This paper contains an overview of the essays contained in the Mind and morals anthology plus a critical discussion of certain themes raised in many of these essays concerning the bearing of recent work in cognitive science on the traditional project of moral theory. Specifically, I argue for the following claims: (1) authors like Virginia Held, who appear to be antagonistic toward the methodological naturalism of Owen Flanagan, Andy Clark, Paul Churchland, and others, are really in fundamental agreement with the (...) naturalists (at least once the naturalist view is suitably clarified); (2) the prototype theory of moral concepts that is inspired by recent work in cognitive science does not necessarily jeopardize the aim of systematization characteristic of traditional moral theory; (3) nor does it threaten certain widely accepted views about moral rationality that is part of traditional moral theorizing. Moreover, I speculate that (4) recent work in cognitive science can be expected to play a corroborative role in the justification of theories in ethics, but we should probably not expect this work to yield new insights and directions in ethics. Finally, (5) Fodor's recent critique of cognitive science makes clear the perils of methodological ethical naturalism. (shrink)

On Three Appearances of Difference in Mathematics. This article proposes to examine three types of relations between man and equality, as they are embodied in the relation to the minimal condition of the mathematical: the sentence of identity: I=I. Starting our examination from the current common conception of science and mechanism, we aim to reveal that behind the dominating logic of identity there are two other systems of logic, which have arisen during the history of humanity and that of mathematics. (...) Following Serres, the first one might be revealed during the passage from the Babylonian mathematics to the interaction between Thales and the Greek gnomon. The Babylonian epoch marks an era, in which the logic of sameness operates; logic which offers a place for the mathematician. This era is followed by a science, working under the second logic: the logic of identity, which consecrates an axiomatic definition‐based approach, at the expense of the human being. The third logic looms after the discovery of Gödel's incompleteness theorems: that an undecidable statement can be derived within every arithmetical system. Under this logic, the roles of man and the allegedly mathematical automatic machine become even more intertwined: the newly found logic promises instability not only for man, but also for the machinic‐mathematics. (shrink)

Should we implement epistemically paternalistic measures outside of the narrow range of cases, like legal trials, in which their benefits and justifiability seem clear-cut? In this chapter I draw on theories of student-led pedagogy, and Jane Friedman’s work on norms of inquiry, to argue against this prospect. The key contention in the chapter is that facts about an inquirer’s interests and temperament have a bearing on whether it is better for her to, at any given moment, pursue epistemic goods (...) via outward-facing evidence-acquisition, or in a more introspective, ratiocinative fashion. This makes problems for any non-consultative approach to assisting people in inquiry, and speaks in favor of approaches which, as with student-led pedagogy, aim to ‘tap into’ the inquirer’s interests and temperament in helping them to learn. (shrink)

The paper is an examination of Michael Friedman’s analysis of the conceptual structure of Einstein’s theory of gravitation, with a particular focus on a number of critical reactions to it. Friedman argues that conceptual frameworks in physics are stratified, and that a satisfactory analysis of a framework requires us to recognize the differences in epistemological character of its components. He distinguishes first-level principles that define a framework of empirical investigation from second-level principles that are formulable in that framework. (...) On his account, the theory of Riemannian manifolds and the equivalence principle define the framework of empirical investigation in which Einstein’s field equations are an intellectual and empirical possibility. Friedman is a major interpreter of relativity and his view has provoked a number of critical reactions, nearly all of which miss the mark. I aim to free Friedman’s analysis of Einsteinian gravitation from a baggage of misconceptions and to defend the notion that physical theories are stratified. But I, too, am a critic and I criticize Friedman’s view on several counts, notably his account of a constitutive principle and that of the principle of equivalence. (shrink)

I reply to Mark Friedman's response to my review of his book, 'Nozick's Libertarian Project.' I restate what I take to be the key mistakes in Friedman’s arguments for individual rights and the minimal state. I outline the explanation of the right to freedom in terms of the human capacity for critical rationality, and the explanation of the poliitcial authority of the state in rule-consequentialist terms which do not appeal to consent.

New scholarship paves the way for Earth-loving spirituality grounded in the ancientChristian image of God as an avian life form.

Today the wood thrush returned to the Crum Woods. I have been waiting for this event for months. I moved to a house in the woods three years ago, and at that time I heard a strange and wonderful bird call in the forest. The song of the wood thrush is a melody unlike anything I had ever heard. Liquid, flute-like, perfectly pitched—the thrush vocalizes a kind of duet with itself in which it simultaneously produces two independent musical notes that (...) reverberate with one another. I have read that Tibetan monks can also sing two notes at the same time, a baseline and a melody line in contrapuntal balance, so now I think of the wood thrush as the singing monk of the forest.1In the spring and summer I wake up, and often .. (shrink)

The author proposes that the Spirit goes well beyond the conventional Christian understanding of the force that unites the Father and Son in the Trinity, and presents a new model of the Spirit, one that is based on the earth and is a natural force that heals the violence humans have done to nature and to one another, and forges unity among enemies and brings opposites together, overcoming the differences that define personal and community life. Original.

Suppose that John has a moral obligation to stop smoking given that smoking is dangerous to his health. Suppose further that smoking is dangerous to his health. Does it follow that John has a moral obligation to stop smoking? Although intuition inclines one to answer in the affirmative, recent developments in deontic logic apparently call this inference into question. The issue at hand is whether unconditional obligations are detachable from conditional obligations on the basis of purely factual considerations. I believe (...) that they are not. In the course of arguing for this position I defend a novel restricted rule of detachment which is constructed out of both factual and normative components. (shrink)

During the years 1814–1819, William Higgins, an Irish chemist who worked at the Dublin Society, claimed he had anticipated John Dalton in developing the atomic theory and insinuated that Dalton was a plagiarist. This essay focuses not on William Higgins, but on his uncle Bryan Higgins, a well-known chemist of his day, who had developed his own theories of caloric and chemical combination, similar in many respects to that of Dalton. New evidence is first introduced addressing Bryan's disappearance from the (...) scientific community after 1803. In his later years, Bryan apparently suffered from a condition resulting in a decline in his mental health, which explains why he never lodged any priority claims of his own against Dalton, or defended those of his nephew. Dalton's mention of Bryan's name in Part II ofA New System of Chemical Philosophy, his laboratory notebook entries, and a fresh look at his correspondence with chemist Thomas Charles Hope indicate that Dalton adopted a Higgins-like caloric model in 1803. Together these factors provide evidence to support the argument that Dalton learned of Bryan's theories via a meeting he had with William Allen on 10 July 1803. Existing evidence related to the origin of the atomic theory is worthy of re-examination in light of Dalton's possible prior knowledge of Bryan's work. (shrink)

In an expansion of the fine-tuning argument, Michael Denton argues that every aspect of the universe is ideally suited for the production and maintenance of familiar and anthropomorphic forms of life. He further argues that the ideal nature of these aspects is extremely improbable unless one postulates a designer who tooled them for the express purpose of producing familiar and anthropomorphic life. I point out shortcomings in Denton’s line of argument, focusing in particular on the premise that the ideal nature (...) of the aspects in question is improbable absent a designer. (shrink)

We give anecdotal accounts from our own experience of scientific theories which have been generally accepted as the ruling opinion long after sufficient evidence has been collected for their disproof. This has led us to the opinion that the normal scientific process, of working hypothesis followed by experimental test aimed at disproof, is being replaced by the ruling opinion followed by experiment aimed at confirmation. The apparently widespread adoption of this procedure may be postulated to arise in part from the (...) need for workers entering a new field of study to obtain grants and to get their results published. (shrink)

Voluntary Consensus Standards are commerce-related documents developed by interested volunteers under due-process procedures which ensure that the concerns of all parties are fairly taken into account. Standards are beneficial to society because they promote commerce and lower the costs of and barriers to doing business. Because of this, conformance to a standard can confer significant competitive advantage.Vigorous, democratic competition between ideas leads to a high- quality standard. Some participants in the standards-development process will, against the general interest, attempt to skew (...) a standard to favor a specific product, service, or practice. In order prevent this sort of abuse, rules are written to prevent any common-interest block from overwhelming the general interest. Unfettered debate is fostered by having no rules defining volunteer-member misconduct, eliminating any possibility that a majority will improperly use such rules to silence a minority. This unfortunately permits the rare but not-hypothetical situation where those unscrupulous and determined, or those out of control, are able to engage in obstructionism and misconduct without any possibility of penalty. (shrink)

Refiguring the Sacred offers perspectives on Ricoeur's life-long reflections about religion. This collection includes two essays by Ricoeur and new interpretations of some of his most significant writings by several noted Ricoeur scholars.

Jan Narveson criticizes the view expressed in my Libertarian Philosophy in the Real World that there is no orthodox libertarian position on the ethics of abortion. He asserts that fetuses lack the defining characteristics of personhood, and thus are ineligible for what he terms “intrinsic” rights under his, and presumably any other, plausible libertarian theory. My counterargument is threefold: Narveson’s contractarianism can be interpreted in a way that is consistent with the pro-life perspective; because his theory permits no principled distinction (...) between the moral status of third trimester fetuses and newborns, the contrary reading of his social contract produces a result that is implausible and even repellent; and even if his version of contractarianism does imply a unique, aggressively pro-choice stance on abortion, there are competing libertarian theories that are receptive to pro-life views. (shrink)

What is the relationship between conceptual engineering and metasemantic externalism? Sally Haslanger has argued that metasemantic externalism justifies the seemingly counterintuitive consequences of her proposed conceptual revisions. But according to Herman Cappelen, metasemantic externalism makes conceptual engineering effectively impossible in practice. After raising objections to Haslanger’s and Cappelen’s views, I argue for a very different picture, on which metasemantic externalism bears very little on conceptual engineering. I argue that, while metasemantic externalism principally operates at the level of semantic-meaning, we should (...) understand conceptual engineering to operate largely at the level of speaker-meaning. This ‘Speaker-Meaning Picture’ has two key benefits. Firstly, it makes conceptual engineering often easy in practice. Secondly, it suggests a new, normative response to the well known objection that conceptual engineering serves only to change the subject. (shrink)

Mark Blaug and I agree that if there is a realist interpretation of economic behavior to be discerned in Friedman, it is to be found not in Friedman's belief that the profit motive overrides other possible motives, but in his belief that a selection mechanism is working in competitive markets. Our joint sympathy for evolutionary economics is largely based on a conviction that the conception of competition as a dynamic evolutionary process is rather plausible. We disagree, however, (...) on two issues: first, how important the evolutionary conception was for Friedman's overall argument; and, second, whether we can learn something about the real world from rigorous formal analytical models. In this article, I explain and argue for my position on these two issues, and use Nelson and Winter's theory of evolutionary economics to support an illustrate my argument. (shrink)

Beliefs are concrete particulars containing ideas of properties and notions of things, which also are concrete. The claim made in a belief report is that the agent has a belief (i) whose content is a specific singular proposition, and (ii) which involves certain of the agent's notions and ideas in a certain way. No words in the report stand for the notions and ideas, so they are unarticulated constituents of the report's content (like the relevant place in "it's raining"). The (...) belief puzzles (Hesperus, Cicero, Pierre) involve reports about two different notions. So the analysis gets the puzzling truth values right. (shrink)

A while ago I pulled the short straw, and became chair of my department. One nice part of the job is to praise people I work with, which I can do sincerely because they are very praiseworthy. I also have to read a lot of praise by others; the familiar things—project evaluations, letters of recommendation, promotion dossiers, and so on and so forth. As a result, I have learnt to attend to praise a little more closely.

In the course of theorising, it can be appropriate to replace one concept—a folk concept, or one drawn from an earlier stage of theorising—with a more precise counterpart. The best-known account of concept replacement is Rudolf Carnap’s ‘explication’. P.F. Strawson famously critiqued explication as a method in philosophy. As the critique is standardly construed, it amounts to the objection that explication is ‘irrelevant’, fails to be ‘illuminating’, or simply ‘changes the subject’. In this paper, I argue that this is an (...) unfair characterisation of Strawson’s critique, spelling out the critique in more detail and showing that, fully understood, it is not undermined by extant responses. In light of both the critique and extant responses, I close by making some substantive comments about what explication can, and cannot, be used to do in philosophy. (shrink)

Moral theories usually aspire to be explanatory – to tell us why something is wrong, why it is good, or why you ought to do it. So it is worth knowing how moral explanations differ, if they do, from explanations of other things. This paper uncovers a common unarticulated theory about how normative explanations must work – that they must follow what I call the Standard Model. Though the Standard Model Theory has many implications, in this paper I focus primarily (...) on only one. It plays a crucial role in an argument originally due to Cudworth that has been widely held to conclusively establish that voluntaristic ethical theories are incoherent. But if Cudworth’s argument works, then so would similar arguments against many other moral theories. All of these theories therefore need a different model for how normative explanations can work. So I also motivate and sketch one such alternative model. The result enables us to make progress in evaluating the prospects for a successful reductive view about the normative. (shrink)

Many concepts are inadequate for serious inquiry, so theorists often seek to engineer new concepts. The method of explication, which involves replacing concepts with more fruitful alternatives, is a model of this process. In this paper, I develop an account of fruitfulness, the Relevant-Goals Account of Fruitfulness. The account is in the spirit of extant proposals, but develops and extends them in important ways. In particular, while it applies to explications in general, the account allows us to derive substantive details (...) for specific explications. This is achieved through a supplementary view, Contextualism, that specifies which theoretical goals are relevant in any given case. I close by discussing how the Relevant-Goals Account fits into the dynamic nature of inquiry. (shrink)

In this chapter I review empirical studies directly testing the hypotheses of my 1973 paper "The Strength of Weak Ties" (hereafter "SWT") and work that elaborates those hypotheses theoretically or uses them to suggest new empirical research not discussed in my original formulation. Along the way, I will reconsider various aspects of the theoretical argument, attempt to plug some holes, and broaden its base.

The study examines employee, managerial, and ethics officer perceptions regarding their companies codes of ethics. The study moves beyond examining the mere existence of a code of ethics to consider the role that code content and code process (i.e. creation, implementation, and administration) might play with respect to the effectiveness of codes in influencing behavior. Fifty-seven in-depth, semi-structured interviews of employees, managers, and ethics officers were conducted at four large Canadian companies. The factors viewed by respondents to be important with (...) respect to code effectiveness include: provisions of examples; readability; tone; relevance; realism; senior management support; training; reinforcement; living up to standards; reporting requirement; anonymous phone line; communicating violations; and enforcement. The factors found to be potentially important include: justification for provisions; employee involvement; and sign-off requirements. Factors found not to be important include: objectives for the code; prior distribution; testing; and relating ones performance review to compliance with the code. (shrink)

Shepherd and Justus argue that experimental philosophy has an important role to play in the method of Carnapian explication, facilitating the preparatory stage during which the concept to be explicated is clarified. I raise concerns about their specific proposal, before sketching an alternative. In particular, I suggest that experimental philosophy can directly aid the construction of fruitful concepts. This provides a clear practical role for experimental philosophy, both within the sciences and theoretical inquiry more generally. In this respect, experimental philosophy (...) may rightly be construed as one aspect of applied philosophy. (shrink)

In this paper I defend the view that knowledge is belief for reasons that are both objectively and subjectively sufficient from an important objection due to Daniel Whiting, in this journal. Whiting argues that this view fails to deal adequately with a familiar sort of counterexample to analyses of knowledge, fake barn cases. I accept Whiting’s conclusion that my earlier paper offered an inadequate treatment of fake barn cases, but defend a new account of basic perceptual reasons that is consistent (...) with the account of knowledge and successfully deals with fake barns. (shrink)

Virtues are dispositions that make their bearers admirable. Dispositions can be studied scientifically by systematically varying whether their alleged bearers are in (or take themselves to be in) the dispositions' eliciting conditions. In recent decades, empirically-minded philosophers looked to social and personality psychology to study the extent to which ordinary humans embody dispositions traditionally considered admirable in the Aristotelian tradition. This led some to conclude that virtues are not attainable ideals, and that we should focus our ethical reflection and efforts (...) more on jerry-rigging our environments than on improving our characters. Most virtue ethicists resisted this reorientation. However, much of the scientific evidence on which the controversy was based has failed to replicate, raising the question of how much faith we should place in methodologically suspect studies. In this paper, I assess the state of the debate and recommend best practices for a renewed interdisciplinary investigation of virtues and vices in which philosophical expertise related to conceptualization and theorizing is essentially intertwined with scientific expertise related to operationalization, measurement, and statistics. (shrink)

Scenarios involving the introduction of artificially intelligent (AI) assistive technologies in health care practices raise several ethical issues. In this paper, I discuss four objections to introducing AI assistive technologies in health care practices as replacements of human care. I analyse them as demands for felt care, good care, private care, and real care. I argue that although these objections cannot stand as good reasons for a general and a priori rejection of AI assistive technologies as such or as replacements (...) of human care, they demand us to clarify what is at stake, to develop more comprehensive criteria for good care, and to rethink existing practices of care. In response to these challenges, I propose a (modified) capabilities approach to care and emphasize the inherent social dimension of care. I also discuss the demand for real care by introducing the ‘Care Experience Machine’ thought experiment. I conclude that if we set the standards of care too high when evaluating the introduction of AI assistive technologies in health care, we have to reject many of our existing, low-tech health care practices. (shrink)

This paper considers the connection between the three-place relation, R is a reason for X to do A and the two-place relation, R is a reason to do A. I consider three views on which the former is to be analyzed in terms of the latter. I argue that these views are widely held, and explain the role that they play in motivating interesting substantive ethical theories. But I reject them in favor of a more obvious analysis, which goes the (...) other way around. (shrink)

In this article I develop a model of theoretical understanding in science. This is a philosophical theory that specifies the conditions that are both necessary and sufficient for a scientist to satisfy the construction ‘S understands theory T ’. I first consider how this construction is preferable to others, then build a model of the requisite conditions on the basis of examples from elementary physics. I then show how this model of theoretical understanding can be made philosophically robust and provide (...) a more sophisticated account than we see from models of a similar kind developed by those working in the psychology of physics and artificial intelligence. 1 Introduction2 The Explicandum/Analysandum3 Analysis of ‘S understands T’ 4 The Inferential Model4.1 Which problems are we talking about?4.2 Does the solution have to be true?4.3 Does each cycle have to be correct for S to understand T?4.4 What is problem-solving reliability?4.5 Does every specific inference of a cycle have to be correct?4.6 Does each inference have to use a principle that is part of the theory?5 Theoretical Understanding and Conceptual Expertise: Empirical Considerations6 Conclusion: Inferential Model of Scientific Understanding and Our Traditional Problems. (shrink)

Philosophers have tended to construe friendship as an intimate relationship involving mutual love, and have focused their discussions on this ‘true’ form of friendship. However, everyone recognizes that we use the word ‘friend’ and its cognates to refer, non-ironically, to those with whom we share various relationships that are not terribly intimate or which do not involve mutual love. I argue that there exists no general reason to restrict our philosophical focus to ‘true’ friendships, and allege that we can gain (...) important insights if we broaden our perspective to include lesser friends. I contend that friendships, in the broad sense (encompassing both ‘true’ and lesser forms), are necessarily relationships that are the product of significant collaborative norm manipulation. And I argue that understanding friendship in this way helps explain important features, including the difference between friendships and familiar relations, the non-fungibility of friends, and why friendships are often in flux. (shrink)

I present an internal problem for David Lewis’s genuine modal realism. My aim is to show that his analysis of modality is inconsistent with his metaphysics. I consider several ways of modifying the Lewisian analysis of modality, but argue that none are successful. I argue that the problem also affects theories related to genuine modal realism, including the stage theory of persistence and modal fictionalism.