Conspiracy theories are a popular topic of conversation in everyday life but are often frowned upon in academic discussions. Looking at the recent spate of philosophical interest in conspiracy theories, The Philosophy of Conspiracy Theories looks at whether the assumption that belief in conspiracy theories is typically irrational is well founded.

What methodology should philosophers follow? Should they rely on methods that can be conducted from the armchair? Or should they leave the armchair and turn to the methods of the natural sciences, such as experiments in the laboratory? Or is this opposition itself a false one? Arguments about philosophical methodology are raging in the wake of a number of often conflicting currents, such as the growth of experimental philosophy, the resurgence of interest in metaphysical questions, and the use of formal (...) methods. This outstanding collection of specially-commissioned chapters by leading international philosophers discusses these questions and many more. It provides a comprehensive survey of philosophical methodology in the most important philosophical subjects: metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, phenomenology, philosophy of science, ethics, and aesthetics. A key feature of the collection is that philosophers discuss and evaluate contrasting approaches in each subject, offering a superb overview of the variety of methodological approaches - both naturalistic and non-naturalistic - in each of these areas. They examine important topics at the heart of methodological argument, including the role of intuitions and conceptual analysis, thought experiments, introspection, and the place that results from the natural sciences should have in philosophical theorizing. The collection begins with a fascinating exchange about philosophical naturalism between Timothy Williamson and Alexander Rosenberg, and also includes contributions from the following philosophers: Lynne Rudder Baker, Matt Bedke, Greg Currie, Michael Devitt, Matthew C. Haug, Jenann Ismael, Hilary Kornblith, Neil Levy, E.J. Lowe, Kirk Ludwig, Marie McGinn, David Papineau, Matthew Ratcliffe, Georges Rey, Jeffrey W. Roland, Barry C. Smith, Amie L. Thomasson, Valerie Tiberius, Jessica Wilson, and David W. Smith. (shrink)

On the assumption that genuinely normative demands concern things connected in some way to our agency, i.e. what we exercise in doing things with or for reasons, epistemologists face an important question: are there genuine epistemic norms governing belief, and if so where in the vicinity of belief are we to find the requisite cognitive agency? Extant accounts of cognitive agency tend to focus on belief itself or the event of belief-formation to answer this question, to the exclusion of the (...) activity of maintaining a system of beliefs. This paper argues that a full account of epistemic normativity will need to make sense of this activity as a core locus of cognitive agency. This idea is used to motivate the conclusion that one important and often overlooked kind of epistemic norms is the kind of norms governing the various cognitive activities by which we check, sustain, and adjust our belief systems. (shrink)

Whether or not we would be happy to do without sounds, the idea that our expe- rience of sounds is of things which are distinct from the world of material objects can seem compelling. All you have to do to confirm it is close your eyes and reflect on the character of your auditory experience.

It is a piece of philosophical common sense that belief and knowledge are states. Some epistemologists reject this claim in hope of answering certain difficult questions about the normative evaluation of belief. I shall argue, however, that this move offends not only against philosophical commonsense but also against ordinary common sense, at least as far as this is manifested in the semantic content of the words we use to talk about belief and knowledge. I think it is relatively easily to (...) show with some linguistic tests that ordinary belief and knowledge attributions should be classified aspectually as state descriptions. Hence, the move some epistemologists to deny that belief and knowledge are states threatens to simply change the topic rather than open up answers to difficult questions in epistemology. I do not know fully how to answer the relevant questions about the normative evaluation of belief, but I pursue this critical point here in service of a positive proposal about the general framework in which they should be answered. In brief, the general framework is one which recognizes an important place for what I call state-norms, beside the action-norms which are more familiar from normative theory. And it locates the epistemic norms that apply to beliefs and are relevant for knowledge on the state-norm side of this divide. This turns out to be not only consistent with but indeed to underwrites the philosophical and ordinary common sense that belief and knowledge are states. (shrink)

The analysis and defence of democracy on the grounds of its epistemic powers is now a well-established, if contentious, area of theoretical and empirical research. This article reconstructs a distinctive and systematic epistemic account of democracy from Dewey’s writings. Running like a thread through this account is a critical analysis of the distortion of hierarchy and class division on social knowledge, which Dewey believes democracy can counteract. The article goes on to argue that Dewey’s account has the resources to defuse (...) at least some important forms of the broader charges of instrumentalism and depoliticization that are directed at the epistemic project. The gloomy conviction of the stratified character of capitalist societies and the conflictual character of their politics shapes Dewey’s view of political agency, and this article outlines how this epistemic conception of democracy is deployed as a critical standard for judging and transforming existing political forms but also serves as a line of defence for democratic political forms against violent and authoritarian alternatives. (shrink)

There are ways that ethical intuitions might be, and the various possibilities have epistemic ramifications. This paper criticizes some extant accounts of what ethical intuitions are and how they justify, and it offers an alternative account. Roughly, an ethical intuition that p is a kind of seeming state constituted by a consideration whether p, attended by positive phenomenological qualities that count as evidence for p, and so a reason to believe that p. They are distinguished from other kinds of seemings, (...) such as those which are content driven (e.g., the sensory experience that a stick in water seems bent) and those which are competence driven (e.g., the intellectual seeming that XYZ is not water, or that one of DeMorgan’s laws is true). One important conclusion is this: when crafting a positive theory of justification ethical intuitionists have fewer resources than intuitionists in other domains, not because of the subject matter of ethical intuitions, but because of the their structure. A second conclusion is that the seemings featured in substantive ethical intuitions deliver relatively weak justification as compared to other seeming states. (shrink)

The hypothesis of extended cognition (HEC) claims that the cognitive processes that materially realise thinking are sometimes partially constituted by entities that are located external to an agent’s body in its local envi- ronment. We show how proponents of HEC need not claim that an agent must have a central nervous system, or physically instantiate processes organised in such a way as to play a causal role equivalent to that of the brain if that agent is to be capable of (...) cognition. Focusing on the case of spatial memory, we make our argument by taking a close look at the striking example of Physarum Polycephalum plasmodium (i.e., slime mould) which uses self- produced non-living extracellular slime trails to navigate its environment. We will argue that the use of exter- nalized spatial memory by basal organisms like Physarum is an example of extended cognition. Moreover, it is a possible evolutionary precursor to the use of internal spatial memory and recall in animals thus demonstrating how extended cognition may have emerged early in evolutionary history. (shrink)

I wish to examine a rather different way of thinking about permissibility, one according to which, roughly speaking, an agent acts impermissibly if and only if he acts for reasons insufficient to justify him in doing what he does. For reasons that will emerge in Section II, I call this the inferential account of permissibility. I shall not here try to prove that this account is superior to its rivals. My aims are more modest. I shall develop the inferential account, (...) exhibiting some of its attractions along the way, and then show that it is invulnerable to a number of influential objections to the very idea that an agent's reasons for acting could be directly relevant to whether he acts permissibly. If these objections have seemed decisive, it is because we have not considered the full range of possible accounts. The inferential account of permissibility is both plausible and attractive---it deserves to be taken seriously. (shrink)

This paper is a critical study of Quassim Cassam’s Self-Knowledge for Humans (Oxford University Press, 2014). Cassam claims that theorists who emphasize the “transparency” of questions about our own attitudes to questions about the wider world are committed to an excessively rationalistic conception of human thought. I dispute this, and make some clarificatory points about how to understand the relevant notion of “transparency”. I also argue that Cassam’s own “inferentialist” account of attitudinal self-knowledge entails an unacceptable alienation from our own (...) attitudes. In closing, I make some brief remarks on the value of understanding privileged self-knowledge, and how this topic is connected with more general questions about the nature of subjectivity. (shrink)

Philosophy & Social Criticism, Volume 48, Issue 4, Page 473-483, May 2022. In my recent book Freedom of Expression as Self-Restraint, I expound and defend the moral principle of freedom of expression. This article recounts a few of the main strands of the exposition in that book, and it touches upon the justification for the principle of freedom of expression. Supplementing the abstract ideas broached in the article are several illustrative examples that render the abstractions more accessible.

This article surveys recent work in pragmatism and political theory. In doing so, it shows both how recent work on pragmatism has secured the view that at its core is a set of arguments about the character of democracy – although the character of those arguments is open to debate and reimagination – and how pragmatist arguments have been reinterpreted and deployed to address contemporary concerns and approaches. This charts a terrain of live disagreements rather than settled opinion.

Drawing on social comparison theory, we investigate employees’ ethical and performance comparisons relative to a similar coworker and subsequent emotional and behavioral responses. We test our theoretically driven hypotheses across two studies. Study 1, a cross-sectional field study, reveals that employees who perceive they are more ethical than their coworkers experience negative emotions toward the comparison coworkers and those feelings are even stronger when the employees perceive they are lower performers than their coworkers. Results also reveal that negative emotions mediate (...) the indirect relationship between being more ethical than a coworker, but also being a lower performer than that coworker onto social undermining and ostracism. Study 2, a 2 × 2 between-subjects experimental design, provides further support for our moderated mediation model. Results reveal that participants experience negative emotions when they receive information that they are more ethical than a comparison participant. Negative emotions are amplified if the participant is told they were a lower performer than the comparison participant. Those participants indicate their desire to mistreat and ignore the comparison participant if given the opportunity. Thus, we find support for our hypotheses using a multi-method design. (shrink)

Notwithstanding an ongoing concern about the low representation of certain groups in higher education, there is reluctance on the part of politicians and policy makers to adopt positive discrimination as an appropriate means of widening participation. This article offers an account of the different objections to positive discrimination and, thereafter, clarifies and criticises the view that universities ought to select those applicants who are expected to be most successful as students. It distinguishes arguments from meritocracy, desert, respect, and productivity and (...) shows how these arguments are compatible with the use of positive discrimination in higher education. (shrink)

_Contemporary Debates in Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art_ features pairs of newly commissioned essays by some of the leading theorists working in the field today. Brings together fresh debates on eleven of the most controversial issues in aesthetics and the philosophy of art Topics addressed include the nature of beauty, aesthetic experience, artistic value, and the nature of our emotional responses to art. Each question is treated by a pair of opposing essays written by eminent scholars, and especially commissioned (...) for the volume. Lively debate format sharply defines the issues, and paves the way for further discussion. Will serve as an accessible introduction to the major topics in aesthetics, while also capturing the imagination of professional philosophers. (shrink)

From the early modern period, Western epistemologists have often been concerned with a rigorous notion of epistemic justification, epitomized in the work of Descartes: properly held beliefs require insulation from extreme skepticism. To the degree that veridical cognitive states may be indistinguishable from non-veridical states, apparently veridical states cannot enjoy high-grade positive epistemic status. Therefore, a good believer begins from what are taken to be neutral, subjective experiences and reasons outward—hopefully identifying the kinds of appearances that properly link up to (...) the world and those that do not. Good beliefs, beliefs that are justified (warranted, etc.), are those that a believer has .. (shrink)

Does expertise within a domain of knowledge predict accurate self-assessment of the ability to explain topics in that domain? We find that expertise increases confidence in the ability to explain a wide variety of phenomena. However, this confidence is unwarranted; after actually offering full explanations, people are surprised by the limitations in their understanding. For passive expertise, miscalibration is moderated by education; those with more education are accurate in their self-assessments. But when those with more education consider topics related to (...) their area of concentrated study, they also display an illusion of understanding. This “curse of expertise” is explained by a failure to recognize the amount of detailed information that had been forgotten. While expertise can sometimes lead to accurate self-knowledge, it can also create illusions of competence. (shrink)

Michael Ghiselin and David Hull’s individuality thesis is that biological species are individuals. Philosophers often treat the term “individual” as synonymous with “mereological sum” and characterize it in terms of mereology. It is easy to see how the biological project has been interpreted as a mereological one. This chapter argues that this is a mistake, that biological part/whole relations often violate the axioms of mereology. Conflating these projects confuses the central issues at stake in both, and makes the job of (...) evaluating either unnecessarily burdensome. Clarifying this helps identify the genuine metaphysical implications of the individuality thesis, which serves as an exemplar of scientifically informed metaphysics. (shrink)

Getting Emotional -- Constructing Discourse -- Telling and Remembering -- Inviting Emotional Tellings -- Eliciting Feelings -- (re)formulating Emotionality -- Managing Emotionality and Distress -- Being Negative -- Reflecting Back, Moving Forward.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 11.1 (2004) 35-41 [Access article in PDF] The Rationality of Psychosis and Understanding the Deluded Matthew R. Broome Campbell's important and influential paper (Campbell 2001) has framed the debate that Bayne and Pacherie (2004) most explicitly, and Klee (2004) and Georgaca (2004) more implicitly, engage in. Campbell has offered two broad ways of thinking about explanations of delusions—the empirical and the rational. He offers (...) some criticism of the former and an endorsement of the latter. Campbell uses examples from clinical psychopathology to illustrate his argument and Bayne and Pacherie in turn employ these. Campbell discusses the eponymously named delusions of Capgras and Cotard—the former a subtype of delusional misidentification and the latter a delusion whose content is colored predominantly with nihilistic and possibly hypochondriacal themes. Campbell, Bayne and Pacherie, and Klee discuss the empirical data in relation to such delusions and as an aid to discussing the empirical model more generally. It does seem a little unfortunate that these delusions, which are less than typical, become the focus of Campbell's paper, and Bayne and Pacherie's criticism of his work. Delusions are remarkably heterogeneous; this indeed may be part of the reason why there is so much difficulty in reaching a definition as Klee discusses, and occur in a wide variety of mental and neurological illnesses. The most common delusions are those of persecution and reference (World Health Organization [WHO] 1973) and typically occur in schizophrenia. By contrast, delusional misidentification occurs most commonly in patients with dementia, delirium, and focal cognitive impairment, but can occur in other functional psychoses such as an affective or schizophrenic psychosis. The most common form of delusional misidentification is not that of either the exotic Capgras or Fregoli syndromes but delusional misidentification for place; thus, although Bayne and Pacherie's arguments against Campbell may still hold, delusional misidentification tends to occur in the context of a patient believing that they are at home or on holiday rather than in hospital and may not necessarily involve close family members or other intimate relationships. Similarly, Cotard's syndrome tends to occur in the context of a severe depressive illness with mood-congruent psychotic symptoms, typically in an elderly individual. It does not have to have the content that the deluded is dead, but can include beliefs, for example, that the world no longer exists or that their internal organs are not present. Thus, a patient with either Capgras' or Cotard's syndrome is likely to differ from patients with delusions of persecution. They would [End Page 35] have different diagnoses, probably be older, and have a greater likelihood of structural abnormalities of the brain on imaging and consequent neuropsychological dysfunction. That is not to say that patients with schizophrenia have normal cerebral anatomy and neuropsychology, but rather that the Capgras' and Cotard's patients are likely to have neurological quality to their presentation that is clinically relevant, rather than what commonly the case in schizophrenia and the other functional psychoses, where the neurological abnormalities are only currently important at the level of academic research. Empirical Models of Delusion Formation Different delusions may not have that much in common, nor may the patients who believe in them. This in turn relates to the empirical paradigm that both Campbell and Bayne and Pacherie discuss. It is true that current research, and indeed the clinical practice of cognitive behavioral therapy for psychosis, is indebted to the work of Maher and it is within his legacy which we work. This, however, is not to say that we think his initial formulation was correct. Maher's (1988, 1992) work focused attempts in explaining delusions—both to support and refute his thesis that delusions are the consequence of normal cognitive mechanisms seeking to explain an anomalous sensory experience. Such a view initially led to work demonstrating delusions in the absence of anomalous perceptions, the presence of reasoning biases in the deluded population, and the possibility that abnormal sensory experience may be consequent upon biased cognitive processes (Garety and Freeman 1999). More recent work has demonstrated the prevalence of... (shrink)

Recently, Jonardan Ganeri reviewed the collaborative translation of the first chapter of Gaṅgeśa's Tattvacintāmaṇi by Stephen H. Phillips and N. S. Ramanuja Tatacharya (Ganeri 2007). The review is quite favorable, and we have no desire to dispute his kind words. Ganeri does, however, put forth an argument in opposition to a fundamental line of interpretation given by Phillips and Ramanuja Tatacharya about the nature of pramāṇa, knowledge sources, as understood by Gaṅgeśa and, for that matter, Nyāya tradition. This response is (...) meant to answer the argument and reassert an understanding of pramāṇa as factive, that is, as knowledge sources that are inerrant. We argue that this is the best reading of Gaṅgeśa himself .. (shrink)

Thirteen original essays by leading scholars explore aspects of Spinoza's ethical theory and, in doing so, deepen our understanding of it as the richly rewarding core of his system. They resolve interpretive difficulties, advance longstanding debates, and point the direction for future research.

In this paper, I argue that in touch, as in vision and audition, we can and often do perceive objects and properties even when we are not in direct or even apparent bodily contact with them. Unlike those senses, however, touch experiences require a special kind of mutually interactive connection between our sensory surfaces and the objects of our experience. I call this constraint the Connection Principle. This view has implications for the proper understanding of touch, and perceptual reference generally. (...) In particular, spelling out the implications of this principle yields a rich and compelling picture of the spatial character of touch. (shrink)

This article examines the relationship of pragmatism to the theory of deliberative democracy. It elaborates a dilemma in the latter theory, between its deliberative or epistemic and democratic or inclusive components, and distinguishes responses to this dilemma that are internal to the conception of deliberation employed from those that are external. The article goes on to identify two models of pragmatism and critically examines how well each one deals with the tension identified in deliberative democracy.

In this article, we focus on a particular kind of emotional impact of the pandemic, namely the phenomenology of the experience of moral injury in healthcare professionals. Drawing on Weber's reflections in his lecture Politics as a Vocation and data from the Experiences of Social Distancing during the COVID-19 Pandemic Survey, we analyse responses from healthcare professionals which show the experiences of burnout, sense of frustration and impotence, and how these affect clinicians’ emotional state. We argue that this may relate (...) to the ethical conflicts they experience when they are forced to make clinical decisions where there are no optimal outcomes, and how in turn that impacts on their own emotional state. We then further examine the notion of ‘burnout’ and the phenomenology of ‘moral injury’. Our argument is that these experiences of moral injury across a range of clinicians during the pandemic may be more prevalent and long-standing in psychiatry and mental health than in other areas of healthcare, where ethically difficult decisions and resource constraints are common outside times of crisis. Hence, in these clinical arenas, moral injury and the phenomenology of emotional changes may be independent of the pandemic. The insights gained during the pandemic may provide wider insights into the challenges of developing services and training the workforce to provide appropriate mental health care. (shrink)

The public’s trust in the technology sector is waning and, in response, technology companies and state governments have started to champion “tech ethics”. That is, they have pledged to design, develop, distribute, and employ new technologies in an ethical manner. In this paper, I observe that tech ethics is already subject to a widespread pathology in that technology companies, the primary executors of tech ethics, are incentivized to pursue it half-heartedly or even disingenuously. Next, I highlight two emerging strategies which (...) might be used to combat this problem, but argue that both are subject to practical limitations. In response, I suggest an additional way of augmenting the practice of tech ethics. This is to employ “trust audits,” a new form of public participation in the socio-technical environment. In the remainder of the paper, I offer a description of how trust audits work, what they might look like in practice, and how they can fit in alongside those other strategies for improving tech ethics. (shrink)

This book examines the ethics of virtual reality technologies. New forms of virtual reality are emerging in society, not just from low-cost gaming headsets, or augmented reality apps on phones, but from simulated “deep fake” images and videos on social media. This book subjects the new VR technological landscape to ethical scrutiny: assessing the benefits, risks and regulatory practices that shape it. Though often associated with gaming, education and therapy, VR can also be used for moral enhancement. Journalists, artists, philanthropic (...) and non-governmental organisations are using VR films, games and installations to stimulate user empathy to marginalised peoples through a combination of immersion, embodiment and persuasion. This book critically assesses the use of VR for empathy arousal and pro-social behaviour change, culminating in the development of a VR “ethical tool” – a device to facilitate reflective ethical judgement. Drawing upon the pragmatist philosophy of John Dewey, virtual reality is reshaped as “dramatic rehearsal”. This book explains how a combination of immersive environment-building, moral imagination, choice architecture and reflective engagement can stimulate a future-focused and empathic ethics for users of the technology. (shrink)

Is the cultural evolution of morality fairly contingent? Could cultural evolution have easily led humans to moral norms and judgments that are mostly false by our present lights? If so, does it matter philosophically? Yes, or so we argue. We empirically motivate the contingency of cultural evolution and show that it makes two major philosophical contributions. First, it shows that moral objectivists cannot explain the reliability of our moral judgments and thus strengthens moral debunking arguments. Second, it shows that the (...) reliability of our moral judgments is evidence for theism over metaphysical naturalism. (shrink)

As philosophers we should have as one of our aims to produce as much philosophical knowledge as possible. A lot of potential philosophical knowledge is lost because of the flaws of the peer review system, and so a lot of philosophical knowledge would be gained were the system improved. Accordingly, as authors we should write papers about how to fix peer review, and as editors we should accept such papers if they are good. This paper presents some familiar problems with (...) peer review, elaborates on and motivates the argument just given, and replies to some objections to it, making the case that fixing peer review is both a philosophical problem and one that admits of a solution. (shrink)

Many of the methods commonly used to research mathematical practice, such as analyses of historical episodes or individual cases, are particularly well-suited to generating causal hypotheses, but less well-suited to testing causal hypotheses. In this paper we reflect on the contribution that the so-called hypothetico-deductive method, with a particular focus on experimental studies, can make to our understanding of mathematical practice. By way of illustration, we report an experiment that investigated how mathematicians attribute aesthetic properties to mathematical proofs. We demonstrate (...) that perceptions of the aesthetic properties of mathematical proofs are, in some cases at least, subject to social influence. Specifically, we show that mathematicians’ aesthetic judgements tend to conform to the judgements made by others. Pedagogical implications are discussed. (shrink)

A categorial dualist, John Heil includes substance and property in his ontology. But in his case for dualism, there are pressures to drop substance or property and endorse monism, as well as pressures to include both. Rather than defend monism or dualism, I introduce a distinction. If a category is a kind of entities, then substance is the only category. If an accounting of categories is to include property, then property must enter not as a kind of entities but a (...) kind of aspects of reality. The distinction is worth deploying for two main reasons. First, it makes plain an important difference between substances and properties, which categorial dualism obscures. Second, the distinction reduces puzzlement about whether and how to include relation in an accounting of categories. (shrink)

The philosophical debate concerning political exchange has largely been confined to debating the desirability of vote trading; where individuals can sell their votes or buy votes from others. However, I show that the vote credit systems prevalent in public choice theory entirely avoid the common objections to political exchange that afflict vote trading proposals. Namely, vote credit systems avoid equality concerns and inalienability concerns. I offer an alternative critique to formal mechanisms that encourage political exchange by drawing on the role (...) that impartiality and impartial moral judgements play in democratic and electoral institutions. (shrink)

In the attempt to understand the norms governing believers, epistemologists have tended to focus on individual belief as the primary object of epistemic evaluation. However, norm governance is often assumed to concern, at base, things we can do as a free exercise or manifestation of our agency. Yet believing is not plausibly conceived as something we freely do but rather as a state we are in, usually as the mostly automatic or involuntary result of cognitively processes shaped by nature, bias, (...) and ideology. In this paper, I sketch a response to this tension. This response is based on rejecting the traditional theoretical focus on an individual’s particular beliefs as the primary object of normative epistemic evaluation. If we shift our focus from the particular beliefs of individuals to the community and its information managing practices, we may lessen the tension between norm governance and automaticity and involuntariness in a way that construes autonomous cognitive agency as a resultant of rather than a precondition for our norm-governed epistemic sociality. (shrink)

In his monograph, Robust Ethics: The Metaphysics and Epistemology of Godless Normative Realism, Erik Wielenberg offers arguably one of the most sophisticated defenses of the autonomy thesis to date. Wielenberg argues that the divine command theory is problematic because it cannot account for the moral obligations of reasonable unbelievers; Godless normative robust realism can be formulated in a way that avoids the standard objections to the autonomy thesis; and GRNR provides a better account of intrinsic value. In this paper, I (...) will argue Wielenberg’s defenses of the autonomy thesis fails. I will argue that his objection to divine command theories fails, that he fails to address two standard challenges to the autonomy thesis adequately, and, finally, that Wielenberg fails to show that GRNR better accounts for the intuition that certain things are intrinsically good than various forms of theistic alternatives. (shrink)

There has been increased attention on how scientific communities should respond to spurious dissent. One proposed method is to hide such dissent by preventing its publication. To investigate this, I computationally model the epistemic effects of hiding dissenting evidence on scientific communities. I find that it is typically epistemically harmful to hide dissent, even when there exists an agent purposefully producing biased dissent. However, hiding dissent also allows for quicker correct epistemic consensus among scientists. Quicker consensus may be important when (...) policy decisions must be made quickly, such as during a pandemic, suggesting times when hiding dissent may be useful. (shrink)

This paper distinguishes between two types of persuasive force arguments can have in terms of two different connections between arguments and inferences. First, borrowing from Pinto, an arguer's invitation to inference directly persuades an addressee if the addressee performs an inference that the arguer invites. This raises the question of how invited inferences are determined by an invitation to inference. Second, borrowing from Sorenson, an arguer's invitation to inference indirectly persuades an addressee if the addressee performs an inference guided by (...) the argument even though it is uninvited. This raises the question of how an invitation to inference can guide inferences that the arguer does not use the argument to invite. Focusing on belief-inducing inference, the primary aims here are to clarify what is necessary for an addressee's belief-inducing inference to be invited by an argument used as an instrument of persuasion; and to highlight the capacity of arguments to guide such inferences. The paper moves beyond Pinto's discussion by using Boghossian's Taking Condition in service of and in way that illustrates how epistemically bad arguments can rationally persuade addressees of their conclusions. (shrink)

What makes teaching a moral endeavor? How can we prepare classroom practitioners for engaging in that moral endeavor in meaningful and effective ways? This volume brings together leading scholars who draw upon both their academic expertise and substantial wisdom of practice to offer a variety of perspectives on the challenge of preparing today’s teachers for the moral work of teaching. Book Features: Examines the role that teacher preparation and development can play in addressing the moral work of teaching. Highlights the (...) work of leading scholars from educational psychology, educational philosophy, and teacher education. Provides compelling insights for identifying the next generation of our nation’s best teachers. Contributors: Wolfgang Althof, Karen Benson, Marvin Berkowitz, Donald Blumenfeld-Jones, Elizabeth Campbell, Julie Canniff, Mary Crawford, Lana Daly, Rebecca Evers, Catherine Fallona, Gary Fenstermacher, Anthony Holter, Lisa Johnson, Daniel Lapsley, Darcia Narvaez, Virginia Navarro, Larry Nucci, Joy Pelton, Virginia Richardson, Don Senneville, David Light Shields, Barbara Stengel, Jonatha Vare, Marilyn Watson. (shrink)

The papers included in this special issue were selected from a series of three interdisciplinary workshops titled Species in the Age of Discordance. Participants including philosophers, phylogeneticists, systematists, population geneticists, invasion biologists, historians, social scientists, botanists, herpetologists, ichthyologists, and microbiologists, among others, were asked to consider species in the context of discordance. The sense of “discordance” was left intentionally ambiguous in the call for abstracts, as our goal was to examine this question from many different perspectives, to seek out connections (...) across disciplines, to think about the different ways discordance surrounding species is conceived, and to ascertain how the varieties of discordance might inform each other. (shrink)

Heraclitean flux plays a large role in Plato 's « Theaetetus » and « Cratylus ». Yet Heraclitus himself did not hold the same conception of flux. The question of how the two thinkers differ, and why Plato treats Heraclitus as he does, is significant because the notion of flux has figured in subsequent philosophical conceptions of the persistence of identity through change. Comparison of Heraclitus, frr. B 12 and B 125 DK reveals that flux is not motion simply, but (...) motion productive of stability ; the unity of stability and flux is the « unapparent connection » that it is Heraclitus ' mission to reveal. Analysis of Tht. 179 C-181 B and Cra. 402 A 3-8 and 411 B-C shows neither any exegesis of Heraclitus ' words, nor any evidence that Plato has in mind any historical Heracliteans. The playful way in which Plato handles Heracliteanism, with comic and hyperbolic imagery, suggests that his audience would have recognized Heraclitean flux as a familiar theory from the context of contemporary oral dialectic. (shrink)