Here’s a problem that any reliability theory must face, whether it’s one that holds that beliefs are justified just when they’re products of belief-forming mechanisms with the potential of having good records of yielding true beliefs, or one that holds that a belief meets the standards for knowledge if and only if its causal basis rules out any relevant chance of mistake. The problem is made evident when cast in probabilistic terms. Let r be S’s reason for tokening the true (...) belief that p under conditions c. Then, according to reliabilism, Sis justified in believing that p under c iff r makes it sufficiently probable that p, whileS knows that p iff the conditional probability that p on r and c is unity. But how do we specify the belief context c to be counted as epistemically relevant? As urged recently by John Pollock, on the face of it there seems to be no principled reason for excluding mention of the truth value of the proposition believed. As he says, ‘The only obvious way to construct an objective non-epistemic kind of definite probability is to make it conditional on everything that is true [at the belief’s tokening]’ ; and, as he notes, ‘one feature of the present circumstances is a characterization of the belief as a belief in [p ], and another feature is the truth value of [p]’. But if we allow both the belief token and its truth value membership in the relevant belief context, we then have the hopeless task of explaining how the probability of the token’s being true can be anything but one or zero, one if what is believed is true, and zero if it’s false. This in tum would commit reliabilism to the foolish doctrines that a belief’s truth is sufficient for knowledge, while no false belief is ever even justified. No wonder, then, that Pollock says ‘there is no way to construct an intelligible notion of reliability which does the job required by the reliabilist’. And he is surely right in this: Neither knowledge nor justification can be explained as the chance of a belief’s being true if the relevant belief context is required to mention both the belief tokened and its truth value. We would be engaged in a comparably pointless task were we to try to explain the likelihood of a wager’s being a good bet on a horse race when we had to include among the givens both which horse was picked and its finish, or were we to try to make sense of the assertion that a theory’s predictions have a good chance of being true when both what the theory predicts and its outcome had to be included among the givens. (shrink)

‘Mysticism means to isolate the eternal from the originated.’ This is not my definition of the word ‘mysticism’ but that of the founder of the ‘orthodox’ school of Muslim mysticism, Al-Junayd of Baghdad who flourished in the ninth century a.d . In actual fact it is not a definition of mysticism at all but of the Arabic word tawḥīd which means primarily ‘the affirmation of unity’; and that surely is an essential ingredient of any form of mysticism: it is the (...) affirmation through personal experience of unity either absolutely or in some qualified sense. (shrink)

As everyone knows, since the end of the Second World War there has been a sensational revival of interest in the non-Christian religions particularly in the United States and in this country. The revival has taken two forms, the one popular, the other academic. The first of these has turned almost exclusively to Hindu and Buddhist mysticism and can be seen as an energetic reaction against the dogmatic and until very recently rigid structure of institutionalised Christianity and a search for (...) a lived experience of the freedom of the spirit which is held to be the true content of mysticism, obscured in Christianity by the basic dogma of a transcendent God, the ‘wholly Other’ of Rudolf Otto and his numerous followers, but wholly untrammelled by any such concept in the higher reaches of Vedanta and Buddhism, particularly in its Zen manifestation. On the academic side the picture is less clear. There is, of course, the claim that the study of religion, like any other academic study, must be subjected to and controlled by the same principles of ‘scientific’ objectivity to which the other ‘arts’ subjects have been subjected, to their own undoing. But even here there would seem to be a bias in favour of the religions of India and the Far East as against Islam, largely, one supposes, in response to popular demand. (shrink)

R. S. Peters, C. A. Mace; VII—Emotions and the Category of Passivity, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 62, Issue 1, 1 June 1962, Pages 117–142, h.

R. S. Peters, C. A. Mace; VII—Emotions and the Category of Passivity, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 62, Issue 1, 1 June 1962, Pages 117–142, h.

Hawthorne and Magidor's criticisms of the model of presupposition and assertion that I have used and defended are all based on a rejection of some transparency or introspection of assumptions about speaker presupposition. This response to those criticisms aims first to clarify, and then to defend, the required transparency assumptions. It is argued, first, that if the assumptions are properly understood, some prima facie problems for them do not apply, second, that rejecting the assumptions has intuitively implausible consequences, and third, (...) that the 'margin of error' argument against the principle of positive introspection has a false premiss. The paper concludes with a response to a criticism of what Hawthorne and Magidor call 'the uniformity principle' that is used in the model to explain some pragmatic phenomena. (shrink)

Objective—To report the ethical development of medical students across four years of education at one medical school.Design and setting—A questionnaire was distributed to all four classes at the Wake Forest University School of Medicine during the Spring of 1996. Participants—Three hundred and three students provided demographic information as well as information concerning their ethical development both as current medical students and future interns. Main measurements—Results were analyzed using cross-tabulations, correlations, and analysis of variance.Results—Results suggested that the observation of and participation (...) in unethical conduct1 may have disparaging effects on medical students' codes of ethics with 35% of the total sample (24% of first years rising to 55% of fourth years) stating that derogatory comments made by residents/attendings, either in the patient's presence or absence, were “sometimes” or “often” appropriate. However, approximately 70% of the sample contended that their personal code of ethics had not changed since beginning medical school and would not change as a resident. Conclusions—Results may represent an internal struggle that detracts from the medical school experience, both as a person and as a doctor. Our goal as educators is to alter the educational environment so that acceptance of such behaviour is not considered part of becoming a physician. (shrink)

Book reviewed in this article: Not In Our Genes: Biology, Ideology, and Human Nature. By R. C. Lewontin, Steven Rose, and Leon J. Kamin.

An impressive array of succinct expositions of a large variety of British and American epistemological theories. Bergson and the Vienna Circle are also treated in detail. Idealism, Realism, and Pragmatism are discussed as well as constructionist, intuitional, and organismic theories.--R. C. N.

Chalmers (2018) maintains that even if we understood every physical process in the brain we could still wonder why these processes give rise to conscious experience. The meta-problem is the challenge of explaining why we think this 'hard problem' exists. This response to the target paper endorses illusionist accounts of three 'problem intuitions' about consciousness: duality, presentation, and revelation. Subject–object duality is explained in terms of a clash between two compelling but contradictory convictions about consciousness. Phenomenal presence is understood in (...) relation to the configurational features of sensory experiences. And intuitions of revelation are explained as due to an unfounded belief in introspective ontological access. These illusionist analyses are used to bolster the case for physicalist realism rather than to support 'strong' illusionism. In addition to addressing the meta-problem they suggest a promising approach to the hard problem as wel. (shrink)

The emergence of Big Data has added a new aspect to conceptualizing the use of digital technologies in the delivery of public services and for realizing digital governance. This article explores, via the ‘value-chain’ approach, the evolution of digital governance research, and aligns it with current developments associated with data analytics, often referred to as ‘Big Data’. In many ways, the current discourse around Big Data reiterates and repeats established commentaries within the eGovernment research community. This body of knowledge provides (...) an opportunity to reflect on the ‘promise’ of Big Data, both in relation to service delivery and policy formulation. This includes, issues associated with the quality and reliability of data, from mixing public and private sector data, issues associated with the ownership of raw and manipulated data, and ethical issues concerning surveillance and privacy. These insights and the issues raised help assess the value of Big Data in government and smart city environments. (shrink)

A well-documented defense of the thesis that St. Augustine held the city of man, especially Rome, to contain many relative goods, however evil it was from the absolute standpoint of goodness consisting in the worship of the true God. O'Meara discusses in some detail many contemporary critics, e.g., Ernest Barker, who oppose this interpretation, and argues on the basis of historical circumstance and Augustine's own declarations in works other than the City of God.--R. C. N.

The argument of the Transcendental Deduction of the Categories in the Critique of Pure Reason is the deepest and most far-reaching in philosophy. In his new book, Robert Howell interprets main themes of the Deduction using ideas from contemporary philosophy and intensional logic, thereby providing a keener grasp of Kant's many subtleties than has hitherto been available. No other work pursues Kant's argument through every twist and turn with the careful, logically detailed attention maintained here. Surprising new accounts of apperception, (...) the concept of an object, the logical functions of thought, the role of the Metaphysical Deduction, and Kant's relations to his Aristotelian-Cartesian background are developed. Howell makes a precise contribution to the discussion of most of the disputed issues in the history of Deduction interpretation. Controversial in its conclusions, this book demands the attention of all who take seriously the task of understanding Kant's work and evaluating it dispassionately. (shrink)