Are counterfactuals with true antecedents and consequents automatically true? That is, is Conjunction Conditionalization: if (X & Y), then (X > Y) valid? Stalnaker and Lewis think so, but many others disagree. We note here that the extant arguments for Conjunction Conditionalization are unpersuasive, before presenting a family of more compelling arguments. These arguments rely on some standard theorems of the logic of counterfactuals as well as a plausible and popular semantic claim about certain semifactuals. Denying Conjunction Conditionalization, then, requires (...) rejecting other aspects of the standard logic of counterfactuals, or else our intuitive picture of semifactuals. (shrink)

Totalitarianism is perhaps unanimously regarded as one of the greatest political evils of the last century and has been the grounds for much of Anglo-American political theory since. Confucianism, meanwhile, has been gaining credibility in the past decades among sympathizers of democratic theory in spite of criticisms of it being anti-democratic or authoritarian. I consider how certain key concepts in the classical Confucian texts of the Mencius and the Xunzi might or might not be appropriated for ‘legitimising’ totalitarian regimes. Under (...) an Arendtian approach to understanding totalitarianism, it is precisely an unproblematised relation to a normative History and Nature that underlies the potential compatibility or incompatibility. I argue against a longstanding prejudice that if any form of Confucianism would be totalitarian, it would have to be Xunzian. Against this, I hope to show that if any form of Confucianism would be totalitarian, it might well be a naturalistic Mencian Confucianism instead of a constructivist Xunzian one. (shrink)

Ugar and Malele write that generic machine learning (ML) technologies for mental health diagnosis would be challenging to implement in sub-Saharan Africa due to cultural specificities in how those conditions are diagnosed. For example, they say that in South Africa, the appearance of ‘schizophrenia’ might be understood as a type of spiritual possession, rather than a mental disorder caused by a brain dysfunction. Hence, a generic ML system is likely to ‘misdiagnose’ persons whose symptomatology matches that of schizophrenia in the (...) South African context. The authors thus claim that ‘a generic or universal design cannot be effective given the heterogeneity of value judgements in defining what mental health disorders are in different contexts’.1 Should we take this to mean that ML systems ‘should not be designed with a generalised perception of mental disorders,’1 as the authors suggest? On the contrary, my view is that generic ML can be useful, with the caveat that issues of cultural sensitivity may engender translational challenges in various national and cultural contexts. Yet, if it can be demonstrated that a generic ML system can reliably and accurately pick up on shared symptomatologies across cultures despite what any individual or community might believe about their actual causes, this aspect is surely the function and value of diagnostic ML which we should take to matter. Cultural gaps in aetiological understandings of mental health conditions make it all the more important to advance generic ML as a calibrating diagnostic tool. In this commentary, therefore, I will endeavour to make a case for generic ML in mental healthcare. ### Aetiological (mis)understanding across cultures The fundamental complexity to which Ugar and Malele direct our attention is the fact that mental health conditions are attributed to variable causal explanations, rather than a …. (shrink)

False consciousness requires a general explanation for why, and how, oppressed individuals believe propositions against, as opposed to aligned with, their own well-being in virtue of their oppressed status. This involves four explanatory desiderata: belief acquisition, content prevalence, limitation, and systematicity. A social constructionist approach satisfies these by understanding the concept of false consciousness as regulating social research rather than as determining the exact mechanisms for all instances: the concept attunes us to a complex of mechanisms conducing oppressed individuals to (...) mistake social understandings of themselves as natural self-understandings—the limits lie where these overlap (sometimes), or are entirely absent. (shrink)

Shun Kwong-loi argues that the distinction between first- and third-person points of view does not play as explanatory a role in our moral psychology as has been supposed by contemporary philosophical discussions. He draws insightfully from the Confucian tradition to better elucidate our everyday experiences of moral emotions, arguing that it offers an alternative and more faithful perspective on our experiences of anger and compassion. However, unlike the distinction between first- and third-person points of view, Shun’s descriptions of anger and (...) compassion leave unarticulated what would be necessary to differentiate these responses from non-moral responses. Here, I make a friendly suggestion on how this explanatory gap might be filled, providing complementary grounding for Shun’s observations by way of K. C. Bhattacharyya’s phenomenological analysis of feeling. It fills the gap by means of a gradation in the possible depth of emotional responses found in the a priori structure of a feeling experience for any subject. The payoff of such a comparison between Shun’s explication of Confucian moral psychology and Bhattacharyya’s explication of rasa theory is not only a possible phenomenological grounding for the former but also a potential way to articulate a missing ethics in Bhattacharyya’s thought. (shrink)

The debate over Hypothetical Syllogism is locked in stalemate. Although putative natural language counterexamples to Hypothetical Syllogism abound, many philosophers defend Hypothetical Syllogism, arguing that the alleged counterexamples involve an illicit shift in context. The proper lesson to draw from the putative counterexamples, they argue, is that natural language conditionals are context-sensitive conditionals which obey Hypothetical Syllogism. In order to make progress on the issue, I consider and improve upon Morreau’s proof of the invalidity of Hypothetical Syllogism. The improved proof (...) relies upon the semantic claim that conditionals with antecedents irrelevant to the obtaining of an already true consequent are themselves true. Moreover, this semantic insight allows us to provide compelling counterexamples to Hypothetical Syllogism that are resistant to the usual contextualist response. (shrink)

Dorothy Edgington’s work has been at the centre of a range of ongoing debates in philosophical logic, philosophy of mind and language, metaphysics, and epistemology. This work has focused, although by no means exclusively, on the overlapping areas of conditionals, probability, and paradox. In what follows, I briefly sketch some themes from these three areas relevant to Dorothy’s work, highlighting how some of Dorothy’s work and some of the contributions of this volume fit in to these debates.

The future is kid stuff -- Sinthom-osexuality -- Compassion's compulsion -- No future.

Many philosophers accept both of the following claims: (1) consciousness matters morally, and (2) species membership doesn’t matter morally. In other words, many reject speciesism but accept what we might call 'sentientism'. But do the reasons against speciesism yield analogous reasons against sentientism, just as the reasons against racism and sexism are thought to yield analogous reasons against speciesism? This paper argues that speciesism is disanalogous to sentientism (as well as racism and sexism). I make a case for the following (...) asymmetry: (a) some non-humans clearly have interests, but (b) no non-conscious entities clearly have interests. This asymmetry, I argue, renders sentientism resistant to the standard argument against speciesism. (shrink)

Although public law scholars have long addressed the problems of accountability generated by private decision-making and "privatization," they have largely ignored this phenomenon in the immigration context. Our ignorance is increasingly indefensible. Millions of employers - private parties - are required by law to screen their workers for unauthorized immigrants, and growing evidence suggests that they use their screening power to ignore workplace protections and to otherwise exploit these workers. This article is the first attempt to apply the insights generated (...) by the privatization literature to immigration law. It argues that our nation's employers have emerged as private immigration screeners who, like airport inspectors screening for ineligible entrants and law enforcement officers screening for criminal noncitizens, assist the Department of Homeland Security in identifying unauthorized workers for removal. More than just agents of exploitation, reframing employers as private screeners demonstrates that they are also agents of the state. Borrowing analytical concepts developing in the privatization literature, I argue that the high risk of abuse and the lack of readily available mechanisms for reducing that risk raise troubling implications over the kind of power that employers wield as private immigration screeners in the workplace. Reframing our nation's employers as private screeners gives theoretical coherence to the discretionary decision-making authority they actually wield, and explains why they have used that authority to exploit workers - as private parties carrying out public duties, they are incentivized to serve their own interests instead of verifying the immigration status of their workers in good faith. Examining the problem of private immigration screening also forces us to reconsider two aspects about immigration screening generally. First, although immigration law tends to reward unauthorized immigrants who lay low and tends to punish those who draw attention to themselves, I suggest that we ought to rethink this logic at least in the context of the workplace. Because workplace violations committed by employers are typically enforced by private parties, punishing unauthorized immigrants who attempt to assert these rights and thus draw attention to themselves, only encourages workplace violations by employers and fosters a culture of lawlessness. Second, thinking about how decision-making authority within immigration law should be allocated between the public and the private contributes to the current conversation over how similar decision-making authority should be allocated between federal entities and local entities. Although questions of accountability have lingered in the backdrop of the immigration federalism debate, I suggest that scholars would be well served to foreground these questions and answer them head-on. (shrink)

Two compelling principles, the Reasonable Range Principle and the Preservation of Irrelevant Evidence Principle, are necessary conditions that any response to peer disagreements ought to abide by. The Reasonable Range Principle maintains that a resolution to a peer disagreement should not fall outside the range of views expressed by the peers in their dispute, whereas the Preservation of Irrelevant Evidence Principle maintains that a resolution strategy should be able to preserve unanimous judgments of evidential irrelevance among the peers. No standard (...) Bayesian resolution strategy satisfies the PIE Principle, however, and we give a loss aversion argument in support of PIE and against Bayes. The theory of imprecise probability allows one to satisfy both principles, and we introduce the notion of a set-based credal judgment to frame and address a range of subtle issues that arise in peer disagreements. (shrink)

In this thesis, I present an account of the development of early Greek epistemology, according to which Protagoras' measure doctrine, and his argument from conflicting appearances, was the starting point for work on perception and knowledge by Plato in the Theaetetus, Aristotle in Metaphysics IV and Democritus. In Chapter One, I argue against the assumption that Protagoras' Aletheia contained a philosophical theory. It was probably not a treatise, but a virtuoso show-piece, with the aim of "knocking down" views according to (...) which truth is only known by gods, and, with difficulty, by privileged humans--namely, philosophers. For this, it need not have contained more than some well-chosen examples of perceptual and value beliefs, and arguments that one cannot decide which are true. In Chapter Two, I argue that Democritus should be seen as Protagoras' heir. Democritus argued Protagoras' general claim is self-refuting, but thought he was right about perceptual appearances. In Confirmations, he defended the senses, attributing to them knowledge and "power of proof." However, his theory led to an ancestor of the primary/secondary quality distinction, and this threatened to undermine the theory itself because of implications--that one can only know how things appear and not how things are by nature--which were later taken up in Pyrrhonist skepticism. In Chapter Three, I present a reading of the Secret Doctrine in Plato's Theaetetus as a defense and diagnosis of Protagoras' claim, in particular, an explanation of the global relativization which Protagoras' claim seems to recommend. This reading is meant to avoid the well-known difficulties concerning the prevailing interpretation of Protagoras' "Secret Doctrine" as a flux doctrine. I also argue that Plato developed the Secret Doctrine with Democritus in mind. In Chapter Four, I argue that Plato's "self-refutation argument" is aimed at relativism, but not relativism about truth. The latter, which Aristotle dismisses as eristical, is a position Protagoras can take, but Plato's argument works against it as well. In Chapter Five, I examine why Aristotle seems to treat Protagoras in Metaphysics IV as being committed to a denial of the principle of non-contradiction. (shrink)

Bartky draws on the experience of daily life to unmask the many disguises by which intimations of inferiority are visited upon women. She critiques both the male bias of current theory and the debilitating dominion held by notions of "proper femininity" over women and their bodies in patriarchal culture.

A thought-provoking comparative take on two seminal thinkers in Christian history In this book -- the first volume in the Kierkegaard as a Christian Thinker series -- Lee Barrett offers a novel comparative interpretation of early church father Augustine and nineteenth-century philosopher-theologian Soren Kierkegaard. Though these two intellectual giants have been paired by historians of Western culture, the exact nature of their similarities and differences has never before been probed in detail. Barrett demonstrates that on many essential theological levels Augustine (...) and Kierkegaard were more convergent than divergent. Most significantly, their parallels point to a distinctive understanding of the Christian life as a passion for self-giving love. Approaching Kierkegaard through the lens of Augustine, Barrett argues, enables the theme of desire for fulfillment in God to be seen as much more central to Kierkegaard's thought than previously imagined. (shrink)

Is a human more conscious than an octopus? In the science of consciousness, it’s oftentimes assumed that some creatures (or mental states) are more conscious than others. But in recent years, a number of philosophers have argued that the notion of degrees of consciousness is conceptually confused. This paper (1) argues that the most prominent objections to degrees of consciousness are unsustainable, (2) examines the semantics of ‘more conscious than’ expressions, (3) develops an analysis of what it is for a (...) degreed property to count as degrees of consciousness, and (4) applies the analysis to various theories of consciousness. I argue that whether consciousness comes in degrees ultimately depends on which theory of consciousness turns out to be correct. But I also argue that most theories of consciousness entail that consciousness comes in degrees. (shrink)