SUPPORTERS of a coherentist standard of truth must be able to establish that this criterion is duly consonant with the definitional nature of truth, for there ought rightfully to be a continuity between our evidential criterion of acceptability-as-true and the "truth" as definitionally specified. Any satisfactory criterion must be such as to yield the real thing--at any rate in sufficiently favorable circumstances. Fortunately for coherentism, it is possible to demonstrate rigorously that truth is tantamount to ideal coherence--that a proposition's being (...) true is in fact equivalent with its being optimally coherent with an ideal data base. Given that the preceding continuity requirement is satisfied, the traditional view of truth as accord with fact is thus also available to coherentists. However, the element of idealization at issue means that we cannot claim that coherence provides us with unqualified truth in actual practice. The coherence-based inquiries we actually carry out, can go only so far as to afford our best available estimate of the real truth. (shrink)

Fabienne Peter (2020) recently proposed a taxonomy of accounts of the meta-normative grounds of political legitimacy. In this article, I argue that there is an important distinction left out of that taxonomy that complicates the picture. This is the distinction between attitude-independent and attitude-dependent conceptions of normative truth. Through an examination of these conceptions of normative truth (and correlate interpretations of what counts as a normative reason) I argue that what Peter calls a fact-based conception of legitimacy may collapse into (...) a will-based conception. Further, the distinction has important implications for what Peter calls the belief-based conception. Finally, I defend the will-based conception against Peter's arbitrariness objection through an examination of ideally coherent eccentrics. (shrink)

How should we understand the notion of moral objectivity? Metaethical positions that vindicate morality’s objective appearance are often associated with moral realism. On a realist construal, moral objectivity is understood in terms of mind-, stance-, or attitude-independence. But realism is not the only game in town for moral objectivists. On an antirealist construal, morality’s objective features are understood in virtue of our attitudes. In this paper I aim to develop this antirealist construal of moral objectivity in further detail, and to (...) make its metaphysical commitments explicit. I do so by building on Sharon Street’s version of “Humean Constructivism”. Instead of the realist notion of attitude-independence, the antirealist account of moral objectivity that I articulate centres on the notion of standpoint-invariance. While constructivists have been criticized for compromising on the issue of moral objectivity, I make a preliminary case for the thesis that, armed with the notion of standpoint-invariance, constructivists have resources to vindicate an account of objectivity with just the right strength, given the commitments of ordinary moral thought and practice. In support of this thesis I highlight recent experimental findings about folk moral objectivism. Empirical observations about the nature of moral discourse have traditionally been taken to give prima facie support to moral realism. I argue, by contrast, that from what we can tell from our current experimental understanding, antirealists can capture the commitments of ordinary discourse at least as well as realists can. (shrink)

Probabilistic coherence is not an absolute requirement of rationality; nevertheless, it is an ideal of rationality with substantive normative import. An idealized rational agent who avoided making implicit logical errors in forming his preferences would be coherent. In response to the challenge, recently made by epistemologists such as Foley and Plantinga, that appeals to ideal rationality render probabilism either irrelevant or implausible, I argue that idealized requirements can be normatively relevant even when the ideals are unattainable, so long as (...) they define a structure that links imperfect and perfect rationality in a way that enables us to make sense of the notion of better approximations to the ideal. I then analyze the notion of approximation to the ideal of coherence by developing a generalized theory of belief functions that allows for incoherence, and showing how such belief functions can be ordered with regard to greater or lesser coherence. (shrink)

Bayesians defend norms of ideal rationality such as probabilism, which they claim should be approximated by non-ideal thinkers. Yet, it is not often discussed exactly in what sense it is beneficial for an agent’s credence function to approximate probabilistic coherence. Some existing research indicates that approximating coherence leads to improvements in accuracy, whereas other research suggests that it decreases Dutch book vulnerability. Yet, the existing results don’t settle whether there is a way of approximating coherence that delivers both benefits at (...) once. We show that there is. (shrink)

A coherent story is a story that fits together well. This notion plays a central role in the coherence theory of justification and has been proposed as a criterion for scientific theory choice. Many attempts have been made to give a probabilistic account of this notion. A proper account of coherence must not start from some partial intuitions, but should pay attention to the role that this notion is supposed to play within a particular context. Coherence is a property (...) of an information set that boosts our confidence that its content is true ceteris paribus when we receive information from independent and partially reliable sources. We construct a measure cr that relies on hypothetical sources with certain idealized characteristics. A maximally coherent information set, i.e. a set with equivalent propositions, affords a maximal confidence boost. cr is the ratio of the actual confidence boost over the confidence boost that we would have received, had the information been presented in the form of maximally coherent information, ceteris paribus. This measure is functionally dependent on the degree of reliability r of the sources. We use cr to construct a coherence quasi-ordering over information sets S and S’: S is no less coherent than S’ just in case c_r is not smaller than c_r for any value of the reliability parameter. We show that, on our account, the coherence of the story about the world gives us a reason to believe that the story is true and that the coherence of a scientific theory, construed as a set of models, is a proper criterion for theory choice. (shrink)

We construct a probabilistic coherence measure for information sets which determines a partial coherence ordering. This measure is applied in constructing a criterion for expanding our beliefs in the face of new information. A number of idealizations are being made which can be relaxed by an appeal to Bayesian Networks.

What should we do when we won't do as we ought? Suppose it ought to be that the procrastinating professor accept the task of reviewing a book, and actually review the book. It seems clear that given he won't review it, he ought not to accept the task. That is a genuine moral obligation in light of less than perfect circumstances. I want to entertain the possibility that a set of such obligations form something like a 'practical morality'; that which (...) we ought to do given that we're unlikely or unwilling to do much of what ideal morality demands. If it is possible to give a coherent account of these kinds of obligations, then it is possible to entertain the idea that these obligations are in fact what morality demands. The conceptual truths about justice (good, right, fairness) that come from ideals are one thing; the actions that morality demands of people given their actual circumstances are quite another. In this paper I will ask about the kinds of facts that can be used to establish a more circumscribed set of obligations than we get from the orthodox view about moral obligation. (shrink)

In discussions surrounding epistemology and rationality, it is often useful to assume an agent is rational or ideally rational. Often, this ideal rationality assumption is spelled out along the following lines: -/- 1. The agent believes everything about a situation which the evidence entitles her to believe and nothing which it does not. -/- 2. The agent believes all the logical consequences of any of her beliefs. -/- 3. The agent knows her own mind: if she believes P, she (...) believes that she believes P; and if she doesn't believe P, she believes that she doesn't believe P. -/- 4. The agent believes nothing of the form 'P and it is not the case that P.' -/- 5. If an agent's background belief-set satisfies 1-4 and if rationality requires the agent to add P to her belief-set, then the resulting belief-set will also satisfy 1-4. -/- While individually plausible, there are cases in which holding on to 1-5 generates paradox. Some resolve such paradoxical cases by granting 1-5 but arguing while ideally rational agents can exist, they can't possibly ever find themselves in such a situation: such case descriptions are epistemically incoherent. Others allow that rational agents can coherently find themselves in such odd circumstances, and argue that it's more reasonable to weaken our concept of ideal rationality and give up premise (2) above. However, this strategy has also been rejected. My aim in this paper is to defend the utility of positing an ideally rational agent in such paradoxical circumstances. I argue in such cases we should give up (2), in particular the assumption that (necessarily) if an ideally rational agent believes both P and the conditional, if P then Q, then she believes Q.. What's important is to hold on to the goal of positing ideal rationality: to maximize the amount of true or probably true information a thinker can justifiably believe in a given circumstance. Normally that will mean holding on to (2), but these unusual paradoxical cases are best handled by giving up (2). (shrink)

What is it to have and act on a personal ideal? Someone who aspires to be a philosopher might imaginatively think “I am a philosopher” by way of motivating herself to think hard about a philosophical question. But doing so seems to require her to act on an inaccurate self-description, given that she isn’t yet what she regards herself as being. J. David Velleman develops the thought that action-by-ideal involves a kind of fictional self-conception. My aim is to expand our (...) thinking about personal ideals by developing another way of understanding them. On this view action-by-ideal involves a kind of metaphorical self-conception. I investigate some salient differences between these views with the aim of understanding the different perspectives they take on the rationality of action-by-ideal. Where the fiction view runs into problems of literary coherence, the metaphor view exploits the richness of poetic invention. But action-by-ideal is a complex phenomenon about which there may be no tidy story to be told. This paper is an attempt to clarify and understand more of this messy terrain. (shrink)

Formal epistemologists often claim that our credences should be representable by a probability function. Complete probabilistic coherence, however, is only possible for ideal agents, raising the question of how this requirement relates to our everyday judgments concerning rationality. One possible answer is that being rational is a contextual matter, that the standards for rationality change along with the situation. Just like who counts as tall changes depending on whether we are considering toddlers or basketball players, perhaps what counts as rational (...) shifts according to whether we are considering ideal agents or creatures more like ourselves. Even though a number of formal epistemologists have endorsed this type of solution, I will argue that there is no way to spell out this contextual account that can make sense of our everyday judgments about rationality. Those who defend probabilistic coherence requirements will need an alternative account of the relationship between real and ideal rationality. (shrink)

Central to the legal positivism of the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth century was the dogma of the Ideal Legislator. Legal materials were to be interpreted as the work of an omniscient, coherent, consistent legislator. We argue that this dogma persists in the different guise of the competent speaker model, on which legal materials are the work of a competent speaker, who follows all the pertinent semantic and pragmatic rules. We will first lay out the Ideal (...) Legislator dogma as applied in legal interpretation, arguing that this dogma does not limit interpretive discretion but rather amplifies it by hiding it under the veil of an inexistent, purely instrumental rationality. We will then turn to the competent speaker model, showing that, despite its apparent neutrality, it proves to be a reincarnation of the Ideal Legislator dogma, for it, too, amplifies interpretive discretion, only it hides it under the veil of an inexistent, purely linguistic rationality. Finally, we will inquire into the different types of rationality and their relations, arguing that there is always a choice and value judgment involved in ascribing rationality to legislators, and that these choices and judgments need to be carefully inspected and normatively justified. (shrink)

This paper contains a novel and coherent reading of Weberian ideal type construction, based on recent philosophical approaches to conceptual engineering. This reading makes transparent the dialectics of Weber's approach, resulting in a more nuanced interpretation of his methodological work. It will become apparent that Weber, when introducing his notion of an ideal type, did not merely summarize his views on methodology in the social sciences, but, rather, presented a two-step argument in favor of these views. The reconstruction will (...) directly bear on issues in the methodology of the social sciences. Weber not only presented a methodology that is, at some level of abstraction, strikingly similar to Carnapian explication (the canonical point of reference in the contemporary debate on conceptual engineering). He also diagnosed, in a systematic fashion, types of problems we face when dealing with ordinary and scientific concepts that play a key role in the description of social reality, and he foreshadowed what is today sometimes described as “debunking” projects. From a philosophy of science perspective, I propose Weber's view (on the reconstruction proposed here) as a serious candidate for an adequate theory of concept replacement in the social sciences. (shrink)

The author introduces a normative conception of coherence, derived from a pragmatic interpretation of the application of norms to concrete cases. A distinction is made between the justification of a norm and its application. In the case of moral norms, justification and application can be analysed as two different discursive procedures which give rise to different aspects of the principle of impartiality. Impartial justification requires a procedure by which all interests concerned are taken into account whereas impartial application requires a (...) procedure where all features of a situation are considered. The complete description of a concrete case makes necessary a coherent interpretation of all the valid norms which are prima facie applicable. This requirement of an ideal coherent system of norms is restricted to interpretive “paradigms” in the case of legal norms, because it is necessary to produce singular judgments under the restrictive conditions of scarce time and incomplete knowledge. (shrink)

A number of social theorists have contended that the essence of historical analysis is the employment of ideal types to comprehend past goings-on. But, while acknowledging that the study of history through ideal types can yield genuine insight, we may still ask if it represents the full emancipation of historical understanding from other modes of conceiving the past. This paper follows Michael Oakeshott's work on the philosophy of history in arguing that explaining the historical past by means of ideal types, (...) even though offering a coherent and fruitful enterprise, nevertheless falls short of fully embodying the characteristics that differentiate historical understanding. -/- This dispute involves fundamental issues regarding the nature of the social sciences. Furthermore, I suggest that it is of more than purely theoretical interest, in that social theorists who have accepted the Weberian view of historical inquiry will tend to be unaware of the defects inherent in all attempts to capture the nature of past events in a net of generalizations, and thus may be lead to ignore the inherent partiality of the understanding of historical happenings provided by ideal typification. (shrink)

Angelica Nuzzo offers a comprehensive reconstruction of Kant's theory of sensibility in his three Critiques. By introducing the notion of "transcendental embodiment," Nuzzo proposes a new understanding of Kant's views on science, nature, morality, and art. She shows that the issue of human embodiment is coherently addressed and key to comprehending vexing issues in Kant's work as a whole. In this penetrating book, Nuzzo enters new terrain and takes on questions Kant struggled with: How does a body that feels pleasure (...) and pain, desire, anger, and fear understand and experience reason and strive toward knowledge? What grounds the body's experience of art and beauty? What kind of feeling is the feeling of being alive? As she comes to grips with answers, Nuzzo goes beyond Kant to revise our view of embodiment and the essential conditions that make human experience possible. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 8.4 (2001) 295-298 [Access article in PDF] A Dialectical Conception of Autism Giovanni Stanghellini Some Reasons for the Philosophical Turn in the Psychopathology of Schizophrenia There are many ways to become a schizphrenic. Each individual has her own schizophrenia, coherent with her life history, her problems and alternatives deriving from them (Binswanger 1960). What clinical psychiatry calls "schizophrenia" is not a unitary illness but (...) a common final state—a "syndrome" in the etymological sense, that is, a condition to which different psychopathological pathways may lead. Schizophrenic symptoms, like Schneiderian first-rank symptoms (delusions, hallucinations, experiences of passivity), are nothing but a rather uniform type of reaction. First-rank Schneiderian symptoms may be interpreted as attempts to explain disturbing basic experiences of change in self, body, and world perception (Klosterkoetter 1988) or as the epiphenomena of complex interactions between sensory disorders (aberrations in the perception of self, body, and world), conceptualisation disorders (impairments in the constitution of meanings and intentions), and attitudinal disorders (eccentric structure of values and beliefs) (Stanghellini 2000a). Since the schizophrenic syndrome, as defined by current diagnostic manuals, lacks any authentic core phenomena, and so-called schizophrenic symptoms are not specific (Berner and Kufferle 1982), the clinical diagnosis of schizophrenia finally becomes a diagnosis by exclusion (Maj 1998). This conceptual weakness is obviously unacceptable (not only for old dissenters from operational diagnostic criteria) and is kindling a velvet revolution in nosological studies and a renaissance of philosophically oriented psychopathological research (Parnas and Zahavi 2000). Autism: The Loss of Vital Contact with Reality Eugène Minkowski was a forerunner in the field of philosophical psychopathology: "The psychiatrist and the metaphysician become one in their common research concerning what is human and human experience" (Minkowski 1947). Indeed, his doctoral thesis on autism (Minkowski 1926) was dedicated to his teachers, the psychiatrist E. Bleuler and the philosopher H. Bergson, and his conceptualisation of autism is an ideal example of the link between philosophical perspectives and psychopathological research. The term "autism" was introduced by Bleuler (1911) to describe detachment from outer reality and immersion in inner life. Bleuler's concept of autism relied on Freud's (1905) notion of autoerotism and on associationistic psychology. According to Bleuler, autism was a consequence of the [End Page 295] splitting of psychic functions: a defense mechanism serving to avoid conflicts between desires and reality testing, promoting the shift to inner fantasy life and entailing social withdrawal, emotional indifference, inappropriate behaviors, and idiosyncratic values and beliefs.Minkowski, who was influenced by Bergson and phenomenology, departed from Bleuler's conceptualisation and defined autism as "loss of vital contact with reality" (Minkowski 1926, 1927). For Minkowski, autism is not a symptom, but a global phenomenon investing the whole person. Autism is a way of being whose essential feature is a pragmatic deficit: Autistic activity consists in the reduced capacity to interact with the external world. Autistic thought is characterized by its lack of communicative action. The pragmatic deviance of autistic language is a good example: The autistic person is not interested in communicating her inner world to the others; language is not a means of communication which serves mutual understanding, a cooperative process whose aim is interlacing one's own world with that of others. The autistic person's use of language is much like a soliloquy, the monologue of the solitary thinker more focused on ex-pression—the outward portrayal of immanent contents of consciousness—than on dialogue—the exchange of meanings between speaker and listener. Moreover, each meaning is presented in its manifold profiles or adumbrations and the task of selecting the context-relevant meaning is left to the listener.The pragmatic weakening of the autistic person, according to Minkowski, is not simply a social or occupational dysfunction (APA 1994), that is, a renunciation or refusal to act according to social expectations and standards. It involves the loss of vital contact with reality. The meaning Minkowski attributes to the term "vital" is essential for understanding his philosophical approach to defining the schizophrenic condition. Minkowski assumes that contact with reality is vital when it is established through action (and language... (shrink)

One of the central debates within contemporary Anglo-American political philosophy concerns how to formulate an egalitarian theory of distributive justice which gives coherent expression to egalitarian convictions and withstands the most powerful anti-egalitarian objections. This book brings together many of the key contributions to that debate by some of the world’s leading political philosophers: Richard Arneson, G.A. Cohen, Ronald Dworkin, Thomas Nagel, Derek Parfit, John Rawls, T.M. Scanlon, and Larry Temkin.

All of us have personal ideals. We are committed to being good (enough) friends, parents, neighbors, teachers, citizens, human beings, and more. In this paper, I examine the thick and thin aspects of these ideals: (i) their substance (to internalize an ideal is to endorse a particular way of being) and (ii) their accountability to reason (to internalize an ideal is to assume that this is really a good way to be). In considering how these two aspects interact in the (...) ideal of rational agency, I address two philosophical debates that are generally conducted in isolation of each other: (i) debates over the anti-ideal of normative “fetishism” and (ii) debates over whether acting for a reason is acting “under the guise of the good.” In the final two sections of the paper, I further explore the relations among the thick and the thin. I note the role that coherence constraints play in the process whereby our ideals gain determinacy. At the same time, I argue, our ideals constrain the possibility and desirability of coherence. This has implications for a third debate: the debate over the possibility of moral dilemmas. (shrink)

The hypothesis that there are connections between the „visibility of the ideal of truth” and the quality of scientific knowledge, is defended in this article. Deep and important scientific results are associated with „truth as manifestatio” and - on the other hand - trivial, inessential discoveries are associated with the coherence theory of truth.

Orthodox Bayesianism is a highly idealized theory of how we ought to live our epistemic lives. One of the most widely discussed idealizations is that of logical omniscience: the assumption that an agent’s degrees of belief must be probabilistically coherent to be rational. It is widely agreed that this assumption is problematic if we want to reason about bounded rationality, logical learning, or other aspects of non-ideal epistemic agency. Yet, we still lack a satisfying way to avoid logical omniscience (...) within a Bayesian framework. Some proposals merely replace logical omniscience with a different logical idealization; others sacrifice all traits of logical competence on the altar of logical non-omniscience. We think a better strategy is available: by enriching the Bayesian framework with tools that allow us to capture what agents can and cannot infer given their limited cognitive resources, we can avoid logical omniscience while retaining the idea that rational degrees of belief are in an important way constrained by the laws of probability. In this paper, we offer a formal implementation of this strategy, show how the resulting framework solves the problem of logical omniscience, and compare it to orthodox Bayesianism as we know it. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Idealizing Hume Alan Hausman and David Hausman Hume's explanation of our belief in the continuing existence of unperceived bodies is notoriously elusive.1 Stroud, for example, despairs that it is difficult to see how Hume's elaborate discussion of the constancy and coherence of perceptions explains the origin of the idea of continuing existence, let alone our belief that there are continually existing things.2 Yet Stroud, careful as he is, does (...) not spot the key to the problem. It is not merely that constancy and coherence, the mainstays ofHume's four-part system, are obscure; rather, there is, we shall argue, a hidden assumption in the discussion which necessitates the construction of the system that embodies that obscurity. This hidden assumption is Hume's implicit idealism. That idealism,we shall show,fashionstheentirediscussionin"Ofscepticism with regard to the senses," as well as key passages in his discussion of the derivation of the idea of the self. Its main influence is on Hume's claims concerning the place of causal reasoning in forming our belief in continued existence. Once that influence is understood, Hume's theory ofcausation can itselfbe seen in a new light. Early in the Treatise, it does not seem as ifthere will be a problem in explaining beliefin the continuing existence ofindependent, thatis, unperceived, bodies. We readily suppose an object may continue individually the same, tho' severaltimesabsentfrom andpresenttothe senses; andascribe to itOn identity, notwithstanding the interruption of the perception, whenever we conclude, that if we had kept our eye or hand constantly upon it, it wou'd have convey^ an invariable and uninterrupted perception. But this conclusion beyond the impressions ofour senses can be founded only on the connexion ofcause and effect; nor can we otherwise have any security, that the object is not chang"d upon us, however much the new object may resemble that which was formerly present to the senses. Whenever we discover such a perfect resemblance, we consider, whether it be common in that species of objects; whether possibly or probably any cause cou'd operate in producing the change and resemblance; and according as we determine concerning these causes and effects, we form our judgment concerning the identity of the object. Volume XVIII Number 2 209 ALAN HAUSMAN AND DAVID HAUSMAN Here then it appears, that ofthose three relations, which depend not upon the mere ideas, the only one, that can be trac'd beyond our senses, and informs us of existences and objects, which we do not see or feel, is causation. (T 74) What is Hume committing himself to here? It certainly seems to be that,ifthereiscausal reasoninggoingonviathe principle ofassociation ofcausation in the cases he cites, itis done upon the observation ofthe constant conjunctions of physical objects and events. Furthermore, if we considercausation as aphilosophical relation, wehave here genuine constant conjunctions which would justify the belief that physical objects exist unperceived.3 Granted that sometimes we associate causally on the basis of*bad' constant conjunctions, there is no prima facie reason to think that this case is one of them. Given these implications, the knowledgeable reader of Hume must be taken somewhat aback; this does not sound like the arch sceptic of all time talking. Yet there are no qualifying passages around the onejust cited. Hume now embarks on his long analysis ofthe causal relation. He then turns, in the section "Ofscepticism with regard to the senses," to a detailed explanation of our belief in the continuing existence of unperceived bodies. He uses as one illustration a fire that one observes, after leaving one's chamber then returning, to have changed in the interim. Since we are accustomed in other instances to seeing the fire burn down, we here reason from what he calls the coherence of the change to the beliefthat the fire existed when we were not in the room. We have in the past observed five log fires burn down to four log fires and then to three log fires. We light a five log fire, leave the room, and return to a three log fire. Using coherence as our guide, we reason that there was a four log fire in the interim. What sort of reasoning... (shrink)

This article reports on research that examines newly qualified UK nurses’ experiences of implementing their ideals and values in contemporary nursing practice. Findings are presented from questionnaire and interview data from a longitudinal interpretive study of nurses’ trajectories over time. On qualification nurses emerged with a coherent and strong set of espoused ideals around delivering high quality, patient‐centred, holistic and evidence‐based care. These were consistent with the current UK nursing mandate and had been transmitted and reinforced throughout their ‘prequalification’ (...) programmes. The existence of professional and organisational constraints influenced their ability to implement these ideals and values once in practice. Data analysis revealed that within 2 years in practice the newly qualified nurses could be categorised as sustained idealists, compromised idealists, or crushed idealists. The majority experienced frustration and some level of ‘burnout’ as a consequence of their ideals and values being thwarted. This led to disillusionment, ‘job‐hopping’ and, in some cases, a decision to leave the profession. These data are explored and discussed to inform the question of whether the current nursing mandate is sustainable. (shrink)

... View (i) The Thesis of Essential Contestedness The view that freedom and other ideals such as justice are essentially contested is important, ...

Formally inclined epistemologists often theorize about ideally rational agents—agents who exemplify rational ideals, such as probabilistic coherence, that human beings could never fully realize. This approach can be defended against the well-known worry that abstracting from human cognitive imperfections deprives the approach of interest. But a different worry arises when we ask what an ideal agent should believe about her own cognitive perfection (even an agent who is in fact cognitively perfect might, it would seem, be uncertain of this (...) fact). Consideration of this question reveals an interesting feature of the structure of our epistemic ideals: for agents with limited information, our epistemic ideals turn out to conflict with one another. This suggests that we must revise the way we see ideal agents in epistemic theorizing. (shrink)

This paper deals with the questions of whether the law should be coherent and what this coherence would amount to. In this connection so‐called “integrated coherentism” is introduced. According to integrated coherentism, an acceptance set is coherent if and only if it contains everything that should rationally be accepted according to what else one accepts and does not contain anything that should rationally be rejected according to what else one accepts. Such an acceptance set is ideally a (...) theory of everything, including amongst others standards for rational aceptance. On the assumption that the law, as a social phenomenon, is what the best theory about the law says it is, the law must be coherent, because the best theory of the law is part of an integratedly coherent theory of everything. This view is compatible with Raz's view that the law stems from different sources that need not be coherent in the sense that they consistently elaborate the same underlying principles or policies. Raz's view is not a consequence of integrated coherentism, however. (shrink)

One of the deepest and longest-lasting debates in ethics concerns a version of the Euthyphro question: are choiceworthy things choiceworthy because agents have certain attitudes toward them or are they choiceworthy independent of any agents’ attitudes? Reasons internalists, such as Bernard Williams, Michael Smith, Mark Schroeder, Sharon Street, Kate Manne, Julia Markovits, and David Sobel answer in the first way. They think that all of an agent’s normative reasons for action are grounded in facts about that agent’s pro-attitudes (e.g., her (...) desires, valuing states, normative judgments). According to the most popular brand of internalism, idealizing internalism, an agent’s reasons are grounded, not in her actual pro-attitudes, but rather in what her pro-attitudes would be in suitably idealized conditions. Idealizing internalists presuppose that, for any agent with an irrational set of attitudes, there is one uniquely rational set that that agent would have if she were to undergo the relevant idealizing process. I argue that this assumption is false and that it raises two puzzles for idealizing internalism: one about the existence of practical reasons and another about their normative weight. I argue that idealizing internalists have an adequate solution to the first puzzle but not the second. Indeed, when they try to solve the second puzzle, they confront a dilemma. This second puzzle and the associated dilemma thus constitutes a powerful, but so far unnoticed, difficulty for idealizing internalism. (shrink)

Foraging for coherence is a pragmatist philosophy of the brain. It is a philosophy anchored to objects and instrumental in understanding the brain. Our age is dominated by neuroscience. A critical common sense underlies inquiry including that of neuroscience. Thus a pragmatist orientation to neuroscience is about foraging for coherence; not overselling neuroscience. Foraging for coherence is the search for adaptation – diverse epistemic orientation tied ideally to learning about oneself, one’s nature, and one’s history in the context of (...) learning about the brain. Neuroscience is about us: Our desires, habits, styles of reason, human vulnerability, and abuse. The language of the neuron, or the gene, or the systems does not replace the discussion about us as the person, in the social and historical context. (shrink)

A number of formal epistemologists have argued that perfect rationality requires probabilistic coherence, a requirement that they often claim applies only to ideal agents. However, in “Rationality as an Absolute Concept,” Roy Sorensen contends that ‘rational’ is an absolute term. Just as Peter Unger argued that being flat requires that a surface be completely free of bumps and blemishes, Sorensen claims that being rational requires being perfectly rational. When we combine these two views, though, they lead to counterintuitive results. If (...) being rational requires being perfectly rational, and only the probabilistically coherent are perfectly rational, then this indicts all ordinary agents as irrational. In this paper, I will attempt to resolve this conflict by arguing that Sorensen is only partly correct. One important sense of ‘rational’, the sanctioning sense of ‘rational’, is an absolute term, but another important sense of ‘rational’, the sense in which someone can have rational capacities, is not. I will, then, show that this distinction has important consequences for theorizing about ideal rationality, developing an account of the relationship between ordinary and ideal rationality. Because the sanctioning sense of ‘rational’ is absolute, it is rationally required to adopt the most rational attitude available, but which attitude is most rational can change depending on whether we are dealing with ideal agents or people more like ourselves. (shrink)

There is some audacity in adding to the formidable list of articles on Pythian 2, which raise the questions of the structure or thematic coherence of the ode, of its specific occasion and of its relation to Pindar's biography. In this paper my aim is the circumscribed one of showing how a correct analysis of the final section of the poem can lead us to a better understanding of the nature of Pindar's poetry, and of the way in which he (...) adapts his laudatory stance to the circumstances and status of the addressee. (shrink)

There is some audacity in adding to the formidable list of articles onPythian2, which raise the questions of the structure or thematic coherence of the ode, of its specific occasion and of its relation to Pindar's biography. In this paper my aim is the circumscribed one of showing how a correct analysis of the final section of the poem can lead us to a better understanding of the nature of Pindar's poetry, and of the way in which he adapts his (...) laudatory stance to the circumstances and status of the addressee. (shrink)

Professor Konvitz’s introduction to Emerson has not been recorded here, and this lecture appears incomplete. For Emerson, Professor Konvitz asserts, man’s mind is prior to the natural world and that world is as man perceives it. Nature, Emerson tells us, appears chaotic until the human mind begins to classify it, to understand its laws, and to provide coherence. As man understands and experience expands, the world expands for him.

When should we judge that a person is leading or has led a happy life? By what standard? What legitimate criticism can be brought to bear on individual ideals? ;I argue that we have three conceptions of longterm happiness: the contentment conception , the affirmation conception , and the justified affirmation conception . The relation between them is one of inclusion. All three have been proposed as ideals: as candidates for . Evaluative happiness is a comprehensive good, i.e., sufficient for (...) realizing the good life. ;The happy life is one in which a person is disposed to affirm his or her life justifiaby. So the best standard of justification, consistent with our concept of a person and affirmation, will provide the best account of evaluative happiness. ;To affirm one's life is to judge that it is good: that one's important desires are satisfied and successful , and to be satisfied as a consequence. The capacity for affirmation is necessary for personhood, i.e., every person holds some individual ideal. ;Contentment is possible without affirmation. So the contentment conception is inadequate as a conception of evaluative happiness. ;Coherence is a minimal requirement for any adequate standard of justification. Affirmation is consistent with incoherence. So the affirmation conception is not defensible. ;Rationality is necessary for realizing the good life. The subjectivist standard of justification is too strong and/or too weak . Subjectivism is thus discredited. ;I argue for an account of happiness as rational affirmation. This standard is neither subjective nor objective . There are some things one has reason to value if one values anything: the goods of rational affirmation. Every person holds some individual ideal. So every person has reason to value the goods of rational affirmation. ;'Radical objectivism' is incoherent: there could be no good objective standard of justification. What is important is what is important to persons. (shrink)

:A qualified pluralism is defended that recognizes value in a variety of forms of political theory and resists arguments that purport to show that one particular approach should occupy a privileged position. Against realists, it is argued that abstract analyses of political values that bracket a wide range of facts about people and their circumstances can be both coherent and important, whereas against those who think “ideal theory” or the identification of ultimate principles should come first, it is argued (...) that the case for always giving priority to either one of these is weak. (shrink)

One reason for the recent attention to conceivability claims is to be found in the extended use of conceivability in philosophy of mind, and then especially in connection with zombie thought experiments. The idea is that zombies are conceivable; beings that look like us and behave like us in all ways, but for which “all is dark inside;” that is, for a zombie, there is no “what it is like.” There is no “what it is like” to be a zombie, (...) there is no “what it is like” for a zombie to feel pain, there is no “what it is like” for a zombie to taste, or feel, or smell something. They are creatures without consciousness. I am skeptical about the conceivability of zombies. That is not to say that I believe that there is some inherent contradiction to be found in the idea of zombies. Instead, I do not think that I am justified in believing that zombies are conceivable. The focus on justification is not common in the literature on conceivability, or for that matter in the literature on the possibility of zombies. Instead, the focus tends to be on trying to find out whether or not the notion of a zombie is contradictory. It is widely accepted in the literature on conceivability that the absence of a contradiction when conceiving of X is both necessary and sufficient for X to be conceivable. That might be true of ideal conceivability, but as I will argue below, ideal conceivability is not relevant to our (human) pursuit of knowledge and understanding. Further, as I will argue, once we focus on non-ideal conceivability the notion of justification, and degrees of justification comes into play. (shrink)

Steve Biko is one of the most important liberation activists of his time. Yet, his theoretical contribution is not well understood or appreciated. This article reconstructs Biko’s political ideas and introduces a new integrated reading and interpretation of his writings, speeches, and recorded interviews. It argues that Biko’s Black consciousness ideal should not only be read as engaging an activist movement or programme but, also, as encompassing an original theoretical framework grounded in a communalist ethos of Biko’s own conceptual development. (...) It argues that Biko’s Black consciousness ideal sought to relate racialised oppression to a historically centred communalist solution framed by two interlocking structural elements—rightful power and free community. The article argues that only by a theoretical and normative consideration of these elements, on Biko’s own conceptual terms, do we get a coherent understanding of Biko’s distinctive view of free postcolonial society. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Creating Life: The Aesthetic Utopia of Russian ModernismJohn GoodliffeCreating Life: The Aesthetic Utopia of Russian Modernism, edited by Irina Paperno and Joan Delaney Grossman; x & 288 pp. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994, $39.95.In describing the history of a country’s literature, one may well be tempted to divide it into separate compartments and so lose sight of the continuity which is, in the final analysis, more worthy of (...) attention. Historians of Russian literature have often succumbed to this temptation and it became almost commonplace to read that in Russia the Realism of the nineteenth century gave way to the Symbolism which began in the twentieth; that Symbolism gave way to Futurism; and that in due course all the earlier “-isms” were swept aside by the Socialist Realism of the Soviet period. For Marxist-oriented Soviet [End Page 371] historians such preoccupation with compartmentalization was obsessive. This makes more than welcome a series of essays which is at pains to emphasize the essential connections and kinship between these various “-isms.”Four of the seven essays are intended to demonstrate how the Symbolists, while ostensibly breaking with the earlier tradition of positivism (the idea that art’s essential purpose is to help build a better world), were, in a number of important respects, continuing and even reinforcing what they claimed to despise. Thus, regarding art and life as indissolubly linked, they attempted to turn life into art and art into life. Their endeavors frequently led them into behavior that now appears “eccentric, at times even ridiculous” (p. 166). Olga Matich describes how Blok, Bely, Dmitry Merezhkovsky, and Zinaida Gippius attempted to model their sexual relationships on the pattern of the “erotic utopia” described by Vladimir Solov’ev in his seminal The Meaning of Love (1892–94). Joan Delaney Grossman discusses Nina Petrovskaia’s relationships with Bely and Valery Briusov. Michael Wachtel shows how Viacheslav Ivanov attempted to overcome his grief at the death of his first wife by using his creative powers to make contact with her “beyond the grave.”Irene Masing-Delic traces the Pygmalion myth through Pushkin, Baratynsky, Turgenev, and Chernyshevsky to the Symbolists who were especially attracted by a myth which showed how an artist could create life and even conquer death. In “Andrei Bely and the Argonauts’ mythmaking,” Alexander Lavrov considers the role of the “Argonaut” circle in establishing a Russian Symbolist culture in the first years of the twentieth century. The Argonauts’ credo was “life-creation” rather than “art-creation,” and they claimed to make no distinction between “talent for living” and “talent for writing.” Lavrov argues that the failure of the relationship between Bely and Nina Petrovskaia marked the disintegration of “Argonautism” and the culture they sought to create. It is left to Irina Gutkin in the concluding essay to guide us through the grotesqueries of Futurism into the apparently diametrically opposed, sanitized world of Socialist Realism, by way of Constructivism, Marxism, and Meyerholdian bio-mechanics, leaving us in little doubt that, appearances to the contrary, each of these movements was concerned with turning art into life and using it to create a better world. So ultimately, as she neatly sums up the thesis of the whole collection, “The aesthetic utopian ideal of art creating life, which took shape at the beginning of the twentieth century, was fused with the utilitarian tradition of the 1860s” (p. 181).I have deliberately reserved for the end comment on Irina Paperno’s introduction and opening article (“The Meaning of Art: Symbolist Theories”) in order to emphasize the manifest contribution she and her co-editor, Joan Delaney Grossman, have made to ensuring the coherence of this admirable collection. Professor Paperno’s clear and concise coverage of her topics makes it evident that she was determined that the book should not turn into the kind of bits-and-pieces patchwork that too many publications of this sort tend to [End Page 372] become without a firm editorial hand at the helm. Her earlier book on Chernyshevsky (Chernyshevsky and the Age of Realism, 1988) and Irene Masing-Delic’s Abolishing Death; a Salvation Myth of Russian Twentieth-Century Literature (1992), form the first two parts of... (shrink)

In Ideal Code, Real World, Brad Hooker attempts to breathe new life into rule-consequentialism, a view which, particularly in its utilitarian guise, was intensively explored in the 1950s and 1960s. But as Hooker points out, as the problems with the view compounded, it became generally thought of as a ‘tried and untrue’ approach to moral theory. It is commonly believed for instance that any coherent version of R-C, when fully fleshed out, will be extensionally equivalent to its act-consequentialist cousin, (...) thus not a distinctive view. Again, views featuring ideal codes are often criticized for being in some sense too ideal because, for example, they involve unrealistic assumptions about human cognition and motivation. Hooker’s book, based partly on some of his published articles, carefully develops a non-utilitarian version of R-C that responds to these and other objections thus making it a serious contender among normative moral theories now on offer. (shrink)

Nel Noddings is arguably one of the premier philosophers of moral education in the English‐speaking world today. Although she is outside the mainstream theory, research, and practice traditions of cognitive‐developmentalism (the Kohlberg legacy) and of character education (which is in public ascendancy), her body of work is unrivalled for originality of insight, comprehensiveness and coherence. Whilst Carol Gilligan's In a different voice (1982) introduced the ethic of caring into academic and public discourse, it is Noddings ‘who has done most to (...) outline a specific feminist position on moral education’ (McClellan, 1999, p. 104), and whose influence extends to educational practice. This essay explicates Noddings's vision in sufficient depth to make the foregoing claims credible. Thematic focus is given to her attention to the ethical self or ethical ideal. The paper also examines Noddings's perspective on character education and the need to incorporate a morality of evil into any serious educational philosophy or practice. It is less a critical appraisal of that vision and perspective than an invitation to others to more fully engage with Noddings's writings.1. (shrink)

Since the 1990s, there has been a growing tendency to interpret Diderot as a radical who first put into question absolutism in the Encyclopédie and then became a fierce opponent of any kind of ‘despotism’, even the ‘enlightened’ one, and a fervent partisan of democratic revolutions in the 1770s. It is argued here that the narrative that cuts Diderot’s life into different phases obscures continuities in his political thought, and misrepresents partly the political vision he had in the 1770s. Diderot’s (...) political thought may have been more coherent than usually acknowledged, and this coherence is to be found in his ideal of a paternalistic monarchy taking advice from its subjects and respecting their rights, that is the constitution of the realm. This idea is not to be mixed up with a democratic programme of government by the people, nor with the endorsement of political change via a revolution. Rather, when towards the end of his life Diderot lost hope that the constitutional order of the French monarchy would be respected, he both feared civil war and hoped that these tumults might bring about the regeneration of the French monarchy. This vision derived from a classical cyclic view of history. (shrink)

During the 1840s and the 1850s botanist Joseph Hooker developed distinct notions about the proper characteristics of a professional man of science. While he never articulated these ideas publicly as a coherent agenda, he did share his opinions openly in letters to family and colleagues; this private communication gives essential insight into his and his X-Club colleagues' public activities. The core aspiration of Hooker's professionalization was to consolidate men of science into a dutiful and centralized community dedicated to national (...) well-being. The nation in turn owed the scientific community for its ministration. When the government bestowed funds and status on men of science it was rewarding science -- not purchasing it. His proposed reforms were piecemeal, immediate, and above all practical. He harbored no taste for vast millenarian transformation, and rested his conception of scientific professionalism upon a respectable High Victorian foundation of patronage and pillars of duty, reciprocity, intimacy, and inequality. The process of professionalization he envisioned was as much shrewd compromise between existing interests as a vindication of principle. His power and prestige from the mid-1850s onward gave him considerable ability to carry out his reform program, although his general success did occasion some undesired consequences for the status of natural-history pursuits. (shrink)

For a discourse on the spectacle of the transcendental world to be received in its comprehensible and coherent totality, its needs to get rid of the arbitrariness of the dominion of tremulous shapes of the sensitive, which is merely the sphere of opinions. This is what Plato suggests, following the course of reflection of the first thinkers: in order to compensate the deficiencies that entail elision of reality and to transform language into a vehicle of authentic intellection of the (...) fundamental concepts of philosophical thinking, he sets it into the center of a rigorous speculation. In the same way as his predecessors Heraclitus and Parmenides, the philosopher reveals logofilia at exerting himself to build a new discursive structure, different from that of common man and thereby stirring, in the field of philosophy, a revolution that had become indispensable: he elaborates a founding model - the beginning of a permanent order as the prelude to the edification of a formal and abstract language that refers to entities that the majority of humans cannot visualize by themselves. Only through it will the universal truth of the divine Forms be able to shine, which, at lending their names to the endless series of sensible particulars, clarifies them and confers them signification. Through the theories he develops based on them and exposes in the Dialogues,the philosopher aims at inducing the reader to prepare himself to methodically operate the conversion of his soul to the level of these super-sensitive ideal beings and grasp, thus, the reality that founds and turns everything cognizable.Para que um discurso sobre o espetáculo do mundo transcendente seja acolhido como totalidade inteligível e coerente, urge desvencilhar-se da arbitrariedade do domínio de trêmulos contornos do sensível, esfera de opiniões apenas. É o que propõe Platão, na esteira das reflexões dos primeiros pensadores: para suprir deficiências que causam a elisão da realidade e transformar a linguagem num veículo de intelecção autêntica dos conceitos essenciais de um pensar filosófico, ele a coloca no centro de uma especulação rigorosa. Tal como seus antecessores Heráclito e Parmênides, Platão revela logofilia ao empenhar-se na construção de uma nova estrutura discursiva, diferente daquela do homem comum, desencadeando no campo da Filosofia uma revolução que se tornara indispensável: elabora um modelo fundador - princípio de uma ordem permanente propedêutica à construção de uma linguagem formal e abstrata - referente a entes que os homens, na maioria, por si mesmos não conseguem visualizar. Somente nela poderá reverberar a verdade universal das Formas que, ao emprestarem seus nomes à infindável série dos particulares sensíveis, os clarifica e lhes confere significação. Com as teorias que a partir das Formas desenvolve e expõe nos Diálogos, o filósofo visa induzir o leitor a preparar-se para operar, metodicamente, a conversão de sua alma ao plano desses seres ideais, supra-sensíveis, e apreender, assim, a realidade que tudo fundamenta e torna cognoscível. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to consider Hegel's unity, which is "the Unity of Identity and Difference" Or to examine and explain the "unity of seemingly contradictory features in a single coherent whole" in the light of the main problem of Hegel's philosophy, that is, the overcoming of divisions or dualities, as the solution of her philosophy. Unity (Einheit) is an important ideal, goal and end for Hegel's philosophical system. Hence, in his entire philosophical system and in different (...) periods of his intellectual life, the traces of the search for unity are always obvious, from the beautiful artistic unity in Greece to his desired unity, which is a rational, speculative, philosophical, absolute and Mediated unity. For him, the whole of philosophy is nothing but the study of the definition of unity and its realization in society. A unity that, instead of eliminating or absorbing another, tries to preserve and eliminate pluralities and differences by accepting and recognizing another in a single coherent whole. A unity in which differences and dualities do not disappear but are preserved as necessary and inevitable moments. Unity that is not the result of direct intuition but the product and result of passing through different stages and an intersubjective matter. For Hegel, it is not atomism and excessive individualism in the modern world that lead to rupture, not mere mystical and abstract unions that wipe out all differences, but the unity of the whole in which All distinctions are preserved. (shrink)

In the methodology of theory construction, the concept of "intuitions" is commonly assigned a central role. This is especially true of philosophical and social scientific theories or rational human agency. An equally important trait of such accounts is the theorist's employment of "ideal models" or rational agency. It is frequently supposed that the concept of intuitions and the concept of ideal models link in such a way as to give rise to a coherent and load-bearing notion of "objective normativity." (...) This paper shows, with reference to a wide range of contemporary theories, that the employment of ideal models is otiose, and that the supposedly related concept of objective normativity is groundless. (shrink)

It is not uncommon for contemporary moral philosophers to appeal, in support or in criticism of one moral theory or another, to supposed features of or facts about persons. Rawls, for example, maintains that ‘utilitarianism does not take seriously the distinction between persons,’ and that since ‘the correct regulative principle for anything depends on the nature of that thing,’ we should not expect utilitarianism to be the correct regulative scheme for human beings. Nozick, in a similar spirit, suggests that the (...) deontological restrictions he calls ‘side constraints’ are desirable components of a moral conception because, without them, a moral scheme is unable to ‘sufficiently respect and take account of the fact that … [each individual] is a separate person,’ unable to take account of the fact that, with respect to each individual, ‘his is the only life he has.’ And Williams, to cite still another example, suggests that utilitarianism is a defective moral theory because ‘it cannot coherently describe the relations between a man's projects and his actions.'. (shrink)

RESUMO:A hipótese desenvolvida nos leva a confrontar três textos do corpusrousseauísta: o Segundo Discurso, Júlia ou A Nova Heloísa e o extrato do Primeiro Diálogo, em que há a ficção do mundo ideal, textos que, apesar do seu estatuto genérico diferente, estão em coerência e convergência teórica. Desejamos evidenciar um aspecto da unidade problemática do pensamento de Rousseau concernente à abordagem crítica da sociedade de seus contemporâneos e sua concepção do papel das Letras e dos Espetáculos. A preocupação do filósofo (...) é de refundar a natureza humana, a fim de lançar as bases de uma nova organização social. Nessa empreitada, a ficção desempenha um papel crucial, o prefácio do Segundo Discurso o comprova: para bem conhecer o homem atual, deve-se supor o que ele não é mais. O homem do estado de natureza, ser de ficção, cujas paixões são retas e naturais, é o modelo teórico que reativa a sociedade dos seres ideais de Júlia. Dessa forma, a ficção é chamada a desempenhar um papel referencial fundamental para o pensamento social e político de Rousseau, aparecendo como um poderoso meio de ação sobre o público. O romance pode reeducar os povos corrompidos, pois, assim como o teatro, como denuncia a Carta a d’Alembert, possui os meios para perverter uma sociedade tida como virtuosa. ABSTRACT:The hypothesis that we will develop leads us to confront three texts of Rousseau’s corpus: the Second Discourse, Julie, and the extract of the First Dialogue that speaks of the pedagogical fiction of the ideal world. These three texts, despite their different types, are theoretically coherent and convergent. We intend to highlight an aspect of the problematic unity of Rousseau’s thought, an aspect which concerns his contemporaries’ critical approach to society and Rousseau’s conception of the role of letters and spectacles. Rousseau’s concern is to refound human nature in order to lay the basis of a new social organization. In this effort, fiction plays a decisive role, as the preface to the Second Discourse affirms: in order to know modern man, we must consider a hypothesis about what he no longer is. Man in the state of nature, a fictional being whose passions are right and natural, is the theoretical model that reactivates the society of ideal beings in Julie. For Rousseau, fiction is called upon to play a fundamental referential role for social and political thought, and it appears as a powerful means of action on the public. The novel can reeducate depraved peoples, because, like the theater, it also has the means to pervert a so-called virtuous society. (shrink)