Results for 'irrelevance'

406 found
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  1. Irrelevant Influences.Katia Vavova - 2018 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research:134-152.
    We often hear such casual accusations: you just believe that because you are a liberal, a Christian, an American, a woman… When such charges are made they are meant to sting—not just emotionally, but epistemically. But should they? It can be disturbing to learn that one's beliefs reflect the influence of such irrelevant factors. The pervasiveness of such influence has led some to worry that we are not justified in many of our beliefs. That same pervasiveness has led others to (...)
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  2. The irrelevance of bootstrapping.David Christensen - 1990 - Philosophy of Science 57 (4):644-662.
    The main appeal of the currently popular "bootstrap" account of confirmation developed by Clark Glymour is that it seems to provide an account of evidential relevance. This account has, however, had severe problems; and Glymour has revised his original account in an attempt to solve them. I argue that this attempt fails completely, and that any similar modifications must also fail. If the problems can be solved, it will only be by radical revisions which involve jettisoning bootstrapping's basic approach to (...)
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  3. Irrelevant Cultural Influences on Belief.Robin McKenna - 2018 - Journal of Applied Philosophy 36 (5):755-768.
    Recent work in psychology on ‘cultural cognition’ suggests that our cultural background drives our attitudes towards a range of politically contentious issues in science such as global warming. This work is part of a more general attempt to investigate the ways in which our wants, wishes and desires impact on our assessments of information, events and theories. Put crudely, the idea is that we conform our assessments of the evidence for and against scientific theories with clear political relevance to our (...)
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  4. Explanatoriness is evidentially irrelevant, or inference to the best explanation meets Bayesian confirmation theory.W. Roche & E. Sober - 2013 - Analysis 73 (4):659-668.
    In the world of philosophy of science, the dominant theory of confirmation is Bayesian. In the wider philosophical world, the idea of inference to the best explanation exerts a considerable influence. Here we place the two worlds in collision, using Bayesian confirmation theory to argue that explanatoriness is evidentially irrelevant.
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  5. The irrelevance of supervenience.Consuelo Preti - 1998 - ProtoSociology 11:160-172.
    Externalistic theses about the nature of content appear to have untoward consequences for the role of content in folk pscyhological causal explanation. Given the predominance of Twin Earth formulations of externalism, however, the explanatory role problem is often construed as the problem of content's failure to supervene on intrinsic states of the head. In this paper I argue that this is misleading. The most general formulation of externalsim is shown to be independent of any supervenience claims. The result is that (...)
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  6. The irrelevance of the presentist/eternalist debate for the ontology of Minkowski spacetime.Mauro Dorato - 2006 - In Dennis Geert Bernardus Johan Dieks (ed.), The ontology of spacetime. Boston: Elsevier. pp. 93-109.
    In this paper I argue that the debate between the so-called “presentists” – according to whom only the present is real – and the “eternalists”, according to whom past present and future are equally real, has no ontological significance. In particular, once we carefully distinguish between a tensed and a tenseless sense of existence, it is difficult to find a single ontological claim on which the two parties could disagree. Since the choice of using a tense or a tenseless language (...)
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  7. The Relevance (and Irrelevance) of Questions of Personhood (and Mindedness) to the Abortion Debate.David Kyle Johnson - 2019 - Socio-Historical Examination of Religion and Ministry 1 (2):121‒53.
    Disagreements about abortion are often assumed to reduce to disagreements about fetal personhood (and mindedness). If one believes a fetus is a person (or has a mind), then they are “pro-life.” If one believes a fetus is not a person (or is not minded), they are “pro-choice.” The issue, however, is much more complicated. Not only is it not dichotomous—most everyone believes that abortion is permissible in some circumstances (e.g. to save the mother’s life) and not others (e.g. at nine (...)
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  8. The Methodological Irrelevance of Reflective Equilibrium.Tristram McPherson - 2015 - In Christopher Daly (ed.), Palgrave Handbook on Philosophical Methods. Palgrave Macmillan. pp. 652-674.
    John Rawls’ method of reflective equilibrium is the most influential methodology in contemporary ethics.This paper argues that this influence is undeserved, for two reasons. First, reflective equilibrium fails to accomplish two tasks that give us reason to care about methodology. On the one hand, it fails to explain how (or whether) moral knowledge is possible.This is because the method is explicitly oriented towards the distinct (and less interesting) task of characterizing our moral sensibilities. On the other hand, the method fails (...)
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  9. Analyzing debunking arguments in moral psychology: Beyond the counterfactual analysis of influence by irrelevant factors.Joanna Demaree-Cotton - 2019 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 42 (e151):15-17.
    May assumes that if moral beliefs are counterfactually dependent on irrelevant factors, then those moral beliefs are based on defective belief-forming processes. This assumption is false. Whether influence by irrelevant factors is debunking depends on the mechanisms through which this influence occurs. This raises the empirical bar for debunkers and helps May avoid an objection to his Debunker’s Dilemma.
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  10. The Irrelevance of Unsuccessful Traders.Gil Hersch - 2018 - Business Ethics Journal Review 6 (8):41-46.
    Alasdair MacIntyre argues that moral virtues are antithetical to what is required of those who trade in financial markets to succeed. MacIntyre focuses on four virtues and argues that successful traders possess none of them: (i) self-knowledge, (ii) courage, (iii) taking a long-term perspective, and (iv) tying one’s own good with some set of common goods. By contrast, I argue that (i)–(iii) are, in fact, traits of successful traders, regardless of their normative assessment. The last trait – caring about the (...)
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  11. Artificial Consciousness Is Morally Irrelevant.Bruce P. Blackshaw - 2023 - American Journal of Bioethics Neuroscience 14 (2):72-74.
    It is widely agreed that possession of consciousness contributes to an entity’s moral status, even if it is not necessary for moral status (Levy and Savulescu 2009). An entity is considered to have...
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  12. (1 other version)Permission to Believe: Why Permissivism Is True and What It Tells Us About Irrelevant Influences on Belief.Miriam Schoenfield - 2012 - Noûs 48 (2):193-218.
    In this paper, I begin by defending permissivism: the claim that, sometimes, there is more than one way to rationally respond to a given body of evidence. Then I argue that, if we accept permissivism, certain worries that arise as a result of learning that our beliefs were caused by the communities we grew up in, the schools we went to, or other irrelevant influences dissipate. The basic strategy is as follows: First, I try to pinpoint what makes irrelevant influences (...)
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  13. Is Normative Uncertainty Irrelevant if Your Descriptive Uncertainty Depends on It?Pamela Robinson - 2021 - Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 103 (4):874-899.
    According to ‘Excluders’, descriptive uncertainty – but not normative uncertainty – matters to what we ought to do. Recently, several authors have argued that those wishing to treat normative uncertainty differently from descriptive uncertainty face a dependence problem because one's descriptive uncertainty can depend on one's normative uncertainty. The aim of this paper is to determine whether the phenomenon of dependence poses a decisive problem for Excluders. I argue that existing arguments fail to show this, and that, while stronger ones (...)
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  14. ‘Pure’ Time Preferences Are Irrelevant to the Debate over Time Bias: A Plea for Zero Time Discounting as the Normative Standard.Preston Greene - 2021 - Australasian Philosophical Review 5 (3):254-265.
    I find much to like in Craig Callender's [2022] arguments for the rational permissibility of non-exponential time discounting when these arguments are viewed in a conditional form: viz., if one thinks that time discounting is rationally permissible, as the social scientist does, then one should think that non-exponential time discounting is too. However, time neutralists believe that time discounting is rationally impermissible, and thus they take zero time discounting to be the normative standard. The time neutralist rejects time discounting because (...)
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  15. The Moral Irrelevance of Constitutive Luck.Mihailis E. Diamantis - 2021 - Erkenntnis 88 (3):1331-1346.
    One’s constitution—whether one is generous or miserly, temperate or intemperate, kind or mean, etc.—is beyond one’s control in significant respects. Yet one’s constitution affects how one acts. And how one acts affects one’s moral standing. The counterintuitive inference—the so-called problem of constitutive moral luck—is that one’s moral standing is, to some significant extent, beyond one’s control. This article grants the premises but resists the inference. It argues that one’s constitution should have no net impact on one’s moral standing. While a (...)
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  16. Shareholder Ownership is Irrelevant for Shareholder Primacy.Hasko von Kriegstein - 2020 - Business Ethics Journal Review 8 (4):20-26.
    Strudler rejects shareholder primacy and argues that, once contractual obligations have been fulfilled and shareholders have received a reasonable return on investment, corporate executives may use corporate wealth for the general good. He seeks to establish this claim via an argument that, contrary to the received view, shareholders do not own corporations. After raising some questions about the latter argument, this commentary goes on to argue that the question of corporate ownership is a red herring. The argument for shareholder primacy (...)
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  17. Ought implies can, asymmetrical freedom, and the practical irrelevance of transcendental freedom.Matthé Scholten - 2020 - European Journal of Philosophy 29 (1):25-42.
    In this paper, I demonstrate that Kant's commitment to an asymmetry between the control conditions for praise and blame is explained by his endorsement of the principle Ought Implies Can (OIC). I argue that Kant accepts only a relatively weak version of OIC and that he is hence committed only to a relatively weak requirement of alternate possibilities for moral blame. This suggests that whether we are transcendentally free is irrelevant to questions about moral permissibility and moral blameworthiness.
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  18. Climate Models and the Irrelevance of Chaos.Corey Dethier - 2021 - Philosophy of Science 88 (5):997-1007.
    Philosophy of science has witnessed substantial recent debate over the existence of a structural analogue of chaos, which is alleged to spell trouble for certain uses of climate models. The debate over the analogy can and should be separated from its alleged epistemic implications: chaos-like behavior is neither necessary nor sufficient for small dynamical misrepresentations to generate erroneous results. The kind of sensitivity that matters in epistemology is one that induces unsafe beliefs, and the existence of a structural analogue to (...)
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  19. Philosophy at a Crossroads: Escaping from Irrelevance.Carlo Cellucci - 2018 - Syzetesis (1):13-53.
    Although there have never been so many professional philosophers as today, most of the questions discussed by today’s philosophers are of no interest to cultured people at large. Specifically, several scientists have maintained that philosophy has become an irrelevant subject. Thus philosophy is at a crossroads: either to continue on the present line, which relegates it into irrelevance, or to analyse the reasons of the irrelevance and seek an escape. This paper is an attempt to explore the second (...)
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  20. The moral irrelevance of autonomy.Gary Comstock - 1992 - Between the Species 8 (1):4.
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  21. On the Signpost Principle of Alternate Possibilities: Why Contemporary Frankfurt-Style Cases are Irrelevant to the Free Will Debate.Simkulet William - 2015 - Filosofiska Notiser 2 (3):107-120.
    This article contends that recent attempts to construct Frankfurt-style cases (FSCs) are irrelevant to the debate over free will. The principle of alternate possibilities (PAP) states that moral responsibility requires indeterminism, or multiple possible futures. Frankfurt's original case purported to demonstrate PAP false by showing an agent can be blameworthy despite not having the ability to choose otherwise; however he admits the agent can come to that choice freely or by force, and thus has alternate possibilities. Neo-FSCs attempt to show (...)
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  22. Killing and letting die: an irrelevant distinction to bioethics.Mohammad Manzoor Malik - 2011 - Journal of Islam in Asia (4):383-396.
    James Rachels’s distinction between killing and letting die maintains that there is morally no difference between killing a terminally ill patient and letting him/her die. Therefore, active and passive euthanasia dichotomy is a distinction without a difference. Hence, if passive euthanasia is allowed, active euthanasia should be permitted too. The paper demonstrated that the distinction between killing and letting die is: (1) irrelevant to euthanasia(2) extraneous to the medical profession, and (3) methodologically degressive. Furthermore, the paper demonstrated invalidity of the (...)
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  23. The proximate–ultimate distinction and evolutionary developmental biology: causal irrelevance versus explanatory abstraction.Massimo Pigliucci & Raphael Scholl - 2015 - Biology and Philosophy 30 (5):653-670.
    Mayr’s proximate–ultimate distinction has received renewed interest in recent years. Here we discuss its role in arguments about the relevance of developmental to evolutionary biology. We show that two recent critiques of the proximate–ultimate distinction fail to explain why developmental processes in particular should be of interest to evolutionary biologists. We trace these failures to a common problem: both critiques take the proximate–ultimate distinction to neglect specific causal interactions in nature. We argue that this is implausible, and that the distinction (...)
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  24. Responding to historical injustices: Collective inheritance and the moral irrelevance of group identity.Santiago Truccone-Borgogno - 2024 - European Journal of Political Theory 23 (I):65-84.
    I argue that changes in the numerical identity of groups do not necessarily speak in favour of the supersession of some historical injustice. I contend that the correlativity between the perpetrator and the victim of injustices is not broken when the identity of groups changes. I develop this argument by considering indigenous people's claims in Argentina for the injustices suffered during the Conquest of the Desert. I argue that present claimants do not need to be part of the same entity (...)
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  25. Why the Indifference of the Universe is Irrelevant to Life’s Meaning.Brooke Alan Trisel - 2019 - Human Affairs 29 (4):453-461.
    When pessimists claim that human life is meaningless, they often also assert that the universe is “blind to good and evil” and “indifferent to us”. How, if it all, is the indifference of the universe relevant to whether life is meaningful? To answer this question, and to know whether we should be concerned that the universe is indifferent, we need a clearer and deeper understanding of the concept of “cosmic indifference”, which I will seek to provide. I will argue that (...)
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  26. Commentary on: Marcin Lewiński’s “‘You’re moving from irrelevant to irrational’—Critical Reactions in Internet Discussion Forums”.Gilbert Plumer - 2009 - In Juho Ritola (ed.), Argument Cultures. Proceedings of the 8th OSSA Conference [CD-ROM]. Ontario Society for the Study of Argumentation. pp. 1-3.
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  27. Kierkegaard’s case for the irrelevance of philosophy.Antony Aumann - 2009 - Continental Philosophy Review 42 (2):221-248.
    This paper provides an account of Kierkegaard’s central criticism of the Danish Hegelians. Contrary to recent scholarship, it is argued that this criticism has a substantive theoretical basis and is not merely personal or ad hominem in nature. In particular, Kierkegaard is seen as criticizing the Hegelians for endorsing an unacceptable form of intellectual elitism, one that gives them pride of place in the realm of religion by dint of their philosophical knowledge. A problem arises, however, because this criticism threatens (...)
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  28. The skeptical import of motivated reasoning: A closer look at the evidence.Maarten van Doorn - 2023 - Thinking and Reasoning 1 (1):1-31.
    Central to many discussions of motivated reasoning is the idea that it runs afoul of epistemic normativity. Reasoning differently about information supporting our prior beliefs versus information contradicting those beliefs, is frequently equated with motivated irrationality. By analyzing the normative status of belief polarization, selective scrutiny, biased assimilation and the myside bias, I show this inference is often not adequately supported. Contrary to what’s often assumed, these phenomena need not indicate motivated irrationality, even though they are instances of belief-consistent information (...)
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  29. Explanatory Challenges in Metaethics.Joshua Schechter - 2018 - In Tristram Colin McPherson & David Plunkett (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Metaethics. New York: Routledge. pp. 443-459.
    There are several important arguments in metaethics that rely on explanatory considerations. Gilbert Harman has presented a challenge to the existence of moral facts that depends on the claim that the best explanation of our moral beliefs does not involve moral facts. The Reliability Challenge against moral realism depends on the claim that moral realism is incompatible with there being a satisfying explanation of our reliability about moral truths. The purpose of this chapter is to examine these and related arguments. (...)
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  30. Five Kinds of Epistemic Arguments Against Robust Moral Realism.Joshua Schechter - 2023 - In Paul Bloomfield & David Copp (eds.), Oxford Handbook of Moral Realism. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. pp. 345-369.
    This chapter discusses epistemic objections to non-naturalist moral realism. The goal of the chapter is to determine which objections are pressing and which objections can safely be dismissed. The chapter examines five families of objections: (i) one involving necessary conditions on knowledge, (ii) one involving the idea that the causal history of our moral beliefs reflects the significant impact of irrelevant influences, (iii) one relying on the idea that moral truths do not play a role in explaining our moral beliefs, (...)
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  31. Purely Probabilistic Measures of Explanatory Power: A Critique.William Roche & Elliott Sober - 2023 - Philosophy of Science 90 (1):129-149.
    All extant purely probabilistic measures of explanatory power satisfy the following technical condition: if Pr(E | H1) > Pr(E | H2) and Pr(E | ∼H1) < Pr(E | ∼H2), then H1’s explanatory power with respect to E is greater than H2’s explanatory power with respect to E. We argue that any measure satisfying this condition faces three serious problems—the Problem of Temporal Shallowness, the Problem of Negative Causal Interactions, and the Problem of Nonexplanations. We further argue that many such measures (...)
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  32. Factoring Out the Impossibility of Logical Aggregation.Philippe Mongin - 2008 - Journal of Economic Theory 141:p. 100-113.
    According to a theorem recently proved in the theory of logical aggregation, any nonconstant social judgment function that satisfies independence of irrelevant alternatives (IIA) is dictatorial. We show that the strong and not very plausible IIA condition can be replaced with a minimal independence assumption plus a Pareto-like condition. This new version of the impossibility theorem likens it to Arrow’s and arguably enhances its paradoxical value.
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  33. Partial Aggregation: What the People Think.Markus Kneer & Juri Viehoff - manuscript
    This article applies the tools of experimental philosophy to the ongoing debate about both the theoretical viability and the practical import of partially aggregative moral theories in distributive ethics. We conduct a series of three experiments (N=383): First, we document the widespread occurrence of the intuitions that motivate this position. Our study then moves beyond establishing the existence of partially aggregative intuitions in two dimensions: First, we extend experimental work in such a way as to ascertain which amongst existing versions (...)
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  34. Escaping the Cycle.J. Dmitri Gallow - 2022 - Mind 131 (521):99-127.
    I present a decision problem in which causal decision theory appears to violate the independence of irrelevant alternatives (IIA) and normal-form extensive-form equivalence (NEE). I show that these violations lead to exploitable behavior and long-run poverty. These consequences appear damning, but I urge caution. This decision should lead causalists to a better understanding of what it takes for a decision between some collection of options to count as a subdecision of a decision between a larger collection of options. And with (...)
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  35. Ambivalent Stereotypes.Andreas Bengtson & Viki Møller Lyngby Pedersen - forthcoming - Res Publica:1-18.
    People often discriminate based on negative or positive stereotypes about others. Important examples of this are highlighted by the theory of ambivalent sexism. This theory distinguishes sexist stereotypes that are negative (hostile sexism) from those that are positive (benevolent sexism). While both forms of sexism are considered wrong towards women, hostile sexism seems intuitively worse than benevolent sexism. In this article, we ask whether the difference between discriminating based on positive vs. negative stereotypes in itself makes a morally relevant difference. (...)
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  36. Truth, fallibility, and justification: new studies in the norms of assertion.John Turri - 2020 - Synthese (9):1-12.
    This paper advances our understanding of the norms of assertion in two ways. First, I evaluate recent studies claiming to discredit an important earlier finding which supports the hypothesis that assertion has a factive norm. In particular, I evaluate whether it was due to stimuli mentioning that a speaker’s evidence was fallible. Second, I evaluate the hypothesis that assertion has a truth-insensitive standard of justification. In particular, I evaluate the claim that switching an assertion from true to false, while holding (...)
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  37. Coherence, First-Personal Deliberation, and Crossword Puzzles.Marc-Kevin Daoust - forthcoming - Philosophical Topics.
    What is the place of coherence, or structural rationality, in good first-personal deliberation? According to Kolodny (2005), considerations of coherence are irrelevant to good first-personal deliberation. When we deliberate, we should merely care about the reasons or evidence we have for our attitudes. So, considerations of coherence should not show up in deliberation. In response to this argument, Worsnip (2021) argues that considerations of coherence matter for how we structure deliberation. For him, we should treat incoherent combinations of attitudes as (...)
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  38. Evidence in a Non-Ideal World: How Social Distortion Creates Skeptical Potholes.Catharine Saint-Croix - forthcoming - In Hilkje Hänel & Johanna Müller (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Non-Ideal Theory. Routledge.
    Our evidential environments are reflections of our social contexts. This is important because the evidence we encounter influences the beliefs we form. But, traditional epistemologists have paid little attention to the generation of this evidential environment, assuming that it is irrelevant to epistemic normativity. This assumption, I argue, is dangerous. Idealizing away the evidential environment obscures the ways that our social contexts distort its contents. Such social distortion can lead to evidential oppression, an epistemic injustice arising from the ubiquity of (...)
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  39. Permissivism and the Truth Connection.Michele Palmira - 2023 - Erkenntnis 88 (2):641-656.
    Permissivism is the view that, sometimes, there is more than one doxastic attitude that is perfectly rationalised by the evidence. Impermissivism is the denial of Permissivism. Several philosophers, with the aim to defend either Impermissivism or Permissivism, have recently discussed the value of (im)permissive rationality. This paper focuses on one kind of value-conferring considerations, stemming from the so-called “truth-connection” enjoyed by rational doxastic attitudes. The paper vindicates the truth-connected value of permissive rationality by pursuing a novel strategy which rests on (...)
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  40. Beyond the metrological viewpoint.Jean Baccelli - 2020 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 1:56-61.
    The representational theory of measurement has long been the central paradigm in the philosophy of measurement. Such is not the case anymore, partly under the influence of the critique according to which RTM offers too poor descriptions of the measurement procedures actually followed in science. This can be called the metrological critique of RTM. I claim that the critique is partly irrelevant. This is because, in general, RTM is not in the business of describing measurement procedures, be it in idealized (...)
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  41. The Money Pump Is Necessarily Diachronic.Adrian M. S. Piper - 2014 - Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin/Philosophy.
    In “The Irrelevance of the Diachronic Money-Pump Argument for Acyclicity,” The Journal of Philosophy CX, 8 (August 2013), 460-464, Johan E. Gustafsson contends that if Davidson, McKinsey and Suppes’ diachronic money-pump argument in their "Outlines of a Formal Theory of Value, I," Philosophy of Science 22 (1955), 140-160 is valid, so is the synchronic argument Gustafsson himself offers. He concludes that the latter renders irrelevant diachronic choice considerations in general, and the two best-known diachronic solutions to the money pump (...)
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  42.  47
    Biology as a Construct: Universals, Historicity, and the Postmodern Critique.Hippokratis Kiaris - 2024 - Perspectives in Biology and Medicine 67 (3):337-347.
    The integration of postmodern thinking in the sciences, especially in biology, has been subject to harsh criticism. Contrary to Enlightenment ideals of objectivity and neutrality in the scientific method, the postmodern stance holds that truth is relative, not universal, and therefore progress is ambiguous. The effect of postmodern thought has ramifications that extend from the distrust of preexisting scientific conclusions to questions about the impact of progress in society. It also reflects skepticism about the scientific endeavor. Especially when postmodern ideas (...)
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  43. Future bias in action: does the past matter more when you can affect it?Andrew J. Latham, Kristie Miller, James Norton & Christian Tarsney - 2020 - Synthese 198 (12):11327-11349.
    Philosophers have long noted, and empirical psychology has lately confirmed, that most people are “biased toward the future”: we prefer to have positive experiences in the future, and negative experiences in the past. At least two explanations have been offered for this bias: belief in temporal passage and the practical irrelevance of the past resulting from our inability to influence past events. We set out to test the latter explanation. In a large survey, we find that participants exhibit significantly (...)
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  44. Mechanisms and Constitutive Relevance.Mark B. Couch - 2011 - Synthese 183 (3):375-388.
    This paper will examine the nature of mechanisms and the distinction between the relevant and irrelevant parts involved in a mechanism’s operation. I first consider Craver’s account of this distinction in his book on the nature of mechanisms, and explain some problems. I then offer a novel account of the distinction that appeals to some resources from Mackie’s theory of causation. I end by explaining how this account enables us to better understand what mechanisms are and their various features.
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  45. Can Beliefs Wrong?Rima Basu - 2018 - Philosophical Topics 46 (1):1-17.
    We care what people think of us. The thesis that beliefs wrong, although compelling, can sound ridiculous. The norms that properly govern belief are plausibly epistemic norms such as truth, accuracy, and evidence. Moral and prudential norms seem to play no role in settling the question of whether to believe p, and they are irrelevant to answering the question of what you should believe. This leaves us with the question: can we wrong one another by virtue of what we believe (...)
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  46. Typicality of Dynamics and the Laws of Nature.Aldo Filomeno - 2023 - In Cristián Soto (ed.), Current Debates in Philosophy of Science: In Honor of Roberto Torretti. Springer Verlag.
    Certain results, most famously in classical statistical mechanics and complex systems, but also in quantum mechanics and high-energy physics, yield a coarse-grained stable statistical pattern in the long run. The explanation of these results shares a common structure: the results hold for a 'typical' dynamics, that is, for most of the underlying dynamics. In this paper I argue that the structure of the explanation of these results might shed some light --a different light-- on philosophical debates on the laws of (...)
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  47. Subjectivity and the Politics of Self-Cultivation: A Comparative Study of Fichte and Nietzsche.James S. Pearson - forthcoming - Nietzsche Studien.
    At first glance, Fichte and Nietzsche may strike us as intellectual contraries. For example, Fichte’s belief in historical progress and universal moral law appears to be diametrically opposed to Nietzsche’s searching critique of Enlightenment optimism. This impression is reinforced by Nietzsche’s disparaging remarks about Fichte. What is more, from the dearth of critical literature comparing the two thinkers, one might be tempted to conclude that they are broadly irrelevant to one another. In this paper, however, I argue that their theories (...)
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  48. Nature, Science, Bayes 'Theorem, and the Whole of Reality‖.Moorad Alexanian - manuscript
    A fundamental problem in science is how to make logical inferences from scientific data. Mere data does not suffice since additional information is necessary to select a domain of models or hypotheses and thus determine the likelihood of each model or hypothesis. Thomas Bayes’ Theorem relates the data and prior information to posterior probabilities associated with differing models or hypotheses and thus is useful in identifying the roles played by the known data and the assumed prior information when making inferences. (...)
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  49. Attainable and Relevant Moral Exemplars Are More Effective than Extraordinary Exemplars in Promoting Voluntary Service Engagement.Hyemin Han, Jeongmin Kim, Changwoo Jeong & Geoffrey L. Cohen - 2017 - Frontiers in Psychology 8:283.
    The present study aimed to develop effective moral educational interventions based on social psychology by using stories of moral exemplars. We tested whether motivation to engage in voluntary service as a form of moral behavior was better promoted by attainable and relevant exemplars or by unattainable and irrelevant exemplars. First, experiment 1, conducted in a lab, showed that stories of attainable exemplars more effectively promoted voluntary service activity engagement among undergraduate students compared with stories of unattainable exemplars and non-moral stories. (...)
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  50. Developing appropriate emotions.Xiaoyu Ke - 2024 - Synthese 203 (6):1-18.
    A central thesis held by neo-Aristotelian virtue theories is that virtues require robust dispositions to have appropriate emotions. This thesis is challenged by a particular form of situationism, which suggests that human beings cannot develop this kind of emotional disposition because our integral emotions are too easily influenced by morally and epistemically irrelevant incidental affect. If the challenge stands, it implies that human beings cannot be virtuous. In response to the challenge, I propose an agential solution that’s grounded in the (...)
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