The focus of this paper is the following claim: as a purely conceptual matter, the moral truths could be pretty much anything, and we should assume this in assessing our reliability at grasping moral truths. This claim, which I call No Content, plays a key role in an important skeptical argument against realist moral knowledge – the Normative Lottery Argument. In this paper, I argue that moral realists can, and should, reject No Content. My argument centers on the idea of (...) practical intelligibility. I explore different aspects of practical intelligibility, and I argue that such intelligibility sets a constraint on the possibilities we should consider when assessing our reliability at grasping moral truths. (shrink)

Recently, theorists have pointed to the role of improvisation in practical reasoning and in gaining new moral knowledge. Laura and François Schroeter have gone even further by suggesting an account of competence with evaluative terms based on holistic improvisation. I argue, however, that they fail in their task. Through a challenge of their key claim against Allan Gibbard’s alternative account, I demonstrate that Schroeter and Schroeter provide only partial constraints on competence, and thus that their account lacks the content to (...) provide an alternative to substantive accounts in metaethics such as minimalism and neo-descriptivism. (shrink)

Emmanuel Levinas has been Professor of Philosophy at the Sorbonne and the director of the Ecole Normale Israelite Orientale. Through such works as "Totality and Infinity" and "Otherwise than Being", he has exerted a profound influence on twentieth-century continental philosophy, providing inspiration for Derrida, Lyotard, Blanchot and Irigaray. "The Levinas Reader" collects, often for the first time in English, essays by Levinas encompassing every aspect of his thought: the early phenomenological studies written under the guidance and inspiration of Husserl and (...) Heidegger; the fully developed ethical critique of such totalizing philosophies; the pioneering texts on the moral dimension to aesthetics; the rich and subtle readings of the Talmud which are an exemplary model of an ethical, transcendental philosophy at work; the admirable meditations on current political issues. Sean Hand's introduction gives a complete overview of Levinas's work and situates each chapter within his general contribution to phenomenology, aesthetics, religion, politics and, above all, ethics. Each essay has been prefaced with a brief introduction presenting the basic issues and the necessary background, and suggesting ways to study the text further. (shrink)

Reflection without Rules offers a comprehensive, pointed exploration of the methodological tradition in economics and the breakdown of the received view within the philosophy of science. Professor Hands investigates economists' use of naturalistic and sociological paradigms to model economic phenomena and assesses the roles of pragmatism, discourse, and situatedness in discussions of economic practice before turning to a systematic exploration of more recent developments in economic methodology. The treatment emphasizes the changes taking place in science theory and its relationship to (...) the movement away from a rules-based view of economic methodology. The work will be of interest to all economists concerned with methodological issues as well as philosophers and others studying the relationships between economics and contemporary science theory. (shrink)

There is, on the face of it, a logical difficulty as well as a practical one about ascribing to parents both a right to give their children a religious upbringing and a duty to avoid indoctrinating them. Curiously, this logical difficulty was largely overlooked in the debate on religious upbringing and parental rights between Terence McLaughlin, Eamonn Callan and Peter Gardner in the 1980s. In this paper I set out the terms of the logical problem and propose a solution to (...) it. (shrink)

This paper examines methodological issues raised by revealed preference theory in economics: particularly contemporary revealed preference theory. The paper has three goals. First, to make the case that revealed preference theory is a broad research program in choice theory—not a single theory—and understanding this diversity is essential to any methodological analysis of the program. Second, to explore some of the existing criticisms of revealed preference theory in a way that emphasizes how the effectiveness of the critique depends on the particular (...) version of revealed preference under consideration. Finally, three additional criticisms are presented that are aimed specifically at contemporary revealed preference theory. (shrink)

In this clear, accessible guide, Sean Hand sets Levinas's work in its intellectual and social contexts and examines: the influence of phenomenology and Judaism ...

Journal of Philosophy of Education, EarlyView.

In the foregoing articles, David Aldridge, Doret de Ruyter and John Tillson offer some weighty and wide-ranging criticisms of my recent book, A Theory of Moral Education (Hand, 2018a). I cannot hope to do justice to the detail of their criticisms in the space available to me, but I shall attempt, in what follows, to defend my account of moral education against their principal lines of attack. I am grateful to Aldridge, de Ruyter and Tillson for their close engagement (...) with the book and for the opportunity their objections afford me to clarify aspects of my argument. (shrink)

Assuming that the issue of same-sex marriage should be discussed in schools, how should the discussion be framed? Michael Hand first distinguishes this question from the related but distinct question of whether discussion on this topic should be steered. He then examines three possible frames for discussion of same-sex marriage: the perfectionist frame, the antiperfectionist frame, and the practical accommodation frame. He defends the perfectionist frame over the two alternatives: the purpose of state involvement in marriage is to promote (...) valuable forms of intimate relationship, so the case for enabling same-sex couples to marry turns on the ethical claim that same-sex and opposite-sex intimate relationships are similarly valuable. Interrogation of this ethical claim must be central to classroom discussion of same-sex marriage. (shrink)

Truth’s universal knowability entails its discovery. This threatens antirealism, which is thought to require it. Fortunately, antirealism is not committed to it. Avoiding it requires adoption (and extension) of Dag Prawitz’s position in his long-term disagreement with Michael Dummett on the notion of provability involved in intuitionism’s identification of it with truth. Antirealism (intuitionism generalized) must accommodate a notion of lost-opportunity truth (a kind of recognition-transcendent truth), and even truth consisting in the presence of unperformable verifications. Dummett’s position cannot abide (...) this, while Prawitz’s can. Antirealism’s epistemic notion of truth derives from general features of its meaning theory, not from a universal knowability principle. (shrink)

R.S. Peters' arguments for the worthwhileness of theoretical activities are intended to justify education per se, on the assumption that education is necessarily a matter of initiating people into theoretical activities. If we give up this assumption, we can ask whether Peters' arguments might serve instead to justify the academic curriculum over other curricular arrangements. For this they would need to show that theoretical activities are not only worthwhile but, in some relevant sense, more worthwhile than activities of other kinds. (...) I argue that Peters' hedonistic and transcendental arguments do not show this, but that his account of theoretical activities is suggestive of an instrumental argument which might fit the bill. (shrink)

In this brief comment on Educational Goods, I raise two worries about the authors' proposed normative framework for educational decision-makers. The first concerns the omission of rationality, or responsiveness to reasons, from the list of educational goods; the second concerns the inclusion of parental interests in the list of independent values.

Discussions of Karl Popper's falsificationist philosophy of science appear regularly in the recent literature on economic methodology. In this literature, there seem to be two fundamental points of agreement about Popper. First, most economists take Popper's falsificationist method of bold conjecture and severe test to be the correct characterization of scientific conduct in the physical sciences. Second, most economists admit that economic theory fails miserably when judged by these same falsificationist standards. As Latsis states, “the development of economic analysis would (...) look a dismal affair through falsificationist spectacles.”. (shrink)

Schools plausibly have a role to play in countering radicalization by taking steps to prevent the acquisition of extremist beliefs, dispositions, and attitudes. A core component of the extremist mindset is aversion to compromise. Michael Hand inquires here into the possibility, desirability, and means of educating against this attitude. He argues that aversion to compromise is demonstrably undesirable and readiness to compromise demonstrably desirable, so discursive teaching of these attitudes should guide pupils toward these verdicts. And he identifies three (...) methods of formative teaching by which readiness to compromise can be cultivated in pupils. (shrink)

This fascinating monograph tackles a well-established problem in the philosophy of education. The problem is the threat posed to the logical possibility of non-confessional religious education by the claim that religion constitutes an autonomous language-game or form of knowledge. Defenders of this claim argue that religion cannot be understood from the outside: it is impossible to impart religious understanding unless one is also prepared to impart religious belief. Michael Hand argues for two central points: first, that non-confessional religious education (...) would indeed be impossible if it were true that religion constitutes a distinct form of knowledge; and, second, that religion does not in fact constitute a distinct form of knowledge. >. (shrink)

In Moral Education in a Secular Society, Paul Hirst offers accounts of the content and justification of morality and the aims and methods of moral education. My own recent book, A Theory of Moral Education, does the same. Here I explore the similarities and differences between our theories. In the first part of the paper, I outline what Hirst calls the ‘sophisticated view of education’, which I wholeheartedly endorse, and highlight his attention to the noncognitive as well as the cognitive (...) aspects of morality. In the second part, I explain how Hirst’s transcendental justification of morality differs from my contractarian justification and trace the implications of this difference for our respective accounts of moral education. (shrink)

In a recent paper in BJES, John Wilson examines the question of the desirability of education and argues that the enterprise can only be justified if it is thought to be necessary 'as a means of salvation'. Here I expose a number of flaws in Wilson's argument and defend a rather more prosaic justificatory strategy.

Matthew Clayton, David Stevens and Laura D’Olimpio have advanced a series of objections to arguments I set out in my recent book A Theory of Moral Education – in particular to the problem-of-sociality justification for basic moral standards. Here I reply to their objections.

InStabilizing Dynamics Roy Weintraub provides a history of stability theory from the work of Hicks and Samuelson in the late 1930s to the Gale and Scarf counterexamples in the 1960s. Unlike his earlier work in the history of general equilibrium theory this recent contribution is not an attempt to fit the Walrasian program into the narrow framework of some particular philosophy of natural science. Rather, the theme inStabilizing Dynamicsis broadly social constructivist. Simply put, the constructivist view of science is “that (...) scientific knowledge itself is constructed socially, in communities of scientists: Knowledge is constructed, not found”. (shrink)

I have proposed that the complementizerthat has a pragmatic property of demonstrativity, analogous to that ascribed by demonstrative analyses of the semantics of the complementizer but not impinging on the syntactic analysis of sentential embedding. My account explains a number of phenomena, including the illocutionary peculiarities of parentheticals, the pragmatics ofthat-omission, and consequently the distributional statistics ofthat-omission and related grammatical features of embeddings reported in the literature. By this means these phenomena are theoretically unified under a single hypothesis.Furthermore, this demonstrativity (...) is a matter of degree. There is a spectrum of distinct pragmatic manifestations of this demonstrativity, ranging from the purely paratactic-like interpretation that ascribes no illocutionary relation between the speaker and the complement, and is highly incompatible withthat-omission, to the purely parenthetical interpretation where illocutionary force attaches to the complement and is highly conducive tothat-omission.A more general moral appears when the minimally revisionist syntactic consequences of my proposal are compared to the radical syntactic consequences of Thompson and Mulac's. Even if we hold that the syntactic structure of a natural language cannot be grasped outside of its general communicative contexts, we need not connect syntax and pragmatics so immediately as Thompson and Mulac seem to think. By resisting the idea that the syntax of parentheticals isipso facto different from the syntax of compositional embeddings, we allow some “slack” between syntax and pragmatics, thereby enabling us to analyze such subtle syntax-pragmatics interactions as negative-raised parentheticals. The methodological moral is to avoid too facile a connection between syntactic and pragmatic analyses. (shrink)

Adding branching quantification to a first-order language increases the expressive power of the language,without adding to its ontology. The present paper is a defense of this claim against Quine (1970) and Patton (1991).

Alexander Rosenberg (1983) has argued, contrary to his previous work in the philosophy of economics, that economics is not science, and it is merely mathematics. The following paper argues that Rosenberg fails to demonstrate either of these two claims. The questions of the predictive weakness of modern economics and the cognitive standing of abstract economic theory are discussed in detail.

Children must be taught morality. They must be taught to recognise the authority of moral standards and to understand what makes them authoritative. But there’s a problem: the content and justification of morality are matters of reasonable disagreement among reasonable people. This makes it hard to see how educators can secure children’s commitment to moral standards without indoctrinating them. -/- In A Theory of Moral Education, Michael Hand tackles this problem head on. He sets out to show that moral (...) education can and should be fully rational. It is true that many moral standards and justificatory theories are controversial, and educators have an obligation to teach these nondirectively, with the aim of enabling children to form their own considered views. But reasonable moral disagreement does not go all the way down: some basic moral standards are robustly justified, and these should be taught directively, with the aim of bringing children to recognise and understand their authority. -/- This is an original and important contribution to the philosophy of moral education, which lays a new theoretical foundation for the urgent practical task of teaching right from wrong. (shrink)

NEIL TENNANT, Antirealism and logic. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987. x+ 325 pp. £32.50.

In the first part of our mini-series on moral education, Michael Hand considers whether schools should be involved in trying to make children moral.

_Education, Ethics and Experience_ is a collection of original philosophical essays celebrating the work of one of the most influential philosophers of education of the last 40 years. Richard Pring’s substantial body of work has addressed topics ranging from curriculum integration to the comprehensive ideal, vocational education to faith schools, professional development to the privatisation of education, moral seriousness to the nature of educational research. The twelve essays collected here explore and build on Pring’s treatment of topics that are central (...) to the field of philosophy of education and high on the agenda of education policy-makers. The essays are by no means uncritical: some authors disagree sharply with Pring; others see his arguments as useful but incomplete, in need of addition or amendment. But all acknowledge their intellectual debt to him and recognise him as a giant on whose shoulders they stand. This book will be a welcome and lively read for educational academics, researchers and students of Educational Studies and Philosophy. (shrink)