It is often assumed that concepts from the formal sciences, such as mathematics and logic, have to be treated differently from concepts from non-formal sciences. This is especially relevant in cases of concept defectiveness, as in the empirical sciences defectiveness is an essential component of lager disruptive or transformative processes such as concept change or concept fragmentation. However, it is still unclear what role defectiveness plays for concepts in the formal sciences. On the one hand, a common view sees formal (...) concepts to be protected against defects because of their precise and stable nature. On the other, studies going back as far as Lakatos (1963) showcase the changeability of such concepts. -/- In this paper, I will investigate if and how defectiveness based on the occurrence of inconsistencies can appear with formal concepts. To make the case as strong as possible, I employ a strict notion of formal concept that assumes the concept to have a fixed and definite extension. I will show that there are indeed certain types of defectiveness that cannot occur with such concepts; but that there are other types of defectiveness that do occur. This means that while formal concepts have to be treated differently than non-formal concepts, questions about defectiveness---as raised in the conceptual engineering debate and philosophy of science---can still be applied to them. I will highlight this point by showing how formal sciences have special strategies available to them that allow them to resolve defectiveness of their concepts in a flexible and informative manner. (shrink)

We argue that political propaganda is a negative phenomenon, against a recent strain of philosophical theorizing that argues that political propaganda can sometimes be neutral or even positive. After an exploration of the sense and connotation of the word ‘propaganda’ in ordinary use and in the scholarly literature, we discuss Ross’s (2002) account of propaganda as an epistemically defective form of political communication. We claim that, with some refinements, it is an explanatorily useful analysis. We then assess two prominent attempts (...) that aim at classifying legitimate cases of public communication as cases of propaganda, namely Ross’s (2013) revision of her previous model, and Stanley’s (2015) influential account. We show that some of the cases in contention are problematic and that the arguments the authors offer for classifying other non-problematic cases as propaganda are inconclusive. We also argue that the idea of considering legitimate public communication as propaganda is unmotivated. (shrink)

In this chapter I hope to persuade you that defective contexts are more ubiquitous than we typically assume. In doing, so I will draw attention to a number of pressing social and theoretical issues which arise once we start to consider defective contexts. I will proceed by pointing to a number of ways in which defective contexts can emerge without self-correcting in the manner envisioned by Stalnaker. First I will consider situations in which some, but not all interlocutors recognise that (...) the context is defective. I will then consider cases of opaquely defective contexts, and the question of what it is for a context to be “close enough” to being non-defective. (shrink)

This paper examines the general prospects for conceptual role expressivism, expressivist theories that embrace conceptual role semantics. It has two main aims. The first aim is to provide a general characterisation of the view. The second aim is to raise a challenge for the general view. The challenge is to explain why normative concepts are not a species of defective concepts, where defective concepts are those that cannot meaningfully embed and participate in genuine inference. After rejecting existing attempts to answer (...) the challenge, I propose an alternative solution. However, the solution leaves conceptual role expressivism a far less distinctive and interesting position than its proponents claim. I conclude that we should be sceptical about how much expressivists gain by appealing to conceptual role semantics. (shrink)

Here, we deal with the question of under which circumstances can scientists achieve a legitimate understanding of defective theories qua defective. We claim that scientists understand a theory if they can recognize the theory’s underlying inference pattern(s) and if they can reconstruct and explain what is going on in specific cases of defective theories as well as consider what the theory would do if non-defective—even before finding ways of fixing it. Furthermore, we discuss the implications of this approach to understanding (...) the meta-metaphysics of Quantum Mechanics, specifically with regard to Quasi-set theory. We illustrate this by employing Quasi-set theory to structure a defective scientific theory and make possible the understanding of the theory. (shrink)

This article focuses on defective conditionals ? namely indicative conditionals whose antecedents are false and whose truth-values therefore cannot be determined. The problem is to decide which formal connective can adequately represent this usage. Classical logic renders defective conditionals true whereas traditional mathematics dismisses them as irrelevant. This difference in treatment entails that, at the propositional level, classical logic validates some sentences that are intuitively false in plane geometry. With two proofs, I show that the same flaw is shared by (...) a family of trivalent logics. I go on to examine the strict conditional and its derivatives. This family is the only one to avoid the faulty inference but it does so without addressing the status of the truth-value assigned to defective conditionals. (shrink)

Alexius Meinong developed a notion of defective objects in order to account for various logical and psychological paradoxes. The notion is of historical interest, since it presages recent work on the logical paradoxes by Herzberger and Kripke. But it fails to do the job it was designed for. However, a technique implicit in Meinong's investigation is more successful and can be adapted to resolve a similar paradox discovered by Romane Clark in a revised version of Meinong's Theory of Objects due (...) to Rapaport. One family of paradoxes remains, but it is argued that they are unavoidable and relatively harmless. (shrink)

Our aim in this paper is to employ conceptual negotiation to inform a method of rethinking defective food concepts, that is concepts that fail to suitably represent a certain food-related domain or that offer representations that run counter to the interests of their users. We begin by sorting out four dimensions of a food concept: the data upon which it rests and the methodology by which those data are gathered; the ontology that sustains it; the social acts that serve to (...) negotiate and establish the concept; and the aims and values that it fosters. We then discuss the conditions that make a food concept defective, pointing out four types of defects—fragility, polarization, incoherence, and schizophrenia—which we illustrate by means of two specific examples: local food and healthy food. (shrink)

Meiotic defects cause abnormal chromosome segregation leading to aneuploidy in mammalian oocytes. Chromosome segregation is particularly error‐prone in human oocytes, but the mechanisms behind such errors remain unclear. To explain the frequent chromosome segregation errors, recent investigations have identified multiple meiotic defects and explained how these defects occur in female meiosis. In particular, we review the causes of cohesin exhaustion, leaky spindle assembly checkpoint (SAC), inherently unstable meiotic spindle, fragmented kinetochores or centromeres, abnormal aurora kinases (AURK), and clinical genetic variants (...) in human oocytes. We mainly focus on meiotic defects in human oocytes, but also refer to the potential defects of female meiosis in mouse models. (shrink)

What epistemic defect needs to show up in a skeptical scenario if it is to effectively target some belief? According to the false belief account, the targeted belief must be false in the skeptical scenario. According to the competing ignorance account, the targeted belief must fall short of being knowledge in the skeptical scenario. This paper argues for two claims. The first is that, contrary to what is often assumed, the ignorance account is superior to the false belief account. The (...) second is that the ignorance account ultimately hobbles the skeptic. It does so for two reasons. First, when this account is joined with either a closure-based skeptical argument or a skeptical underdetermination argument, the best the skeptic can do is show that we don’t know that we know. And second, the ignorance account directly implies the maligned KK principle. (shrink)

Increased amyloid beta (Aβ) production by sequential cleavage of the amyloid precursor protein (APP) by the β‐ and γ‐secretases contributes to the etiological basis of Alzheimer's disease (AD). This process requires APP and the secretases to be in the same subcellular compartments, such as the endosomes. Since all membrane organelles in the endomembrane system are kinetically and functionally linked, any defects in the trafficking and sorting machinery would be expected to change the functional properties of the whole system. The Golgi (...) is a primary organelle for protein trafficking, sorting and modifications, and Golgi defects have been reported in AD. Here we hypothesize that Golgi fragmentation in AD accelerates APP trafficking and Aβ production. Furthermore, Golgi defects may perturb the proper trafficking and processing of many essential neuronal proteins, resulting in compromised neuronal function. Therefore, molecular tools that can restore Golgi structure and function could prove useful as potential drugs for AD treatment. (shrink)

The Defective Image develops the argument that Darwinism is predicated on a profound epistemological flaw and proposes to demonstrate that the limitations in Darwinism can be illustrated by its inability to furnish a credible explanation for communication. The author argues that Darwinism is more faith-based ideology than scientific theory and that its character as a faith-based ideology accounts for much of the rancor that characterizes the current debate over evolution.

Alexius Meinong developed a notion of defective objects in order to account for various logical and psychological paradoxes. The notion is of historical interest, since it presages recent work on the logical paradoxes by Herzberger and Kripke. But it fails to do the job it was designed for. However, a technique implicit in Meinong's investigation is more successful and can be adapted to resolve a similar paradox discovered by Romane Clark in a revised version of Meinong's Theory of Objects due (...) to Rapaport. One family of paradoxes remains, but it is argued that they are unavoidable and relatively harmless. (shrink)

A defective word is defined by paradigm as incomplete compared with the major class it belongs to. Defectiveness signifies the unwanted intrusion of morphological idiosyncrasy into syntax. Although this phenomenon has been a constant subject of studies, it has been ill incorporated into the theories of language. This present volume brings together scholars from various theoretical schools for an overdue typological view of defectiveness. It concentrates on some samples of idiosyncratic gaps which are assumed as indicative of the phenomenon of (...) defectiveness. Before delving into the specified topics of each chapter, this introductory chapter presents a typology of defective paradigms. It discusses terms used to describe defectiveness in synchronotic terms, and the possible diachrony of defective paradigms. (shrink)

Accurate and rapid defect identification based on pulsed eddy current testing plays an important role in the structural integrity and health monitoring of in-service equipment in the renewable energy system. However, in conventional data-driven defect identification methods, the signal feature extraction is time consuming and requires expert experience. To avoid the difficulty of manual feature extraction and overcome the shortcomings of the classic deep convolutional network, such as large memory and high computational cost, an intelligent defect recognition pipeline based on (...) the general Warblet transform method and optimized two-dimensional DCNN is proposed. The GWT method is used to convert the one-dimensional PECT signal to a 2D grayscale image used as the input of 2D DCNN. A compound method is proposed to optimize the baseline VGG16, a well-known DCNN, from four aspects including reducing the input size, adding batch normalization layer after every convolutional layer and fully connection layer, simplifying the FCs, and removing unimportant filters in Convs so as to reduce memory and computational costs while improving accuracy. Through a pulsed eddy current testing experiment considering interference factors including liftoff and noise, the following conclusion can be obtained. The time-frequency representation obtained by the GWT method not only has excellent ability in terms of the transient component analysis but also is less affected by the reduction of image size; the proposed optimized DCNN can accurately identify defect types without manual feature extraction. And compared to the baseline VGG16, the accuracy obtained by the optimized DCNN is improved by 7%, to about 99.58%, and the memory and computational cost are reduced by 98%. Moreover, compared with other well-known DCNNs, such as GoogLeNet, Inception V3, ResNet50, and AlexNet, the optimized network has significant advantages in terms of accuracy and computational cost, too. (shrink)

The desire-satisfaction theory of welfare says, roughly, that one's life goes well to the extent that one's desires are satisfied. On standard 'actualist' versions of the theory, it doesn't matter what you desire. So long as you are getting what you actually want – whatever it is – things are going well for you. There is widespread agreement that these standard versions are incorrect, because we can desire things that are bad for us -– in other words, because there are (...) 'defective desires'. The aim of this paper is to defend the actualist desire-satisfaction theory against the problem of defective desires. I aim to show how the theory can accommodate the obvious fact that we can desire things that are bad for us. Admittedly, there are kinds of allegedly defective desire the theory cannot accommodate, but these desires, I argue, turn out not to be defective in the relevant way. (shrink)

Here, we deal with the question of under which circumstances can scientists achieve a legitimate understanding of defective theories qua defective. We claim that scientists understand a theory if they can recognize the theory’s underlying inference pattern(s) and if they can reconstruct and explain what is going on in specific cases of defective theories as well as consider what the theory would do if non-defective –even before finding ways of fixing it. Furthermore, we discuss the implications of this approach to (...) understanding the meta-metaphysics of Quantum Mechanics, specifically with regard to Quasi-set theory. We illustrate this by employing Quasi-set theory to structure a defective scientific theory and make possible the understanding of the theory. (shrink)

Ultrasonic excitation has been widely used in the detection of microcracks on metal surfaces, but there are problems such as poor excitation effect of ultrasonic pulse, long time to reach the best excitation, and difficult to find microcracks. In this paper, an adaptive ultrasonic pulse excitation device and infrared thermal imaging technology have been combined, as well as their control method, to solve the problem. The adaptive ultrasonic pulse excitation device adds intelligent modules to realize automatic adjustment of detection parameters, (...) which can quickly obtain reliable excitation; the multidegree-of-freedom base realizes the three-dimensional direction change of the ultrasonic gun to adapt to different excitation occasions. When the appropriate ultrasonic excitation makes microcracks in the resonance state, the microcracks can be frictionated, which produce heat rise with the temperature. Then, the microcrack defect can be detected by the infrared thermal instrument through the different surface temperatures with imaging recognition method. Our detection experiments of the titanium alloy plates and the aluminum alloy profiles of marine engineering show that the method can get reliable detection parameters in a short time and measure the crack length effectively. It can be used in many aspects such as crack detection in mechanical structures or complex equipment operating conditions and industrial production processes. (shrink)

Michael Tye's response to my “Grain” (Block ) and “Windows” (Block ) raises general metaphilosophical issues about the value of intuitions and judgments about one's perceptions and the relations of those intuitions and judgments to empirical research, as well as specific philosophical issues about the relation between seeing, attention and de re thought. I will argue that Tye's appeal to what is (§. 2) “intuitively obvious, once we reflect upon these cases” (“intuition”) is problematic. I will also argue that first (...) person judgments can be problematic when used on their own as Tye does but can be valuable when integrated with empirical results. (shrink)

This chapter evaluates the defective verbal paradigms in the Hungarian language. The first section of the chapter provides an overview of the defectiveness in Hungarian, with emphasis on the systematic, phonotactically motivated defectiveness of the paradigms of some verbal stems. The aim of this section is to be as theoretically neutral and descriptive as possible to facilitate a good comparison with other types of defectiveness in other languages. The second section of the chapter discusses the results of the experiments which (...) are conducted in order to determine the various aspects of the defectiveness in the verbal paradigm. Some of the aspects tested include: the gap locations such as the occurrence and variation of forms in other designated cells of the verbal paradigm, and the correlations between the occurrence of forms in some designated cells; and the gap properties such as the differences in the classification of some verb stems into various stem-classes, and the range of variation exhibited by the forms that native Hungarian speakers accept as fill-ins for the gaps that are present in the paradigms of the defective verbs. (shrink)

I argue that the conception of reflective equilibrium that is generally accepted in contemporary philosophy is defective and should be replaced with a conception of fruitful reflective disequilibrium which prohibits ad hoc manoeuvres, encourages new approaches, and eschews all justification in favour of continuous improvement. I suggest how the conception of fruitful disequilibrium can be applied more effectively to moral enquiry, to encourage genuine progress in moral knowledge, if we make moral theory empirically testable by adopting a meta-ethical postulate which (...) is independently plausible. (shrink)

This chapter discusses the defective paradigms of the reflexive nouns and participles in the Latvian language. In Latvian, the reflexiveness of the nouns and the verbs functions as a complex derivational and inflectional system. In this language, the reflexive verbs, participles, and nouns are formed through the fusion of verbal or noun forms with enclitic accusative form of the reflexive pronoun. Reflexive verbs have full person, tense and mood paradigms whilst reflexive nouns and participles have defective paradigms in Latvian. Although (...) the rationale behind defectiveness of the paradigms of the reflexive nouns and participles are difficult to pinpoint, there are several types of compensation for the defectiveness in the Modern Latvian. These include the use of non-standard forms, the use of corresponding non-reflexive participle and noun forms, and the use of other forms of paradigms in lieu of the missing ones. These alternative paradigms depend however on the syntactic function of the word-form. Some topics discussed herein include: derivation and semantics of reflexive nouns; paradigmatic system of reflexive nouns and participles; and functioning of the paradigms of reflexive nouns and participles. (shrink)

One common criticism of deflationism is that it does not have the resources to explain defective discourse. This problem is especially pressing for someone like Robert Brandom, who not only endorses deflationist accounts of truth, reference, and predication, but also refuses to use representational relations to explain content and propositional attitudes. To address this problem, I suggest that Brandom should explain defective discourse in terms of what it is to treat some portion of discourse as defective. To illustrate this strategy, (...) I present an extension of his theory of content and use it to provide an explanation of confusion. The result is a theory of confusion based on Joseph Camp's recent treatment. The extension of Brandom's theory of content involves additions to his account of scorekeeping that allow members of a discursive practice to accept different standards of inferential correctness. (shrink)

This is a translation from the Russian of Nikolai Lossky’s “Heдocтaтки гнoceoлoгiи Бepгcoнa и влiянie иxъ нa eгo мeтaфизикy” (The Defects of Bergson’s Epistemology and Their Consequences on His Metaphysics), which was published in the journal Boпpocы филocoфiи и пcиxoлoгiи (Questions of Philosophy and Psychology) in 1913. In this article, Lossky criticizes Bergson’s epistemological dualism, which completely separates intuition from reason, and which rejects reason in favor of intuition. For Bergson, reality is continuous, indivisible, fluid, etc., and reason distorts it (...) through its acts of division, abstraction, extraction, and so on. Lossky argues that this conclusion does not follow. Reason does not distort the living flow of reality; it rather provides a window unto aspects of the otherwise undivided seamless flowing organic whole. In fact, reason is itself a species of intuition in its own right, namely an intellectual intuition, the object of which is the atemporal facet of the world (the Platonic ideal realm), which is necessary for the existence of its temporal facet. Lossky thus challenges Bergson’s one-sided and self-defeating reduction of being to a flux of changes devoid of changing things. (Frédéric Tremblay). (shrink)

In this paper, we do two things. First, we provide some support for adopting a version of the meaningless strategy with respect to the liar paradox, and, second, we extend that strategy, by providing, albeit tentatively, a solution to that paradox—one that is semantic, rather than logical.

It is commonly accepted that the spelling of the pre-exilic books of the Bible was generally defective like that of contemporary epigraphy, and that the matres lectionis were inserted into the original texts by scribes during the first half of the Second Temple period. This article argues that the orthography of the ancient books of the Bible was from its beginning similar to that of the MT. The difference between the current biblical spelling and the defective spelling of the inscriptions (...) should instead be understood as a matter of different registers. (shrink)

Political scientists generally consider that the incentive for legislators to switch parties lies in their desire to be re-elected. While some scholars attribute defection to the legislators’ popularity and strong connections with their constituents which enable them to be re-elected without relying on party labels, others assert that legislators switch if they perceive that staying put might threaten their chances of re-election. In this paper, we find that the two assumptions, to some extent, contradict each other. More surprisingly, the (...) two contradictory hypotheses cohabit under the single non-transferable vote system. From an analysis of the switching in the Taiwanese Legislative Yuan, the empirical evidence shows that because of fierce intraparty competition in the multimember districts, not only barely elected but also top-ranked legislators switched party affiliation in order to avoid the loss in votes or even seats to their copartisans and to maximize their chances of re-election. (shrink)

There are three main problems in track fastener defect detection based on image: The number of abnormal fastener pictures is scarce, and supervised learning detection model is difficult to establish. The potential data features obtained by different feature extraction methods are different. Some methods focus on edge features, and some methods focus on texture features. Different features have different detection capabilities, and these features are not effectively fused and utilized. The detection of the track fastener clip will be interfered by (...) the track fastener bolt subimage. Aiming at the above three problems, a method for track fastener defects detection based on Local Deep Feature Fusion Network is proposed. Firstly, the track fastener image segmentation method is used to obtain the track fastener clip subimage, which can effectively reduce the interference of bolt subimage features on the track fastener clip detection. Secondly, the edge features and texture features of track fastener clip subimages are extracted by Autoencoder and Restricted Boltzmann Machine, and the features are fused. Finally, the similarity measurement method Mahalanobis Distance is used to detect defects in track fasteners. The effectiveness of the proposed method is verified by real Pandrol track fastener images. (shrink)

The current study investigates how native speakers of a morphologically complex language handle uncertainty related to linguistic forms that have gaps in their inflectional paradigms. We analyze their strategies of dealing with paradigmatic defectivity and how these strategies are motivated by subjective contemporaneousness, frequency, acceptability, and other lexical and structural characteristics of words. We administered a verb production task with Finnish native speakers using verbs from a small non-productive inflectional type that has many paradigmatic gaps and asked participants to inflect (...) the verbs in a given context. Inflectional uncertainty was measured by the number of different forms the participants produced for each verb. We classified produced forms that were not expected as either synonymous or novel and measured their optimal string alignment distance to expected forms. Our analyses revealed that a usage-based approach to paradigmatic defectivity fits better with the obtained results than a classical approach typically met in dictionaries and descriptive grammars. Thus, we argue, that paradigmatic defectivity can be better described as a dynamic rather than a static system, where gaps represent a continuum of possible inflectional choices rather than a lack of an inflectional variant. (shrink)

In this paper, in order to achieve automatic defect identification for pneumatic pressure equipment, an improved feature extraction algorithm eddy current pulsed thermography is presented. The presented feature extraction algorithm contains four elements: data block selection; variable step search; relation value classification; and between-class distance decision function. The data block selection and variable step search are integrated to decrease the redundant computations in the automatic defect identification. The goal of the classification and between-class distance calculation is to select the typical (...) features of thermographic sequence. The main image information can be extracted by the method precisely and efficiently. Experimental results are provided to demonstrate the capabilities and benefits of the proposed algorithm in automatic defect identification. (shrink)

Neural tube defects (NTDs) are very serious malformations for the fetus, causing either low life expectancy or a chance of survival only with costly and difficult surgical interventions. In western countries the average prevalence is 1/1000-2000 and in Turkey it is 4/1000. The aim of the study was to characterize ethical approaches at institutional level to the fetus with an NTD and the mother, and the role of health care professionals in four major centers in Turkey. The authors chose perinatology (...) units of four university hospitals and prepared questionnaires for the responsible professionals concerning their own and their institution’s ethical approaches to the fetus with an NTD and the mother. The investigation revealed that there were no institutional ethical frameworks or ethics committees available to professional teams in the units. The roles of the health care professionals and their individual decisions and approaches based on ethical principles are described. The ethical decision-making process concerning fetuses with NTDs, examples of institutional approaches to the topic and institutional frameworks, and the role of nurses and other health care professionals are all discussed, based on a literature review. The authors suggest that institutional ethical frameworks, ethics committees, professionals’ ethics education and multidisciplinary teamwork should be established for critical situations such as fetuses with an NTD. (shrink)

Propositional Attitudes defends an account of ‘believes’ on which the verb is contextually sensitive. x believes that S says that x has a belief which is ‘well rendered’ or acceptably translated by S; since contextually variable information about what makes for a good translation helps determine the extension of ‘believes,’ the verb is contextually sensitive. Sider and Soames criticize this account. They say it has unacceptable consequences in cases in which we make multiple ascriptions of belief to a single individual (...) - as happens, for example, when we say that Odile believes such and such, that the woman in the corner believes so and so, but are ignorant of the identity of Odile and the woman in the corner.I will distinguish two objections along these lines, and argue that neither is forceful. The objections differ as to whether or not the speaker mistakenly presupposes that the believers under discussion are distinct. (shrink)

The non-identity problem is that some actions seem morally wrong even though, by affecting future people’s identities, they are worse for nobody. In this paper, I further develop and defend a lesser-known solution to the problem, one according to which when such actions are wrong, it is not because of what they do or produce, but rather just because of why they were performed. In particular, I argue that the actions in non-identity cases are wrong just when and because they (...) result from, or reflect in those who have performed them, a morally dubious character trait. (shrink)

Cognitive psychologists have uncovered a number of natural tendencies to systematic errors in thinking. This paper proposes some ways that intellectual character virtues might help correct these sources of epistemic unreliability. We begin with an overview of some insights from recent work in dual-process cognitive psychology regarding ‘biases and heuristics’, and argue that the dozens of hazards the psychologists catalogue arise from combinations and specifications of a small handful of more basic patterns of thinking. We expound four of these, and (...) sketch how they conspire to produce the myriad biases, heuristics, and illusions. We then offer accounts of two character virtues—self-vigilance and intellectual vitality—and explain how these virtues could help correct our error-prone thinking. The self-vigilant person appreciates her vulnerability to natural epistemic defects, is on the watch for cues to the working of these possible error-makers, and intelligently acts to correct for them. The intellectually vital person is naturally or has learned to be energetic, active, alert, attentive, and inquisitive, contrary to the natural tendency to cognitive laziness. We suggest that these intellectual virtues, like the moral virtues, will cluster in the personality, and will tend to be mutually reinforcing and mutually recruiting, even as each has its own corrective function. (shrink)

Patrick Stokes has argued that although many conspiracy theories are true, we should reject the policy of particularism (that is, the policy of investigating conspiracy theories if they are plausible and believing them if that is what the evidence suggests) and should instead adopt a policy of principled skepticism, subjecting conspiracy theories – or at least the kinds of theories that are generally derided as such – to much higher epistemic standards than their non-conspiratorial rivals, and believing them only if (...) they are proven up to the hilt. The reason is that although some conspiracy theories are true (or otherwise epistemically kosher) there is a widespread practice of conspiracy theorizing which leads to the social acceptance of conspiracy theories which (much like Lord Byron) are mad, bad and dangerous to ‘know’, leading to radically false beliefs about the natural and political worlds (for instance to Trump’s claim that Global Warming is a ‘Chinese Hoax’). Thus Stokes is a defender of the epistemic status quo in which the punditocracy routinely dismisses and sneers at ‘conspiracy theories’, simply because they are conspiracy theories, whilst admitting sotto voce that once in a blue moon there are some conspiracy theories that are true. It is just the he would prefer the epistemic policy of the punditocracy to be the policy of the populace at large. Stokes seems to be suggesting that although particularism looks like a sensible epistemic policy (and might indeed be the correct policy in an ideal world), if it were put into practice at the level of public debate it would give a specious air of plausibility to many false and dangerous conspiracy theories with pernicious social effects. I reply that the actual moral costs of conspiracy ‘skepticism’ (as it is currently practiced) exceed the likely costs of particularism, especially if it is informed by some sensible heuristics, ruling out some conspiracy theories as crazy and ruling in others as relatively sane. For the conspiracy ‘skepticism’ as currently practiced is highly selective, pouring scorn and contempt on conspiracy theories which threaten current elites whilst giving the conspiratorial concoctions of those elites something close to a free pass. (shrink)

I present a puzzle about inquiry and discuss two potential solutions. The puzzle stems from two equally compelling sets of data suggesting that, on the one hand, there’s something epistemically defective with inquiring into questions that don’t have true answers. On the other hand, however, there can be scenarios in which we are epistemically permitted to inquire into questions that don’t have true answers. How is it that inquiries into questions that don’t have true answers can both be defective and (...) permissible from an epistemic point of view? The first solution I consider maintains that inquiries into questions that don’t have true answers are always impermissible but can be excusable. The second solution maintains that inquiries into questions that don’t have true answers are bad inquiries that can be conducted by inquirers we can legitimately trust. I argue against the former and in favor of the latter. (shrink)