In this review essay, Barbara Applebaum uses white complicity as a framework for discussing three books: Mica Pollock’s Colormute: Race Talk Dilemmas in an American School, Debra Van Ausdale and Joe R. Feagin’s The First R: How Children Learn Race and Racist, and Virginia Lea and Judy Helfand’s Identifying Race and Transforming Whiteness in the Classroom. She explains the notion of white complicity and discusses some of the deep philosophical questions involving moral responsibility and agency that arise when (...) one acknowledges white complicity. In particular, she examines the question of whether complicity is best described as grounded in individual intention or as an outcome of collective action, as well as whether “complicity” as a word displaces the strong sense of harm implied by the term “racist.” Finally, Applebaum explores how some of these philosophical questions crisscross through the discussions highlighted in the three books. (shrink)

Linked by the connection of feminism, sociology, and cultural studies, Changing Cultures assesses feminist theory, its transformations, and its ability to highlight issues and practices. This controversial yet stimulating volume explores the complex relationship between these three subjects, conceptual approaches, their political implications and their historical context. Nava analyzes utopianism of feminist thought on the family; sexuality and sexual differences in youth service provision; and the symbolic resonance of the urban and domestic education of girls. She also investigates the relationship (...) of child sexual abuse to problems of interpretation and the politics of media representation, and different theories of consumerism and advertising and their implications for our understanding of youth and identity. Controversial yet accessible, Changing Cultures will attract a wide range of readers, from women's studies to interpersonal violence, youth/adolescent studies to cultural studies. "This is a lively and stimulating collection, a series of essays which spans the recent history of feminism and cultural studies and which draws together the pleasures and the pain of these encounters with clarity and theoretical fluency." --Angela McRobbie, Thames Valley University "This is a collection of previously published articles which were well worth gathering together, and which I'm pleased to have on my bookshelf." --Chartist "The essays are interesting, provocative, and theoretical in nature. . . . Excellent references are given throughout. If seeking a political, historical, and theoretical evaluation of the topics discussed, one can find a brief summary and excellent references. . . . [The book] provides food for thought and intellectual stimulation." --Journal of Consumer Affairs. (shrink)

Pollock describes an exciting theory of rationality and its partial implementation in OSCAR, a computer system whose descendants will literally be persons.

In this book Pollock deals with the subject of probabilistic reasoning, making general philosophical sense of objective probabilities and exploring their ...

This new edition of the classic Contemporary Theories of Knowledge has been significantly updated to include analyses of the recent literature in epistemology.

In the flurry of recent exchanges between defenders of moral encroachment and their critics, some of the finer details of particular encroachment accounts have only begun to receive critical attention. This is especially true concerning accounts of the putative wrong-making features of the beliefs to which defenders of moral encroachment draw our attention. Here I attempt to help move this part of the discussion forward by critically engaging two leading accounts. These come from Mark Schroeder and Rima Basu, respectively. The (...) problem of explaining how the beliefs at issue have a morally significant impact on the people they are about will turn out to be difficult. However, this shouldn’t be taken to mean that the beliefs have no such significance. In any case, as I hope to show, there are resources available to the evidentialist for acknowledging that the beliefs at issue affect those they are about in morally relevant ways—indeed, that they harm the person in a way that results in a demand on even the most impeccably rational believer. This is not the demand that she abandon her belief, however. It is instead a demand for a substantial form of regret in relation to the belief, a doxastic analogue to Bernard Williams’ “agent-regret”. An evidentialism with space for this notion of regret shows promise for withstanding the moral encroachment challenge. (shrink)

In this paper I present an in-class game designed to simulate the dynamics of the state of nature. I first explain the mechanics of the game, and how to administer it in the classroom. Then I address how the game can help introduce students to a number of important topics in political philosophy. In broad terms, the game serves to generate discussion regarding to main questions. (1) How does civil society come about? (2) Is the state of nature and the (...) arrangement which arises from it fair? In so doing I suggest how the game can further student understanding of figures such as Aristotle, Hobbes, Locke, Hume, Rousseau, Marx, and Rawls. (shrink)

This paper reveals the original teaching from Sinai that Rosenzweig claims to have discovered while translating Exodus 3 with Martin Buber, and why he viewed this discovery as vindicating their decision to translate the Tetragrammaton in the way they did. A report of this discovery is to be found, I show, in the exchange between Buber and Rosenzweig during their translation of Exodus, as recorded in the Working Papers (Arbeitspapiere). The significance of Rosenzweig’s account of the divine name only becomes (...) fully clear, however, when viewed against the background of the revelation of the divine name in The Star of Redemption. (shrink)

Princeton University Press, 1974. This book is out of print, but can be downloaded as a pdf file (5 MB).

There was a long tradition in philosophy according to which good reasoning had to be deductively valid. However, that tradition began to be questioned in the 1960’s, and is now thoroughly discredited. What caused its downfall was the recognition that many familiar kinds of reasoning are not deductively valid, but clearly confer justification on their conclusions. Here are some simple examples.

I thank Justin Coates, Jacob MacDavid, Paulina Mendoza Valdez, Tyler Porter, Mark Schroeder, Tim Schroeder, Martin Wallace, Jonathan Weid, and two anonymous referees.

The objective of this book is to produce a theory of rational decision making for realistically resource-bounded agents. My interest is not in “What should I do if I were an ideal agent?”, but rather, “What should I do given that I am who I am, with all my actual cognitive limitations?” The book has three parts. Part One addresses the question of where the values come from that agents use in rational decision making. The most comon view among philosophers (...) is that they are based on preferences, but I argue that this is computationally impossible. I propose an alternative theory somewhat reminiscent of Bentham, and explore how human beings actually arrive at values and how they use them in decision making. Part Two investigates the knowledge of probability that is required for decision-theoretic reasoning. I argue that subjective probability makes no sense as applied to realistic agents. I sketch a theory of objective probability to put in its place. Then I use that to define a variety of causal probability and argue that this is the kind of probability presupposed by rational decision making. So what is to be defended is a variety of causal decision theory. Part Three explores how these values and probabilities are to be used in decision making. In chapter eight, it is argued first that actions cannot be evaluated in terms of their expected values as ordinarily defined, because that does not take account of the fact that a cognizer may be unable to perform an action, and may even be unable to try to perform it. An alternative notion of “expected utility” is defined to be used in place of expected values. In chapter nine it is argued that individual actions cannot be the proper objects of decision-theoretic evaluation. We must instead choose plans, and select actions indirectly on the grounds that they are prescribed by the plans we adopt. However, our objective cannot be to find plans with maximal expected utilities. Plans cannot be meaningfully compared in that way. (shrink)

Imagine yourself sitting on your front porch, sipping your morning coffee and admiring the scene before you. You see trees, houses, people, automobiles; you see a cat running across the road, and a bee buzzing among the flowers. You see that the flowers are yellow, and blowing in the wind. You see that the people are moving about, many of them on bicycles. You see that the houses are painted different colors, mostly earth tones, and most are one-story but a (...) few are two-story. It is a beautiful morning. Thus the world interfaces with your mind through your senses. There is a strong intuition that we are not disconnected from the world. We and the other things we see around us are part of a continuous whole, and we have direct access to them through vision, touch, etc. However, the philosophical tradition tries to drive a wedge between us and the world by insisting that the information we get from perception is the result of inference from indirect evidence that is about how things look and feel to us. The philosophical problem of perception is then to explain what justifies these inferences. We will focus on visual perception. Figure one presents a crude diagram of the cognitive system of an agent capable of forming beliefs on the basis of visual perception. Cognition begins with the stimulation of the rods and cones on the retina. From that physical input, some kind of visual processing produces an introspectible visual image. In response to the production of the visual image, the cognizer forms beliefs about his or her surroundings. Some beliefs the perceptual beliefs are formed as direct responses to the visual input, and other beliefs are inferred from the perceptual beliefs. The perceptual beliefs are, at the very least, caused or causally influenced by having the image. This is signified by the dashed arrow marked with a large question mark. We will refer to this as the mystery link. Figure one makes it apparent that in order to fully understand how knowledge is based on perception, we need three different theories.. (shrink)

Stuart Russell [14] describes rational agents as --œthose that do the right thing--�. The problem of designing a rational agent then becomes the problem of figuring out what the right thing is. There are two approaches to the latter problem, depending upon the kind of agent we want to build. On the one hand, anthropomorphic agents are those that can help human beings rather directly in their intellectual endeavors. These endeavors consist of decision making and data processing. An agent that (...) can help humans in these enterprises must make decisions and draw conclusions that are rational by human standards of rationality. Anthropomorphic agents can be contrasted with goal-oriented agents --” those that can carry out certain narrowly-defined tasks in the world. Here the objective is to get the job done, and it makes little difference how the agent achieves its design goal. (shrink)

Reidel, 1976. This book is out of print, but can be downloaded as a pdf file (3.3 MB).

This paper focuses on the question of political anger's non-instrumental justification. I argue that the case for anger is strong where anger expresses a valuable form of valuing the good. It does so only when properly integrated with non-angry emotional responsiveness to the good. The account allows us to acknowledge the non-instrumentally bad side of anger while still delivering the intuitive verdict that anger is often justified. Moreover, it provides an avenue for criticizing much of the anger run amok in (...) contemporary political life without directly engaging entrenched moral and political views. (shrink)

Reliabilist theories propose to analyse epistemic justification in terms of reliability. This paper argues that if we pay attention to the details of probability theory we find that there is no concept of reliability that can possibly play the role required by reliabilist theories. A distinction is drawn between the general reliability of a process and the single case reliability of an individual belief, And it is argued that neither notion can serve the reliabilist adequately.

David Hume: Moral Philosophy Although David Hume is commonly known for his philosophical skepticism, and empiricist theory of knowledge, he also made many important contributions to moral philosophy. Hume’s ethical thought grapples with questions about the relationship between morality and reason, the role of human emotion in thought and action, the nature of moral … Continue reading David Hume: Moral Philosophy →.

Debates about cosmopolitanism in the spheres of political philosophy, sociology and postcolonial criticism have on the whole ignored specific histories of the cosmopolitan imagination and its vernacular expressions in everyday life. This article draws on aspects of the urban and often feminized worlds of entertainment, commerce, the arts and the emotions in metropolitan England during the first decades of the 20th century, in which an interest in abroad and cultural ‘others’ increasingly signalled an engagement with the new, in order to (...) argue for a notion of cosmopolitan modernity. This should be understood not just as a reflexive stance of openness, but also as a dialogic formation – a counterculture – part of a psychic and often gendered revolt against the conservatism and xenophobia of the parental culture. (shrink)

Recent work in social epistemology has drawn attention to various problematic social epistemic phenomena that are common within online networks. Nguyen (2020) argues that it is important to distinguish epistemic bubbles from echo chambers. An epistemic bubble is an information structure that merely lacks information or sources that would be relevant or important to the user. An echo chamber is a structure in which dissenting opinions are, not necessarily absent, but actively undermined, for example by instilling attitudes of distrust towards (...) their adherents. Because of this, echo chambers are thought to be especially difficult to escape. In contrast, according to Nguyen, it is relatively easy to shatter an epistemic bubble: one simply introduces the missing information. In this paper, I argue that it is more difficult to shatter an epistemic bubble than has been recognised in the literature. The reason for this is the relationship between epistemic bubbles and interpretative resources. Despite their epistemic drawbacks, it is comparatively easy to gain knowledge from sources inside one's epistemic bubble because agents within a bubble share common ground. In contrast, it can be very difficult to gain knowledge from sources outside of one's bubble because interlocutors on the outside are less likely to have the shared context needed to facilitate communicative success. I argue that this problem suggests a different way to understand the nature of epistemic bubbles and our prospects for escaping them. (shrink)

In a previous paper by Pollock and Singh, it was proven that the total entropy of de Sitter space-time is equal to zero in the spatially flat case K=0. This result derives from the fundamental property of classical thermodynamics that temperature and volume are not necessarily independent variables in curved space-time, and can be shown to hold for all three spatial curvatures K=0,±1. Here, we extend this approach to Schwarzschild space-time, by constructing a non-vacuum interior space with line element (...) ds 2=e2λ(r) dt 2−e−2λ(r) dr 2−r 2(dθ 2+sin2 θdϕ 2), where $\mathrm{e}^{2{\lambda }(r)}=-\frac{1}{2}(1-\frac{r^{2}}{R_{0}^{2}})$ , which matches onto the vacuum exterior Schwarzschild metric in such a way that e2λ and d(e2λ )/dr are both continuous at the Schwarzschild radius R 0=2M. Then we show that the volume entropy is equal to A/4, where $A\equiv 4\pi R_{0}^{2}$ is the area of the apparent horizon, as found by Hawking. (shrink)

Princeton University Press, 984. This book is out of print, but can be downloaded as a pdf file (3.9 MB).

The question addressed in this paper is how the degree of justification of a belief is determined. A conclusion may be supported by several different arguments, the arguments typically being defeasible, and there may also be arguments of varying strengths for defeaters for some of the supporting arguments. What is sought is a way of computing the “on sum” degree of justification of a conclusion in terms of the degrees of justification of all relevant premises and the strengths of all (...) relevant reasons. (shrink)

The strategy of this paper is to throw light on rational cognition and epistemic justification by examining irrationality. Epistemic irrationality is possible because we are reflexive cognizers, able to reason about and redirect some aspects of our own cognition. One consequence of this is that one cannot give a theory of epistemic rationality or epistemic justification without simultaneously giving a theory of practical rationality. A further consequence is that practical irrationality can affect our epistemic cognition. I argue that practical irrationality (...) derives from a general difficulty we have in overriding built-in shortcut modules aimed at making cognition more efficient, and all epistemic irrationality can be traced to this same source. A consequence of this account is that a theory of rationality is a descriptive theory, describing contingent features of a cognitive architecture, and it forms the core of a general theory of “voluntary” cognition — those aspects of cognition that are under voluntary control. It also follows that most of the so-called “rules for rationality” that philosophers have proposed are really just rules describing default (non- reflexive) cognition. It can be perfectly rational for a reflexive cognizer to break these rules. The “normativity” of rationality is a reflection of a built-in feature of reflexive cognition — when we detect violations of rationality, we have a tendency to desire to correct them. This is just another part of the descriptive theory of rationality. Although theories of rationality are descriptive, the structure of reflexive cognition gives philosophers, as human cognizers, privileged access to certain aspects of rational cognition. Philosophical theories of rationality are really scientific theories, based on inference to the best explanation, that take contingent introspective data as the evidence to be explained. (shrink)

Princeton University Press, 1982. This book is out of print, but can be downloaded as a pdf file (5 MB).

A fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, and of the Royal Society, William Clifford made his reputation in applied mathematics, but his interests ranged far more widely, encompassing ethics, evolution, metaphysics and philosophy of mind. This posthumously collected two-volume work, first published in 1879, bears witness to the dexterity and eclecticism of this Victorian thinker, whose commitment to the most abstract principles of mathematics and the most concrete details of human experience resulted in vivid and often unexpected arguments. Edited by Leslie (...) Stephen and Frederick Pollock, the essays show Clifford's thorough engagement with scientific thought as a method for illuminating ethical and moral questions. They include 'On Some of the Conditions of Mental Development', 'On the Scientific Basis of Morals' and 'The Ethics of Belief'. Pollock also supplied a biography which focuses on Clifford's devotion to the principles of scientific enquiry and experiment. (shrink)

An argument is self-defeating when it contains defeaters for some of its own defeasible lines. It is shown that the obvious rules for defeat among arguments do not handle self-defeating arguments correctly. It turns out that they constitute a pervasive phenomenon that threatens to cripple defeasible reasoning, leading to almost all defeasible reasoning being defeated by unexpected interactions with self-defeating arguments. This leads to some important changes in the general theory of defeasible reasoning.