Certain plausible evidential requirements and coherence requirements on rationality seem to yield dilemmas of rationality (in a specific, objectionable sense) when put together with the possibility of misleading higher-order evidence. Epistemologists have often taken such dilemmas to be evidence that we’re working with some false principle. In what follows I show how one can jointly endorse an evidential requirement, a coherence requirement, and the possibility of misleading higher-order evidence without running afoul of dilemmas of rationality. The trick lies (...) in observing the difference between attitudes it is rational to hold (= propositional justification) and rationally holding those attitudes (= doxastic justification). (shrink)

According to Keith Lehrer’s coherence theory, knowledge is true acceptance whose justification is undefeated by a falsehood. It has recently become clear that Lehrer’s handling of important Gettier-inspired problems depends upon his position that only falsehoods accepted by the subject can act as defeaters of knowledge. I argue against this and present an example in which an unreckoned truth---one neither believed nor believed to be false by the subject---defeats knowledge. I trace the negative implications of this matter for the (...) coherence theory. (shrink)

Sven Rosenkranz’s Justification as Ignorance shows how a strongly internalist conception of justification can be derived from a strongly externalist conception of knowledge, given an identification of justification with second-order ignorance and a set of structural principles concerning knowing and being in a position to know. Among these principles is an epistemic analogue of the Geach modal schema which states that one is always in a position to know that one doesn’t know p or in a position (...) to know that one doesn’t know not-p. Even suitably refined, the principle faces a range of counterexamples in which it misleadingly and persistently seems to one that one knows whether p without it seeming to one that one knows p nor that one knows not-p. These cases also threaten the book’s case for the luminosity of second-order ignorance, which is in turn central to its derivation of strongly internalist principles of justification. (shrink)

Broadly speaking, this is a book about truth and the criteria thereof. Thus it is, in a sense, a book about justification and rationality. But it does not purport to be about the notion of justification or the notion of rationality. For the assumption that there is just one notion of justification, or just one notion of rationality, is, as the book explains, very misleading. Justification and rationality come in various kinds. And to that extent, (...) at least, we should recognize a variety of notions of justification and rationality. This, at any rate, is one of the morals of Chapter VI. This book, in Chapters I-V, is mainly concerned with the kind of justification and rationality characteristic of a truth-seeker, specifically a seeker of truth about the world impinging upon the senses: the so-called empirical world. Hence the book's title. But since the prominent contemporary approaches to empirical justification are many and varied, so also are the epistemological issues taken up in the following chapters. For instance, there will be questions about so-called coherence and its role, if any, in empirical justification. And there will be questions about social consensus (whatever it is) and its significance, or the lack thereof, to empirical justification. Furthermore, the perennial question of whether, and if so how, empirical knowledge has so-called founda­ tions will be given special attention. (shrink)

In his paper "Role Obligations," Michael Hardimon defends an account of the nature and justification of institutional obligations that he takes to be clearly superior to the "standard" voluntarist view. Hardimon argues that this standard view presents a "misleading and distorted" picture of role obligations (and of morality generally); and in its best form he claims this view still "leaves out" of its understanding of even contractual role obligations an "absolutely vital factor". I argue against Hardimon that a (...) related version of this "standard view" of institutional obligations is "standard" for a very good reason - namely, that it is true. (shrink)

Bernard Williams once said that doing moral philosophy could be hazardous because there, presumably unlike in other areas of philosophy, we may run the risk of misleading people on important matters.1 This risk seems to be particularly present when considering the topic of terrorism. I would like to discuss what seems to be a most striking feature of contemporary terrorism, a feature that, as far as I know, has not been noted. This has implications concerning the way that we (...) should view terrorism (and counterterrorism) and shows the force of a number of neglected illusions surrounding the issue of terrorism, as well as its justification. (shrink)

Thinkers justify their views in a variety of ways. Operating in an alien intellectual milieu, the early Confucian Xunzi provides an intriguing counterpoint to familiar contemporary options for such reasoned support. This essay examines an idea thatis crucial to Xunzi’s justification of his larger philosophical vision, and which has been the object of incompatible and misleading interpretations. This key term of art is li, meaning “order” or “pattern,” which some scholars have translated as “principle,” and others more recently (...) as “reason” or “rationale.” Examining how, for Xunzi, li never means “reason” in the sense of a faculty of the mind, or a warrant for an action or belief, nor “rationale” in the sense of a justifying account, helps us to grasp the distinctive ways he conceived of thinking and arguing. It also illuminates his understanding of the cosmos and human relations with and within it. (shrink)

Classical acquaintance theory is any version of classical foundationalism that appeals to acquaintance in order to account for non-inferential justification. Such theories are well suited to account for a kind of infallible non-inferential justification. Why am I justified in believing that I’m in pain? An initially attractive (partial) answer is that I’m acquainted with my pain. But since I can’t be acquainted with what isn’t there, acquaintance with my pain guarantees that I’m in pain. What’s less clear is (...) whether, given classical acquaintance theory, it’s possible to have non-inferential justification to believe something false. Classical acquaintance theorists try to make room for such a possibility, but I argue that the attempts of Richard Fumerton, Ali Hasan, and Evan Fales are inadequate. I’ll focus on introspective justification, but similar issues arise for a priori justification as well. (shrink)

ABSTRACT It is plausible to think that we're rationally required to follow our total evidence. It is also plausible to think that there are coherence requirements on rationality. It is also plausible to think that higher order evidence can be misleading. Several epistemologists have recognized the puzzle these claims generate, and the puzzle seems to have only startling and unattractive solutions that involve the rejection of intuitive principles. Yet Alex Worsnip has recently argued that this puzzle has a tidy, (...) attractive and independently motivated solution that involves rejecting the claim that we're rationally required to follow our total evidence. In what follows I argue that this solution fails to solve the fundamental problem for rationality. (shrink)

The existential insecurity of human beings has induced them to create protective spheres of symbols: myths, religions, values, belief systems, theories, etc. Rationality is one of the key factors contributing to the construction of civilisation in technical and symbolic terms. As Hankiss (2001) has emphasised, protective spheres of symbols may collapse – thus causing a profound social crisis. Social and political transformations had a tremendous impact at the end of the 20th century. As a result, management theories have been revised (...) in order to deal with transition and uncertainty. Francis Fukuyama's (2000) approach is supportive of hierarchical organisation as the best solution when facing a 'disruption'. The notion of Homo Hierarchicus has been based on, allegedly, rational presumptions. This paper contributes to the discussion on hierarchy within contemporary organisations. It criticises so-called 'natural' and 'rational' necessities justifying hierarchy. A key issue identified by the paper is the formalisation of language in claiming value-free knowledge and 'detached' observation as the basis for neutral rationality and aspired efficiency. This should be seriously reconsidered as hindering rather than aiding understanding of social complexity. All in all, Homo Hierarchicus appears to be misleading rather than helping symbolic sphere or construct. (shrink)

Both morality and theories of morality play many distinctive—and sometimes apparently conflicting—functions: they identify and prohibit wrongful aggression; they chart and analyze basic duties; they present ideals for emulation; they set the terms or justice, rights and entitlements; they characterize the norms of basic decency and neighborliness. Since many of these can, in practice, come into conflict with one another, morality provides guidance for integrating priorities. Claims to morality can, however, be misused as well as used: sanctimonious self-righteousness, self-centered moral (...) narcisism and deflecting, misleading justification all present an abusive mask of morality. In this paper, I analyze both the use and abuse of morality and offer an account of its appropriate use, as presenting multiple heuristic questions for reflection. (shrink)

The typical epistemology course begins with a discussion of the distinction between justification and knowledge and ends without any discussion of the distinction between justification and excuse. This is unfortunate. If we had a better understanding of the justification-excuse distinction, we would have a better understanding of the intuitions that shape the internalism-externalism debate. My aims in this paper are these. First, I will explain how the kinds of excuses that should interest epistemologists exculpate. Second, I will (...) explain why the intuitions that underwrite the new evil demon argument don't provide support for the internalist claim that justification is just in the head. The positive response that Cohen's example elicits is an indication that the subject should be excused if she violates an epistemic norm, not an indication that no norm has been violated. For just about any conceivable norm we can think of we can imagine situations in which someone violates that norm because they're moved by evidence that misleadingly suggests that they'd conform to it. When that happens, we'll respond positively in just the way we do when we consider Cohen's deceived subjects. When that happens, we cannot say that the subjects' responses were justified because we've stipulated that the subjects' responses contravene the relevant norms. Regardless of whether you think of norms along internalist or externalist lines, you should see that the intuitions that underwrite the new evil demon objection tell us nothing at all about whether a subject conforms to a norm. They tell us nothing about justification. (shrink)

Diane Vaughan’s popular book, The Challenger Launch Decision: Risky Technology, Culture and Deviance at NASA, advances a thesis that I termed the “cog in the machine manifesto”: since the Challenger disaster was the result of the determined, mechanistic movement of the parts of the organizational system; once the mechanism was set in motion, the disaster was inevitable, and could not have been prevented. In order to expose the fallacies of the cog in the machine manifesto, I consider an alternative umbrella (...) thesis and four sub-theses. The umbrella thesis proposes that the causes of the Challenger disaster were the lack of an overall 'safety first' ethos, and irresponsible choice and poor decision-making practices in the lead up to and including the final risky decision. The four sub-theses are as follows: (1) the widespread justification that one always faces inherent risk when one operates in the realm of risky technology (a thesis foreshadowed by Vaughan’s book) is an illicit and misleading justification when one considers that there is no binding necessity to employ the risky technology; (2) the real culprit is not so much "risky technology," which locates the risk in the technology, but "risky assessment," which locates the risk in the decision to employ technology while not basing that decision on known safe designs and continued use on performance data; (3) the decision to choose an Orbiter without a passenger and crew abort system is proof in and of itself of a lack of a "safety first" management priority; (4) an analysis of the fateful eve of the Challenger launch teleconference launch decision makes it impossible to construe it as a banal, routine and inevitable organizational mistake. A careful examination of the “cog in the machine manifesto” and similar frameworks that purport to explain moral disasters will reveal that the language of risky technology, organizational complexity, and inevitable accidents is deeply pernicious and should thus be avoided at all costs. (shrink)

The familiar Cartesian sceptical arguments all involve an explanation of our experiences. An account of the persuasive power of the sceptical arguments should explain why this is so. This supports a diagnosis of the error in Cartesian sceptical arguments according to which they mislead us into regarding our perceptual beliefs as if they were justified as inferences to the best explanation. I argue that they have instead a perceptual justification that does not involve inference to the best explanation and (...) that should not be put in doubt by the sceptical hypotheses. (shrink)

This paper proposes a novel answer to the question of what attitude agents should adopt when they receive misleading higher-order evidence that avoids the drawbacks of existing views. The answer builds on the independently motivated observation that there is a difference between attitudes that agents form as conclusions of their reasoning, called terminal attitudes, and attitudes that are formed in a transitional manner in the process of reasoning, called transitional attitudes. Terminal and transitional attitudes differ both in their descriptive (...) and in their normative properties. When an agent receives higher-order evidence that they might have reasoned incorrectly to a belief or credence towards p, then their attitude towards p is no longer justified as a terminal attitude towards p, but it can still be justified as a transitional attitude. This view, which I call the unmooring view, allows us to capture the rational impact of misleading higher-order evidence in a way that integrates smoothly with a natural picture of epistemic justification and the dynamics of deliberation. (shrink)

Perceptions guide our actions and provide us with evidence of the world around us. Illusions and hallucinations can mislead us: they may prompt as to act in ways that do not mesh with the world around us and they may lead us to form false beliefs about that world. The capacity view provides an account of evidence that does justice to these two facts. It shows in virtue of what illusions and hallucinations mislead us and prompt us to act. Moreover, (...) it shows in virtue of what we are in a better epistemic position when we perceive than when we hallucination. In this paper, I develop the capacity view, that is, the view that perceptual experience has epistemic force in virtue of the epistemic and metaphysical primacy of the perceptual capacities employed in perception. By grounding the epistemic force of experience in facts about the metaphysical structure of experience, the capacity view is not only an externalist view, but moreover a naturalistic view of the epistemology of perceptual experience. So it is an externalist and naturalistic alternative to reliabilism. I discuss the repercussions of this view for the justification of beliefs and the epistemic transparency of mental states, as well as, familiar problem cases. (shrink)

Elsewhere I and others have argued that evidence one should have had can bear on the justification of one's belief, in the form of defeating one's justification. In this paper, I am interested in knowing how evidence one should have had (on the one hand) and one's higher-order evidence (on the other) interact in determinations of the justification of belief. In doing so I aim to address two types of scenario that previous discussions have left open. In (...) one type of scenario, there is a clash between a subject's higher-order evidence and the evidence she should have had: S's higher-order evidence is misleading as to the existence or likely epistemic bearing of further evidence she should have. In the other, while there is further evidence S should have had, this evidence would only have offered additional support for S's belief that p. The picture I offer derives from two “epistemic ceiling” principles linking evidence to justification: one's justification for the belief that p can be no higher than it is on one's total evidence, nor can it be higher than what it would have been had one had all of the evidence one should have had. Together, these two principles entail what I call the doctrine of Epistemic Strict Liability: insofar as one fails to have evidence one should have had, one is epistemically answerable to that evidence whatever reasons one happened to have regarding the likely epistemic bearing of that evidence. I suggest that such a position can account for the battery of intuitions elicited in the full range of cases I will be considering. (shrink)

Most of our memories are inferential, so says Sven Bernecker in Memory: A Philosophical Study. I show that his account of inferentially remembering that p is too strong. A revision of the account that avoids the difficulty is proposed. Since inferential memory that p is memory that q (a proposition distinct from p) with an admixture of inference from one’s memory that q and a true thought one has that r, its analysis presupposes an adequate account of the (presumably non-inferential) (...) memory that q. Bernecker’s account of non-inferentially remembering that is shown to be inadequate. A remedy lies in strengthening the account by requiring the rememberer to have had prima facie justification to believe that q, any defeaters of which were misleading. (shrink)

Barnett provides an interesting new challenge for Dogmatist accounts of perceptual justification. The challenge is that such accounts, by accepting that a perceptual experience can provide a distinctive kind of boost to one’s credences, would lead to a form of diachronic irrationality in cases where one has already learnt in advance that one will have such an experience. I show that this challenge rests on a misleading feature of using the 0–1 interval to express probabilities and show that (...) if we switch to using Odds or Log-Odds, the misleading appearance that there is only ‘a little room’ for one’s credences to increase evaporates. Moreover, there are familiar, independent reasons for taking the Log-Odds scale to provide a clearer picture of the confirmatory effect of evidence. Thus the Dogmatist can after all escape the charge of diachronic irrationality. (shrink)

As a general rule, whenever a hearer is justified in forming the belief that p on the basis of a speaker’s testimony, she will also be justified in assuming that the speaker has formed her belief appropriately in light of a relevantly large and representative sample of the evidence that bears on p. In simpler terms, a justification for taking someone’s testimony entails a justification for trusting her assessment of the evidence. This introduces the possibility of what I (...) will call “evidential preemption.” Evidential preemption occurs when a speaker, in addition to offering testimony that p, also warns the hearer of the likelihood that she will subsequently be confronted with apparently contrary evidence: this is done, however, not so as to encourage the hearer to temper her confidence in p in anticipation of that evidence, but rather to suggest that the (apparently) contrary evidence is in fact misleading evidence or evidence that has already been taken into account. Either way, the speaker is signalling to the hearer that the subsequent disclosure of this evidence will not require her to significantly revise her belief that p. Such preemption can effectively inoculate an audience against future contrary evidence, and thereby creates an opening for a form of exploitative manipulation that I will call “epistemic grooming.” Nonetheless, I argue, not all uses of evidential preemption are nefarious; it can also serve as an important tool for guiding epistemically limited agents though complex evidential scenarios. (shrink)

I formulate a resilient paradox about epistemic rationality, discuss and reject various solutions, and sketch a way out. The paradox exemplifies a tension between a wide range of views of epistemic justification, on the one hand, and enkratic requirements on rationality, on the other. According to the enkratic requirements, certain mismatched doxastic states are irrational, such as believing p, while believing that it is irrational for one to believe p. I focus on an evidentialist view of justification on (...) which a doxastic state regarding a proposition p is epistemically rational or justified just in case it tracks the degree to which one’s evidence supports p. If it is possible to have certain kinds of misleading evidence, then evidentialism and the enkratic requirements come into conflict. Yet, both have been defended as platitudinous. After discussing and rejecting three solutions, I sketch an account that rejects the enkratic requirements, while nevertheless explaining our sense that epistemic akrasia is a distinct kind of epistemic failure. Central to the account is distinguishing between two evaluative perspectives, one having to do with the relevant kind of success, the other having to do with manifesting good dispositions. The problem with akratic subjects, I argue, is that they manifest dispositions to fail to correctly respond to a special class of conclusive and conspicuous reasons. (shrink)

It is common orthodoxy among internalists and externalists alike that knowledge is lost or defeated in situations involving misleading evidence of a suitable kind. But making sense of defeat has seemed to present a particular challenge for those who reject an internalist justification condition on knowledge. My main aim here is to argue that externalists ought to take seriously a view on which knowledge can be retained even in the face of strong seemingly defeating evidence. As an instructive (...) example, I first discuss whether a theory on which knowledge is belief that is safe from error has the resources for accommodating defeat. I argue that beliefs retained in defeat cases need not be unsafe or true in some accidental way. I then discuss externalist strategies for explaining why we have incorrect intuitions about defeat. The notion of an epistemically reasonable subject plays a central role in my theory. Reasonable subjects adopt general strategies that are good for acquiring true belief and knowledge across a wide range of normal cases, but stubbornly retaining belief in the face of new evidence does not reflect such policies. I argue that though the methods employed by subjects who fail to adjust their beliefs in defeat cases may be perfectly good, they are not good methods to adopt, as their adoption is accompanied by bad dispositions. What emerges is a view on which a subject can know despite being unreasonable, and despite failing to manifest dispositions to know across normal cases. Unreasonable subjects are genuinely criticisable, but like almost anything, knowledge can sometimes be achieved in the absence of a good general strategy. (shrink)

This article defends the Fixed Point Thesis: that it is always a rational mistake to have false beliefs about the requirements of rationality. The Fixed Point Thesis is inspired by logical omniscience requirements in formal epistemology. It argues to the Fixed Point Thesis from the Akratic Principle: that rationality forbids having an attitude while believing that attitude is rationally forbidden. It then draws out surprising consequences of the Fixed Point Thesis, for instance that certain kinds of a priori justification (...) are indefeasible and that misleading all-things-considered evidence about rational requirements is impossible. Finally, the Fixed Point Thesis is applied to defend the Right Reasons position on peer disagreement, according to which an agent who has drawn the correct conclusion from her evidence should retain belief in that conclusion even in the face of disagreeing peers. (shrink)

Although traditionally neglected, mathematical diagrams have recently begun to attract attention from philosophers of mathematics. By now, the literature includes several case studies investigating the role of diagrams both in discovery and justification. Certain preliminary questions have, however, been mostly bypassed. What are diagrams exactly? Are there different types of diagrams? In the scholarly literature, the term “mathematical diagram” is used in diverse ways. I propose a working definition that carves out the phenomena that are of most importance for (...) a taxonomy of diagrams in the context of a practice-based philosophy of mathematics, privileging examples from contemporary mathematics. In doing so, I move away from vague, ordinary notions. I define mathematical diagrams as forming notational systems and as being geometric/topological representations or two-dimensional representations. I also examine the relationship between mathematical diagrams and spatiotemporal intuition. By proposing an explication of diagrams, I explain certain controversies in the existing literature. Moreover, I shed light on why mathematical diagrams are so effective in certain instances, and, at other times, dangerously misleading. (shrink)

Subjects who retain their beliefs in the face of higher-order evidence that those very beliefs are outputs of flawed cognitive processes are at least very often criticisable. Many think that this is because such higher-order evidence defeats various epistemic statuses such as justification and knowledge, but it is notoriously difficult to give an account of such defeat. This paper outlines an alternative explanation, stemming from some of my earlier work, for why subjects are criticisable for retaining beliefs in the (...) face of paradigm kinds of putatively defeating higher-order evidence: they manifest dispositions that are bad relative to a range of candidate epistemic successes such as true belief and knowledge. In particular, giving up belief in response to higher-order evidence only when that evidence is not misleading would require subjects to have dispositions that discriminate between cases in which their original cognitive processes is fine, and cases in which they merely seemed to be fine. But, I argue, such dispositions are not normally humanly feasible. I show that retaining belief in putative cases of defeat by higher-order evidence is problematic irrespective of whether veritism or some form of gnosticism is true. In the end I contrast my account of dispositional evaluations with similar-sounding ideas that have been put forth in the literature, such as consequentialist views that focus on instrumental means to success. (shrink)

Researchers misunderstand their role in creating ethical problems when they allow dogmas to purportedly divorce scientists and scientific practices from the values that they embody. Cortina, Edwards, and Powell help us clarify and further develop our position by responding to our critique of, and alternatives to, this misleading separation. In this rebuttal, we explore how the desire to achieve the separation of facts and values is unscientific on the very terms endorsed by its advocates—this separation is refuted by empirical (...) observation. We show that positivists like Cortina and Edwards offer no rigorous theoretical or empirical justifications to substantiate their claims, let alone critique ours. Following Powell, we point to how classical pragmatism understands ‘purpose’ in scientific pursuits while also providing an alternative to the dogmas of positivism and related philosophical positions. In place of dogmatic, unscientific cries about an abstract and therefore always-unobservable ‘reality,’ we invite all organizational scholars to join us in shifting the discussion about quantitative research towards empirically grounded scientific inquiry. This makes the ethics of actual people and their practices central to quantitative research, including the thoughts, discourses, and behaviors of researchers who are always in particular places doing particular things. We propose that quantitative researchers can thus start to think about their research practices as a kind of work, rather than having the status of a kind of dogma. We conclude with some implications that this has for future research and education, including the relevance of research and research methods. (shrink)

There is a large literature exploring how accuracy constrains rational degrees of belief. This paper turns to the unexplored question of how accuracy constrains knowledge. We begin by introducing a simple hypothesis: increases in the accuracy of an agent’s evidence never lead to decreases in what the agent knows. We explore various precise formulations of this principle, consider arguments in its favour, and explain how it interacts with different conceptions of evidence and accuracy. As we show, the principle has some (...) noteworthy consequences for the wider theory of knowledge. First, it implies that an agent cannot be justified in believing a set of mutually inconsistent claims. Second, it implies the existence of a kind of epistemic blindspot: it is not possible to know that one’s evidence is misleading. (shrink)

Perception of a property (e.g. a colour, a shape, a size) can enable thought about the property, while at the same time misleading the subject as to what the property is like. This long-overlooked claim parallels a more familiar observation concerning perception-based thought about objects, namely that perception can enable a subject to think about an object while at the same time misleading her as to what the object is like. I defend the overlooked claim, and then use (...) it to generate a challenge for a standard way of thinking about the relationship between visual experience and rational belief formation. Put informally, that view holds that just as we can mislead others by saying something false, illusory experience misleads by misrepresenting how things stand in the world. I argue that we ought to abandon this view in favour of some radical alternative account of the relationship between visual experience and rational belief formation. (shrink)

A trusted guide into the inner realm where our spirits find strength to master life and live for God. It is hard to exaggerate the significance of Innerland, either for Eberhard Arnold or his readers. It absorbed his energies off and on for most of his adult life--from World War I, when he published the first chapter under the title War: A Call to Inwardness, to 1935, the last year of his life. Packed in metal boxes and buried at night (...) for safekeeping from the Nazis, who raided the author_s study a year before his death (and again a year after it), Innerland was not openly critical of Hitler_s regime. Nevertheless, it attacked the spirits that animated German society: its murderous strains of racism and bigotry, its heady nationalistic fervor, its mindless mass hysteria, and its vulgar materialism. In this sense Innerland stands as starkly opposed to the zeitgeist of our own day as to that of the author_s. At a glance, the focus of Innerland seems to be the cultivation of the spiritual life as an end in itself. Nothing could be more misleading. In fact, to Eberhard Arnold the very thought of encouraging the sort of selfish solitude whereby people seek their own private peace by shutting out the noise and rush of public life around them is anathema. He writes in The Inner Life:_These are times of distress. We cannot retreat, willfully blind to the overwhelming urgency of the tasks pressing on society. We cannot look for inner detachment in an inner and outer isolation...The only justification for withdrawing into the inner self to escape today's confusing, hectic whirl would be that fruitfulness is enriched by it. It is a question of gaining within, through unity with eternal powers, a strength of character ready to be tested in the stream of the world._ Innerland, then, calls us not to passivity, but to action. It invites us to discover the abundance of a life lived for God. It opens our eyes to the possibilities of that _inner land of the invisible where our spirit can find the roots of its strength and thus enable us to press on to the mastery of life we are called to by God._ Only there, says Eberhard Arnold, can our life be placed under the illuminating light of the eternal and seen for what it is. Only there will we find the clarity of vision we need to win the daily battle that is life, and the inner anchor without which we will lose our moorings. (shrink)

In this paper we argue that transparency of machine learning algorithms, just as explanation, can be defined at different levels of abstraction. We criticize recent attempts to identify the explanation of black box algorithms with making their decisions (post-hoc) interpretable, focusing our discussion on counterfactual explanations. These approaches to explanation simplify the real nature of the black boxes and risk misleading the public about the normative features of a model. We propose a new form of algorithmic transparency, that consists (...) in explaining algorithms as an intentional product, that serves a particular goal, or multiple goals (Daniel Dennet’s design stance) in a given domain of applicability, and that provides a measure of the extent to which such a goal is achieved, and evidence about the way that measure has been reached. We call such idea of algorithmic transparency “design publicity.” We argue that design publicity can be more easily linked with the justification of the use and of the design of the algorithm, and of each individual decision following from it. In comparison to post-hoc explanations of individual algorithmic decisions, design publicity meets a different demand (the demand for impersonal justification) of the explainee. Finally, we argue that when models that pursue justifiable goals (which may include fairness as avoidance of bias towards specific groups) to a justifiable degree are used consistently, the resulting decisions are all justified even if some of them are (unavoidably) based on incorrect predictions. For this argument, we rely on John Rawls’s idea of procedural justice applied to algorithms conceived as institutions. (shrink)

The Self-Intimation thesis has it that whatever justificatory status a proposition has, i.e., whether or not we are justified in believing it, we are justified in believing that it has that status. The Infallibility thesis has it that whatever justificatory status we are justified in believing that a proposition has, the proposition in fact has that status. Jointly, Self-Intimation and Infallibility imply that the justificatory status of a proposition closely aligns with the justification we have about that justificatory status. (...) Self-Intimation has two noteworthy implications. First, assuming that we never have sufficient justification for a proposition and for its negation, we can derive Infallibility from Self-Intimation. Interestingly, there seems to be no equivalently simple way to derive Self-Intimation from Infallibility. This asymmetry provides reason for thinking that bottom-level justification rather than top-level justification drives the explanation for why the levels of justification align. Second, Self-Intimation suggests a counterintuitive treatment of information concerning what justificatory status a proposition has. It follows from Self-Intimation that we always have justification for the truth about whether a proposition is justified for us, and therefore, that higher-order evidence could change what we should believe on this matter only by misleading us. This permits forming beliefs about whether a proposition is justified for us without regard to higher-order evidence, and thus reveals a reason for thinking that top-level justification is evidentially inert. (shrink)

All things considered, there are many public assistance recipients for whom there are compelling moral reasons to engage in welfare fraud. For many people, failure to defraud the welfare system, should they find themselves in a position to do so with impunity, would constitute a serious moral offense. This conclusion seems to fly in the face of prevailing notions of common sense. But this is misleading, since it is at the same time implied by principles that are widely embraced, (...) assuming a set of circumstances that can be readily shown to obtain in many cases. Under that set of circumstances, and given our affirmation of certain basic moral convictions, we cannot consistently blame the practitioner of welfare fraud, or excuse, without special justifications, the legal conformist. (shrink)

“Pascal's Wager” is the name given to an argument due to Blaise Pascal for believing, or for at least taking steps to believe, in God. The name is somewhat misleading, for in a single paragraph of his Pensées, Pascal apparently presents at least three such arguments, each of which might be called a ‘wager’ — it is only the final of these that is traditionally referred to as “Pascal's Wager”. We find in it the extraordinary confluence of several important (...) strands of thought: the justification of theism; probability theory and decision theory, used here for almost the first time in history; pragmatism; voluntarism (the thesis that belief is a matter of the will); and the use of the concept of infinity. (shrink)

I argue that the use of a social discount rate to assess the consequences of climate policy is unhelpful and misleading. I consider two lines of justification for discounting: (i) ethical arguments for a "pure rate of time preference" and (ii) economic arguments that take time as a proxy for economic growth and the diminishing marginal utility of consumption. In both cases I conclude that, given the long time horizons, distinctive uncertainties, and particular costs and benefits at stake (...) in the climate context, discount rates are at best a poor proxy for the normative considerations they are meant to represent. (shrink)

I claim that we should reject a sharp distinction between fiction and non-fiction according to which documentary is a faithful representation of the facts, whilst fiction films merely invite us to imagine what is made up. Instead, we should think of fiction and non-fiction as genres: categories whose membership is determined by a combination of non-essential features and which influence appreciation in a variety of ways. An objection to this approach is that it renders the distinction too conventional and fragile, (...) undermining our justification for criticising documentaries like Bowling for Columbine or The Hunting Ground for playing fast and loose with the facts. I argue that this objection is misguided, misidentifying the justification for criticising non-fiction films that mislead or deceive. I develop an alternative account that explains why we also criticise many fictions for inaccuracy. (shrink)