In this paper a theoretical framework is proposed for how the brain processes the information necessary for us to achieve the understanding of others that we experience in our social worlds. Our framework attempts to expand several previous approaches to more fully account for the various data on interpersonal understanding and to respond to theoretical critiques in this area. Specifically, we propose that social understanding must be achieved by at least two mechanisms in the brain that are capable of parallel (...) information processing. The first mechanism, based on research into mirror matching systems in the brain, suggests that representations of others are mapped onto an observer's representations of these same schemas in order to understand them. The second mechanism requires semantic analysis of a given social situation in order to understand the actions of others and most likely involves conscious processes. We suggest that experimental correlates of these systems should be dissociable using both behavioral and neuroimaging techniques. (shrink)

As practicing clinicians, physicians are expected to uphold the ethical norms of their profession, including fidelity to patients and respect for patients’ self-determination. At the same time, as individuals, physicians are moral agents in their own right and, like their patients, are informed by and committed to diverse cultural, religious, and philosophical traditions and beliefs. In some circumstances, the expectation that physicians will put patients’ needs and preferences first may be in tension with the need to sustain the sense of (...) moral integrity and continuity that grounds a physician’s personal and professional life. This article examines the implications for patients, physicians, and the medical profession when tensions arise between a physician’s professional commitments and his or her deeply held personal moral beliefs. It offers guidance on when a physician’s professional commitments should outweigh personal beliefs as well as when physicians should have freedom to act according to the dictates of conscience while still protecting patients’ interests. (shrink)

An ideal vision model accounts for behavior and neurophysiology in both naturalistic conditions and designed lab experiments. Unlike psychological theories, artificial neural networks (ANNs) actually perform visual tasks and generate testable predictions for arbitrary inputs. These advantages enable ANNs to engage the entire spectrum of the evidence. Failures of particular models drive progress in a vibrant ANN research program of human vision.

This article draws on the social theory of Theodor W. Adorno in order to critique the discourse of ‘color-blindness’ and articulate an alternative individualist ideal of racial justice. I begin by noting that Adorno’s criticism of law in Negative Dialectics anticipates arguments against color-blindness advanced in critical race theory. I then explicate Adorno’s understanding of law in relation to his broader account of social domination. Race can be situated within this account through the concept of ‘second nature’. The notion of (...) racial second nature elucidates the contradiction within color-blindness between formal equality and substantive inequality. As an alternative to the color-blind norm, I posit Adorno’s utopian ideal of emancipated individuality as an appropriate aspiration for racial justice. This ideal enables the jurisgenerative transformation of liberal rights concepts, which have at once enabled and constrained the struggle for racial equity. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Sophocles’s Enemy Sisters: Antigone and IsmeneWm. Blake Tyrrell (bio) and Larry J. BennettAt the core of the Oedipus myth, as Sophocles presents it, is the proposition that all masculine relationships are based on reciprocal acts of violence. Laius, taking his cue from the oracle, violently rejects Oedipus out of fear that his son will seize his throne and invade his conjugal bed. Oedipus, taking his cue from the (...) oracle, does away with Laius, violently rebuffs the sphinx, then takes their places—as king and “scourge of the city,” respectively. Again, Oedipus, taking his cue from the oracle, plots the death of that unknown figure who may be seeking to usurp his own position. Oedipus, Creon, and Tiresias, each taking his cue from the oracle, seek one another’s downfall.All these acts of violence gradually wear away the differences that exist not only in the same family but throughout the community.—René Girard, Violence and the SacredRené Girard does not include feminine relationships in his assessment of the Oedipus myth, yet the same redundancy that characterizes the males marks the females.1 Jocasta conjoins in one person multiple and redundant social roles: she is the mother and wife of the same person, for which she [End Page 1] hangs herself, leaving for Oedipus “many pains that a mother’s furies fulfilled” (Homer Odyssey 11.279–80). Her daughters, their father’s sisters, manifest kinship redundancy in two persons. Incest produces circularly, reverting to a sibling of the parent rather than moving forward with a descendant. The absence of linear progression from one generation to the next creates a sameness and equilibrium that thwart separation and individuality. Oedipus’s brothers/sons fail in their adult roles, because neither can overcome the other’s right to the throne of Thebes and the mastery of its royal household. They are enemy brothers locked in reciprocal violence.2 Antigone and Ismene have escaped notice not only as enemy sisters but even as products of the same incest. Audiences for Sophocles’s Antigone have viewed them as “normal” women and cooperated with his characters in emphasizing the differences between them. They have assumed from Antigone’s betrothal to Haemon and resistance to Creon that she is the elder, more mature sister.3 They tend to accept without question that Antigone engages in burial rituals with Polyneices’s corpse (241–58) and returns to it (442–35).4 Bernard M. W. Knox’s critically powerful concept of the “Sophoclean hero” has bolstered this view of Antigone while reducing Ismene to a foil, and abetted the tendency of modern producers of the play to cast an older or more famous actress in the role of Antigone.5 Naturalistic readings like that of C. M. Bowra—“seeing that Ismene is her only close relative in the world, Antigone is remarkably cold to her”6—have masked the source and hence the vehemence of Antigone’s fury.That the reciprocity of the violence between Ismene and Antigone has gone unnoticed is understandable in view of the familiarity of the conflict between their brothers. Males in Greek society pursued difference by striving to excel as aristoi (best) in competition for prestige, wealth, and power.7 Whenever Eteocles and Polyneices came together, each asserted a right to Oedipus’s household and throne that was equally matched, and violence ensued from the equilibrium. On the other hand, Greek women were not supposed to compete with one another for distinction. They wove wool for clothes, maintained the household, and cared for the children, the sick, and the dead, activities that required cooperation away from public view.8 Proximity to other women was the norm and desideratum. Moreover, lawgivers like Solon based their funeral legislation on the premise that every woman wanted to participate in mourning.9 For the sake of public tranquillity, legislators tried to limit the numbers of women participants by imposing restrictions according to degrees of kinship, for instance, to children of fifth cousins. In this context, women were interchangeable, and the places they held during birth, coming of age in wedding ceremonies, and death, [End Page 2] were open to more than one woman. Closeness and... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:A "Conception" of Truth in Plato's SophistBlake E. Hestir (bio)1. IntroductionPlato's solution to the problem of falsehood carries a notorious reputation which sometimes overshadows a variety of interesting developments in Plato's philosophy. One of the less-noted developments in the Sophist is a nascent conception of truth which casts truth as a particular relation between language and the world. F. M. Cornford, for one, in his translation and commentary on (...) the Sophist takes Plato's account of truth to involve something like correspondence: "The [true] statement as a whole is complex and its structure corresponds to the structure of the fact. Truth means this correspondence."1 In more general contexts, we find A. N. Prior claiming in his Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on the correspondence theory of truth: "Aristotle did not originate the correspondence theory but took it over from Plato's Sophist."2However, all this assumes a lot about Plato, much less Aristotle. For one, it assumes that to claim that the statement 'Theaetetus is sitting' is true is to claim that it is true because it corresponds with the fact that Theaetetus is sitting. Other scholars, for a wide variety of interpretational reasons, have been reluctant to accept Cornford's view, but few offer any explanation of what sort of account of truth we might ascribe to Plato by the end of the Sophist. Michael Frede claims [End Page 1] that Plato thinks a true statement is true precisely if a form is something that is with reference to a subject. Frede is quiet about whether this expresses a particular conception of truth, but if he's right, truth involves something other than correspondence. Alfred Tarski has argued at length that truth is a simpler notion than that of correspondence or coherence or whatever. In fact, one claim he emphasizes about his own "conception" of truth is that it is similar to the classical conception of truth we find in places like Aristotle's Metaphysics—a conception of truth which is formulated in Greek in very much the same way Plato formulates it in the Sophist. Unfortunately, Tarski never sufficiently explains exactly what it is about the classical conception that makes it closer to his own.I shall argue that in a very general sense Tarski is right about the ancient conception of truth, but this is not to claim that Tarski's own conception of truth can be found in Plato. By interpreting in a certain way Plato's solution to the paradox of not being and his solution to the problem of falsehood, I argue that the account of true and false statement that emerges within the discussion of not being and falsehood generally neither entails nor outwardly suggests any of the traditional characterizations of a correspondence "theory" of truth.3 On the contrary, what emerges from the Sophist is a very minimalistic "conception" of truth which requires neither positing the existence of facts or states of affairs nor formulating a precise, explanatory definition of truth. Aristotle's discussion of truth in the Categories and De Interpretatione is in many respects remarkably similar to Plato's; and I argue that although some, including W. D. Ross and J. L. Ackrill, have found forms of the correspondence theory in these early works, Aristotle's conception of truth makes no radical departures from Plato's and in fact stands as an obvious extension of the ideas about truth Plato presents in the Sophist. In the final section, I offer a few reasons why one should not expect to find the emergence of a "theory" of truth in the Sophist. If my general interpretation of Plato is correct, we should revise at least one historically significant footnote to Plato accordingly: Plato did not father the correspondence theory of truth and those claiming otherwise risk anachronistically attributing a problem-laden theory to Plato and/or missing one of Plato's points about the fundamental nature of truth.2. The Target Passage: Sophist 2 6 3 B 4Interesting philosophical developments in Plato's dialogues are frequently obscured by vexing translational issues, and the Sophist certainly contains a few. In fact, Plato's account... (shrink)

Can poem and picture collaborate successfully in a composite art of text and design? Or does one art inevitably dominate the other? W.J.T. Mitchell maintains that Blake's illuminated poems are an exception to Suzanne Langer's claim that "there are no happy marriages in art—only successful rape." Drawing on over one hundred reproductions of Blake's pictures, this book shows that neither the graphic nor the poetic aspect of his composite art consistently predominates: their relationship is more like an energetic (...) rivalry, a dialogue between vigorously independent modes of expression. W.J.T. Mitchell is Professor of English and Art and Design at the University of Chicago and editor of Critical Inquiry. Originally published in 1978. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905. (shrink)

The Lost Sheep in Philosophy of Religion: New Perspectives on Disability, Gender, Race, and Animals, edited by Blake Hereth and Kevin Timpe. Routledge, 2020. Pp. xiii + 400. $155.00, $28.98.

Although the notion of spatiality has always lurked in the background of discussions of literary form, the self-conscious use of the term as a critical concept is generally traced to Joseph Frank's seminal essay of 1945, "Spatial Form in Modern Literature."1 Frank's basic argument is that modernist literary works are "spatial" insofar as they replace history and narrative sequence with a sense of mythic simultaneity and disrupt the normal continuities of English prose with disjunctive syntactic arrangements. This argument has been (...) attacked on several fronts. An almost universal objection is that spatial form is a "mere metaphor" which has been given misplaced concreteness and that it denies the essentially temporal nature of literature. Some critics will concede that the metaphor contains a half-truth, but one which is likely to distract attention from more important features of the reading experience. The most polemical attacks have come from those who regard spatial form as an actual, but highly regrettable, characteristic of modern literature and who have linked it with antihistorical and even fascist ideologies.2 Advocates of Frank's position, on the other hand, have generally been content to extrapolate his premises rather than criticize them, and have compiled an ever-mounting list of modernist texts which can be seen, in some sense, as "antitemporal." The whole debate can best be advanced, in my view, not by some patchwork compromise among the conflicting claims but by a radical, even outrageous statement of the basic hypothesis in its most general form. I propose, therefore, that far from being a unique phenomenon of some modern literature, and far from being restricted to the features which Frank identifies in those works , spatial form is a crucial aspect of the experience and interpretation of literature in all ages and cultures. The burden of proof, in other words, is not on Frank to show that some works have spatial form but on his critics to provide an example of any work that does not. · 1. Frank's essay first appeared in Sewanee Review 53 and was revised in his The Widening Gyre . Frank's basic argument has not changed essentially even in his most avante-garde statements; he still regards spatial form "as a particular phenomenon of modern avante-garde writing." See "Spatial Form: An Answer to Critics," Critical Inquiry 4 : 231-52. A useful bibliography, "Space and Spatial Form in Narrative," is being complied by Jeffrey Smitten .· 2. This charge generally links the notion of spatial form with Wyndham Lewis and Ezra Pound, the imagist movement, the "irrationality" and pessimistic antihistoricism of modernism, and the conservative Romantic tradition. Frank discusses the complex motives behind these associations in the work of Robert Weimann and Frank Kermode in his "Answer to Critics," pp. 238-48. W. J. T. Mitchell, editor of Critical Inquiry, is the author of Blake's Composite Art, and The Last Dinosaur Book: The Life and Times of a Cultural Icon. The present essay is part of Iconology: The Image in Literature and the Visual Arts. "Diagrammatology" appeared in the Spring 1981 issue of Critical Inquiry. Leon Surette responds to the current essay in "‘Rational Form in Literature’". (shrink)

The criterion of "arguability" has tended to steer Critical Inquiry away from the kind of pluralism which defines itself as neutral, tolerant eclecticism toward a position which I would call "dialectical pluralism." This sort of pluralism is not content with mere diversity but insists on pushing divergent theories and practices toward confrontation and dialogue. Its aim is not the mere preservation or proliferation of variety but the weeding out of error, the elimination of trivial or marginal contentions, and the clarification (...) of fundamental and irreducible differences. The goal of dialectical pluralism is not liberal toleration of opposing views from a neutral ground but transformation, conversion, or, at least, the kind of communication which clarifies exactly what is at stake in any critical conflict. A good dramatization of Critical Inquiry's editorial ideal would be the dialogue of the devil and angel in Blake's Marriage of Heaven and Hell, an exchange in which each contestant enters into and criticizes the metaphysics of his contrary and which ends happily with the angel transformed into a devil. (shrink)

Chapter One Triadomany defined You shall bind them in Three Classes; according to their Classes. William Blake, Milton In a manuscript of The Quest for ...

In order for a state to rightfully exercise self-determination by means of setting policies concerning migrants and migration, they must be legitimate, Gillian Brock argues in _Justice for People on the Move_. Legitimacy, in Brock’s view, requires that states satisfy three (jointly sufficient) conditions: they must respect their own citizens’ human rights; they must be a part of a legitimate state system; and they must adequately contribute to the maintenance of this state system. In her new book, Brock also argues (...) persuasively for a variety of migration-related policies that states ought to adopt (concerning, for example, addressing the needs of refugees, regularization of undocumented migrants, and protections for temporary labor migrants). In previous work (Brock, _Global Justice: A Cosmopolitan Account_, Oxford University Press, New York, 2009; Brock and Blake, _Debating Brain Drain: May Governments Restrict Emigration?_, Oxford University Press, New York, 2015), Brock has compellingly defended the justice of policies designed to allay the harmful effects of brain drain. In this commentary, I wish to argue that the legitimacy standard Brock defends in _Justice for People on the Move_ is an obstacle to the justified adoption of the migration-related policies Brock demonstrates here and in previous work to be substantively morally justified, if not required by justice. If a state is not legitimate, then it lacks the moral standing to adopt migration policies that are otherwise morally justified. I do not intend to question the importance of the concept of state legitimacy for political philosophy generally. However, I wish to argue that that in the context of migration justice, considerations of state legitimacy may be contrary to the goal of defending a view on what policies a state ought to adopt. It may be more useful simply to consider whether or not there is moral justification for a particular state to adopt a particular policy. (shrink)

Among the main themes of this book are the positions that "Evil is an inherent element in the universe" ; that the Devil is real in the sense that an evil impulse is part of man’s composition, and it will persist as long as man continues to be man; that man without the Devil would be a brute without responsibility, without temptation, without the possibility of greatness; that evil is a positive entity, a "deliberate outrage on the Good," and not (...) merely the absence of good ; that the counterpart of bad is good, while the counterpart of evil is saintliness; that some good resides even in evil; that man can transmute tragedy into spiritual and moral transcendence; that suffering is a part of man’s dignity; and that acceptance of death can allow man to triumph in self-esteem. The author also contends that, despite the validity of determinism and predestination, freedom of choice exists, but she does not explain how. Photographs are included of 16 pertinent works of art, such as Bosch’s "The Temptation of Saint Anthony," Blake’s "Satan Exulting Over Sin," and Picasso’s "The Charnel House." Chapters on "The Devil in Myth and Legend" and "The Devil and Sex" probe especially evocative and imaginative aspects of the domain being studied.—W. G. (shrink)

Among the main themes of this book are the positions that "Evil is an inherent element in the universe" ; that the Devil is real in the sense that an evil impulse is part of man’s composition, and it will persist as long as man continues to be man; that man without the Devil would be a brute without responsibility, without temptation, without the possibility of greatness; that evil is a positive entity, a "deliberate outrage on the Good," and not (...) merely the absence of good ; that the counterpart of bad is good, while the counterpart of evil is saintliness; that some good resides even in evil; that man can transmute tragedy into spiritual and moral transcendence; that suffering is a part of man’s dignity; and that acceptance of death can allow man to triumph in self-esteem. The author also contends that, despite the validity of determinism and predestination, freedom of choice exists, but she does not explain how. Photographs are included of 16 pertinent works of art, such as Bosch’s "The Temptation of Saint Anthony," Blake’s "Satan Exulting Over Sin," and Picasso’s "The Charnel House." Chapters on "The Devil in Myth and Legend" and "The Devil and Sex" probe especially evocative and imaginative aspects of the domain being studied.—W. G. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Ethics & the Environment 8.2 (2003) 132-139 [Access article in PDF] Environmentalism: A Global History, by Ramachandra Guha. New York: Longman, 161 pp, includes Bibliographic Essay and Index. Softcover, ISBN 0-321-01169-4. This short but wide-ranging book is a global survey of the history of environmental thought by one of the people most responsible for broadening environmental discussions to include recognition of post-colonial societies. The overall goal of this introductory (...) textbook is to explain multiple environmental discourses from Brazil, the United States, China, India, the Soviet Union, and Africa, and then to situate them as complimentary components of a global socially oriented environmental discursive framework.With that said, it is always difficult to evaluate an introductory textbook. In this case, much of what is covered represents well-worn ground for the environmental scholar. The thesis that emerges is less about a new set of environmental proposals and more about how we ought to understand the history of ideas that informs the development of policy and what ideas ought to be taught in the classroom. Since this book is designed as a textbook, much of my commentary stems from a consideration of how it might work in the classroom. [End Page 132]As an educator regularly teaching courses in environmental thought, ethics, planning, and policy, I have often wondered why so few texts exist on the global history of environmental thought. Guha's work represents an attempt to bridge this gap in the literature. Despite Guha's admirable intentions, I am hesitant to endorse this work as an introductory textbook on the global history of environmental thought for one important reason: Guha's methodology leads to the omission of important components of the global history of environmental thought. From the outset, it is important to acknowledge the difficulty of this type of project. The very title of this work signals perhaps an impossible project, given the 145 pages of text set aside for the task. Guha does cover a number of subjects well, and some are welcome additions to the discussion of the history of environmental thought. Overall though, the topics not covered work to neutralize what is accomplished by the topics that are covered. Consider first what Guha does include.The book is divided into two parts, each focusing on a wave of environmental thought. In the first part, there are four chapters and an afterword. In the initial chapter, Guha argues that a more social and international environmentalism can be a spur to "human reflection and human action," and not just a "scientific study of the state of nature or a balance sheet of the impact of human beings on the earth" (p. 3). While it is common to divide the environmental movement into waves (usually three or four), Guha chooses to delineate only one major shift and thus only two waves of environmentalism. The first wave is comprised of what Guha calls a "period of pioneering and prophecy" and an initial reaction to industrialization; the second wave is comprised of the more socially oriented responses that have emerged in recent decades (p. 3). There are good reasons for delineating more waves, but Guha's project is generally well-served by the two-wave distinction.Guha divides the first wave into three varieties distinguished by their different guiding ideologies—back-to-the-land, scientific conservation, wilderness idea—which are treated respectively in chapters two, three, and four. What I found most compelling about Guha's varieties are some of the figures he chose to include. For example, in chapter two Guha offers a treatment of the back-to-the-land ideology that concurrently condemned excessive industrialization and espoused a commitment to agrarian and pastoral values. From William Wordsworth, William Blake, John Clare, Edward Carpenter, Henry David Thoreau, John Ruskin, Edward Carpenter, [End Page 133] Henry David Thoreau, William Morris, and Octavia Hill, to Gandhi and the Nazis, Guha's range here is impressive. While I do have reservations about how convincing it is to link Wordsworth, Ruskin, and Gandhi according to a largely generic and nondescript agrarian ideal that he claims... (shrink)

"Although this book looks back mainly to Blake (after all, Locke could not have read Blake) it also looks past Blake to discover a Locke not given much shrift by Blake scholars. It does this in a constantly interesting sinuous juxtaposition of Blake's and Locke's views on a variety of subjects, some wonderfully unexpected. Glausser's grasp of his material is impressive, and he writes with admirable clarity.... A deft blending of historical, biographical, and interpretive scholarship."--Hazard (...) Adams, Byron W. and Alice L. Lockwood Professor of Humanities, University of Washington Locke and Blake is a composite critical biography of two giants of 18th-century culture. Organized by topics of cultural significance for the period, it weaves together two lives, focusing on critical topics as opposed to biographical details, in order to illuminate ideas of Locke and Blake and the cultural contexts and transformations of the "period" they shared. Glausser begins each chapter by sketching a biographical connection between the two men, which in turn leads to a broader discussion of textual as well as cultural significance. From their shared experience of having had paintings stolen by a friend, for instance, Glausser details the two men's angry responses and then explores the larger social issue of private property at each end of the 18th century. Other points of correspondence include mothers and lovers, charges of sedition, medicine and the body, slavery, and printing. Glausser's new approach to the lives and ideas of Locke and Blake offers a more balanced treatment of their relationship than has been available in the past. Through this juxtaposition and rethinking of the two traditional "antagonists" of the period, he moves beyond adversarial caricatures of temperament, faculty, ideology, and intention and illuminates both the century and the two intellectual giants who stood at either end of it. Wayne Glausser is professor of English at DePauw University and author of articles on Locke and Blake as well as various topics in recent American fiction and popular culture. (shrink)

On March 12, 2018, I received an email from André De Tienne, General Editor of the Peirce Edition Project. He recommended that I visit the Francis Blake archives at the Massachusetts Historical Society, remarking, Francis Blake was a cousin of Charles Peirce. I have not yet figured out how that cousinage works out genealogically. In any case, on 13 January 1893, the day CSP and Juliette returned from Boston to New York after the Lowell Lectures, they first took (...) a trip to Weston, MA, to visit Frank Blake, and from there they went to Worcester to visit W. Stanley Hall at Clark University. … If you look in folder R L49, it... (shrink)

The text of each poem is given in letterpress on the page facing the beautiful color reproductions of the plate. The book is printed on vellum.

This paper pertains to research works aiming at linking ethics and automated reasoning in autonomous machines. It focuses on a formal approach that is intended to be the basis of an artificial agent’s reasoning that could be considered by a human observer as an ethical reasoning. The approach includes some formal tools to describe a situation and models of ethical principles that are designed to automatically compute a judgement on possible decisions that can be made in a given situation and (...) explain why a given decision is ethically acceptable or not. It is illustrated on three ethical frameworks—utilitarian ethics, deontological ethics and the Doctrine of Double effect whose formal models are tested on ethical dilemmas so as to examine how they respond to those dilemmas and to highlight the issues at stake when a formal approach to ethical concepts is considered. The whole approach is instantiated on the drone dilemma, a thought experiment we have designed; this allows the discrepancies that exist between the judgements of the various ethical frameworks to be shown. The final discussion allows us to highlight the different sources of subjectivity of the approach, despite the fact that concepts are expressed in a more rigorous way than in natural language: indeed, the formal approach enables subjectivity to be identified and located more precisely. (shrink)

Doxastic involuntarists have paid insufficient attention to two debates in contemporary epistemology: the permissivism debate and the debate over norms of assertion and belief. In combination, these debates highlight a conception of belief on which, if you find yourself in what I will call an ‘equipollent case’ with respect to some proposition p, there will be no reason why you can’t believe p at will. While doxastic involuntarism is virtually epistemological orthodoxy, nothing in the entire stock of objections to belief (...) at will blocks this route to doxastic voluntarism. Against the backdrop of the permissivism debate and the literature on norms of belief and assertion, doxastic involuntarism emerges as an article of faith, not the obvious truth it’s usually purported to be. (shrink)

Does knowledge depend in any interesting way on our practical interests? This is the central question in the pragmatic encroachment debate. Pragmatists defend the affirmative answer to this question while purists defend the negative answer. The literature contains two kinds of arguments for pragmatism: principle-based arguments and case-based arguments. Principle-based arguments derive pragmatism from principles that connect knowledge to practical interests. Case-based arguments rely on intuitions about cases that differ with respect to practical interests. I argue that there are insurmountable (...) problems for both kinds of arguments, and that it is therefore unclear what motivates pragmatism. (shrink)

"The Blackwell Guide to Philosophy of Education" is state-of-the-art map to the field as well as a valuable reference book.

According to what I will call ‘the disanalogy thesis,’ beliefs differ from actions in at least the following important way: while cognitively healthy people often exhibit direct control over their actions, there is no possible scenario where a cognitively healthy person exhibits direct control over her beliefs. Recent arguments against the disanalogy thesis maintain that, if you find yourself in what I will call a ‘permissive situation’ with respect to p, then you can have direct control over whether you believe (...) p, and you can do so without manifesting any cognitive defect. These arguments focus primarily on the idea that we can have direct doxastic control in permissive situations, but they provide insufficient reason for thinking that permissive situations are actually possible, since they pay inadequate attention to the following worries: permissive situations seem inconsistent with the uniqueness thesis, permissive situations seem inconsistent with natural thoughts about epistemic akrasia, and vagueness threatens even if we push these worries aside. In this paper I argue that, on the understanding of permissive situations that is most useful for evaluating the disanalogy thesis, permissive situations clearly are possible. (shrink)