At the request of the Classical Journals Board we have undertaken for the present to edit this Journal. In so doing we confidently rely upon the co-operation of those who have hitherto been contributors, as well as of others who may be in a position to assist us.

The subject to which I invite your attention this evening is a very recent development in mathematics which happens to be of great importance to philosophy.The question may perhaps be raised why a terrifying topic like mathematics as introduced into an Institute of Philosophy. There are two answers to this question. In the first place my talk this evening will not be a “mathematical lecture” in any ordinary sense of the term, and no mathematical knowledge whatsoever will be presupposed. In (...) the second place, even if it were to be a mathematical lecture, such an audience as is here assembled tonight would find nothing terrifying in the prospect. (shrink)

Are humans rational? Various experiments performed over the last several decades have been interpreted as showing that humans are irrational we make significant and consistent errors in logical reasoning, probabilistic reasoning, similarity judgements, and risk-assessment, to name a few areas. But can these experiments establish human irrationality, or is it a conceptual truth that humans must be rational, as various philosophers have argued? In this book, Edward Stein offers a clear critical account of this debate about rationality in (...) philosophy and cognitive science. He discusses concepts of rationality - the pictures of rationality that the debate centres on - and assesses the empirical evidence used to argue that humans are irrational. He concludes that the question of human rationality must be answered not conceptually but empirically, using the full resources of an advanced cognitive science. Furthermore, he extends this conclusion to argue that empirical considerations are also relevant to the theory of knowedge - in other words, that epistemology should be naturalized. from the reviews: 'Stein has done a great service in bringing together all of the important arguments in the human rationality debate and providing a measured critical assessment of them.... This will be an important book and is essential reading for epistemologists, philosophers of mind, and cognitive and evolutionary psychologists.' Choice 'very considerable value... for professionals' Times Higher Education Supplement. (shrink)

Are humans rational? Various experiments performed over the last several decades have been interpreted as showing that humans are irrational we make significant and consistent errors in logical reasoning, probabilistic reasoning, similarity judgements, and risk-assessment, to name a few areas. But can these experiments establish human irrationality, or is it a conceptual truth that humans must be rational, as various philosophers have argued? In this book, Edward Stein offers a clear critical account of this debate about rationality in (...) philosophy and cognitive science. He discusses concepts of rationality - the pictures of rationality that the debate centres on - and assesses the empirical evidence used to argue that humans are irrational. He concludes that the question of human rationality must be answered not conceptually but empirically, using the full resources of an advanced cognitive science. Furthermore, he extends this conclusion to argue that empirical considerations are also relevant to the theory of knowedge - in other words, that epistemology should be naturalized. from the reviews: 'Stein has done a great service in bringing together all of the important arguments in the human rationality debate and providing a measured critical assessment of them.... This will be an important book and is essential reading for epistemologists, philosophers of mind, and cognitive and evolutionary psychologists.' Choice 'very considerable value... for professionals' Times Higher Education Supplement. (shrink)

In the last decade, fierce controversy has arisen over the nature of sexual orientation. Scientific research, religious views, increasingly ambiguous gender roles, and the growing visibility of sexual minorities have sparked impassioned arguments about whether our sexual desires are hard-wired in our genes or shaped by the changing forces of society. In recent years scientific research and popular opinion have favored the idea that sexual orientations are determined at birth, but philosopher and educator Edward Stein argues that much (...) of what we think we know about the origins of sexual desire is probably wrong. Stein provides a comprehensive overview of such research on sexual orientation and shows that it is deeply flawed. Stein argues that this research assumes a picture of sexual desire that reflects unquestioned cultural stereotypes rather than cross-cultural scientific facts, and that it suffers from serious methodological problems. He considers whether sexual orientation is even amenable to empirical study and asks if it is useful for our understanding of human nature to categorize people based on their sexual desires. Perhaps most importantly, Stein examines some of the ethical issues surrounding such research, including gay and lesbian civil rights and the implications of parents trying to select or change the sexual orientation of their children. The Mismeasure of Desire offers a reasoned, accessible, and incisive examination of contemporary thinking about one of the most hotly debated issues of our time and adds a compelling voice of dissent to prevailing--and largely unexamined--assumptions about human sexuality. (shrink)

In the months preceding the writing of this review, bioethics has been in the news a great deal. In congressional and public policy debates surrounding stem cell research, human cloning, and the Human Genome Project, bioethics and bioethicists have gained national attention and been subject to public scrutiny. Commentators have asked who these self-appointed moral experts are to tell us what is right and wrong.

This paper considers a central objection to evolutionary epistemology. The objection is that biological and epistemic development are not analogous, since while biological variation is blind, epistemic variation is not. The generation of hypotheses, unlike the generation of genotypes, is not random. We argue that this objection is misguided and show how the central analogy of evolutionary epistemology can be preserved. The core of our reply is that much epistemic variation is indeed directed by heuristics, but these heuristics are analogous (...) to biological preadaptations which account for the evolution of complex organs. We also argue that many of these heuristics or epistemic preadaptations are not innate but were themselves generatedby a process of blind variation and selective retention. (shrink)

Most U.S. jurisdictions deem testimony regarding what one spouse tells the other in private inadmissible in most circumstances and most do not allow a person to be compelled to testify against his or her spouse. Although confidential communications and what a spouse knows about the other are both relevant and quite probative, triers of fact do not get to consider them. The scope, character, and very existence of these exceptions to the general principle of admitting everything into evidence have been (...) questioned by legal commentators for centuries, but they remain in force in most U.S. jurisdictions. This paper reviews the justifications for the spousal evidentiary privileges and argues for recasting the spousal evidentiary privileges in functional terms. (shrink)

In this paper, the author considers an argument against the thesis that humans are irrational in the sense that we reason according to principles that differ from those we ought to follow. The argument begins by noting that if humans are irrational, we should not trust the results of our reasoning processes. If we are justified in believing that humans are irrational, then, since this belief results from a reasoning process, we should not accept this belief. The claim that humans (...) are irrational is, thus, self-undermining. The author shows that this argument--and others like it--fails for several interesting reasons. In fact, there is nothing self-undermining about the claim that humans are irrational; empirical research to establish this claim does not face the sorts of a priori problems that some philosophers and psychologists have claimed it does. (shrink)

In this special issue, Steins and Edwards introduced the notion of nested platforms for resource use negotiation as a tool to facilitate collective action amongst multiple-users in complex common-pool resource management scenarios. Five discussion statements were put forward to aid the debate on multi-use platforms. This paper is a synthesis of the responses to these statements by the other contributors to this special issue. It aims to further stimulate the debate on the management of complex, multiple-use common-pool management scenarios.

The United States has recently made significant and positive civil rights gains for LGB people, including expanded recognition of marriages between people of the same sex. Among the central tropes that have emerged in the struggle for the rights of LGB people are that they are “born that way,” that sexual orientations cannot change, and that one's sexual orientation is not affected by choice. Writer Andrew Sullivan put it this way: “[H]omosexuality is an essentially involuntary condition that can neither be (...) denied nor permanently repressed.… [S]o long as homosexual adults as citizens insist on the involuntary nature of their condition, it becomes politically impossible to deny or ignore the fact of homosexuality.… [The strategy for obtaining LGB rights is to] seek full public equality for those who, through no fault of their own, happen to be homosexual.”This idea of linking LGB rights to empirical claims about sexual orientations has become so central that casting doubt on these claims is, in many circles, tantamount to opposing LGB rights. Nonetheless, claims about innateness, immutability, and lack of choice about sexual orientation should not be the primary basis for LGB rights. (shrink)

Perhaps the foremost issue in the emerging area of inquiry known as lesbian and gay studies is the social constructionist controversy. Social constructionism is the view that the categories of sexual orientation are cultural constructs rather than naturally universal categories. ____Forms of Desire__ brings together important essays by social constructionists and their critics, representing several disciplines and approaches to this debate about the history and science of sexuality.

Many people believe that a person's sexual orientation is genetic. Given the widespread prejudice against, and hatred of, homosexuals in many societies, it seems likely that many parents will be interested in using genetic technologies to prevent the birth of children who will not be heterosexual. This paper considers the moral and legal implications of such procedures (whether or not they would work). It is argued that the availability of procedures to select the sexual orientation of children would contribute to (...) discrimination and prejudice against lesbians, gay men and bisexuals and, more generally, undermine the maintenance of a just society. These effects carry significant weight in determining whether genetic technologies should be developed and whether their use is, or should be, legally permissible and morally acceptable. (shrink)

The observation that humans are often irrational has become commonplace. This observation has received empirical support from various experiments performed by cognitive scientists that are supposed to show that humans systematically violate principles of probability, rules of logic, and other norms of reasoning. In response to these experiments, philosophers have made creative and appealing arguments that these experiments must be mistaken or misinterpreted because humans must be rational. I examine these arguments for human rationality and show that they fail; cognitive (...) science does play a role in assessing human rationality. ;In Chapter One, I examine three cognitive science experiments in detail and discuss what is at issue in the debate about human rationality. At issue is whether the mistakes humans make are mere mistakes or indicative of systematic divergences from norms of reasoning. Defenders of human rationality say these mistakes are not characteristic of underlying reasoning abilities but are performance errors. Because humans make performance errors, human reasoning ability cannot be read off of behavior, but rather is to be studied by exploring cognitive competence, the underlying ability to reason. ;In Chapter Two, I develop and discuss the notion of cognitive competence. I then consider and reject two arguments that human cognitive competence must match the norms of reasoning. The first argument appeals to simplicity considerations, the second to the supposed common origin of our cognitive competence and our normative standards. In Chapter Three, I turn to a related argument for a view that humans are rational that says cognitive competence is discovered in the same way norms of reasoning are justified: both projects involve reflective equilibrium using as data people's judgments about what counts as good reasoning. ;In Chapter Four, I consider an argument for human rationality that draws on the principle of charity: when translating utterances of a speaker, one should try to interpret her utterances as rational and true. ;In Chapter Five, I consider an argument for human rationality that appeals to evolution. This argument claims that natural selection will select for cognitive mechanisms that produce true beliefs, and that such "truth-tropic" mechanisms are sufficient for being rational. ;My overall conclusion is that while cognitive science does not determine what the normative principles of reasoning are, it is relevant to whether or not human cognitive competence matches these principles; whether or not humans are irrational is, thus, an empirical question. (shrink)

If, as is not implausible, the correct moral theory is indexed to human capacity for moral reasoning, then the thesis that moral heuristics exist faces a serious objection. This objection can be answered by embracing a wide reflective equilibrium account of the origins of our normative principles of morality.

Cohen (1981) and others have made an interesting argument for the thesis that humans are rational: normative principles of reasoning and actual human reasoning ability cannot diverge because both are determined by the same process involving our intuitions about what constitutes good reasoning as a starting point. Perhaps the most sophisticated version of this argument sees reflective equilibrium as the process that determines both what the norms of reasoning are and what actual cognitive competence is. In this essay, I will (...) evaluate both the general argument that humans are rational and the reflective equilibrium argument for the same thesis. While I find both accounts initially appealing, I will argue that neither successfully establishes that humans are rational. (shrink)