The debate between exceptionalists and anti-exceptionalists about logic is often framed as concerning whether the justification of logical theories is a priori or a posteriori (for short: whether logic is a priori or a posteriori). As we substantiate (S1), this framing more deeply encodes the usual anti-exceptionalist thesis that logical theories, like scientific theories, are abductively justified, coupled with the common supposition that abduction is an a posteriori mode of inference, in the sense that the epistemic value of abduction is (...) (and, indeed, must be) a posteriori. In past work, however, we have argued that this common supposition is incorrect: abduction is an a priori mode of inference, in the sense that the epistemic value of abduction is (and indeed, must be) a priori (Biggs and Wilson 2017a, 2017b, 2019). After sketching our two main argumentative strategies for this conclusion (S2), we go on (S3) to consider its import on the proper understanding of anti-exceptionalism about logic. (shrink)

Business Ethics, the Environment & Responsibility, Volume 31, Issue 2, Page 546-561, April 2022.

It is widely accepted that there is a visual field, but the analogous notion of an auditory field is rejected by many philosophers on the grounds that the metaphysics or phenomenology of audition lack the necessary spatial or phenomenological structure. In this paper, I argue that many of the common objections to the existence of an auditory field are misguided and that, contrary to a tradition of philosophical scepticism about the spatiality of auditory experience, it is as richly spatial as (...) visual experience—and in some ways even more so. By carefully considering the spatiality and boundedness of audition, along with how sounds or their sources are experienced as occurring within the surrounding acoustic environment, we can gain a better understanding of (i) our auditory experience of space and (ii) the conditions for the existence of spatial sensory fields in general in a way that does not privilege vision over the other senses. (shrink)

How should we respond to cases of disagreement where two epistemic agents have the same evidence but come to different conclusions? Adam Elga has provided a Bayesian framework for addressing this question. In this paper, I shall highlight two unfortunate consequences of this framework, which Elga does not anticipate. Both problems derive from a failure of commutativity between application of the equal weight view and updating in the light of other evidence.

This paper argues that there took place in the eighteenth century a specific, distinctive and essential phase in the emergence of modern science, a phase which can be characterised as “the Great Instauration” in that it witnessed the large-scale realisation of Francis Bacon’s earlier vision—albeit not, for the most part, through the specific means which Bacon had proposed. That claim is exemplified in three fields—the “physico-mathematical sciences,” chemistry and electricity—each of which yielded dramatic and permanent advances in knowledge; and an (...) attempt is then made to render those advances intelligible in terms of specific social and technical themes. The paper proposes that the eighteenth-century Great Instauration arose from the development of an international natural-philosophical community, made possible by new institutions and especially by new publication media. And it suggests that what made this social development epistemologically fruitful was an inherently progressive process which had been anticipated by Bacon, namely what Sophie Weeks has called his “cybernetic” account of knowledge-making—the refinement of both questions and techniques in the light of Nature’s response to investigation. (shrink)

Economic theory assumes that preferences are rational. However, experiments have found small violations of transitivity. This paper develops a model of rationality with preference discovery costs. Introspection is costly. Thus, agents may find it optimal to use less than full effort, even though this raises the risk of making a poor choice. This model could potentially explain the intransitivities observed in the data while retaining rationality and optimization.

This article shows how funding research on Alzheimer's disease became a priority for the British Medical Research Council in the late 1970s and 1980s, thanks to work that isolated new pathological and biochemical markers, and showed that the disease affected a significant proportion of the elderly population. In contrast to histories that focus on the emergence of new and competing theories of disease causation in this period, I argue that concerns over the use of different assessment methods ensured the MRC's (...) immediate priority was standardising the ways in which researchers identified and recorded symptoms of Alzheimer's disease in potential research subjects. I detail how the rationale behind the development of standard assessment guidelines was less about arriving at a firm diagnosis and more about facilitating research by generating data that could be easily compared across the disciplines and sites that constitute modern biomedicine. Drawing on criticism of specific tests in the MRC's guidelines, which some psychiatrists argued were "middle class biased", I also show that debates over standardisation did not simply reflect concerns specific to the fields or areas of research that the MRC sought to govern. Questions about the validity of standard assessment guidelines for Alzheimer's disease embodied broader concerns about education and social class, which ensured that distinguishing normal from pathological in old age remained a contested and historically contingent process. (shrink)

Visual perception is widely taken to present properties such as redness, roundness, and so on. This in turn might be thought to give rise to accuracy conditions for experience, and so content, regardless of which metaphysical view of perception one endorses. An influential version of this argument—Susanna Siegel’s ’Argument from Appearing’—aims to establish the existence of content as common ground between representational and relational views of perception. This goes against proponents of ‘austere’ relationalism who deny that content plays a substantive (...) role in philosophical explanations of conscious perceptual experience. Though Siegel’s argument purports to be neutral with respect to the metaphysics of perception, it relies upon an equivocation between the presentation of property-types and property-instances. Consequently, the argument begs the question against the austere relational view, and so fails to establish the desired conclusion. So while relationalists can and should allow that experiences have accuracy conditions, it does not follow from this that they have contents of any philosophically interesting or significant kind. (shrink)

We explain how the work of Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914) – the founder of semiotics and of the pragmatist tradition in philosophy – contributes an epistemological, metaphysical, and ethical foundation to some key transhumanist ideas, including the following claims: technological cognitive enhancement is not only possible but a present reality; pursuing more sweeping cognitive enhancements is epistemically rational; and current humans should try to evolve themselves into posthumans. On Peirce’s view, the fundamental aim of inquiry is truth, understood in terms (...) of a stage of ideal cognition (what he calls the “final opinion”). As current human cognitive abilities are insufficient to achieve this stage, Peirce’s views on cognition support a variety of ways in which they might be enhanced. Finally, we argue that what Peirce describes as our ethical summum bonum seems remarkably similar to what Bostrom (2005) argues to be the core transhumanist value: “the exploration of the posthuman realm.”. (shrink)

This article takes its point of departure from late Lacan's meditations on the incompatibility of psychoanalysis with Japanese culture due to its non-European linguistic basis. The article argues that this emphasis on language narrowly conceived fails to keep pace with the interconnected, multi-media, all-encompassing nature of the unconscious today. Illustrating this point, the article focuses on the figure of the hikikomori: middle-class Japanese youths who have withdrawn from all conventional social contact to indulge exclusively computer-based interactions. Thanks to the overlap (...) with the related figure of the ‘Bedroom DJ’, the analysis then moves on to the ambient music of Richard D. James, aka Aphex Twin. It argues for the validity of the concept of an ‘audio unconscious’ distinct from Lacan's unconscious ‘structured like a language’. The final part of the article, however, examines one of James's music videos and discerns in it modes of jouissance that psychoanalysis can still describe. (shrink)

Historians of modern design and sociology have shown little interest in the leaders of the ever resourceful and influential British Positivist Society. One of the aims of this essay is to show that the Positivist polymath Frederic Harrison (1831–1923) cultivated ideas and practices that are compatible with modernists’ aspirations to improve the lives of the masses. It is accordingly shown that Harrison was an ardent supporter of working-class causes and that on this basis he developed sociological survey methods and produced (...) social programmes to initiate the comprehensive reorganisation of cities. Harrison intended to realise a modern utopia called the “Occidental Republic”, created by Auguste Comte, the Positivist Philosopher who – during the 1830 and 1840s – introduced both sociology and the Religion of Humanity. While many studies pore over the Positivists’ “church” rituals, this essay is the first to argue that the Religion of Humanity and sociology were of equal consequence – and that together they formed the basis of their controversial spatial theory and practice, which was considered the means to realise Comte’s utopia. This vision, it is argued, is central to appreciating how Positivism percolated into the “modern movements” of architecture and planning. (shrink)

Bioethics, Volume 36, Issue 3, Page 283-289, March 2022.

Virtue and the Moral Life brings together distinguished philosophers and theologians with younger scholars of consummate promise to produce ten essays that engage both academics and students of ethics. This collection explores the role virtues play in identifying the good life and the good society.

Human nature and cooperation -- Tucson knows all about that -- Featuring interviews with Curtis A., Renø M., and Alanna C. -- Democracy and Sproul Plaza -- The people's library -- Featuring interviews with Zachary L. and Jaime T. -- Barcelona to Greensboro -- Student loan debt -- Featuring an interview with professor George Caffentzis -- Solidarity.

George Boolos, Crispin Wright, and others have demonstrated how most of Frege's treatment of arithmetic can be obtained from a second-order statement that Boolos dubbed ‘Hume's principle’. This note explores the historical evidence that Frege originally planned to develop a philosophical approach to numbers in which Hume's principle is central, but this strategy was abandoned midway through his Grundlagen.

Using the term world to mean a creative response to objective reality, this book considers the ways in which Eastern and Western peoples construct their natural, social, aesthetic, and religious worlds. It points the way to a view of Eastern and Western as complementary, rather than contradictory, descriptions.

Fair allocation of scarce healthcare resources has been much studied within philosophy and bioethics, but analysis has focused on a narrow range of cases. The Covid-19 pandemic provided significant new challenges, making powerfully visible the extent to which health systems can be fragile, and how scarcities within crucial elements of interlinked care pathways can lead to cascading failures. Health system resilience, while previously a key topic in global health, can now be seen to be a vital concern in high-income countries (...) too. Unfortunately, mainstream philosophical approaches to the ethics of rationing and prioritisation provide little guidance for these new problems of scarcity. Indeed, the cascading failures were arguably exacerbated by earlier attempts to make health systems leaner and more efficient. This paper argues that health systems should move from simple and atomistic approaches to measuring effectiveness to approaches that are holistic both in focusing on performance at the level of the health system as a whole, and also in incorporating a wider range of ethical concerns in thinking about what makes a health system good. (shrink)

The idea that there are five senses dates back to Aristotle, who was one of the first philosophers to examine them systematically. Though it has become conventional wisdom, many scientists and philosophers would argue that this idea is outdated and inaccurate. Indeed, they have given many different answers to this question, ranging from just three (the number of different kinds of physical energy we can detect) to 33 or more senses. Perhaps surprisingly, the issue remains controversial, partly because it is (...) not clear exactly what should count as a ‘sense’. Should proprioception, balance and kinaesthesis, amongst others, be considered additional senses? And if so, how do we figure out how many senses we really have? -/- (Published in Turkish under the title ‘Çok Duyumlu Algi’). (shrink)

Each of our sensory modalities—vision, touch, taste, etc.—works on a slightly different timescale, with differing temporal resolutions and processing lag. This raises the question of how, or indeed whether, these sensory streams are co-ordinated or ‘bound’ into a coherent multisensory experience of the perceptual ‘now’. In this paper I evaluate one account of how temporal binding is achieved: the temporal windows hypothesis, concluding that, in its simplest form, this hypothesis is inadequate to capture a variety of multisensory phenomena. Rather, the (...) evidence suggests the existence of a more complex temporal structure in which multiple overlapping windows support distinct functional mechanisms. To aid in the precise formulation of such views, I propose a taxonomy of temporal window types and their characteristics that in turn suggests promising avenues for future empirical and philosophical research. I conclude by examining some philosophical implications of multi-window models for the metaphysics of perception and perceptual experience more generally. (shrink)

SCOTT A and WILSON L. Nursing Inquiry 2011; 18: 40–49 Valued identities and deficit identities: Wellness Recovery Action Planning and self-management in mental healthWellness Recovery Action Planning (WRAP) is a self-management programme for people with mental illnesses developed by a mental health consumer, and rooted in the values of the ‘recovery’ movement. The WRAP is noteworthy for its construction of a health identity which is individualised, responsibilised, and grounded in an ‘at risk’ subjectivity; success with this programme requires development (...) of an intensely focused health lifestyle. We draw on Bourdieu and Giddens to argue that what is being developed is a ‘reflexive health habitus’, which is not equally accessible to all social groups, and is in tension with WRAP’s recovery-orientated aims. However, it is understandable that such a programme developed in mental health, because people with mental illness are highly stigmatised as ‘a risk’ and viewed as in need of risk management. By developing their own form of self-monitoring ‘at risk’ identity, mental health consumers are, paradoxically, able to construct themselves as ideal health citizens and no longer a risk, thus re-entering the moral community. We conclude by suggesting some changes to WRAP practice. (shrink)

Evolutionary science (ES) and contextual behavioral science (CBS) have developed largely independently during the last half century. However, the earlier histories of these two bodies of knowledge are thoroughly entwined. ES provides a unifying theoretical framework for the biological sciences, and is increasingly being applied to human-related sciences. Meanwhile, CBS is concerned with influencing human behavior in a practical sense. This groundbreaking volume seeks to integrate ES and CBS to promote real, positive change in peoples' lives. Evolution and Contextual Behavioral (...) Science offers a unique glimpse into the histories of ES and CBS, shows how they are intrinsically linked, and outlines why their integration--or, reunification--is essential. By examining these two schools of thought side by side, you'll gain an understanding of why functional and contextual approaches in CBS need to be combined with ES for both fields to advance more rapidly. Finally, rather than the sequential relationship that is typically imagined between ES and CBS, you'll discover how an integrated relationship between these two sciences will result in a better framework for understanding predicting, and influencing human behavior--back cover. (shrink)

In this article the basic principles of responsible authorship and peer review are surveyed, with special emphasis on (a) guidelines for refereeing archival journal articles and proposals; and (b) how these guidelines should be taken into account at all stages of writing.

Struck by the absence of love affairs, adventures, travels, and political engagement in Immanuel Kant's life, a noted commentator describes him as unformed, to a degree surpassing all other philosophers, by challenging life events. Declaring that Kant 'can be understood only through his work in which he immerses himself with unwavering discipline,' the writer evokes the image of a body of writing demanding to be understood through text-internal analytical methods alone. The theme of the enclosed Kantian text is virtually irresistible. (...) It dominates in teaching practice and in a large percentage of the expository literature, where Kant's ideas are paraphrased in more, or even less transparent prose. It is attributable to the fact that Kant is a difficult author, a fact that, despite his scorn for popular philosophy, he knew and to some extent regretted. The commentator too is apt to immerse him or herself in Kant's writings with unwavering discipline, leaving little time and energy for a study of Kant's surrounding context. Like Wordsworth's Isaac Newton, whose innate powers enable him to teach the truth to himself, Kant is seen as a walled-off genius whose innovations nevertheless reached to the whole world. But Kant's famous domesticity and addiction to routine did not preclude contact with an external world. His mind was formed--as was Newton's, as is that of any one of us-- by his encounters with books and essays, by his exchanges with correspondents and dinner guests, from whom he learned and by whom he was provoked and challenged. The name index of the Academy Edition of Kant's works and the range of authors in the catalogue of Kant's library books published by Arthur Warda in 1922 leave no doubt as to the breadth of his personal and literary acquaintances. (shrink)

“This chapter looks at four arguments which Microsoft has used to justify the claim that illegal copying of software is wrong: software piracy is theft; software piracy violates the rights of copyright holders; software piracy is free riding; and software piracy reduces incentives to future innovation. It argues that the first argument is simply wrong, and the other three do not establish that it is in fact wrong to pirate Microsoft’s programs.

THE CONSERVATIVE SPIRIT IN POLITICS IT is difficult for me to express my pleasure in being again for a few days on the campus of the University of ...

The paper offers contextual and integrating comments about sex, evolution and psychopathology as a point of departure toward a new and more scientific understanding of human neurosis. The evolved roots of neurotic behavior are firmly linked to theorems of evolution, which is emerging as the basic science of psychopathology. Evolutionary tenets serve to: 1) redefine key aspects of neuroses, 2) place neurotic behavior in a broad and integrated evolutionary context, and 3) pose basic questions for all psychopathology. Readers who wish (...) to expand, clarify or confirm elements of might well consult basic books in either field as a passing familiarity with psychiatry and biology is assumed. (shrink)

This paper introduces the special theme on management and political philosophy, following a call for papers in the journal Philosophy of Management. The scope of this introduction is to emphasize the importance of political philosophy as a subtheme in the discipline of philosophy of management by shedding light on a cornerstone conversation: the role of the state in fostering corporate accountability for social injustice. For doing so, we present the papers invited to this special theme and show how they contribute (...) to this conversation. Inspired by the arguments that the articles in this special theme develop, we also provide further thoughts for the directions that future research should pursue for enriching the discussions in the political philosophy of management. (shrink)

Chalmers’s two-dimensional argument against materialism (aka the zombie argument) is arguably the most ingenious attempt to ground a view about fundamental reality on epistemic considerations. From the conceivability of a being that is physically identical to a conscious being but that is deprived of phenomenal consciousness (a zombie), the argument draws on the interplay of the primary and the second intensions of the zombie hypothesis to infer the metaphysical possibility of a zombie world, and thus the falsity of physicalism about (...) phenomenality. By means of a detailed reconstruction of the two-dimensional argument, the paper tries to isolate its most central assumption: that the role played by an epistemic scenario (an intentional object) in the verification of the zombie hypothesis is played by a nonintentionally individuated metaphysical world (the zombie world) considered as actual. The paper argues that no non-viciously circular case for this assumption has been made. Thus, the two-dimensional argument is at best inconclusive. (shrink)

Examines the perennial issues that keep science and religion at arm's length, clarifies those issues, and fits them into an historical framework—from Plato, to Aquinas, to today's thinkers.