Donald Trump and Boris Johnson are notoriously uninterested in truth-telling. They also often appear uninterested even in constructing plausible falsehoods. What stands out above all is the brazenness and frequency with which they repeat known falsehoods. In spite of this, they are not always greeted with incredulity. Indeed, Republicans continue to express trust Donald Trump in remarkable numbers. The only way to properly make sense of what Trump and Johnson are doing, we argue, is to give a greater role to (...) audience relativity – and in some cases, audience participation – in notions like bullshitting and bald-faced lying. In this paper, we develop a new understanding of bullshitting, one that includes bald-faced lying, and recognizes that different communicative acts may be directed at different audiences with a single utterance. In addition, we argue for recognition of the category of bald-faced bullshitting, a particular speciality of both Trump and Johnson, and one especially useful to authoritarian leaders. (shrink)

There are empirical grounds to doubt the effectiveness of a common and intuitive approach to teaching debiasing strategies in critical thinking courses. We summarize some of the grounds before suggesting a broader taxonomy of debiasing strategies. This four-level taxonomy enables a useful diagnosis of biasing factors and situations, and illuminates more strategies for more effective bias mitigation located in the shaping of situational factors and reasoning infrastructure—sometimes called “nudges” in the literature. The question, we contend, then becomes how best to (...) teach the construction and use of such infrastructures. (shrink)

An influential idea in the epistemology of testimony is that people often acquire justified beliefs through testimony, in contexts too informationally poor for the justification to be evidential. This has been described as the Scarcity of Information Objection (SIO). It is an objection to the reductive thesis that the acceptance of testimony is justified by evidence of general kinds not unique to testimony. SIO hinges on examples intended to show clearly that testimonial justification arises in low-information contexts; I argue that (...) the common examples show no such thing. There is a great deal of information available in testimonial contexts, including in the examples alleged to show otherwise – enough information to render SIO implausible. Purported SIO examples tend to give a wrong impression about the informational richness of testimonial contexts, I argue, due to the lack of detail in which they are presented. (shrink)

False polarization (FP) is an interpersonal bias on judgement, the effect of which is to lead people in contexts of disagreement to overestimate the differences between their respective views. I propose to treat FP as a problem of applied social epistemology—a barrier to reliable belief-formation in certain social domains—and to ask how best one may debias for FP. This inquiry leads more generally into questions about effective debiasing strategies; on this front, considerable empirical evidence suggests that intuitively attractive strategies for (...) debiasing are not very effective, while more effective strategies are neither intuitive nor likely to be easily implemented. The supports for more effective debiasing seem either to be inherently social and cooperative, or at least to presuppose social efforts to create physical or decision-making infrastructure for mitigating bias. The upshot, I argue, is that becoming a less biased epistemic agent is a thoroughly socialized project. (shrink)

Donald Trump and Boris Johnson are notoriously uninterested in truthtelling. They also often appear uninterested even in constructing plausible falsehoods. What stands out above all is the brazenness and frequency with which they repeat known falsehoods. In spite of this, they are not always greeted with incredulity. Indeed, Republicans continue to express trust in Donald Trump in remarkable numbers. The only way to properly make sense of what Trump and Johnson are doing, we argue, is to give a greater role (...) to audience relativity - and in some cases, audience participation - in notions like bullshitting and bald-faced lying. In this paper, we develop a new understanding of bullshitting, one that includes bald-faced lying, and recognizes that different communicative acts may be directed at different audiences with a single utterance. In addition, we argue for recognition of the category of bald-faced bullshitting, a particular speciality of both Trump and Johnson, and one especially useful to authoritarian leaders. (shrink)

The context or manner of an utterance can alter or nullify the speech-act that would normally be performed by utterances of that sort. Coercive contexts have this effect on some kinds of seeming assertions: they end up being non-assertoric, and are merely capitulations. An earlier version of this view is clarified, defended, and extended partly in response to a useful critique by Roy Sorensen. I examine some complications that arise regarding resistance to speaking under coercion when ideological or religious commitments (...) are implicated. (shrink)

An influential view in the epistemology of testimony is that typical or paradigmatic beliefs formed through testimonial uptake are noninferential. Some epistemologists in particular defend a causal version of this view: that beliefs formed from testimony (BFT) are generated by noninferential processes. This view is implausible, however. It tends to be elaborated in terms that do not really bear it out – e.g. that BFT is fixed directly, immediately, unconsciously or automatically. Nor is causal noninferentialism regarding BFT plausibly expressed in (...) terms of belief-independent belief formation; the complex cognitive details of BFT fixation do not accord well with such a view. But perhaps the most significant issue is that the relevant causal notion of inference itself is not particularly well-defined, at least with respect to BFT. Causal noninferentialism in this domain is obscure as a result, but this does not in turn clearly vindicate any interesting version of inferentialism. (shrink)

This paper begins by exploring a subspecies of assertion. Under some circumstances an utterance intuitively counts as an assertion, even though it is Cynical: that is, it is insincere, and made without the reasonable expectation of even appearing sincere to its audience. The paper explores the contextual and cognitive workings of Cynical assertion – directly, in part, but also by comparison with superficially similar but non-assertoric utterances, namely, those made under duress. Finally, the paper examines the broader relevance of Cynical (...) assertion, by considering two philosophical applications of the notion: first, in support of Michael Dummett’s conventionalist account of assertion; and second, in illuminating an aspect of Moore’s paradox. (shrink)

Social epistemology has paid little attention to oral historiography as a source of expert insight into the credibility of testimony. One extant suggestion, however, is that oral historians treat testimony with a default trust reflecting a standing warrant for accepting testimony. The view that there is such a standing warrant is sometimes known as the Acceptance Principle for Testimony. I argue that the practices of oral historians do not count in support of APT, all in all. Experts have commonly described (...) oral traditions as oriented towards political, cultural and entertainment ends, and not only—or not even—towards an accurate depiction of past events. Even when accuracy is the emphasis, many historians of oral tradition do not trust such testimony as APT would suggest; the importance of gathering supporting evidence is a consistent emphasis. Yet oral historiography, both of traditions and more generally, does hold out lessons for the epistemology of testimony, implicating a wider range of social.. (shrink)

An interesting recent reply to the Paradox of Knowability is Neil Tennant's proposal: to restrict the anti-realist's knowability thesis to truths the knowing of which is logically consistent. However, this proposal is egregiously ad hoc unless motivated by something other than the wish to save anti-realism from embarrassment. We examine Tennant's argument that his restriction is motivated by parallel considerations in cases that are neutral with respect to debates about realism. We conclude that the cases are not neutral, nor the (...) considerations parallel. The failure of Tennant's argument provides an opportunity to reflect on, among other things, the nature of Moore's paradox, and the role of idealization in doxastic logic. (shrink)

Critical thinking is often taught with some emphasis on categories and operations of cognitive biases. The underlying thought is that knowledge of biases equips students to reduce them. The empirical evidence, however, doesn’t provide much support for this thought. We have previously argued that the emphasis on debiasing in critical thinking education is worth preserving, but in light of a more explicit and broader conception of debiasing. We now argue that this broader conception of debiasing strategies obliges critical thinking instructors (...) and curriculum designers to reflect on the teaching approaches that might facilitate the use of those strategies. We propose some teaching techniques to expand the scope of debiasing in the classroom—some untested, some only rarely and recently characterized as critical thinking strategies, rather than as pragmatic considerations in, e.g., design, engineering, marketing. These methods and others like them, we suggest, broaden the prospects for teaching a range of effective critical thinking techniques for debiasing. (shrink)

An interesting recent reply to the Paradox of Knowability is Neil Tennant's proposal: to restrict the anti-realist's knowability thesis to truths the knowing of which is logically consistent. However, this proposal is egregiously ad hoc unless motivated by something other than the wish to save anti-realism from embarrassment. We examine Tennant's argument that his restriction is motivated by parallel considerations in cases that are neutral with respect to debates about realism. We conclude that the cases are not neutral, nor the (...) considerations parallel. The failure of Tennant's argument provides an opportunity to reflect on, among other things, the nature of Moore's paradox, and the role of idealization in doxastic logic. (shrink)

Graham Solomon, to whom this collection is dedicated, went into hospital for antibiotic treatment of pneumonia in Oc- ber, 2001. Three days later, on Nov. 1, he died of a massive stroke, at the age of 44. Solomon was well liked by those who got the chance to know him—it was a revelation to?nd out, when helping to sort out his a?airs after his death, how many “friends” he had whom he had actually never met, as his email included correspondence (...) with philosophers around the world running sometimes to hundreds of messages. He was well respected in the philosophical community more broadly. He was for several years a member of the editorial board for the Western Ontario Series in Philosophy of Science. While he was employed at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Ontario, several of us at the University of Wat- loo always regarded our own department as a sort of second academic home for him. We therefore decided that it would be appropriate to hold a memorial conference in his honour. Thanks to the generous?nancial support of the Humphrey Conference Fund, we were able to do so in May 2003. Many of the papers in this volume were presented at that conf- ence. (shrink)

To assert is to utter a sentence under certain conventions, claims Michael Dummett. This view runs afoul of empirical evidence indicating the widespread assertoric use of non‐elliptical words and phrases. Dummett also advances two theses apparently related to his sentence conventionalism: that word meaning depends on sentence meaning, and that language is (in some sense) prior to thought. I argue that these latter two theses are independent of the empirically dubious Sentential Thesis. Plausibly, the wider Dummettian logico‐metaphysical programme is not (...) impugned by the existence of non‐sentential assertions. (shrink)

It is widely held that proper names are ambiguous in some sense, a view commonly associated with the theory that names are, when suitably idealized, semantically “rigid designators”. In this brief paper I suggest that, while some refinement of the concept of a name is surely appropriate, proper names do not very clearly meet the standards normally used to determine ambiguity. There is reason to regard shared names as semantically univocal, including some evidence from development linguistics to regard a grasp (...) of names as having a metalinguistic descriptive aspect. (shrink)

The epistemology of disagreement has developed around a highly idealized notion of epistemic peers. The analysis of examples in the literature has somewhat entrenched this idealization, when using cases of extant philosophical disputes between named interlocutors. These examples make it hard to emphasize the ordinary ways in which discussants, as disciplinary colleagues, may be wrong. Overlooking these possibilities is probably made easier by widespread attitudes in philosophy about the importance of genius or raw intelligence in doing philosophy. The use of (...) such internal examples needlessly limits consideration of the full range of epistemically relevant features of disagreements.L’épistémologie du désaccord s’est développée autour d’une notion idéalisée de pairs épistémiques. L’analyse d’exemples dans la littérature a quelque peu enraciné cette idéalisation, surtout lorsque les exemples étudiés sont des désaccords tirés du canon philosophique contemporain et qu’ils opposent des interlocuteurs identifiés. Il est difficile, pour des raisons socio-professionnelles, de souligner les manières ordinaires par lesquelles ces collègues disciplinaires peuvent se tromper. Il est probablement d’autant plus facile de négliger ces possibilités que les attitudes concernant l’importance du génie dans la pratique de la philosophie sont fort répandues dans le domaine. L’utilisation de ces exemples limite donc la prise en compte de toutes les caractéristiques épistémiquement pertinentes des désaccords. (shrink)

We shall see that both these projects are deeply misguided. The first suffers from Searle’s misrepresentation, en masse and individually, of the various materialist theories. To show this, I will focus on the basic claims of token identity specifically, and draw out the inaccuracy of Searle’s straw materialism. This is a shortcut; by showing one conjunct to be false, we may show the conjunction of Searle’s summaries to be false. And, after all, token identity is the most widely held current (...) view. Searle’s second project, I will argue, is characterized by two unfortunate traits: it makes some confused and unsupported claims about supervenience and causality, and, when interpreted most charitably, it is fundamentally indistinguishable from a prevalent account of token identity augmented by supervenience. (shrink)

We shall see that both these projects are deeply misguided. The first suffers from Searle’s misrepresentation, en masse and individually, of the various materialist theories. To show this, I will focus on the basic claims of token identity specifically, and draw out the inaccuracy of Searle’s straw materialism. This is a shortcut; by showing one conjunct to be false, we may show the conjunction of Searle’s summaries to be false. And, after all, token identity is the most widely held current (...) view. Searle’s second project, I will argue, is characterized by two unfortunate traits: it makes some confused and unsupported claims about supervenience and causality, and, when interpreted most charitably, it is fundamentally indistinguishable from a prevalent account of token identity augmented by supervenience. (shrink)

Jennifer Hornsby has a distinct position on the metaphysics of mind and action, which she terms naïve naturalism. Her new book is a collection of essays, often illuminating, sometimes tantalizing and frustrating, in which she sketches the outlines of this position. The sketch is distributed over twelve essays in three main sections: Ontological Questions; Agency; and Mind, Causation, and Explanation. The discussions are far from introductory—they were mostly published in venues or read for audiences of a specialized nature—but they are (...) rich with ideas that will engage graduate students and professional philosophers of many interests. Besides action theory, issues in the philosophy of mind and the philosophy of science frequently surface indirectly, especially explanation theory and reductionism. Hornsby’s writing is stimulating and will reward those readers already familiar with at least the basic literature in any of these areas. (shrink)

The suggested citation for this white paper is: University of Waterloo Working Group on Bibliometrics, Winter 2016. White Paper: Measuring Research Outputs through Bibliometrics, Waterloo, Ontario: University of Waterloo.

Sense-perception—the awareness or apprehension of things by sight, hearing, touch, smell and taste—has long been a preoccupation of philosophers. One pervasive and traditional problem, sometimes called “the problem of perception”, is created by the phenomena of perceptual illusion and hallucination: if these kinds of error are possible, how can perception be what it intuitively seems to be, a direct and immediate access to reality? The present entry is about how these possibilities of error challenge the intelligibility of the phenomenon of (...) perception, and how the major theories of perception in the last century are best understood as responses to this challenge. (shrink)

Detlef Dürr was a remarkable figure in many different ways. I recall some adventures we had with him in Abu Dhabi.

Every soul has an unconscious knowledge of the ultimate truth of things, a premise long taught by all great spiritual teachers, East and West, regularly experienced by those who follow the spiritual path. In the quest to help reestablish that universal connection, editor J. Douglas Kenyon has culled from the pages of Atlantis rising magazine this compilation of concise and well-illustrated articles by world-class researchers and theoreticians."--Back cover.

Explanation does not exist in a metaphysical vacuum. Conceptions of the structure of a phenomenon play an important role in guiding attempts to explain it, and erroneous conceptions of a phenomenon may direct investigation in misleading directions. I believe that there is a case to be made for thinking that much work on the neural underpinnings of consciousness—what is often called the neural correlates of consciousness—is driven by an erroneous conception of the structure of consciousness. The aim of this paper (...) is lay bare some connections between the explanation of consciousness and the structure of consciousness, and to argue for a conception of the structure of consciousness that is more adequate than that which currently drives much research into the neural correlates of consciousness. (shrink)

Philosophy at the Gymnasium sets Greek moral philosophy in its original context-Athenian gyms-to understand how training for the body sparked training for the mind. It explores Socratic dialogue set in gyms, civic and mental health in Plato's works, and Olympic victors as Aristotle's model for the happy life.

John McDowell's contribution to philosophy has ranged across Greek philosophy, philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, metaphysics and ethics. His writings have drawn on the works of, amongst others, Aristotle, Kant, Hegel, Frege, Russell, Wittgenstein, Sellars, and Davidson. His contributions have made him one of the most widely read, discussed and challenging philosophers writing today. This book provides a careful account of the main claims that McDowell advances in a number of different areas of philosophy. The interconnections between the different (...) arguments are highlighted and Tim Thornton shows how these individual projects are unified in a post-Kantian framework that articulates the preconditions of thought and language. Thornton sets out the differing strands of McDowell's work prior to, and leading up to, their combination in the broader philosophical vision revealed in "Mind and World" and provides an interpretative and critical framework that will help shape ongoing debates surrounding McDowell's work. An underlying theme of the book is whether McDowell's therapeutic approach to philosophy, which owes much to the later Wittgenstein, is consistent with the substance of McDowell's discussion of nature that uses the vocabulary of other philosophers including, centrally, Kant. (shrink)

Quantum Non-Locality and Relativity is recognized as the premier philosophical study of Bell's Theorem and its implication for the relativistic account of space and time. Previous editions have been praised for the remarkable clarity of Maudlin's descriptions of both Bell's theorem and his examination of the potential conflict between the theorem and relativity. The third edition of this text has been carefully updated to reflect significant developments, including a new chapter covering important recent work in the foundations of physics. Foremost (...) among these is Roderich Tumiulka's explicit, relativistic theory that can reproduce the quantum mechanical violation of Bell's inequality. The "Free Will Theorem" of John Conway and Simon Kochen is also discussed, as is the status of locality in the Many Worlds interpretation of quantum theory. The book has also been updated to reflect recent results in information theory. The book introduces philosophers to the relevant physics and demonstrates how philosophical analysis can help to resolve some of the problems, and requires no technical background in Physics. All of the physics is presented from first principles, and as much as possible is presented pictorially"--Provided by publisher. (shrink)

What does imagination do for our perception of the world? Why should reality be broken off from our imagining of it? It was not always thus, and in these essays, Tim Ingold sets out to heal the break between reality and imagination at the heart of modern thought and science. Imagining for Real joins with a lifeworld ever in creation, attending to its formative processes, corresponding with the lives of its human and nonhuman inhabitants. Building on his two previous essay (...) collections, The Perception of the Environment and Being Alive, this book rounds off the extraordinary intellectual project of one of the world's most renowned anthropologists. Offering hope in troubled times, these essays speak to coming generations in a language that surpasses disciplinary divisions. They will be essential reading not only to for anthropologists but also for students in fields ranging from art, aesthetics, architecture and archaeology to philosophy, psychology, human geography, comparative literature and theology. (shrink)

Neural organoids are laboratory-generated entities that replicate certain structural and functional features of the human brain. Most neural organoids are disembodied—completely decoupled from sensory input and motor output. As such, questions about their potential capacity for consciousness are exceptionally difficult to answer. While not disputing the need for caution regarding certain neural organoid types, this paper appeals to two broad constraints on any adequate theory of consciousness—the first involving the dependence of consciousness on embodiment; the second involving the dependence of (...) consciousness on representations—to argue that disembodied neural organoids are not plausible candidates for consciousness. (shrink)

1891. The recovered manuscript of Aristotle's Constitutional History of Athens, now for the first time given to the world from the unique text in the British...

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work. This work is in the public domain (...) in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

Hilary Putnam once suggested that “the actual existence of sets as ‘intangible objects’ suffers… from a generalization of a problem first pointed out by Paul Benacerraf… are sets a kind of function or are functions a sort of set?” Sadly, he did not elaborate; my aim, here, is to do so on his behalf. There are well-known methods for treating sets as functions and functions as sets. But these do not raise any obvious philosophical or foundational puzzles. For that, we (...) first need to provide a full-fledged function theory. I supply such a theory: it axiomatizes the iterative notion of function in exactly the same sense that ZF axiomatizes the iterative notion of set. Indeed, this function theory is synonymous with ZF. It might seem that set theory and function theory present us with rival foundations for mathematics, since they postulate different ontologies. But appearances are deceptive. Set theory and function theory provide the very same judicial foundation for mathematics. They do not supply rival metaphysical foundations; indeed, if they supply metaphysical foundations at all, then they supply the very same metaphysical foundations. (shrink)

Against transmission -- For attention -- Education in the minor key -- Anthropology, art and the university.

Workplace AI is transforming labor but decisions on which AI applications are developed or implemented are made with little to no input from workers themselves. In this piece for AI & Society, I argue for nationalization as a strategy for democratizing AI.

Chapter 1: Then . . . -- Chapter 2: In Search of the Fellowship's Ethical Pulse -- Chapter 3: The Fellowship's Roots -- Chapter 4: Development of the General Council -- Chapter 5: Building Blocks of a Pentecostal Worldview -- Chapter 6: Interracial Roots (prior to 1914) -- Chapter 7: Withdrawal and Separation (1914-38) -- Chapter 8: The Struggle for Inclusion (1939-62) -- Chapter 9: Adjusting to a Changing Society (1955-75) -- Chapter 10: Becoming a Church for All Peoples (1960-80s) (...) -- Chapter 11: Race Relations: A Reactionary Ethic -- Chapter 12: Women Forerunners (prior to 1914) -- Chapter 13: The Formative Years (1914-26) -- Chapter 14: The Exclusive Establishment (1927-76) -- Chapter 15: Decline and Thaw (1977-80s) -- Chapter 16: Women in Ministry: A Dogmatic Ethic -- Chapter 17: The Pacifist Years (through 1919) -- Chapter 18: Transitional Years (1920-38) -- Chapter 19: Changing Perspectives in Wartime (1939-53) -- Chapter 20: Settling on a Loyal Priesthood (1954-80s) -- Chapter 21: Attitudes toward War: A Pragmatic Ethic -- Chapter 22: In Search of a Pentecostal Ethic -- Chapter 23: . . . And Now. (shrink)