This study explores African students' use of cultural metaphoric reasoning in classifying everyday situations as hot or cold, as is part of Sotho cultural tradition. It documents the extent to which such metaphoric reasoning is related to the use of science (mis)conceptions of heating. Written probes were used to document cultural metaphoric reasoning and science misconceptions of students entering a university science program. The same instruments were used as postprobes after a 4-week teaching intervention using experimental cognitive conflict strategies for (...) various standard misconceptions on heating. The findings show that almost a third of the sample used metaphoric reasoning consistently. This group was, as expected, significantly dominated by Sotho speakers. Initially, a large percentage of students explained the particulate effect of heating in terms of melting, shrinking, or breaking up of atoms. Most students identified specific materials as good insulators against coldness or against heat. Heat transfer was frequently explained in terms of absorption, diffusion, or reflection rather than conduction. There were no significant differences in the type and frequencies of these alternative concepts held by cultural metaphoric and noncultural metaphoric reasoners before the intervention. The teaching program did not affect cultural metaphoric reasoning, but had significant and equal benefits for the conceptual understanding of both groups, with the exception that the cultural metaphoric reasoners were more persistent in attributing observable properties to atoms. The present study suggests some further modification to the teaching strategies and concludes that, at this level of education, students are able to distinguish between different types of reasoning appropriate for cultural everyday situations and scientific contexts. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The New Husserl: A Critical ReaderBob SandmeyerDonn Welton, editor. The New Husserl: A Critical Reader. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003. Pp. xxv + 334. Cloth, $75.00. Paper, $29.95.Donn Welton has put together a superb collection of twelve essays which "provide an alternative to the standard approach to Husserl by examining his method as a whole and by offering depth-probes into a number of issues, old and new, that (...) occupied [Husserl] during his exceptionally productive later period" (xi). Although classed under five subheadings by Welton, the essays are of three types generally. These are (1) essays which provide introduction to and overview of Husserl's philosophy, especially as expressed in his later works, (2) essays of comparison between aspects of Husserl's philosophy and other non-phenomenological or psychological theories, and (3) analytic essays which treat a particular thematic within (and transcending) Husserl's phenomenological philosophy.The book begins with Klaus Held's wonderfully coherent introductions to Husserl's phenomenological method and phenomenology of the life-world. Although these two essays are not new, they remain original and current overviews of Husserl's whole philosophy [End Page 122] translated into English for the first time. More importantly, they do not lapse into an obtuse jargon so typical of Husserlian scholarship. Both essays provide an excellent introduction to the major themes of Husserl's philosophy.Three essays within the collection are primarily comparative. Dieter Lohmar delves into a notoriously thorny issue within Kant's first critique, i.e., the schematism of concepts, in order to compare this against Husserl's concept of type. But he attempts herein to articulate something that "never really interested Kant" (97), i.e., the empirical genesis of the schemata. Apart from providing a clear account of the genesis of empirical schema within Kantian philosophy, Lohmar also clarifies the Husserlian conception of type as instituted in perceptual consciousness. Rudolf Bernet examines the appearing of Unconsciousness as presented by Freud in order to "show how it is possible that consciousness can bring to present appearance something unconscious... without thereby incorporating it into or subordinating it to the conscious present" (200). Bernet achieves two ends in this fine essay. He employs Husserl's theory of phantasy in inner-time consciousness in order to intimate a solution to the seeming aporia implicit in Freud's theory of unconscious consciousness. More importantly to Husserlian scholarship, however, Bernet also provides a fine articulation of Husserl's theory of phantasy as it develops from the "apprehension of a content of apprehension" schema to that of a non-positing, intuitive-reproductive presentification. Donn Welton's essay, "World as Horizon," attacks the semantic theory of claims and descriptions espoused primarily by Robert Brandom. What is lacking in Brandom's theory of claims and, by extension, in any abstracting semantic theory, Welton argues, is the proper starting point. Speech acts must be understood from within a theory of world "as a nexus of significance that situates not only our multiple discourses about different regions but also the regions themselves" (224).The bulk of the essays in this collection, however, are analytic in nature and range over themes as diverse as intentionality, inner-time-consciousness, self-reflection, intersubjectivity and the differing styles of phenomenological analysis within Husserl's philosophy. Perhaps the best essays in this collection, given its aim, are Lanei Rodemeyer's essay "Developments in the Theory of Time-Consciousness: an Analysis of Protention" and Anthony Steinbock's "Generativity and the Scope of Generative Phenomenology." Where Rodemeyer concentrates her attention on explicating the role of protention in all of Husserl's time-analyses—but most especially in the later Bernauer and C manuscripts, Steinbock looks from within Husserl's philosophy to a style of analysis that goes beyond Husserl to become "a communal effort, not just among contemporary phenomenologists, but as a project handed down and appropriated over the generations" (317 ff.). With the exception of David Carr's essay on subjectivity in the transcendental tradition, what is common to all these analytical essays is the dominant place of Husserl's late analyses of inner-time-consciousness and temporalization. These analyses play a major role in the two essays just... (shrink)

In this collection of closely interrelated essays, Robert Young emphasizes the scope of the nineteenth-century debate on 'man's place in nature' at the same time as he engages with the approaches of scholars who write about it. He is critical of the separation of the writing of history from writing about history, historiography, and of the separation of history from politics and ideology, then or now. Dr Young challenges fellow historians for reimposing the very disciplinary boundaries that the nineteenth-century debate (...) showed were in the service of ideological forces in that culture. Rather, he proposes that the full weight of the contending forces should be made apparent and debated openly so that neither nineteenth-century nor contemporary issues about the role of science in culture should be treated in a narrow perspective. (shrink)

This paper argues that we should assign certainty a central place in epistemology. While epistemic certainty played an important role in the history of epistemology, recent epistemology has tended to dismiss certainty as an unattainable ideal, focusing its attention on knowledge instead. I argue that this is a mistake. Attending to certainty attributions in the wild suggests that much of our everyday knowledge qualifies, in appropriate contexts, as certain. After developing a semantics for certainty ascriptions, I put certainty to explanatory (...) work. Specifically, I argue that by taking certainty as our central epistemic notion, we can shed light on a variety of important topics, including evidence and evidential probability, epistemic modals, and the normative constraints on credence and assertion. (shrink)

In the future, when we compare the welfare of a being of one substrate (say, a human) with the welfare of another (say, an artificial intelligence system), we will be making an intersubstrate welfare comparison. In this paper, we argue that intersubstrate welfare comparisons are important, difficult, and potentially tractable. The world might soon contain a vast number of sentient or otherwise significant beings of different substrates, and moral agents will need to be able to compare their welfare levels. However, (...) this work will be difficult, because we lack the same kinds of commonalities across substrates that we have within them. Fortunately, we might be able to make at least some intersubstrate welfare comparisons responsibly in spite of these issues. We make the case for cautious optimism and call for more research. (shrink)

Why engage in inquiry? According to many philosophers, the goal of inquiring into some question is to come to know its answer. While this view holds considerable appeal, this paper argues that it stands in tension with another highly attractive thesis: knowledge does not require absolute certainty. Forced to choose between these two theses, I argue that we should reject the idea that inquiry aims at knowledge. I go on to develop an alternative view, according to which inquiry aims at (...) maximizing the epistemic value of our credences. This alternative view makes room for knowledge that falls shy of certainty, and it coheres nicely with a rich body of work in epistemic decision theory. I proceed to highlight the implications of this replacement for some important topics in epistemology, including the dogmatism paradox, the nature of interrogative attitudes, and the norm of practical reasoning. (shrink)

Uses interviews with persons who have changed from belief to nonbelief or vice versa, and discusses what comfort people receive from religion.

The past decade has seen a protracted debate over the semantics of epistemic modals. According to contextualists, epistemic modals quantify over the possibilities compatible with some contextually determined group’s information. Relativists often object that contextualism fails to do justice to the way we assess utterances containing epistemic modals for truth or falsity. However, recent empirical work seems to cast doubt on the relativist’s claim, suggesting that ordinary speakers’ judgments about epistemic modals are more closely in line with contextualism than relativism (...) (Knobe & Yalcin 2014; Khoo 2015). This paper furthers the debate by reporting new empirical research revealing a previously overlooked dimension of speakers’ truth-value judgments concerning epistemic modals. Our results show that these judgments vary systematically with the question under discussion in the conversational context in which the utterance is being assessed. We argue that this ‘QUD effect’ is difficult to explain if contextualism is true, but is readily explained by a suitably flexible form of relativism. (shrink)

In this book John Campbell shows that the general structural features of human thought can be seen as having their source in the distinctive ways in which we...

In this wide-ranging interview, Bob Jessop discusses the development of, and many of the main themes in, his work over the last fifty years. He explains how he became interested in realism and Marx...

One leading approach to justification comes from the reliabilist tradition, which maintains that a belief is justified provided that it is reliably formed. Another comes from the ‘Reasons First’ tradition, which claims that a belief is justified provided that it is based on reasons that support it. These two approaches are typically developed in isolation from each other; this essay motivates and defends a synthesis. On the view proposed here, justification is understood in terms of an agent’s reasons for belief, (...) which are in turn analyzed along reliabilist lines: an agent's reasons for belief are the states that serve as inputs to their reliable processes. I show that this synthesis allows each tradition to profit from the other's explanatory resources. In particular, it enables reliabilists to explain epistemic defeat without abandoning their naturalistic ambitions. I go on to compare my proposed synthesis with other hybrid versions of reliabilism that have been proposed in the literature. (shrink)

Relativism and expressivism offer two different semantic frameworks for grappling with a similar cluster of issues. What is the difference between these two frameworks? Should they be viewed as rivals? If so, how should we choose between them? This chapter sheds light on these questions. After providing an overview of relativism and expressivism, I discuss three potential choice points: their relation to truth conditional semantics, their pictures of belief and communication, and their explanations of disagreement.

Here, Bob Hale and Crispin Wright assemble the key writings that lead to their distinctive neo-Fregean approach to the philosophy of mathematics. In addition to fourteen previously published papers, the volume features a new paper on the Julius Caesar problem; a substantial new introduction mapping out the program and the contributions made to it by the various papers; a section explaining which issues most require further attention; and bibliographies of references and further useful sources. It will be recognized as the (...) most powerful presentation yet of a neo-Fregean program. (shrink)

This paper examines the strategic use of corporate philanthropy in the 1990s by UK building societies faced with an intensification of societal pressure to change legal form from mutual to corporate status. While the economic case for mutuality has been made elsewhere, this paper examines the observation that community relationships were thought by management to be capable of assisting in the strategic positioning of mutual societies with regard to their legal form. By increasing charitable giving to respond to the level (...) of societal scrutiny and discussion on the issue of mutuality, this paper argues that charitable giving, as one proxy for community involvement, was used as a strategic tool to deflect calls for demutualisation, thereby preserving the existing mutual status of building societies. (shrink)

A fresh explication of the Thomist justification of self-defense casts off the hobbles of the principle of double effects to find a more secure footing in the historicaldevelopment of subjective natural rights by medieval jurists, and a straight-forward application to the latent threat of death in childbirth posed by non-consensual pregnancy. By articulating the implicit Thomistic right to defensive abortion in terms of conditional rights bestowed in Creation as correlative to particular natural law duties, justly proportionate limits to defensive abortion (...) are identified, and balanced against the forfeited or reserved natural rights variously imputed to conceptus and embryo in non-consensual pregnancies. Subsequently, the varieties of involuntary consent are examined from a Thomist perspective with a view to their relevance in justifying recourse to a rehabilitated practice of defensive abortion when free and full consent to impregnation and childbirth is absent. (shrink)

One attractive feature of process reliabilism is its reductive potential: it promises to explain justification in entirely non-epistemic terms. In this paper, I argue that the phenomenon of epistemic defeat poses a serious challenge for process reliabilism’s reductive ambitions. The standard process reliabilist analysis of defeat is the ‘Alternative Reliable Process Account’ (ARP). According to ARP, whether S’s belief is defeated depends on whether S has certain reliable processes available to her which, if they had been used, would have resulted (...) in S not holding the belief in question. Unfortunately, ARP proves untenable. I show, by way of counterexample, that ARP fails to articulate either necessary or sufficient conditions on defeat. Process reliabilists must either provide an alternative reductive account of defeat or renounce their reductive aspirations. (shrink)

To 'consequentialise' is to take a putatively non-consequentialist moral theory and show that it is actually just another form of consequentialism. Some have speculated that every moral theory can be consequentialised. If this were so, then consequentialism would be empty; it would have no substantive content. As I argue here, however, this is not so. Beginning with the core consequentialist commitment to 'maximising the good', I formulate a precise definition of consequentialism and demonstrate that, given this definition, several sorts of (...) moral theory resist consequentialisation. My strategy is to decompose consequentialism into three conditions, which I call 'agent neutrality', 'no moral dilemmas', and 'dominance', and then to exhibit some moral theories which violate each of these. (shrink)

A question of focus -- A unitary impulse : Husserl's confrontation with Dilthey -- The development of constitutive phenomenology -- The system of phenomenological philosophy -- Appendix 1: Husserl's publishing history -- Appendix 2: The Husserl Misch correspondence -- Appendix 3: Draft arrangements for Edmund Husserl's time investigations -- Appendix 4: Systems of phenomenological philosophy.

The book, which stepwise develops successively more powerful logical and grammatical systems, covers an unusually broad range of material.

According to many philosophers, belief is a settling state. On this view, someone who believes p is disposed to take p for granted in practical and theoretical reasoning. This paper presents a simple objection to this settling conception of belief: it conflicts with our ordinary patterns of belief ascription. I show that ascriptions of unsettled beliefs are commonplace, and that they pose problems for all of the most promising ways of developing the settling conception. I proceed to explore the implications (...) of my argument for the relation between belief and credence, and for the relative importance of belief in psychological explanation. (shrink)

We know that animals are harmed in plant production. Unfortunately, though, we know very little about the scale of the problem. This matters for two reasons. First, we can’t decide how many resources to devote to the problem without a better sense of its scope. Second, this information shortage throws a wrench in arguments for veganism, since it’s always possible that a diet that contains animal products is complicit in fewer deaths than a diet that avoids them. In this paper, (...) then, we have two aims: first, we want to collect and analyze all the available information about animal death associated with plant agriculture; second, we try to show just how difficult it’s to come up with a plausible estimate of how many animals are killed by plant agriculture, and not just because of a lack of empirical information. Additionally, we show that there are significant philosophical questions associated with interpreting the available data—questions such that different answers generate dramatically different estimates of the scope of the problem. Finally, we document current trends in plant agriculture that cause little or no collateral harm to animals, trends which suggest that field animal deaths are a historically contingent problem that in future may be reduced or eliminated altogether. (shrink)

As we begin our exploration of our relationship with animals, we come face to face with Peter Singer and his insistence that speciesism is a vice. It is important to come to know what he means by speciesism, why he regards it as a moral mistake.

A sourcebook/textbook on the problem of free will and determinism. Contains a history of the free will problem, a taxonomy of current free will positions, the standard argument against free will, the physics, biology, and neuroscience of free will, the most plausible and practical solution of the problem, and reviews of the work of the leading determinist Ted Honderich, the leading libertarian Robert Kane, the well-known compatibilist Daniel Dennett, and the determinism-agnostic Alfred Mele.

Science and the originality of life -- Christian facticity -- Grasping life as a topic -- Ruinance -- The retrieval of history -- Facticity and ontology -- Factical speaking -- Rhetoric -- Sophistry.

This paper develops a new challenge for moral noncognitivism. In brief, the challenge is this: Beliefs — both moral and non-moral — are epistemically evaluable, whereas desires are not. It is tempting to explain this difference in terms of differences in the functional roles of beliefs and desires. However, this explanation stands in tension with noncognitivism, which maintains that moral beliefs have a desire-like functional role. After critically reviewing some initial responses to the challenge, I suggest a solution, which involves (...) rethinking the functional relationship between desire and belief. (shrink)

Bob Hale presents a broadly Fregean approach to metaphysics, according to which ontology and modality are mutually dependent upon one another. He argues that facts about what kinds of things exist depend on facts about what is possible. Modal facts are fundamental, and have their basis in the essences of things--not in meanings or concepts.

Bob Hale presents a broadly Fregean approach to metaphysics, according to which ontology and modality are mutually dependent upon one another. He argues that facts about what kinds of things exist depend on facts about what is possible. Modal facts are fundamental, and have their basis in the essences of things--not in meanings or concepts.

This paper examines the extent to which the voluntary adoption of codes of conduct by multinational corporations (MNCs) renders MNCs accountable for the performance of actions specified in a code of conduct. In particular, the paper examines the ways in which codes of conduct coordinate the expectations of relevant parties with regard to the provision of assistance by MNCs on grounds of rescue or justice. The paper argues that this coordinative role of codes of conduct renders MNCs more accountable for (...) the performance of actions specified in a code of conduct than they would be without a code of conduct. This interpretation of the significance of codes of conduct is contrasted with the view that codes of conduct render MNCs accountable for performing actions specified in a code of conduct by grounding contractual obligations for the performance of such actions. (shrink)

This monograph articulates and defends a theory-based epistemology of modality (TEM). According to TEM, someone justifiably believe an interesting modal claim if and only if (a) she justifiably believes a theory according to which that claim is true, (b) she believes that claim on the basis of that theory, and (c) she has no defeaters for her belief in that claim. The book has two parts. In the first, the author motivates TEM, sets out the view in detail, and defends (...) it against a number of objections. In the second, the author considers whether TEM is worth accepting. To argue that it is, the author sets out criteria for choosing between modal epistemologies, concluding that TEM has a number of important virtues. However, the author also concedes that TEM is cautious: it probably implies that we are not justified in believing some interesting modal claims that we might take ourselves to be justified in believing. This raises a question about TEM's relationship to Peter van Inwagen's modal skepticism, which the author explores in detail. As it turns out, TEM offers a better route to modal skepticism than the one that van Inwagen provides. But rather than being a liability, the author argues that this is a further advantage of the view. Moreover, he argues that other popular modal epistemologies do not fare better: they cannot easily secure more extensive modal justification than TEM. The book concludes by clarifying TEM’s relationship to the other modal epistemologies on offer, contending that TEM need not be a rival to those views, but can instead be a supplement to them. (shrink)

According to a rich tradition in philosophy of action, intentional action requires practical knowledge: someone who acts intentionally knows what they are doing while they are doing it. Piñeros Glasscock argues that an anti-luminosity argument, of the sort developed in Williamson, can be readily adapted to provide a reductio of an epistemic condition on intentional action. This paper undertakes a rescue mission on behalf of an epistemic condition on intentional action. We formulate and defend a version of an epistemic condition (...) that is free from any luminosity commitments. While this version of an epistemic condition escapes reductio, it comes with substantive commitments of its own. In particular, we will see that it forces us to deny the existence of any essentially intentional actions. We go on to argue that this consequence should be embraced. On the resulting picture, intentional action is not luminous. But it still entails practical knowledge. (shrink)

Taking a fundamentally critical approach to the subject of business ethics, this book deals with the traditional material of ethics in business, as well as introducing and surveying some of the most interesting developments in critical ethical theory which have not yet been introduced to the mainstream. Including chapters on different philosophical approaches to ethics, this is a highly structured and clearly written textbook, the first book of its kind on this often neglected aspect of business.

In Belief, Inference, and the Self-Conscious Mind (BISCM), Eric Marcus analyses and responds to a core set of puzzles concerning belief and inference. Most centrally on offer are: an explanation of non-evidential/non-observational doxastic self-knowledge, an explanation of the unintelligibility of Moore-Paradoxical statements, an account of inference (built on an interpretation of the ‘Taking Condition’) fit to solve the Lewis Carroll regress, and an account of what constitutes the unity of the rational mind. Marcus’ answers depend on viewing beliefs as essentially (...) self-known and expressible (through asserting their contents (“P”), or avowing them in a self-ascription (“I believe that P”)). Beliefs are also held to (metaphysically) necessarily exclude their contradictories, and (metaphysically) necessitate their implications. Or at least they do in their paradigm form; when they are ‘in mind’ (an important theoretical concept Marcus makes much use of throughout the book. In this paradigmatic form, Marcus terms them judgments. A significant achievement of BISCM is in how, despite the strength of these and other core commitments (theses variously acknowledged to be “very strong”, “wildly unpopular”, and “singularly anachronistic”, Marcus remains utterly clear-eyed about the need to pass the plausibility test. Nowhere, for example, does he lose sight of the fact that we are “distinctively liable to irrationality”, including to self-deception (which is analysed in terms of both belief and the doxastic self-knowledge which essentially accompanies it on Marcus’ view, being ‘out of mind’). A second, and related strength is in the connections Marcus traces between both expressive and rational mental capacities. This is relatively rare in many of the literatures Marcus is engaging with, especially in the first half of the book. Marcus (building on earlier work) shows how such a synthesis can bear serious fruit, not least in his excellent analysis of Moore-Paradoxical unintelligibility. There is a lot one could say about what is exciting and valuable about each element of Marcus’ discussion. And inevitably for a book so bold and full of riches, there is also a lot one might question about these elements. But as Marcus emphasises, what is on offer is “… not a collection of discrete solutions to putatively separate problems [but] a unified conception of the mind in its theoretical orientation”. And what I want to press him on is a big-picture question: what are the boundaries, and what is the internal structure, of the mind's ‘theoretical’ orientation? For, for all the important and detailed work throughout the book, in which a general conception of believing is suggested, tested, refined, and applied, I don't yet have a stable sense of Marcus’ answers to these questions. (shrink)