Universal Game Theory - The theory that all of life is a game played by consciousness’es, (Living Beings). The board is a dream like structure of the universe. The progression is through an active process of intent witnessing, and passive meditation. Which releases the tension in the nerves of the body and leads to selfless actions, moral goodness, and eventually the finish, Enlightenment. Just like a wounded creature only cares about it’s own self. Man in tensionthrough self-centered thought only thinks (...) about his own predicaments. Even if he is thinking about others it is only through his own objectionable view from his false-created center. The enemy or deterrents in the game is the conditioning created by society for ambition, greed, control and general brain washing to give theindividual a false sense of identity, the ego. This is achieved by Religion; tradition, culture, education, reasoning, linear thought, and the creation of time. Leaving him/her in constant anxiety about millions of future contingencies. Through witnessing one realizes the whole futility of one dimensional thought which only leads to more and more thought. Simple or constructed elaborately, thought being time, a human construction. The final step of the Universal Game Theory is understanding the whole process of thought and the eventual revelation of Enlightenment, Bliss, ecstasy. Which the person then understands that he/she is the creator of the life/dream with which they are in. That point being a sexual ecstasy similar to what happens in death to men. i.e. Human males release semenwhen they die, having a sexual ecstasy at their last breath. (shrink)

-/- ABSTRACT: The concept of beauty has been central to the understanding of Aesthetics, but most modern scholars examine and celebrate Aesthetics presupposing that beauty exists in this Universe, and that by merely being patrons and proponents of art, they can exercise their metaphysical-value judgment however they feel is fulfilling. Contemporary artists fail to realize the etiology and phenomenological value of beauty. The perfect exemplification of this can be seen in the veritable themes and allegories of Postmodernism. The fetishistic penchant (...) of Post-structuralists and Post-modernists has made the treatment of art and literature destructively convoluted and obfuscated, and offers infinite leeway for analysis of any kind. The trite adage ''Kill the writer’’ has been grossly misused and misidentified. Having said that, this essay also does not aim to blindly ridicule Postmodernism, and It will be apparent from the tone of the essay that I myself subscribe to the incontrovertible absolutism that Postmodernism offers, but only in the sense of axiom and logic. I, however, do not value and extol the senseless plurality and verbosity of non-analytical assessment that is ubiquitously pronounced in Postmodern content. (shrink)

The Repugnant Conclusion served an important purpose in catalyzing and inspiring the pioneering stage of population ethics research. We believe, however, that the Repugnant Conclusion now receives too much focus. Avoiding the Repugnant Conclusion should no longer be the central goal driving population ethics research, despite its importance to the fundamental accomplishments of the existing literature.

Embedding ethics modules within computer science courses has become a popular response to the growing recognition that CS programs need to better equip their students to navigate the ethical dimensions of computing technologies like AI, machine learning, and big data analytics. However, the popularity of this approach has outpaced the evidence of its positive outcomes. To help close that gap, this empirical study reports positive results from Northeastern’s program that embeds values analysis modules into CS courses. The resulting data suggest (...) that such modules have a positive effect on students’ moral attitudes and that students leave the modules believing they are more prepared to navigate the ethical dimensions they’ll likely face in their eventual careers. Importantly, these gains were accomplished at an institution without a philosophy doctoral program, suggesting this strategy can be effectively employed by a wider range of institutions than many have thought. (shrink)

This paper continues a thread in Analysis begun by Adam Rieger and Nicholas Denyer. Rieger argued that Frege’s theory of thoughts violates Cantor’s theorem by postulating as many thoughts as concepts. Denyer countered that Rieger’s construction could not show that the thoughts generated are always distinct for distinct concepts. By focusing on universally quantified thoughts, rather than thoughts that attribute a concept to an individual, I give a different construction that avoids Denyer’s problem. I also note that this problem (...) for Frege’s philosophy was discovered by Bertrand Russell as early as 1902 and has been discussed intermittently since. (shrink)

In this article we develop and defend what we call the “Trust View” of promissory obligation, according to which making a promise involves inviting another individual to trust one to do something. In inviting her trust, and having the invitation accepted (or at least not rejected), one incurs an obligation to her not to betray the trust that one has invited. The distinctive wrong involved in breaking a promise is a matter of violating this obligation. We begin by explicating the (...) core notion of “inviting someone to trust one to do something”, suggesting that it involves signaling to the other individual one's recognition of the importance the relevant action has for her, and one’s willingness to license her to have faith or optimism in one's character with regard to the performance of that action. We then turn to a defense of the Trust View, arguing that it has considerable appeal in its own right, that it is distinct from and superior to three similar accounts (T.M. Scanlon's Assurance View, Judith Jarvis Thomson's Reliance View and David Owens' Authority View), and that several objections to it can be answered. (shrink)

Perception involves the processing of content or information about the world. In what form is this content represented? I argue that perception is widely compositional. The perceptual system represents many stimulus features (including shape, orientation, and motion) in terms of combinations of other features (such as shape parts, slant and tilt, common and residual motion vectors). But compositionality can take a variety of forms. The ways in which perceptual representations compose are markedly different from the ways in which sentences or (...) thoughts are thought to be composed. I suggest that the thesis that perception is compositional is not itself a concrete hypothesis with specific predictions; rather it affords a productive framework for developing and evaluating specific empirical hypotheses about the form and content of perceptual representations. The question is not just whether perception is compositional, but how. Answering this latter question can provide fundamental insights into perception. (shrink)

Thick terms and concepts, such as honesty and cruelty, are at the heart of a variety of debates in philosophy of language and metaethics. Central to these debates is the question of how the descriptive and evaluative components of thick concepts are related and whether they can be separated from each other. So far, no empirical data on how thick terms are used in ordinary language has been collected to inform these debates. In this paper, we present the first empirical (...) study, designed to investigate whether the evaluative component of thick concepts is communicated as part of the semantic meaning or by means of conversational implicatures. While neither the semantic nor the pragmatic view can fully account for the use of thick terms in ordinary language, our results do favour the semanticist interpretation: the evaluation of a thick concept is only slightly easier to cancel than semantically entailed content. We further discovered a polarity effect, demonstrating that how easily an evaluation can be cancelled depends on whether the thick term is of positive or negative polarity. (shrink)

Education – typically and rightly held to be an incontrovertible good – has for some time now been dominated by mass formal schooling systems. These systems routinely harm and oppress many students. I argue that they do so impermissibly, and I call this stance “educational pacifism”. I propose that Maria Montessori’s views on mass formal schooling systems broadly align with educational pacifism and that, therefore, she can be considered an educational pacifist. Finally, I claim that contemporary Montessorians ought to be (...) educational pacifists, firstly because educational pacifism makes a compelling moral argument and secondly because Montessori herself agrees with it. (shrink)

How can we think about things in the outside world? There is still no widely accepted theory of how mental representations get their meaning. In light of pioneering research, Nicholas Shea develops a naturalistic account of the nature of mental representation with a firm focus on the subpersonal representations that pervade the cognitive sciences.

Sosa, Pritchard, and Vogel have all argued that there are cases in which one knows something inductively but does not believe it sensitively, and that sensitivity therefore cannot be necessary for knowledge. I defend sensitivity by showing that inductive knowledge is sensitive.

Commentators have shown a steady interest in the role of feeling in Kant’s moral and practical philosophy over the last few decades. Much attention has been given to the notion of ‘moral feeling’ in general, as well as to what Kant calls the ‘feeling of respect’ for the moral law. My focus in this essay is on the role of feeling in practical judgment. My claim in what follows is that the act of judging in the practical domain—i.e., determining what (...) one ought to do, or what action one ought to perform, in a specific case—crucially involves feeling. Put more simply: I argue that practical judgment has an essentially affective dimension. The upshot of the account I will give is that it provides us with a richer and more complex account of moral feeling than has previously been appreciated in the literature. While it is recognized that feeling plays a certain role in moral motivation, what I hope to demonstrate here is that feeling is involved much earlier in the exercise of moral agency. Far from entering only at the point at which we are trying to muster the strength of will to carry out what we know we ought to do, feeling is present the moment we begin to deliberate about what it is that we ought to do. (shrink)

Vogel, Sosa, and Huemer have all argued that sensitivity is incompatible with knowing that you do not believe falsely, therefore the sensitivity condition must be false. I show that this objection misses its mark because it fails to take account of the basis of belief. Moreover, if the objection is modified to account for the basis of belief then it collapses into the more familiar objection that sensitivity is incompatible with closure.

You have higher-order uncertainty iff you are uncertain of what opinions you should have. I defend three claims about it. First, the higher-order evidence debate can be helpfully reframed in terms of higher-order uncertainty. The central question becomes how your first- and higher-order opinions should relate—a precise question that can be embedded within a general, tractable framework. Second, this question is nontrivial. Rational higher-order uncertainty is pervasive, and lies at the foundations of the epistemology of disagreement. Third, the answer is (...) not obvious. The Enkratic Intuition---that your first-order opinions must “line up” with your higher-order opinions---is incorrect; epistemic akrasia can be rational. If all this is right, then it leaves us without answers---but with a clear picture of the question, and a fruitful strategy for pursuing it. (shrink)

Predictable polarization is everywhere: we can often predict how people’s opinions, including our own, will shift over time. Extant theories either neglect the fact that we can predict our own polarization, or explain it through irrational mechanisms. They needn’t. Empirical studies suggest that polarization is predictable when evidence is ambiguous, that is, when the rational response is not obvious. I show how Bayesians should model such ambiguity and then prove that—assuming rational updates are those which obey the value of evidence—ambiguity (...) is necessary and sufficient for the rationality of predictable polarization. The main theoretical result is that there can be a series of such updates, each of which is individually expected to make you more accurate, but which together will predictably polarize you. Polarization results from asymmetric increases in accuracy. This mechanism is not only theoretically possible, but empirically plausible. I argue that cognitive search—searching a cognitively accessible space for a particular item—often yields asymmetrically ambiguous evidence, I present an experiment supporting its polarizing effects, and I use simulations to show how it can explain two of the core causes of polarization: confirmation bias and the group polarization effect. (shrink)

Through a series of empirical studies involving native speakers of English, German, and Chinese, this paper reveals that the predicate “true” is inherently ambiguous in the empirical domain. Truth statements such as “It is true that Tom is at the party” seem to be ambivalent between two readings. On the first reading, the statement means “Reality is such that Tom is at the party.” On the second reading, the statement means “According to what X believes, Tom is at the party.” (...) While there appear to exist some cross-cultural differences in the interpretation of the statements, the overall findings robustly indicate that “true” has multiple meanings in the realm of empirical matters. (shrink)

A lively topic of debate in decision theory over recent years concerns our understanding of the different risk attitudes exhibited by decision makers. There is ample evidence that risk-averse and risk-seeking behaviours are widespread, and a growing consensus that such behaviour is rationally permissible. In the context of clinical medicine, this matter is complicated by the fact that healthcare professionals must often make choices for the benefit of their patients, but the norms of rational choice are conventionally grounded in a (...) decision maker’s own desires, beliefs and actions. The presence of both doctor and patient raises the question of whose risk attitude matters for the choice at hand and what to do when these diverge. Must doctors make risky choices when treating risk-seeking patients? Ought they to be risk averse in general when choosing on behalf of others? In this paper, I will argue that healthcare professionals ought to adopt a deferential approach, whereby it is the risk attitude of the patient that matters in medical decision making. I will show how familiar arguments for widely held anti-paternalistic views about medicine can be straightforwardly extended to include not only patients’ evaluations of possible health states, but also their attitudes to risk. However, I will also show that this deferential view needs further refinement: patients’ higher-order attitudes towards their risk attitudes must be considered in order to avoid some counterexamples and to accommodate different views about what sort of attitudes risk attitudes actually are. (shrink)

In a recent paper, Melchior pursues a novel argumentative strategy against the sensitivity condition. His claim is that sensitivity suffers from a ‘heterogeneity problem:’ although some higher-order beliefs are knowable, other, very similar, higher-order beliefs are insensitive and so not knowable. Similarly, the conclusions of some bootstrapping arguments are insensitive, but others are not. In reply, I show that sensitivity does not treat different higher-order beliefs differently in the way that Melchior states and that while genuine bootstrapping arguments have insensitive (...) conclusions, the cases that Melchior describes as sensitive ‘bootstrapping’ arguments don’t deserve the name, since they are a perfectly good way of getting to know their conclusions. In sum, sensitivity doesn’t have a heterogeneity problem. (shrink)

Philosophers and linguists currently lack the means to reliably identify evaluative concepts and measure their evaluative intensity. Using a corpus-based approach, we present a new method to distinguish evaluatively thick and thin adjectives like ‘courageous’ and ‘awful’ from descriptive adjectives like ‘narrow,’ and from value-associated adjectives like ‘sunny.’ Our study suggests that the modifiers ‘truly’ and ‘really’ frequently highlight the evaluative dimension of thick and thin adjectives, allowing for them to be uniquely classified. Based on these results, we believe our (...) operationalization may pave the way for a more quantitative approach to the study of thick and thin concepts. (shrink)

Many current popular views in epistemology require a belief to be the result of a reliable process (aka ‘method of belief formation’ or ‘cognitive capacity’) in order to count as knowledge. This means that the generality problem rears its head, i.e. the kind of process in question has to be spelt out, and this looks difficult to do without being either over or under-general. In response to this problem, I propose that we should adopt a more fine-grained account of the (...) epistemic basing relation, at which point the generality problem becomes easy to solve. (shrink)

Vigorous debate over the moral propriety of cognitive enhancement exists, but the views of the public have been largely absent from the discussion. To address this gap in our knowledge, four experiments were carried out with contrastive vignettes in order to obtain quantitative data on public attitudes towards cognitive enhancement. The data collected suggest that the public is sensitive to and capable of understanding the four cardinal concerns identified by neuroethicists, and tend to cautiously accept cognitive enhancement even as they (...) recognize its potential perils. The public is biopolitically moderate, endorses both meritocratic principles and the intrinsic value of hard work, and appears to be sensitive to the salient moral issues raised in the debate. Taken together, these data suggest that public attitudes toward enhancement are sufficiently sophisticated to merit inclusion in policy deliberations, especially if we seek to align public sentiment and policy. (shrink)

The Lockean Thesis says that you must believe p iff you’re sufficiently confident of it. On some versions, the 'must' asserts a metaphysical connection; on others, it asserts a normative one. On some versions, 'sufficiently confident' refers to a fixed threshold of credence; on others, it varies with proposition and context. Claim: the Lockean Thesis follows from epistemic utility theory—the view that rational requirements are constrained by the norm to promote accuracy. Different versions of this theory generate different versions of (...) Lockeanism; moreover, a plausible version of epistemic utility theory meshes with natural language considerations, yielding a new Lockean picture that helps to model and explain the role of beliefs in inquiry and conversation. Your beliefs are your best guesses in response to the epistemic priorities of your context. Upshot: we have a new approach to the epistemology and semantics of belief. And it has teeth. It implies that the role of beliefs is fundamentally different than many have thought, and in fact supports a metaphysical reduction of belief to credence. (shrink)

Anna Smajdor and Joona Räsänen argue that we have good reason to classify pregnancy as a disease. They discuss five accounts of disease and argue that each account either implies that pregnancy is a disease or, if it does not, it faces problems. This strategy allows Smajdor and Räsänen to avoid articulating their own account of disease. Consequently, they cannot establish that pregnancy is a disease, only that plausible accounts of disease suggest this. Some readers will dismiss Smajdor and Räsänen’s (...) claims as counterintuitive. By analogy, if a mathematical proof concludes ‘2+2=5’, readers will know—without investigation—that an error occurred. Rather than dismiss Smajdor and Räsänen’s work, however, the easiest way to undermine their argument is to describe at least one plausible account of disease that (i) excludes pregnancy and (ii) avoids the problems they raise for it. This is our strategy. We focus on dysfunction accounts of disease. After outlining Smajdor and Räsänen’s main arguments against dysfunction accounts, we explain why pregnancy is not a disease on these accounts. Next, we defend dysfunction accounts against the three problems that Smajdor and Räsänen raise. If successful, then contra Smajdor and Räsänen, at least one plausible account of disease does not imply that pregnancy is a disease. We suspect that defenders of other accounts can respond similarly. Yet, we note that insofar as dysfunction accounts align with the commonsense intuition that pregnancy is not a disease, this, all else being equal, seems like a point in their favour. (shrink)

In this open peer commentary, we concur with the three target articles’ analysis and positions on abortion in the special issue on Roe v. Wade as the exercise of reproductive liberty essential for the bioethical commitment to patient autonomy and self-determination. Our proposed OPC augments that analysis by explicating more fully the concept crucial to Roe of fetal personhood. We explain that the development and use of predictive reproductive technologies over the fifty years since Roe has changed the literal image, (...) and thereby the epistemological landscape, through which a prospective parent comes to know the fetus. The logic of Roe required a legal and ethical denial of fetal personhood to prioritize maternal autonomy over claims to fetal moral personhood. Our claim is that such a denial may be more complicated today. The fetal person genetic testing and reproductive imaging now presents to prospective parents has become an increasingly individualized, distinct medicalized picture of a developing person with which a parent can either identify or differentiate. In contrast, the fetal person of Roe was an abstract and vague figure stripped of most human particulars, a pregnancy rather than the specific individualized human entity reproductive technology now presents as a person to prospective parents. We discuss the implications of this shift and call for a more capacious analysis of reproductive ethics that works towards both reproductive and disability justice. (shrink)

A realist theory of truth for a class of sentences holds that there are entities in virtue of which these sentences are true or false. We call such entities ‘truthmakers’ and contend that those for a wide range of sentences about the real world are moments (dependent particulars). Since moments are unfamiliar, we provide a definition and a brief philosophical history, anchoring them in our ontology by showing that they are objects of perception. The core of our theory is the (...) account of truthmaking for atomic sentences, in which we expose a pervasive ‘dogma of logical form’, which says that atomic sentences cannot have more than one truthmaker. In contrast to this, we uphold the mutual independence of logical and ontological complexity, and the authors outline formal principles of truthmaking taking account of both kinds of complexity. (shrink)

This is a review article on Franz Brentano’s Descriptive Psychology published in 1982. We provide a detailed exposition of Brentano’s work on this topic, focusing on the unity of consciousness, the modes of connection and the types of part, including separable parts, distinctive parts, logical parts and what Brentano calls modificational quasi-parts. We also deal with Brentano’s account of the objects of sensation and the experience of time.

In this paper I expound an argument which seems to establish that probabilism and special relativity are incompatible. I examine the argument critically, and consider its implications for interpretative problems of quantum theory, and for theoretical physics as a whole.

Of the dozens of purported solutions to the liar paradox published in the past fifty years, the vast majority are "traditional" in the sense that they reject one of the premises or inference rules that are used to derive the paradoxical conclusion. Over the years, however, several philosophers have developed an alternative to the traditional approaches; according to them, our very competence with the concept of truth leads us to accept that the reasoning used to derive the paradox is sound. (...) That is, our conceptual competence leads us into inconsistency. I call this alternative the inconsistency approach to the liar. Although this approach has many positive features, I argue that several of the well-developed versions of it that have appeared recently are unacceptable. In particular, they do not recognize that if truth is an inconsistent concept, then we should replace it with new concepts that do the work of truth without giving rise to paradoxes. I outline an inconsistency approach to the liar paradox that satisfies this condition. (shrink)

On at least one of its uses, ‘higher-order evidence’ refers to evidence about what opinions are rationalized by your evidence. This chapter surveys the foundational epistemological questions raised by such evidence, the methods that have proven useful for answering them, and the potential consequences and applications of such answers.

Grounding pluralism is the view that there are multiple kinds of grounding. In this essay, I motivate and defend an explanation-theoretic view of grounding pluralism. Specifically, I argue that there are two kinds of grounding: why-grounding—which tells us why things are the case—and how-grounding—which tells us how things are the case.

Kant’s distinction between the determining and reflecting power of judgment in the third Critique is not well understood in the literature. A mainstream view unifies these by making determination the telos of all acts of judgment (Longuenesse 1998). On this view, all reflection is primarily in the business of producing empirical concepts for cognition, and thus has what I call a determinative ideal. I argue that this view fails to take seriously the independence and autonomy of the ‘power of judgment’ (...) [Urteilskraft] as a higher cognitive faculty in its own right with its own a priori principle. Instead of seeing merely reflecting judgments as failed or incomplete acts of judgment, I argue that these are in fact paradigmatic of the activity of the power of judgment. More precisely, the reflecting power of judgment just is the power of judgment. Accordingly, reflecting judgment takes precedence over determining judgment; while the former operates according to a law that it gives itself, the latter requires another higher cognitive faculty to provide its principle. On my view, reflecting judgment should be understood as the capacity for purposive subsumption—most clearly seen in the activity of mere reflection. (shrink)

The gambler’s fallacy is the tendency to expect random processes to switch more often than they actually do—for example, to think that after a string of tails, a heads is more likely. It’s often taken to be evidence for irrationality. It isn’t. Rather, it’s to be expected from a group of Bayesians who begin with causal uncertainty, and then observe unbiased data from an (in fact) statistically independent process. Although they converge toward the truth, they do so in an asymmetric (...) way—ruling out “streaky” hypotheses more quickly than “switchy” ones. As a result, the majority (and the average) exhibit the gambler’s fallacy. If they have limited memory, this tendency persists even with arbitrarily-large amounts of data. Indeed, such Bayesians exhibit a variety of the empirical trends found in studies of the gambler’s fallacy: they expect switches after short streaks but continuations after long ones; these nonlinear expectations vary with their familiarity with the causal system; their predictions depend on the sequence they’ve just seen; they produce sequences that are too switchy; and they exhibit greater rates of gambler’s reasoning when forming binary predictions than when forming probability estimates. In short: what’s been thought to be evidence for irrationality may instead be rational responses to limited data and memory. (shrink)

The Twin Earth thought experiment invites us to consider a liquid that has all of the superficial properties associated with water (clear, potable, etc.) but has entirely different deeper causal properties (composed of “XYZ” rather than of H2O). Although this thought experiment was originally introduced to illuminate questions in the theory of reference, it has also played a crucial role in empirically informed debates within the philosophy of psychology about people’s ordinary natural kind concepts. Those debates have sought to accommodate (...) an apparent fact about ordinary people’s judgments: Intuitively, the Twin Earth liquid is not water. We present results from four experiments showing that people do not, in fact, have this intuition. Instead, people tend to have the intuition that there is a sense in which the liquid is not water but also a sense in which it is water. We explore the implications of this finding for debates about theories of natural kind concepts, arguing that it supports views positing two distinct criteria for membership in natural kind categories – one based on deeper causal properties, the other based on superficial, observable properties. (shrink)

It is often said that normative properties are “just too different” to reduce to other kinds of properties. This suggests that many philosophers find it difficult to believe reductive theses in ethics. I argue that the distinctiveness of the normative concepts we use in thinking about reductive theses offers a more promising explanation of this psychological phenomenon than the falsity of Reductive Realism. To identify the distinctiveness of normative concepts, I use resources from familiar Hybrid views of normative language and (...) thought to develop a Hybrid view of normative concepts. In addition to using this new Hybrid view to explain why reductive theses are difficult to believe, I show how to preserve several patterns of inference involving normative concepts that, intuitively, it is possible to make, and hence answer an important recent challenge to Hybrid views from Mark Schroeder. (shrink)

Education systems are full of harmful violence of types often unrecognised or misunderstood by educators, education leaders, and bureaucrats. Educational violence harms a great number of innocent persons (those who, morally speaking, may not be justifiably harmed). Accordingly, this paper rejects educational violence used to achieve educational ends. It holds that educational violence is unjustified if the condition that innocent persons are harmed is satisfied, that this condition is satisfied in current educational practice (compulsory schooling), and that, therefore, the current (...) education system (schooling) acts in an unjustifiable manner. If the means of educating cannot be justified, then that education system itself cannot be justified, since an end cannot be justifiably pursued if the means requisite to pursuing it are unjustifiable. I call this stance ‘educational pacifism’. (shrink)

If our experiences are cognitively penetrable, they can be influenced by our antecedent expectations, beliefs, or other cognitive states. Theorists such as Churchland, Fodor, Macpherson, and Siegel have debated whether and how our cognitive states might influence our perceptual experiences, as well as how any such influences might affect the ability of our experiences to justify our beliefs about the external world. This article surveys views about the nature of cognitive penetration, the epistemological consequences of denying cognitive penetration, and the (...) epistemological consequences of affirming cognitive penetration. (shrink)

I propose a revision of Cantor’s account of set size that understands comparisons of set size fundamentally in terms of surjections rather than injections. This revised account is equivalent to Cantor's account if the Axiom of Choice is true, but its consequences differ from those of Cantor’s if the Axiom of Choice is false. I argue that the revised account is an intuitive generalization of Cantor’s account, blocks paradoxes—most notably, that a set can be partitioned into a set that is (...) bigger than it—that can arise from Cantor’s account if the Axiom of Choice is false, illuminates the debate over whether the Axiom of Choice is true, is a mathematically fruitful alternative to Cantor’s account, and sheds philosophical light on one of the oldest unsolved problems in set theory. (shrink)

During the realist revival in the early years of this century, philosophers of various persuasions were concerned to investigate the ontology of truth. That is, whether or not they viewed truth as a correspondence, they were interested in the extent to which one needed to assume the existence of entities serving some role in accounting for the truth of sentences. Certain of these entities, such as the Sätze an sich of Bolzano, the Gedanken of Frege, or the propositions of Russell (...) and Moore, were conceived as the bearers of the properties of truth and falsehood. Some thinkers however, such as Russell, Wittgenstein in the Tractatus, and Husserl in the Logische Untersuchungen, argued that instead of, or in addition to, truth-bearers, one must assume the existence of certain entities in virtue of which sentences and/or propositions are true. Various names were used for these entities, notably 'fact', 'Sachverhalt', and 'state of affairs'. (1) In order not to prejudge the suitability of these words we shall initially employ a more neutral terminology, calling any entities which are candidates for this role truth-makers. (shrink)

You can perceive things, in many respects, as they really are. For example, you can correctly see a coin as circular from most angles. Nonetheless, your perception of the world is perspectival. The coin looks different when slanted than when head-on, and there is some respect in which the slanted coin looks similar to a head-on ellipse. Many hold that perception is perspectival because you perceive certain properties that correspond to the “looks” of things. I argue that this view is (...) misguided. I consider the two standard versions of this view. What I call the PLURALIST APPROACH fails to give a unified account of the perspectival character of perception, while what I call the PERSPECTIVAL PROPERTIES APPROACH violates central commitments of contemporary psychology. I propose instead that perception is perspectival because of the way perceptual states are structured from their parts. (shrink)

This response addresses the excellent responses to my book provided by Heather Douglas, Janet Kourany, and Matt Brown. First, I provide some comments and clarifications concerning a few of the highlights from their essays. Second, in response to the worries of my critics, I provide more detail than I was able to provide in my book regarding my three conditions for incorporating values in science. Third, I identify some of the most promising avenues for further research that flow out of (...) this interchange. (shrink)

Abstract: From familiar concepts like TALL and TABLE to exotic ones like GRAVITY and GENOCIDE, they guide our lives and are the basis for how we represent the world. However, there is good reason to think that many of our most cherished concepts, like TRUTH, FREEDOM, KNOWLEDGE, and RATIONALITY are defective in the sense that the rules for using them are inconsistent. This defect leads those who possess these concepts into paradoxes and absurdities. Indeed, I argue that many of the (...) central problems of contemporary philosophy should be thought of as having their source in philosophical concepts that are defective in this way. If that is right, then we should take a more active role in crafting and sculpting our conceptual repertoire. We need to explore various ways of replacing these defective concepts with ones that will still do the work we need them to do without leading us into contradictions. (shrink)

This is an excerpt of a report that highlights and explores five questions that arose from the Network for Sensory Research workshop on perceptual learning and perceptual recognition at the University of York in March, 2012. This portion of the report explores the question: What is perceptual learning?

In this chapter we explore two important questions that we believe should be central to any discussion of the ethics and politics of cultural heritage: What are the harms associated with appropriation and commodification, specifically where the heritage of Indigenous peoples is concerned? And how can these harms best be avoided? Archaeological concerns animate this discussion; we are ultimately concerned with fostering postcolonial archaeological practices. But we situate these questions in a broader context, addressing them as they arise in connection (...) with the appropriation of Indigenous cultural heritage, both past and present. (shrink)

Socrates' attitude towards falsehood is quite puzzling in the Republic. Although Socrates is clearly committed to truth, at several points he discusses the benefits of falsehood. This occurs most notably in Book 3 with the "noble lie" (414d-415c) and most disturbingly in Book 5 with the "rigged sexual lottery" (459d-460c). This raises the question: What kinds of falsehoods does Socrates think are beneficial, and what kinds of falsehoods does he think are harmful? And more broadly: What can this tell us (...) about the relationship between ethics and epistemology? The key to answering these questions lies in an obscure and paradoxical passage in Book II; at 382a-d Socrates distinguishes between "true falsehoods" and "impure lies." True falsehoods are always bad, but impure lies are sometimes beneficial. Despite Socrates' insistence that he is not saying anything deep, his distinction is far from straightforward. Nevertheless, in order to determine why some falsehoods are beneficial and why some are always harmful, we must understand what exactly true falsehoods are and how they differ from impure lies. In this paper, I argue that true falsehoods are a restricted class of false beliefs about ethics; they are false beliefs about how one should live and what one should pursue. I refer to these beliefs as "normative commitments." False normative commitments are always pernicious because they create and sustain psychological disharmony. Unlike true falsehoods, impure lies can be about anything. Nevertheless, they are only beneficial when they help produce and sustain true normative commitments. I argue that the upshot of this is that practical concerns have a kind of primacy over theoretical concerns. (shrink)

Willful ignorance is an important concept in criminal law and jurisprudence, though it has not received much discussion in philosophy. When it is mentioned, however, it is regularly assumed to be a kind of self-deception. In this article I will argue that self-deception and willful ignorance are distinct psychological kinds. First, some examples of willful ignorance are presented and discussed, and an analysis of the phenomenon is developed. Then it is shown that current theories of self-deception give no support to (...) the idea that willful ignorance is a kind of self-deception. Afterwards an independent argument is adduced for excluding willful ignorance from this category. The crucial differences between the two phenomena are explored, as are the reasons why they are so easily conflated. (shrink)

This paper considers objections to Popper's views on scientific method. It is argued that criticism of Popper's views, developed by Kuhn, Feyerabend, and Lakatos, are not too damaging, although they do require that Popper's views be modified somewhat. It is argued that a much more serious criticism is that Popper has failed to provide us with any reason for holding that the methodological rules he advocates give us a better hope of realizing the aims of science than any other set (...) of rules. Consequently, Popper cannot adequately explain why we should value scientific theories more than other sorts of theories ; which in turn means that Popper fails to solve adequately his fundamental problem, namely the problem of demarcation. It is suggested that in order to get around this difficulty we need to take the search for explanations as a fundamental aim of science. (shrink)

According to Sider, a question is metaphysically substantive just in case it has a single most natural answer. Recently, Barnes and Mikkola have argued that, given this notion of substantivity, many of the central questions in the metaphysics of gender are nonsubstantive. Specifically, it is plausible that gender pluralism—the view that there are multiple, equally natural gender kinds—is true, but this view seems incompatible with the substantivity of gender. The goal of this paper is to argue that the notion of (...) substantivity can be understood in a way that accommodates gender pluralism. First, I claim that gender terms (at least as used in the ontology room) are referentially indeterminate, where referential indeterminacy holds in virtue of the way the world is. Second, I propose a degree-theoretic (or scalar) account of metaphysical substantivity; genders are substantial to the degree that they are determinate. I conclude that gender is relatively, although not absolutely, substantial. (shrink)

Generic statements (‘Tigers have stripes’) are pervasive and early-emerging modes of generalization with a distinctive linguistic profile. Previous experimental work found that generics display a unique asymmetry between their acceptance conditions and the implications that are typically drawn from them. This paper presents evidence against the hypothesis that only generics display an asymmetry. Correcting for limitations of previous designs, we found a generalized asymmetry effect across generics, various kinds of explicitly quantified statements (‘most’, ‘some’, ‘typically’, ‘usually’), and variations in types (...) of predicated properties (striking vs. neutral). We discuss implications of these results for our understanding of the source of asymmetry effects and whether and in which ways these effects might introduce biased beliefs into social networks. (shrink)

Phineas Gage’s story is typically offered as a paradigm example supporting the view that part of what matters for personal identity is a certain magnitude of similarity between earlier and later individuals. Yet, reconsidering a slight variant of Phineas Gage’s story indicates that it is not just magnitude of similarity, but also the direction of change that affects personal identity judgments; in some cases, changes for the worse are more seen as identity-severing than changes for the better of comparable magnitude. (...) Ironically, thinking carefully about Phineas Gage’s story tells against the thesis it is typically taken to support. (shrink)