In a recent paper, Selim Berker develops an abductive argument against practical reasons for belief that exploits an alleged difference between epistemic and practical reasons. According to Berker, epistemic reasons for belief balance to suspension. If I have equally strong epistemic reasons to believe and disbelieve some proposition, I lack sufficient reason either to believe or disbelieve it. Rather, I have decisive reason to suspend judgment. In contrast, practical reasons balance to permission. If I have equally strong practical reasons to (...) φ or ψ, I have sufficient reason to do either. Given this difference, Berker argues that defenders of practical reasons for belief cannot offer a plausible explanation of how practical and epistemic reasons interact in order to yield all-things-considered normative verdicts. In this essay, I defend a non-interactionist “pure” form of pragmatism against Berker’s objection. I outline a pure pragmatist theory, recapitulate why Berker thinks it also falls prey to his objection, and explain why the objection fails to undermine pure pragmatism. Finally, I consider an additional reason Berker’s argument might seem persuasive and show that it depends on conflating Berker’s objection and a separate challenge to pure pragmatism. Once these distinct challenges are disambiguated, it is easier to see why Berker’s objection is not a significant concern for pure pragmatists. (shrink)

Recently, there has been an increased interest in folk intuitions about freedom and moral responsibility from both philosophers and psychologists. We aim to extend our understanding of folk intuitions about freedom and moral responsibility using an individual differences approach. Building off previous research suggesting that there are systematic differences in folks’ philosophically relevant intuitions, we present new data indicating that the personality trait extraversion predicts, to a significant extent, those who have compatibilist versus incompatibilist intuitions. We argue that identifying groups (...) of people who have specific and diverse intuitions about freedom and moral responsibility offers the possibility for theoretical advancement in philosophy and psychology, and may in part explain why some perennial philosophical debates have proven intractable. (shrink)

The importance of being ambiguous -- Interlude : ambiguity, order and the deity -- Notation and its limits -- Interlude : the Israelite red heifer and the edge of power in China -- Ritual and the rhythms of ambiguity -- Interlude : crossing the boundaries of empathy -- Shared experience -- Interlude : experience and multiplicity.

In this paper I propose an account of representation for scientific models based on Kendall Walton’s ‘make-believe’ theory of representation in art. I first set out the problem of scientific representation and respond to a recent argument due to Craig Callender and Jonathan Cohen, which aims to show that the problem may be easily dismissed. I then introduce my account of models as props in games of make-believe and show how it offers a solution to the problem. Finally, I demonstrate (...) an important advantage my account has over other theories of scientific representation. All existing theories analyse scientific representation in terms of relations, such as similarity or denotation. By contrast, my account does not take representation in modelling to be essentially relational. For this reason, it can accommodate a group of models often ignored in discussions of scientific representation, namely models which are representational but which represent no actual object. (shrink)

The 'best-system' analysis of lawhood [Lewis 1994] faces the 'zero-fit problem': that many systems of laws say that the chance of history going actually as it goes--the degree to which the theory 'fits' the actual course of history--is zero. Neither an appeal to infinitesimal probabilities nor a patch using standard measure theory avoids the difficulty. But there is a way to avoid it: replace the notion of 'fit' with the notion of a world being typical with respect to a theory.

When it comes to evaluating our own abilities and prospects, most people are subject to a distorting bias. We think that we are better – friendlier, more well-liked, better leaders, and better drivers – than we really are. Once we learn about this bias, we should ratchet down our self-evaluations to correct for it. But we don’t. That leaves us with an uncomfortable tension in our beliefs: we knowingly allow our beliefs to differ from the ones that we think are (...) supported by our evidence. We can mitigate the tension by waffling between two belief states: a reflective state that has been recalibrated to take into account our tendency to overrate ourselves, and a non-reflective state that has not. (shrink)

Joshua Knobe (2003a) has discovered that the perceived goodness or badness of side effects of actions influences people's ascriptions of intentionality to those side effects. I present the paradigmatic cases that elicit what has been called the Knobe effect and offer some explanations of the Knobe effect. I put these explanations into two broad groups. One explains the Knobe effect by referring to our concept of intentional action. The other explains the Knobe effect without referring to our concept of intentional (...) action. I discuss some problems with these explanations and conclude with some possible avenues for future research. (shrink)

We study the lattice of extensions of four-valued Belnap–Dunn logic, called super-Belnap logics by analogy with superintuitionistic logics. We describe the global structure of this lattice by splitting it into several subintervals, and prove some new completeness theorems for super-Belnap logics. The crucial technical tool for this purpose will be the so-called antiaxiomatic (or explosive) part operator. The antiaxiomatic (or explosive) extensions of Belnap–Dunn logic turn out to be of particular interest owing to their connection to graph theory: the lattice (...) of finitary antiaxiomatic extensions of Belnap–Dunn logic is isomorphic to the lattice of upsets in the homomorphism order on finite graphs (with loops allowed). In particular, there is a continuum of finitary super-Belnap logics. Moreover, a non-finitary super-Belnap logic can be constructed with the help of this isomorphism. As algebraic corollaries we obtain the existence of a continuum of antivarieties of De Morgan algebras and the existence of a prevariety of De Morgan algebras which is not a quasivariety. (shrink)

Transdisciplinarity includes the assumption that within new institutional settings, scientific research becomes more closely responsive to practical problems and user needs and is therefore often subject to considerable application pressure. This raises the question whether transdisciplinarity affects the epistemic standards and the fruitfulness of research. Case studies show how user-orientation and epistemic innovativeness can be combined. While the modeling involved in all cases under consideration was local and focused primarily on features of immediate practical relevance, it was informed by theoretical (...) insights from basic research. Conversely, industrial research turns out sometimes to produce theoretical understanding. These findings highlight an interactive relationship between science and technology (moderate emergentism), which is distinct from the traditional view of a one-sided dependence of technology on science (cascade model) and from the newly received independence account (emergentism). (shrink)

The United Nations Since its foundation in international relations has become a core system. From the United Nations restrictions on the use of force, peacekeeping and monitoring operations of the rapid expansion of the controversy surrounding the reform of the Security Council and international standards and guidelines for the four in terms of advocacy, the United Nations has played an irreplaceable role, and will remain in the international transformation of society play an important role. The United Nations has become one (...) of the central institutions since its foundation. This study takes into account some important issues in appraising the role of the United Nations in international relations including: the UN's restriction on the use of force, the rapid expansion of UN peacekeeping and election-monitoring activities, the debates concerning the reform of the Security Council and the UN's promotion on international standards and norms. It reaches a conclusion that the United States has played an irreplaceable role and will still been so in the transformation of international society. (shrink)

"[An] important essay by a philosopher who more convincingly than any other I can think of demonstrates the continuing significance of his vocation in the life of our culture."—Karsten Harries, _The New York Times Book Review_ With _The Presence of Myth_, Kolakowski demonstrates that no matter how hard man strives for purely rational thought, there has always been-and always will be-a reservoir of mythical images that lend "being" and "consciousness" a specifically human meaning. "Kolakowski undertakes a philosophy of culture which (...) extends to all realms of human intercourse—intellectual, artistic, scientific, and emotional.... [His] book has real significance for today, and may well become a classic in the philosophy of culture."—_Anglican Theological Review_. (shrink)

Scheler’s main objection against Kant’s ethical system was that it was a formal system, not material. Ethics should deal with actual deeds, intentions, values, etc., not with a form, but with a content. Scheler separated values from goods and made them immutable and imperishable ideal objects that become real only when manifesting themselves ingoods. The world of values is hierarchical and is founded on the value of God. However, the principal moral values – good and evil – are not included (...) in this hierarchy; they come into play when actualizing other values. Values are accessible to humans through an emotive intuition and are inaccessible to reason, which is a fairly serious weakness of Scheler’s system. The person, defined as the unity of actions, is the original carrier of good and evil. Moral goodness of a person becomes a reality when nonmoral positive values are actualized. There is a measure of innateness in Scheler’s system. Not only the entire emotive apparatus is built into the human being – strivings, preference, will, and feelings with the dominating character of love and hate – but also general rules or hierarchy of values and the rules or axioms of application of values. The general aspect of such rules means that formal ethics is innate, and this formal aspect of ethics acquires material dimension in life according toa particular social milieu. In this way, Kant’s framework of formal ethics is moved to the inborn level of emotive machinery. (shrink)

The book prescribes a way to educate ourselves and our young people how to disagree well and lays out a framework for flourishing together in society despite our radical differences.

The philosophical case for extended cognition is often made with reference to ‘extended-memory cases’ ; though, unfortunately, proponents of the hypothesis of extended cognition as well as their adversaries have failed to appreciate the kinds of epistemological problems extended-memory cases pose for mainstream thinking in the epistemology of memory. It is time to give these problems a closer look. Our plan is as follows: in §1, we argue that an epistemological theory remains compatible with HEC only if its epistemic assessments (...) do not violate what we call ‘the epistemic parity principle’. In §2, we show how the constraint of respecting the epistemic parity principle stands in what appears to be a prima facie intractable tension with mainstream thinking about cases of propositional memory. We then outline and evaluate in §3 several lines of response. (shrink)

Most accounts of “logical empiricism in America” take logical empiricism to be a monolithic, or at least a one-dimensional, philosophical group. This picture of logical empiricism has come under well-reasoned attack during the past two decades, but some of the relevant conclusions for the reception-history of the movement were not drawn, or were not drawn as thoroughly as they could have been. Thus, if we want to understand the reception of logical empiricism, we should not talk about the reception of (...) logical empiricism as such; rather, we should provide a more stratified and differently balanced account. This article aims to draw the contours of one more stratified account by pointing out differences in the reception-history of logical empiricism with respect to pragmatism in particular. Namely, I will examine and defend an account according to which the more pragmatist-naturalist wing of logical empiricism was welcomed by the majority of American pragmatists while the more technical wing came immediately under pragmatist attack from various sides. (shrink)

In the process of implementing an ethical code of conduct, a business organization uses formal methods. Of these, training, courses and means of enforcement are common and are also suitable for self-regulation. The USA is encouraging business corporations to self regulate with the Federal Sentencing Guidelines (FSG). The Guidelines prescribe similar formal methods and specify that, unless such methods are used, the process of implementation will be considered ineffective, and the business will therefore not be considered to have complied with (...) the guidelines. Business organizations invest enormous funds on formal methods. However, recent events indicate that these are not, by themselves, yielding the desired results. Our study, based on a sample of 812 employees and conducted in an Israeli subsidiary of a leading multinational High-Tech corporation headquartered in the US, indicates that, of the methods used in the process of implementation, one of the informal methods (namely, the social norms of the organization) is perceived by employees to have the most influence on their conduct. This result, when examined against employee tenure, remains relatively stable over the years, and stands in contradistinction to the formalistic approach embedded in the FSG. We indirectly measure the effectiveness of the percieved most influential implementation process methods by analyzing their impact on employee attitudes (namely, personal ethical commitment and employees'' commitment to organizational values). Our results indicate that the informal methods (manager sets an example or social norms of the organization) are likely to yield greater commitment with respect to both employee attitudes than the formal method (training and courses on the subject of ethics). The personal control method (my own personal values) differs significantly from all the other methods in that it yields the highest degree of personal ethical commitment and the lowest degree of employees'' commitment to organizational values. (shrink)