Suppose someone is brought up as an orthodox Jew, and so only eats kosher, is very conservative sexually, etc. Suppose they then find out that this Judaism stuff is just all a big mistake. If they then regret all the shrimp they could have eaten, all the sex!, this makes perfect sense. Not so, however, if someone finds out that moral realism is false, and they now regret all the fun they could have had hurting people’s feeling, etc. Even if (...) this does make sense, there’s a strong disanalogy between the moral and the religious case. This asymmetry, on a realist picture of morality, calls for explanation. This chapter tries to explain it. The discussion engages some topics familiar from objections to Robust realism—the why-be-moral challenge, the status of de-dicto moral motivation, and whether and why we should care about the moral properties, robustly realistically understood. (shrink)

1. The Shmagency Challenge to Constitutivism In metaethics – and indeed, meta-normativity – constitutivism is a family of views that hope to ground normativity in norms, or standards, or motives, or aims that are constitutive of action and agency. And mostly because of the influential work of Christine Korsgaard and David Velleman, constitutivism seems to be gaining grounds in the current literature. The promises of constitutivism are significant. Perhaps chief among them are the hope to provide with some kind of (...) answer to the skeptic about morality or perhaps practical reason, and the hope to secure for practical reason a kind of objectivity that is consistent with its practical, motivationally engaged nature. The former philosophical motivation for constitutivism – most clearly present in much of Korsgaard’s relevant work[1] – relies on the fact that constitutive norms seem to be less mysterious than not-clearly-constitutive norms. There arguably is nothing mysterious about, say, the norms of certain reasonably-well-defined activities, like building a house, or playing chess. And challenges by the relevant skeptic – the one asking "Why should I make sure the house I’m building can shelter people from the weather?" or "Why should I not castle when my king is checked?" – seem very rare, barely intelligible, and anyway remarkably easy to cope with. We should explain to the misguided skeptic that if he doesn’t even try to build something that can protect people from the weather, he’s not in the business of building a house at all; that if she doesn’t even try to play by the rules of chess, she’s not in the business of playing chess at all; and so on. It would be nice, the constitutivist hope seems to go, if we had something equally powerful by way of a response to the skeptic asking "Why be moral?". The other main motivation for constitutivism – most clearly present in David Velleman’s relevant work[2] – starts from a commitment to some rather strong kind of existence-internalism about reasons: An agent has a reason to?, according to such views ), only if she can come to?, or at least to be motivated to?, by sound deliberation starting from her actual motivational set. (shrink)

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)

In "Nietzsche's Perspectivism", Steven Hales and Rex Welshon offer an analytic approach to Nietzsche's important idea that truth is perspectival. Drawing on Nietzsche's entire published corpus, along with manuscripts he never saw to press, they assess the different perspectivisms at work in Nietzsche's views with regard to truth, logic, causality, knowledge, consciousness, and the self. They also examine Nietzsche's perspectivist ontology of power and the attendant claims that substances and subjects are illusory while forces and alliances of power constitute the (...) only reality. Hales and Welshon present Nietzsche's treatment of perspectivism as both more complex and more fruitful than the common view of it as a doctrine that truth is not objective. Neither a metaphor nor a methodology, perspectivism emerges as a protean concept akin to a unifying theme; an alternative to the absolutism that recurs in science, philosophy, and religion; and a technique for revealing the unimagined possibilities open to every individual. (shrink)

The youth of Bentham (1776-1789).--The evolution of the utilitarian doctrine from 1789 to 1815.--Philosophic radicalism.

In this paper, we present an account of in virtue of what thinkers are justified in employing certain basic belief‐forming methods. The guiding idea is inspired by Reichenbach’s work on induction. There are certain projects in which thinkers are rationally required to engage. Thinkers are epistemically justified in employing a belief‐forming method that is indispensable for successfully engaging in such a project. We present a detailed account based on this intuitive thought, and address objections to it. We conclude by commenting (...) on the implications that our account may have for other important epistemological debates. (shrink)

Nietzsche offers a positive epistemology, and those who interpret him as a skeptic or a mere pragmatist are mistaken. Instead he supports what he calls per- spectivism. This is a familiar take on Nietzsche, as perspectivism has been analyzed by many previous interpreters. The present paper presents a sketch of the textually best supported and logically most consistent treatment of perspectivism as a first- order epistemic theory. What’s original in the present paper is an argument that Nietzsche also offers a (...) second-order methodological perspectivism aimed at enhancing understanding, an epistemic state distinct from knowledge. Just as Descartes considers and rejects radical skepticism while at the same time adopting methodological skepticism, one could consistently reject perspectivism as a theory of knowledge while accepting it as contributing to our understanding. It is argued that Nietzsche’s perspectivism is in fact two-tiered: knowledge is perspectival because truth itself is, and in addition there is a methodological perspectivism in which distinct ways of knowing are utilized to produce understanding. A review of the manner in which understanding is conceptualized in contemporary epistemology and philosophy of science serves to illuminate how Nietzsche was tackling these ideas. (shrink)

David Enoch develops, argues for, and defends a strongly realist and objectivist view of ethics and normativity more broadly. This view--according to which there are perfectly objective, universal, moral and other normative truths that are not in any way reducible to other, natural truths--is familiar, but this book is the first in-detail development of the positive motivations for the view into reasonably precise arguments. And when the book turns to defend Robust Realism against traditional objections, it mobilizes the original (...) positive arguments for the view to help with fending off the objections. (shrink)

Background: Biological products are widely used in the treatment of burns, chronic wounds, and other forms of acute injury. However, the religious and ethical issues, including consent, arising from their use have never been addressed in the medical literature.Aims: This study was aimed to ascertain the views of religious leaders about the acceptability of biological products and to evaluate awareness among healthcare professionals about their constituents.Methods: The religious groups that make up about 75% of the United Kingdom population were identified (...) and a questionnaire on 11 biological products was sent to its leaders. Another questionnaire concerning 17 products was sent to 100 healthcare professionals working in seven specialist units in the UK.Results: All religious leaders replied, some after consultation with international bodies. Among them, 77% said that patients should be informed of the constituents of the biological products and consent obtained. Some leaders expressed concerns about particular products including the transmission of viral and prion diseases, cruelty to animals, and material derived from neonates. None of the healthcare professionals surveyed knew the constituents of all the products correctly.Conclusion: Ignoring religious sensitivities and neglecting consent in the usage of biological products could have very serious implications, including litigation. Hospitals and manufacturers should take immediate measures to enlighten healthcare professionals of the constituents of these products so that they can obtain informed consent from patients. (shrink)

Kit Fine’s book is a study of abstraction in a quite precise sense which derives from Frege. In his Grundlagen, Frege contemplates defining the concept of number by means of what has come to be called Hume’s principle—the principle that the number of Fs is the same as the number of Gs just in case there is a one-to-one correspondence between the Fs and the Gs. Frege’s discussion is largely conducted in terms of another, similar but in some respects simpler, (...) proposal—to define the concept of direction by laying down the principle that the direction of a line a is the same as that of line b if and only if lines a and b are parallel. Such principles have come to be known as abstraction principles. More generally, abstraction principles are ones of the shape: ∀α∀β ↔ α ≈ β), where ≈ is an equivalence relation on entities of the type over which α and β vary and, if the principle is acceptable, § is a function from entities of that type to objects. Since ‘the direction of’ is intended to stand for a function from objects of a certain sort to other objects, the Direction Equivalence is a first-order, or in Fine’s terminology objectual, abstraction; since ‘the number of’ is intended to stand for a function from concepts to objects, Hume’s principle is a higher-order, or as Fine says conceptual, abstraction. As is well-known, Frege himself abandoned the idea of defining number implicitly or contextually by means of Hume’s principle—adopting instead an explicit definition of the number of Fs as the extension of the concept concept equinumerous to the concept F— because he thought that an adequate definition should settle the question whether Julius Caesar, for example, is or is not the number of some concept, but that the proposed implicit definition cannot do so. But interest in abstraction principles has revived in the last couple of decades, largely as a result of Crispin Wright’s attempt to show that in spite of the many difficulties confronting it—including the notorious Julius Caesar problem— Hume’s principle can after all serve as a foundation for arithmetic. (shrink)

I argue that Monique Wittig's view that lesbians are not women neglects the complexities involved in the composition of the category "woman." I develop an articulation of the concept "woman" in the contemporary United States, with thirteen distinct defining characteristics, none of which are necessary nor sufficient. I argue that Wittig's emphasis on the material production of "woman" through the political regime of heterosexuality, however, is enormously fruitful for feminist and queer strategizing.

Scientific behavior is used as a benchmark to examine the truth status of computationalism (COMP) as a law of nature. A COMP-based artificial scientist is examined from three simple perspectives to see if they shed light on the truth or falsehood of COMP through its ability or otherwise, to deliver authentic original science on the a priori unknown like humans do. The first perspective (A) looks at the handling of ignorance and supports a claim that COMP is "trivially true" or (...) "pragmatically false" in the sense that you can simulate a scientist if you already know everything, which is a state that renders the simulation possible but pointless. The second scenario (B) is more conclusive and unusual in that it reveals that the COMP scientist can never propose/debate that COMP is a law of nature. This marked difference between the human and the artificial scientist in this single, very specific circumstance, means that COMP cannot be true as a general claim. The third scenario (C) examines the artificial scientist's ability to do science on itself/humans to uncover the "law of nature" which results in itself. This scenario reveals that a successful test for scientific behavior by a COMP-based artificial scientist supports a claim that COMP is true. Such a test is quite practical and can be applied to an artificial scientist based on any design principle, not merely COMP. Scenario (C) also reveals a practical example of the COMP scientist's inability to handle informal systems (in the form of liars), which further undermines COMP. Overall, the result is that COMP is false, with certainty in one very specific, critical place. This lends support to the claims (i) that artificial general intelligence will not succeed based on COMP principles, and (ii) computationally enacted abstract models of human cognition will never create a mind. (shrink)

This volume provides a survey of contemporary philosophy of language. As well as providing a synoptic view of the key issues, figures, concepts and debates, each essay makes new and original contributions to ongoing debate.

PriestGraham. Towards Non-Being: The Logic and Metaphysics of Intentionality. Oxford University Press, 2016. 2nd ed. ISBN 978-0-19-878359-6 ; 978-0-19-878360-2. Pp. xxxvi + 368.

Nietzsche est trop mal connu et trop méconnu. On lui a fait dire tout et n'importe quoi! On l'a dit nihiliste, lui qui a éreinté le nihilisme. On a fait de lui un misanthrope violent, lui qui était la courtoisie, la sensibilité et la douceur mêmes. On a voulu faire de lui un précurseur du nazisme, lui, l'ami des Juifs qui ne haïssait tant rien que le militarisme et le germanisme. On sait que Nietzsche proclamait que "Dieu est mort!". Mais (...) sait-on de quel Dieu il parlait et sait-on qu'il fut le prophète de la Vie et de l'Amour du Destin... On sait que Nietzsche était un philosophe du soupçon et le pourfendeur de toutes les espérances. (shrink)

This book is a collection of essays written by Bob Hale (three co-authored), with a critical introduction from Kit Fine. They comprise Hale’s final years of work, adding to and extending beyond his landmark monograph Necessary Beings: An Essay on Ontology, Modality, and the Relations Between Them (OUP, 2013, 2nd edition 2015). The essays develop and consolidate several key themes in Hale’s work, most notably the notion of definition, especially as it extends beyond definition of a word (...) to definition of a thing more generally, and its relations to essence and existence; how the recently influential notion of truthmaking relates to and illuminates some of these issues; and ontological questions connected with Hale’s metaphysical commitments on the one hand, and his commitments in the foundations of mathematics on the other. Several of the essays engage with and respond to work by Kit Fine, and contributions to Being Necessary: Themes of Ontology and Modality from the Work of Bob Hale (OUP 2018). As such, these essays also demonstrate a rich and fruitful philosophical dialogue between Hale and his critics and friends. (shrink)

Faith communities have always struggled with the questions of ethical method and cultural inclusivity. Accordingly, Ethical Issues that Matter enlarges the methodological discussion among ethicists and theologians by adopting the landscape of a mountain as a useful metaphor for racism. On a practical level, Ethical Issues that Matter is about the agonizing struggle to understand and to dismantle the mountain of racism in American society. According to the author, to do so would undoubtedly enhance the meaning and diversity of the (...) Christian moral life. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Riding Out of the Cave Discipline and Diet Toughing It Out Surprises Down the Road From Tribulation to Wisdom Notes.

Locality is a key concept not only in linguistic theorizing, but in explaining pattern of acquisition and patterns of recovery in garden path sentences, as well. If syntax relates sound and meaning over an infinite domain, syntactic dependencies and operations must be restricted in such a way to apply over limited, finite domains in order to be detectable at all. The theory of what these finite domains are and how they relate to the fundamentally unbounded nature of syntax is the (...) theory of locality. The papers in this collection all deal with the concept of locality in syntactic theory, and, more specifically, describe and analyze the various contributions Luigi Rizzi has made to this area over the past three and a half decades. The authors are all eminent linguists in generative syntax who have collaborated with Rizzi closely, and in eleven chapters, they explore locality in both pure syntax and psycholinguistics. This collection is essential reading for students and scholars of linguistic theory, generative syntax, and comparative syntax. (shrink)

In the literature, the term code-mixing/switching refers to instances of language mixing in which speakers/signers combine properties of two or more languages in their utterances. Such a linguistic behavior is typically discussed in the context of multilinguals, and experts commonly focus on the form of language mixing/switching and its cross-linguistic commonalities. Not much is known, however, about how the knowledge of code-mixing comes about. How come any speaker/signer having access to more than one externalization channel (spoken or signed) code-mixes spontaneously? (...) Likewise, why do both neurotypical speakers/signers and certain neuro-atypical speakers/signers produce structurally similar mixing types? This paper offers some answers to these questions arguing that the cognitive process underlying code-mixing is a basic property of the human learning device: recombination, a fully automated cognitive process. Recombination is innate: it allows learners to select relevant linguistic features from heterogeneous inputs, and recombine then into new syntactic objects as part of their mental grammars whose extensions, arguably individual idiolects, represents what Aboh (2015a, 2019a, b) characterizes as hybrid grammars. (shrink)

I am writing a mediocre paper on a topic you are not particularly interested in. You don't have, it seems safe to assume, a (normative) reason to read my draft. I then ask whether you would be willing to have a look and tell me what you think. Suddenly you do have a (normative) reason to read my draft. What exactly happened here? Your having the reason to read my draft – indeed, the very fact that there is such a (...) reason – depends, it seems, on my having asked you to read it. By my asking, I managed to make it the case that you have such a reason, or to give you the reason to read the draft. What does such reason-giving consist in? And how is it that we can do it? In the next section, I distinguish between purely epistemic reason-giving, merely triggering reason-giving, and the kind of reason-giving I will be primarily interested in, the kind presumably involved in requests, which I call robust reasongiving. Then, in section 3, I try to characterize in some detail the intuitive or phenomenological data. I try, in other words, to clarify what it is we want an account of robust reason-giving to accommodate. But at the end of section 3 it remains entirely open whether any possible account in fact satisfies the desiderata elaborated in that section. In section 4 I thus proceed to inquire whether such an account is there to be found. I argue that the only plausible way of making sense of robust reason-. (shrink)

The practice of ‘diaspora missions’ is necessitated by the demographic change in the United Kingdom in the 21st century. In this paper, the ‘diaspora mission strategy’ is proposed in response to such demographic change.

The law views with suspicion statistical evidence, even evidence that is probabilistically on a par with direct, individual evidence that the law is in no way suspicious of. But it has proved remarkably hard to either justify this suspicion, or to debunk it. In this paper, we connect the discussion of statistical evidence to broader epistemological discussions of similar phenomena. We highlight Sensitivity – the requirement that a belief be counterfactually sensitive to the truth in a specific way – as (...) a way of epistemically explaining the legal suspicion towards statistical evidence. Still, we do not think of this as a satisfactory vindication of the reluctance to rely on statistical evidence. Knowledge – and Sensitivity, and indeed epistemology in general – are of little, if any, legal value. Instead, we tell an incentive-based story vindicating the suspicion towards statistical evidence. We conclude by showing that the epistemological story and the incentive-based story are closely and interestingly related, and by offering initial thoughts about the role of statistical evidence in morality. (shrink)

Metaethical—or, more generally, metanormative— realism faces a serious epistemological challenge. Realists owe us—very roughly speaking—an account of how it is that we can have epistemic access to the normative truths about which they are realists. This much is, it seems, uncontroversial among metaethicists, myself included. But this is as far as the agreement goes, for it is not clear—nor uncontroversial—how best to understand the challenge, what the best realist way of coping with it is, and how successful this attempt is. (...) In this paper I try, first, to present the challenge in its strongest version, and second, to show how realists—indeed, robust realists—can cope with it. The strongest version of the challenge is, I argue, that of explaining the correlation between our normative beliefs and the independent normative truths. And I suggest an evolutionary explanation as a way of solving it. (shrink)

How should you update your (degrees of) belief about a proposition when you find out that someone else — as reliable as you are in these matters — disagrees with you about its truth value? There are now several different answers to this question — the question of `peer disagreement' — in the literature, but none, I think, is plausible. Even more importantly, none of the answers in the literature places the peer-disagreement debate in its natural place among the most (...) general traditional concerns of normative epistemology. In this paper I try to do better. I start by emphasizing how we cannot and should not treat ourselves as `truthometers' — merely devices with a certain probability of tracking the truth. I argue that the truthometer view is the main motivation for the Equal Weight View in the context of peer disagreement. With this fact in mind, the discussion of peer disagreement becomes more complicated, sensitive to the justification of the relevant background degrees of belief (including the conditional ones), and to some of the most general points that arise in the context of discussions of scepticism. I argue that thus understood, peer disagreement is less special as an epistemic phenomenon than may be thought, and so that there is very little by way of positive theory that we can give about peer disagreement in general. (shrink)

The combination of this vindication of moral deference and diagnosis of its fishiness nicely accommodates, I argue, some related phenomena, like the (neglected) fact that our uneasiness with moral deference is actually a particular instance of uneasiness with opaque evidence in general when it comes to morality, and the (familiar) fact that the scope of this uneasiness is wider than the moral as it includes other normative domains.

Do biological species have essences? The debate over this question in philosophy of biology exhibits fundamental confusion both between and within authors. In What to Salvage from the Species Essentialism Debate, I argue that the best way forward is to drop the question and its terms in order to make progress on two issues: how to individuate species taxa; and how to make sense of changes in explanatory frameworks across the Darwinian historical divide. I further argue that a primary motivation (...) for anti-essentialism, biological variation, matters differently to each project. Anti-essentialism in the philosophy of biology has inspired influential rejections of the idea that there is such a thing as human nature. In More Bark than Bite, I show that the arguments are significantly weaker than supposed. Moreover, none of the weighty consequences thought to follow from any genuine sense in which there is no human nature, actually do follow. The evolution-based denial of human nature has little to contribute to inquiries into the human condition, both philosophical and scientific. Decisions about whether to undergo experiences that could change the very preference-base on which the choice is made are “transformative”. L. A. Paul argues that transformative decisions present a problem for standard decision theory when approached in a way that leans on evaluations of the experiential consequences of the choices. Her solution proposes that we approach such decisions by asking ourselves how much we value the kind of discovery involved in transformative experience. In Shifting Attention on Transformative Choice, I present two problems for her solution and offer an alternative. Transformative decisions may be rationally approached by asking ourselves how much we judge the activities on the other side of transformation to be worthwhile. This proposal helps make better sense of our relationship to experiential consequences of transformation, which is more flexible than Paul acknowledges. (shrink)

For lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer youth, identity development is one of the most critical developmental task. LGBTQ youth are shown to be at risk for a variety of risk factors including depression and suicidal ideation and attempts due to how their identities are appraised in heteronormative societies. However, most LGBTQ educational psychology research have highlighted protective factors that are primarily relevant to support LGBTQ white-youth. One of the major developmental theories, Erikson’s stages of psychosocial development, has identified adolescence (...) as the period where identity development occurs. However, through an intersectional lens, identity development appears to encompass more than adolescence but also emerging adulthood, a developmental stage not accounted for by Erikson’s stages of psychosocial development. The primary goal of this study is to seek to understand and question Erikson’s stages of psychosocial development through an intersectional lens of an autoethnography of my LGBTQ experiences. An autoethnographic approach [diary entries, conversations, interview, social media websites and blogs, and drawing ] is used to understand my LGBTQ-person of color experiences of “coming out” or self-disclosure during my adolescence through emerging adulthood. Data was collected on April 2020 and spanned from 2006 through 2020 to account for the developmental period of adolescence and emerging adulthood. Thematic analysis revealed four themes across the two developmental periods: confusion and conflict between my gay and ethnic identity as a closeted adolescent, my first “coming out” as a gay adolescent and “it got better,” frustration arising from the internal conflict between my gay and POC identity as an emerging adult, and frustration arising from external experiences with the flaws of LGBTQ community inclusivity. Results reflected a continuous theme of identity exploration and struggle through both adolescence and emerging adulthood, highlighting the need for future research to replicate similar experiences from other intersectional individuals during emerging adulthood stage, a developmental stage that is considered in between Erikson’s adolescent and young adulthood developmental stage. (shrink)