Epistemic dependence refers to our social mechanisms of reliance in practices of knowledge production. Epistemic oppression concerns persistent and unwarranted exclusions from those practices. This article examines the relationship between these two frameworks and demonstrates that attending to their relationship is a fruitful practice for applied epistemology. Paying attention to relations of epistemic dependence and how exclusive they are can help us track epistemically oppressive practices. In order to show this, I introduce a taxonomy of epistemic dependence. I argue that (...) this particular taxonomy is useful for tracking epistemically oppressive practices in institutional contexts. This is because, first, the forms of epistemic dependence in this taxonomy yield, what I call, diagnostic questions. These are questions that help us track how relations of epistemic dependence could become exclusive and that thus help reveal epistemic oppression in institutional contexts. Second, the forms of epistemic dependence in the taxonomy are interrelated. Paying attention not just to each of three forms of epistemic dependence but also to the way in which they are interrelated is useful for illuminating epistemically oppressive practices. I conclude by demonstrating how the diagnostic questions can be used in analyses of concrete institutional practices in asylum law and higher education. (shrink)

The human experience is shaped by information from different perceptual channels, but it is still debated whether and how differential experience influences language use. To address this, we compared congenitally blind, blindfolded, and sighted people's descriptions of the same motion events experienced auditorily by all participants (i.e., via sound alone) and conveyed in speech and gesture. Comparison of blind and sighted participants to blindfolded participants helped us disentangle the effects of a lifetime experience of being blind versus the task-specific effects (...) of experiencing a motion event by sound alone. Compared to sighted people, blind people's speech focused more on path and less on manner of motion, and encoded paths in a more segmented fashion using more landmarks and path verbs. Gestures followed the speech, such that blind people pointed to landmarks more and depicted manner less than sighted people. This suggests that visual experience affects how people express spatial events in the multimodal language and that blindness may enhance sensitivity to paths of motion due to changes in event construal. These findings have implications for the claims that language processes are deeply rooted in our sensory experiences. (shrink)

The fact that Sufi metaphysics is usually taken to be merely the writings of Islamic philosophers, like Ibn al-'Arabi, seems to underestimate the philosophical indications of literary texts in the Sufi tradition. When Sufi literary texts are examined for philosophical content, that content is sought within and through the traditional Sufist approach. However, there appears to be a lack of correspondence between the traditional approach on the main conceptions (of God, of the universe, etc.) in Sufism and what literary texts (...) can offer regarding those, when some literary texts are to be examined in a way in which an underlying philosophical system can be extracted from them. In this article, Ipresent a brief analysis of The Conference of the Birds by Farid ud-Din Attar, one of the most significant works focusing on God and written in Sufi tradition. I suggest an alternative framework for Sufi metaphysics, which overlaps with the metaphysical connotations of The Conference of the Birds, via some Spinozistic ideas on God and on God's relationship to the rest of the universe. Since The Conference of the Birds represents a metaphysical doctrine that is apart from the traditional approach, I argue that we are not justified in thinking that Sufi metaphysics is only what Islamic philosophers have so far offered us. (shrink)

Big Ideas for Little Kids includes everything a teacher, a parent, or a college student needs to teach philosophy to elementary school children from picture books. Written in a clear and accessible style, the book explains why it is important to allow young children access to philosophy during primary-school education. Wartenberg also gives advice on how to construct a "learner-centered" classroom, in which children discuss philosophical issues with one another as they respond to open-ended questions by saying whether they agree (...) or disagree with what others have said. (shrink)

One of the recent attempts to explore epistemic dimensions of forced displacement focuses on the institution of gender-based asylum and hopes to detect forms of epistemic injustice within assessments of gender related asylum applications. Following this attempt, I aim in this paper to demonstrate how the institution of gender-based asylum is structured to produce epistemic injustice at least in the forms of testimonial injustice and contributory injustice. This structural limit becomes visible when we realize how the institution of asylum is (...) formed to provide legitimacy to the institutional comfort the respective migration courts and boards enjoy. This institutional comfort afforded to migration boards and courts by the existing asylum regimes in the current order of nation-states leads to a systemic prioritization of state actors’ epistemic resources rather than that of applicants, which, in turn, results in epistemic injustice and impacts the determination of applicants’ refugee status. (shrink)

One of the recent attempts to explore epistemic dimensions of forced displacement focuses on the institution of gender-based asylum and hopes to detect forms of epistemic injustice within assessments of gender related asylum applications. Following this attempt, I aim in this paper to demonstrate how the institution of gender-based asylum is structured to produce epistemic injustice at least in the forms of testimonial injustice and contributory injustice. This structural limit becomes visible when we realize how the institution of asylum is (...) formed to provide legitimacy to the institutional comfort the respective migration courts and boards enjoy. This institutional comfort afforded to migration boards and courts by the existing asylum regimes in the current order of nation-states leads to a systemic prioritization of state actors’ epistemic resources rather than that of applicants, which, in turn, results in epistemic injustice and impacts the determination of applicants’ refugee status. (shrink)

A credible fear test is an in-depth interview process given to undocumented people of any age arriving at a U.S. port of entry to determine qualification for asylum-seeking. Credible fear tests as a typical immigration procedure demonstrate not only what structural epistemic violence looks like but also how this violence lives in and through the design of asylum policy. Key terms of credible fear tests such as “significant possibility,” “evidence,” “consistency,” and “credibility” can never be neutral in the context of (...) colonial administrative violence. We argue that these terms function as mechanisms of exclusion and demonstrate that the capacity to be violent (i.e. to be an instrument of violence) is built into these tests, ready to be deployed when an administration wants to stop certain people from certain places from entering without regard to their own ongoing occupation of Indigenous lands. Not only are such practices instruments of violence, but the concept of ‘violence’ continues to be organized, defined, and conceived within settler colonial epistemologies so as to exclude these administrative forms of violence deployed against Indigenous peoples and people of color from recognition and nameability. We argue that this is an intentional strategy of colonial power preservation that is functionalized through social processes that remain structurally stable and self-regenerating across historical and political changes. (shrink)

Issues of reliability are claiming center-stage in the epistemology of machine learning. This paper unifies different branches in the literature and points to promising research directions, whilst also providing an accessible introduction to key concepts in statistics and machine learning---as far as they are concerned with reliability.

v. 1. Editorial introduction -- v. 2. The English and Latin texts (i) -- v. 3. The English and Latin texts (ii).

The words quoted above distill the common secular conception of death. If we decline the traditional religious reassurances of an afterlife, or their fuzzy new age equivalents, and instead take the hard-boiled and thoroughly modern materialist view of death, then we likely end up with Gonzalez-Cruzzi. Rejecting visions of reunions with loved ones or of crossing over into the light, we anticipate the opposite: darkness, silence, an engulfing emptiness. But we would be wrong.

Self-regulation in early childhood is an important predictor of success across a variety of indicators in life, including health, well-being, and earnings. Although conceptually self-regulation has been defined as multifaceted, previous research has not investigated whether there is conceptual and empirical overlap between the factors that comprise self-regulation or if they are distinct. In this study, using a bifactor model, we tested the shared and unique variance among self-regulation constructs and prediction to pre-academic and social-emotional skills. The sample included 932 (...) preschool children, their parents, and their teachers in the United States. Children’s self-regulation was assessed using measures of executive function, behavioral self-regulation, and emotion regulation. The bifactor model demonstrated a common overarching self-regulation factor, as well as distinct executive function and emotion regulation factors. The common overarching self-regulation factor and executive function predicted children’s pre-academic and social-emotional skills. The emotion regulation factor predicted children’s social-emotional skills. Identifying the shared and unique aspects of self-regulation may have important implications for supporting children’s regulatory skills as well as their success in school. (shrink)

One way to articulate the promise of interdisciplinary research is in terms of the relationship between knowledge and ignorance. Disciplinary research yields deep knowledge of a circumscribed range of issues, but remains ignorant of those issues that stretch outside its purview. Because complex problems such as climate change do not respect disciplinary boundaries, disciplinary research responses to such problems are limited and partial. Interdisciplinary research responses, by contrast, integrate disciplinary perspectives by combining knowledge about different issues and as a result (...) reduce ignorance about more aspects of the problem. In this paper, we develop this idea and argue that while interdisciplinary research can help remediate damaging ignorance about complex problems, it also creates conditions in which other damaging forms of ignorance can arise. We illustrate this point in detail with three case studies before discussing three implications of our analysis for identifying and managing deleterio... (shrink)

This paper is an exposition and evaluation of the Agustín Rayo's views about the epistemology and metaphysics of mathematics, as they are presented in his book The Construction of Logical Space.

Thomas Reid is now recognized as one of the towering figures of the Enlightenment. Best known for his published writings on epistemology and moral theory, he was also an accomplished mathematician and natural philosopher, as an earlier volume of his manuscripts edited by Paul Wood for the Edinburgh Reid Edition, Thomas Reid on the Animate Creation, has shown. The Correspondence of Thomas Reid collects all of the known letters to and from Reid in a fully annotated form. (...) Letters already published by Sir William Hamilton and others have been reedited, and roughly half of the letters included appear in print for the first time. Writing in 1802, Reid's disciple and biographer Dugald Stewart doubted that Reid's correspondence &"would be generally interesting.&" This collection proves otherwise, for the letters illuminate virtually every aspect of Reid's life and career and, in some instances, provide us with invaluable evidence about activities otherwise undocumented in his manuscripts or published works. Through his correspondence we can trace Reid's relations with contemporaries such as David Hume and his colleagues at both King's College, Aberdeen, and the University of Glasgow, as well as his engagement with the most controversial philosophical, scientific, and political issues of his day. If anything, the letters assembled here serve as the starting point for understanding Reid and his place in the Enlightenment. (shrink)

This volume is a study of the influence of Timaeus on the development of Western cosmology in three axial periods of European culture: Late Antiquity, Middle Ages and Renaissance.

BackgroundThe ARRIVE (Animal Research: Reporting of In Vivo Experiments) guidelines are widely endorsed but compliance is limited. We sought to determine whether journal-requested completion of an ARRIVE checklist improves full compliance with the guidelines.MethodsIn a randomised controlled trial, manuscripts reporting in vivo animal research submitted to PLOS ONE (March–June 2015) were randomly allocated to either requested completion of an ARRIVE checklist or current standard practice. Authors, academic editors, and peer reviewers were blinded to group allocation. Trained reviewers performed outcome adjudication (...) in duplicate by assessing manuscripts against an operationalised version of the ARRIVE guidelines that consists 108 items. Our primary outcome was the between-group differences in the proportion of manuscripts meeting all ARRIVE guideline checklist subitems.ResultsWe randomised 1689 manuscripts (control: n = 844, intervention: n = 845), of which 1269 were sent for peer review and 762 (control: n = 340; intervention: n = 332) accepted for publication. No manuscript in either group achieved full compliance with the ARRIVE checklist. Details of animal husbandry (ARRIVE subitem 9b) was the only subitem to show improvements in reporting, with the proportion of compliant manuscripts rising from 52.1 to 74.1% (X2 = 34.0, df = 1, p = 2.1 × 10−7) in the control and intervention groups, respectively.ConclusionsThese results suggest that altering the editorial process to include requests for a completed ARRIVE checklist is not enough to improve compliance with the ARRIVE guidelines. Other approaches, such as more stringent editorial policies or a targeted approach on key quality items, may promote improvements in reporting. (shrink)

Frege made a derivative of the distinction that he made between the meanings of senses (Sinn) and references (Bedeutung) on judgments, and named the judgments which he treats as hollow functions; ‘Unsaturated’ (ungesättigt) phrases and the phrases which completed an argument as, ‘Saturated’ (gesättigt) phrases. Saturated phrases consist of first and second level concepts and are considered to be meaningful expressions with an accurate value. Frege became the founder of modern symbolic logic with the language of formal logic he developed (...) in ‘Concept Writing’, and based all this formal analysis on the distinction of ‘function (Funktion) – argument (Argument)’ and ‘concept – coverage’. The philosopher, who makes sense of the judgments as their ‘thoughts’; determines the logical value accuracy of the reference on the basis of this distinction, has adopted a contradictory acceptance in terms of both considering the judgments as a condition of being able to receive a truth value and reducing them to the senses of the sentences. Then, if the thoughts were indeed the sense of the sentences, as Frege thought, then it would not be possible to speak of sentences that were meaningful but lacked truthfulness. That is why, to overcome this distress, we propose to change the definition of thought in Frege's theory and to consider it as function values, not the sense of sentences. Likewise for us, thoughts are not the senses of the sentences, nor are they references. Contrariwise, thoughts are the function value of the sentences. To put it in a different way, if a sentence lacks function value, it can be meaningful but not true or false, and if the sentence has a function value, it can be true or false. Thus, for us, thoughts are neither the expression of the sentence in the language nor the logical value of the sentence; thoughts are function values that can be true or false. (shrink)

Examines how the educations of America's first four presidents, and in particular their scholarly devotion to ancient Greek and Roman classics, informed the beliefs and ideals that shaped the nation's constitution and government.

Thomas Hill, a leading figure in the recent development of Kantian moral philosophy, presents a set of essays exploring the implications of basic Kantian ideas for practical issues. The first part of the book provides background in central themes in Kant's ethics; the second part discusses questions regarding human welfare; the third focuses on moral worth-the nature and grounds of moral assessment of persons as deserving esteem or blame. Hill shows moral, political, and social philosophers just how valuable moral (...) theory can be in addressing practical matters. (shrink)

Glymour and Quine propose two different formal criteria for theoretical equivalence. In this paper we examine the relationships between these criteria.

Serena Olsaretti brings together new essays by leading moral and political philosophers on the nature of desert and justice, their relations with each other and with other values.

This is a new edition of T. H. Green's Prolegomena to Ethics (1883), a classic of modern philosophy, in which Green sets out his perfectionist ethical theory. In addition to the text of the Prolegomena itself, this new edition provides an introductory essay, a bibliographical essay, and an index. Brink's extended editorial introduction examines the context, themes, and significance of Green's work and will be of special interest to readers working on the history of ethics, ethical theory, political philosophy, and (...) nineteenth century philosophy. (shrink)

This book is a fiftieth anniversary republication of Thomas Nagel's "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?", a classic in the philosophy of mind. Through its argument for the irreducible subjectivity of consciousness, it played an essential role in making the study of consciousness a central part of philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience. It also spurred the now flourishing scientific attention to the consciousness of non-human creatures: mammals, birds, fish, mollusks, and insects. The book also includes a second essay (...) offering Nagel's more recent thoughts on the most promising positive response to the mind-body problem, as posed in the original essay. (shrink)

The purported fact that geometric theories formulated in terms of points and geometric theories formulated in terms of lines are “equally correct” is often invoked in arguments for conceptual relativity, in particular by Putnam and Goodman. We discuss a few notions of equivalence between first-order theories, and we then demonstrate a precise sense in which this purported fact is true. We argue, however, that this fact does not undermine metaphysical realism.

This paper presents a simple pair of first-order theories that are not definitionally (nor Morita) equivalent, yet are mutually conservatively translatable and mutually 'surjectively' translatable. We use these results to clarify the overall geography of standards of equivalence and to show that the structural commitments that theories make behave in a more subtle manner than has been recognized.

Wilhelm (Forthcom Synth 199:6357–6369, 2021) has recently defended a criterion for comparing structure of mathematical objects, which he calls Subgroup. He argues that Subgroup is better than SYM \(^*\), another widely adopted criterion. We argue that this is mistaken; Subgroup is strictly worse than SYM \(^*\). We then formulate a new criterion that improves on both SYM \(^*\) and Subgroup, answering Wilhelm’s criticisms of SYM \(^*\) along the way. We conclude by arguing that no criterion that looks only to the (...) automorphisms of mathematical objects to compare their structure can be fully satisfactory. (shrink)

This book is available either individually, or as part of the specially-priced Arguments of the Philosphers Collection.

In Freedom: An Impossible Reality, Ray Tallis argues that we escape imprisonment by causal determinism, and thus gain free will, by the virtual distance from natural laws afforded us by intentionality, a human capacity that he claims cannot be naturalized. I respond that we can’t know in advance that intentionality will never be subsumed by science, and that our capacities to entertain possibilities and decide among them are natural cognitive endowments that supervene on generally reliable neural processes. Moreover, any disconnection (...) from the multi-level determinants that account for human behavior cannot augment, but would likely undermine, effective human agency. Our full inclusion in nature, understood in terms of a pragmatic, explanatory determinism, is therefore not a prison from which we need to escape. (shrink)

Quine often argued for a simple, untyped system of logic rather than the typed systems that were championed by Russell and Carnap, among others. He claimed that nothing important would be lost by eliminating sorts, and the result would be additional simplicity and elegance. In support of this claim, Quine conjectured that every many-sorted theory is equivalent to a single-sorted theory. We make this conjecture precise, and prove that it is true, at least according to one reasonable notion of theoretical (...) equivalence. Our clarification of Quine’s conjecture, however, exposes the shortcomings of his argument against many-sorted logic. (shrink)