Evolutionary processes such as natural selection and random drift are commonly regarded as causes of population-level change. We respond to a recent challenge that drift and selection are best understood as statistical trends, not causes. Our reply appeals to manipulation as a strategy for uncovering causal relationships: if you can systematically manipulate variable A to bring about a change in variable B, then A is a cause of B. We argue that selection and drift can be systematically manipulated to produce (...) different kinds of population-level change. They should therefore be regarded as causes. (shrink)

This lucid and wide-ranging volume constitutes a self-contained introduction to the elements and key issues of the philosophy of language.

There is a broadly held view that neonatologists are ethically obligated to act to override parental nontreatment decisions for imperiled premature newborns when there is a reasonable chance of a good outcome. It is argued here that three types of uncertainty undercut any such general obligation: (1) the vagueness of the boundary at which an infant’s deficits become so intolerable that death could be reasonably preferred; (2) the uncertainty about whether aggressive treatment will result in the survival of a reasonably (...) healthy child or, alternatively, the survival of a child with intolerable deficits; and (3) the inability to determine an acceptable ratio between the likelihoods of those two outcomes. It is argued that the broadly held view accords insufficient weight to the fact that newborn intensive care increases the likelihood of harm to the child by effecting survival with intolerable deficits. Though treatment may offer a reasonable chance of a good outcome, it is argued that there are situations in which neonatologists should nonetheless defer to parental nontreatment decisions. (shrink)

An accompanying website offers a set of interactive debate tutorials, which include photographs of debates; a guide to the participants; a grammar of Tibetan debating, which includes sample propositions, responses, and strategies; the ethnomethods employed by debaters; videos of illustrative debates, complete with English translations, all analyzed in detail in the book; and an appendix comprising an interactive debate, glossary, manual, and illustrations. Please see www.thdl.org/DebateTutorials/ for this material. -- back cover.

This book examines the Socratic method of elenchus, or refutation.

the structure of medical science with a special focus on the role of generalizations and universals in medicine, and (2) philosophy of medicine's relation with the philosophy of science. I argue that a usually overlooked aspect of Kuhnian paradigms, namely, their characteristic of being "exemplars", is of considerable significance in the biomedical sciences. This significance rests on certain important differences from the physical sciences in the nature of theories in the basic and the clinical medical sciences. I describe those differences (...) and maintain that they are these differentiating features that require the use of more comparative and analogical reasoning in medicine. I suggest that Kitcher's recent introduction of the notion of a ‘practice’ may have similar implications if it is construed to contain more analogical elements than he appears to recognize in his initial formulation. Finally I argue that though Gorovitz and MacIntyre's characterization of medicine as a "science of particulars" bears some similarities with my thesis, I maintain that such a position without careful qualification can lead to ignoring both the nature of generalizations in these sciences and their role as positive analogies tying together a family of overlapping models. Keywords: medical reasoning, biomedical theories/paradigms, science of particulars, philosophy of medicine CiteULike Connotea Del.icio.us What's this? (shrink)

Kant's views on revolution have been widely discussed, and commentators have long been astounded that the philosopher who made famous the principle that persons are ends in themselves could reach such abhorent conclusions as that citizens owe unqualified obedience to their supreme ruler. I address an important and ignored sub-issue of this topic: the relations between Kant's doctrine of the division of governmental powers and his doctrine of absolute obedience. I argue that these two doctrines are not compatible; Kant's defense (...) of absolute obedience undermines his own division of powers. Examining exactly why this is the case leads to several further results. First, a constitutional court is crucial to a republic. Second, Kant is closer to a consistent view of government and obedience than first appears. Third, Kant's account of the division of powers was theoretically behind his times. Fourth, there is a crucial distinction between the separation of governmental powers and a system of checks and balances among the three branches of government. Fifth, Kant did grasp the relevant principles governing impeachment - a far more drastic measure than a constitutional court. Finally, most of the principles needed to revise Kant's constitutional theory are already contained in his published writings. Kants Thesen zur Revolution sind viel diskutiert worden, und lange Zeit waren Kommentatoren darüber verwundert, daß der Philosoph, der das Prinzip berühmt gemacht hat, wonach Personen Zwecke an sich selbst sind, insbesondere zu der abschreckenden Schlußfolgerung kommen konnte, die Bürger eines Staates hätten dem Herrscher unbedingten Gehorsam zu leisten. Ich befasse mich mit einem wichtigen und regelmäßig übersehenen Aspekt dieses Problemfeldes: Dem Verhältnis zwischen Kants Lehre von der Gewaltenteilung und seiner These vom absoluten Gehorsam des Staatsbürgers. Ich behaupte, daß diese beiden Lehren nicht miteinander vereinbar sind; Kants Verteidigung des absoluten Gehorsams unterminiert seine Gewaltenteilungsthese. Eine genaue Untersuchung der Frage, warum das so ist, führt zu weiteren Resultaten: Erstens ist ein Verfassungsgericht wesentlich für eine Republik. Zweitens ist Kant näher an einer konsistenten Auffassung von Staat und Gehorsam als dies auf den ersten Blick zu sein scheint. Drittens bleibt Kants Auffassung zur Gewaltenteilung hinter der Entwicklung seiner Zeit zurück. Viertens besteht ein wesentlicher Unterschied zwischen der Trennung der Staatsgewalten einerseits und einem System von "checks and balances" der drei Zweige der Staatslenkung andererseits. Fünftens hat Kant durchaus die relevanten Prinzipien eines "impeachment" erkannt - eine wesentlich drastischere Einrichtung als die eines Verfassungsgerichts. Schließlich sind die meisten der Prinzipien, die für eine Revision von Kants Verfassungstheorie notwendig sind, bereits in seinen eigenen Werken enthalten. (shrink)

Journal of Social Philosophy, Volume 53, Issue 1, Page 59-75, Spring 2022.

Moral relativism is often rejected on grounds that it is either descriptively inadequate, at best, or self-defeating, at worst. In this essay, I swim against the predominant anti-relativistic philosophical tide. My minimal aim is to show that relativism is neither descriptively inadequate nor self-defeating. My maximal aim is to outline the beginnings of an argument that relativism is a truth resting on deep facts about the human normative predicament. And I shall suggest that far from being a source of cultural (...) degeneracy, the fact of relativism has the potential to ground a culture that is deeply life-affirming. My argument against the twin charges of descriptive inadequacy and self- defeat turns on a distinction between tolerant and intolerant relativism. I concede that many of the standard arguments against relativism do have force against tolerant relativism. But against intolerant relativism, those arguments are entirely unavailing. The crucial difference between the tolerant and intolerant relativist is that although the intolerant relativist agrees with the tolerant relativist that norms are relative, she insists that agents are sometimes entitled to hold others to norms by which they are not bound. I shall argue that just because the intolerant relativist allows that we are sometimes entitled to hold others to norms by which we are bound but they are not, she is able to escape both the charge of descriptive inadequacy and the charge of self- defeat. In particular, I shall show that the intolerant relativist has a coherent and satisfying account of the nature of moral disagreement and moral argument. Establishing the ultimate truth of relativism, however, would take more than showing that one form of relativism escapes certain standard arguments against relativism. Though I do not pretend to conclusively discharge the burden of showing that relativism is true in the space of this essay, I do sketch the beginnings of an account of what I call the bindingness of norms that has intolerant relativism as more or less straight-forward downstream consequence. If there are independent grounds for accepting that account of bindingness, then there are independent grounds for accepting intolerant moral relativism. (shrink)

Classically, position effect variegation has been studied in Drosophila and results when a euchromatic gene is placed adjacent to either centromeric heterochromatin or to a telomeric domain. In such a circumstance expression of the locus variegates, being active in some cells and silent in others. Over the last few years a comparable phenomenon in yeast has been discovered. This system promises to tell us much about this curious behaviour. Indeed, experiments reported recently(1) indicate that the variegation of a yeast telomeric (...) gene is cell‐cycle regulated. The results suggest the following model. During DNA replication there is a disassembly of chromatin that allows a competition between silencing factors and trans‐activators to take place. Thus, reassembly of the domain may result in either the repression or the expression of the affected gene and, hence, produce a variegating phenotype. (shrink)

The rapid development of connectionist models in computer science and of powerful computational tools in neuroscience has encouraged eliminativist materialist philosophers to propose specific alternatives to traditional mentalistic theories of mind. One of the problems associated with such a move is that elimination of the mental would seem to remove access to ideas like truth as the foundations of normative epistemology. Thus, a successful elimination of propositional or sentential theories of mind must not only replace them for purposes of our (...) psychology, it must also replace them for purposes of the evaluation of our theories and explanations, psychological and otherwise. This paper briefly reviews eliminativist arguments for doubting the correctness of sentential accounts of explanation, understanding, and normative evaluation. It then considers Paul Churchland's (1989) proposed alternative norms, which are framed neurocomputationally. The alternative is found wanting in several specific ways. The arguments for eliminating propositionally-based norms are then re-examined and it is suggested that the need for wholesale elimination is overstated. A clear gap in the traditional epistemological story is identified, however, and a more modest set of norms is proposed as a way of filling this gap, rather than as a way of entirely replacing the traditional framework. (shrink)

Henry Allison criticizes and rejects naturalism because the idea of freedom is constitutive of rational spontaneity, which alone enables and entitles us to judge or to act rationally, and only transcendental idealism can justify our acting under the idea of freedom. Allison’s critique of naturalism is unclear because his reasons for claiming that free rational spontaneity requires transcendental idealism are inadequate and because his characterization of Kant’s idealism is ambiguous. Recognizing this reinforces the importance of the question of whether only (...) transcendental idealism “can ground the right to the conceptual space” that we occupy when thinking spontaneously or acting under the idea of freedom. Only with a clear answer to this question can Kant’s idea of freedom provide a basis for assessing today’s naturalist orthodoxy. (shrink)

The problem of semantic content is the problem of explicating those features of brain processes by virtue of which they may properly be thought to possess meaning or reference. This paper criticizes the account of semantic content associated with fodor's version of cognitive science, And offers an alternative account based on mathematical communication theory. Its key concept is that of a neuronal representation maintaining a high-Level of mutual information with a designated external state of affairs under changing conditions of perceptual (...) presentation. (shrink)

Henry Harris noted that ‘the Baconian applied science of this world is the solid foundation upon which Hegel’s ladder of spiritual experience rests’. Understanding the philosophical character of Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature requires recognizing some basic legitimate philosophical issues embedded in the development of physics from Galileo to Newton (§2). These issues illuminate the character of Hegel’s analysis of philosophical issues regarding nature (§3) and the central aims and purposes of Hegel’s philosophy of nature (§4). Hegel recognized some key weaknesses (...) in Newton’s own mathematical treatment of planetary orbits which were only rectified when Johann Bernoulli recast Newtonian gravitational theory on the basis of mathematical analysis (calculus). So reconstructed, Newtonian physics provides sufficient grounds to ascribe gravitational force to matter (Enz. §§262, 269). Hegel incorporated this important point into his illuminating accounts of causal laws of nature and natural-scientific explanation. These points reveal how Hegel’s Science of Logic and Philosophy of Nature are interdependent works, integrated in part by Hegel’s critical, moderately holistic theory of semantic meaning and reference. Highlighting these features of Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature illuminates Hegel’s emergentist account of structural and functional organization of various kinds of natural phenomena. (shrink)

In some articles published over the past fifteen years, I have tried to show that the scientific arguments that have been made against there ever having been merely two human beings do not require a revision of the Catholic doctrine of the monogenetic origin of the human race. In a recent issue of Forum Philosophicum, Fr. Michał Chaberek says that my argument fails. Here is my reply.

Jerry Fodor's Asymmetric Dependency Theory (ADT) of meaning is discussed in the context of his attempt to avoid holism and the relativism it entails. Questions are raised about the implications of the theory for psychological theories of meaning, and brief suggestions are offered for how to more closely link a theory of meaning to a theory of perception.

Kant’s ‘Refutation of Idealism’ plainly has an anti-Cartesian conclusion: ‘inner experience in general is only possible through outer experience in general’ (B278). Due to wide-spread preoccupation with Cartesian skepticism, and to the anti-naturalism of early analytic philosophy, most of Kant’s recent commentators have sought to find a purely conceptual, ‘analytic’ argument in Kant’s Refutation of Idealism – and then have dismissed Kant when no such plausible argument can be reconstructed from his text. Kant’s argument supposedly cannot eliminate all relevant alternatives, (...) and so cannot justify its strong modal claims. Kant based his arguments on an inventory of our basic cognitive capacities to employ our forms of intuition and our forms of judgment. Kant provides a variety of considerations and arguments to determine what our cognitive capacities are. This involves ‘transcendental reflection’, which Kant held is absolutely crucial for judging matters a priori (A263/B319). I argue that there is a level of philosophical reflection on our own cognitive capabilities and their preconditions that is significantly richer than has been noticed by recent commentators, and that is a precondition of Kant’s transcendental reflection proper. I explicate certain thought experiments Kant proposes in order for us to recognize some our basic, characteristic cognitive capabilities, and the limits and requirements they entail for the nature and objects of human knowledge. These thought experiments involve a kind of reflection on who we as cognizant subjects are, on what our basic cognitive capabilities are. Engaging in this kind of reflection reveals that Kant’s transcendental arguments are significantly stronger and more persuasive than has been recognized in recent commentary. (shrink)