phase out existing approaches must be prepared to take over these duties with at least equal facility. However, whereas various "narrow" schools of psychotherapy such as Cognitive Therapy are fairly successful in this regard and show every indication of continuing to be needed for the foreseeable future, the Syntactic Theory seems to show very poor promise of being able to help relieve the distress of people with psychological disturbances, while a purely neurobiological approach is inappropriate in many cases, and tends to cause a variety of untoward and dangerous side-effects. As for the "wide" theorists with their emphasis upon the social and environmental contributions to meaning: they must acknowledge that a good deal of content is in the head; and, more importantly, by focusing on the role of the "experts" in a society's language-game, they miss the whole point of a psychological attribution, which is to understand an individual's reasons--however idiosyncratic--for acting as he or she does. (shrink)

What role does the imagination play in scientific progress? After examining several studies in cognitive science, I argue that one thing the imagination does is help to increase scientific understanding, which is itself indispensable for scientific progress. Then, I sketch a transcendental justification of the role of imagination in this process.

Quietist Moral Realists accept that there are moral facts and properties, while aiming to avoid many of the explanatory burdens thought to fall on traditional moral realists. This chapter examines the forms that Quietist Moral Realism has taken and the challenges it has faced, in order to better assess its prospects. The best hope, this chapter argues, lies in a pragmatist approach that distinguishes the different functions of diverse areas of discourse. This paves the way for a form of Quietism (...) that does not simply remain quiet about the explanatory demands of metaethics, but rather is able to diagnose where they go wrong. By combining a neopragmatic analysis of the discourse with an easy approach to ontology, , we can develop a form of Quietist Moral Realism that is far stronger than critics of quietism have appreciated. (shrink)

There is a theorem that shows that it is impossible for an algorithm to jointly satisfy the statistical fairness criteria of Calibration and Equalised Odds non-trivially. But what about the recently advocated alternative to Calibration, Base Rate Tracking? Here, we show that Base Rate Tracking is strictly weaker than Calibration, and then take up the question of whether it is possible to jointly satisfy Base Rate Tracking and Equalised Odds in non-trivial scenarios. We show that it is not, thereby establishing (...) an even more general impossibility theorem. (shrink)

It is widely held that every person is a person essentially, where being a person is having special mental properties such as intelligence and self-consciousness. It follows that nothing can acquire or lose these properties. The paper argues that this rules out all familiar psychological-continuity views of personal identity over time. It also faces grave difficulties in accounting for the mental powers of human beings who are not intelligent and self-conscious, such as foetuses and those with dementia.

Some contemporary philosophers suggest that we know just by introspection that folk psychological states exist. However, such an "armchair refutation" of eliminativism seems too easy. I first attack two strategems, inspired by Descartes, on how such a refutation might proceed. However, I concede that the Cartesian intuition that we have direct knowledge of representational states is very powerful. The rest of this paper then offers an error theory of how that intuition might really be mistaken. The idea is that introspection (...) does not detect any folk psychological states, but rather detects neural states that dispose us to certain sorts of linguistic behavior. Briefly, rather than detecting a mental appearance of the state-of-affairs that I am sitting near the fire, introspection detects a state disposing me to assert "It appears to me that I am sitting by the fire." The nature of this linguistic-dispositional state is then given a connectionist underpinning, where inputs from introspection lead to such assertive behavior. The Cartesian certainty we feel in self-ascribing such appearances is also explained. Even though I do not endorse such an error theory outright, I suggest that its tenability is enough to undercut introspection arguments against eliminativism. (shrink)

Experience, it is widely agreed, constrains our thinking and is also thoroughly theory-laden. But how can it constrain our thinking while depending on what it purports to constrain? To address this issue, I revisit and carefully analyze the account of observation provided by Norwood Russell Hanson, who introduced the term ‘theory-ladenness of observation’ in the first place. I show that Hanson’s account provides an original and coherent response to the initial question and argue that, if suitably developed, his account provides (...) a distinctive, powerful, and attractive alternative to relationalist and standard representationalist conceptions of experience. (shrink)

The most important voices concerning the changes now occurring in Central and Eastem Europe are those that come from within, for those voices are informed not only by indifferent data and objective reports, but by personal hopes, fears, desires and needs. Without careful consideration of what such voices say, judgment can only be sterile. Furthermore, policy decisions made without the benefit of the intemal perspective are likely to be flawed, and ineffectual. Policies won’t work if they do not take into (...) account the point of view of those who are supposed to be affected by them. There nevertheless remains an important role for outsiders to play in the discussion of the impact of political change on the future of philosophical thought, especially if the outside perspective can serve as a test of the internal view. (shrink)

I try in this essay to accomplish two things. First I offer some first thoughts toward a clarification of the ethical foundations of private property rights that avoids pitfalls common to more strictly Lockean theories, and is thus better prepared to address arguments posed by critics of standard private property arrangements. Second, I'll address one critical argument that has become pretty common over the years. While versions of the argument can be traced back at least to Pierre Joseph Proudhon, I'll (...) focus on a formulation given it by Jeremy Waldron. The basic idea is that the only sound arguments for private property rights lead to the conclusion that society has an obligation to insure that every citizen possess private property. In Waldron's formulation, what is justifiable is a general, rather than a special, right to private property. I shall try to suggest that this conclusion is unwarranted. (shrink)

Synthetic biologists aim to generate biological organisms according to rational design principles. Their work may have many beneficial applications, but it also raises potentially serious ethical concerns. In this article, we consider what attention the discipline demands from bioethicists. We argue that the most important issue for ethicists to examine is the risk that knowledge from synthetic biology will be misused, for example, in biological terrorism or warfare. To adequately address this concern, bioethics will need to broaden its scope, contemplating (...) not just the means by which scientific knowledge is produced, but also what kinds of knowledge should be sought and disseminated. (shrink)

Some philosophers need no introduction. Julius Kovesi is a philosopher who, regrettably, does need introducing. Kovesi’s career was as a moral philosopher and intellectual historian. This book is intended to reintroduce him, more than twenty years after his death and more than forty years after the publication of his only book, Moral Notions. This Introduction will sketch some of the key features of his life and philosophical thought.

A number of philosophers think that grounding is, in some sense, well-founded. This thesis, however, is not always articulated precisely, nor is there a consensus in the literature as to how it should be characterized. In what follows, I consider several principles that one might have in mind when asserting that grounding is well-founded, and I argue that one of these principles, which I call ‘full foundations’, best captures the relevant claim. My argument is by the process of elimination. For (...) each of the inadequate principles, I illustrate its inadequacy by showing either that it excludes cases that should not be ruled out by a well-foundedness axiom for grounding, or that it admits cases that should be ruled out. (shrink)

In a series of papers, Thomas P. Flint has posited that God the Son could become incarnate in any human person as long as certain conditions are met (Flint 2001a, 2001b). In a recent paper, he has argued that all saved human persons will one day become incarnated by the Son (Flint 2011). Flint claims that this is motivated by a combination of Molinism and orthodox Christology. I shall argue that this is unmotivated because it is condemned by orthodox Christology. (...) Flint has unknowingly articulated a version of the heresy called Origenism that is condemned by the Fifth Ecumenical Council. After arguing that Flint’s account is unmotivated because it is condemned, I shall offer some reflections and prolegomena on the relationship between contemporary analytic theology and the ecumenical creeds. (shrink)

Every day nurses are required to make ethical decisions in the course of caring for their patients. Ethics in Nursing Practice provides the background necessary to understand ethical decision making and its implications for patient care. The authors focus on the individual nurse’s responsibilities, as well as considering the wider issues affecting patients, colleagues and society as a whole. This third edition is fully updated, and takes into account recent changes in ICN position statements, WHO documents, as well as addressing (...) current issues in healthcare, such as providing for the health and care needs of refugees and asylum seekers, bioethics and the enforcement of nursing codes. (shrink)

How to conceptualize loving relationships so as to accommodate that just love is geared toward preserving and fostering individual autonomy? To develop an answer, this paper draws on the recent debate on the rational role of experience to motivate a view dubbed Murdochian presentationalism. Murdochian presentationalism takes seriously two presentationalist ideas: 1) individuals harboring different world views who respond to identical situations differently can be equally rational; 2) our views and concepts develop under the constant pressure of experience. It combines (...) these ideas with Murdoch’s tenet that coming to know others (and thus being able to do well by them) requires unselfish love, construed as just attention that involves a continuous refinement of our evaluative concepts and makes us better attuned to what is real. Complemented with a broadly Kantian notion of autonomy, the resulting view fits the bill. The paper ends on a sketch of what is dubbed the ideal lovers’ pledge and a comment on what metaphor the view arrived at suggests for thinking about loving relationships. (shrink)

This chapter corrects for Susan Sontag's undeserved neglect by contemporary ethical philosophers by bringing awareness to some of the unique metaethical insights born of her reflections on photographic representations of evil. I argue that Sontag's thought provides fertile ground for thinking about: (1) moral perception and its relation to moral knowledge; and (2) the epistemic and moral value of our emotional responses to the misery and suffering of others. I show that, contrary to standard moral perception theory (e.g. Blum 1994), (...) Sontag holds that we can have general moral perceptual knowledge. I then explore Sontag's idea that certain emotional responses, like sympathy and compassion, can sometimes be impertinent, in virtue of their having false or illusory content. I explain why this is so, and show the epistemic and motivational problems it poses for moral sentimentalism. (shrink)

We might think that thought experiments are at their most powerful or most interesting when they produce new knowledge. This would be a mistake; thought experiments that seek understanding are just as powerful and interesting, and perhaps even more so. A growing number of epistemologists are emphasizing the importance of understanding for epistemology, arguing that it should supplant knowledge as the central notion. In this chapter, I bring the literature on understanding in epistemology to bear on explicating the different ways (...) that thought experiments increase three important kinds of understanding: explanatory, objectual and practical. (shrink)

Anne Conway rejects the view that creatures are essentially members of any natural kind more specific than the kind 'creature'. That is, she rejects essentialism about species membership. This chapter provides an analysis of one of Anne Conway's arguments against such essentialism, which (as I argue) is drawn from metaethical rather than metaphysical premises. In her view, if a creature's species or kind were inscribed in its essence, that essence would constitute a limit on the creature's potential to participate in (...) the divine good. It is this consideration that ultimately leads her to reject essentialism about species membership. The chapter concludes with an examination of some of the metaethical consequences of Conway's view as well as a lesson it can teach us about ideal adviser accounts of the good. (shrink)

What are words? What makes two token words tokens of the same word-type? Are words abstract entities, or are they (merely) collections of tokens? The ontology of words tries to provide answers to these, and related questions. This article provides an overview of some of the most prominent views proposed in the literature, with a particular focus on the debate between type-realist, nominalist, and eliminativist ontologies of words.

One of the main contentions of the framework for Responsible Innovation (RI) is that social and ethical aspects have to be addressed by deliberative engagement with stakeholders and the wider public throughout the innovation process. The aim of this article is to reflect on the question to what extent is deliberative engagement suitable for conducting RI in business. We discuss several tensions that arise when this framework is applied in the business context. Further, we analyse the place of deliberative engagement (...) in several theories of business ethics. We conclude that there remains a tension between the ideal of RI and the way in which the competitive market operates. Hence, RI scholars should reflect more critically on changes that are required in the market in order to make RI possible, modify the ideal of deliberative engagement for RI in business, or attempt to strike a balance between these two responses. (shrink)

This short piece of communication has the sole purpose of identifying some evidence, supporting our view regarding a possible missing environment-nurturing cultural value. As groundwater depletion has recently emerged as one of the most crucial environmental issues, we aim to examine the extant cultural studies within the boundary of groundwater depletion research.

A short paper discussing and critiquing common claims that "truth is relative.".

Replacing the value-free ideal (VFI) for science requires attention to the broader understanding of how science in society should function. In public spaces, science needed to project the VFI in norms for science advising, science education, and science communication. This resulted in the independent science advisor model and a focus on science literacy for science education and communication. Attending to these broader implications of the VFI which structure science and society relationships is crucial if we are to properly replace the (...) VFI with a better ideal. (shrink)

Kit Fine (2000) breaks with tradition, arguing that, pace Russell (e.g., 1903: 228), relations have neither directions nor converses. He considers two ways to conceive of these new "neutral" relations, positionalism and anti-positionalism, and argues that the latter should be preferred to the former. Cody Gilmore (2013) argues for a generalization of positionalism, slot theory, the view that a property or relation is n-adic if and only if there are exactly n slots in it, and (very roughly) that each slot (...) may be occupied by at most one entity. Slot theory (and with it, positionalism) bears the full brunt of Fine's (2000) symmetric completions and conflicting adicities problems. I fully develop an alternative, plural slot theory (or pocket theory), which avoids these problems, key elements of which are first considered by Yi (1999: 168 ff.). Like the slot theorist, the pocket theorist posits entities (pockets) in properties and relations that can be occupied. But unlike the slot theorist, the pocket theorist denies that at most one entity can occupy any one of them. As a result, she must also deny that the adicity of a property or relation is equal to the number of occupiable entities in it. By abandoning these theses, however, the pocket theorist is able to avoid Fine's problems, resulting in a stronger theory about the internal structure of properties and relations. Pocket theory also avoids a serious drawback of anti-positionalism. (shrink)

The COVID-19 crisis has highlighted the considerable challenge of sourcing expertise and determining which experts to trust. Dissonant information fostered controversy in public discourse and encouraged an appeal to a wide range of social indicators of trustworthiness in order to decide whom to trust. We analyze public discourse on expertise by examining how social indicators inform the reputation of Dr. Didier Raoult, the French microbiologist who rose to international prominence as an early advocate for using hydroxychloroquine to treat COVID-19. To (...) comprehend how these indicators came to inform his reputation, we outline Dr. Raoult's rise to fame based on discourse about hydroxychloroquine. We then discuss why we trust in experts like scientist-practitioners. This is followed by an examination of how social indicators of trust like status, epistemic authority, influence and values have informed Dr. Raoult's reputation. We conclude with recommendations for how to improve the selection and evaluation social indicators of trust and reputations. Our aim here, instead of making a claim about the efficacy of hydroxychloroquine or Dr. Raoult's reputation per se, is to outline through this case study how social indicators of trust inform reputation and the challenge they present to evaluating expertise. (shrink)

Can the issue of how important it is whether or not there is a God be decided prior to deciding whether or not there is a God? In this paper, I explore some difficulties that stand in the way of answering this question in the affirmative and some of the implications of these difficulties for that part of the Philosophy of Religion which concerns itself with assessing arguments for and against the existence of God, the implications for how its importance (...) may best be defended within secular academe. (shrink)

What is sexual orientation? The contemporary consensus among philosophers is that it is a disposition. Unsurprisingly, recent debates about the metaphysics of sexual orientation are almost entirely intramural. Behavioral dispositionalists argue that sexual orientation is a disposition to behave sexually. Desire dispositionalists argue that it is a disposition to desire sexually. We argue that sexual orientation is not best understood in terms of dispositions to behave or dispositions to desire before arguing that dispositions tout court fail to illuminate sexual orientation. (...) We then introduce and defend the idea that sexual orientation is best understood in terms of categorical phenomenal properties of sexual arousal. (shrink)

The Standard View of personal identity says that someone who exists now can exist at another time only if there is continuity of her mental contents or capacities. But no person is psychologically continuous with a fetus, for a fetus, at least early in its career. has no mental features at all. So the Standard View entails that no person was ever a fetus---contrary to the popular assumption that an unthinking fetus is a potential person. It is also mysterious what (...) does ordinarily happen to a human fetus, if it does not come to be a person. Although an extremely complex variant of the Standard View may allow one to persist without psychological continuity before one becomes a person but not afterwards, a far simpler solution is to accept a radically non-psychological account of our identity. (shrink)

Tennenbaum's Theorem yields an elegant characterisation of the standard model of arithmetic. Several authors have recently claimed that this result has important philosophical consequences: in particular, it offers us a way of responding to model-theoretic worries about how we manage to grasp the standard model. We disagree. If there ever was such a problem about how we come to grasp the standard model, then Tennenbaum's Theorem does not help. We show this by examining a parallel argument, from a simpler model-theoretic (...) result. (shrink)

John D. Norton is responsible for a number of influential views in contemporary philosophy of science. This paper will discuss two of them. The material theory of induction claims that inductive arguments are ultimately justified by their material features, not their formal features. Thus, while a deductive argument can be valid irrespective of the content of the propositions that make up the argument, an inductive argument about, say, apples, will be justified (or not) depending on facts about apples. The argument (...) view of thought experiments claims that thought experiments are arguments, and that they function epistemically however arguments do. These two views have generated a great deal of discussion, although there hasn’t been much written about their combination. I argue that despite some interesting harmonies, there is a serious tension between them. I consider several options for easing this tension, before suggesting a set of changes to the argument view that I take to be consistent with Norton’s fundamental philosophical commitments, and which retain what seems intuitively correct about the argument view. These changes require that we move away from a unitary epistemology of thought experiments and towards a more pluralist position. (shrink)

Many pantheists have claimed that their view of the divine is motivated by a kind of spiritual experience. In this paper, I articulate a novel argument, inspired by recent work on moral exemplarism, that gives voice to this kind of motivation for pantheism. The argument is based on two claims about the emotion of awe, each of which is defended primarily via critical engagement with empirical research on the emotion. I also illustrate how this pathway to pantheism offers pantheists distinctive (...) resources for responding to persistent objections to their view, and how it might lead to more exotic views incorporating pantheistic elements. (shrink)

This article constructively retrieves St. Anselm of Canterbury’s theory of retributive justice and provides a defense of what can be called the retributive model of hell. In the first part of this article, we develop the place of retributive punishment in Anselm’s thinking and discuss how and when retributive punishment is a good thing. In the second part, we apply Anselm’s thinking on retributive justice to the problem of hell and provide a defense of how hell, defined as a state (...) of receiving retributive, damnatory, and irreversible punishment, is good. We then address a series of objections. Despite some criticism that both Anselm and the retributive model of hell receive in the contemporary literature, Anselm’s account of retributive justice can make unique and constructive contributions to the contemporary discussion of hell; by retrieving and applying Anselm’s thought to the problem of hell, we intend to kill two birds with one stone. (shrink)

Background: All research has room for improvement, but authors do not always clearly acknowledge the limitations of their work. In this brief report, we sought to identify the prevalence of limitations statements in the medRxiv COVID-19 SARS-CoV-2 dataset. Methods: We combined automated methods with manual review to analyse manuscripts for the presence, or absence, either of a defined limitations section in the text, or as part of the general discussion. Results: We identified a structured limitations statement in 28% of the (...) manuscripts, and overall 52% contained at least one mention of a study limitation. Over one-third of manuscripts contained none of the terms that might typically be associated with reporting of limitations. Overall our method performed with precision of 0.97 and recall of 0.91. Conclusion: The presence or absence of limitations statements can be identified with reasonable confidence using automated tools. We suggest that it might be beneficial to require a defined, structured statement about study limitations, either as part of the submission process, or clearly delineated within the manuscript. (shrink)

An observation of Hume’s has received a lot of attention over the last decade and a half: Although we can standardly imagine the most implausible scenarios, we encounter resistance when imagining propositions at odds with established moral (or perhaps more generally evaluative) convictions. The literature is ripe with ‘solutions’ to this so-called ‘Puzzle of Imaginative Resistance’. Few, however, question the plausibility of the empirical assumption at the heart of the puzzle. In this paper, we explore empirically whether the difficulty we (...) witness in imagining certain propositions is indeed due to claim type (evaluative v. non-evaluative) or whether it is much rather driven by mundane features of content. Our findings suggest that claim type plays but a marginal role, and that there might hence not be much of a ‘puzzle’ to be solved. (shrink)

Summary: Throughout the history of science, indeed throughout the history of knowledge, unification has been touted as a central aim of intellectual inquiry. We’ve always wanted to discover not only numerous bare facts about the universe, but to show how such facts are linked and interrelated. Large amounts of time and effort have been spent trying to show diverse arrays of things can be seen as different manifestations of some common underlying entities or properties. Thales is said to have originated (...) philosophy and science with his declaration that everything was, at base, a form of water. Plato’s theory of the forms was thought to be a magnificent accomplishment because it gave a unified solution to the separate problems of the relation between knowledge and belief, the grounding of objective values, and how continuity is possible amid change. Pasteur made numerous medical advancements possible by demonstrating the interconnection between microorganisms and human disease symptoms. Many technological advances were aided by Maxwell’s showing that light is a kind of electromagnetic radiation. The attempt to unify the various known forces is often referred to as “The Holy Grail” of physics. Some philosophers have even suggested that providing explanations is itself just a sort of unifying of our knowledge. But while unification (like simplicity) has often been hailed as a tremendous virtue in science, the meaning of the term is not altogether clear. Scientists often don’t specify what, precisely, they mean by unification. And in cases where what they mean is clear, different thinkers plainly mean different things by the term. What are the various senses of unification, and why has unification been such an important aim in the history of inquiry? (shrink)

Trước những khó khăn và thách thức của các nhà khoa học trẻ và các nhà khoa học ở những nước đang phát triển do thiếu tài nguyên và cơ hội được tiếp cận với các kiến thức và phương pháp nghiên cứu bài bản…, các nhà khoa học Việt Nam đã phát triển nền tảng Cổng thông tin SM3D hỗ trợ đào tạo phương pháp nghiên cứu khoa học xã hội cho các nhà khoa học. Sau gần 2 năm (...) được triển khai, Cổng thông tin SM3D được đánh giá là một trong những sáng kiến đóng góp tiêu biểu của khoa học Việt Nam cho cộng đồng khoa học quốc tế, đặc biệt là đối với các nước đang phát triển. (shrink)

In the study of education, as in many more travelled regions of Classical scholarship, democratic Athens is something of a special case. The cautions formulation is appropriate: in the case of education, surprisingly few studies have sought to establish quite how special Athens was, and those which have, have often raised more questions than they answered. The subject itself is partly to blame. The history of education invites comparison with the present day, while those planning the future of education rarely (...) fail to invoke the past. The place of Classical Athens in European culture has ensured a place for Athenian education in almost every debate from the relation between education and democracy to the value of educationversustraining, and as the original champion of causes as varied as mass education, co-education, and the national curriculum. Desirable as it is to be in demand, such treatment is not calculated to produce the most circumspect account of the subject. The study of education is further hampered by the fact that our knowledge of Athenian culture is so vibrant and diverse in some ways and so partial in others. Plato and Aristophanes present a vivid fictional picture of education in the late fifth century. If we add a few passages from Xenophon and Aristotle, a large number of vases depicting men, women, and children reading, playing the lyre, and doing athletics, and one or two archaeological finds of an educational appearance, it is tempting to take the result as a clear portrait of a society at school. (shrink)

In his Philosophical Inquiry concerning Human Liberty (1717), the English deist Anthony Collins proposed a complete determinist account of the human mind and action, partly inspired by his mentor Locke, but also by elements from Bayle, Leibniz and other Continental sources. It is a determinism which does not neglect the question of the specific status of the mind but rather seeks to provide a causal account of mental activity and volition in particular; it is a ‘volitional determinism’. Some decades later, (...) Diderot articulates a very similar determinism, which seeks to recognize the existence of “causes proper to man” (as he says in the Réfutation d’Helvétius). The difference with Collins is that now biological factors are being taken into account. Obviously both the ‘volitional’ and the ‘biological’ forms of determinism are noteworthy inasmuch as they change our picture of the nature of determinism itself, but my interest here is to compare these two determinist arguments, both of which are broadly Spinozist in nature – and as such belong to what Jonathan Israel called in his recent book “the radical Enlightenment,” i.e. a kind of underground Enlightenment constituted by Spinozism – and to see how Collins’ specifically psychological vision and Diderot’s specifically biological vision correspond to their two separate national contexts: determinism in France in the mid-1750s was a much more medico-biological affair than English determinism, which appears to be on a ‘path’ leading to Mill and associationist psychology. (shrink)