Political polarization is one of the most discussed challenges facing contemporary democracies and is often associated with a broader epistemic crisis. While inspiring a large literature in political science, polarization’s epistemic problems also have significance for normative democratic theory, and this study develops a new approach aimed at understanding them. In contrast to prominent accounts from political psychology—group polarization theory and cultural cognition theory—which argue that polarization leads individuals to form unreliable political beliefs, this study focuses on system-level diversity. It (...) argues that polarization’s epistemic harms are best located in its tendency to reduce the diversity of perspectives utilized in a democratic system and in how this weakens the system’s ability to identify and address problems of public concern. Understanding such harms is also argued to require a greater consideration of the political dynamics of polarization and issues of elite discourse, alongside political psychology. (shrink)

Deliberative democracy is increasingly criticised as out of touch with the realities of partisan politics. This paper considers the rise of fake and hyperpartisan news as one source of this scepticism. While popular accounts often blame such content on citizens’ political biases and motivated reasoning, I survey the empirical evidence and argue that it does not support strong claims about the inability of citizens to live up to deliberative ideals. Instead, much of this research is shown to support the deliberative (...) capacities of citizens and points to their potential in helping to reduce the spread of false and misleading content. (shrink)

Epistemic questions have become an important area of debate within democratic theory. Epistemic democrats have revived epistemic justification of democracy, while social scientific research has speared a significant debate on voter knowledge. An area which has received less attention, however, is the epistemic case for markets. Market advocates have developed a number of epistemic critiques of democracy which suggest that most goods are better provided by markets than democratic institutions. Despite representing important challenges to democracy, these critiques have gone without (...) reply as democratic theorists have tended to exclude markets from consideration. This article responds to these critiques and argues that there are good epistemic grounds for granting a much greater role to democracy than its market critics have claimed. It argues that there is a broad range of goods, including important ethical goods, which are better provided by democracy than markets due to the particular epistemic burdens they create. (shrink)

By considering carefully Socrates' invocations of 'compulsion' in Plato's Republic, I seek to explain how both justice and compulsion are crucial to the philosophers' decision to rule in Kallipolis, so that this decision does not contradict Socrates' central thesis that it is always in one's interests to act justly. On my account, the compulsion is provided by a law, made by the city's lawgivers, that requires people raised to be philosophers take turns ruling. Justice by itself does not require the (...) philosophers to rule, but it does require them to obey just laws. I also consider the implications of this view for Plato's politics. (shrink)

This paper contributes to growing debates over the decision-making ability of democracy by considering the epistemic value of deliberative democracy. It focuses on the benefits democratic deliberation can derive from its diversity, and the extent to which these benefits can be realised with respect to the complexities of political problems. The paper first calls attention to the issue of complexity through a critique of Hélène Landemore and the Diversity Trumps Ability Theorem. This approach underestimates complexity due to its reliance on (...) an ‘oracle assumption’ and this is shown to highlight more general difficulties for applying the benefits of diversity to the realities of political problems. The paper then develops a new model of deliberation—based on an relationship between cognitive diversity and diminishing returns to cognitive type—which does not involve an oracle assumption and can therefore support the epistemic value of deliberative democracy even for complex problems. The benefits of diversity are also argued to be better realised though sortition than either democratic elections or epistocracy, pointing to the value of deliberation between randomly selected citizens. Finally, and contrary to past work, the new account suggests that diversity cannot alone establish the superiority of democratic deliberation over all non-democratic alternatives, and that it is insufficient to mount a purely epistemic argument for deliberative democracy. The paper therefore furthers our understanding of the epistemic value of deliberative democracy by clarifying when and to what extent diversity is a benefit to political problem solving. (shrink)

A number of writers have drawn on Hayek’s epistemic defence of market institutions to argue that free-markets and tort law are best placed to overcome the knowledge problems associated with the environmental sphere. This paper argues to the contrary, that this Austrian School approach itself suffers from significant knowledge problems. The first of these relates to the ability of Austrian economics to assign victim compensation and the second to the difficulty of establishing causation in complex environmental problems. The paper will (...) also show how alternative approaches may not suffer from these epistemic challenges and are better placed to overcome them. (shrink)

Social referencing informs and regulates one’s relation with the environment as a function of the perceived appraisals of social partners. Increased emphasis on relational and social contexts in the study of emotion makes this interpersonal process particularly relevant to the field. However, theoretical conceptualizations and empirical operationalizations of social referencing are disjointed across domains and populations of study. This article seeks to unite and refine the study of this construct by providing a clear and comprehensive definition of social referencing. Our (...) perspective presents social referencing and social appraisal as coterminous processes and emphasizes the importance of a relational and interpersonal approach to the study of emotion. We conclude by outlining possible lines of research on this construct. (shrink)

Recently, Doolittle and Inkpen formulated a thought provoking theory, asserting that evolution by natural selection was responsible for the sideways evolution of two radically different kinds of selective units (also called Domains). The former entities, termed singers, correspond to the usual objects studied by evolutionary biologists (gene, genomes, individuals, species, etc.), whereas the later, termed songs, correspond to re‐produced biological and ecosystemic functions, processes, information, and memes. Singers perform songs through selected patterns of interactions, meaning that a wealth of critical (...) phenomena might receive novel evolutionary explanations. However, this theory did not provide an empirical approach to study evolution in such a broadened context. Here, we show that analyzing songs and singers, using patterns of interaction networks as a common ontology for both, offers a novel, actionable, inclusive and mathematical way to analyze not only the re‐production but also the evolution and fitness of biological and ecosystemic interconnected processes. (shrink)

How can any of my actions genuinely be my own? How can they be more than just intentional performances, with whatever investment of my will that involves, but also belong to me in the special way that makes me autonomous in performing them? How, in other words, can any of my actions be my own in such a way that they arise from or manifest my capacities for self-governance? -/- The literature on autonomous agency employs a number of metaphors to (...) characterize the difference between merely intentional action and action that is, in the fullest sense, the agent's own. Harry Frankfurt's metaphors are among the most vivid and compelling. A person who acts autonomously genuinely “participates” in the operation of her will, as opposed to being “estranged” from herself or being “a helpless or passive bystander to the forces that move” her. Agents who act intentionally but without autonomy do not do what they “really want” to do; their effective volitions are “external to” or “outside” them. The pervasive notion in this literature that persons who are autonomous in acting act upon wills that are fully their own or that really belong to them suggests an initial answer to the questions with which the chapter opened. I am autonomous in acting just when I take ownership of my actions, or at least have the unimpeded capability to take ownership of what I do and regularly exercise that capability. (shrink)

A collection of quirky, entertaining, and reader-friendly short pieces on philosophical topics that range from a theory of jerks to the ethics of ethicists. Have you ever wondered about why some people are jerks? Asked whether your driverless car should kill you so that others may live? Found a robot adorable? Considered the ethics of professional ethicists? Reflected on the philosophy of hair? In this engaging, entertaining, and enlightening book, Eric Schwitzgebel turns a philosopher's eye on these and other (...) burning questions. In a series of quirky and accessible short pieces that cover a mind-boggling variety of philosophical topics, Schwitzgebel offers incisive takes on matters both small and large. A common theme might be the ragged edge of the human intellect, where moral or philosophical reflection begins to turn against itself, lost among doubts and improbable conclusions. The history of philosophy is humbling when we see how badly wrong previous thinkers have been, despite their intellectual skills and confidence. Some of the texts resist thematic categorization—thoughts on the philosophical implications of dreidels, the diminishing offensiveness of the most profane profanity, and fatherly optimism—but are no less interesting. Schwitzgebel has selected these pieces from the more than one thousand that have appeared since 2006 in various publications and on his popular blog, The Splintered Mind, revising and updating them for this book. Philosophy has never been this much fun. (shrink)

In his _Duino Elegies,_ Rainer Maria Rilke suggests that animals enjoy direct access to a realm of being—the open—concealed from humans by the workings of consciousness and self-consciousness. In his own reading of Rilke, Martin Heidegger reclaims the open as the proper domain of human existence but suggests that human life remains haunted by vestiges of an animal-like relation to its surroundings. Walter Benjamin, in turn, was to show that such vestiges—what Eric Santner calls the _creaturely_—have a biopolitical aspect: (...) they are linked to the processes that inscribe life in the realm of power and authority. Santner traces this theme of creaturely life from its poetic and philosophical beginnings in the first half of the twentieth century to the writings of the enigmatic German novelist W. G. Sebald. Sebald’s entire oeuvre, Santner argues, can be seen as an archive of creaturely life. For Sebald, the work on such an archive was inseparable from his understanding of what it means to engage ethically with another person’s history and pain, an engagement that transforms us from indifferent individuals into neighbors. An indispensable book for students of Sebald, _On Creaturely Life_ is also a significant contribution to critical theory. (shrink)

Don Marquis’s “future-like-ours” argument against the moral permissibility of abortion is widely considered the strongest anti-abortion argument in the philosophical literature. In this paper, I address the issue of whether the argument relies upon controversial metaphysical premises. It is widely thought that future-like-ours argument indeed relies upon controversial metaphysics, in that it must reject the psychological theory of personal identity. I argue that that thought is mistaken—the future-like-ours argument does not depend upon the rejection of such a theory. I suggest, (...) however, that given a widely-accepted view about contraception and abstinence, the argument is committed to contentious metaphysics after all, as it relies upon a highly controversial assumption about mereology. This commitment is not only relevant for those who are inclined to endorse the argument but reject the mereological view in question, but in addition entails dialectical and epistemological liabilities for the argument, which on some views will be fatal to the argument’s overall success. (shrink)

To date, emotion research has primarily focused on the experience and display of the emoter. However, of equal, if not more, importance is how such displays impact and guide the behavior of an observer. We incorporate a functionalist framework of emotion to examine the development of differential responding to discrete emotion, theorize on what may facilitate its development, and hypothesize the functions that may underlie such behavioral responses. Although our review is focused primarily on development, the theoretical and methodological ideas (...) laid out are relevant for researchers of emotion at all ages. (shrink)

The orthodox reading of Sententia Vaticana (SV) 23 emends the sentence and attributes to Epicurus the view that every friendship is choiceworthy for its own sake. I argue that this reading should be rejected, because it singularly contradicts all our evidence about Epicurus' view, according to which only pleasure is choiceworthy for its own sake. I defend the manuscript reading, that every friendship is in itself a virtue, and I argue that anyone who rejects the manuscript reading should attribute the (...) emended sentence not to Epicurus but to one of his followers who altered the Epicurean account of the value of friendship in response to Academic criticism. (shrink)

In Jeremy Waldron’s book, The Harm in Hate Speech, it is not always clear whether he argues that hate speech causes harm or whether it constitutes harm. This article considers this uncertainty, concluding that the best understanding of Waldron’s argument is that hate speech tends to cause harm - a weak form of the consequentialist case for its proscription. His argument is not advanced by his apparent reliance on speech-act theory.

Despite such widespread acclaim, there are some influential theater critics who have panned Qualia!

I reject the traditional picture of philosophical withdrawal in the Hellenistic Age by showing how both Epicureans and Stoics oppose, in different ways, the Platonic and Aristotelian assumption that contemplative activity is the greatest good for a human being. Chrysippus the Stoic agrees with Plato and Aristotle that the greatest good for a human being is virtuous activity, but he denies that contemplation exercises virtue. Epicurus more thoroughly rejects the assumption that the greatest good for a human being is virtuous (...) activity. He maintains that the greatest good for a human being is the tranquility that virtuous activity always and contemplative activity sometimes brings about. (shrink)

Only a small proportion of academically dishonest students ever receive an official report of academic dishonesty, and the sociology of deviance literature is ripe with studies illustrating disproportionalities in detecting, policing, and prosecuting crimes. This study addresses the degree to which disproportionalities exist in the application of relatively few official sanctions levied upon students for academic dishonesty. I compared the demographics of those who have been reported for cheating with those of an entire undergraduate student body and of self-reported cheaters (...) in the literature. I found that international students are much more likely than domestic students to get reported. (shrink)

Taking as the focus of enquiry the engagements of Félix Guattari with Marcel Duchamp, namely, those rare passages in Schizoanalytic Cartographies and Chaosmosis, the question of the encounter is posed in the field of the sign, but of a sign ‘destructured’ (as Duchamp du signe), in the sense also that Guattari started by destructuring Lacan (from Psychoanalysis and Transversality to Anti-Oedipus). Introduced by the relationships between Guattari and Foucault to better play in between the early and the late Guattari, Guattari’s (...) key insight into the Bottle Rack readymade as an existential function is critically discussed from a reopening to enunciation through the ‘Duchamp effect’. If the latter seems to privilege language contrary to Guattari’s own semiotics, it is to derail it as a machinic unconscious. Duchamp’s writings on his readymades and other machinations are analysed, with the role of Raymond Roussel for Duchamp (and Deleuze-Guattari via Foucault), as well as the implications of a trans-Duchamp, his alter-ego Rrose Sélavy, as an opening to a machinic alterity undoing and queering gender binarity and phallic centricity, recovering the singularity of the bachelor machine and its rupture of subjectivation. The article shows how it could be transversally returned to the very middle of the Guattarian trajectory. (shrink)

Academic dishonesty occurs at alarming rates in higher education. In the present study, we examined predictors of academic cheating behaviors, and beliefs in the acceptability of cheating, in disliked courses at two large universities, using structural equation modeling. Perceived mastery and extrinsic goal structures were related to beliefs about cheating but not cheating behaviors. Beliefs in the acceptability of cheating were more likely to be endorsed in math and science courses. College students were more likely to cheat and to believe (...) in the acceptability of cheating when they reported a high need for sensation. (shrink)

Friedrich von Hayek’s classical liberalism argued that free markets allow individuals the greatest opportunity to achieve their ends. This paper develops an internal critique of this claim. It argues that once externalities are introduced, the forms of economic knowledge Hayek thought to undermine government action and orthodox utilitarianism also rule out relative welfarist assessments of more or less regulated markets. Given the pervasiveness of externalities in modern economies, Hayek will frequently be unable to make comparative welfarist claims, or he must (...) relax his epistemic assumptions and allow for greater government action than his classical liberalism would wish to accept. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Journal of Speculative Philosophy 14.1 (2000) 79-81 [Access article in PDF] Books Received July 1999 through December 1999Asmuth, Christoph. 1999. Das Begriefen des Unbegreiflich. Abt. II, Band 41 of Spekulation and Erfahrung. Stuttgart: Frommann-holzboog. 411 pp.Badiou, Alain. 1999. Manifesto for Philosophy. Trans. and ed. Norman Madarasz. Albany: SUNY Press. 181 pp. h.c. 0-7914-4219-5, $14.95 pbk. 0-7914-4220-9.Barwise, Jon, and John Perry. 1999. Situations and Attitudes. New York: Cambridge UP. (...) lxxxviii + 352 pp. $22.95 pbk. 1-57586-193-3.Benson, Bruce L. 1998. To Serve and Protect: Privatization and Community in Criminal Justice. New York: New York UP. xxviii + 372 pp. $37.50 h.c. 1-8147-1327-0.Bonsdorff, Pauline von, and Arto Haapala, eds. 1999. Aesthetics in the Human Environment. Lahti, Finland: International Institute of Applied Aesthetics. 204 pp. h.c. 952-5069-07-09.Bratman, Michael E. 1999. Intention, Plans, and Practical Reason. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications. vi + 200 pp. $22.95 pbk. 1-57586-192-5.Brencick, Janice M., and Glenn A. Webster. 2000. Philosophy of Nursing: A New Vision for Health Care. Albany: SUNY Press. ix + 247 pp. h.c. 0-7914-4379-5, $19.95 pbk. 0-7914-4380-9.Clendenning, John. 1999. The Life and Thought of Josiah Royce. 2d ed. Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt UP. xvii + 446 pp. $49.95 h.c. 0-8265-1312-3, $24.95 pbk. 0-8265-1322-0.Curtis, Kimberley. 1999. Our Sense of the Real: Aesthetic Experience and Arendtian Politics. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP. xv + 197 pp. $39.95 h.c. 0-8014-3577-3, $16.95 pbk. 0-8014-8640-8.Frederick, Robert E., ed. 1999. A Companion to Business Ethics. Malden, MA: Blackwell. xvi + 464 pp. $99.95 h.c. 0-631-20130-0.Gallois, André. 1996. The World Without, the Mind Within: An Essay on First-Person Authority. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP. xii + 213 pp. h.c. 0-521-56093-4.Gracia, Jorge J. E. 1999. Metaphysics and its Task: The Search for the Categorial Foundation of Knowledge. Albany: SUNY Press. xix + 247 pp. h.c. 0-7914-4213-6, $17.95 pbk. 0-7914-4214-4.Grosz, Elizabeth, ed. 1999. Becomings: Explorations in Time, Memory, and Futures. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP. vi + 250 pp. $45.00 h.c. 0-8014-3632-X, $18.95 pbk. 0-8014-8590-8.Heidegger, Martin. 1999. Ontology--The Hermeneutics of Facticity. Trans. John van Buren. Bloomington: Indiana UP. xii + 138 pp. $24.95 h.c. 0-253-33507-8.Heyde, Ludwig. 1999. The Weight of Finitude: On the Philosophical Question of God. Trans. Alexander Harmsen and William Desmond. Albany: SUNY Press. xviii + 177 pp. h.c. 0-7914-4265-9, $17.95 pbk. 0-7914-4266-7.Lang, Berel. 1999. The Future of the Holocaust: Between History and Memory. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP. xiv + 198 pp. $45.00 h.c. 0-8014-3588-9, $17.95 pbk. 0-8014-8569-X.Levinas, Emmanuel. 1999. Alterity and Transcendence. Trans. Michael B. Smith. New York: Columbia UP. xxiv + 195 pp. $29.50 h.c. 0-231-11650-0.Lorraine, Tamsin. 1999. Irigaray and Deleuze: Experiments in Visceral Philosophy. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP. xiv + 272 pp. h.c. 0-8014-3623-0, $19.95 pbk. 0-8014-8586-X.Margolis, Eric, and Stephen Laurence, eds. 1999. Concepts: Core Readings. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. x + 652 pp. h.c. 0-262-13353-9, $37.50 pbk. 0-262-63193-8.McCumber, John. 1999. Metaphysics and Oppression: Heidegger's Challenge to Western Philosophy. Bloomington: Indiana UP. xiv + 338 pp. $49.95 h.c. 0-253-33473-X, $24.95 pbk. 0-253-21316-9.McWhorter, Ladelle. 1999. Bodies and Pleasures: Foucault and the Politics of Sexual Normalization. Bloomington: Indiana UP. xx + 260 pp. $39.95 h.c. 0-253-33558-2, $18.95 pbk. 0-253-21325-8.Raposa, Michael L. 1999. Boredom and the Religious Imagination. Charlottesville, VA: UP of Virginia. xiii + 199 pp. $40.00 h.c. 0-8139-1898-7, $13.95 pbk. 0-8139-1925-8.Redding, Paul. 1999. The Logic of Affect. Ithaca, NY: Cornell... (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Introduction The Challenge to the Distinctiveness and the Coherence of Contract Four Autonomy‐Based Theories Three Teleological Theories Concluding Remarks References.

Offers a history of the philosophy of time and a comparison of the ways of conceiving the temporal, concentrating on European philosophy and its impact the connection between time and money in Western civilization.

The nature of necessary truth was a central concern of Ludwig Wittgenstein. It was present in his early reflections on logic, a core motif of the Tractatus, and a topic he returned to over and again in his reflections on language, logic, and mathematics. This chapter explores the aspects of Wittgenstein's account of necessity and apriority, beginning with the Tractatus, where many of his core insights received their first expression. It discusses two more contemporary accounts of these topics: conceptual role (...) semantic theories of the a priori, and the arguments for divorcing apriority from necessity. Necessity in the Tractatus appears at two locations. One is at the level of individual elementary propositions. The other is at the level of the inferential connections between propositions. The chapter looks at the Tractatus theory of the proposition. Wittgenstein saw an important difference between the formulations of the rules of grammar and descriptions of states of affairs. (shrink)

Un examen de la division quasi officielle du monde philosophique en deux blocs : phénoménologique et analytique. Bilan de ses prolongements en France ces vingt dernières années.

In The Paradox of Predictivism I tried to demonstrate that there is an intimate relationship between predictivism and epistemic pluralism. Here I respond to various published criticisms of some of the key points from Paradox from David Harker, Jarret Leplin, and Clark Glymour. Foci include my account of predictive novelty, the claim that predictivism has two roots, the prediction per se and predictive success, and my account of why Mendeleev’s predictions carried special weight in confirming the Periodic Law of the (...) Elements. (shrink)

In 1987, George Soros introduced his concepts of reflexivity and fallibility and has further developed and applied these concepts over subsequent decades. This paper attempts to build on Soros's framework, provide his concepts with a more precise definition, and put them in the context of recent thinking on complex adaptive systems. The paper proposes that systems can be classified along a ‘spectrum of complexity’ and that under specific conditions not only social systems but also natural and artificial systems can be (...) considered ‘complex reflexive.’ The epistemological challenges associated with scientifically understanding a phenomenon stem not from whether its domain is social, natural, or artificial, but where it falls along this spectrum. Reflexive systems present particular challenges; however, evolutionary model-dependent realism provides a bridge between Soros and Popper and a potential path forward for economics. (shrink)

The factors which have brought society to its present pass and impasse contain forces which, when released and constructively utilized, form the positive basis of an educational philosophy and practice that will recover and will develop our original national ideals. The basic principle in that philosophy and practice is that we should use that method of experimental action called natural science to form a disposition which puts a supreme faith in the experimental use of intelligence in all situations of life.In (...) the past, ethical theories have been presented as self-sufficient and holistic. Philosophers have historically been either deontologists, consequentialists, virtue ethicists, divine command theorists, or .. (shrink)

The importance of _naturalization_—the establishment of species introduced into foreign places—to the early development of Darwin’s theory of evolution deserves historical attention. Introduced and invasive European species presented Darwin with interpretive challenges during his service as naturalist on the HMS _Beagle_. Species naturalization and invasive species strained the geologist Charles Lyell’s creationist view of the organic world, a view which Darwin adopted during the voyage of the _Beagle_ but came to question afterward. I suggest that these phenomena primed Darwin to (...) question the “stability of species.” I then examine the role of introduced and invasive species in Darwin’s early theorizing and negotiation with Lyell’s ideas, recorded in his post-voyage “transmutation notebooks.” Therein, the subject was an inflection point in his contention with Lyell’s views and moreover, his theorizing on invasive species occasioned some of his earliest inklings of natural selection. Finally, I examine how naturalization was crucial to Lyell’s own eventual conversion to evolutionism. I conclude with brief reflections on the implications of this narrative for our understanding of Darwin’s reasoning, his intellectual relationship to Lyell, and the historical context that shaped his theory. (shrink)

Territory and population, migration, division of territories and their globalised populations… Re-presenting in this paper Wars and Capital (written with Maurizio Lazzarato, first published 2016), we’ll argue that Deleuze and Guattari’s view on this complex of relations must be reconstructed from their understanding of war’s constitutive relationship with capitalism by taking up the confrontation with Clausewitz to reverse the famous formula that war is/is only the continuation of politics by other means. Except that, as with Foucault, albeit differently, it is (...) not so much a question of reversal but an interweaving of war in politics and politics in war that adopts the movements of capitalism in the twentieth century’s world economy. Politics is not, as in Clausewitz, the politics of the state but the war machine of the financialised economy interwoven in the multiplicity of wars that move and hold together the war of destruction in action with wars of class, race and sex under the auspices of a ‘war amongst the people’ that provide the fractal environment of all the others when war and peace become indistinguishable in a neoliberalism of combat. A transversal and global civil war that is also a war of subjectivity fractures all territories in the North(s) and South(s) since internal and external colonisations are no longer distributed only geographically. As proof, if needed, more than forty years after the publication of A Thousand Plateaus – it is not enough to state that micropolitics has to pass into macropolitics to transform it: both micro- and macropolitics have to be part of the multiplicity of wars that take place, without which both micro- and macropolitics collapse in the ‘becoming-minor’ of the ‘missing people’. (shrink)