We present a one per cent measurement of the cosmic distance scale from the detections of the baryon acoustic oscillations in the clustering of galaxies from the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey, which is part of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey III. Our results come from the Data Release 11 sample, containing nearly one million galaxies and covering approximately 8500 square degrees and the redshift range 0.2 < z < 0.7. We also compare these results with those from the publicly released (...) DR9 and DR10 samples. Assuming a concordance Λ cold dark matter cosmological model, the DR11 sample covers a volume of 13 Gpc3 and is the largest region of the Universe ever surveyed at this density. We measure the correlation function and power spectrum, including density-field reconstruction of the BAO feature. The acoustic features are detected at a significance of over 7σ in both the correlation function and power spectrum. Fitting for the position of the acoustic features measures the distance relative to the sound horizon at the drag epoch, rd, which has a value of rd,fid = 149.28 Mpc in our fiducial cosmology. We find DV = at z = 0.32 and DV = at z = 0.57. At 1.0 per cent, this latter measure is the most precise distance constraint ever obtained from a galaxy survey. Separating the clustering along and transverse to the line of sight yields measurements at z = 0.57 of DA = and H =. Our measurements of the distance scale are in good agreement with previous BAO measurements and with the predictions from cosmic microwave background data for a spatially flat CDM model with a cosmological constant. © 2014 The Author Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Royal Astronomical Society. (shrink)

I aim to illuminate foundational epistemological issues by reflecting on 'epistemic consequentialism'—the epistemic analogue of ethical consequentialism. Epistemic consequentialism employs a concept of cognitive value playing a role in epistemic norms governing belief-like states that is analogous to the role goodness plays in act-governing moral norms. A distinction between 'direct' and 'indirect' versions of epistemic consequentialism is held to be as important as the familiar ethical distinction on which it is based. These versions are illustrated, respectively, by cognitive decision-theory and (...) reliabilism. Cognitive decision-theory is defended, and various conceptual issues concerning it explored. A simple dilemma suggests that epistemic consequentialism has radical consequences. (shrink)

Philip Percival; X*—Absolute Truth, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 94, Issue 1, 1 June 1994, Pages 189–214, https://doi.org/10.1093/aristotelia.

Although many researchers theorize that primitive numerosity processing abilities may lay the foundation for whole number concepts, other classes of numbers, like fractions, are sometimes assumed to be inaccessible to primitive architectures. This research presents evidence that the automatic processing of nonsymbolic magnitudes affects processing of symbolic fractions. Participants completed modified Stroop tasks in which they selected the larger of two symbolic fractions while the ratios of the fonts in which the fractions were printed and the overall sizes of the (...) compared fractions were manipulated as irrelevant dimensions. Participants were slower and less accurate when nonsymbolic dimensions of printed fractions were incongruent with the symbolic comparison decision. Results indicated a robust basic sensitivity to nonsymbolic ratios that exceeds prior conceptions about the accessibility of fraction values. Results also indicated a congruity effect for overall fraction size, contrary to findings of prior research. These findings have implications for extending theory about the nature of human number sense and mathematical cognition more generally. (shrink)

PaceZagzebski, there is no route from the value of knowledge to a non–reliabilist virtue–theoretic epistemology. Her discussion of the value problem is marred by an uncritical and confused employment of the notion of a “state” of knowledge, an uncritical acceptance of a “knowledge–belief” identity thesis, and an incoherent presumption that the widely held thought that knowledge is more valuable than true belief amounts to the view that knowledge is a state of true belief having an intrinsic property which a state (...) of ‘mere” true belief lacks. Her arguments against a “machine–product” conception of knowledge are undermined by these flaws, while the alternative “agent–act” model she recommends is unattractive, at odds with the knowledge–belief identity thesis she favours, and no solution to the problem of the value of knowledge she poses. I end with the observation that her version of virtue–theoretic epistemology points in the direction of cognitive decision–theoretic norms, and I briefly discuss the bearing of this fact upon her viewpoint. (shrink)

Quantum mechanics gives us reason to think both that the world is indeterministic, and that there are irreducibly statistical laws governing objectively chancy processes. Lewis notes that this raises a two-horned dilemma between two options deemed unacceptable: severely curtail our explanatory practices with respect to macro events, or revise our conception of the essence of chance. He maintains, however, that we can escape this dilemma by making a distinction between ‘plain’ why-questions of the simple form ‘Why did D occur?’ and (...) ‘contrastive’ why-questions of the more complex form ‘Why did E occur rather than E*?’ I will argue that even if a chance event receives a nontrivial explanation, there is still a sense in which it happens for no reason if there is a time prior to its occurrence at which the change of its happening when it does is fixed. (shrink)

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work.This work is in the public domain in (...) the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work.As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

A physician and medical reformer enthused by the scientific and cultural progress of the Enlightenment as it took hold in Britain, Thomas Percival wrote on many topics, including public health and demography. His volume on medical ethics is considered the first modern formulation, and it and several of his other works are reissued in this series. This short book of improving tales, first published in 1777, and revised and enlarged in 1779, was originally written for his own children, and, (...) as he says, the articles 'are placed in the order in which they were written … as leisure allowed, or as the subjects of them were suggested'. The little stories contain lessons on obedience to parents, family affection, and kindness to animals, among many other examples of moral instruction. Percival refers to the book as 'Part the First', but a further collection seems never to have been published. (shrink)

Materialists about human persons think that we are material through and through—wholly material beings. Those who endorse materialism more widely think that everything is material through and through. But what is it to be wholly material? In this article, I answer that question. I identify and defend a definition or analysis of ‘wholly material’.

It’s often claimed that some people—fundamentalists or fanatics—are indeed sealed off from rational criticism. And every month new pop psychology books appear, describing the dumb ways ordinary people make decisions, as revealed by psychological experiments. The conclusion is that all or most people are fundamentally irrational. -/- Ray Scott Percival sets out to demolish the whole notion of the closed mind and of human irrationality. There is a difference between making mistakes and being irrational. Though humans are prone to (...) mistakes, they remain rational. In fact, making mistakes is a sign of rationality: a totally non-rational entity could not make a mistake. -/- Rationality does not mean absence of error; it means the possibility of correcting error in the light of criticism. In this sense, all human beliefs are rational: they are all vulnerable to being abandoned when shown to be faulty. -/- Percival agrees that people cling stubbornly to their beliefs, but he maintains, first, that not being too ready to abandon one’s beliefs is rational, and second, that people do not cling to their beliefs indefinitely or “come what may.” The illusion that they do can be dispelled by examining what really goes on in the formation and abandonment of beliefs, and here we need to observe the high rate of turnover in membership of ideological movements, as well as their numerous splits and schisms. -/- Percival examines and refutes the arguments of writers who have upheld the Irrationality or Closed Mind thesis, including Raymond Boudon, Serge Chakotin, Richard Dawkins, Jon Elster, Ernest Gellner, Adolf Hitler, Leszek Kolakowski, Walter Laqueur, Gustav Le Bon, Karl Popper, and Max Weber. -/- A key aspect of Percival’s approach is to identify “the persuader’s predicament,” the situational logic of the propagandist. Percival contends that a propagandist is faced with a trade-off between his message being closed to criticism and the message reaching and converting as many people as possible. It is possible to make a belief system more closed to criticism, but only by limiting the wide dissemination of the system. Percival illustrates the way belief systems adapt to criticism by an examination of two ideologies, Marxism and Freudianism, and by various examples drawn from the history of religion. (shrink)

According to theists, God is an immaterial thinking being. The main question of this article is whether theism supports the view that we are immaterial thinking beings too. I shall argue in the negative. Along the way, I will also explore some implications in the philosophy of mind following from the observation that, on theism, God’s mentality is in a certain respect magical.

C Bailey; The Notion of Development and Moral Education, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 3, Issue 1, 30 May 2006, Pages 65–80, https://doi.org/10.111.

Comic moralism holds that some moral properties impact negatively on the funniness of certain items that possess them. Strong versions of the doctrine deem the impact to be devastating: the possession of such a property by one of these items ensures the item is not funny. Weak versions deem the impact merely damaging: any funniness one of the items possesses is diminished, but not destroyed, by its possession of the property. Various species of comic moralism hold, respectively, various moral properties (...) to impact negatively on funniness. For example, one species holds as much of the property “manifests attitudes that are morally wrong,” but other species hold as much of different moral properties. Comic moralism, or a species of it, can be unrestricted, or restricted, depending on whether it pertains to all the items that possess the negatively impacting moral property or properties, or to just a subset of these items. (shrink)

Empathy is a form of emotionally charged imaginative perspective‐taking. It is also the unique source of a particular form of understanding, which I will call humane understanding. Humane understanding consists in the direct apprehension of the intelligibility of others’ emotions. This apprehension is an epistemic good whose ethical significance is multifarious. In this paper, I focus on elaborating the sense in which humane understanding of others is non‐instrumentally valuable to its recipients. People have a complex but profound need to be (...) humanely understood. Because we respond to others’ very real need when we pursue this sort of understanding of their emotions, empathy is best understood as itself a way of caring, rather than just a means to promote other caring behavior. (shrink)

Alan Bailey offers a clear exposition and defence of the philosophy of Sextus Empiricus, one of the most influential of ancient thinkers, the father of philosophical scepticism.

Grounded in what Alan Wertheimer terms the nonworseness claim, it is thought by some philosophers that what will be referred to herein as better-than-permissible acts —acts that, if undertaken, would make another or others better off than they would be were an alternative but morally permissible act to be undertaken—are necessarily morally permissible. What, other than a bout of irrationality, it may be thought, would lead one to hold that an act (such as outsourcing production to a sweatshop in a (...) developing country) that produces more benefits for others than an act that is itself morally permissible (such as not doing business in the developing country at all) with respect to those same others, is not morally permissible? In this article, I argue that each of the two groups of philosophers that are most likely to accept the nonworseness claim—consequentialists and non-consequentialists—have reason to reject it, and thereby also have reason to reject the belief that better-than-permissible acts are necessarily morally permissible. (shrink)

This book offers ways to overcome problems that arise when voters, politicians, and bureaucrats pursue selfish interests rather than the general interest in their political behavior. It combines previously published ideas about charging people the costs of their political actions and selling insurance against unfavorable political outcomes, with new ideas about competing legislatures and incentives for generating efficient political outcomes. The book includes new are discussed, as well as a proposed constitution and its rationale.

First published in 1999. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

The mathematical study of probability originated in the seventeenth century, when mathematicians were invited to tackle problems arising in games of chance. In such games gamblers want to know which betting odds on unpredictable events are advantageous. This amounts to a concern with probability, because probability and fair betting odds appear linked by the principle that odds of m to n for a bet on a repeatable event E are fair if and only if the probability of E is n/(m (...) + n). For example, suppose E is the occurrence of double‐six on a throw of two dice and that its probability is 1/36 = 1/(35 + 1). Because of the intuitive connection between the probability of an event and its long‐run frequency in repeated trials, we would expect E to occur on average 1 time in (35 + 1) throws. Since to set odds on E at 35 to 1 is to agree that for a stake B, the one who bets on E gains 35B/1 if E occurs and loses B to his opponent if it does not, those must be the fair odds for a bet on E. At them, we can expect 1 win of 35B to be balanced in the long run by 35 losses of the stake B, so that neither party to the bet enjoys net gain. (shrink)

ABSTRACTIs offering hazard pay ethically permissible when the pay premium is the only reason that a dangerous job is accepted? Robert C. Hughes argues that it is not. Central to his argument is the claim that in such cases, workers intend the foreseeable risks of harm as a means to the pay premium. Herein I question the plausibility of this claim and then develop a conception of the concept of means sufficient to make it plausible. By so doing, I provide (...) support for Hughes’s stringent position. (shrink)

Richard Dawkins tries to establish an analogy between computer viruses and theistic belief systems, analyzing the latter in terms of his concept of the meme. The underlying thrust of Dawkins' argument is to downplay the role of truth and logic in the survival of theories and to emphasize humankind's helpless liability to incurable infection by doctrines that Dawkins regards as absurd. Dawkins supplies a list of "symptoms” of mind-infection. However, on closer investigation these characteristics are found to be either rather (...) weak protection against criticism or quite virtuous. Dawkins relies on a crude justificationism that could just as well be called a mind-virus. Applying Dawkins’ own selection of the general characteristics of a good meme protector and propagator leads to the conclusion that his particular theistic examples would actually impair copyability. -/- Scientific theories are better examples of memes with high longevity, fecundity, and fidelity. A Darwinian analysis of wishful and fearful thinking as useful to hypotheses-testing and goal-seeking organisms undermines Dawkins' attribution of absolute irrational stubbornness to theists. To counterbalance Dawkins' emphasis on the propagation of the absurd, I rehabilitate the Socratic emphasis on the importance of truth and logic in rhetoric, interpreted broadly as the theory of the successful propagation of a message. I use Popper's notion of situational analysis, and an evolutionary perspective to argue that rational standards of a message enhance its copyability. I further apply Popper’s notions of World 3, 2, and 1 to memes; this helps us see the perpetuation of a doctrine as a logical task. (shrink)

Here is a question as intriguing as it is brief: what are we? The animalist’s answer is equal in brevity: we are animals. This stark formulation of the animalist slogan distances it from nearby claims—that we are essentially animals, for example, or that we have purely biological criteria of identity over time. Is the animalist slogan—unburdened by modal or criterial commitments—still interesting, though? Or has it lost its bite? In this article we address such questions by presenting a positive case (...) for the importance of animalism and applying that case to recent critiques. (shrink)

For good or for ill, we have animal bodies. Through them, we move around, eat and drink, and do many other things besides. We owe much – perhaps our very lives – to these ever-present animals. But how exactly do we relate to our animals? Are we parts of them, or they of us? Do we and these living animals co-inhere or constitute or coincide? Or what? Animalism answers that we are identical to them. There are many objections to animalism, (...) and a dizzying array of rival views. In this article, we do not propose to evaluate those objections and rivals. We will instead present a new argument for that view. The argument begins with the fact that we have emotions. (shrink)

Materialists about human persons say that we are, and must be, wholly material beings. Substance dualists say that we are, and must be, wholly immaterial. In this paper, I take issue with the “and must be” bits. Both materialists and substance dualists would do well to reject modal extensions of their views and instead opt for contingent doctrines, or doctrines that are silent about those modal extensions. Or so I argue.

Background People who are at elevated risk of suicide stand to benefit from internet-based interventions; however, research in this area is likely impacted by a range of ethical and practical challenges. The aim of this study was to examine the ethical issues and practical barriers associated with clinical studies of internet-based interventions for suicide prevention. Method This was a mixed-methods study involving two phases. First, a systematic search was conducted to identify studies evaluating internet-based interventions for people at risk of (...) suicide, and information pertaining to safety protocols and exclusion criteria was extracted. Second, investigators on the included studies were invited to complete an online survey comprising open-ended and forced-choice responses. Quantitative and qualitative methods were used to analyse the data. Results The literature search identified 18 eligible studies, of which three excluded participants based on severity of suicide risk. Half of the 15 suicide researchers who participated in the survey had experienced problems obtaining ethics approval, and none had encountered adverse events attributed to their intervention. Survey respondents noted the difficulty of managing risk in online environments and the limitations associated with implementing safety protocols, although some also reported increased confidence resulting from the ethical review process. Respondents recommended researchers pursue a collaborative relationship with their research ethics committees. Conclusion There is a balance to be achieved between the need to minimise the risk of adverse events whilst also ensuring interventions are being validated on populations who may be most likely to use and benefit from them. Further research is required to obtain the views of research ethics committees and research participants on these issues. Dialogue between researchers and ethics committees is necessary to address the need to ensure safety while also advancing the timely development of effective interventions in this critical area. (shrink)

Charles Bailey; Teaching by Discussion and the Neutral Teacher, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 7, Issue 1, 30 May 2006, Pages 26–38, https://doi.org.

_Utilitarianism_ is a classic work of ethical theory, arguably the most persuasive and comprehensible presentation of this widely influential position. Mill argues that it is pleasure and pain that ought to guide our decision-making&and not the pleasure and pain of any one person or group, but the summative experience of all who are affected by our actions. While he didn’t invent utilitarianism, Mill offered its clearest expression and strongest defense, and expanded the theory to account for the variety in quality (...) that we find among specific pleasures and pains. Today, Mill’s version of the “Greatest Happiness Principle” is a standard premise in many moral arguments within the academy and in practical ethical and political deliberation. The complete text of the 1871 edition of _Utilitarianism_ is presented here, with footnote annotations added to clarify unfamiliar references and terminology for the student reader. A detailed introduction by the editor is divided into brief digestible parts discussing the context of the text and offering guidelines on how to read it accurately and critically. This edition has its origin in the acclaimed _Broadview Anthology of Social and Political Thought_ and adheres to the anthology’s format and high standard of accuracy and accessibility. (shrink)