Results for 'Tracking Truth'

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  1. Tracking the Moral Truth: Debunking Street’s Darwinian Dilemma.Gerald L. Hull - manuscript
    Sharon Street’s 2006 article “A Darwinian Dilemma for Realist Theories of Value” challenges the epistemological pretensions of the moral realist, of the nonnaturalist in particular. Given that “Evolutionary forces have played a tremendous role in shaping the content of human evaluative attitudes” – why should one suppose such attitudes and concomitant beliefs would track an independent moral reality? Especially since, on a nonnaturalist view, moral truth is causally inert. I abstract a logical skeleton of Street’s argument and, with its (...)
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  2. The Backward Clock, Truth-Tracking, and Safety.John N. Williams & Neil Sinhababu - 2015 - Journal of Philosophy 112 (1):46-55.
    We present Backward Clock, an original counterexample to Robert Nozick’s truth-tracking analysis of propositional knowledge, which works differently from other putative counterexamples and avoids objections to which they are vulnerable. We then argue that four ways of analysing knowledge in terms of safety, including Duncan Pritchard’s, cannot withstand Backward Clock either.
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  3.  73
    Social Evolution as Moral Truth Tracking in Natural Law.Filipe Nobre Faria & André Santos Campos - 2021 - Politics and the Life Sciences 41 (1):76 - 89.
    Morality can be adaptive or maladaptive. From this fact come polarizing disputes on the meta-ethical status of moral adaptation. The realist tracking account of morality claims that it is possible to track objective moral truths and that these truths correspond to moral rules that are adaptive. In contrast, evolutionary anti-realism rejects the existence of moral objectivity and thus asserts that adaptive moral rules cannot represent objective moral truths, since those truths do not exist. This article develops a novel evolutionary (...)
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  4. Two New Counterexamples to the Truth-Tracking Theory of Knowledge.Tristan Haze - 2015 - Logos and Episteme 6 (3):309-311.
    I present two counterexamples to the recently back-in-favour truth-tracking account of knowledge: one involving a true belief resting on a counterfactually robust delusion, one involving a true belief acquired alongside a bunch of false beliefs. These counterexamples carry over to a recent modification of the theory due to Briggs and Nolan (2012), and seem invulnerable to a recent defence of the theory against known counterexamples, by Adams and Clarke (2005).
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  5. Two Non-Counterexamples to Truth-Tracking Theories of Knowledge.Fred Adams & Murray Clarke - 2016 - Logos and Episteme 7 (1):67-73.
    In a recent paper, Tristan Haze offers two examples that, he claims, are counterexamples to Nozick's Theory of Knowledge. Haze claims his examples work against Nozick's theory understood as relativized to belief forming methods M. We believe that they fail to be counterexamples to Nozick's theory. Since he aims the examples at tracking theories generally, we will also explain why they are not counterexamples to Dretske's Conclusive Reasons Theory of Knowledge.
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  6. Tracking the Evidence.Brian Weatherson - manuscript
    Comments on Sherri Rousch’s Tracking Truth for the 2006 Philosophy of Science Association conference.
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  7. Communicate and Vote: Collective Truth-tracking in Networks.Nicolien Janssens - 2022 - Dissertation, Illc
    From different angles of science, there has been a growing interest in the abilities of groups to track the truth. The Condorcet Jury Theorem (1785) states that without communication, infinitely big groups will reach a correct majority opinion with certainty. Coughlan (2000), meanwhile formulated a model in which all agents communicate with each other, showing that majorities are only just as good as fully-communicating individuals. In reality, communication is usually between these two extremes: some agents communicate with some of (...)
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  8. Where Tracking Loses Traction.Mitchell Barrington - 2020 - Episteme 20 (1):1-14.
    Tracking theories see knowledge as a relation between a subject’s belief and the truth, where the former is responsive to the latter. This relationship involves causation in virtue of a sensitivity condition, which is constrained by an adherence condition. The result is what I call a stable causal relationship between a fact and a subject’s belief in that fact. I argue that when we apprehend the precise role of causation in the theory, previously obscured problems pour out. This (...)
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  9. Referent Tracking: The Problem of Negative Findings.Werner Ceusters, Peter Elkin & Barry Smith - 2006 - Studies in Health Technology and Informatics 124:741-46.
    The paradigm of referent tracking is based on a realist presupposition which rejects so-called negative entities (congenital absent nipple, and the like) as spurious. How, then, can a referent tracking-based Electronic Health Record deal with what are standardly called ‘negative findings’? To answer this question we carried out an analysis of some 748 sentences drawn from patient charts and containing some form of negation. Our analysis shows that to deal with these sentences we need to introduce a new (...)
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  10. Tracking Eudaimonia.Paul Bloomfield - 2018 - Philosophy, Theory, and Practice in Biology 10 (2).
    A basic challenge to naturalistic moral realism is that, even if moral properties existed, there would be no way to naturalistically represent or track them. Here, the basic structure for a tracking account of moral epistemology is given in empirically respectable terms, based on a eudaimonist conception of morality. The goal is to show how this form of moral realism can be seen as consistent with the details of evolutionary biology as well as being amenable to the most current (...)
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  11. Narrating Truths Worth Living: Addiction Narratives.Doug McConnell & Anke Snoek - 2012 - American Journal of Bioethics Neuroscience 3 (4):77-78.
    Self-narrative is often, perhaps primarily, a tool of self- constitution, not of truth representation. We explore this theme with reference to our own recent qualitative interviews of substance-dependent agents. Narrative self- constitution, the process of realizing a valued narrative projection of oneself, depends on one’s narrative tracking truth to a certain extent. Therefore, insofar as narratives are successfully realized, they have a claim to being true, although a certain amount of self-deception typically comes along for the ride. (...)
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  12. Stumbling in Nozick’s Tracks.John Turri - 2012 - Logos and Episteme 3 (2):291-293.
    Rachael Briggs and Daniel Nolan have recently proposed an improved version of Nozick’s tracking account of knowledge. I show that, despite its virtues, the new proposal suffers from three serious problems.
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  13. The Truth and Nothing but the Truth: Non-Literalism and The Habits of Sherlock Holmes.Heidi Savage - 2020 - Southwest Philosophy Review 36 (2).
    Abstract: Many, if not most philosophers, deny that a sentence like ‘Sherlock Holmes smokes’ could be true. However, this attitude conflicts with the assignment of true to that sentence by natural language speakers. Furthermore, this process of assigning truth values to sentences like ‘Sherlock Holes smokes’ seems indistinguishable from the process that leads speakers to assign true to other sentences, those like ‘Bertrand Russell smokes’. I will explore the idea that when speakers assign the value true to the first (...)
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  14. Epistemic Democracy Without Truth: The Deweyan Approach.Michael Fuerstein - forthcoming - Raisons Politiques.
    In this essay I situate John Dewey’s pragmatist approach to democratic epistemology in relation to contemporary “epistemic democracy.” Like epistemic democrats, Dewey characterizes democracy as a form of social inquiry. But whereas epistemic democrats suggest that democracy aims to “track the truth,” Dewey rejects the notion of “tracking” or “corresponding” to truth in political and other domains. For Dewey, the measure of successful decision-making is not some fixed independent standard of truth or correctness but, instead, our (...)
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  15. How Science Tracks Understanding. [REVIEW]Federica Isabella Malfatti - 2023 - Philosophical Problems in Science (Zagadnienia Filozoficzne W Nauce) 74:317-320.
    This review article discusses the book Understanding How Science Explains the World by Kevin McCain, published by Cambridge University Press (2022). With an impressive combination of clarity and depth, McCain provides the reader with a firm grasp of how science works, of what science aims to achieve, and of what makes science a successful epistemic enterprise. The review article reconstructs the book’s overall dialectic and identifies one potential point of tension which concerns the role of truth or accuracy in (...)
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  16. Sensitivity and Closure.Sherrilyn Roush - 2012 - In Kelly Becker & Tim Black (eds.), The Sensitivity Principle in Epistemology. New York: Cambridge University Press. pp. 242-268.
    This paper argues that if knowledge is defined in terms of probabilistic tracking then the benefits of epistemic closure follow without the addition of a closure clause. (This updates my definition of knowledge in Tracking Truth 2005.) An important condition on this result is found in "Closure Failure and Scientific Inquiry" (2017).
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  17. An Idle and Most False Imposition: Truth-Seeking vs. Status-Seeking and the Failure of Epistemic Vigilance.Joseph Shieber - 2023 - Philosophic Exchange 2023.
    The theory of epistemic vigilance posits that -- to quote the eponymous paper that introduced the theory -- “humans have a suite of cognitive mechanisms for epistemic vigilance, targeted at the risk of being misinformed by others." Despite the widespread acceptance of the theory of epistemic vigilance, however, I argue that the theory is a poor fit with the evidence: while there is good reason to accept that people ARE vigilant, there is also good reason to believe that their vigilance (...)
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  18. Evolution and Epistemic Justification.Michael Vlerick & Alex Broadbent - 2015 - Dialectica 69 (2):185-203.
    According to the evolutionary sceptic, the fact that our cognitive faculties evolved radically undermines their reliability. A number of evolutionary epistemologists have sought to refute this kind of scepticism. This paper accepts the success of these attempts, yet argues that refuting the evolutionary sceptic is not enough to put any particular domain of beliefs – notably scientific beliefs, which include belief in Darwinian evolution – on a firm footing. The paper thus sets out to contribute to this positive justificatory project, (...)
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  19. There’s nothing to beat a backward clock: A rejoinder to Adams, Barker and Clarke.John N. Williams - 2016 - Logos and Episteme 7 (3):363-378.
    Neil Sinhababu and I presented Backward Clock, an original counterexample to Robert Nozick’s truth-tracking analysis of propositional knowledge. Fred Adams, John Barker and Murray Clarke argue that Backward Clock is no such counterexample. Their argument fails to nullify Backward Clock which also shows that other tracking analyses, such as Dretske’s and one that Adams et al. may well have in mind, are inadequate.
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  20. Problems with Using Evolutionary Theory in Philosophy.Seungbae Park - 2017 - Axiomathes 27 (3):321-332.
    Does science move toward truths? Are present scientific theories (approximately) true? Should we invoke truths to explain the success of science? Do our cognitive faculties track truths? Some philosophers say yes, while others say no, to these questions. Interestingly, both groups use the same scientific theory, viz., evolutionary theory, to defend their positions. I argue that it begs the question for the former group to do so because their positive answers imply that evolutionary theory is warranted, whereas it is self-defeating (...)
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  21. Does Pluralism Itself Need to Be Plural?Gagnon Philippe - 2022 - In M. Fuller, D. Evers & A. Runehov (eds.), Issues in Science and Theology: Creative Pluralism? Springer Nature. pp. 187-197.
    Theology used to be the discipline that arbitrated and ‘said’ the truth. Some argued that its methodical engagement had to make it a search-driven experimentation with an inductive outlook intended at tracking truth through practice and praise, in short conversion. The empirico-formal sciences have sought canonical norms of knowledge away from any regimentation. Neopositivism had for a time entertained a fact-derived language and, as such, it banned metaphor as mingling problems by perpetuating the belief in entirely theoretical (...)
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  22. Is It Rational to Reject Expert Consensus?Bryan Frances - 2020 - International Journal for the Study of Skepticism 10 (3-4):325-345.
    Philosophers defend, and often believe, controversial philosophical claims. Since they aren’t clueless, they are usually aware that their views are controversial—on some occasions, the views are definitely in the minority amongst the relevant specialist-experts. In addition, most philosophers are aware that they are not God’s gift to philosophy, since they admit their ability to track truth in philosophy is not extraordinary compared to that of other philosophers. In this paper I argue that in many real-life cases, such beliefs in (...)
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  23. Mental Fictionalism: the costly combination of magic and the mind.Amber Ross - 2022 - In Tamás Demeter, T. Parent & Adam Toon (eds.), Mental Fictionalism: Philosophical Explorations. New York & London: Routledge.
    Mental fictionalism is not the benign view that we may better understand the mind if we think of mental states as something like useful fictions, but the more radical view that mental states just are useful fictions. This paper argues that, if one were to treat mental states as a kind of fiction, the genre of fiction best suited to this purpose would be fantasy make-believe, in which magic is a central feature. After defending a promising fictionalist account of mental (...)
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  24. Experimental philosophy and moral responsibility.Gunnar Björnsson - 2022 - In Dana Kay Nelkin & Derk Pereboom (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Moral Responsibility. New York: Oxford University Press. pp. 494–516.
    Can experimental philosophy help us answer central questions about the nature of moral responsibility, such as the question of whether moral responsibility is compatible with determinism? Specifically, can folk judgments in line with a particular answer to that question provide support for that answer. Based on reasoning familiar from Condorcet’s Jury Theorem, such support could be had if individual judges track the truth of the matter independently and with some modest reliability: such reliability quickly aggregates as the number of (...)
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  25. Beat the (Backward) Clock.Fred Adams, John A. Barker & Murray Clarke - 2016 - Logos and Episteme 7 (3):353-361.
    In a recent very interesting and important challenge to tracking theories of knowledge, Williams & Sinhababu claim to have devised a counter-example to tracking theories of knowledge of a sort that escapes the defense of those theories by Adams & Clarke. In this paper we will explain why this is not true. Tracking theories are not undermined by the example of the backward clock, as interesting as the case is.
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  26. Reply to Adams and Clarke.Tristan Haze - 2016 - Logos and Episteme 7 (2):221-225.
    Here I defend two counterexamples to Nozick’s truth-tracking theory of knowledge from an attack on them by Adams and Clarke. With respect to the first counterexample, Adams and Clarke make the error of judging that my belief counts as knowledge. More demonstrably, with respect to the second counterexample they make the error of thinking that, on Nozick’s method-relativized theory, the method M in question in any given case must be generally reliable.
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  27. (1 other version)Teaching & Learning Guide for: The Epistemic Aims of Democracy.Robert Weston Siscoe - 2023 - Philosophy Compass 18 (11):e12954.
    In order to serve their citizens well, democracies must secure a number of epistemic goods. Take the truth, for example. If a democratic government wants to help its impoverished citizens improve their financial position, then elected officials will need to know what policies truly help those living in poverty. Because truth has such an important role in political decision-making, many defenders of democracy have highlighted the ways in which democratic procedures can lead to the truth. But there (...)
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  28. Raciocínio com Falsidades: Um Ensaio sobre Conhecimento Inferencial.Eduardo Alves - 2021 - Dissertation, Pontifical Catholic University of Rio Grande Do Sul
    The goal of this essay is to evaluate the claim that it is possible to acquire inferential knowledge from false belief. In order to do so, we explain the main problem and some preliminaries notions in the first chapter. In the second chapter, we evaluate the reasons against the possibility of knowledge from falsehood. In the final chapter, we examine the reasons for the possibility of knowledge from falsehood.
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  29. Better than our nature.Michael Vlerick - 2017 - Cambridge University Press.
    The fact of evolution raises important questions for the position of moral realism, because the origin of our moral dispositions in a contingent evolutionary process is on the face of it incompatible with the view that our moral beliefs track independent moral truths. Moreover, this meta-ethical worry seems to undermine the normative justification of our moral norms and beliefs. If we don’t have any grounds to believe that the source of our moral beliefs has any ontological authority, how can our (...)
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  30. What If Well-Being Measurements Are Non-Linear?Daniel Wodak - 2019 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 97 (1):29-45.
    Well-being measurements are frequently used to support conclusions about a range of philosophically important issues. This is a problem, because we know too little about the intervals of the relevant scales. I argue that it is plausible that well-being measurements are non-linear, and that common beliefs that they are linear are not truth-tracking, so we are not justified in believing that well-being scales are linear. I then argue that this undermines common appeals to both hypothetical and actual well-being (...)
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  31. Debunking Evolutionary Debunking.Katia Vavova - 2014 - Oxford Studies in Metaethics 9:76-101.
    Evolutionary debunking arguments start with a premise about the influence of evolutionary forces on our evaluative beliefs, and conclude that we are not justified in those beliefs. The value realist holds that there are attitude-independent evaluative truths. But the debunker argues that we have no reason to think that the evolutionary forces that shaped human evaluative attitudes would track those truths. Worse yet, we seem to have a good reason to think that they wouldn’t: evolution selects for characteristics that increase (...)
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  32. The Foundations of Skeptical Theism.Stephen J. Wykstra & Timothy Perrine - 2012 - Faith and Philosophy 29 (4):375-399.
    Some skeptical theists use Wykstra’s CORNEA constraint to undercut Rowe-style inductive arguments from evil. Many critics of skeptical theism accept CORNEA, but argue that Rowe-style arguments meet its constraint. But Justin McBrayer argues that CORNEA is itself mistaken. It is, he claims, akin to “sensitivity” or “truth-tracking” constraints like those of Robert Nozick; but counterexamples show that inductive evidence is often insensitive. We here defend CORNEA against McBrayer’s chief counterexample. We first clarify CORNEA, distinguishing it from a deeper (...)
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  33. An Epistemic Interpretation of Paraconsistent Weak Kleene Logic.Damian E. Szmuc - forthcoming - Logic and Logical Philosophy:1.
    This paper extends Fitting's epistemic interpretation of some Kleene logics, to also account for Paraconsistent Weak Kleene logic. To achieve this goal, a dualization of Fitting's "cut-down" operator is discussed, rendering a "track-down" operator later used to represent the idea that no consistent opinion can arise from a set including an inconsistent opinion. It is shown that, if some reasonable assumptions are made, the truth-functions of Paraconsistent Weak Kleene coincide with certain operations defined in this track-down fashion. Finally, further (...)
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  34. Expressivism and the Reliability Challenge.Camil Golub - 2017 - Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 20 (4):797-811.
    Suppose that there are objective normative facts and our beliefs about such facts are by-and-large true. How did this come to happen? This is the reliability challenge to normative realism. As has been recently noted, the challenge also applies to expressivist “quasi-realism”. I argue that expressivism is useful in the face of this challenge, in a way that has not been yet properly articulated. In dealing with epistemological issues, quasi-realists typically invoke the desire-like nature of normative judgments. However, this is (...)
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  35.  71
    (1 other version)Clinical Reasoning and Generics.Rajeev Dutta - 2024 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 1.
    I argue that generic generalizations expressed in language (i.e. ‘generics’) are apt for clinical reasoning. I introduce generics and describe two problems in the use and interpretation of generics: Generics may license inaccurate judgements about the frequency of events or properties within a group (i.e. a problem with the ‘truth-aptness’ of generics) and may facilitate problematic beliefs about social kinds (e.g. prejudice or essentializing). I provide an account of clinical reasoning and describe some features of what I call ‘good’ (...)
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  36. THE CAUSAL-PROCESS-CHANCE-BASED ANALYSIS OF CONTERFACTUALS.Igal Kvart - manuscript
    Abstract In this paper I consider an easier-to-read and improved to a certain extent version of the causal chance-based analysis of counterfactuals that I proposed and argued for in my A Theory of Counterfactuals. Sections 2, 3 and 4 form Part I: In it, I survey the analysis of the core counterfactuals (in which, very roughly, the antecedent is compatible with history prior to it). In section 2 I go through the three main aspects of this analysis, which are the (...)
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  37. (1 other version)Group Knowledge and Group Rationality: A Judgment Aggregation Perspective.Christian List - 2005 - Episteme 2 (1):25-38.
    In this paper, I introduce the emerging theory of judgment aggregation as a framework for studying institutional design in social epistemology. When a group or collective organization is given an epistemic task, its performance may depend on its ‘aggregation procedure’, i.e. its mechanism for aggregating the group members’ individual beliefs or judgments into corresponding collective beliefs or judgments endorsed by the group as a whole. I argue that a group’s aggregation procedure plays an important role in determining whether the group (...)
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  38. The Wisdom of the Small Crowd: Myside Bias and Group Discussion.Edoardo Baccini, Stephan Hartmann, Rineke Verbrugge & Zoé Christoff - forthcoming - Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation.
    The my-side bias is a well-documented cognitive bias in the evaluation of arguments, in which reasoners in a discussion tend to overvalue arguments that confirm their prior beliefs, while undervaluing arguments that attack their prior beliefs. The first part of this paper develops and justifies a Bayesian model of myside bias at the level of individual reasoning. In the second part, this Bayesian model is implemented in an agent-based model of group discussion among myside-biased agents. The agent-based model is then (...)
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  39. Leaps of Knowledge.Andrew Reisner - 2013 - In Timothy Chan (ed.), The Aim of Belief. Oxford, GB: Oxford University Press. pp. 167-183.
    This paper argues that both a limited doxastic voluntarism and anti-evidentialism are consistent with the views that the aim of belief is truth or knowledge and that this aim plays an important role in norm-setting for beliefs. More cautiously, it argues that limited doxastic voluntarism is (or would be) a useful capacity for agents concerned with truth tracking to possess, and that having it would confer some straightforward benefits of both an epistemic and non-epistemic variety to an (...)
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  40. Perspectives and Good Dispositions.Maria Lasonen-Aarnio - forthcoming - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research.
    I begin with by discussing cases that seem to show that a range of norms – norms like Choose the best!, Believe the truth!, and even Keep your promises! – fail to map out an important part of normative space. At the core of the problem is the observation that in some cases we can only conform to these norms by luck, in a way that is not creditable to us. I outline a prevalent diagnosis of the problem of (...)
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  41. Putting Inferentialism and the Suppositional Theory of Conditionals to the Test.Niels Skovgaard-Olsen - 2017 - Dissertation, University of Freiburg
    This dissertation is devoted to empirically contrasting the Suppositional Theory of conditionals, which holds that indicative conditionals serve the purpose of engaging in hypothetical thought, and Inferentialism, which holds that indicative conditionals express reason relations. Throughout a series of experiments, probabilistic and truth-conditional variants of Inferentialism are investigated using new stimulus materials, which manipulate previously overlooked relevance conditions. These studies are some of the first published studies to directly investigate the central claims of Inferentialism empirically. In contrast, the Suppositional (...)
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  42. The evolution of moral belief: support for the debunker’s causal premise.Michael T. Dale - 2022 - History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 44 (2):1-18.
    The causal premise of the evolutionary debunking argument contends that human moral beliefs are explained by the process of natural selection. While it is universally acknowledged that such a premise is fundamental to the debunker’s case, the vast majority of philosophers focus instead on the epistemic premise that natural selection does not track moral truth and the resulting skeptical conclusion. Recently, however, some have begun to concentrate on the causal premise. So far, the upshot of this small but growing (...)
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  43. Linguistic intuitions in context: a defense of nonskeptical pure invariantism.John Turri - 2014 - In Anthony Robert Booth & Darrell P. Rowbottom (eds.), Intuitions. Oxford, United Kingdom: Oxford University Press UK. pp. 165-184.
    Epistemic invariantism is the view that the truth conditions of knowledge ascriptions don’t vary across contexts. Epistemic purism is the view that purely practical factors can’t directly affect the strength of your epistemic position. The combination of purism and invariantism, pure invariantism, is the received view in contemporary epistemology. It has lately been criticized by contextualists, who deny invariantism, and impurists, who deny purism. A central charge against pure invariantism is that it poorly accommodates linguistic intuitions about certain cases. (...)
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  44. A debunking explanation for moral progress.Nathan Cofnas - 2020 - Philosophical Studies 177 (11):3171-3191.
    According to “debunking arguments,” our moral beliefs are explained by evolutionary and cultural processes that do not track objective, mind-independent moral truth. Therefore (the debunkers say) we ought to be skeptics about moral realism. Huemer counters that “moral progress”—the cross-cultural convergence on liberalism—cannot be explained by debunking arguments. According to him, the best explanation for this phenomenon is that people have come to recognize the objective correctness of liberalism. Although Huemer may be the first philosopher to make this explicit (...)
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  45. A debunking argument against speciesism.François Jaquet - 2019 - Synthese 198 (2):1011-1027.
    Many people believe that human interests matter much more than the like interests of non-human animals, and this “speciesist belief” plays a crucial role in the philosophical debate over the moral status of animals. In this paper, I develop a debunking argument against it. My contention is that this belief is unjustified because it is largely due to an off-track process: our attempt to reduce the cognitive dissonance generated by the “meat paradox”. Most meat-eaters believe that it is wrong to (...)
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  46. Understanding Scientific Progress: Aim-Oriented Empiricism.Nicholas Maxwell - 2017 - St. Paul, USA: Paragon House.
    "Understanding Scientific Progress constitutes a potentially enormous and revolutionary advancement in philosophy of science. It deserves to be read and studied by everyone with any interest in or connection with physics or the theory of science. Maxwell cites the work of Hume, Kant, J.S. Mill, Ludwig Bolzmann, Pierre Duhem, Einstein, Henri Poincaré, C.S. Peirce, Whitehead, Russell, Carnap, A.J. Ayer, Karl Popper, Thomas Kuhn, Imre Lakatos, Paul Feyerabend, Nelson Goodman, Bas van Fraassen, and numerous others. He lauds Popper for advancing beyond (...)
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  47. Evolutionary debunking arguments in three domains: Fact, value, and religion.S. Wilkins John & E. Griffiths Paul - 2013 - In James Maclaurin Greg Dawes (ed.), A New Science of Religion. New York: Routledge.
    Ever since Darwin people have worried about the sceptical implications of evolution. If our minds are products of evolution like those of other animals, why suppose that the beliefs they produce are true, rather than merely useful? We consider this problem for beliefs in three different domains: religion, morality, and commonsense and scientific claims about matters of empirical fact. We identify replies to evolutionary scepticism that work in some domains but not in others. One reply is that evolution can be (...)
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  48. Debunking Debunking's Debunkers: A Response to Street's Critics.Corin Katzke - manuscript
    In her 2006 paper, A Darwinian Dilemma for Realist Theories of Value, Sharon Street argues that evolutionary psychology, if roughly true, undermines evaluative realism as a metaethical theory. Evolutionary psychology suggests that our moral beliefs track evolutionary pressures, and not realist evaluative truths. Therefore, Street concludes, evaluative realism entails moral skepticism. The most compelling arguments against Street's evolutionary debunking of evaluative realism suggest that its implications are unacceptable. Vavova (2014, 2021) argues that, in order to work, evolutionary debunking entails global (...)
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  49. Defusing the Regress Challenge to Debunking Arguments.Shang Long Yeo - 2020 - Canadian Journal of Philosophy 50 (6):785-800.
    A debunking argument contends that some target moral judgments were produced by unreliable processes and concludes that such judgments are unjustified. Debunking arguments face a regress challenge: to show that a process is unreliable at tracking the moral truth, we need to rely on other moral judgments. But we must show that these relied-upon judgments are also reliable, which requires yet a further set of judgments, whose reliability needs to be confirmed too, and so on. Some argue that (...)
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  50. Do Acquaintance Theorists Have an Attitude Problem?Rachel Goodman - 2017 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 96 (1):67-86.
    This paper is about the relevance of attitude-ascriptions to debates about singular thought. It examines a methodology (common to early acquaintance theorists [Kaplan 1968] and recent critics of acquaintance [Hawthorne and Manley 2012], which assumes that the behaviour of ascriptions can be used to draw conclusions about singular thought. Although many theorists (e.g. [Recanati 2012]) reject this methodology, the literature lacks a detailed examination of its implications and the challenges faced by proponents and critics. I isolate an assumption of the (...)
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