In this paper we explain our pretense account of truth-talk and apply it in a diagnosis and treatment of the Liar Paradox. We begin by assuming that some form of deflationism is the correct approach to the topic of truth. We then briefly motivate the idea that all T-deflationists should endorse a fictionalist view of truth-talk, and, after distinguishing pretense-involving fictionalism (PIF) from error- theoretic fictionalism (ETF), explain the merits of the former over the latter. After presenting the basic framework (...) of our PIF account of truth-talk, we demonstrate a few advantages it offers over T-deflationist accounts that do not explicitly acknowledge pretense at work in the discourse. In turning to the Liar Paradox, we explain how the quasi-anaphoric functioning that our account attributes to truth-talk provides a diagnosis of the Liar Paradox (and other instances of semantic pathology) as having no content—in the sense of not specifying any of what we call M-conditions. At the same time, however, we vindicate the intuition that we can understand liar sentences, thereby avoiding one standard objection to “meaningless strategy” responses to the Liar Paradox. With this diagnosis in place, we then, by way of treatment, introduce a new predicate, ‘semantically defective’, and show how the explanation we give for its application allows for a consistent, yet revenge-immune, (dis)solution of the Liar Paradox, and semantic pathology generally. (shrink)

Reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) employ an evolving framework of calibrated language for assessing and communicating degrees of certainty in findings. A persistent challenge for this framework has been ambiguity in the relationship between multiple degree-of-certainty metrics. We aim to clarify the relationship between the likelihood and confidence metrics used in the Fifth Assessment Report (2013), with benefits for mathematical consistency among multiple findings and for usability in downstream modeling and decision analysis. We discuss how our (...) proposal meshes with current and proposed practice in IPCC uncertainty assessment. (shrink)

Well-Being and Death addresses philosophical questions about death and the good life: what makes a life go well? Is death bad for the one who dies? How is this possible if we go out of existence when we die? Is it worse to die as an infant or as a young adult? Is it bad for animals and fetuses to die? Can the dead be harmed? Is there any way to make death less bad for us? Ben Bradley defends (...) the following views: pleasure, rather than achievement or the satisfaction of desire, is what makes life go well; death is generally bad for its victim, in virtue of depriving the victim of more of a good life; death is bad for its victim at times after death, in particular at all those times at which the victim would have been living well; death is worse the earlier it occurs, and hence it is worse to die as an infant than as an adult; death is usually bad for animals and fetuses, in just the same way it is bad for adult humans; things that happen after someone has died cannot harm that person; the only sensible way to make death less bad is to live so long that no more good life is possible. (shrink)

First published in 2006. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Deflationism about truth, what is often simply called “deflationism”, is really not so much a theory of truth in the traditional sense, as it is a different, newer sort of approach to the topic. Traditional theories of truth are part of a philosophical debate about the nature of a supposed property of truth. Philosophers offering such theories often make suggestions like the following: truth consists in correspondence to the facts; truth consists in coherence with a set of beliefs or propositions; (...) truth is what is acceptable in the ideal limit of inquiry. According to deflationists, such suggestions are mistaken, and, moreover, they all share a common mistake. The common mistake is to assume that truth has a nature of the kind that philosophers might find out about and develop theories of. The main idea of the deflationary approach is (a) that all that can be significantly said about truth is exhausted by an account of the role of the expression ‘true’ or of the concept of truth in our talk and thought, and (b) that, by contrast with what traditional views assume, this role is neither metaphysically substantive nor explanatory. For example, according to deflationary accounts, to say that ‘snow is white’ is true, or that it is true that snow is white, is in some sense strongly equivalent to saying simply that snow is white, and this, according to the deflationary approach, is all that can be said significantly about the truth of ‘snow is white’. Philosophers looking for some underlying nature of some truth property that is attributed with the use of the expression ‘true’ are bound to be frustrated, the deflationist says, because they are looking for something that isn’t there. Deflationism comprises a variety of different versions, each of which have gone by different names, including at least the following: disquotationalism, minimalism, prosententialism, the redundancy theory, the disappearance theory, the no-truth theory. There has not always been terminological consensus in the literature about how to use these labels: sometimes they have been used interchangeably; sometimes they have been used to mark distinctions between different developments of the same general approach. The actual variety of deflationary views has not always been clear in discussions of this approach, especially in the earlier literature, where important differences are occasionally missed. To help clear this up, we will use ‘deflationism’ to denote the general approach we want to discuss and reserve other names for specific versions of that approach. (shrink)

This book is a collection of important writings on deflationism, with a detailed introduction and an exhaustive annotated bibliography. Among philosophers concerned with the theory of truth, deflationist positions have quickly gained ground and have become the most popular. Yet heretofore there has been no single book to which the readers can go for a detailed, overall view of the entire phenomenon of deflationism. This is the only available map of the whole terrain of deflationism. -/- Deflationism is a comparatively (...) new approach, though it has its roots in the thinking of some philosophers in the early twentieth century. Deflationism rejects all the traditional theories of truth: the correspondence theory (truth corresponds with facts), the coherence theory (truth is membership of a coherent set of beliefs), the pragmatist theory is provability or verifiability). This book gives complete coverage to all the different varieties of deflationism, and to earlier philosophers who anticipated deflationism. The articles and exerpts include classic works by Frege, Ayer, Ramsey, Tarsk, and Quine, and recent works by the leading deflationist authors of today: Paul Horwich, Hartry Field, Stephen Schiffer, Robert Brandom, and Stephen Leeds. (shrink)

In this comprehensive study of Wittgenstein's modal theorizing, Bradley offers a radical reinterpretation of Wittgenstein's early thought and presents both an interpretive and a philosophical thesis. A unique feature of Bradley's analysis is his reliance on Wittgenstein's Notebooks, which he believes offer indispensable guidance to the interpretation of difficult passages in the Tractatus. Bradley then goes on to argue that Wittgenstein's account of modality--and the related notion of possible worlds--is in fact superior to any of the currently (...) popular theories in this area. In this context, he examines and critiques the work of such figures as Adams, Carnap, Hintikka, Lewis, Rescher, and Stalnaker. (shrink)

Note: This is a "pre-review" version, not the final version that will be published. -/- In “Nothing is True,” Will Gamester defends a form of alethic nihilism that still grants truth-talk a kind of legitimacy: an expressive role that is implemented via a pretense. He argues that this view has all of the strengths of deflationism, while also providing an elegant resolution of the Liar Paradox and its kin. For the alethic nihilist, Liar and related sentences are not true, and (...) that is the end of the story. No contradiction arises because it does not thereby follow that any of these sentences are also true, since nothing is. Gamester concludes that the simplicity of this response to the semantic paradoxes makes alethic nihilism an attractive approach. We disagree. In addition to providing insurmountable obstacles for his form of alethic nihilism, we contend that a certain form of non-nihilist deflationism is better placed to deal with the paradoxes and to account for truth-talk more generally. (shrink)

There are things we routinely say that may strike us as literally false but that we are nonetheless reluctant to give up. This might be something mundane, like the way we talk about the sun setting in the west, or it could be something much deeper, like engaging in talk that is ostensibly about numbers despite believing that numbers do not literally exist. Rather than regard such behaviour as self-defeating, a "fictionalist" is someone who thinks that this kind of discourse (...) is entirely appropriate, even helpful, so long as we treat what is said as a useful fiction, rather than as the sober truth. "Fictionalism" can be broadly understood as a view that uses a notion of pretense or fiction in order to resolve certain puzzles or problems that otherwise do not necessarily have anything to do with literature or fictional creations. Within contemporary analytic philosophy, fictionalism has been on the scene for well over a decade and has matured during that time, growing in popularity. There are now myriad competing views about fictionalism and consequently the discussion has branched out into many more subdisciplines of philosophy. Yet there is widespread disagreement on what philosophical fictionalism actually amounts to and about how precisely it ought to be pursued. This volume aims to guide these discussions, collecting some of the most up-to-date work on fictionalism and tracing the view's development over the past decade. After a detailed discussion in the book's introductory chapter of how philosophers should think of fictionalism and its connection to metaontology more generally, the remaining chapters provide readers with arguments for and against this view from leading scholars in the fields of epistemology, ethics, metaphysics, philosophy of science, philosophy of language, and others. (shrink)

This work combines two early pamphlets by F. H. Bradley , the foremost philosopher of the British Idealist movement. The first essay, published in 1874, deals with the nature of professional history, and foreshadows some of Bradley's later ideas in metaphysics. He argues that history cannot be subjected to scientific scrutiny because it is not directly available to the senses, meaning that all history writing is inevitably subjective. Though not widely discussed at the time of publication, the pamphlet (...) was influential on historian and philosopher R. G. Collingwood. The second pamphlet is Bradley's critique of Henry Sidgwick's The Methods of Ethics. Sidgwick was the first to propose the paradox of hedonism, which is the idea in ethics that pleasure can only be acquired indirectly. Published in 1877, this work is divided into three parts, treating Sidgwick's definitions, arguments, and his view of ethical science. (shrink)

This book charts the shape of future philosophical investigation by posing the question: "What is the Matrix?" Guided by the example of the Matrix film trilogy, the author examines issues ranging from simulation, proof and action to value, culture and mythology, offering a progressively deeper diagnosis of modern philosophical conditions. In contrast to the contemporary focus upon cognitive science and a commitment to the distinction between appearance and reality, this book helps readers to explore the argument that such abstractions are (...) inevitably displaced by a more concrete distinction between dreaming and waking, with the Matrix as the real and only world we inhabit. Researchers and scholars will find this work an engaging and enlightening examination of reality, via the medium of popular culture and film. (shrink)

Most theorists working on moral obligations to refugees conceive of western states as innocent bystanders with duties to aid refugees if they can do so at little cost to themselves. This paper challenges this dominant theoretical framing of global displacement by highlighting for the first time certain practices of western states in response to refugee flows such as border violence, detention, encampment and containment which may make us question whether states who engage in such practices are indeed innocent. This paper (...) provides the first normative analysis of these practices by seeking to classify them as either doing or allowing harm and invoking the fundamental moral imperative central to core common moral commitments - not to harm innocent people - to suggest that certain western states are not merely failing to aid refugees and allowing harm to come to them, but are instead responding to their calls for aid by harming them. (shrink)

By quantifying over properties we cannot create new properties any more than by quantifying over individuals we can create new individuals. Someone murdered Jones, and the murderer is either Smith or Jones or Wang. That “someone,” who murdered Jones, is not a person in addition to Smith, Jones, and Wang, and it would be absurd to posit a disjunctive person, Smith‐or‐Jones‐or‐Wang, with whom to identify the murderer. The same goes for second‐order properties and their realizers. (Kim 1997a, 201).

This volume is a serious attempt to open up the subject of European philosophy of science to real thought, and provide the structural basis for the interdisciplinary development of its specialist fields, but also to provoke reflection on the idea of ‘European philosophy of science’. This efforts should foster a contemporaneous reflection on what might be meant by philosophy of science in Europe and European philosophy of science, and how in fact awareness of it could assist philosophers interpret and motivate (...) their research through a stronger collective identity. The overarching aim is to set the background for a collaborative project organising, systematising, and ultimately forging an identity for, European philosophy of science by creating research structures and developing research networks across Europe to promote its development. (shrink)

Here presented are three singular, philosophical perspectives on the Delhi student protests which took place in 2019 and 2020, before the coronavirus pandemic. The writers hail from India, England...

This selection from the writings of the great English idealist philosopher F.H. Bradley, on truth, meaning knowledge, and metaphysics, provides within covers of a single volume a selection of original texts that will enable the reader to obtain a firsthand and comprehensive grasp of his thought. In addition, the editors have contributed general introductions to Bradley's logic and metaphysics and particular introductions to specific topics. These provide a systematic explanation of his thought and relate it to developments wihin (...) the recent history of analytical philosophy, giving the reader a framework in which to read and appreciate this important and sometimes difficult writing. Admirably suited for use both as a textbook in taught courses on recent philosophy and for individual study, this introduction comes at a time when Bradley's thought is being reassessed and the importance o his work appreciated once more. As one of only two volumes of Bradley's works available, it is sure to become an essential Bradley reader. (shrink)

Certain states in the Global North have responded to refugees seeking safety on their territories through harmful practices of border violence, detention, encampment and containment that serve to prevent and deter refugee arrivals. These practices are ostensibly justified through an appeal to a right to control borders. This paper therefore assesses whether these harmful practices can indeed be morally justified by a state’s right to control borders. It analyses whether Christopher Heath Wellman’s account of a state’s right to freedom of (...) association, which represents the most restrictive account of a state’s right to control borders available in the literature, can extend to justify current harmful practices against refugees. If not, then no available justification will be able to do so, and thus contemporary harmful practices used against refugees cannot be justified by a state’s right to control borders. (shrink)

There are a number of people who do great work in philosophy who have said very little about the Liar paradox. The purpose of this volume is to afford those philosophers the opportunity to address what might be described as reflections on the Liar.

Journal of Social Philosophy, EarlyView.

Multiple-vote majority rule is a procedure for making group decisions in which individuals weight their votes on issues in accordance with how competent they are on them. When individuals are motivated by the truth and know their relative competence on different issues, multiple-vote majority rule performs nearly as well, epistemically speaking, as rule by an expert oligarchy, but is still acceptable from the point of view of equal participation in the political process.Send article to KindleTo send this article to your (...) Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about sending to your Kindle. Find out more about sending to your Kindle. Note you can select to send to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be sent to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply. Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.A CASE FOR MULTIPLE-VOTE MAJORITY RULEVolume 9, Issue 1Richard Bradley and Christopher ThompsonDOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/epi.2011.5Your Kindle email address Please provide your Kindle [email protected]@kindle.com Available formats PDF Please select a format to send. By using this service, you agree that you will only keep articles for personal use, and will not openly distribute them via Dropbox, Google Drive or other file sharing services. Please confirm that you accept the terms of use. Cancel Send ×Send article to Dropbox To send this article to your Dropbox account, please select one or more formats and confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about sending content to Dropbox. A CASE FOR MULTIPLE-VOTE MAJORITY RULEVolume 9, Issue 1Richard Bradley and Christopher ThompsonDOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/epi.2011.5Available formats PDF Please select a format to send. By using this service, you agree that you will only keep articles for personal use, and will not openly distribute them via Dropbox, Google Drive or other file sharing services. Please confirm that you accept the terms of use. Cancel Send ×Send article to Google Drive To send this article to your Google Drive account, please select one or more formats and confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about sending content to Google Drive. A CASE FOR MULTIPLE-VOTE MAJORITY RULEVolume 9, Issue 1Richard Bradley and Christopher ThompsonDOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/epi.2011.5Available formats PDF Please select a format to send. By using this service, you agree that you will only keep articles for personal use, and will not openly distribute them via Dropbox, Google Drive or other file sharing services. Please confirm that you accept the terms of use. Cancel Send ×Export citation Request permission. (shrink)

The book develops a comprehensive and measured case that bitcoin is a net benefit to the world, despite its imperfections. Resistance Money is intended for all, from the clueless to the specialist, from the proponent to the die-hard skeptic, and everyone in between.

The main question of this study is whether God has a personality. We show what the question means, why it matters, and that good sense can be made of an affirmative answer to it. A God with personality — complete with particular, sometimes peculiar, and even seemingly unexplainable druthers — is not at war with maximal perfection, nor is the idea irredeemably anthropomorphic. And the hypothesis of divine personality is fruitful, with substantive consequences that span philosophical theology. But problems arise (...) here too, and new perspectives on inquiry itself. Our cosmos is blessed with weirdness aplenty. To come to know it is nothing less than to encounter a strange and untamed God. (shrink)

The aim of this chapter is to explain, motivate, and provide the central details of a specific version of what has come to be called alethic fictionalism—namely, a fictionalist account of truth (or, more accurately, of truth-talk, that fragment of discourse that involves the truth-predicate and other alethic-locutions). Our particular brand of alethic fictionalism is sometimes described as a “pretense theory of truth,” and a catchphrase for our view is “truth is a pretense.” But a more precise label for the (...) view that we will present is “semantic pretense-involving fictionalism about truth-talk.” Our endorsement of this view (for short, our SPIF account) stems from our belief that deflationism is the right approach to take on the topic of truth. This already shifts the focus away from any property of truth, since deflationism “about truth” (or, as we will call this view, T-deflationism) is best understood as an approach to analyzing truth-talk. We arrive specifically at our SPIF account of truth-talk because we also think that versions of T-deflationism should be understood as a kind of fictionalism (which, again, puts the focus on discourse, rather than metaphysics) and because we maintain that a SPIF account is the best variety of fictionalism to apply specifically to truth-talk. We will explain some of our reasons for holding these beliefs below, laying out the basics of our SPIF account of truth-talk and highlighting the merits of endorsing our particular account of that talk. (shrink)

John Maynard Keynes was the most important economist of the twentieth century. He was also a philosopher who wrote on ethics and the theory of probability and was a central figure in the Bloomsbury Group of writers and artists. In this volume contributors from a wide range of disciplines offer new interpretations of Keynes's thought, explain the links between Keynes's philosophy and his economics, and place his work and Keynesianism - the economic theory, the principles of economic policy, and the (...) political philosophy - in their historical context. Chapter topics include Keynes's philosophical engagement with G. E. Moore and Franz Brentano, his correspondence, the role of his General Theory in the creation of modern macroeconomics, and the many meanings of Keynesianism. New readers will find this the most convenient, accessible guide to Keynes currently available. Advanced students and specialists will find a conspectus of recent developments in the interpretation of Keynes. (shrink)

In this study, we comprehensively examine the relationships between ethical leadership, social exchange, and employee commitment. We find that organizational and supervisory ethical leadership are positively related to employee commitment to the organization and supervisor, respectively. We also find that different types of social exchange relationships mediate these relationships. Our results suggest that the application of a multifoci social exchange perspective to the context of ethical leadership is indeed useful: As hypothesized, within-foci effects (e.g., the relationship between organizational ethical leadership (...) and commitment to the organization) are stronger than cross-foci effects (e.g., the relationship between supervisory ethical leadership and commitment to the organization). In addition, in contrast to the “trickle down” model of ethical leadership (Mayer et al. in Org Behav Hum Decis Process 108:1–13, 2009), our results suggest that organizational ethical leadership is both directly and indirectly related to employee outcomes. (shrink)

In drawing on my own research and collaborative work with Karl Pribram, I show that love and power play a central role in psychosocial evolution. When these relations are coupled in a self-regulating system of cooperative interactions, brain growth is stimulated, mind and agency develop, and stable forms of collective social organization are generated. Focusing on the endogenous dynamics of social collectives, the article is organized in four parts. Part I summarizes evidence from developmental neuropsychology and social science to show (...) that stable psychosocial organization, across the human life span, is associated with social interaction organized along two dimensions. One dimension involves love, positive affective attachment, and the second involves power, social regulation of the aroused affective energy. Part II draws on Piaget's theory of cooperation and Bradley and Pribrams' theory of communication to describe how mind and agency are generated, and how stable organization is produced, respectively, from the relations involved in the arousal and regulation of affective energy. Combining elements of the two theories, Part III presents a sketch of a holographic model of collective organization in which goal-directed behavior is generated by a feed-forward process involving imaging and information processing of interaction along the two dimensions. Part IV shows how the model accounts for the emergence of human agency within the context of a more general evolutionary theory, such as Laszlo's. The article concludes with a discussion of my approach for building a "fully human theory of evolution.". (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Reinhold Niebuhr and Paul Ramsey: Idealist and Pragmatic Christians on Politics, Philosophy, Religion, and WarBradley BurroughsReinhold Niebuhr and Paul Ramsey: Idealist and Pragmatic Christians on Politics, Philosophy, Religion, and War Kevin Carnahan Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2010. 302 pp. $75.00.In a time when the “war on terror” and the polarization of American political culture have raised acute questions about politics, war, and the use of power, Kevin Carnahan (...) believes ethicists could benefit from the legacies of Reinhold Niebuhr and Paul Ramsey. During a similarly vexed period, Niebuhr and Ramsey found themselves at odds over the morality of the Vietnam War. Carnahan’s project seeks to elucidate the underlying sources of this disagreement, examining in turn how each thinker construes the task of moral theology, the nature of political society, and the moral status of war. Throughout these treatments, Carnahan illustrates how Niebuhr and Ramsey elaborated “overlapping but divergent” positions profoundly influenced by their respective encounters with pragmatism and idealism.Even as he shows how Niebuhr modified the pragmatist inheritance and Ramsey the idealist, Carnahan highlights how both were shaped especially by the way in which these traditions sought to counter specific moral dangers. For pragmatists, the key danger lay in the kind of moral fanaticism that blithely assumes its own righteousness. Sensitized to this threat, Niebuhr articulated a moral theology centered upon an understanding of love as an ideal that is always relevant yet never fully realizable in history, a construal that subverts all pretensions to righteousness. Idealism, on the other hand, sets itself against the danger of atomistic individualism, which Ramsey opposed by depicting social institutions in their essential forms as “‘garments of skin’... with which God... clothed naked human relations” (129) and by characterizing love as fundamentally a matter of upholding the covenants implied in such institutions. Ultimately, Niebuhr’s opposition to fanaticism predisposed him to focus upon the idolatries at play in political society and war and allowed him rather early on to descry the pretentiousness of the Vietnam War. Meanwhile, Ramsey’s thought included a presumption in favor of supporting the policies developed by social and political leaders that led him to defend American intervention in Vietnam until sometime around 1973. [End Page 218]The book’s expository work is generally surefooted and illuminative, although it at times falls into redundancy, baldly reiterating its thesis. Nonetheless, it complements existing scholarship on Niebuhr and Ramsey with an investigation of the philosophical premises of their ethical thought that each was eager to conceal. Such work will benefit scholars of Niebuhr and Ramsey as well as advanced students seeking to grasp the general architecture of their thought. Moreover, many will find Carnahan’s interpretations of Niebuhr and Ramsey impressive. For example, Carnahan portrays Niebuhr as a more Barthian and ecclessially minded thinker than most accounts. Although Carnahan understandably does not treat such indictments in detail, his rendering undercuts charges leveled by many of Niebuhr’s critics, including Bennett, Yoder, and Hauerwas. Unfortunately, though, Carnahan’s arguments on some of these disputed points are predicated upon a relatively narrow selection of essays. Still, the book unsettles assumptions and suggests further possibilities for inquiry.In addition to his expository work, Carnahan also makes a further contribution as he subjects both Niebuhr and Ramsey to constructive criticism that exposes—and identifies ways of reinforcing—some of the weaknesses of pragmatism and idealism. Eschewing a synthesis, Carnahan instead offers a mutually constructive dialogue capable of helping thinkers of both stripes think through the issues that confront contemporary America. Even if he does not elaborate on a more precise application of his insights to contemporary politics, he offers advice helpful to pragmatists and idealists alike and leaves many of us hoping that he has more to say on such matters. [End Page 219]Bradley BurroughsEmory UniversityCopyright © 2012 Society of Christian Ethics... (shrink)

The modern subject of theoretical legal ethics began in the 1970s. This brief history distinguishes two waves of theoretical writing on legal ethics. The “First Wave” connects the subject to moral philosophy and focuses on conflicts between ordinary morality and lawyers’ role morality, while the “Second Wave” focuses instead on the role legal representation plays in maintaining and fostering a pluralist democracy. We trace the emergence of the First Wave to the larger social movements of the 1960s and 1970s; in (...) the conclusion, we speculate about possible directions for a Third Wave of theoretical legal ethics, based in behavioral ethics, virtue ethics, or fiduciary theory. (shrink)