Human geography, as a subject, has become widely recognized since its connections with the social sciences have widened and deepended the study of people, places and social structures. Horizons in Human Geography provides a clear and accessible sketch map of some of the latest and most promising developments in the subject. The book starts by assessing the role and limitations of techniques, models and theories and proceeds to provide a broad-ranging overview of the major social, cultural, urban, regional, political, economic (...) and environmental issues confronting geographers today. Contents: Introduction; Part I: Beyond The Quantitative Revolution; Part II: People and Places, Societies and Spaces; Part III: Explorations in the City; IV: Landscapes of Production; Part V: Regional Geographies and Global Perspectives; Part VI: Politicising The Environment. Contributors: Derek Gregory, Rex Walford, Michael J. Clark, Alan Wilson, R. J. Johnston, John Eyles, Denis Cosgrove, Linda McDowell, Roger Lee, Keith Bassett, John Short, Richard Dennis, Ian Douglas, Doreen Massey, Richard Meegan, John Harriss, Barbara Hariss, Nigel Thrift, Michael Taylor, Peter Taylor, Graham E. Smith, Stuart Cobridge, Judith Rees, Timothy O'Riordan and Bill Mead. (shrink)

Many of our beliefs are acquired online. Online epistemic environments are replete with fake news, fake science, fake photographs and videos, and fake people in the form of trolls and social bots. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the threat that such online fakes pose to the acquisition of knowledge. I argue that fakes can interfere with one or more of the truth, belief, and warrant conditions on knowledge. I devote most of my attention to the effects of (...) online fakes on satisfaction of the warrant condition, as these have received comparatively little attention. I consider three accounts of the conditions under which fakes compromise the warrant condition. I argue for the third of these accounts, according to which the propensity of fakes to exist in an environment threatens warrant acquisition in that environment. Finally, I consider some limitations on the epistemic threat of fakes and suggest some strategies by which this threat can be mitigated. (shrink)

A central issue in epistemology concerns the connection between truth and justification. The burden of our paper is to explain this connection. Reliabilism, defended by Goldman, assumes that the connection is one of reliability. We argue that this assumption is too strong. We argue that foundational theories, such as those articulated by Pollock and Chisholm fail to elucidate the connection. We consider the potentiality of coherence theories to explain the truth connection by means of higher level convictions about probabilities, which (...) we call doxastic ascent, and defend such a theory. Our defense appeals to the work of Reid and contemporary cognitive psychology in order to account for the psychological reality of higher level evaluations. (shrink)

Mind and Supermind offers an alternative perspective on the nature of belief and the structure of the human mind. Keith Frankish argues that the folk-psychological term 'belief' refers to two distinct types of mental state, which have different properties and support different kinds of mental explanation. Building on this claim, he develops a picture of the human mind as a two-level structure, consisting of a basic mind and a supermind, and shows how the resulting account sheds light on a (...) number of puzzling phenomena and helps to vindicate folk psychology. Topics discussed include the function of conscious thought, the cognitive role of natural language, the relation between partial and flat-out belief, the possibility of active belief formation, and the nature of akrasia, self-deception and first-person authority. This book will be valuable for philosophers, psychologists and cognitive scientists. (shrink)

Resistance to contextualism comes in the form of many very different types of objections. My topic here is a certain group or family of related objections to contextualism that I call “Now you know it, now you don’t” objections. I responded to some such objections in my “Contextualism and Knowledge Attributions” a few years back. In what follows here, I will expand on that earlier response in various ways, and, in doing so, I will discuss some aspects of David Lewis’s (...) recent paper, “Elusive Knowledge.”. (shrink)

The best grounds for accepting contextualism concerning knowledge attributions are to be found in how knowledge-attributing (and knowledge-denying) sentences are used in ordinary, nonphilosophical talk: What ordinary speakers will count as “knowledge” in some non-philosophical contexts they will deny is such in others. Contextualists typically appeal to pairs of cases that forcefully display the variability in the epistemic standards that govern ordinary usage: A “low standards” case (henceforth, “LOW”) in which a speaker seems quite appropriately and truthfully to ascribe knowledge (...) to a subject will be paired with a “high standards” case (“HIGH”) in which another speaker in a quite different and more demanding context seems with equal propriety and truth to say that the same subject (or a similarly positioned subject) does not know. The contextualist argument based on such cases is driven by the premises that the positive attribution of knowledge in LOW is true, and that the denial of knowledge in HIGH is true. And where the contextualist has constructed HIGH and LOW wisely, those premises are in turn powerfully supported by the two mutually reinforcing strands of evidence that both of the claims intuitively seem true, and that both claims are perfectly appropriate. The resulting argument for contextualism is very powerful indeed, but I am on the offensive making that case in another paper: “The Ordinary Language Basis for Contextualism and the New Invariantism.”. (shrink)

Atomism denies that complexes exist. Common-sense metaphysics may posit masses, composite individuals and sets, but atomism says there are only simples. In a singularist logic, it is difficult to make a plausible case for atomism. But we should accept plural logic, and then atomism can paraphrase away apparent reference to complexes. The paraphrases require unfamiliar plural universals, but these are of independent interest; for example, we can identify numbers and sets with plural universals. The atomist paraphrases would fail if plurals (...) presuppose complexes: but an Appendix shows that reference to complexes is not required in the semantics of plurals. (shrink)

One chapter in the science of emotion has focused, largely through an individualist lens, on just a few emotions: the Ekman Six. Considerable debate has occurred and entrenched positions have ensued. In this essay we offer evidence and argument revealing that there are not only six emotions, nor states measured as valence and arousal, but upwards of 20 discrete emotions that contribute to our subjective and social lives. These emotions enable the rich fabric of relationships, from caregiving interactions to collective (...) activities, that are vital to cooperation. Grounded in advances in cultural evolution, we detail how emotions and culture co-evolved, highlighting how emotions are building blocks of cultural forms such as ceremonies, dance, narratives, music, and visual art. (shrink)

Dual-process theories hold that there are two distinct processing modes available for many cognitive tasks: one that is fast, automatic and non-conscious, and another that is slow, controlled and conscious. Typically, cognitive biases are attributed to type 1 processes, which are held to be heuristic or associative, and logical responses to type 2 processes, which are characterised as rule-based or analytical. Dual-system theories go further and assign these two types of process to two separate reasoning systems, System 1 and System (...) 2 – a view sometimes described as ‘the two minds hypothesis’. It is often claimed that System 2 is uniquely human and the source of our capacity for abstract and hypothetical thinking. This study is an introduction to dual-process and dual-system theories. It looks at some precursors, surveys key work in the fields of learning, reasoning, social cognition and decision making, and identifies some recent trends and philosophical applications. (shrink)

I will here sharply oppose all the phases of the story Schaffer & Knobe tell. In Part 1 we will look at the supposed empirical case against standard contextualism, and in Part 2 we will investigate Schaffer & Knobe’s supposed empirical case for the superiority of contrastivism over standard contextualism.

About the book: This book explores the idea that we have two minds - automatic, unconscious, and fast, the other controlled, conscious, and slow. In recent years there has been great interest in so-called dual-process theories of reasoning and rationality. According to such theories, there are two distinct systems underlying human reasoning - an evolutionarily old system that is associative, automatic, unconscious, parallel, and fast, and a more recent, distinctively human system that is rule-based, controlled, conscious, serial, and slow. Within (...) the former, processes the former, processes are held to be innate and to use heuristics that evolved to solve specific adaptive problems. In the latter, processes are taken to be learned, flexible, and responsive to rational norms. (shrink)

In this dissertation, I defend an answer to the following question in the diachronic personal identity debate: what are the necessary and sufficient conditions for our persistence over time? Two popular approaches to answering this question are the psychological and the somatic approach. On the former approach, we persist in virtue of some sort of psychological continuity. So, some proponents of the psychological approach think that we cease to exist if we lose certain features of our psychology such as our (...) memories, beliefs, and rationality. On the latter approach, we persist in virtue of some sort of physical continuity. Eric Olson defends a version of the somatic approach called animalism. On his view, we are numerically identical to biological organisms and we persist if and only if the organisms we are persist. Although Olson’s animalism has some benefits, it also faces some challenges. For example, many people would say that we go wherever our brains go (if we go anywhere at all) because our brains (more specifically, our cerebra) realize the aspects of our psychology traditionally associated with persons, such as memories, beliefs, rationality, and self-awareness. But on Olson’s animalism, our psychology has nothing to do with our persistence and we go wherever our bodies go rather than our cerebra. Following Aristotle and Aquinas, I lay out an animalist view of our persistence called hylomorphic animalism. On this view, we are numerically identical to rational animals, which are living bodies composed of prime matter and a rational soul. Furthermore, we persist if and only if the composite of matter and rational soul persists. I claim that hylomorphic animalism makes better sense of certain contemporary personal identity thought experiments than Olson’s animalism. For example, contra Olson, I argue that our psychology does have something to do with our persistence and that we go wherever our brains go. (shrink)

Network neuroscience provides a systems approach to the study of the brain and enables the examination of interactions measured at different temporal and spatial scales. We review current methods to quantify the structure of brain networks and compare that structure across different clinical cohorts, cognitive states, and subjects. We further introduce the emerging mathematical concept of multilayer networks and describe the advantages of this approach to model changing brain dynamics over time. We conclude by offering several concrete examples of how (...) multilayer network approaches to neuroimaging data provide novel insights into brain structure and evolving function. (shrink)

The efforts of some institutional review boards (IRBs) to exercise what is viewed as appropriate oversight may contribute to deceit on the part of investigators who feel unjustly treated. An organizational justice paradigm provides a useful context for exploring why certain IRB behaviors may lead investigators to believe that they have not received fair treatment. These feelings may, in turn, lead to intentional deception by investigators that IRBs will rarely detect. Paradoxically, excessive protective zeal by IRBs may actually encourage misconduct (...) by some investigators. The authors contend that, by fostering a climate in which investigators perceive that they receive fair and unbiased treatment, IRBs optimize the likelihood of collegial compliance with appropriate participant protections. (shrink)

exactly as the essay appears in Skepticism. It's pretty close, though. In the version that appears in the book, page references to other essays in Skepticism refer to page numbers in the book, while below page references are, for the most part, to the original place of publication of the essays referred to. Also, I below make one correction (in red) of a factual error..

How did the French Revolution become thinkable? Keith Michael Baker, a leading authority on the ideological origins of the French Revolution, explores this question in his wide-ranging collection of essays. Analyzing the new politics of contestation that transformed the traditional political culture of the Old Regime during its last decades, Baker revises our historical map of the political space in which the French Revolution took form. Some essays study the ways in which the revolutionaries' break with the past was (...) prepared by competition between agents and critics of absolute monarchy to control the cultural resources and political meanings of French sought before 1789 to reconstitute their body politic; and by the invention of 'public opinion' as a new form of political authority displacing notions of 'representation', 'constitution', 'sovereignty' - and of 'the French Revolution' itself - the ambiguities, tensions, and contradictions that were to drive the revolutionary dynamic in subsequent years. The result is a substantial and unified set of studies, stimulating renewed reflection on one of the central themes in modern European history. (shrink)

We did not, as Brakel & Shevrin imply, intend to classify either System 1 or System 2 as rational or irrational. Instrumental rationality is assessed at the organismic level, not at the subpersonal level. Thus, neither System 1 nor System 2 are themselves inherently rational or irrational. Also, that genetic fitness and instrumental rationality are not to be equated was a major theme in our target article. We disagree with Bringsjord & Yang's point that the tasks used in the heuristics (...) and biases literature are easy. Bringsjord & Yang too readily conflate the ability to utilize a principle of rational choice with the disposition to do so. Thus, they undervalue tasks in the cognitive science literature that compellingly reveal difficulties with the latter. We agree with Newton & Roberts that models at the algorithmic level of analysis are crucial, but we disagree with their implication that attention to issues of rationality at the intentional level of analysis impedes work at the algorithmic level of analysis. (shrink)

David Hume’s arguments against believing reports of miracles are shown to be very weak. Laws of nature, I suggest, are best seen not as exceptionless rules but as context-dependent realizations of natural powers. In that context miracles transcend the natural order not as "violations" but as intelligible realizations of a divine supernatural purpose. Miracles are not parts of scientific theory but can be parts of a web of rational belief fully consistent with science. (edited).

A few years back, I participated in the Spindell Conference in Memphis, and gave a paper, “How Can We Know That We’re Not Brains in Vats?” (available on-line at: http://pantheon.yale.edu/~kd47/Spindell.htm). The bulk of that paper concerned responses to skepticism. I pursued an unusually radical criticism of the often-criticized “Putnam-style” responses to skepticism. To put it rather enigmatically, I argued that such responses don’t work even if they work! And I compared such responses with the type of response I favor – (...) the “contextualist Moorean” response – to show how these latter responses are of a type that avoids the radical problems that plague Putnam-style responses. But in the final section of the paper, I turned briefly to a different, though related, issue, presenting my proposed solution to what’s often called the “McKinsey problem.”. (shrink)

The causes of violence -- The corruptibility of all things human -- Religion and war -- Faith and reason -- Life after death -- Morality and the Bible -- Morality and faith -- The enlightenment, liberal thought and religion -- Does religion do more harm than good in personal life? -- What good has religion done?

As a result of in-house discussions stimulated by previous Gonzaga engineering ethics conferences, Coffman Engineers began the implementation of what is to be a company-wide ethics training program. While preparing a curriculum aimed at consulting engineers, we found very little guidance as to how to proceed with most available literature being oriented towards the academic environment. We consulted a number of resources that address the teaching of engineering ethics in higher education, but questioned their applicability for the Consulting Engineering environment. (...) This lack of guidance led us to informal research into the ethical knowledge and attitudes of both consulting engineers and engineering students. Some of our findings were unexpected, and suggest that a simpler approach to teaching ethics to working professionals might be preferred to that typically promoted in higher education. (shrink)

This paper rejects a traditional epistemic interpretation of conditional probability. Suppose some chance process produces outcomes X, Y,..., with probabilities P(X), P(Y),... If later observation reveals that outcome Y has in fact been achieved, then the probability of outcome X cannot normally be revised to P(X|Y) ['P&Y)/P(Y)]. This can only be done in exceptional circumstances - when more than just knowledge of Y-ness has been attained. The primary reason for this is that the weight of a piece of evidence varies (...) with the means by which it is provided, so knowledge of Y-ness does not have uniform impact on the probability of X. A better updating of the probability of X is provided by P(X|Y*), where Y* is not an outcome of the chance process being observed, but the sentence 'the outcome Y has been observed', an 'outcome' of the subsequent observation process. This alternative formula is widely endorsed in practice, but not well recognized in theory, where the oversight has generated some unsatisfactory consequences. (shrink)

Some texts appear more than once across the corpus of Zygmunt Bauman’s work. This has led to accusations of self-plagiarism and a lack of scholarly rigour. This paper is an explanation of why texts reappear. It pays attention to a number of frequently overlooked texts from the 1970s which are of fundamental importance for any understanding of Bauman’s work. It is contended that if: (a) there is an understanding of the stakes and purpose of sociology as it is framed in (...) Bauman’s work; and (b) attention is paid to the argument of Hermeneutics and Social Science; then (c) the repetition of texts across the work becomes explicable and unproblematic. The paper argues that dealings with Bauman’s work need to be more aware of the less well-known texts. They also need to be alert to different – and incommensurable – ways of practising sociology. (shrink)

Autoantibodies to three eukaryotic 60S ribosomal phosphoproteins P0, P1 and P2 have been found in the sera of 10–20% of patients with systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE). These three proteins share a common epitope contained within the carboxy terminal 22 amino acids of each protein. Because central nervous system disturbances, with major behavioural disorders, occur in a significant fraction of SLE patients, the antiribosomal autoantibodies were measured in this subset of SLE individuals to determine whether or not there was an association. (...) This antibody is present in 90% of SLE patients who were diagnosed as having psychosis, secondary to the disease. (shrink)

The cognitive critique of the goals and desires that are input into the implicit calculations that result in instrumental rationality is one aspect of what has been termed broad rationality (Elster, 1983). This cognitive critique involves, among other things, the search for rational integration (Nozick, 1993)—that is, consistency between first-order and second-order preferences. Forming a second-order preference involves metarepresentational abilities made possible by mental decoupling operations. However, these decoupling abilities are separable from the motive that initiates the cognitive critique itself. (...) I argue that Velleman (1992) has identified that motive (“the desire to act in accordance with reasons”), and that it might be operationalisable as a thinking disposition at a very superordinate cognitive level. This thinking disposition, the Master Rationality Motive, is likely to be of particular importance in explaining individual differences in the tendency to seek rational integration. Preliminary research on related constructs suggests that this construct is measurable. (shrink)

This article seeks to explore some of the origins of Zygmunt Bauman's social thought. Using the metaphor of paths from a story by Borges, the article argues that Bauman's work follows paths which were opened up to him by Gramsci, Camus and Levinas. Bauman has acknowledged the importance of Gramsci and Levinas in his intellectual development and, therefore, the identification of a path leading from Camus is offered by way of circumstantial rather than direct evidence. The article discusses each of (...) these thinkers in the context of Bauman's own themes and concerns and, in so doing, it is hoped to show that Bauman's work has long been marked by a consistence of ambition and foundational assumptions. (shrink)

This essay examines Aquinas's discussions of hatred in Summa Theologica I-II, Q. 29 and II-II, Q. 34, in order to retrieve an account of what contemporary theorists of the emotions call its cognitive contents. In Aquinas's view, hatred is constituted as a passion by a narrative pattern that includes its intentional object, beliefs, perceptions of changes in bodily states, and motivated desires. This essay endorses Aquinas's broadly "cognitivist" account of passional hatred, in line with his way of treating passions in (...) general. I suggest that Aquinas's account of hatred's arising out of attachment is compelling. However, I also argue that if Aquinas's treatment of hatred is to help us understand the phenomenon of hate, where classes of people are abominated for an identity they bear, and to avoid equating an oppressor's hatred with that of the oppressed for the oppressor, the cognitive pathway to hatred must be broader than through envy. (shrink)

P EM Manifestos for History /EM is a thought-provoking and controversial text that, through a star studded collection of essays, presents a wide ranging ...

Weighted averaging is a method for aggregating the totality of information, both regimented and unregimented, possessed by an individual or group of individuals. The application of such a method may be warranted by a theorem of the calculus of probability, simple conditionalization, or Jeffrey's formula for probability kinematics, all of which average in terms of the prior probability of evidence statements. Weighted averaging may, however, be applied as a method of rational aggregation of the probabilities of diverse perspectives or persons (...) in cases in which the weights cannot be articulated as the prior probabilities of statements of evidence. The method is justified by Wagner's Theorem exhibiting that any method satisfying the conditions of the Irrelevance of Alternatives and Zero Unanimity must, when applied to three or more alternatives, be weighted averaging. (shrink)

This essay investigates questions about the relationship between language, speech, and democratic institutions by bringing into conversation Hannah Arendt's and Pierre Bourdieu's distinctive views of the politics of language and speech. First, I explicate Arendt's account of the connection between speech, action, and identity disclosure, as well as its role in her broad conception of political institutions. Next, I complicate this outlook by examining Bourdieu's political sociology of language, focusing on the ways that linguistic competences valorized in particular institutional settings (...) operate as mechanisms of silencing, domination, and exclusion. Finally, I bring these approaches together by investigating political events—AIDS activism in the United States during the 1980s and early 1990s—that raise critical issues regarding the politics of language and speech within a specific institutional setting. By reading Arendt and Bourdieu together in the context of these events, one can develop a defensible account of the politics of speech in democratic theory and practice. (shrink)

In most logical systems, inferences cannot be invalidated simply by the addition of new premises. If an inference can be drawn from a set of premises S, then it can also be drawn from any larger set incorporrating S. The truth of the original premises guarantees the truth of the inferred conclusion, and the addition of extra premises cannot undermine it. This property is known as monotonicity. Nonmonotonic inference lacks this property. The conclusions drawn are provisional, and new information may (...) lead to the withdrawal of a previous conclusion, even though none of the original premises is retracted. (shrink)