What should we believe when epistemic and practical reasons pull in opposite directions? The traditional view states that there is something that we ought epistemically to believe and something that we ought practically to (cause ourselves to) believe, period. More recent accounts challenge this view, either by arguing that there is something that we ought simpliciter to believe, all epistemic and practical reasons considered (the weighing view), or by denying the normativity of epistemic reasons altogether (epistemic anti-normativism). I argue against (...) both accounts and defend the traditional view. An agent can be blameworthy in doxastic dilemmas for complying with their practical but not their epistemic reasons. This reveals how epistemic reasons are normative: the concept of epistemic blame helps us track epistemic normativity. (shrink)

We relax the assumption that priors are common knowledge, in the standard model of games of incomplete information. We make the realistic assumption that the players are boundedly rational: they base their actions on finite-order belief hierarchies. When the different layers of beliefs are independent of each other, we can retain Harsányi's type-space, and we can define straightforward generalizations of Bayesian Nash Equilibrium and Rationalizability in our context. Since neither of these concepts is quite satisfactory, we propose a hybrid concept, (...) Mirage Equilibrium, providing us with a practical tool to work with inconsistent belief hierarchies. When the different layers of beliefs are correlated, we must enlarge the type-space to include the parametric beliefs. This presents us with the difficulty of the inherent openness of finite belief subspaces. Appealing to bounded rationality once more, we posit that the players believe that their opponent holds a belief hierarchy one layer shorter than they do and we provide alternative generalizations of BNE and Rationalizability. Finally, we show that, when beliefs are degenerate point beliefs, the definition of Mirage Equilibrium coincides with that of the generalized BNE. (shrink)

Various theories try to give accounts of how measures of this confidence do or ought to behave, both as far as the internal mental consistency of the agent as ...

The method of reflective equilibrium (MRE) is a method of justification popularized by John Rawls and further developed by Norman Daniels, Michael DePaul, Folke Tersman, and Catherine Z. Elgin, among others. The basic idea is that epistemic agents have justified beliefs if they have succeeded in forming their beliefs into a harmonious system of beliefs which they reflectively judge to be the most plausible. Despite the common reference to MRE as a method, its mechanisms or rules are typically expressed in (...) a metaphorical or simplified manner and are therefore criticized as too vague. Recent efforts to counter this criticism have been directed towards the attempt to provide formal explications of MRE. This paper aims to supplement these efforts by providing an informal working definition of MRE. This approach challenges the view that MRE can adequately be characterized only in the negative as a set of anti-essentialisms. I argue that epistemic agents follow MRE iff they follow four interconnected rules, which are concerned with a minimalistic form of foundationalism, a minimalistic form of fallibilism, a moderate form of holism, and a minimalistic form of rationality. In the critical spirit of MRE, the corresponding working definition is, of course, provisional and revisable. In general, the aim is to contribute to a reflective equilibrium (RE) concerning MRE. If it is successful, this working definition provides a better grasp of the most basic elements of the method and thereby enhances our understanding of it. (shrink)

Today, bioethics experts have an increasing role in public life. However, the question arises: what does bioethics expertise really mean? Can there be such a thing in our globalised world characterised by ethical pluralism? I will argue that bioethics as a discipline represents the transformation of ethics expertise from a hard to a soft form of it. Bioethics was born as a reaction to the growing awareness of ethical pluralism, and it denied the hard form of normative–prescriptive ethics expertise, particularly (...) in its medical ethics form. In contrast, the traditional medical ethics model, and pre-modern societies in general, believed in hard normative ethics expertise. From this followed the characteristic paternalism of traditional medical practice: if physicians were experts in moral matters as well, if they knew what the right course of action to choose was, then they had a right to benevolently force this course of action on their patients. The remnants of this doctrine, although rarely stated explicitly, still can often be seen in clinical practice. The whole bioethics movement can be seen as a radical denial of the doctrine of physician's hard expertise in moral matters. Bioethics, however, represents a type of soft ethics expertise. Hence follows the seeming paradox of bioethics expertise: bioethics is both a denial of ethics expertise as well as a type of ethics expertise. (shrink)

Many of our attitudes are non-culpable: there was nothing that we should have done to avoid holding them. I argue that we can still be blameworthy for non-culpable attitudes: they can impair our relationships in ways that make our full practice of apology and forgiveness intelligible. My argument poses a new challenge to indirect voluntarists, who attempt to reduce all responsibility for attitudes to responsibility for prior actions and omissions. Rationalists, who instead explain attitudinal responsibility by appeal to reasons-responsiveness, can (...) make sense of blameworthiness for non-culpable attitudes. In response, voluntarists could propose a revision of our actual practices. This would lead us into a quite different debate. (shrink)

The normative force of evidence can seem puzzling. It seems that having conclusive evidence for a proposition does not, by itself, make it true that one ought to believe the proposition. But spelling out the condition that evidence must meet in order to provide us with genuine normative reasons for belief seems to lead us into a dilemma: the condition either fails to explain the normative significance of epistemic reasons or it renders the content of epistemic norms practical. The first (...) aim of this paper is to spell out this challenge for the normativity of evidence. I argue that the challenge rests on a plausible assumption about the conceptual connection between normative reasons and blameworthiness. The second aim of the paper is to show how we can meet the challenge by spelling out a concept of epistemic blameworthiness. Drawing on recent accounts of doxastic responsibility and epistemic blame, I suggest that the normativity of evidence is revealed in our practice of suspending epistemic trust in response to impaired epistemic relationships. Recognizing suspension of trust as a form of epistemic blame allows us to make sense of a purely epistemic kind of normativity the existence of which has recently been called into doubt by certain versions of pragmatism and instrumentalism. (shrink)

The semeiotic of Charles Sanders Peirce is irreducibly triadic, positing that a sign mediates between the object that determines it and the interpretant that it determines. He eventually holds that each sign has two objects and three interpretants, standardizing quickly on immediate and dynamical for the objects but experimenting with a variety of names for the interpretants. The two most prominent terminologies are immediate/dynamical/final and emotional/energetic/logical, and scholars have long debated how they are related to each other. This paper seeks (...) to shed new light on the matter by reviewing the numerous manuscript drafts where Peirce develops the latter nomenclature while attempting to introduce his pragmatism to a general audience. It then goes on to examine an additional set of interpretants, intentional/effectual/communicational, and shows that the three different trichotomies can be understood as complementary, rather than redundant or conflicting. (shrink)

Das Buch beschreibt die Transformation des Diskurses der Kulturwissenschaft, der seit seinem Entstehen um die Jahrhundertwende auch die deutsch-jüdische Interkulturalität retten sollte, in einem Diskurs der politischen Theologie (Carl Schmitt und Gerschom Scholem), über den sich der katastrophale Trennungsprozess beider Kulturen vollstreckt.

Several important questions in applied ethics – like whether to switch to a plant-based diet, reduce greenhouse gas emissions, or vote in elections – seem to share the following structure: if enough people ‘cooperate’ and become vegan for example, we bring about a better outcome; but what you do as an individual seems to make no difference whatsoever. Such collective action problems are often thought to pose a serious challenge to consequentialism. In response, I defend the Reactive Attitude Approach: rather (...) than focus only on the deontic status of (non-)cooperative acts – as existing consequentialist responses mostly do – consequentialists should also focus on when to praise or blame individuals. For example, even if your veganism does not change the overall outcome, consequentialists might still recommend praising you for your cooperative behavior. I make a consequentialist case for including praise and blame in our ethical practices around collective action and argue that doing so helps us capture important intuitions. I develop and defend these arguments by drawing on recent instrumentalist theories of blame and responsibility. (shrink)

It is often argued that there are no practical reasons for belief because we could not believe for such reasons. A recent reply by pragmatists is that we can often believe for practical reasons because we can often cause our beliefs for practical reasons. This paper reveals the limits of this recently popular strategy for defending pragmatism, and thereby reshapes the dialectical options for pragmatism. I argue that the strategy presupposes that reasons for being in non-intentional states are not reducible (...) to reasons to act. Pragmatists who want to preserve a motivational constraint on reasons therefore have exactly two options: either arguing that there are irreducible reasons for being in non-intentional states ; or arguing that we can believe directly for practical reasons. I argue that the prospects for the former option are dim because irreducible reasons to be in states are hard to square with the motivational constraint on reasons. Returning to the more traditional route of arguing for pragmatism by defending a version of doxastic voluntarism therefore seems to be the more promising way for pragmatists to go. (shrink)

I present an explanatory argument for the reasons-first view: It is superior to knowledge-first views in particular in that it can both explain the specific epistemic role of perception and account for the shape and extent of epistemic justification.

Justice at Nuremberg traces the history of the Nuremberg Doctors' Trial held in 1946-47, as seen through the eyes of the Austrian bliogemigrbliogé psychiatrist Leo Alexander. His investigations helped the United States to prosecute twenty German doctors and three administrators for war crimes and crimes against humanity. The legacy of Nuremberg was profound. In the Nuremberg code--a landmark in the history of modern medical ethics--the judges laid down, for the first time, international guidelines for permissible experiments on humans. One of (...) those who helped to formulate the code was Alexander. Justice at Nuremberg provides a detailed insight into the origins of human rights in medical science and into the changing role of international law, ethics and politics. (shrink)

In this commentary I discuss the role of types of knowledge and conceptual structures in lexical representation, revealing the explanatory potential of frame-based knowledge. Although frame-based lexical semantics is not alien to the theoretical model outlined in Jackendoff's conceptual semantics, testing its relevance to the analysis of the lexical evidence presented in his book has been left out of consideration.

Sartre pädagogisch lesen, dies ist bislang versäumt worden. Zu entdecken ist in seinem Denken eine deutliche Nähe zum Bildungsbegriff des frühen Nietzsche und damit auch eine Akzentuierung der Selbstverantwortlichkeit des Subjekts gegenüber allen situativen Einschränkungen seiner Freiheit. In Zeiten einer drohenden Selbstabdankung des Subjekts ist die Anknüpfung an Sartres Verständnis der Authentizität hilfreich für das Bemühen um die Neuformulierung eines tragfähigen Bildungsbegriffs. Die Sportpädagogik gewinnt über Sartres Analysen des Körpers eine bis heute unerschlossene phänomenologische Perspektive auf ihre anthropologischen Grundlagen.

I argue that epistemological disjunctivism, as defended by Pritchard (2012) or McDowell (1982/2009), faces a dilemma. To avoid collapsing into the “highest common factor view” (McDowell 1982/2009, 80), it has to combined with a metaphysical brand of disjunctivism. This is so because the epistemological disjunctivist’s contention, that veridical perception provides the perceiver with reflectively accessible epistemic reasons that are superior to those provided by hallucination, is tenable only if underwritten by the naïve realist claim that perception is partly constituted by (...) the perceived fact. As I argue, this claim inexorably leads to metaphysical disjunctivism. So, epistemological disjunctivism cannot be advertised as a view that shares some of the advantages of metaphysical disjunctivism, but is less extreme and therefore more widely acceptable. In addition to presenting the dilemma, I discuss and reject one route of escape for the epistemological disjunctivist. (shrink)

Examining the naturalist and normativist concepts of health and disease this article starts with analysing the view of C. Boorse. It rejects Boorse's account of health as species-typical functioning, giving a critique of his view based on evolutionary theory of contemporary biology. Then it gives a short overview of the normativist theories of health, which can be objectivist and subjectivist theories. Rejecting the objectivist theories as philosophically untenable, it turns to the subjectivist theories of Gert and Culver, and to the (...) view of Nordenfelt. These theories give quite a good subjectivist account of health and disease, but they do not pay enough attention to the notion of the environment, without which it is impossible to define health and disease. Starting with their definitions but introducing the notion of “reasonable social norms”, the article arrives at the following definition of health: The healthier a physical or mental characteristic, process, reaction is, the more it makes it possible for the individual to adapt to reasonable social norms without pain and suffering, and the longer, and happier a life it will be able to ensure him in that society. (shrink)

This commentary asks the reader to examine Pylyshyn's target article and the imagery debate at four levels of analysis – institutional, programmatic, empirical, and individual. It is proposed that the debate follows somewhat generic patterns of discourse at all four levels, but the discourse associated with one side of the debate may or may not be expressible and evaluated in terms of the other. The different sides of the debate might better serve cognitive science if they proceed as separate research (...) programs in their respective sub-disciplines. A more inclusive program could result, however, if the opposing approaches could somehow unite. (shrink)

The current use of citation-based metrics to evaluate the research output of individual researchers is highly discriminatory because they are uniformly applied to authors of single-author articles as well as contributors of multi-author papers. In the latter case, these quantitative measures are counted, as if each contributor were the single author of the full article. In this way, each and every contributor is assigned the full impact-factor score and all the citations that the article has received. This has a multiplication (...) effect on each contributor's citation-based evaluative metrics of multi-author articles, because the more contributors an article has, the more undeserved credit is assigned to each of them. In this paper, I argue that this unfair system could be made fairer by requesting the contributors of multi-author articles to describe the nature of their contribution, and to assign a numerical value to their degree of relative contribution. In this way, we could create a contribution-specific index of each contributor for each citation metric. This would be a strong disincentive against honorary authorship and publication cartels, because it would transform the current win-win strategy of accepting honorary authors in the byline into a zero-sum game for each contributor. (shrink)

This paper invokes the conceptual framework of Bourdieu to analyse the mechanisms, which help to maintain inappropriate authorship practices and the functions these practices may serve. Bourdieu’s social theory with its emphasis on mechanisms of domination can be applied to the academic field, too, where competition is omnipresent, control mechanisms of authorship are loose, and the result of performance assessment can be a matter of symbolic life and death for the researchers. This results in a problem of game-theoretic nature, where (...) researchers’ behaviour will be determined more by the logic of competition, than by individual character or motives. From this follows that changing this practice requires institutionalized mechanisms, and change cannot be expected from simply appealing to researchers’ individual conscience. The article aims at showing that academic capital is translated into honorary authorship. With little control, undetected honorary authorship gives the appearance of possessing intellectual capital. In this way a dominant position is made to be seen as natural result of intellectual ability or scientific merit, which makes it more acceptable to those in dominated positions. The final conclusion of this paper is that undemocratic authorship decisions and authorship based performance assessment together are a form of symbolic violence. (shrink)

This chapter defends a legal human right to tobacco control. Building on existing work, the chapter argues that the legal case for such a right is strong. Existing international human rights treaties, chiefly the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, recognize a human right to health alongside several other rights that speak for covering tobacco control under human rights law. Drawing on Allen Buchanan’s pluralistic justificatory framework for human rights, the chapter argues that the philosophical case is strong (...) too. Tobacco is among the deadliest public health threats worldwide and its health impacts so severe that humans should have a claim against their governments to protect them against the harms of tobacco. Human rights law is a promising avenue to strengthen this claim. The chapter then defends a human right to tobacco control against several philosophical worries. For example, is strong tobacco control compatible with personal freedom? Is it compatible with personal consent? Would human rights legislation facilitate power relations that unduly restrict national and individual self-determination? This chapter argues that concerns with freedom of choice, consent and power relations do not speak against tobacco control. Conversely, a concern with power relations speaks for a human right to tobacco control as it could lessen the power asymmetries between tobacco companies and vulnerable populations, such as children, smokers of lower socio-economic status and citizens in low-income countries with weaker governance structures. (shrink)