Most epistemologists hold that knowledge entails belief. However, proponents of this claim rarely offer a positive argument in support of it. Rather, they tend to treat the view as obvious and assert that there are no convincing counterexamples. We find this strategy to be problematic. We do not find the standard view obvious, and moreover, we think there are cases in which it is intuitively plausible that a subject knows some proposition P without—or at least without determinately—believing that P. Accordingly, (...) we present five plausible examples of knowledge without (determinate) belief, and we present empirical evidence suggesting that our intuitions about these scenarios are not atypical. (shrink)

An influential objection to the epistemic power of the imagination holds that it is uninformative. You cannot get more out of the imagination than you put into it, and therefore learning from the imagination is impossible. This paper argues, against this view, that the imagination is robustly informative. Moreover, it defends a novel account of how the imagination informs, according to which the imagination is informative in virtue of its analog representational format. The core idea is that analog representations represent (...) relations ‘for free,’ and this explains how the imagination can contain more information than is put into it. This account makes important contributions to both philosophy of mind, by showing how the imagination can generate new content that is not represented by a subject’s antecedent mental states, and epistemology, by showing how the imagination can generate new justification that is not conferred by a subject’s antecedent evidence. (shrink)

I argue for the existence of imaginative beliefs: mental states that are imaginative in format and doxastic in attitude. I advance two arguments for this thesis. First, there are imaginings that play the functional roles of belief. Second, there are imaginings that play the epistemic roles of belief. These arguments supply both descriptive and normative grounds for positing imaginative beliefs. I also argue that this view fares better than alternatives that posit distinct imaginative and doxastic states to account for the (...) same phenomena. Along the way, I demonstrate the theoretical significance of imaginative beliefs by showing how they pose a challenge for standard taxonomies of the mind, clarify the sense in which imagination is occurrent and voluntary, explain the justificatory role of the imagination, and point to a deep but underappreciated symmetry between imagistic and non-imagistic thought. (shrink)

Traditionally, philosophers have been skeptical that the imagination can justify beliefs about the actual world. After all, how could merely imagining something give you any reason to believe that it is true? However, within the past decade or so, a lively debate has emerged over whether the imagination can justify empirical belief and, if so, how. This paper provides a critical overview of the recent literature on the epistemology of imagination and points to avenues for future research.

This, the third edition of Fundamentals of Experimental Design, has five added chapters - those on regression (Chapters 12, 14, and 15), multivariate analysis (Chapter 18), and the matrix algebra appropriate to the level of presentation of this material (Chapter 13). I have noted in the preface other additions in this third edition. The added material should enhance the value of the book as a textbook and a reference. Given these additions, however, alternative approaches in using the current edition as (...) a textbook may merit consideration. It may help to note that Chapters 16 and 17 (analysis of covariance, trend analysis) do not depend on the material in Chapters 12 through 15, although the student should know something about simple linear regression to be able to understand fully the material in Chapters 16 and 17. In any event, the instructor who wants to teach only the material in the first two editions can do so by dropping the added chapters - 12 through 15, and 18 - from the syllabus. (shrink)

When they are first introduced to the ethical study of humor, students and colleagues alike sometimes react skeptically. They worry that doing ethics about humor is somehow antithetical to the nature of humor, or that it risks impinging on what makes humor valuable. In this paper, I attempt to explore and explain this intuition. I provide an account of humor’s contribution to the good life which helps to explain how and in what sense we might think humor is resistant to (...) ethics. I argue that humor, understood as a sort of play, is resistant to the introduction of practical ethical restrictions, which I call ethical taboos. This is because one of humor’s central contributions to the good life is in relieving us of the burdens of our social, moral, and political obligations. In this way, humor’s value is liberatory. Ethical taboos are exactly the sort of thing we engage in humor to escape, and so they counteract our reasons for engaging in the activity in the first place. I conclude this paper by discussing what some implications might follow from my account on humor ethics more generally. I argue that there may be ways to both preserve the integrity of humorous play and take deal with ethical issues unique to humor. (shrink)

During much of the past century, it was widely believed that phonemes--the human speech sounds that constitute words--have no inherent semantic meaning, and that the relationship between a combination of phonemes (a word) and its referent is simply arbitrary. Although recent work has challenged this picture by revealing psychological associations between certain phonemes and particular semantic contents, the precise mechanisms underlying these associations have not been fully elucidated. Here we provide novel evidence that certain phonemes have an inherent, non-arbitrary emotional (...) quality. Moreover, we show that the perceived emotional valence of certain phoneme combinations depends on a specific acoustic feature--namely, the dynamic shift within the phonemes' first two frequency components. These data suggest a phoneme-relevant acoustic property influencing the communication of emotion in humans, and provide further evidence against previously held assumptions regarding the structure of human language. This finding has potential applications for a variety of social, educational, clinical, and marketing contexts. (shrink)

This article examines Bourdieu’s adoption of Husserl’s concept of ‘doxa’ and argues that Bourdieu’s reading of Husserl overpolarizes doxa and reflexivity. The article argues that there is a need for Bourdieusian sociology to adopt a more complex interpretation of Husserlian phenomenology in order to understand the potential range of states of consciousness between doxa and reflexivity. In contrast to Bourdieu’s reading of Husserl, this article argues that the philosophical underlabouring for an adequate understanding of doxa is now available within recent (...) Husserlian studies which marks a radical development from earlier readings in the ‘sociology of consciousness’. (shrink)

Can an effective argument against scepticism about objective values be modelled on Donald Davidson’s familiar argument against scepticism about external things?

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:IntroductionWilliam T. Myershenning offers a most significant work that deals with fundamental yet neglected subjects in Dewey's philosophy, and she challenges much of the cognitive and linguistic efforts to recast pragmatism as part of the epistemology industry. She does all of this by asking questions that we have not really engaged before.Henning's central argument is that Dewey's theory of mind offers an implicit theory of the unconscious, one that (...) has more in common with psychodynamic understandings of the self than with the cognitive-behaviorism that has become the dominant model for the American mind. This kinship between Dewey and psychodynamic perspectives is found in its rejection of atomistic experience and its emphasis on the felt dimensions of experience. Although the recent revival of interest in Dewey has most often linked him with a more linguistic pragmatism and epistemology, Henning moves away from that trend to re-engage with Dewey's "cultural naturalism," returns to the question of what Dewey means by "experience," and advocates for the value of the non-linguistic, non-cognitive portion therein.It is through Dewey's theory of quality that Henning finds a clear connection to the unconscious. Dewey holds that we live in a qualitative world, that we experience the world as affectively charged, and he claims that things come together only insofar as they are pervaded by a single unifying quality. The process of knowing anything begins first in an immediate, sensuous, and affective experience, a dimension that eludes linguistic symbols. That is, there is an ineffable portion of experience that supports our discursive practices and can never be exhausted by them. Henning holds that insofar as qualities resist language and are immediately and sensuously available, there is also a sense in which they guide and form experience unconsciously. [End Page 75]Having set forth her background and thesis in the first half of the book, Henning then turns to Dewey's conceptions of aesthetic and religious experience, where she finds the best evidence for an implicit proposal for a theory of the unconscious. She starts with Dewey's notion that we are primarily aesthetic creatures. The aesthetic is the realm of human experience that most effectively communicates its qualitative dimension. Henning then demonstrates the nature of the aesthetic unconscious through encounters with art, desire, and the sacred. [End Page 76]William T. MyersBirmingham-Southern CollegeCopyright © 2024 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois... (shrink)

Individualism: The Cultural Logic of Modernity is an edited collection of sixteen essays on the idea of the modern sovereign individual in the western cultural tradition. Reconsidering the eighteenth-century realist novel, twentieth-century modernism, and underappreciated topics on individualism and literature, this volume provocatively revises and enriches our understanding of individualism as the generative premise of modernity itself.

This paper examines understandings of community and safety for Gypsy, Roma and Traveller (GRT) groups in schools in a metropolitan borough. One school in particular was identified as being the 'Gypsy school' and was attended by the majority of GRT children in the borough. The school was recognised as a model of 'good practice' reflecting its holistic approach towards the GRT community but it was also successful for wider reasons. A picture of the intersection of different communities emerged from interview (...) accounts in which a GRT community with strong local attachments, socially negotiated and maintained, figured very strongly. The GRT community was also identified as sharing racist attitudes towards other non-white immigrants. This article examines children's perspectives of their engagement with the education process and how the strong GRT community played an important part in their understandings of safety and belonging. (shrink)

Homotopy type theory (HoTT) enables reasoning about groups directly as the types of symmetries (automorphisms) of mathematical structures. The HoTT approach to groups—first put forward by Buchholtz, van Doorn, and Rijke—identifies a group with the type of objects of which it is the symmetries. This type is called the “delooping” of the group, taking a term from algebraic topology. This approach naturally extends the group theory to higher groups which have symmetries between symmetries, and so on. In this paper, we (...) formulate and prove a higher version of Schreier’s classification of all group extensions of a given group. Specifically, we prove that extensions of a group G by a group K are classified by actions of G on a delooping of K. Our proof is formalized in Cubical Agda, a dependently typed programming language and proof assistant which implements HoTT. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:John Dewey & Moral ImaginationWilliam T. MyersJohn Dewey & Moral Imagination, by Steven Fesmire. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2003, 167 pp., $19.95 paper.The resurgence of interest in pragmatism, especially in regard to the work of John Dewey, has been ongoing for several decades now. In addition to the development of neo-pragmatism with its appreciation of the deconstructive side of Dewey, there have also been numerous books (...) written on the constructive side of pragmatism, including pragmatist aesthetics, metaphysics, politics, and education. An interest in pragmatist ethics, though later coming, seems to be picking up some steam at last, and Steven Fesmire's book, John Dewey & Moral Imagination, is an important contribution to that burgeoning area of inquiry.While Fesmire's book is not a full-blown account of a Deweyan moral theory, a fact he makes clear from the [End Page 107] outset, it is an insightful and important development of the role of aesthetics, inquiry, and imagination within a Deweyan framework. Fesmire is not interested in simply explicating Dewey's view of imagination, but in further developing Dewey's sometimes cryptic comments on the subject. But even more than that, Fesmire explicitly notes that he is going beyond Dewey, though Dewey is his starting point (p. 4). And in this enterprise, the book is successful, as Fesmire's development is very much in the spirit of Dewey's empiricism. That having been said, however, there are some elements of Dewey's ethics that I believe are important to Fesmire's interpretation, but do not receive enough attention in his book. In addition, the centrality of imagination seems somewhat overstated, sometimes to the detriment of other central notions. I will address these concerns later.In the Introduction, Fesmire states three interrelated theses that he builds a case for: "(1) Moral character, belief, and reasoning are inherently social, embodied, and historically situated; (2) Moral deliberation is fundamentally imaginative and historically situated; (3) Moral conduct is helpfully conceived on the model of aesthetic perception and artistic creation" (p. 4). He goes on to note that the first two are clearly and articulately defended by Dewey, and the third is "inspired" by him, but, clearly, this latter one he sees as a further development of Dewey's ethics.In order to build his case, Fesmire spends Part I of the book elaborating the "pragmatic turn" and its conception of "character, belief, inquiry, and intelligence" (p. 4). This first part is necessary in order to keep the second, more developmental part from seeming a piecemeal dialogue with traditional ethical theories. In other words, Part I contextualizes Part II.In the opening chapter, "Habit and Character," Fesmire contrasts the Deweyan notion of character with the traditional atomistic conception of the individual. As Dewey points out, it isn't that moral conduct ought to be social; rather it is social by its very nature (p. 13). Indeed, character and habits are socially derived from our cultural context. Moral inquiry is, then, social at its very base. Using the example of Studs Lonigan, Fesmire continues to develop these notions through a fascinating discussion of the James T. Farrell character. The application of the Deweyan notion of character and habit is a natural fit here, given that Farrell wrote his trilogy as an explicit exploration of Dewey's notion of habit. Through this discussion, we see the ongoing struggle of the individual and the environment, with the ultimate lesson learned being that one cannot be separated from the other, though either can be destructive of the other. Fesmire then applies this same essential idea to nature and culture. As Fesmire notes, "Dewey's goal was to break down the barriers that separate nature from culture, to show that biological drives are transmuted by social life, that neither impulse nor culture simply trumps the other, and that culture lends itself as much to intelligent conservation and critical redirection as to transmission" (p. 23). The lesson to learn from all of this is that the individual is not, as much traditional moral theory has supposed, a detached decision maker who can, by a simple act of will, follow some categorical imperative. Indeed, "[i]ndividuals... (shrink)

Presents a comparison of Marx's and Nietzsche's philosophies through innovative fictional dialogue. These fictional exchanges are prefaced by background commentary by the narrator, a 19th-century liberated female foreign correspondent for the New York Daily Tribune. Compares the philosophers' views on such topics as religion, the state, the ideal society, women's rights, equality, human nature, history, science, and the role of philosophy.

THE PAPER IS AN ATTEMPT TO ANSWER STANLEY ROSEN'S CHARGE\nTHAT MARX'S VIEW OF MAN IS EITHER NIHILISTIC OR INCOHERENT.\nIT IS ALLEGED THAT MARX'S NOTION THAT MAN MAKES HIMSELF\nLEADS TO THE NIHILISTIC CONCLUSION THAT EVERYTHING IS\nPERMISSIBLE. THUS, MARX'S CONCEPT OF HUMAN ALIENATION IS\nEMPTY BECAUSE HE CANNOT MAKE GOOD ON THE NORMATIVE CONCEPT\nOF UNALIENATED EXISTENCE. I ATTEMPT TO EXTRICATE MARX FROM\nROSEN'S DILEMMA BY SHOWING THAT MARX'S NOTION OF HUMAN\nSELF-CREATION IS NOT ONLY CONSISTENT WITH BUT REQUIRES THE\nAFFIRMATION OF A SOCIALIST FRAMEWORK. MARX'S CONCEPT (...) OF\nUNIQUE HUMAN NEEDS TURNS OUT TO BE CRUCIAL. (shrink)

“When Species Meet is a breathtaking meditation on the intersection between humankind and dog, philosophy and science, and macro and micro cultures.” —Cameron Woo, Publisher of Bark magazine In 2006, about 69 million U.S. households had pets, giving homes to around 73.9 million dogs, 90.5 million cats, and 16.6 million birds, and spending over $38 billion dollars on companion animals. As never before in history, our pets are truly members of the family. But the notion of “companion species”—knotted from human (...) beings, animals and other organisms, landscapes, and technologies—includes much more than “companion animals.” In When Species Meet, Donna J. Haraway digs into this larger phenomenon to contemplate the interactions of humans with many kinds of critters, especially with those called domestic. At the heart of the book are her experiences in agility training with her dogs Cayenne and Roland, but Haraway’s vision here also encompasses wolves, chickens, cats, baboons, sheep, microorganisms, and whales wearing video cameras. From designer pets to lab animals to trained therapy dogs, she deftly explores philosophical, cultural, and biological aspects of animal-human encounters. In this deeply personal yet intellectually groundbreaking work, Haraway develops the idea of companion species, those who meet and break bread together but not without some indigestion. “A great deal is at stake in such meetings,” she writes, “and outcomes are not guaranteed. There is no assured happy or unhappy ending—socially, ecologically, or scientifically. There is only the chance for getting on together with some grace.” Ultimately, she finds that respect, curiosity, and knowledge spring from animal-human associations and work powerfully against ideas about human exceptionalism. One of the founders of the posthumanities, Donna J. Haraway is professor in the History of Consciousness Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Author of many books and widely read essays, including The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness and the now-classic essay “The Cyborg Manifesto,” she received the J. D. Bernal Prize in 2000, a lifetime achievement award from the Society for Social Studies in Science. (shrink)

A response to Kavita Shah's article Selecting Barrenness.

ABSTRACT The primary aim of the paper is to apply the concept of retribution to nuclear defence policy. Nuclear defence policy, as I conceive it, is concerned with addressing the threat Soviet nuclear weapons pose for Western security. I argue that, contrary to popular opinion, MAD is not a retributive doctrine—that in fact it violates two constitutive principles of retribution: culpability and proportionality. After explicating these constitutive principles, I apply them to retaliatory strategy—showing that the culpability criterion restricts retaliation to (...) the agents of aggression while the proportionality criterion requires a just measure of retaliation. The result is a defence policy continuous with the just war tradition—one which rules out deterrence based on threats against the civilian population. I show why a retributive policy requires non‐nuclear forces and discuss the feasiblity of replacing all nuclear forces with conventional weapons. I anticipate and answer major objections to the denuclearization of U.S. and NATO forces. Finally, I conclude that an advocate of a retributive policy—specifically, a policy calling for a proportional or measured response against combatants only—must be willing, in the name of justice, to accept the risk of making war more thinkable by making it less horrible. (shrink)

Mental time travel is defined as projecting the self into the past and the future. Despite growing evidence of the similarities of remembering past and imagining future events, dominant theories conceive of these as distinct capacities. I propose that memory and imagination are fundamentally the same process – constructive episodic simulation – and demonstrate that the ‘simulation system’ meets the three criteria of a neurocognitive system. Irrespective of whether one is remembering or imagining, the simulation system: acts on the same (...) information, drawing on elements of experience ranging from fine-grained perceptual details to coarser-grained conceptual information and schemas about the world; is governed by the same rules of operation, including associative processes that facilitate construction of a schematic scaffold, the event representation itself, and the dynamic interplay between the two ; and is subserved by the same brain system. I also propose that by forming associations between schemas, the simulation system constructs multi-dimensional cognitive spaces, within which any given simulation is mapped by the hippocampus. Finally, I suggest that simulation is a general capacity that underpins other domains of cognition, such as the perception of ongoing experience. This proposal has some important implications for the construct of ‘MTT’, suggesting that ‘time’ and ‘travel’ may not be defining, or even essential, features. Rather, it is the ‘mental’ rendering of experience that is the most fundamental function of this domain-general simulation system enabling humans to re-experience the past, pre-experience the future, and also comprehend the complexities of the present. (shrink)