This paper addresses the problem of how scientific knowledge, which is always locally generated, becomes accepted in other sites. The analysis suggests that there are a small number of strategies that enable scientists to resituate knowledge and that these strategies are generic: they are not restricted to specific disciplines or modes of doing science but rather are found in a variety of different forms across the sciences.

Some have claimed that there are laws of appearance, i.e. in principle constraints on which types of sensory experiences are possible. Within a representationalist framework, these laws amount to restrictions on what a given experience can represent. I offer an in-depth defence of one such law and explain why prevalent externalist varieties of representationalism have trouble accommodating it. In light of this, I propose a variety of representationalism on which the spatial content of experience is determined by intrinsic features of (...) conscious subjects. I conclude by considering an externalist-friendly reworking of my proposal, but suggest that the success of such a reworking is dubious. (shrink)

In this paper I survey a range of trolling behaviors and analyze a particular species that stands out. After a brief discussion of some of the inherent challenges in studying internet speech, I describe a few examples of behaviors commonly described as ‘trolling’ in order to identify what they have in common. I argue that most of these behaviors already have well-researched offline counterparts. In contrast, in the second half of the paper I argue that so-called ‘subcultural trolling’ calls out (...) for further analysis: it cannot be fully explained using standard tools like insincerity or bullshit, or even using new tools like dogwhistling. Instead, I propose a new species of speech act force. I conclude by highlighting some implications for broader issues in pragmatics and ethics. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThe notion of immunity to error through misidentification has played a central role in discussions of first-person thought. It seems like a way of making precise the idea of thinking about oneself ‘as subject’. Asking whether bodily first-person judgments can be IEM is a way of asking whether one can think about oneself simultaneously as a subject and as a bodily thing. The majority view is that one cannot. I rebut that view, arguing that on all the notions of IEM (...) that have so far been successfully defined, bodily first-person judgments can be IEM. (shrink)

Emmanuel Levinas emerged as an influential philosophical voice in the final decades of the twentieth century, and his reputation has continued to flourish and increase in our own day. His central themes--the primacy of the ethical and the core of ethics as our responsibility to and for others--speak to readers from a host of disciplines and perspectives. However, his writings and thought are challenging and difficult. The Oxford Handbook of Levinas contains essays that aim to clarify and engage Levinas and (...) his writings in a number of ways. Some focus on central themes of his work, others on the ways in which he read and was influenced by figures from Plato, Hobbes, Descartes, and Kant to Blanchot, Husserl, Heidegger, and Derrida. And there are essays on how his thinking has been appropriated in moral and political thought, psychology, film criticism, and more, and on the relation between his thinking and religious themes and traditions. Finally, several essays deal primarily with how readers have criticized him and found him wanting. The volume exposes and explores both the depth of Levinas's philosophical work and the range of applications to which it has been put, with special attention to clarifying why his interests in the human condition, the crisis of civilization, the centrality and character of ethics and morality, and the very meaning of human experience should be of interest to the widest range of readers. (shrink)

Volume 23, Issue 2, April 2024, Page 237-242.

ABSTRACTIn this essay, I set out key aspects of Nicholas’ Rescher’s Metaphysical Perspectives. I illustrate the tenor and value of the text based on extended analysis of: Chapter 1, on fundamental...

In the following essay I use an extended commentary on Dave Elder-Vass’s The Reality of Social Construction to explore the issue of what progress in realism means. I set out and critique the concept of the norm circle in order to consider how an argument is developed as realist social theory and what limits that might have in terms of the recognized realist concept of adequacy. Specifically, I address the way realist social theory can become restricted to an internal exploration (...) of realism whilst issues of real world relevance are deferred. (shrink)

A long-standing tradition presents economic activity in terms of the flow of fluids. This metaphor lies behind a small but influential practice of hydraulic modelling in economics. Yet turning the metaphor into a three-dimensional hydraulic model of the economic system entails making numerous and detailed commitments about the analogy between hydraulics and the economy. The most famous 3-D model in economics is probably the Phillips machine, the central object of this paper.

This book provides a clear and helpful overview of the philosophical core of the thought of Emmanuel Levinas, one of the most significant and interesting philosophers of the late twentieth century.

This paper uses a problematic passage at Phaedo 69a–c as a case study to explore the advantages we can gain by reading Plato in his cultural context. Socrates argues that the common conception of courage is strange: people fear death, but endure it because they are afraid of greater evils. They are thus brave through fear. He proposes that we should not exchange greater pleasures, pains, and fears for lesser, like coins, but that there is the only correct coin, for (...) which we must exchange all these things: wisdom (phronēsis). Commentators have been puzzled by the precise nature of the exchange envisaged here, sometimes labelling the coinage metaphor as inept, sometimes describing this stretch of argument as “religious” and thus not to be taken seriously. The body of the paper looks at (1) the connection between money and somatic materialism, (2) the incommensurability in Plato of financial and ethical orders, (3) financial metaphors outside Plato that connect coinage with ethics, (4) intrinsic and use values in ancient coinage, and (5) Athenian laws on coinage, weights, and measures that reflect anxiety about debased coins in the fifth and early fourth centuries. It sees the Phaedo passage as the product of a sociopolitical climate which facilitated the consideration of coinage as an embodiment of a value system and which connected counterfeit or debased currency with debased ethical types. Athenians in the early fourth century were much concerned with issues of commensurability between different currencies and with problems of debasement and counterfeiting; understanding this makes Socrates’ use of coinage metaphors less puzzling. Both the metaphor of coinage and the other metaphors in this passage of the Phaedo (painting and initiation) engage with ideas of purity, genuineness, and deception. Taken as a group, these metaphors cover a large area of contemporary popular culture and are used to illustrate a disjunction between popular and philosophical ways of looking at value. (shrink)

In this review article various aspects of Andrew Wright's Christianity and Critical Realism are explored. Wright claims that Trinitarian theology is essentially realist in its form and that realism can be used to defend or justify Trinitarian Christianity. The nature of the specific case brings to the fore a number of issues regarding the nature of reasoning and judgemental rationality for realists.

Fuzzy logics are systems of logic with infinitely many truth values. Such logics have been claimed to have an extremely wide range of applications in linguistics, computer technology, psychology, etc. In this note, we canvass the known results concerning infinitely many valued logics; make some suggestions for alterations of the known systems in order to accommodate what modern devotees of fuzzy logic claim to desire; and we prove some theorems to the effect that there can be no fuzzy logic which (...) will do what its advocates want. Finally, we suggest ways to accommodate these desires in finitely many valued logics. (shrink)

Most of us think that we can obtain knowledge about the aesthetic properties of objects via testimony – at least sometimes. We can learn that a painting is beautiful by reading a book, or learn that a film is awful by talking to a friend (as long as our sources are reliable). At the same time, if we go on to share this knowledge we have to carefully qualify it as second-hand in order to avoid misleading our audience. Simply stating (...) that a painting is beautiful or that a film is awful is liable to give off the impression that we have experienced it ourselves. In this paper I draw on my other work in the pragmatics of normative language to explain why aesthetic discourse has these distinctive features. Because our aesthetic practices have developed as a way for us to share both our beliefs and our affective states, traditional theories of assertion and testimony fail to capture the full richness of what we are up to in our aesthetic conversations. (shrink)

Surprisingly, over the decade or so since its publication, Bhaskar's Dialectic: The Pulse of Freedom has received relatively little in the way of systematic analysis either by critical realists or their critics. There have been, however, a number of critiques that have dealt with some of its themes and developments in a variety of contexts. In the following study, I assess the argument of Alex Callinicos. Callinicos' critique, though in many ways sympathetic, is fundamental to critical realism. Engaging with it (...) provides a means to develop and clarify a number of arguments about aspects of critical realism in general and also provides a useful staging point to set forth a basic and consistent ordering of inquiry for a critique of DPF. The initial purpose of the analysis is not so much a defence of DPF but an assessment of the construction of an argument brought to bear on it. I argue that the form of the argument deployed is problematic in a way that detracts from the substance of the critique of the content of DPF. This is not to suggest that DPF is immune to criticism but rather to suggest that a fuller analysis of the DPF argument and its potential remains to be made. The ultimate purpose of the analysis is to use this assessment of a strategy of critique—an argumentation schema or discursive form—to create an alternative approach to critically appraising DPF. Fundamental to Callinicos' argument is the nature of transcendental argument. (shrink)

In this article I offer an account of normative thought inspired by Plato's proposal in the Theaetetus that judgement is ‘speech spoken … silently.’ After arguing that force conventionalism is the speech act theory best suited for modeling dialogic inner speech, I close the article by sketching the picture of normative thought that results. Though I defend a particular theory of normative speech elsewhere, the core insights of this article can be used by other theorists as well. The arguments offered (...) here also serve as an important step forward for the more general program of using social speech to better understand thought. (shrink)

InFam.13.1 Cicero, visiting Athens en route to Cilicia in the summer of 51b.c., writes to C. Memmius L.f., praetor in 58 but by the time of Cicero's communication an exile in Athens after the shambolic consular elections for 53; Memmius was (temporarily, one assumes) absent from Athens in Mytilene, hence the need for Cicero to write to him. This letter, along withAtt.5.11.6 and 19.3, is our focus in the argument that follows, but, to summarize the situation in the very broadest (...) terms, Cicero's concern in it is with Memmius’ intentions regarding a plot of land in Athens occupied by a house of Epicurus, and with the objections to Memmius’ plans that had been raised with Cicero by the scholarch of the Epicurean community in Athens, Patro. (shrink)

I examine Beauvoir's moral assessment of Romantic Love in The Second Sex. I first set out Beauvoir's central philosophical assumptions concerning the nature and situations of women, setting the framework for her analysis of the intersubjective dynamic which constitutes the phenomenology of romantic loving. In this process four double-bind paradoxes are generated which can lead, ultimately, to servility in the woman who loves. In a separate analysis, I ask whether it is wrong for a woman to aspire to and/or choose (...) this form of servitude. I distinguish two kinds of considerations: (1) those having to do with the intrinsic moral nature of the commitment or decision, and (2) those based on considerations of harm: first, to the woman who loves; second, to the loved Other; third to the nature of the relationship; and fourth, to society in general. (shrink)

The historiography of the ‘dark age’ of biochemistry between 1910–1930 is examined. The biochemistry of the period is located within a larger contemporary debate on the interrelationship between structure and function on a submicroscopic level. It is suggested that biocolloid science was an understandable part of the historical development of biochemistry, representing a conceptual bridge between the cell biology of the late nineteenth century, and the era of structural macromolecular studies of proteins that began after 1930.

The paper discusses various relationships between the concepts mentioned in the title. In Section 1 Todorcevic functions are shown to arise from both morasses and square. In Section 2 the theme is of supplements to morasses which have some of the flavour of square. Distinctions are drawn between differing concepts. In Section 3 forcing axioms related to the ideas in Section 2 are discussed.

This article uses differing interpretations of a thread of narrative taken from Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four as a springboard to exploring the connection between philosophical truth and political liberalism. It argues that while no positive connection exists between realist truth and political liberalism, minimal negative connections do exist between Rorty’s humanistic account of truth and a basic commitment to democratic and liberal frameworks. It sees these minimal connections as limiting in their failure to provide a politics that moves beyond an exclusive (...) concern with liberty and democracy to more substantive political issues of equality and justice. However, it also sees them as reassuring in showing how acceptance of Rorty’s humanistic account of truth in no way necessitates adopting his own ethnocentric political stance. (shrink)

I present an account of the good life as one in which wholesale engagement in the social practices that human agents take up is the signature feature. I then argue that sport, because it is one of a select few human undertakings in which such full-blown action is the rule rather than the exception, is a paradigmatic example of such a good life. I close by claiming that equating the good life with wholehearted action is an especially promising way not (...) only to appreciate the contribution sport makes to our lives but to legitimize that contribution to would-be detractors. (shrink)