According to Fricker’s (2007) seminal account, an epistemic injustice is done when, based on prejudice, a hearer ascribes to a speaker a level of credibility below what they deserve. When prejudice results in credibility excess, however, Fricker contends no similar injustice takes place. In this paper, I will challenge the second of these claims. Using a modified version of Zollman’s (2007) two-armed bandit model, I will show how the systematic over-ascription of credibility within a dominant group can produce epistemic advantages (...) for that group relative to non-group members. (shrink)

Howson (2000) contends that the No-Miracles argument fails as an argument in support of scientific realism because it commits the base-rate fallacy. Psillos (2009) has defended the argument by appealing to cases that involve conditional probabilities but where base-rate information can properly be ignored. I show that Psillos’s defense of the No-Miracles argument is inadequate and that the prospects for a purely probabilistic formulation of the argument are dim. I end by considering whether interpreting the argument as an inference to (...) the best explanation might better serve the scientific realist, concluding that such an approach would limit the realist’s ability to effectively counter the Pessimistic Induction. (shrink)

A Naive Realist Theory of Colour defends the view that colours are mind-independent properties of things in the environment, that are distinct from properties identified by the physical sciences. This view stands in contrast to the long-standing and wide-spread view amongst philosophers and scientists that colours don't really exist - or at any rate, that if they do exist, then they are radically different from the way that they appear. It is argued that a naive realist theory of colour best (...) explains how colours appear to perceiving subjects, and that this view is not undermined either by reflecting on variations in colour perception between perceivers and across perceptual conditions, or by our modern scientific understanding of the world. A Naive Realist Theory of Colour also illustrates how our understanding of what colours are has far-reaching implications for wider questions about the nature of perceptual experience, the relationship between mind and world, the problem of consciousness, the apparent tension between common sense and scientific representations of the world, and even the very nature and possibility of philosophical inquiry. (shrink)

In this article we criticize two recent articles that examine the relation between explanation and unification. Halonen and Hintikka (1999), on the one hand, claim that no unification is explanation. Schurz (1999), on the other hand, claims that all explanation is unification. We give counterexamples to both claims. We propose a pluralistic approach to the problem: explanation sometimes consists in unification, but in other cases different kinds of explanation (e.g., causal explanation) are required; and none of these kinds is more (...) fundamental. (shrink)

Visual perception is widely taken to present properties such as redness, roundness, and so on. This in turn might be thought to give rise to accuracy conditions for experience, and so content, regardless of which metaphysical view of perception one endorses. An influential version of this argument—Susanna Siegel’s ’Argument from Appearing’—aims to establish the existence of content as common ground between representational and relational views of perception. This goes against proponents of ‘austere’ relationalism who deny that content plays a substantive (...) role in philosophical explanations of conscious perceptual experience. Though Siegel’s argument purports to be neutral with respect to the metaphysics of perception, it relies upon an equivocation between the presentation of property-types and property-instances. Consequently, the argument begs the question against the austere relational view, and so fails to establish the desired conclusion. So while relationalists can and should allow that experiences have accuracy conditions, it does not follow from this that they have contents of any philosophically interesting or significant kind. (shrink)

This book addresses a fundamental question in the philosophy of religion. Can religious experience provide evidence for religious belief? If so, how? Keith Yandell argues against the notion that religious experience is ineffable, while advocating the view that strong numinous experience provides some evidence that God exists. An attractive feature of the book is that it does not confine its attention to any one religious cultural tradition, but tracks the nature of religious experience across different traditions in both the (...) East and the West. (shrink)

Is the mind just a by-product of the brain? Or is mind the fundamental reality, which creates matter? This book is a defense of mind as prior to matter. It is a philosophical work, written in an accessible style, which explains idealism as the teaching of most classical philosophers, and as most consistent with modern science"-- Back cover.

Many philosophers and scientists take perceptual experience, whatever else it involves, to be representational. In ‘The Silence of the Senses’, Charles Travis argues that this view involves a kind of category mistake, and consequently, that perceptual experience is not a representational or intentional phenomenon. The details of Travis’s argument, however, have been widely misinterpreted by his representationalist opponents, many of whom dismiss it out of hand. This chapter offers an interpretation of Travis’s argument from looks that it is argued presents (...) a genuine and important challenge to orthodox representational views of experience. Whilst this challenge may not be insurmountable, it places a substantial burden upon the representationalist to explain not only how experiences come to have the contents that they do, but how those contents come to feature in our conscious mental lives. (shrink)

The Western world is experiencing a resurgence of interest in the therapeutic potential of psychedelics, most of which are derived from plants or fungi with a history of Indigenous ceremonial use. Recent research has revealed that psychedelic compounds have the potential to address treatment‐resistant depression and anxiety, as well as post‐traumatic stress disorder and addictions. These findings have contributed to the decriminalization of psychedelics in some jurisdictions and their legalization in others. Despite psychedelics’ opaque legal status, numerous companies and individuals (...) are profiting from speculative investments with few, if any, benefits accruing to Indigenous Peoples. In this paper, we suggest that the aptly named “psychedelic renaissance,” like the European Renaissance, is made possible by colonial extractivism. We further suggest that Indigenous philosophical traditions offer alternative approaches to reorient the “psychedelic renaissance” towards a more equitable future for Indigenous Peoples, psychedelic medicines, and all our relations. (shrink)

Some early work in economics built on the assumption that people are mostly motivated by self-interest. However, there is much converging evidence from behavioural economics, anthropology, and psyc...

Previous research on associative learning has uncovered detailed aspects of the process, including what types of things are learned, how they are learned, and where in the brain such learning occurs. However, perceptual processes, such as stimulus recognition and identification, take time to unfold. Previous studies of learning have not addressed when, during the course of these dynamic recognition processes, learned representations are formed and updated. If learned representations are formed and updated while recognition is ongoing, the result of learning (...) may incorporate spurious, partial information. For example, during word recognition, words take time to be identified, and competing words are often active in parallel. If learning proceeds before this competition resolves, representations may be influenced by the preliminary activations present at the time of learning. In three experiments using word learning as a model domain, we provide evidence that learning reflects the ongoing dynamics of auditory and visual processing during a learning event. These results show that learning can occur before stimulus recognition processes are complete; learning does not wait for ongoing perceptual processing to complete. (shrink)

It is widely accepted that there is a visual field, but the analogous notion of an auditory field is rejected by many philosophers on the grounds that the metaphysics or phenomenology of audition lack the necessary spatial or phenomenological structure. In this paper, I argue that many of the common objections to the existence of an auditory field are misguided and that, contrary to a tradition of philosophical scepticism about the spatiality of auditory experience, it is as richly spatial as (...) visual experience—and in some ways even more so. By carefully considering the spatiality and boundedness of audition, along with how sounds or their sources are experienced as occurring within the surrounding acoustic environment, we can gain a better understanding of (i) our auditory experience of space and (ii) the conditions for the existence of spatial sensory fields in general in a way that does not privilege vision over the other senses. (shrink)

What, according to Locke, are ideas? I argue that Locke does not give an account of the nature of ideas. In the Essay, the question is simply set to one side, as recommended by the “Historical, plain Method” that Locke employs. This is exemplified by his characterization of ‘ideas’ in E I.i.8, and the discussion of the inverted spectrum hypothesis in E II.xxxii. In this respect, Locke's attitude towards the nature of ideas in the Essay is reminiscent of Boyle's diffident (...) attitude towards the nature of matter. In posthumously published work, however, Locke suggests that the enquiry into the nature of ideas is one of the things that the enquiry into the extent of human knowledge undertaken in the Essay actually shows to lie beyond the “compass of human understanding”. In this respect, Locke's attitude towards the nature of ideas is reminiscent of Sydenham's attitude towards the nature of diseases. (shrink)

The dual role of olfaction in both smelling and tasting, i.e. flavour perception, makes it an important test case for philosophical theories of sensory individuation. Indeed, the psychologist Paul Rozin claimed that olfaction is a “dual sense”, leading some scientists and philosophers to propose that we have not one, but two senses of smell: orthonasal and retronasal olfaction. In this paper I consider how best to understand Rozin’s claim, and upon what grounds one might judge there to be one or (...) two distinct olfactory modalities. I conclude that while Rozin may be right that humans have dual occurrences of an olfactory ‘sense’, the concept of a sense-modality, and hence the ‘sense’ of smell, is ambiguous between two different notions: a physiological sensory channel and an experiential modality, along the lines suggested by J. J. Gibson. Furthermore, recognising that these are complementary rather than competing conceptions of a sense-modality enables the formulation of a powerful ‘dual-concept’ framework for posing and addressing questions concerning the complex architecture of human multisensory experience. (shrink)

El presente trabajo propone al lector una interpretación acerca del problema de la «Idea» y del «tiempo» de la muerte en la obra de Proust En busca del tiempo perdido. Abordaré la cuestión analizando dos de sus episodios clave: el encuentro con «un poco de tiempo en estado puro» y el de la muerte de la «abuela». Mi trabajo tiene su fuente de inspiración en la constante reivindicación de Deleuze de que la memoria no desempeña en el arte más que (...) un papel secundario, lo cual constituye un modo de ver que Deleuze nunca abandonará en sus sucesivas lecturas de Proust. En qué radica la importancia de la figura de «Tanatos» en una interpretación de Proust es, fundamentalmente, a lo que mi trabajo tratará de dar respuesta al seguir la línea deleuzeana de pensamiento de acuerdo con la cual incluso en lo virtual y en el recuerdo involuntario existe el fuerte remanente, que ha de ser superado y conquistado, de una inversión erótica en la memoria. Se hace visible lo mucho que a la obra proustiana le va en el encuentro con eros y tanatos allí donde contrapongo las interpretaciones que sobre Proust han ofrecido Deleuze y Kristeva, al final de mi artículo. Éste procura dilucidar la naturaleza y función de lo «virtual» en Deleuze y arrojar un poco de luz sobre la manera en que la «pulsión de muerte» opera en el pensamiento deleuzeano, en especial por lo que se refiere a cómo esa noción articula la de «movimiento forzado», que tan importante lugar ocupa en su interpretación de Proust y en su demostración de las diferentes síntesis del tiempo. (shrink)

In early August 2011, disturbances broke out in a number of English cities. What happened was broadcast globally, and all of a sudden it seemed as if all of the country was about to burst into flames. This short paper is offered by way of a ‘letter’ from England. It was written in late August 2011 and is an initial attempt to develop an understanding of why the disturbances broke out, what motivated the people who were involved and, indeed, why (...) things were confined to England. Cities elsewhere in Britain experienced nothing. The paper identifies a crisis in the English social imaginary. The disturbances are understood as a conjunctural response to this crisis, a response highlighting the interregnum in the English social imaginary. (shrink)

We examine three assumptions commonly held in the corporate reputation literature: (1) reputation ratings of owners and investors are generally representative of all stakeholders; (2) stakeholders will generally provide a higher reputation rating to firms that emphasize corporate social responsibility versus firms that do not; and (3) profitability is the primary criterion of importance to all stakeholders when rating a firm's reputation. Using an exploratory in‐class exercise, our findings suggest that: (1) there are significant differences among stakeholder groups in their (...) reputation ratings; (2) firms that emphasize corporate social responsibility are not rated more highly across all stakeholder groups; and (3) for all stakeholder groups, the ethicality criterion explained more of the variance in firms' reputation ratings than the profitability criterion. (shrink)

This essay shows that truth cannot be divorced from human experience and an individual’s world view, his or her weltanschauung. There exist different weltanschauungen that favour alternative truths. Thus, loosely speaking, truth is determined by context. It may be socially acceptable to prefer one among the alternative truths as truly true, but this goal necessarily involves taking an ideological perspective on what is perceived and accepted as the sole truth. In other words, it is prejudiced. The truth value assigned to (...) the proposition God exists starkly illustrates this claim, but in the course of this essay I demonstrate that alternative truths are widespread and that conflicting truths can co-exist within a community even when they create dissension. A hegemonic group will assert a preference for one truth over its alternatives, but that does not eliminate the existence of alternative truths. Alternative weltanschauungen need to be managed somehow, and the recognition that alternative truths exist is one step in their management. (shrink)

This paper is motivated by the search for a natural and deductively powerful extension of classical set theory. A theory of properties U is developed, based on a system of relevant logic related to RQ. In U the set {a, b, c,...} is identified with the property [x: x=a x=b x=c...]. The universe of all sets V, is identified with the property of being a hereditary set. The main result is that relevant implication collapses to material implication for sentences with (...) quantifiers restricted to V. This demonstrates the naturalness of the system. However, an aparent lack of deductive power leads to the conclusion that the best extension of classical set theory is to be found in intensional theories with the unrestricted comprehension schema based on weak relevant logics. The author has obtained similar collapses of to for these systems. (shrink)

ABSTRACT It has long been recognised that Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations (1776) advances a ‘system of natural liberty’ in seeking to account for the ‘nature and causes of the wealth of nations.’ This is not however a theme that is explored or explained in the early sections of the book; in fact, not until Book IV, Ch. ix does Smith give his most expansive account of what he might mean by this term. This paper examines this chapter in detail (...) to determine the limits of his critique in that chapter of the ‘agricultural system’ (of Physiocracy), and why it might be that Smith is so parsimonious in offering a clear account of his central idea. (shrink)

In an incisive critique of Professor Hick's Evil and the God of Love , Professor Puccetti claims to ‘carry the campaign as well as the battle’—i.e. to show that, with respect to evil, theists ‘are either “explaining it away” or saying it cannot be explained at all. And in both cases they are in effect admitting they have no rational defence to offer. Which means that despite appearances they really are abandoning the battlefield.’.

Having shown that Ramanuja and Madhva are indeed monotheists, I argue that (i) they differ concerning the relationship between God, the original Agent, and human agents created by God; (ii) that this difference involves in Madhva’s case there being only one agent and in Ramanuja’s case both God and created persons being agents, and (iii) since both positions require that created persons be agents, Madhva’s perspective is inconsistent and Ramanuja’s is not.