It’s a familiar fact that there is something it is like to see red, eat chocolate or feel pain. More recently philosophers have insisted that in addition to this objectual phenomenology there is something it is like for me to eat chocolate, and this for-me-ness is no less there than the chocolatishness. Recognizing this subjective feature of consciousness helps shape certain theories of consciousness, introspection and the self. Though it does this heavy philosophical work, and it is supposed to be (...) relatively obvious to anyone who introspects, it is rather difficult to see just what this phenomenal me-ness is supposed to be; indeed, many philosophers deny it exists. In this paper we try to provide a clear sense of what phenomenal me-ness involves, and then then consider some arguments for the existence of phenomenal me-ness experience as well as some accounts of what gives rise to it. In the end, we argue that the plausible senses of me-ness are a good deal thinner than what often seems to be claimed. (shrink)

Rule-consequentialism has been accused of either collapsing into act-consequentialism or being internally inconsistent. I have tried to develop a form of rule-consequentialism without these flaws. In this June's issue of Utilitas, Robert Card argued that I have failed. Here I assess his arguments.

This chapter discusses Kuhn’s conception of the history of science by focussing on two respects in which Kuhn is an historicist historian and philosopher of science. I identify two distinct, but related, aspects of historicism in the work of Hegel and show how these are also found in Kuhn’s work. First, Kuhn held tradition to be important for understanding scientific change and that the tradition from which a scientific idea originates must be understood in evaluating that idea. This makes Kuhn (...) a historicist in a sense we may call conservative. Secondly, Kuhn held that there is a pattern to the development of science. In the light of the fact that he held scientific change to be law-like, we can call this second aspect of Kuhn’s historicism determinist. I discuss the relationship of Kuhn’s historicist historiography to the philosophical purposes he had for his history of science, namely to refute a conception of scientific progress as driven towards increasing truth by something like ‘the scientific method’. I argue that while this determinism refutes certain positivist conceptions of scientific change, it also requires internalism—the view that the causes of scientific change come from within science, not from outside. Consequently, Kuhn’s historiography of science contrasts with that implicit in much of post-Kuhnian science studies. (shrink)

A critical examination of James Brown's Who Rules in Science?

Rule-consequentialism is frequently regarded as problematic since it faces the following powerful dilemma: either rule-consequentialism collapses into act-consequentialism or rule-consequentialism is inconsistent. Recent defenders of this theory such as Brad Hooker provide a careful response to this objection. By explicating the nature and theoretical commitments of rule-consequentialism, I contend that these maneuvers are not successful by offering a new way of viewing the dilemma which retains its force even in light of these recent discussions. The central idea is that (...) even the most well-developed contemporary form of the view is ensnared in the following dilemma: as an agent-neutral consequentialist theory, rule-consequentialism is either inconsistent or it is desperately unmotivated as a form of consequentialism since it is committed to a non-consequentialist form of ultimate moral value. (shrink)

Met lit. opg. Met reg. The author argues that the rupture of post-modernism with the critical culture of modernism, realism and Marxism is in the ligt of the still determining power of many of the aims and concerns of the modernist and realist projects. Also included is a description of the production, distribution and criticism of the visual arts in Britain since the late 1970s and the rise of Thatcherism.

From the ferment of recent debates about the intellectual virtues, Roberts and Wood develop an approach they call 'regulative epistemology', exploring the connection between knowledge and intellectual virtue. In the course of their argument they analyse particular virtues of intellectual life - such as courage, generosity, and humility - in detail.

In July 2017, China’s State Council released the country’s strategy for developing artificial intelligence, entitled ‘New Generation Artificial Intelligence Development Plan’. This strategy outlined China’s aims to become the world leader in AI by 2030, to monetise AI into a trillion-yuan industry, and to emerge as the driving force in defining ethical norms and standards for AI. Several reports have analysed specific aspects of China’s AI policies or have assessed the country’s technical capabilities. Instead, in this article, we focus on (...) the socio-political background and policy debates that are shaping China’s AI strategy. In particular, we analyse the main strategic areas in which China is investing in AI and the concurrent ethical debates that are delimiting its use. By focusing on the policy backdrop, we seek to provide a more comprehensive and critical understanding of China’s AI policy by bringing together debates and analyses of a wide array of policy documents. (shrink)

Resumen: El discurso de la economía ha transitado por una tensión entre pertenecer a una Ciencia Social y presentar rasgos prototípicos de una Ciencia Básica. Ahora bien, evidenciar esta hibridez desafía a los investigadores del lenguaje, sobre todo si estos textos son parte de la formación de un economista. Particularmente, el Informe de Política Monetaria no ha sido estudiado desde el punto de vista lingüístico, por lo que se busca observar, en un corpus de 45 textos, si el género IPOM (...) evidencia dicha tensión discursiva de la disciplina. Para lograr ese objetivo, se ha optado por una metodología basada en dos dimensiones: Contexto de Producción y Organización Retórico-Funcional. Tras el análisis, los hallazgos del corpus IPOM-2013 integradamente muestran que el género IPOM efectivamente evidencia dicha tensión con rasgos más características de la CB como es el uso de recursos matemáticos y, por otro lado, rasgos de la CS, asociados a la modalización del discurso en su macromovida central.: The discourse of economy has gone by a constant tension between belonging to a Social Science and present prototypical features of a Basic Science. However, evidence this hybridity poses a challenge for researchers of language, especially if these texts are part of the training of an economist. In particular, the Monetary Policy Report has not been studied from the linguistic point of view. In this context, this research search to answer the question whether the gender IPOM evidences such discursive tension of the discipline. To achieve this objective, it has opted for a methodology based on 2 dimensions: Production Context and Rhetorical-Functional Organization. After the analysis, the findings Integrally shows that the IPOM genre effectively demonstrates this tension with features more characteristic of the BS such as the use of mathematical resources and, on the other hand, SC traits, mainly associated to the modalization of the discourse in its central macromove. (shrink)

ABSTRACTCommunity-focused journalists increasingly publish their work for global audiences. This project defines a circle of “community privacy”—the understanding that some information is ethically...

This book, with its attention to literature and the visual arts as well as traditional non-fiction sources, provides a distinctive, wide-ranging exploration of utopia and education. Utopia is examined not as a model of social perfection but as an active, ongoing, imaginative educational process the building of better worlds.

In this paper, we develop an analysis of the structure and content of loneliness. We argue that this is an emotion of absence-an affective state in which certain social goods are regarded as out of reach for the subject of experience. By surveying the range of social goods that appear to be missing from the lonely person's perspective, we see what it is that can make this emotional condition so subjectively awful for those who undergo it, including the profound sense (...) of being unable to realise oneself, in collaboration with others. (shrink)

Exponents and critics of semantic presupposition have almost invariably based their discussion on the ('Standard') definition of presupposition implied by Frege and Strawson. In this study Noel Burton-Roberts argues convincingly against this definition, that leads it to a three-valued semantics. He presents a very simple semantic definition which is weaker, more general and leads to a semantics more easily interpreted as two-valued with gaps. The author shows that a wide range of intuitive facts that eluded the Standard definition follow (...) directly from this ('Revised') definition itself: facts about the presuppositions of compound sentences and modal sentences, about presuppositional conflict and about differences in the logical status of simple sentences suffering from presupposition failure. The book includes a detailed argument that an ambiguity of natural language negation, generally assumed to be necessary to the defence of semantic presupposition, is neither possible nor necessary in a presuppositional semantics. Noel Burton-Roberts has made an authoritative contribution to a debate which has involved philosophers and linguists for many years. His command of the issues, his clarity of exposition and his theoretical insight may well serve to change the boundaries of that debate. (shrink)

Since the publication of Edmund Gettier's challenge to the traditional epistemological doctrine of knowledge as justified true belief, Roberts and Wood claim that epistemologists lapsed into despondency and are currently open to novel approaches. One such approach is virtue epistemology, which can be divided into virtues as proper functions or epistemic character traits. The authors propose a notion of regulative epistemology, as opposed to a strict analytic epistemology, based on intellectual virtues that function not as rules or even as (...) skills but as habits of the heart. To that end, they divide the task of clarifying and expounding their notion in the book's two parts.In the first part, Roberts and Wood examine various components that constitute their notion of regulative epistemology. The first are the epistemic goods or goals that drive the epistemic process. What is needed, claim Roberts and Wood, is an enriched notion of these goods rather than the restricted notion of justified true belief. Epistemic agents are more than calculating devices in that …. (shrink)

In 1945, Michael Polanyi achieved, in Full Employment and Free Trade, the integration of Keynesian and monetarist economics that the economics profession did not ahieve until the 1970s. In yet another field, Polanyi saw the heart of important matters long before anyone else.

Leibniz Equivalence is a principle of applied mathematics that is widely assumed in both general relativity textbooks and in the philosophical literature on Einstein’s hole argument. In this article, I clarify an ambiguity in the statement of this Leibniz Equivalence, and argue that the relevant expression of it for the hole argument is strictly false. I then show that the hole argument still succeeds as a refutation of manifold substantivalism; however, recent proposals that the hole argument is undermined by principles (...) of representational equivalence do not fare so well. (shrink)

Many philosophers believe that there is a causal condition on perception, and that this condition is a conceptual truth about perception. A highly influential argument for this claim is based on intuitive responses to Gricean-style thought experiments. Do the folk share the intuitions of philosophers? Roberts et al. (2016) presented participants with two kinds of cases: Blocker cases (similar to Grice’s case involving a mirror and a pillar) and Non-Blocker cases (similar to Grice’s case involving a clock and brain (...) stimulation). They found that a substantial minority agreed that seeing occurs in the Non-Blocker cases, and that in the Blocker cases significantly less agreed that seeing occurs. They thus hypothesized that folk intuitions better align with a no blocker condition than with a causal condition. This paper continues this line of enquiry with two new experiments. The paper investigates the generality and robustness of Roberts et al.’s findings by expanding the sense modalities tested from only vision to audition and olfaction as well. The paper also uses Gricean-style thought experiments as a case study for investigating the “reflection defense” against the negative project in experimental philosophy. Our results replicate and extend Roberts et al.’s study and support their hypothesis that folk intuitions better align with a no blocker condition. They also provide an empirical reason to doubt the reflection defense. (shrink)

According to many, that the normative supervenes on the non-normative is a truism of normative discourse. This chapter argues that those committed to more specific moral, aesthetic, and epistemic supervenience theses should also hold : As a matter of conceptual necessity, whenever something has a normative property, it has a base property or collection of base properties that metaphysically necessitates the normative one. The main aim in this chapter is to show that none of the available arguments establish, or indeed (...) the relevant epistemic, aesthetic, and moral supervenience theses. is not a conceptual truth. This has considerable dialectical importance. One interesting upshot is that it affords non-reductivists and non-naturalists a novel way of resisting certain prominent supervenience-based objections to their views, including objections that formulate supervenience as a purely metaphysical thesis. (shrink)

Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions has been enduringly influential in philosophy of science, challenging many common presuppositions about the nature of science and the growth of scientific knowledge. However, philosophers have misunderstood Kuhn's view, treating him as a relativist or social constructionist. In this book, Brad Wray argues that Kuhn provides a useful framework for developing an epistemology of science that takes account of the constructive role that social factors play in scientific inquiry. He examines the core concepts of (...) Structure and explains the main characteristics of both Kuhn's evolutionary epistemology and his social epistemology, relating Structure to Kuhn's developed view presented in his later writings. The discussion includes analyses of the Copernican revolution in astronomy and the plate tectonics revolution in geology. The book will be useful for scholars working in science studies, sociologists and historians of science as well as philosophers of science. (shrink)

Numerous definitions of literacy have been advanced by policy‐makers, politicians, academics, teachers and others over the years. It is not always easy, however, to know how one definition might relate to another or differ from it. This paper offers a framework, based on the work of the educational philosopher Israel Scheffler, for identifying and distinguishing between different types of definition. Modified to have particular relevance to statements about literacy, the three types of definition are: stipulative, essentialist and prescriptive. The paper (...) shows how this modified framework can be helpful in understanding and addressing apparent tensions in statements about literacy by the influential Brazilian educationist, Paulo Freire. Brief suggestions for further study are included in the author's final remarks. (shrink)