Pascal’s Wager involves expected utilities. In this chapter, we examine the Wager in light of two main features of expected utility theory: utilities and probabilities. We discuss infinite and finite utilities, and zero, infinitesimal, extremely low, imprecise, and undefined probabilities. These have all come up in recent literature regarding Pascal’s Wager. We consider the problems each creates and suggest prospects for the Wager in light of these problems.

Each of the following papers gives an account of a different UK clinical ethics committee. The committees vary in the length of time they have been established, and also in the main focus of their work. The accounts discuss the development of the committees and some of the ethical problems that have been brought to them. The issues raised will be relevant for other National Health Service (NHS) trusts in the UK that wish to set up such a committee.

Biological ontologies are used to organize, curate, and interpret the vast quantities of data arising from biological experiments. While this works well when using a single ontology, integrating multiple ontologies can be problematic, as they are developed independently, which can lead to incompatibilities. The Open Biological and Biomedical Ontologies Foundry was created to address this by facilitating the development, harmonization, application, and sharing of ontologies, guided by a set of overarching principles. One challenge in reaching these goals was that the (...) OBO principles were not originally encoded in a precise fashion, and interpretation was subjective. Here we show how we have addressed this by formally encoding the OBO principles as operational rules and implementing a suite of automated validation checks and a dashboard for objectively evaluating each ontology’s compliance with each principle. This entailed a substantial effort to curate metadata across all ontologies and to coordinate with individual stakeholders. We have applied these checks across the full OBO suite of ontologies, revealing areas where individual ontologies require changes to conform to our principles. Our work demonstrates how a sizable federated community can be organized and evaluated on objective criteria that help improve overall quality and interoperability, which is vital for the sustenance of the OBO project and towards the overall goals of making data FAIR. Competing Interest StatementThe authors have declared no competing interest. (shrink)

In a career that spanned a quarter of a century, Richard Wright used literature to struggle for the rights of Africans and Asians and to combat colonialism. Like Franz Fanon, whose thinking Wright?s books overtly influenced, Wright deployed sociological and psychological insights in his fiction to advance the causes of non?white humanity during the end of the colonial era. But Wright?s great leap in understanding, not withstanding his global fame and notoriety, revolved around his regular use (...) of violence in his fictions as means of enabling his black characters to attain their full humanity. While his thematic obsession with black violence was shocking, Wright never flattered his black audiences; until the end of his life he challenged and criticised the health and value of the black cultural tradition. (shrink)

Frank Jackson and Robert Pargetter (1987)2 have argued for a version of reductive physicalism about color which they claim can accommodate the basic intuitions that have led others to embrace dispositionalism or subjectivism about color. Jackson (1996) has further developed the view and provided responses to some objections to its original statement. While Jackson and Pargetter do not have much company in endorsing their specific form of color physicalism, elements of their view have shown up in other (...) realist accounts, including the relativized account of color offered by John Spackman (2002), the disjunctivism of color properties endorsed by Peter Ross (2000), and the subjectivist strain present in Sydney Shoemaker’s (1994) discussion of color.3 Additionally, Mark Johnston (1992) has used Jackson and Pargetter’s view as a principal target in his arguments against color physicalism. (shrink)

Neo-Fregeans argue that substantial mathematics can be derived from a priori abstraction principles, Hume's Principle connecting numerical identities with one:one correspondences being a prominent example. The embarrassment of riches objection is that there is a plurality of consistent but pairwise inconsistent abstraction principles, thus not all consistent abstractions can be true. This paper considers and criticizes various further criteria on acceptable abstractions proposed by Wright settling on another one—stability—as the best bet for neo-Fregeans. However, an analogue of the embarrassment (...) of riches objection resurfaces in the metatheory and I conclude by arguing that the neo-Fregean program, at least insofar as it includes a platonistic ontology, is fatally wounded by it. (shrink)

The paper explains what disjunctivism is and explores its implications for skepticism. Following an account of Paul Snowdon’s conception of a disjunctivist account of perceptual experience the the focus is on how disjunctivism has figured in the epistemological work of John McDowell. A conception of recognitional abilities is deployed to expand on McDowell’s position. Finally, there is consideration of whether McDowell offers a satisfactory response to skepticism, taking account of criticism’s made by Crispin Wright.

A major voice in late twentieth-century philosophy, Alan Donagan is distinguished for his theories on the history of philosophy and the nature of morality. The Philosophical Papers of Alan Donagan, volumes 1 and 2, collect 28 of Donagan's most important and best-known essays on historical understanding and ethics from 1957 to 1991. Volume 2 addresses issues in the philosophy of action and moral theory. With papers on Kant, von Wright, Sellars, and Chisholm, this volume also covers a (...) range of questions in applied ethics--from the morality of Truman's decision to drop atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki to ethical questions in medicine and law. (shrink)

With papers on Kant, von Wright, Sellars, and Chisholm, this volume also covers a range of questions in applied ethics—from the morality of Truman's decision to drop atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki to ethical questions in medicine ...

SummaryThis essay explains why and how nineteenth-century chemists sought to stabilize the melting and boiling points of organic substances as reliable characteristics of identity and purity and how, by the end of the century, they established these values as ‘Constants of Nature’. Melting and boiling points as characteristic values emerge from this study as products of laboratory standardization, developed by chemists in their struggle to classify, understand and control organic nature. A major argument here concerns the role played by the (...) introduction of organic synthesis in driving these changes. Synthetic organic chemistry vastly increased the number of known organic substances, precipitating the chemical identity crisis of my title. Successful natural product synthesis, moreover, depended on chemists’ ability to demonstrate the absolute identity of synthetic product and natural target – something late nineteenth-century chemists eventually achieved by making reliable, replicable melting and boiling point measurements. In the period before the establishment of national standards laboratories, chemists and scientific glassblowers worked together to standardize melting and boiling points as physical constants, such collaborations highlighting the essential importance of chemical glassware and glassblowing skill in the development of nineteenth-century organic chemistry. (shrink)

Since the 1950s, the cognitive revolution has been transforming work in psychology, linguistics, and anthropology. Literary scholars, however, have only recently begun to grapple with the significance of cognitive understandings of language, mind, and behavior for literary and cultural studies. This unique issue of Poetics Today brings the concerns of literary history and cultural studies for the first time into a sustained and productive dialogue with cognitive methods, findings, and paradigms.The introduction situates the collection in relation to previous work, defines (...) the issues, highlights the stakes. Articles by Mark Turner and Paul Hernadi propose a bold extension of notions of literary history to include not only preliterature oral forms but the entire history of the species, viewing literary activity as a crucial human adaptation. Ellen Spolsky's essay provides an unprecedented statement of common ground shared by cognitive-evolutionary approaches and poststructuralist theory. The final three essays examine works by Aphra Behn, A. L. Barbauld, and Jane Austen in terms of their contemporary cultural and political contexts as well as in light of paradigms drawn from cognitive neuroscience and evolutionary theory. A commentary by Tony Jackson surveys the entire issue from the viewpoint of an informed outsider. (shrink)

[…] Open the pages of almost any national journal or magazine, and where ten years ago one found only one or another kind of free verse lyric, one now finds well rhymed quatrains, sestinas, villanelles, sonnets, and blank verse dramatic monologues or meditations.1 In a recent issue of the New Criterion, Robert Richman describes this rekindled interest in formal verse among younger poets as a return to the high seriousness, eloquence, and technical fluency that characterized the best achievements of American (...) poetry forty years ago.2 As Mr. Richman numbers me among the younger poets working in form, I ought to be as cheered by these developments as he is. Yet I am anything but cheered. And not because I don’t want to belong to club that would have me as a member, though this may be a part of it; but because I suspect that what Mr. Richman hails as a development may in fact be nothing but a mechanical reaction, and that the new formalists, in rejecting the sins of their experimental fathers may end up merely repeating the sings of their New Critical grandfathers, resuscitating the stodgy, overrefined conventions of the “fifties poem,” conventions which were of course sufficiently narrow and restrictive to provoke rebellion in the first place. Any reform, carried to uncritical extremes by lesser talents who ignore rather than try to assimilate the achievements of their predecessors, will itself require reformation. If James Wright, say, or Robert Bly, produced more than their fair share of imitators, if they even imitate themselves much of the time, they nonetheless have written poems all of us can and ought to learn from. Maybe we have had too much of the “raw” in recent years. But the answer to the raw is not the overcooked. Besides, it’s dangerous to think we have to choose exclusively between free verse and form. The wider the range of styles and forms that we avail ourselves of, the more enriched, more flexible and inclusive our expressive resources will be. It’s as important for those who work in form to be familiar with the experiments and innovatins of the last hundred years as it is for those who work in looser measures to be familiar with traditional verse forms that go back beyond the twentieth century. Alan Shapiro’s most recent book of poems, Happy Hour, was published this year. (shrink)

The dissertation is a critical examination of theory evaluation in population genetics. There are three main philosophical approaches to theory evaluation in philosophy of science: confirmation and hypothesis testing, scientific change, and experimentation. Accounts that champion each of the main philosophical approaches to scientific theory evaluation are represented in philosophy of biology: confirmation and hypothesis testing by Elisabeth A. Lloyd, scientific change by Lindley Darden, and experimentation by David W. Rudge. I argue that each of the main approaches is insufficient (...) for evaluating population genetics theories. However, the accounts I critique are not fundamentally incompatible. I modify, unify, and extend them into a comprehensive account of theory evaluation for population genetics. ;My philosophical analysis is driven by a complex, important, and ongoing controversy in population genetics, viz., the R. A. Fisher-Sewall Wright controversy in population genetics. I use my historical case study to assess the adequacy of both the extant philosophical analyses of theory evaluation and my own account. Between 1929 and 1962 Fisher and Wright debated the main differences emanating from their alternative approaches to evolutionary theorizing. The debates between Fisher and Wright functionally ended with Fisher's death. However, Wright continued to clarify his position in the controversy until his death in 1988, and other biologists have continued work on the core debates. ;Recently, four scientific papers led by biologists Jerry A. Coyne and Michael J. Wade have been key in revisiting and rekindling the Fisher-Wright controversy with analyses of old theoretical and empirical issues as well as new developments that have spun off the older work. Four decades after the debates between Fisher and Wright, these papers have staked out, with substantial disagreement, claims about the evaluative status of the two predominant population genetics approaches to evolution in the field. A further task of this dissertation is to provide a non-partisan evaluation of the last 40 years of work on the controversy, i.e., the controversy since Fisher's death in 1962. It is hoped that such a critical analysis of the controversy will advance it to some extent. (shrink)

We examine George Boolos's proposed abstraction principle for extensions based on the limitation-of-size conception, New V, from several perspectives. Crispin Wright once suggested that New V could serve as part of a neo-logicist development of real analysis. We show that it fails both of the conservativeness criteria for abstraction principles that Wright proposes. Thus, we support Boolos against Wright. We also show that, when combined with the axioms for Boolos's iterative notion of set, New V yields a (...) system equivalent to full Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory with a principle of global choice. This advances Boolos's longstanding interest in the foundations of set theory. (shrink)

This is a survey of the development of the philosophy of perception over the past twelve years. There are four sections. Part I deals largely with arguments for the propositionalizing of perception and for those types of externally founded realism that eschew inner representation. Part ii is devoted to three books that put the case for sense-Data (pennycuick, Jackson, Ginet) and some of the arguments against (pitcher). Part iii outlines james j gibson's psychological theory. Part iv takes up the (...) arguments for a theory of 'dual coding', Combining a non-Epistemic inner presentation as a first stage with epistemic selection as an independent module. The mental-Image argument (kosslyn, Pylyshyn) and wittgenstein's remarks on psychology, Recently published, Are brought in as relevant to this issue. (edited). (shrink)

Arguments from "easy knowledge" are meant to refute a class of epistemological views, including foundationalism about perceptual knowledge. I present arguments from easy knowledge in their strongest form, and explain why other formulations in the literature are inferior. I criticize two features of Stewart Cohen's presentation, namely his focus on knowing that one's faculties are reliable, and his use of a Williamson-style closure principle. Rather, the issue around easy knowledge must be understood using a notion of epistemic priority. Roger White's (...) presentation is contaminated by the so-called lottery puzzle, which is best kept separate. Distinguishing basic from non-basic visual contents limits the force of the examples discussed by Cohen, White, and Crispin Wright. Finally, I present a new strategy for resisting even the best-formulated arguments from easy knowledge. (shrink)

From an Indirect Realist point of view, the Knowledge Argument in the philosophy of perception has been misdirected by its very title. If it can be argued that sense-fields are at their basis no more than evidence, indeed, a part of existence as brute as what is usually termed the 'external', then, if 'knowing' is not essential to sensing, that argument has to be radically reconstructed. Resistance to there being an non-epistemic or 'raw feel' basis for sensing is very fashionable (...) at the moment (e.g. in Davidson, McDowell, Harman), but the present article aims at breaking through it. Scientific facts are adduced to show that sensing can exist without perceiving. It is argued that the part played by motivation in the gathering of knowledge in a feedback system, enhanced by intersubjective linguistic correction in the human case, allows for a ready evolutionary adaptation. One can advance from this to a fresh view of knowledge and rationality which see them at base as part of a folk-psychological method of allowing for continuing disambiguation of what are identified within that method as 'entities' and 'properties'. (shrink)

In 1987, psychologist Alan Leslie published the essay “Pretense and Representation: The Origins of ‘Theory of Mind.’”1 Even after more than twenty years, this remains a benchmark essay, having been cited over seven hundred times in the PsychINFO database as of summer 2011. “Theory of mind” is the cognitive-psychological term for the human ability to attribute mental states—intentions, desires, emotions—to others. Our social being depends on this ability, which humans demonstrate from infancy, though, of course, it develops as the (...) child grows. This ability depends on a certain kind of thought process that Leslie calls “metarepresentation.” Leslie’s essay offers an explanation of how metarepresentational thinking .. (shrink)

In 1911, Drs John Freeman and Leonard Noon published an account of a novel treatment for hay fever. Their method of desensitisation consisted of injecting increasing doses of an extract of pollen subcutaneously until the hypersensitivity reaction was diminished or abolished. Over subsequent decades, desensitisation established itself as the cornerstone of clinical allergy in both England and the United States, at least until the advent of novel pharmaceutical agents in the 1950s and 1960s. Although British allergists such as Noon and (...) Freeman were aware of conceptual developments within European immunology and pathology (such as the identification of anaphylaxis by Richet and Portier or von Pirquet's coining of the term allergy), their approach to hay fever was driven by more immediate pragmatic, and indeed financial, considerations. Freeman's immersion in the problems of hay fever and asthma and his pioneering use of allergen desensitisation or immunotherapy were shaped by his adherence to the convictions and bacteriological practices of his principal at St Mary's Hospital, Almroth Wright, and by the drive to produce commercial vaccines which would help to subsidise the experimental and therapeutic work at St Mary's. The aim of this paper is to explore early twentieth-century approaches to hay fever and other allergic diseases by tracing the intellectual and institutional origins of clinical allergy in Britain. (shrink)

Chauncey Wright (1830–1874) was one of the first American philosophers to explore the implications of Charles Darwin's work in evolutionary biology. Wright became a strong supporter of the idea of natural selection and a strong critic of the anti-selectionist and teleological arguments of St. George Jackson Mivart and Herbert Spencer, and he laid the groundwork for the field that is today called evolutionary epistemology. As the mentor of the original Cambridge "Metaphysical Club" (William James, Charles Sanders Peirce, (...) and Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.), Wright was also instrumental in the development of the American school of Pragmatism. Although his analytical brilliance was widely acknowledged, he never became professionally successful, and he died in 1874 in his 45th year. (shrink)

Radical moral encroachment is the view that belief itself is morally evaluable, and that some moral properties of belief itself make a difference to epistemic rationality. To date, almost all proponents of radical moral encroachment hold to an asymmetry thesis: the moral encroaches on rational belief, but not on rational credence. In this paper, we argue against the asymmetry thesis; we show that, insofar as one accepts the most prominent arguments for radical moral encroachment on belief, one should likewise accept (...) radical moral encroachment on credence. We outline and reject potential attempts to establish a basis for asymmetry between the attitude types. Then, we explore the merits and demerits of the two available responses to our symmetry claim: (i) embracing moral encroachment on credence and (ii) denying moral encroachment on belief. (shrink)