This is a response to Paul Boghossian’s paper: What is inference?. The paper and the abstract originate from a symposium at the Pacific Division Meeting of the APA in San Diego in April 2011. John Broome was a co-commentator.

These comments are part of a book symposium on Karen Bennett's book, _Making Things Up_.

This comment considers some potential implications of both the appraisal approaches and the framework proposed by Mascolo in regard to a mechanism that is particularly important for development: le...

Online debates typically possess a large number of argumentative comments. Most readers who would like to see which comments are winning arguments often only read a part of the debate. Many platforms that host such debates allow for the comments to be sorted, say from the earliest to latest. How can argumentation theory be used to evaluate the effectiveness of such policies of sorting comments, in terms of the actually winning arguments displayed to a reader who may not have read (...) the whole debate? We devise a pipeline that captures an online debate tree as a bipolar argumentation framework, which is sorted depending on the policy, giving a sequence of induced sub-BAFs representing how and how much of the debate has been read. Each sub-BAF has its own set of winning arguments, which can be quantitatively compared to the set of winning arguments of the whole BAF. We apply this pipeline to evaluate policies on Kialo debates, where it is shown that reading comments from most to least liked, on average, displays more winners than reading comments earliest first. Therefore, in Kialo, reading comments from most to least liked is on average more effective than reading from the earliest to the most recent. (shrink)

Comment on A Fine: "Piecemeal Realism." Fine's critique of scientific realism derives its force from a selective focus on mechanics. But what does the antirealist have to say about evolutionary theory or astrophysics? Furthermore, the circularity objection to the "explanationist" defence of realism can be countered. Fine's own position (NOA) reduces either to instrumentalism or to an unargued-for realism, depending on where the stress is laid.

This comment argues that appraisals result from the almost incessant predictive activity of the awake brain, using its incoming and stored information. It explores how appraisal operates when it does. It argues that the analysis of the processes that lead to appraisals currently is still at an early stage.

Agada’s new book has arrived at a time when contemporary African philosophers are gradually engaging one another’s work and participating actively in system-building. It is based on this “new wave” in contemporary African philosophy scholarship that I provide some critical comments over Agada’s book emConsolationism and Comparative Philosophy: Beyond Universalism and Particularism./em Whereas the originality and depth of Agada is not in doubt regarding his idea of Mood, the ultimate category of his ontology, I level four objections against the metaphysical (...) system. These shortcomings, I argue, set limits on the ontological framework that can mediate thought, theory, and practice both in Africa and beyond./p. (shrink)

This comment is analysing the last section of a paper by Piotr Blaszczyk, Mikhail G. Katz, and David Sherry on alleged misconceptions committed by historians of mathematics regarding the history of analysis, published in this journal in the first issue of 2013. Since this section abounds of wrong attributions and denouncing statements regarding my research and a key publication, the comment serves to rectify them and to recall some minimal methodological requirements for historical research.

In Time Deposits, Dimension, and Fraud (2009), William Barnett and Walter Block argue that by borrowing short and lending long there is an over issuance of property rights. Their article, however, does not fully extend the consequences of their contribution. Once this is done, it becomes clearer that their argument suits a great impediment to banking, becoming a possible reason to support rather than to oppose fractional reserve banking. Bagus and Howden (J Bus Ethics 90(3):399–406, 2009) comment on Barnett (...) and Block (J Bus Ethics 88(4):711–716, 2009), the authors claim that while maintaining the illegitimacy of fractional reserve deposits, borrowing short and lending long it is actually not illegitimate. An extension on Bagus and Howden (2009) will show that their line of argumentation can be applied as a defense of fractional reserve banking as well. (shrink)

Gignac and Zajenkowski (2020) find that “the degree to which people mispredicted their objectively measured intelligence was equal across the whole spectrum of objectively measured intelligence”. This Comment shows that Gignac and Zajenkowski’s (2020) finding of homoscedasticity is likely the result of a recoding choice by the experimenters and does not in fact indicate that the Dunning-Kruger Effect is a mere statistical artifact. Specifically, Gignac and Zajenkowski (2020) recoded test subjects’ responses to a question regarding self-assessed comparative IQ onto (...) a linear IQ scale when a normal IQ scale would likely have been more appropriate. More generally, researchers studying self-assessed intelligence should be aware of potential measurement problems that may arise when transforming an ordinal scale onto an interval scale. (shrink)

This review article grapples with the issue of race in Latin American philosophy and Susan Nuccetelli's analysis of it by asking how we grapple with race in Latin American philosophy if race is both an internal factor (in the sense that Latin American philosophy theorizes race) as well as an external factor (in the sense that racism and raciality have significantly determined the production of Latin American philosophy)? It thematizes white supremacy in Latin American philosophy in order to ask to (...) what degree Latin American philosophy can respond to white supremacy in philosophy without questioning its own grounds and relation to white supremacy. (shrink)

Comments on Thi Nguyen’s Games: The Art of Agency, delivered at the 2021 American Society for Aesthetics Annual Meeting in Montreal.

Professor Buck has given an illuminating account of the logical status of reflexive predictions in the social sciences. He tells us that the classification of a prediction as reflexive is predicated on a tacit distinction between the “normal” and the “abnormal” or perturbed conditions under which it is made. This seems to me to be a perceptive and sound circumscription of the class of reflexive predictions as encountered in the social sciences. He goes on to show helpfully how the social (...) scientist can cope with the pitfalls of spurious disconfirmation and spurious confirmation which are created by “self-frustrating” and “self-fulfilling” predictions respectively. And Professor Buck then offers some searching doubts concerning the adequacy of regarding self-fulfilling predictions as the pattern of racial discrimination against minority groups. Finally, he presents objections to my critique of Robert Merton's claim that self-defeating and self-fulfilling predictions are endemic to the domain of human affairs and are “not found among predictions about the world of nature.”. (shrink)

In this comment, I indicate several challenges and opportunities—out of the many—for an integrated science–humanities approach to emotions, from the perspective of a historian of the modern science...

I am here to criticize a very good book. Julia Annas’s Intelligent Virtue offers us “an account of virtue” that is manifestly indebted to Aristotle and the ancient Stoics, but is also modern and highly original, deeply and carefully thought through, with well-informed attention to contemporary issues and insights. She says “[this] account of virtue results from attending to two ideas” . I will discuss the first of them in parts 1 and 2 of my comments, and the second in (...) part 3.The Skill AnalogyThe first of these two ideas “is that exercising a virtue involves practical reasoning of a kind that can illuminatingly be compared to the kind of reasoning we find in someone exercising a practical skill” . Professor Annas has said quite lot in her précis by way of explaining this idea. Her point that a practical “ability, though a habituated one, is constantly informed by the way the person is thinking” , does, I think, help us to understand how a sort of habituation can contribute to .. (shrink)

I’ll start by giving a very brief summary of Sider’s position and will identify some points on which my own position differs from his. I’ll then raise four issues, viz., how to articulate the 3-dimensionalist view, the trade-offs between Ted’s stage view of persistence and endurance with respect to intrinsic properties, the endurantist’s response to the argument from vagueness, and finally more general questions about what’s at stake in the debate. I don’t believe that anything I say raises insurmountable problems (...) for Sider’s view; and in fact, I’m sure he’s in a better position to defend his view more convincingly than I’m able to defend mine. However, there is plenty worth discussing further. (shrink)

This comment on Main and Kho’s suggestion for “a relational framework for integrating the study of empathy in children and adults” takes a conversation analytic perspective. First, I will su...

David Papineau, Jerry Fodor and many others wonder how the conjunction of the following three positions can be true: 1) Special science laws: There are lawlike generalizations in the special sciences. These sciences trade in kinds that are such that statements about salient, reliable correlations that are projectible and that support counterfactuals apply to the tokens coming under these kinds. 2) Non-reductionism: The laws of some of the special sciences cannot be reduced to physical laws. 3) Physicalism: Everything there is (...) in the world supervenes on the physical, that is, is fixed by the distribution of the physical properties in the world. The obvious problem is that (3) implies that the similarities among tokens in the world, accounting for the kinds in which the special sciences trade, and the correlations among such tokens, accounting for the laws of the special sciences, are fixed by the distribution of the physical properties. By contrast, (2) implies that some of the laws seizing such correlations are not reducible to physical laws. By using the term “token”, I mean a particular instantiating a property. Papineau’s proposal to reconcile these three positions is to account for (2) in terms of selection (pp. 6-9): There can be laws in the special sciences that are not reducible to physical laws if and only if these laws focus on effects that are selected for in a given context independently of the mechanisms by which they are brought about. Thus, the fact of there being such laws and their non-reducibility to physics do not contradict physicalism (3). The drawback is that the kinds that figure in such laws cannot enter into a rich network of laws 199 and that nothing can be causally efficacious insofar as it is a member of such a kind. In these comments, I shall try to push Papineau further in the direction of a reductive physicalism, thus solving the problem by simply abandoning (2).. (shrink)

This is the handout of my comments on E. Zimmermann's paper "Monotonicity in Opaque Verbs", which I prepared for the workshop on Intensional Verbs and Non-Referential Terms held at IHPST on January 14, 2006.

Bentham offers a detailed critique of William Blackstone's 'Commentaries on the Laws of England' (1765-9).

Professor Narveson's comments about my papers on equality are both penetrating and comprehensive. I cannot hope to discuss all the issues he raises in any detail. But there is a special problem: his main question is about what I have not said. He asks how I might defend equality of resources other than simply by describing a version of it, and of course this question will require some extended discussion. But he is right to say that this is his most (...) important question, and I should hate to lose the opportunity of encouraging discussion of it. So I shall begin with some general remarks about the defence of the idea of equality and then take up, in a very hasty and summary way, the other problems he discusses or raises. Please allow me, however, this apology and caution. I know that what I shall say about the defense of equality is at many points dogmatic and at others unmindful of very natural objections and replies. I want to answer Narveson only by showing in a rough and general way how far I think a defense of equality is possible, what kind of defense this can be, and what form it should take. (shrink)