What is it for a group to believe something? A summative account assumes that for a group to believe that p most members of the group must believe that p. Accounts of this type are commonly proposed in interpretation of everyday ascriptions of beliefs to groups. I argue that a nonsummative account corresponds better to our unexamined understanding of such ascriptions. In particular I propose what I refer to as the joint acceptance model of group belief. I argue that group (...) beliefs according to the joint acceptance model are important phenomena whose aetiology and development require investigation. There is an analogous phenomenon of social or group preference, which social choice theory tends to ignore. (shrink)

In recent years, the free market position has been gaining strength. In this book, Radin provides a nuanced response to its sweeping generalization.

This paper introduces the author's approach to everyday ascriptions of collective cognitive states as in such statements as we believe he is lying. Collective epistemology deals with these ascriptions attempting to understand them and the phenomena in question.

Fifteen original essays open up a novel area of inquiry: the distinctively ethical dimensions of women's experiences of and in aging. Contributors distinguished in the fields of feminist ethics and the ethics of aging explore assumptions, experiences, practices, and public policies that affect women's well-being and dignity in later life. The book brings to the study of women's aging a reflective dimension missing from the empirical work that has predominated to date. Ethical studies of aging have so far failed to (...) emphasize gender. And feminist ethics has neglected older women, even when emphasizing other dimensions of 'difference.' Finally work on aging in all fields has focused on the elderly, while this volume sees aging as an extended process of negotiating personal and social change. (shrink)

Moral virtue is, for Aristotle, a state to which an agent’s motivation is central. For anyone interested in Aristotle’s account of moral development this invites reflection on two questions: how is it that virtuous motivational dispositions are established? And what contribution do the moral learner’s existing motivational states make to the success of her habituation? I argue that views which demand that the learner act with virtuous motives if she is to acquire virtuous dispositions misconstrue the nature and structure of (...) the habituation process, but also obscure Aristotle’s crucial insight that the very practice of virtuous actions affords a certain discovery and can be transformative of an agent’s motivational states. Drawing attention, in Aristotle’s account, to an asymmetry between the agential perspective and the observation of others, I consider what the agential perspective affords the learner, and offer a novel interpretation of the role a learner’s existing motives play in her habituation. (shrink)

A feature of David Lewis's account of conventions in his book "Convention" which has received admiring notices from philosophers is his use of the mathematical theory of games. In this paper I point out a number of serious flaws in Lewis's use of game theory. Lewis's basic claim is that conventions cover 'coordination problems'. I show that game-Theoretical analysis tends to establish that coordination problems in Lewis's sense need not underlie conventions.

Through the use of particular pedagogies and the adoption of new modes of thinking, physical literacy promises more realistic models of physical competence and ...

Tomasello argues in the target article that a sense of moral obligation emerges from the creation of a collaborative “we” motivating us to fulfill our cooperative duties. We suggest that “we” takes many forms, entailing different obligations, depending on the type of the relationship in question. We sketch a framework of such types, functions, and obligations to guide future research in our commentary.

In Culture and Agency, I distinguished between the ‘Cultural System', namely all items logged into the universal cultural archive, and ‘Socio-Cultural' interaction, na...

Seventeenth century philosophers were pre-occupied with the justification for the use of coercion; the nature and scope of the citizen's duty to obey the law was a central concern. The typical philosophical accounts which attempt to articulate the conditions under which a citizen has an obligation to obey the law tend to fall into two camps: those that ground the obligation to obey the law in consent, and those that ground it in benefits received, or possibly a combination of both. (...) More recently, however, some have argued that questions about the obligation to obey the law have been eclipsed by questions about distributive justice. Many leading figures in modern analytic jurisprudence remain concerned with the nature of political obligation. Joseph Raz is a current-day theorist who has recognized the importance of this issue and the need for an answer that is not over-simplistic. Recently Raz has re-examined his account in ?The Problem of Authority: Revisiting the Service Conception, - making an exploration of his theory particularly timely. Raz argues that all governments claim morally legitimate authority, but not all of them actually possess it. His theory seeks to give us the tools by which to distinguish the legitimate claims from imposters. The complexity and flexibility of Raz's understanding of the nature and scope of the individual's obligation to obey the law accounts for its appeal. Upon closer inspection, however, difficulties emerge. I argue that Raz's theory is plagued by a deep-seated tension between his two central theses: the pre-emption thesis and the normal justification thesis. While I explore both theses in further depth, the gist of the pre-emption thesis is that it requires a pre-commitment to authority in order for the law?s mediating role to be performed. Conversely, the normal justification thesis invites a case by case assessment of the bindingness of norms. I argue that instead of offering us a unified conception of authority, Raz vacillates unstably between two models - a consent-based model and a benefits received model. I demonstrate that this tension is ineradicable because the theses are connected to divergent models of law and incompatible methodologies. (shrink)

The Cambridge Analytica–Facebook scandal led to widespread concern over the methods deployed by Cambridge Analytica to target voters through psychographic profiling algorithms, built upon Facebook user data. The scandal ultimately led to a record-breaking $5 billion penalty imposed upon Facebook by the Federal Trade Commission in July 2019. The FTC action, however, has been criticized as failing to adequately address the privacy and other harms emanating from Facebook’s release of approximately 87 million Facebook users’ data, which was exploited without user (...) authorization. This Essay summarizes the FTC’s response to the Cambridge Analytica–Facebook scandal. It concludes that the scandal focuses attention on the need to explore the potential for embedding due process-type inquiries and protections within the enforcement actions by regulatory agencies such as the FTC. These protections are increasingly important in addressing the problem of “black boxing the voter” that is now presented by data- and algorithmic-driven companies such as Cambridge Analytica and Facebook. (shrink)

Fostering early literacy depends in part on engaging and inspiring children’s early interest in reading. Enriching the causal content of children’s books may be one way to do so, as causal information has been empirically shown to capture children’s attention. To more directly test whether children’s book preferences might be driven by causal content, we created pairs of expository books closely matched for content and complexity, but with differing amounts of causal information embedded therein. Three and 4 years old participants (...) ( n = 48) were read both books and their interests and preferences were evaluated. When asked to choose, children preferred the highly causal over the minimally causal books. Results are discussed in terms of broader implications for creating books that optimally engage young children, as well as guiding book selections parents and educators make in their endeavors to promote interest in reading and early literacy. (shrink)

Economists study "The Economy," or so one might suppose. Yet this overarching entity is strikingly absent from mainstream theory. Since the 1950s, it has generally been described with a few mathematical propositions and not given a description that attends to institutions, power relations, or the emergent properties that form the leading indicators in macroeconomic theory. There is thus a significant divergence between folk economics and scientific economics on this theoretical entity. This article briefly addresses the history of this concept, noting (...) its heyday in the interwar years, and brings to bear some of the analytical apparatus on institutional facts devised by John Searle. Whatever is meant by "The Economy" in folk economics appears to be significantly divergent from what is posited in scientific economics. Key Words: economy • Searle • theoretical entities • macroeconomics • economic indicators • folk economics. (shrink)

Economies - and the government institutions that support them - reflect a moral and political choice, a choice we can make and remake. Since the dawn of industrialization and democratization in the late eighteenth century, there has been a succession of political economic frameworks, reflecting changes in technology, knowledge, trade, global connections, political power, and the expansion of citizenship. The challenges of today reveal the need for a new moral political economy that recognizes the politics in political economy. It also (...) requires the redesign of our social, economic, and governing institutions based on assumptions about humans as social beings rather than narrow self-serving individualists. This Element makes some progress toward building a new moral political economy by offering both a theory of change and some principles for institutional design. (shrink)

The parasol, whatever the conditions of use, ultimately functions as a social symbol as it satisfies no utilitarian need. The operative mechanism of that symbol varies from culture to culture but the parasol is polysemous even at its least complicated, when held by the person to be protected without allusion to foreign social systems and in the context of single-sex usage. For example, as an implement of fashionable feminine attire of over a century ago, the parasol signified the maintenance of (...) a standard of beauty that precluded extended activities out of doors and the delicate constitution of the lady thus protected, both with further implications of ‘good breeding’ and economic inutility; and the wasteful employment of items that must be changed with the costume and discarded before unserviceable to suit the dictates of fashion. Both facets—termed ‘conspicuous leisure’ and ‘conspicuous consumption’ by Veblen—conjointly served to advertise the wealth of the individual man on the basis of whose property such extravagance and non-productive practice could be sustained. (shrink)

The current debate over Aristotle's commitment to prime matter is centered on diachronic considerations found in his theory of substantial change. I argue that an appeal to this theory is not required in order to establish his commitment to the existence of prime matter. By drawing on Physics II.1's conception of what it is for an element to have a nature - that is, to have an inner source of movement and rest - I introduce a synchronic justification for the (...) existence of prime matter. By trading on the relationship between the thing that has a source of change and the source it has , I show that something that has a source in itself cannot be identical with its source, and that a type of matter that has no nature of its own (a kind of prime matter) is required to block this identification at the level of the elements. (shrink)

Dating from her years as a philosophy student at the Sorbonne, this is the 1926-27 diary of the teenager who would become the famous French philosopher, author, and feminist, Simone de Beauvoir. Written years before her first meeting with Jean-Paul Sartre, these diaries reveal previously unknown details about her life and offer critical insights into her early philosophy and literary works. Presented here for the first time in translation and fully annotated, the diary is completed by essays from Barbara Klaw (...) and Margaret A. Simons that address its philosophical, historical, and literary significance. The volume represents an invaluable resource for tracing the development of Beauvoir’s independent thinking and influence on the world. (shrink)

Political difficulties and adverse working conditions during the Restoration period obliged many French scientists and technologists to seek employment elsewhere. Lamé and Clapeyron made the most of their years of exile, and in this paper their contribution to the development of Russian engineering is studied, together with their work for the future of French industry. Their scientific and technological research is also considered. Archival sources throw new light on the significance of their ten years in Russia.

This article examines different conceptions of causation and their implications for understanding educational phenomena and conducting educational research. Specifically, I discuss four research designs for pursuing questions about causation in education. Two of these research designs take a variance approach to causation , while the other two take a process approach . The point of the discussion is to illustrate, first, their respective strengths and, second, their necessary interdependence. Ultimately, I argue that just as both hammers and saws are needed (...) to build a good house, both variance and process approaches are needed to build a good understanding of causation in education. (shrink)

Contemporary economists deem virtually every piece of reasoning and argumentation in economics a model, forgetting that there may well be other conceptual tools at hand. This article demonstrates that David Hume used thought experiments to make some remarkable breakthroughs in monetary economics, and that this resolves a longstanding debate about an apparent inconsistency in Hume, between the neutrality and non-neutrality of money. In the actual world, money is never neutral for Hume; only in thought experiments does a sudden growth in (...) the money stock result in an identical and hence neutral increase in the price level. Thought experiments isolate tendencies but do not lend themselves to direct confirmation. Moreover, Hume’s dislike for the French model builders, Melon and Quesnay, captures an important juncture in mid eighteenth-century economic discourse regarding the warranted level of abstraction and of idealization. (shrink)

scholars often use letter correspondences to uncover missing historical information. For example, while searching for the influential but unacknowledged women in the history of pragmatism, Charlene Haddock Seigfried discovered John Dewey’s letters to Elsie Ripley Clapp. Using these letters, Seigfried defended Clapp’s name as an early pragmatist. Similarly, Joan Smith cited Dewey’s letter to John T. McManis to show that Ella Flagg Young likewise influenced Dewey’s work. More recently, Eduardo Mendieta has defended a different approach to letters, and argues that (...) we should take the letters, diaries, and notebooks of certain philosophers more seriously—not just for the historical or... (shrink)

This article is currently available as a free download on ingentaconnect.

In his paper on the “Methodology of Positive Economics”, Milton Friedman warned his readers that, “more than other scientists, social scientists need to be self-conscious about their methodology.” (1953, p. 34). But until quite recently, he seems either to have spoken to deaf ears or, more plausibly, to have been so successful in promoting his own views on methodology as to lead economists to be complacent about the many problems which plague their discipline. Many current textbooks, for example the one (...) by Eugene Silberberg, present economics as a science attaining the falsificationist standards once set down by Karl Popper, despite much evidence to the contrary. Indeed, as Douglas W. Hands (1985) has recently shown, even Sir Karl did not intend economics to be subjected to such severe standards. (shrink)

History is useful when it is used properly: to understand why we and those we must deal with think and react in certain ways. It can offer examples to inform our decisions and guesses about the consequences of our actions. But we should be wary of looking to history for dogmatic lessons.We should distrust those who abuse history when they call on it to justify unreasonable claims to land, for example, or restitution. MacMillan illustrates how dangerous history can be in (...) the hands of nationalistic or religious or ethnic leaders who use it to foster a sense of grievance and a desire for revenge. (shrink)

We have a complicated, sometimes contradictory, perception of the use of political violence. This article discusses the possible legitimacy of a particular kind, referred to as “resistance violence,” or violence carried out by vulnerable targeted social groups. After providing distinctions regarding who, when, and why resistance violence happens, this article considers two examples that highlight different factors. By considering the work of various philosophers including Locke, Arendt, Fanon, and Fricker, this article proposes two theses: first, that epistemic contextualization requires that (...) the legitimacy of resistance violence always be evaluated with the understanding that vulnerable social groups often reside outside the parameters of legal/criminal/judicial protection. And, second, that resistance violence is a politically legitimate option and need not promise practical success to be worth pursuing due to the fact that resistance actors often see violence as establishing their dignity and humanity. (shrink)

St. Augustine, pictured by Western painters holding in his hand his heart blazing with passionate love, consistently and repeatedly insisted―from his earliest writings until close to his death―that the essential characteristic of God is “God is love” (1 John 4:16). Yet he also insisted on the doctrines of original sin and everlasting punishment for the massa damnata. This article will not explore the rationale or semantics of his arguments, nor the detail and nuance of the doctrines of predestination and perseverance. (...) Rather, I seek to understand, from Augustine’s last writings, how he reconciled his strong conviction that God is love with doctrines requiring belief in a God who determined the fate of individuals to eternal reward or punishment “before the foundation of the world” (Eph. 1:4), a God indifferent to individuals’ actions, struggles, or longings. My primary interest is not on Augustine’s ability to render these two apparently opposing ideas of God intellectually compatible, but rather on his feeling, gathered from his last sermons, as he approached death. In brief, how could Augustine love the God in whom he believed? (shrink)