In this paper I describe the imaginary community of Gullible. Gulliblians are led by moral pressures to believe whatever they are told and, in the scenario that I sketch, this leads to them having widespread contradictory beliefs. This community is nevertheless intelligible to us given what we know about their situation and their moral code. Davidson, however, holds there to be what I call a logicist constraint on interpretation: thinkers can only be interpreted if a good proportion of their beliefs (...) are rational and, for Davidson, rationality entails logical consistency. The possibility of Gullible therefore forces us to reject this logicist aspect of Davidson’s account of interpretation and intelligibility. (shrink)

Reductionism about testimony has become less popular as philosophers have uncovered our epistemic dependence on others. Meanwhile, both non-reductionism and the interpersonal view face a challenge from gullibility. Surprisingly, the concept of gullibility has not been sustainedly examined. The primary goal in this paper is to propose an analysis of gullibility. After some introductory remarks, we begin this paper by discussing an account of gullibility in terms of insensitivity to defeaters. We argue that this account cannot (...) accommodate cases where agents are gullible. We, therefore, offer a dispositional account of gullibility. In so doing, we show how gullibility differs from other epistemic vices vis-à-vis its interpersonal features. We also discuss how treating gullibility as an intellectual vice has salient implications for the debate between reductionists and non-reductionists about gullibility. (shrink)

There is a general consensus among religious scholars that Pentecostalism has risen phenomenally in Africa and Zimbabwe is no exception. In most cases, Pentecostalism has been presented as a sophisticated brand of Christianity while members of African Independent churches are shown to be gullible. The newly founded Pentecostal churches are more focused on gospreneurship while the media is busy with cases of cheating, dishonesty and the sexual abuse of women in these churches. Thus, academic scholars have begun to pay their (...) attention on gullibility in Pentecostalism. Unfortunately, not many scholarly works have looked at literary texts that bring out the gullibility of members of Pentecostal churches in Zimbabwe. This article seeks to bridge this gap by analysing Aaron Chiundura Moyo’s Kereke Inofa [The Church Can die]. The main purpose is to bring out the significance of literary texts in projecting societal ills, specifically the gender power dynamics in Zimbabwean Pentecostal churches that may be difficult to deal with directly. The focus is on how women and some men are victims of the whims of some Pentecostal church leaders. The article is informed by the socio-historical approach, which states that artists derive the material for their works of art, subject matter, images and artistic languages from the life experiences of their societies. The socio-historical approach enables the researcher to understand the prevalence of gullibility in Pentecostal churches in Zimbabwe. The article relies heavily on content analysis of Moyo’s Kereke Inofa’s presentation of deception, and infidelity in Pentecostal Churches being performed on members who are projected in this play as ‘gullible’.Contribution: This article’s contribution lies in its critical analysis of gender and gullibility in African Pentecostalism in Zimbabwe. It is significant as it utilises a literary text to project the ills in Pentecostal churches and women’s sexual vulnerabilities. (shrink)

Research in the psychology of deception detection implies that Fricker, in making her case for reductionism in the epistemology of testimony, overestimates both the epistemic demerits of the antireductionist policy of trusting speakers blindly and the epistemic merits of the reductionist policy of monitoring speakers for trustworthiness: folk psychological prejudices to the contrary notwithstanding, it turns out that monitoring is on a par (in terms both of the reliability of the process and of the sensitivity of the beliefs that it (...) produces) with blind trust. The consequence is that while (a version of) Fricker’s argument for the necessity of a reduction succeeds, her argument for the availability of reductions fails. This does not, however, condemn us to endorse standard pessimistic reductionism, according to which there is no testimonial knowledge, for recent research concerning the methods used by subjects to discover deception in non-laboratory settings suggests that only a more moderate form of pessimism is in order. (shrink)

Trust is a key ingredient of business activities. Scams are spectacular betrayals of trust. When the victim is a powerful organization that does not look vulnerable at first sight, we can suspect that this organization has developed an excessive trust, or over-trust. In this article, we take over-trust as the result of the intentional production of gullibility by the scammer. The analysis of a historically famous scam case, the Elf “Great Sniffer Hoax,” suggests that the victim is made gullible (...) by the scammer through a range of seduction and protection maneuvers that prevent the victim from developing doubts and suspicions. An integrated framework of the production of gullibility in organizations is proposed in order to further our understanding of over-trust. We discuss how these insights might be extended, beyond the case of scams, to more ordinary contexts of business activities. (shrink)

_This mirror for princes sheds light on the relationship between spiritual and political authority in early modern Egypt_ This guide to political behavior and expediency offers advice to Sufi shaykhs, or spiritual guides, on how to interact and negotiate with powerful secular officials, judges, and treasurers, or emirs. Translated into English for the first time, it is a unique account of the relationship between spiritual and political authority in late medieval / early modern Islamic society.

Are we gullible? Can we be easily influenced by what others tell us, even if they do not deserve our trust? Many strands of research, from social psychology to cultural evolution suggest that humans are by nature conformist and eager to follow prestigious leaders. By contrast, an evolutionary perspective suggests that humans should be vigilant towards communicated information, so as not to be misled too often. Work in experimental psychology shows that humans are equipped with sophisticated mechanisms that allow them (...) to carefully evaluate communicated information. These open vigilance mechanisms lead us to reject messages that clash with our prior beliefs, unless the source of the message has earned our trust, or provides good arguments, in which case we can adaptively change our minds. These mechanisms make us largely immune to mass persuasion, explaining why propaganda, political campaigns, advertising, and other attempts at persuading large groups nearly always fall in deaf ears. However, some false beliefs manage to spread through communication. I argue that most popular false beliefs are held reflectively, which means that they have little effect on our thoughts and behaviors, and that many false beliefs can be socially beneficial. Accepting such beliefs thus reflects a much weaker failure in our evaluation of communicated information than might at first appear. (shrink)

According to most accounts of trust, you can only trust other people (or groups of people). To trust is to think that another has goodwill, or something to that effect. I sketch a different form of trust: the unquestioning attitude. What it is to trust, in this sense, is to settle one’s mind about something, to stop questioning it. To trust is to rely on a resource while suspending deliberation over its reliability. Trust lowers the barrier of monitoring, challenging, checking, (...) and questioning. Trust sets up open pipelines between yourself and parts of the external world. Trust permits external resources to have a similar relationship to one as one’s internal cognitive faculties. This creates efficiency, but at the price of exquisite vulnerability. We must trust in this way because we are cognitively limited beings in a cognitively overwhelming world. Crucially, we can hold the unquestioning attitude towards objects and technologies. When I trust my climbing rope, I stop worrying about its reliability. When I trust my online calendaring system, I simply go to the events indicated, without question. But, one might worry, how could one ever hold such a normatively loaded attitude as trust towards mere objects? How could it ever make sense to feel betrayed by an object? Trust is our engine for expanding and outsourcing our agency — for binding external processes into our practical selves. Thus, we can be betrayed by our smartphones in the same way that we can be betrayed by our memory. When we trust, we try to make something a part of our agency, and we are betrayed when our part lets us down. To unquestioningly trust something is to let it in—to attempt to bring it inside one’s practical functioning. This suggests a new form of gullibility: agential gullibility, which occurs when agents too hastily and carelessly integrate external resources into their own agency. (shrink)

Some of the most problematic human behaviors involve vices of the mind such as arrogance, closed-mindedness, dogmatism, gullibility, and intellectual cowardice, as well as wishful or conspiratorial thinking. What sorts of things are epistemic vices? How do we detect and mitigate them? How and why do these vices prevent us from acquiring knowledge, and what is their role in sustaining patterns of ignorance? What is their relation to implicit or unconscious bias? How do epistemic vices and systems of social (...) oppression relate to one another? Do we unwittingly absorb such traits from the process of socialization and communities around us? Are epistemic vices traits for which we can blamed? Can there be institutional and collective epistemic vices? This book seeks to answer these important questions about the vices of the mind and their roles in our social and epistemic lives, and is the first collection of its kind. Organized into three parts, chapters by outstanding scholars explore the nature of epistemic vices, specific examples of these vices, and case studies in applied vice epistemology, including education and politics. Alongside these foundational questions, the volume offers sophisticated accounts of vices both new and familiar. These include epistemic arrogance and servility, epistemic injustice, epistemic snobbishness, conspiratorial thinking, procrastination, and forms of closed-mindedness. Vice Epistemology is essential reading for students of ethics, epistemology, and virtue theory, and various areas of applied, feminist, and social philosophy. It will also be of interest to practitioners, scholars, and activists in politics, law, and education. (shrink)

Vice epistemology is the philosophical study of the nature, identity, and epistemological significance of intellectual vices. Such vices include gullibility, dogmatism, prejudice, closed-mindedness, and negligence. These are intellectual character vices, that is, intellectual vices that are also character traits. I ask how the notion of an intellectual character vice should be understood, whether such vices exist, and how they might be epistemologically significant. The proposal is that intellectual character vices are intellectual character traits that impede effective and responsible inquiry. (...) I argue that situationist critiques of virtue epistemology pose no significant threat to this proposal. Studies by social psychologists of belief in conspiracy theories suggest that it is sometimes appropriate to explain questionable beliefs by reference to intellectual character vices. Neither ‘regulative’ nor ‘analytic’ epistemology has any good reason to question the epistemological significance of such vices. (shrink)

Conspiracy theories pose a serious threat to our society these days. People often dismiss conspiracy theory believers as at best gullible, or more often unintelligent. However, there are cases in which individuals end up believing conspiracy theories out of no epistemic fault of their own. In this paper, I want to offer a diagnosis of the problem by focusing on the genealogy of the conspiracy theory beliefs. Drawing on a novel interpretation of Nietzsche’s use of genealogies, I argue that the (...) problem of belief in conspiracy theories is best understood as a broadly political one regarding the oppressive, dominating, and exploitative world in which conspiracy theory believers find themselves in. I, then, draw on the work of the feminist philosopher, María Lugones, to offer an approach to addressing the problem of belief in conspiracy theories which recommends radical humility and playfulness. (shrink)

One of the central points of contention in the epistemology of testimony concerns the uniqueness (or not) of the justification of beliefs formed through testimony--whether such justification can be accounted for in terms of, or 'reduced to,' other familiar sort of justification, e.g. without relying on any epistemic principles unique to testimony. One influential argument for the reductionist position, found in the work of Elizabeth Fricker, argues by appeal to the need for the hearer to monitor the testimony for credibility. (...) Fricker (1994) argues, first, that some monitoring for trustworthiness is required if the hearer is to avoid being gullible, and second, that reductionism but not anti-reductionism is compatible with ascribing an important role to the process of monitoring in the course of justifiably accepting observed testimony. In this paper we argue that such an argument fails. (shrink)

Philosophers agree that an important part of our knowledge is acquired via testimony. One of the main objectives of social epistemology is therefore to specify the conditions under which a hearer is justified in accepting a proposition stated by a source. Non-reductionists, who think that testimony could be considered as an a priori source of knowledge, as well as reductionists, who think that another type of justification has to be added to testimony, share a common conception about children development. Non-reductionists (...) believe that infants and children are fundamentally gullible and their gullibility could be seen as an example for justifying testimony, while reductionists believe that this gullibility is merely an exception that should be taken into account. The objective of this paper is to review contemporary literature in developmental psychology providing empirical grounds likely to clarify this philosophical debate. What emerges from current research is a more elaborated vision of children’s attitude toward testimony. Even at a very young age, children do not blindly swallow information coming from testimony; doubtful or contradictory information is automatically screened by their cognitive system. Even if they are unable to give positive reasons for the acceptance of a given testimony, young children are not gullible. Such empirical findings tend to call into question the radical opposition between reductionism and non-reductionism. (shrink)

This paper presents two studies on the development and validation of a ten-item scale of epistemic vice and the relationship between epistemic vice and misinformation and fake news. Epistemic vices have been defined as character traits that interfere with acquiring, maintaining, and transmitting knowledge. Examples of epistemic vice are gullibility and indifference to knowledge. It has been hypothesized that epistemically vicious people are especially susceptible to misinformation and conspiracy theories. We conducted one exploratory and one confirmatory observational survey study (...) on Amazon Mechanical Turk among people living in the United States. We show that two psychological traits underlie the range of epistemic vices that we investigated: indifference to truth and rigidity. Indifference manifests itself in a lack of motivation to find the truth. Rigidity manifests itself in being insensitive to evidence. We develop a scale to measure epistemic vice with the subscales indifference and rigidity. The Epistemic Vice Scale is internally consistent; has good convergent, divergent, and discriminant validity; and is strongly associated with the endorsement of misinformation and conspiracy theories. Epistemic vice explains additional variance in the endorsement of misinformation and conspiracy theories over and above demographic and related psychological concepts and shows medium to large effect sizes across outcome measures. We demonstrate that epistemic vice differs from existing psychological constructs, and show that the scale can explain individual differences in dealing with misinformation and conspiracy theories. We conclude that epistemic vice might contribute to “postfactive” ways of thinking. (shrink)

This article addresses important epistemological issues raised by Barry Hallen and J. Olubi Sodipo’s pioneering philosophical fieldwork among Yoruba herbalists or masters of medicine (onisegun). More precisely, I shall primarily investigate, as well as object to, the unduly restrictive view they take on testimony in Yoruba epistemic practice. With this criticism as the starting point, but still based on the cases Hallen and Sodipo provide, I explore different ways in which an “oral culture” like Yoruba (as traditionally depicted) can rely (...) on testimony as a source of justification without succumbing to the gullible and uncritical attitude towards tradition such societies have been charged with. To this purpose, I put to use relevant developments in analytic epistemology taking place after Hallen and Sodipo published their work. (shrink)

We seem to be responsible for our beliefs in a distinctively epistemic way. We often hold each other to account for the beliefs that we hold. We do this by criticising other believers as ‘gullible’ or ‘biased’, and by trying to persuade others to revise their beliefs. But responsibility for belief looks hard to understand because we seem to lack control over our beliefs. In this paper, I argue that we can make progress in our understanding of responsibility for belief (...) by thinking about it in parallel with another kind of responsibility: legal responsibility for criminal negligence. Specifically, I argue that that a popular account of responsibility for belief, which grounds it in belief’s reasons-responsiveness, faces a problem analogous to one faced by H.L.A. Hart’s influential capacity-based account of culpability. This points towards a more promising account of responsibility of belief, though, if we draw on accounts of negligence that improve on Hart’s. Broadly speaking, the account of negligence that improves on Hart’s account grounds culpability in a concern for others’ interests, whereas my account of epistemic responsibility grounds responsibility for belief in a concern for the truth. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:"What Is Philosophy?"The Status of World Philosophy in the ProfessionRobert C. SolomonThe question "What is philosophy?" is both one of the most virtuously self-effacing and one of the most obnoxious that philosophers today tend to ask. It is virtuously self-effacing insofar as it questions, with some misgivings, its own behavior, the worth of the questions it asks, and the significance of the enterprise itself. It is obnoxious when it (...) refuses to question its own behavior but instead takes that same behavior as the exclusive standard to delegitimize any other activity that dares to call itself "philosophy." Thus, for most of this century, Anglo-American and most European philosophers have simply ignored the rich philosophical traditions of Africa, Asia, Latin and Native America, and the rest of the world. Some leading African American and African European philosophers have dismissed "ethnophilosophy" as "not philosophy," presumably to protect their own analytic credentials. Universities as far flung as Singapore, Sierra Leone, and New Delhi have prided themselves on their fidelity to Oxbridge philosophy. It seems that the globalization of free market economics goes with the globalization of one brief moment in philosophy, with similarly devastating effects on local cultures and the rich varieties of human experience.Philosophy might be thought of as made up of two components: critical thinking and passionate vision. But "critical thinking" does not necessarily imply the hermeneutics of suspicion, skepticism, or intellectual paranoia—all too often the trademarks of the bright young professional philosopher. One can be "critical," that is, reflective, while at the same time be committed, even devoted, to an idea or a way of thinking. The emphasis on passionate vision, however, is just as essential, and any philosophy that doesn't include both components just isn't worthy of the name. Without passionate vision, we get that utterly eviscerated focus on forms of argumentation—philosophia minimalia—devoid of "empirical" content (that is to say, content) and, as far as most people are concerned, devoid of any interest. Without critical reflection, we get gullibility and the worst of New Age philosophy, accepting of any kind of nonsense, just because it stirs the passions. But simply to assume that philosophy must be as rigorously self-questioning as modern European and Anglo-American philosophy is a subtle form of ethnic chauvinism. It eliminates from the realm of philosophy not only African ethnophilosophy and Latin and Native American and South Pacific mythology but a good deal of the philosophy of religion, the basis (for better or worse) of the development of Western philosophy over much of the past two thousand years. [End Page 100]I have just withdrawn from a recent dispute, in a respectable and supposedly eclectic philosophy journal, in which my worst fears in this regard were rather bluntly confirmed. I had made the point mentioned above—rather matter-of-factly, I thought—that if (analytic) philosophy dismisses or ignores modes of thinking that are not obviously self-critical and are presented poetically instead of by way of positions to be argued for, then a good deal of the world's philosophy, including a good deal of Western philosophy, would be left out of the arena. The journal's board reacted indignantly, to put it mildly, to the suggestion that anything should count as "philosophy" that was not sufficiently self-critical in just this sense. But what about the millennium or so of religious philosophy in the West? Does anyone believe that thinkers like Anselm, or Alvin Plantiga for that matter, are seriously skeptical of the truth of Christianity, as they go through their admittedly brilliant argumentative routines? For that matter, to what extent is the emphasis on logical form and argument subjected to scrutiny in contemporary analytic philosophy? (As one of the foremost practitioners of that art commented, "Metaphilosophy makes me sick.")Some of the hostility to world philosophy, to be sure, turns on the conflict between philosophy and religion, which may have its origins in ancient and medieval philosophy but emerges full-blown with the Enlightenment and its campaign against "superstition." But many people and a good many cultures do not distinguish between philosophy and religion. If we consider the word "philosophy... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:"What Is Philosophy?"The Status of World Philosophy in the ProfessionRobert C. SolomonThe question "What is philosophy?" is both one of the most virtuously self-effacing and one of the most obnoxious that philosophers today tend to ask. It is virtuously self-effacing insofar as it questions, with some misgivings, its own behavior, the worth of the questions it asks, and the significance of the enterprise itself. It is obnoxious when it (...) refuses to question its own behavior but instead takes that same behavior as the exclusive standard to delegitimize any other activity that dares to call itself "philosophy." Thus, for most of this century, Anglo-American and most European philosophers have simply ignored the rich philosophical traditions of Africa, Asia, Latin and Native America, and the rest of the world. Some leading African American and African European philosophers have dismissed "ethnophilosophy" as "not philosophy," presumably to protect their own analytic credentials. Universities as far flung as Singapore, Sierra Leone, and New Delhi have prided themselves on their fidelity to Oxbridge philosophy. It seems that the globalization of free market economics goes with the globalization of one brief moment in philosophy, with similarly devastating effects on local cultures and the rich varieties of human experience.Philosophy might be thought of as made up of two components: critical thinking and passionate vision. But "critical thinking" does not necessarily imply the hermeneutics of suspicion, skepticism, or intellectual paranoia—all too often the trademarks of the bright young professional philosopher. One can be "critical," that is, reflective, while at the same time be committed, even devoted, to an idea or a way of thinking. The emphasis on passionate vision, however, is just as essential, and any philosophy that doesn't include both components just isn't worthy of the name. Without passionate vision, we get that utterly eviscerated focus on forms of argumentation—philosophia minimalia—devoid of "empirical" content (that is to say, content) and, as far as most people are concerned, devoid of any interest. Without critical reflection, we get gullibility and the worst of New Age philosophy, accepting of any kind of nonsense, just because it stirs the passions. But simply to assume that philosophy must be as rigorously self-questioning as modern European and Anglo-American philosophy is a subtle form of ethnic chauvinism. It eliminates from the realm of philosophy not only African ethnophilosophy and Latin and Native American and South Pacific mythology but a good deal of the philosophy of religion, the basis (for better or worse) of the development of Western philosophy over much of the past two thousand years. [End Page 100]I have just withdrawn from a recent dispute, in a respectable and supposedly eclectic philosophy journal, in which my worst fears in this regard were rather bluntly confirmed. I had made the point mentioned above—rather matter-of-factly, I thought—that if (analytic) philosophy dismisses or ignores modes of thinking that are not obviously self-critical and are presented poetically instead of by way of positions to be argued for, then a good deal of the world's philosophy, including a good deal of Western philosophy, would be left out of the arena. The journal's board reacted indignantly, to put it mildly, to the suggestion that anything should count as "philosophy" that was not sufficiently self-critical in just this sense. But what about the millennium or so of religious philosophy in the West? Does anyone believe that thinkers like Anselm, or Alvin Plantiga for that matter, are seriously skeptical of the truth of Christianity, as they go through their admittedly brilliant argumentative routines? For that matter, to what extent is the emphasis on logical form and argument subjected to scrutiny in contemporary analytic philosophy? (As one of the foremost practitioners of that art commented, "Metaphilosophy makes me sick.")Some of the hostility to world philosophy, to be sure, turns on the conflict between philosophy and religion, which may have its origins in ancient and medieval philosophy but emerges full-blown with the Enlightenment and its campaign against "superstition." But many people and a good many cultures do not distinguish between philosophy and religion. If we consider the word "philosophy... (shrink)

This paper argues that vice-charging, the practice of charging other persons with epistemic vice, can itself be epistemically vicious. It identifies some potential vices of vice-charging and identifies knowledge of other people as a type of knowledge that is obstructed by epistemically vicious attributions of epistemic vice. The hazards of vice-charging are illustrated by reference to the accusation that parents who hesitate to give their children the MMR triple vaccine are guilty of gullibility and dogmatism. Ethnographic and sociological research (...) is used to make the case that this charge is, in a significant range of cases, epistemically unjust and hinders attempts to make sense of vaccine hesitancy. This epistemic injustice consists in the representation of vaccine hesitant parents as less than full epistemic agents. A case is made for a more tolerant and inclusive approach, not only to vaccine hesitancy but also to other forms of unorthodoxy or non-compliance. The primary objective in these cases should be to achieve Verstehen of seemingly alien outlooks and practices so that policy makers and practitioners in public services can more effectively educate a sceptical public about the risks of vaccine hesitancy. (shrink)

In this paper, I aim to shed some light on the nature and value of this neglected but important virtue of trustfulness. First, I briefly introduce the nature of trust and trust relationships and explain why they are essentially risky. Second, I examine the nature of trustfulness mainly by comparing it with other traits such as distrustfulness, gullibility, and prudent reliance. I then argue that its attitudinal element of respecting the trustee as a person—that is, respecting her as an (...) agent capable of free choice—is what distinguishes trustfulness from other traits. I also show why trustfulness is not only intrinsically admirable but also necessary for building a harmonious community. Then I add some further remarks on trustfulness that might help better understand this virtue. Finally, I conclude this paper after addressing some possible objections. (shrink)

Shankman holds that Derek Freeman “trashed” Margaret Mead’s reputation as a public intellectual by portraying her as a naïve and gullible anthropologist who perpetrated a serious error about adolescence in American Samoa. Shankman concedes that Mead’s Coming of Age in Samoa was factually in error but argues that her reputation in anthropology did not rest on it but rather on her extensive works on other societies. Ostensibly about Samoa, her book was rather a critique of American society and should be (...) judged as such. It is unjust that its factual errors undermine her status as a public intellectual. Fieldwork method and the lingering influence of inductivism are shown to underlie the controversy. (shrink)

One of the central points of contention in the epistemology of testimony concerns the uniqueness (or not) of the justification of beliefs formed through testimony-whether such justification can be accounted for in terms of, or 'reduced to,' other familiar sort of justification, e.g. without relying on any epistemic principles unique to testimony. One influential argument for the reductionist position, found in the work of Elizabeth Fricker, argues by appeal to the need for the hearer to monitor the testimony for credibility. (...) Fricker (1994) argues, first, that some monitoring for trustworthiness is required if the hearer is to avoid being gullible, and second, that reductionism but not anti-reductionism is compatible with ascribing an important role to the process of monitoring in the course of justifiably accepting observed testimony. In this paper we argue that such an argument fails. (shrink)

In any competition for monuments of wasted labour the collection of accidental acrostics in Latin poets published by I. Hilberg would stand a good chance of a prize. But amongst his examples of ‘neckische Spiele des Zufalls’ is one I am gullible enough to believe may be more significant. In Aeneid 7. 601–15 Vergil describes the custom of opening the gates of war in a long anacoluthic sentence, the first four lines of which run: Mos erat Hesperio in Latio, quern (...) protinus urbes Albanae coluere sacrum, nunc maxima rerum Roma colit, cum prima movent in proelia Mortem, Sive Getis inferre manu lacrimabile bellum…. (shrink)

This paper argues that vice-charging, the practice of charging other persons with epistemic vice, can itself be epistemically vicious. It identifies some potential vices of vice-charging and identifies knowledge of other people as a type of knowledge that is obstructed by epistemically vicious attributions of epistemic vice. The hazards of vice-charging are illustrated by reference to the accusation that parents who hesitate to give their children the MMR triple vaccine are guilty of gullibility and dogmatism. Ethnographic and sociological research (...) is used to make the case that this charge is, in a significant range of cases, epistemically unjust and hinders attempts to make sense of vaccine hesitancy. This epistemic injustice consists in the representation of vaccine hesitant parents as less than full epistemic agents. A case is made for a more tolerant and inclusive approach, not only to vaccine hesitancy but also to other forms of unorthodoxy or non-compliance. The primary objective in these cases should be to achieve Verstehen of seemingly alien outlooks and practices so that policy makers and practitioners in public services can more effectively educate a sceptical public about the risks of vaccine hesitancy. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Fear and Loathing in Academe:Gonzo Scholarship and the War Against TourismDaniel StempelIWhen I retired in 1985 I chose as my mantra an academic version of a famous general's farewell to his troops: "Old scholars never die—they just fade away into the stacks." Now that I am an octogenarian, I have faded away into total invisibility, but, like Tithonus, I am not inaudible. I hope my voice will be strident (...) enough to disturb the utopian dreams of a new generation, although I doubt that it will wake them from their dogmatic slumbers. My decision to return to the wars of intellect was occasioned by a chance discovery as I haunted the periodical stacks. I noted the name of an old friend in the title of an article and was surprised to find him pilloried as both a "liberal white Protestant" and a "white supremacist," terms which do not, in my experience, necessarily go together.The article, "Pacific Scholarship, Literary Criticism, and Touristic Desire: The Specter of A. Grove Day," written by Paul Lyons, a member of the University of Hawai'i English department's Cultural Studies group, uses bell, book, and candle of the new postcolonial faith in a rite of exorcism to dispel the evil influences of commercial tourism.1 As every exorcist knows, the rite demands that a demon must be called by his name and Lyons has chosen to demonize a deceased member of the English department. Grove Day came to Hawaii in 1944 and retired in 1969. He served as chairman from 1948 to 1953 and taught the course in Literature of the Pacific until his retirement in 1969. He began as a freelance writer long before he decided to enter graduate school at [End Page 95] Stanford and continued to publish more than fifty books on Hawaii and the Pacific. In 1979 he received the State Award for Literature. He died in 1994 in a plunge from an upper floor of a retirement home. Paul Lyons, by his own admission, came to Hawaii in 1990 knowing nothing of its history and culture but soon became a self-appointed authority on Hawaii, its colonial past and present, and its postcolonial future, eagerly embracing the ideas disseminated by the Center for Hawaiian Studies at the university.His article begins with a pretentious elaboration of the method he plans to use to raze the Potemkin village of tourism. Invoking the authority of Hegel on appearance and reality in a passage he has found cited by Žižek, he follows Dean MacCannell, who has adapted Erving Goffman's distinction between dramatic front and back: the entertaining scene presented to the tourist public contrasts with the backstage machinery of the stagehands who put it all together to deceive gullible visitors.2 He combines this with a quotation he has found in a book by William V. Spanos, the founder and former editor of Boundary 2, taken from a journalist's view of the Vietnam War, complaining that they had all been "deeply backgrounded." These are enlisted in the service of MacCannell's quest for "authenticity" as the touchstone of all encounters with other cultures, including the tourist experience.Had Lyons, instead of accepting MacCannell's interpretation of Goffman's early work, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1959), taken a closer look at this witty and ironic study of social behavior in a small community in the Shetland Islands, he would have found that Goffman makes no judgment on the comparative authenticity of either front or back. He utilizes what may be called the J. Alfred Prufrock theory of interaction between individuals and the groups in which they find themselves: "There will be time, there will be time / To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet...." MacCannell, in contrast, sees the tourist as a Tennysonian Ulysses in pursuit of a horizon of authenticity that recedes into infinity, "whose margin fades / Forever and forever as I move."Of course, the front/back and foreground/background binary oppositions and the insistence on authenticity are commonplaces rooted in the ubiquitous literary and philosophical tradition of "All the world's a stage" and require no... (shrink)

One of the first things that comes to mind when we think of the special issue’s theme, “Trust in a Social and Digital World” is the epidemic of ‘fake news’ and a cluster of trust- relevant vices we commonly associate with those who share it, click on it, and believe it. Fake news consumers are, among other things, gullible and naïve. Many are also dogmatic: intellectually and/or emotionally tied to a view point, and as a result, too quick to uncritically (...) trust whatever aligns with it. Gullibility, naivety, and dogmatism are all examples of vices that lead to us trust when we shouldn’t. The effects of these kinds of vices can be dangerous. Our aim here, however, is to explore the other side of the coin: those character vices that lead us to refrain from trusting when we should trust. For ease of reference, call these vices of distrust. Vices of distrust are dangerous in their own right, and in ways that often harm others along with oneself. The three vices of distrust we want explore—with a particular focus on their manifestations online—are: closemindedness, emulousness, and arrogance. Each contributes to vicious distrust in its own distinctive way. (shrink)

Historical Cognitive Science I am lucky to strike three reviewers who extract so clearly my book's spirit as well as its substance. They all both accept and act on my central methodological assumption; that detailed historical research, and consideration of difficult contemporary questions about cognition and culture, can be mutually illuminating. It's gratifying to find many themes which recur in different contexts throughout _Philosophy and Memory_ _Traces_ so well articulated here. The reviews catch my desires to interweave discussion of cognitive (...) theories of memory with moral questions of psychological control and self-mastery, to evoke the virtues and the pleasures of strange, baroque beliefs about fickle 'animal spirits' coursing through the nerves and the brain, to demonstrate that mechanistic explanation (even in its blunt old Cartesian form) can acknowledge complexity, and to develop scientific conceptions of dynamic memory traces and representations which can survive uncharitable philosophical criticism. The book's insistent interdisciplinarity is just an inchoate quest to acknowledge the daunting variety of the phenomena: remembering is both natural and cultural, and is studied by narrative theorists as well as neurobiologists, by physicists as well as psychologists. By fusing the rangy detail of a history of early modern neurophysiology with the committed, even gullible fervor of a defence of 'new connectionist' cognitive science, I wanted to pull out the carpet from all those who are happy to let 'scientific' and 'cultural' approaches to the mind run along independently. Once this general project is given space, as it is by all three reviewers, we can get down to specifics. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:“It’s not true, but I believe it”: Discussions on jettatura in Naples between the End of the Eighteenth and Beginning of the Nineteenth CenturiesFrancesco Paolo de CegliaIntroduction: What is Jettatura?Non èvero...ma ci credo (“It’s not true... but I believe it”) is the title of a comedy by the Italian actor and playwright, Peppino De Filippo, younger brother of the more famous Eduardo, which was staged for the first time (...) in 1942. The narrated events take place in the twentieth century and concern Gervasio Savastano, a Neapolitan businessman who is tormented by the fear of jettatura. The character, victim of grotesque events, first sacks a worker, believing him to be a jettatore, and then hires another, who is a hunchback and so should bring him good luck. In the end, however, it is discovered that the presumed jettatore has never harmed anyone and that the hunchback is not what he seems: he has stuffed his jacket in order to enter into the good graces of the gullible businessman and marry his daughter, with whom he has planned a con trick. The “lucky” events ascribed to his presence can therefore be considered casual. The epilogue? In keeping with the logic of compromise, typical of the brothers De Filippo’s theater, even though the character is rationally convinced of the unfounded nature of his beliefs, he remains adamant: “It’s not true, but I believe it” in other words.1 [End Page 75]“Where I come from, jettatura rules,” wrote the journalist and scriptwriter Giuseppe Marotta in 1947. Indeed, it is still a part of popular Neapolitan culture today.2 Often confused with similar beliefs, such as fascination (fascino) and the evil eye (malocchio), jettatura assumed its present form between the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth century, at a time when a polite debate on its nature was taking shape in the city. In this period, the epistemological pluralism animating the discussions was translated into a variety of interpretative hypotheses and literary genres, in which grotesque atmospheres and spirited quips also found room, all perfectly in line with what could be considered the Weltanschauung of Savastano. It is the purpose of this article to examine these discussions, which even spread the term abroad and, with it, the “local color” of the concept.Nineteenth-century European writers on jettatura knew the Neapolitan authors well, and either quoted them explicitly or associated them with characters whose names were a deformation of real people’s: for example, Volitta for Valletta (Stendhal), don Jo (Stendhal) or Ojori (Dumas) for De Jorio. They explained that jettatura corresponded to the more familiar evil eye, but they left the term in Italian, as if to underline the fact that it was untranslatable.Is jettatura a mere anthropological issue, linked to a “primitive” culture, in the face of which official science would remain refractory? A belief that could not be exported or shared by those educated in more “highly developed” contexts? Well, in part, yes. Nevertheless, in the 1840s there was a visitor to Naples who expressed himself in the following terms: “When a foreigner arrives in Naples, at first he laughs at jettatura, then, little by little, he becomes troubled by it, and finally, after a stay of three months, you will see him covered in horns and with his right hand forever clenched [to ward off evil].”3 [End Page 76]So wrote the novelist Alexandre Dumas, père, one of the many travellers who, after having completed the Grand Tour of southern Italy, decided to describe its picturesque scenes and backward customs.4 Creating a veritable topos of travel literature, in the same period the philologist Karl August Mayer commented, “often foreigners let themselves be influenced” by local “superstitions.”5 Indeed many of them were captivated by these Neapolitan beliefs, despite their desire to remain objective and detached; and so they were “converted,” and driven to seek scientific explanations, often after meeting “a Real Jettatore,” whose image had nothing in common with the exotic fantasies of “a French Novelist’s Idea of Jettatore.”6Actually, Dumas and Mayer probably exaggerated somewhat in order to make their descriptions more... (shrink)

Placebo cures. Global warming. Extraterrestrial life. Psychokinesis. In a time when scientific claims can sound as strange as science fiction--and can have a profound effect on individual life or public policy--assessing the merits of a far-out, supposedly scientific idea can be as difficult as it is urgent. Into the breach between helpless gullibility and unyielding skepticism steps physicist Robert Ehrlich, with an indispensable guide to making sense of "scientific" claims. A series of case studies of some of the most (...) controversial (and for the judging public, deeply vexing) topics in the natural and social sciences, Ehrlich's book serves as a primer for evaluating the evidence for the sort of strange-sounding ideas that can shape our lives. A much-anticipated follow-up to his popular Nine Crazy Ideas in Science, this book takes up issues close to readers' everyday reality--issues such as global warming, the dangers of cholesterol, and the effectiveness of placebos--as well as questions that resonate through (and beyond) civic life: Is intelligent design a scientific alternative to evolution? Is homosexuality primarily innate? Are people getting smarter or dumber? In each case, Ehrlich shows readers how to use the tools of science to judge the accuracy of strange ideas and the trustworthiness of ubiquitous "experts." As entertaining as it is instructive, his book will make the work of living wisely a bit easier and more reliable for scientists and nonscientists alike. (shrink)

This book enables the reader to recognize public expressions of an ideology, thereby avoiding gullibility and the consequences of ignorance. A Marxist-Freudian orientation is adopted. This book also discusses the possibility of escaping ideology and how it differs from science.

Much recent work on the masculinities enacted by early Christians has focused upon Christian texts and claims about their heroes and practices among elite Christians. Lucian’s Passing of Peregrinus offers another avenue for thinking about early Christian masculinity. Lucian denies Peregrinus’ claim to masculinity on the basis of his over-concern for honour, especially from the masses, his inability to control his appetites regarding food and sex, his being a parricide, his enacting ‘strange’ ascetic practices and his lack of courage in (...) the face of death. By tying Peregrinus to a Christian community in Judea, Lucian both demonstrates the lack of manliness in the Christian movement, which he suggests is populated mostly by gullible women and children, and further ‘unmans’ Peregrinus by linking him to a community of easily duped people whose praise is not worthy of a philosopher. By presenting this Christian community as a group that not only accepts Peregrinus as a member but also quickly establishes him as their leader, almost at par with Jesus himself, according to Lucian’s account, these early Christians show their lack of self-control by being deceived by a charlatan. Early Christian writers who claimed that their heroes were manly, even more manly than the Greek or Roman heroes, were writing in part to rebut the types of claims made by writers like Lucian. (shrink)

This chapter presents a new semantics for inductive empirical knowledge. The epistemic agent is represented concretely as a learner who processes new inputs through time and who forms new beliefs from those inputs by means of a concrete, computable learning program. The agent’s belief state is represented hyper-intensionally as a set of time-indexed sentences. Knowledge is interpreted as avoidance of error in the limit and as having converged to true belief from the present time onward. Familiar topics are re-examined within (...) the semantics, such as inductive skepticism, the logic of discovery, Duhem’s problem, the articulation of theories by auxiliary hypotheses, the role of serendipity in scientific knowledge, Fitch’s paradox, deductive closure of knowability, whether one can know inductively that one knows inductively, whether one can know inductively that one does not know inductively, and whether expert instruction can spread common inductive knowledge—as opposed to mere, true belief—through a community of gullible pupils. (shrink)

Epistemologists have long worried that the willingness of open-minded people to reconsider their beliefs in light of new evidence is both a condition of improving their beliefs and a risk factor for losing their grip on what they already know. In this paper I introduce and attempt to resolve a moral variation of this puzzle: A willingness to engage people having strange or (to us) repugnant moral ideals looks like a condition of broadening our moral horizons, but also a risk (...) factor for doing the wrong thing or becoming bad. I pursue a contractualist line according to which such hazardous engagement is a virtue only when it matters to our interlocutors whether they can justify themselves to us on terms we can accept—and for our sake or for the sake of their own virtue, not instrumentally or to get something out of us. When it does not so matter, openness can be unintelligent or gullible, i.e. not virtuous. (shrink)

When I was eleven, my form teacher, Mr Howard, showed some of my class how to punch. We were waiting for the rest of the class to finish changing after gym, and he took a stance that I would now call shizentai yoi and snapped his right fist forward into a head-level straight punch, pulling his left back to his side at the same time. Then he punched with his left, pulling back on his right. We all lined up in (...) our ties and sensible shoes (this was England) and copied him—left, right, left, right—and afterwards he told us that if we practised in the air with sufficient devotion for three years, then we would be able to use our punches to kill a bull with one blow. I worshipped Mr Howard (though I would sooner have died than told him that) and so, as a skinny, eleven-year-old girl, I came to believe that if I practised, I would be able to kill a bull with one blow by the time I was fourteen. This essay is about epistemic viciousness in the martial arts, and this story is illustrates just that. Though the word ‘viciousness’ normally suggests deliberate cruelty and violence, I will be using it here with the more old-fashioned meaning, possessing of vices. Vices (such as avarice, alcoholism and nail-biting) are common, and most of us struggle with a few, but ‘epistemic’ means ‘having to do with knowledge and the justification of belief’ and so epistemic viciousness is the possession of vices that make one bad at acquiring true beliefs, or give one a tendency to form false ones. My eleven-year-old self possessed the epistemic vice of gullibility and hence showed a streak of epistemic viciousness, which led to the formation of a false belief. Other kinds of epistemic vice can lead to us failing to form true beliefs when we ought to. Consider the internet-surfing karate-sensei who stumbles upon an article claiming that chocolate milk is better than water or sports drinks for promoting recovery after strenuous exercise, and describing an experiment using stationary bikes performed at the University of Indiana, purporting to support this claim.. (shrink)

This is the first systematically organized anthology on responsible conduct in scientific research aimed at students and practicing researchers in the biological sciences. It has been designed in response to the increasing concern to teach graduate students about ethical issues in the biological sciences. The book contains classic essays and other published material and is carefully structured to explore a range of subjects: the qualifications for authorship; plagiarism; the use of human beings and animals in research; the norms of ethical (...) conduct in science; scientific honesty and its relationship to gullibility and self-deception; ethical issues in laboratory work; the relation between science and society; the ethics of teaching and learning. The volume also provides insights into issues often not formally considered in graduate science education such as methods of scientific investigation, scientific paradigms, and the creative process. (shrink)

This paper criticizes two forms of philosophical materialism that adopt opposite strategies but end up in the same place. Both hold that individual entities must be banished from philosophy. The first kind is ground floor materialism, which attempts to dissolve all objects into some deeper underlying basis; here, objects are seen as too shallow to be the truth. The second kind is first floor materialism, which treats objects as naive fictions gullibly posited behind the direct accessibility of appearances or relations; (...) here, objects are portrayed as too deep to be the truth. One major thesis of this paper is that these two forms of materialism are parasitical on one another and need each other's resources to make sense of the world. The second major thesis is that both forms of materialism thereby stand condemned, and that philosophy must be rebuilt from the individual objects that the two forms of materialism disdain. These points are made through a detailed consid- eration of the book Every Thing Must Go by the analytic structural realists James Ladyman and Don Ross, which has gained a surprising following among some speculative realists in continental philosophy. Ladyman and Ross claim to preserve objects by treating them as ``real patterns'', but they do so at the price of destroying their autonomous reality. Furthermore, they are unable to tell us whether the mathematical structures they see as the basis of human knowledge are also the basis of reality itself. In short, their ontology is scientism for scientism's sake (or `Bunsen burner realism') and must be eliminated in favor of a genuine realist metaphysics of objects. (shrink)

This chapter states the contrast between presumptivism about testimonial warrant (often called anti-reductionism) and strict reductionism (associated with Hume) about testimonial warrant. Presumptivism sees an analogy with modest foundationalism about perceptual warrant. Strict reductionism denies this analogy. Two theoretical frameworks for these positions are introduced to better formulate the most popular version of persumptivism, a competence reliabilist account. Seven arguments against presumptivism are then stated and critiqued: (1) The argument from reliability; (2) The argument from reasons; (3) the argument from (...) positive reasons; (4) the argument from negative reasons; (5) the argument from agency; (6) the argument from psychological force; and (7) the argument from gullibility. If presumptivm is false, it is not for any of these arguments. (shrink)

A June 2020 survey found one in four Americans agreeing that “powerful people intentionally planned the coronavirus outbreak.” In fall 2020, seven percent said they believe the elaborate and grotesque mythology of QAnon; another eleven percent were unsure whether they believe it. November and December 2020 found tens of millions of Americans believing in election-theft plots that would require superhuman levels of coordination and secrecy among dozens, perhaps hundreds, of otherwise-unconnected and unidentified miscreants. Conspiracy theories are nothing new, and they (...) raise a question that preoccupied Hannah Arendt in The Origins of Totalitarianism: whatever happened to common sense? Arendt analyzed both conspiracy theories and totalitarian ideologies; in both, she argued, common sense was replaced by “supersense” – her name for all-encompassing Theories of Everything that trace surface political events back to hidden causes. Refuting fake facts doesn’t help, she warned, because “if everyone always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but that no one believes anything at all anymore.” The result, she warns, is a dangerous mix of gullibility and cynicism. My aim in this paper is threefold: to explain Arendt’s arguments, to explore their contemporary relevance, and to examine their consequences through the lens of virtue epistemology. In a section on “the epistemology of bullshit” I use virtue epistemologists’ concepts of epistemic malevolence and epistemic insouciance to examine the production, distribution, and consumption of bullshit, and to define a vice I call culpable credulousness. The final sections discuss the collapse of moral common sense that led multitudes to believe that mass murder can be justified. Arendt sometimes wrote as though morality had mysteriously turned upside-down, replacing “Thou shalt not kill” with “Thou shalt kill.” I argue that this need not be so: the moral principle of justifiable self-defense, applied to fake facts about existential threats, can explain the behavior. Even so, Arendt powerfully analyzes the ways that rules of moral common sense fail in a society where factual common sense has lost its validity. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 8.1 (2001) 39-40 [Access article in PDF] Remembering Feminisms:A Response to the Commentary Erica Burman I am grateful to Gwen Adshead for outlining the broader arguments surrounding feminist critiques of science and their relevance for mental health, particularly in forensic contexts. As she highlights, the debates about the status of accounts of memory hinge upon contested concepts of objectivity and the problem of discursive and (...) provisional (but also necessary) claims to external reality, these being debates to which feminists have actively contributed. There are four additional points I would like to make in response to her comments.Firstly, while I am in general agreement with her presentation of feminist positions in relation to scientific theory and method--and this does largely reflect a current consensus within feminist approaches--it is important not to overstate this consensus. Feminist debates about science, method, and claims to truth are precisely debates. There is no unitary feminist approach. Key arguments between feminists concern, for example, whether to lay claim to (forms of "strong") subjectivity rather than objectivity (see Harding 1986, Hollway 1989, Griffin et al. 1998) or whether to re-work criteria for objectivity to takeaccount of well-known gender biases (Eichler 1988).In my analysis of feminist approaches to "false memory syndrome" (FMS), I wanted to highlight the diversity of feminist positions in order to indicate something of the interconnections between feminist and other political, theoretical, and cultural analyses--ranging from the modernist and empiricist to the postmodernist and constructionist. Hence, while I agree with Adshead that much feminist analysis seems unremarkable since its impact on cultural practice has been so great, I would argue that her account glosses over the many different feminist positions mobilized within the debate around "false/recovered memories." There are widely different views, for example, about the status of evidence/science. Another key area of debate is the role of psychiatric diagnosis between those who subscribe to and those who reject the "terms of art" of psychiatric diagnostic categories.This may sound like a mere effort to attest to the rigor and rationality of feminist scholarship, including feminist re-workings of these terms. However, to come to my second point, there is a material consequence of this closer attention to the conditions for, and reception of, specific feminist analyses. For the debate about "false" or "recovered" memories goes beyond questions about the circulation of the roles of victim versus perpetrator that surround claims of credibility, legitimacy, manipulation, or gullibility. [End Page 39]Thus, Laura Brown and I (1997) and Jan Haaken (1998) have suggested that in order to understand how the current debates surrounding (women's) reported memories could have come about, we need to analyze what has happened through, and what the stakes have been in, the (limited) institutionalization of feminism within models and practices of therapy. This involves attending to the particular forms of feminism that have been included and excluded: For example, how far do therapeutic models accept, and how far do they problematize, the forms and functioning of families? We also need to consider the broader societal response (or backlash?) to a feminized/therapeutic culture, including consequences of the confounding of the therapeutic with the feminized. In particular, Haaken draws attention to the gender essentialism that pervaded second wave (1960s and 1970s) U.S. feminist therapies. This essentialism, she argues, has fueled a failure to interrogate power dynamics (including therapeutic dynamics) between women that make possible displacements of transferential dynamics to an outside party, whether past or present.My third point concerns the ever closer relationship between the therapeutic and legal arenas reflected within the career of FMS. Adshead's reference to a film narrative to highlight competing versions of legal knowledge puts me in mind of how FMS--as a potent cocktail of psychiatric labeling, familial conflict and abuse, and litigation--is the U.S. television courtroom drama writ large. It may be the case that, as Adshead argues, I fail adequately to address the complexity of legal process, with its assumptions about what makes certain accounts more credible or legitimate than others... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Sally Is a Block of IceRevis(it)ing the Figure of Woman in PhilosophyRobyn FerrellThere is a metaphor made famous in the analytic philosophical literature by John Searle et al.: “Sally is a block of ice.” I met this metaphor first as an undergraduate student in philosophy of language classes. I remember, then, feeling a wordless anxiety for Sally, for the “tone” of this example interrupting, but not interrogated by, the (...) discussion it was recruited to illustrate. Later, I met Sally again, in papers given at philosophy conferences on metaphor in which, each time, this mention of Sally struck me as pointed but not observed.John Searle claims that to say “Sally is a block of ice” is to mean “Sally is an extremely unemotional and unresponsive person,” But this seems disingenuous, since the color in the metaphor comes from innuendo of a sexual character, the echoes of the Ice Queen, etc. And no doubt this is one reason why Searle would have adopted it, because it introduces the rhetorical color of sexual intrigue into an apparently technical discourse in the philosophy of language.But in his paper, this metaphor, “Sally is a block of ice,” features along with other metaphors only as an example of the trope. She is there in the text to illustrate Searle’s thesis that metaphor has meaning only because what he calls “speaker’s meaning” and “sentence meaning” are two very different things. On this view, “words have only the meanings they have,” and it is speakers uttering them “in a way that departs from what they actually mean” that allows the metaphor to operate. [End Page 194]Why would the speaker say anything other than what he meant? Why doesn’t he say, “Sally is an extremely unemotional and unresponsive person”? Since the “actual meaning” of language remains unchanged by the use of metaphor in an example of it, the interesting effect of this theory of metaphor is that the speaker can still say that, while he may have said, “Sally is a block of ice,” he didn’t mean it.Sally Is a Metaphor“Sally is a block of ice”: this evocative metaphor, this provocative figure, conjures for me the dilemma that women in philosophy have found, seeking a philosophical account of identity for an identity politics while also trying to find a place for themselves in the academy. Sally is a figure haunting the practice of English-speaking philosophy, where women are grudgingly admitted but, as Genevieve Lloyd has pointed out, disadvantaged by “inclusion without recognition of our difference.”Unless she is frozen on the slab at the morgue, Sally is not obviously a block of ice. But if Sally were a block of ice, if her identity were as a block of ice, and if the copulative form accurately described her in her essence, as “a block of ice,” why would she appear to us in physical form to be a woman?Between “This is Sally” and “Sally is a block of ice” lies a metaphysics of identity, stemming from the way that certain European languages tolerate the copula form to represent divergent senses, the “to be” of identity and the “to be” of attribution. I’ve written about the impact of this copula form for sexual difference elsewhere (Ferrell 2006). While the copula assigns objects to subjects, it does so in an ambiguous manner. Sometimes we say things such as: “Meg Ryan is Sally in the movie When Harry Met Sally on Channel 7 Sunday night.” Meg Ryan is Sally in the sense that she performs Sally. So, is Sally playing a part, then, when “Sally is a block of ice”?Judith Butler would likely say she was, her femininity a masquerade (Butler 1990). Is Sally playing a part when “Sally is Sally”? Nietzsche would say so: “[A]round every profound spirit a mask is continually growing” (Nietzsche 1968). Nietzsche incriminated grammar or syntax in the reproduction of metaphysics, claiming philosophers are particularly gullible in this regard: “[T]hey always believe in reason as in a piece of the metaphysical world itself, this backward belief always reappears in them as an all-powerful regression” (ibid., cited... (shrink)

What strikes one first about two recent books in philosophy of science is that they seem to be polar opposites in all important respects. Bridgman, of course, typifies the hard-headed and skeptical physical scientist, whose interest in the broad “philosophic” questions of scientific methodology stems largely from current problems in theoretical physics, but he is, nevertheless, very much concerned to extend the salutary effects of operational analysis to other intellectual disciplines. Jung, on the other hand, not only is a psychiatrist—and (...) therefore professionally committed to a certain gullibility about mental phenomena—but he also is deeply convinced of the importance for science of such subjects as astrology and alchemy; and Pauli, although a distinguished physicist in his own right, has clearly been influenced by Jung's conception of archetypal ideas in the collective unconscious. (shrink)

Can dialogue make real impact on the state of affairs in the real world, or is it a pastime of the polite societies or a lullaby useful for sending gullible grown-ups into “sleep”? In the present paper, following a two-tier analysis of the notion of dialogue, as “shared exploration towards greater understanding, connection, or possibility,” and as a product of our “collective intentionality,” I shall develop a bifurcated argument. Against the cynic pundits, who preach that realpolitik and not dialogue is (...) the name of the game in our daily interactions with each other, I shall argue that in an increasingly pluralistic world, dialogue is a powerful and indispensable means for making desirable changes. Similarly, against the over-enthusiastic optimists who believe that dialogue provides us with a magical wand, I shall argue that dialogue is as good as we can make it: dialogue cannot work miracles in a vacuum of collective will. The upshot of my argument is that firstly, dialogue is an indicator of the rationality and maturity of the social actors: the more rational the social actors the more ubiquitous and effective the dialogue and vice versa. And secondly, although, dialogue itself may lead to frustration or even violence, it is the absence of dialogue that poses the greatest danger for the future of mankind. (shrink)

In "Truth and Politics" Hannah Arendt defends opinion against the judgment of the philosophical tradition. This defense risks misinterpretation as epistemologically nihilistic unless read in conjunction with Arendt's position on facts and acting in concert. What Arendt prizes in opinion is its performative dimension rather than its constative dimension where it falls short of truth. It is opinion as action that Arendt rehabilitates: she subscribes to the philosophical tradition's harsh verdict on the pseudotruths of an anonymous and repressive public opinion. (...) For opinion to be an action, for action to be recognizable as such, there has to be a world beyond each given opinion and action on which they leave a mark. This world, irreducible in its diversity and historical contingency to rational truth, is the arena common to facts and action. To acknowledge the facts is to trust in the testimony of others, but if this trust is not to be gullibility, if it is not to mistake the facts for lies and vice versa, it stands in need of judgment. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reading Paradise Regained EthicallyRobert B. PierceMuch modern criticism follows a long tradition by attending to the presumed effect of literature on our personal and political lives. Feminists, cultural materialists, new historicists, and postcolonialists frequently remind us that texts are "not innocent," and such analysts seek to make explicit the values and judgments that literary texts encourage in their readers. Whether in the vein of unmasking or of celebrating, we (...) critics often attribute great ethical and political significance to the works we study, but we are inclined to be vague about the mechanisms by which these effects occur. Given that I share this presumption that the texts we love to study matter to our lives, I would like to look more closely at how the process occurs, taking Milton's Paradise Regained as a test case.Does our reading of literary texts affect us ethically, and should it?1 An ancient and powerful critical tradition has taken for granted that the answer to both questions is yes. At the very least, good literature read properly is seen as one among the shaping forces of our education. But, beginning in the late eighteenth century, the theoretical movement to separate esthetics from ethics rendered this assumption problematic. Perhaps the beautiful is a value quite separate from the good. Later the literary school of estheticism brashly proclaimed the triumph of beauty over goodness under the banner of art for art's sake, [End Page 208] and Auden more modestly noted in "In Memory of W. B. Yeats" that "poetry makes nothing happen,"2 presumably including in the denial the moral betterment of its readers. The idea that literature is good for us has been almost embarrassing for the past century or so. On the other hand, many feminists and cultural critics have recently argued in effect that literature is often bad for us, that it is implicated in the ethical and political life of the time when it is produced and also in the time when it is received or consumed, so that it may tend to reinforce the ideology of one period or the other. In their assumption that literature is ethically significant they agree with most ordinary people and with the cultural right, especially in concern about its influence.What does this recent set of contentions entail? The term "implicated" that is characteristically used in such analysis claims at a minimum that the literary text in question has been shaped in production, consumption, or both by larger cultural forces, shaped in such a way as to incorporate certain values. Most such analyses go further to assert or suggest that the text under study helps to reinforce those values in the original audience or in later consumers (sometimes by attacking opposed values).3 The characteristic rhetorical stance in such readings is an implied warning to the reader against the insidious effect of the text lest it instill some fallacious, unethical, or politically harmful attitude or idea. Often the reader is rhetorically invited to share a position of intellectual superiority along with the critic, both of them above the corruption that afflicts an unspecified gullible audience. Thus many modern critics identify a romanticizing of war and the military hero in Shakespeare's Henry V, though they differ among themselves in that some locate both poison and cure in the text itself (suggesting, for example, that Shakespeare subverts the official ideology that he portrays), while some offer a "reading against the text," a cure administered by the critic against the wholly poisonous work.Such critics frequently manifest a reasonable caution about their own ethical and political stance. In an age of widespread pluralism and cultural relativism, we have learned to suspect self-confident proclamations of the ethical and political truth by critics as well as by literary authors, and in particular we are suspicious of official codes of conduct, including our own. Also we are (often at least) less confident than our forebears in purporting to state the meaning of a text. We have learned to heed the ambiguities and self-undermining elements in texts that complicate the capacity of any simple critical statement to reflect adequately what the text means. We no... (shrink)

The U.S.-led military incursion in Iraq and the subsequent occupation has been filled with myriad examples of the Bush Administration using misleading statements in an effort to win the support of American citizens, and in a secondary sense, the international community and the Iraqis. This situation provides many opportunities to analyze the use of sophistry and linguistic sleight of hand. In this paper, I draw upon the insights offered by Hannah Arendt in the earlier context of her critiques of totalitarianism (...) during the 1930s and 1940s, and her later critique of the United States upon the publication of the Pentagon Papers in the midst of the U.S. war in Vietnam. Her insights regarding truth and lying in politics shed light on what is wrong with U.S. approaches today. Similar methods continue to be used today since people have continued to be gullible to these methods. (shrink)

In any competition for monuments of wasted labour the collection of accidental acrostics in Latin poets published by I. Hilberg would stand a good chance of a prize. But amongst his examples of ‘neckische Spiele des Zufalls’ is one I am gullible enough to believe may be more significant. In Aeneid 7. 601–15 Vergil describes the custom of opening the gates of war in a long anacoluthic sentence, the first four lines of which run: Mos erat Hesperio in Latio, quern (...) protinus urbes Albanae coluere sacrum, nunc maxima rerum Roma colit, cum prima movent in proelia Mortem, Sive Getis inferre manu lacrimabile bellum…. (shrink)