Jim Joyce has presented an argument for Probabilism based on considerations of epistemic utility [Joyce, 1998]. In a recent paper, I adapted this argument to give an argument for Probablism and the Principal Principle based on similar considerations [Pettigrew, 2012]. Joyce’s argument assumes that a credence in a true proposition is better the closer it is to maximal credence, whilst a credence in a false proposition is better the closer it is to minimal credence. By contrast, my argument in that (...) paper assumed (roughly) that a credence in a proposition is better the closer it is to the objective chance of that proposition. In this paper, I present an epistemic utility argument for Probabilism and the Principal Principle that retains Joyce’s assumption rather than the alternative I endorsed in the earlier paper. I argue that this results in a superior argument for these norms. (shrink)

Contrairement à une croyance trop répandue, le darwinisme et son prolongement au XXe siècle — le néo-darwinisme — ne portent pas sur une idée de l'évolution fondée sur la simple notion de « la survie du plus apte ». Si la théorie de la sélection naturelle est partie intégrante du néo-darwinisme, plusieurs de ses fondateurs seront en quête d'une conception beaucoup plus généreuse, pleine et compréhensive de l'évolution. En réalité, la révolution dite darwinienne s'insère au coeur d'une révolution intellectuelle beaucoup (...) plus importante : la révolution transformiste. Avant d'être des darwiniens, de dignes représentants de cette mouvance s'afficheront comme étant des transformistes. Cela signifie que, en plus des mécanismes de l'évolution biologique, d'autres éléments tout aussi cruciaux seront pris en considération`, dans l'élaboration d'une véritable synthèse évolutionniste : les rapports entre l'évolution biologique et l'évolution cosmique ; les interrogations portant sur la question d'une possible direction évolutive ; l'enseignement à tirer pour l'homme de sa place et de son rôle dans la nature. A la croisée de l'histoire, de la philosophie et de la science, cet ouvrage cherche à démontrer, à travers l'analyse des travaux de plusieurs néo-darwiniens de premier plan, que la révolution darwinienne demeurera incomplète aussi longtemps que la révolution transformiste le restera. (shrink)

Ethical decisions have to be made by everyone. Yet Christians often find it difficult to know exactly how they should make them. Is there a better way than an emotional response or looking for a quick answer from the Bible? In the first of the book a sixth-former, Matthew, takes moral issues as the topic of his RS project. He has interviews with various people, such as a businessman, a scientist, a police officer, and a doctor as well as with (...) members of his own family and his minister. These open his eyes to problems that he had not thought about before. In the second part the issues that have been raised are examined more systematically. (shrink)

THE PAPER EXAMINES WHAT IS MEANT BY ’EVIDENCE’ WHEN IT IS SAID THAT A THEORY IS PROBABLE ON CERTAIN EVIDENCE. IT CONSIDERS WHAT IS THE RELATION BETWEEN A THEORY BEING PROBABLE ON CERTAIN EVIDENCE, A THEORY BEING BELIEVED, AND A THEORY BEING CREDIBLE. IT DISTINGUISHES VARIOUS SENSES OF ’ACCEPT’ IN WHICH SCIENTISTS ARE SAID TO ACCEPT THEORIES, ONLY ONE OF WHICH IS THE SENSE OF ’ACCEPT’ IN WHICH IT IS EQUATED WITH ’BELIEVE’. IT ANALYSES THE LOGICAL RELATIONS BETWEEN A THEORY (...) BEING PROBABLE ON THE EVIDENCE, AND A THEORY BEING ACCEPTED, AND A THEORY BEING ACCEPTABLE, IN THE DIFFERENT SENSES OF ’ACCEPT’. (shrink)

A brief, non-technical introduction to technical and philosophical aspects of Frege's philosophy of arithmetic. The exposition focuses on Frege's Theorem, which states that the axioms of arithmetic are provable, in second-order logic, from a single non-logical axiom, "Hume's Principle", which itself is: The number of Fs is the same as the number of Gs if, and only if, the Fs and Gs are in one-one correspondence.

In this exciting new collection, a distinguished international group of philosophers contribute new essays on central issues in philosophy of language and logic, in honor of Michael Dummett, one of the most influential philosophers of the late twentieth century. The essays are focused on areas particularly associated with Professor Dummett. Five are contributions to the philosophy of language, addressing in particular the nature of truth and meaning and the relation between language and thought. Two contributors discuss time, in particular the (...) reality of the past. The last four essays focus on Frege and the philosophy of mathematics. The volume represents some of the best work in contemporary analytical philosophy. (shrink)

Hartry Field has suggested that we should adopt at least a methodological deflationism: "[W]e should assume full-fledged deflationism as a working hypothesis. That way, if full-fledged deflationism should turn out to be inadequate, we will at least have a clearer sense than we now have of just where it is that inflationist assumptions... are needed". I argue here that we do not need to be methodological deflationists. More precisely, I argue that we have no need for a disquotational truth-predicate; that (...) the word 'true', in ordinary language, is not a disquotational truth-predicate; and that it is not at all clear that it is even possible to introduce a disquotational truth-predicate into ordinary language. If so, then we have no clear sense how it is even possible to be a methodological deflationist. My goal here is not to convince a committed deflationist to abandon his or her position. My goal, rather, is to argue, contrary to what many seem to think, that reflection on the apparently trivial character of T-sentences should not incline us to deflationism. (shrink)

Using the case of an industrial accident involving a killer robot, the author successfully combines technical and ethical concepts to present to students and professionals real-life issues that they may one day have to confront.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:MetanoiaRichard G. T. Gipps, ClinPsyD, PhD (bio)A “honeysuckle on a broken fence”: Scrutton’s (2024) theologically potent image offers us a dignified vision of how a living faith and the experience of mental illness might intersect. Mental and physical illness, deprivation and bereavement sometimes provide a propitious structure on which faith’s bright strands may grow. Scrutton posits no simply causal relationship between faith and mental illness, and steers us helpfully (...) away from the narcissistic overvaluation of inner experience too often met with in (1) mysterium tremendum (meeting-God-blew-my-mind), and (3) mental openness (divine-light-pours-through-the-cracks), formulations. She helps us to avoid settling, too, for the clever-sounding but ultimately too-easy idea of (2) ‘mental illness’ and ‘religious experience’ as different descriptions under which identical experiences may sometimes be brought. For one thing, and to animadvert now in my own vein: can we really—as William James aspires to, say, when he takes it for granted that the “more personal branch [of] feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to... the divine” can be neatly hived off from the “institutional branch of religion... worship... theology... ceremony... ” and so on—even individuate the relevant experiential phenomena independently of their meaning-conferring contexts? For another, it seems to me that too often in the literature of (1) (2) and (3) do we meet with a fatal confusion that can be expressed in terms of a conflation of two meanings of “ego,” as when a) the dropping of the kinds of boundaries which it makes sense to talk of putting up (i.e., our ego’s defensive, prideful, shame-driven shirking of intimacy) is muddled together with b) the crumbling of such individuating ego boundaries as constitute us. Such a confusion gets readily promulgated by vague and tacitly polysemic talk not only of ‘ego’ but also of ‘non-duality,’ ’transpersonal,’ and ‘higher’ and ‘lower’ ‘levels’ of ‘self’ and ‘consciousness’ (e.g., see Kasprow & Scotton 1999). Sometimes driving this, one can’t help suspect, is the narcissistic gain of conflating the dismal dissolution of ego boundaries in illness (Conrad, 1958) with the epiphanic transcendence of a grasping and fearful ego. Spiritual pride and spiritual bypass (i.e. fleeing the relational tasks of adult development into a self-preoccupied ‘spiritualised’ inner journey) (Welwood, 2000) then abound, not only for the sufferer but also for the lowly therapist who now receives their shamanic guide/hierophant upgrade. By contrast with all of this, Scrutton’s (4) honeysuckle on a broken fence model stands out in its theological dignity and psychological sobriety.Even so I found myself, on reading Scrutton’s piece, wondering whether a more romantic conception of a growing faith’s possible relation [End Page 257] to psychological disturbance might yet be available and sometimes even find application. What particularly came to my mind was that notion of metanoia as offered us by the existential tradition in both theology and psychopathology.Mark’s gospel begins with John the Baptist heralding Christ’s arrival and preaching the “baptism of repentance [metanoia; μετανοίας] for the remission of sins” (Mark 1:4). Jesus’s first public words then proclaim the same message: “the kingdom of God is at hand: repent ye [μετανοεῖτε], and believe the gospel” (Mark 1:15). ‘Repentance’ is today often understood as a sorrowful acknowledgement of one’s wrongdoings, but it has long been acknowledged that, if that be the meaning we give the term, it is an inapt translation of ‘metanoia’ (Walden, 1896). For what the gospel instead calls for is rather a wholesale turning about, or conversion, from ‘ego-dominance to surrender’ (Barron, 2021), i.e. from (a) defensive and illusory attempts to handle our vulnerability and dependency through self-reliance and self-affirmation to (b) an aliveness to grace (i.e. seeing our lives and their bounties under the aspect of the freely given gift) and a trusting surrender to the dominion of that God of love in which we anyway inexorably ‘live and move and have our being’ (Acts 17:28). The ‘I’ in Paul’s “It is no longer I who... (shrink)

The purpose of this note is to present a strong form of the liar paradox. It is strong because the logical resources needed to generate the paradox are weak, in each of two senses. First, few expressive resources required: conjunction, negation, and identity. In particular, this form of the liar does not need to make any use of the conditional. Second, few inferential resources are required. These are: (i) conjunction introduction; (ii) substitution of identicals; and (iii) the inference: From ¬(p (...) ∧ p), infer ¬ p. It is, interestingly enough, also essential to the argument that the ‘strong’ form of the diagonal lemma be used: the one that delivers a term λ such that we can prove: λ = ¬ T(⌈λ⌉); rather than just a sentence Λ for which we can prove: Λ ≡ ¬T(⌈Λ⌉). The truth-theoretic principles used to generate the paradox are these: ¬(S ∧ T(⌈¬S⌉); and ¬(¬S ∧ ¬T(⌈¬S⌉). These are classically equivalent to the two directions of the T-scheme, but they are intuitively weaker. The lesson I would like to draw is: There can be no consistent solution to the Liar paradox that does not involve abandoning truth-theoretic principles that should be every bit as dear to our hearts as the T-scheme. So we shall have to learn to live with the Liar, one way or another. (shrink)

Written as a comment on Crispin Wright's "Vagueness: A Fifth Column Approach", this paper defends a form of supervaluationism against Wright's criticisms. Along the way, however, it takes up the question what is really wrong with Epistemicism, how the appeal of the Sorities ought properly to be understood, and why Contextualist accounts of vagueness won't do.

In Mind and World, John McDowell argues against the view that perceptual representation is non-conceptual. The central worry is that this view cannot offer any reasonable account of how perception bears rationally upon belief. I argue that this worry, though sensible, can be met, if we are clear that perceptual representation is, though non-conceptual, still in some sense 'assertoric': Perception, like belief, represents things as being thus and so.

A chance-credence norm states how an agent's credences in propositions concerning objective chances ought to relate to her credences in other propositions. The most famous such norm is the Principal Principle (PP), due to David Lewis. However, Lewis noticed that PP is too strong when combined with many accounts of chance that attempt to reduce chance facts to non-modal facts. Those who defend such accounts of chance have offered two alternative chance-credence norms: the first is Hall's and Thau's New Principle (...) (NP); the second is Ismael's General Recipe (IP). Thus, the question arises: Should we adopt NP or IP or both? In this paper, I argue that IP has unacceptable consequences when coupled with reductionism, so we must accept NP alone. (shrink)

This book prints for the first time two remarkable interlocking sequences of letters between Paris and the Netherlands: 40 letters from Gilles Ménage in Paris to Johann-Georg Grævius in Utrecht, and 30 from the printer Henrik Wetstein, in Amsterdam, to Ménage. Their principal focus is the publication of a considerable number of Ménage's works outside France, above all his monumental edition of Diogenes Laertius's Lives of the Philosophers. The letters give an engaging picture of mutual help within the community of (...) scholars, Dutch, German, English, and French, including Huguenot exiles like Le Clerc and Bayle. Ménage's are full of information from Paris; while Wetstein's, forthright and humorous, concentrate on publishing details in a sometimes stormy relationship. The great Diogenes edition encountered an extraordinary range of problems: difficulties at every stage of publication, hazardous wartime communications, and, not least, a bizarrely eccentric collaborator in Marcus Meibomius. The two correspondences provide a fascinating case-study of the practical working of international scholarly publishing in time of war, and the European network of learned correspondence in the later seventeenth century. Each letter is printed in full, accompanied by a summary, detailed commentary, and extensive annotations. (shrink)

This book offers a thorough reanalysis of Charles Darwin's Origin of Species, which for many people represents the work that alone gave rise to evolutionism. Of course, scholars today know better than that. Yet, few resist the temptation of turning to the Origin in order to support it or reject it in light of their own work. Apparently, Darwin fills the mythical role of a founding figure that must either be invoked or repudiated. The book is an invitation to move (...) beyond what is currently expected of Darwin's magnum opus. Once the rhetorical varnish of Darwin's discourses is removed, one discovers a work of remarkably indecisive conclusions. The book comprises two main theses: The Origin of Species never remotely achieved the theoretical unity to which it is often credited. Rather, Darwin was overwhelmed by a host of phenomena that could not fit into his narrow conceptual framework. In the Origin of Species, Darwin failed at completing the full conversion to evolutionism. Carrying many ill-designed intellectual tools of the 17th and 18th centuries, Darwin merely promoted a special brand of evolutionism, one that prevented him from taking the decisive steps toward an open and modern evolutionism. It makes an interesting read for biologists, historians and philosophers alike. (shrink)

John Etchemendy has argued that it is but "a fortuitous accident" that Tarski's work on truth has any signifance at all for semantics. I argue, in response, that Etchemendy and others, such as Scott Soames and Hilary Putnam, have been misled by Tarski's emphasis on definitions of truth rather than theories of truth and that, once we appreciate how Tarski understood the relation between these, we can answer Etchemendy's implicit and explicit criticisms of neo-Davidsonian semantics.

The 1920-1960 period saw the creation of the conditions for a unification of disciplines in the area of evolutionary biology under a limited number of theoretical prescriptions: the evolutionary synthesis. Whereas the sociological dimension of this synthesis was fairly successful, it was surprisingly loose when it came to the interpretation of the evolutionary mechanisms per se, and completely lacking at the level of the foundational epistemological and metaphysical commitments. Key figures such as Huxley, Simpson, Dobzhansky, and Rensch only paid lip (...) service to the conceptual dimension of the evolutionary synthesis, as they eventually realized that a number of evolutionary phenomena could not be explained by its narrow theoretical corpus. Apparently, the evolutionary synthesis constituted a premature event in the development of evolutionary biology. Not only are the real achievements of the evolutionary synthesis in need of reevaluation, but this reassessment also has important implications for the historiography of Darwinism and the current debates about the darwinian movement. (shrink)

The paper formulates and proves a strengthening of ‘Frege’s Theorem’, which states that axioms for second-order arithmetic are derivable in second-order logic from Hume’s Principle, which itself says that the number of Fs is the same as the number ofGs just in case the Fs and Gs are equinumerous. The improvement consists in restricting this claim to finite concepts, so that nothing is claimed about the circumstances under which infinite concepts have the same number. ‘Finite Hume’s Principle’ also suffices for (...) the derivation of axioms for arithmetic and, indeed, is equivalent to a version of them, in the presence of Frege’s definitions of the primitive expressions of the language of arithmetic. The philosophical significance of this result is also discussed. (shrink)

One characteristic of the transition from the Middle Paleolithic to the Upper Paleolithic in Europe was the emergence of representational charcoal drawings and engravings by Aurignacian and Gravettian artists. European Neanderthals never engaged in representational drawing during the Middle and Early Upper Paleolithic, a property that might reflect less developed visuomotor coordination. This article postulates a causal relationship between an evolved ability of anatomically modern humans to throw spears accurately while hunting and their ability to draw representational images from working (...) memory. Unlike Neanderthals, archaic and anatomically modern humans in sub-Saharan Africa adopted longer-range hunting practices using hand-cast spears as a compensation for the emergence of increasingly wary game. For Neanderthals, paleoclimatic fluctuations likely precluded consistent hunting of cold-adapted game, a property making game more approachable for close-range hunting with thrusting spears. As evidence of less historical wariness of humans, many of the species hunted by Neanderthals were eventually domesticated. Due to strong sources of natural selection on archaic and anatomically modern humans for effective hunting, the parietal cortex that integrates visual imagery and motor coordination expanded progressively, yielding the globular shape of the human cranium that is not evident in Neanderthals. To characterize how the cognitive properties employed for throwing spears and drawing line work are similar, the Upper Paleolithic drawings of animals in Chauvet cave, France, are discussed in the speculative context of how these artists engaged simultaneously in overt attention to guide their hand movements and covert attention to their mental images during the drawing process. (shrink)

Gottlob Frege's Grundgesetze der Arithmetik, or Basic Laws of Arithmetic, was intended to be his magnum opus, the book in which he would finally establish his logicist philosophy of arithmetic. But because of the disaster of Russell's Paradox, which undermined Frege's proofs, the more mathematical parts of the book have rarely been read. Richard G.

This is the first dictionary dedicated to the work of Jean Baudrillard. It explains and contextualises more than a hundred key concepts, terms, influences and topics within his thought. An essential reference for students and scholars of Baudrillard, it also serves as an authoritative overview of how his ideas have shaped a broad range of disciplines, from art, architecture, film and photography to sociology, philosophy, human geography, media studies and cultural studies. The entries are written by 35 leading Baudrillard specialists (...) from around the world, including Rex Butler, Mike Gane, Gary Genosko, Victoria Grace, Diane Rubenstein and Andrew Wernick. (shrink)

Scaffolds are fundamental to many cellular signaling pathways. In this essay, a novel class of scaffolds are proposed, whose action bears striking resemblance to kinetic proofreading. Commonly, scaffold proteins are thought to work as tethers, bringing different components of a pathway together to improve the likelihood of their interaction. However, recent studies show that the cytoskeletal scaffold, anillin, supports contractile signaling by a novel, non‐tethering mechanism that controls the membrane dissociation kinetics of RhoA. More generally, such proof‐reading‐like scaffolds are distinguished (...) from tethers by a rare type of cooperativity, manifest as a super‐linear relationship between scaffold concentration and signaling efficiency. The evidence for this hypothesis is reviewed, its conceptual ramifications are considered, and research questions for the future are discussed. (shrink)

Talk of matters ethical is, in the psychotherapeutic context, typically relegated to therapy’s preconditions and setting, i.e., to its ‘frame’. What goes on within that frame, i.e., therapeutic action itself, gets theorised in psychological rather than ethical terms. An explanation for this is the frequent therapeutic imperative to extirpate self-directed moralising. Moralising, however, constitutes but a phoney pretender to the ethical life. A true ethical sensibility instead shows itself in such moments of life as involve our offering humane recognition to (...) one another and to ourselves. Being offered such recognition not only allows a patient to internalise it as a remoralising dignity or healthy pride. It also enables the patient to know herself by animating within herself a range of virtue concepts—courage, probity, repentance, etc.—which can then function as regulative ideals for a well-functioning psyche. Inchoate anxiety now takes shape as intelligible guilt. Repentance and the repair of damaged relationships now replace blame’s repression or projection. Conscience now becomes a motor for therapeutic change. In such ways, ethical concern constitutes not merely the frame but the living flesh of the therapeutic project. (shrink)

The book begins with an overview that introduces the Theorem and the issues surrounding it, and explores how the essays that follow contribute to our understanding of those issues.

As is well-known, the formal system in which Frege works in his Grundgesetze der Arithmetik is formally inconsistent, Russell's Paradox being derivable in it. This system is, except for minor differences, full second-order logic, augmented by a single non-logical axiom, Frege's Axiom V. It has been known for some time now that the first-order fragment of the theory is consistent. The present paper establishes that both the simple and the ramified predicative second-order fragments are consistent, and that Robinson arithmetic, Q, (...) is relatively interpretable in the simple predicative fragment. The philosophical significance of the result is discussed. (shrink)

Although it is not their fault, Shors & Matzel's attempt to review the LTP and learning hypothesis suffers from there being no clear published statement of the idea. Their summary of relevant evidence is not without error, however, and it oversimplifies fundamental issues relating to NMDA receptor function. Their attentional hypothesis is intriguing but requires a better systems-level understanding of how attention contributes to cognitive function.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 10.3 (2003) 255-259 [Access article in PDF] Illnesses and Likenesses Richard G. T. Gipps IN THIS RESPONSE to Neil Pickering's paper I shall focus only on what he describes as the "strong objection" to the typical use of the likeness argument. The likeness argument, to recap, has it that we can decide whether conditions such as schizophrenia, depression, or alcoholism do or do not (...) deserve the designation of illness depending on whether they possess features which, if they occurred in physical conditions, would enable one to decide for or against the designation. To take an implausible example, if it were decided that it would be enough to describe a physical condition as an illness if it involves pain not caused through injury, then a psychological condition would be appropriately described as an illness just to the extent that it too involved such pain.In arguing against typical deployments of the likeness argument, Pickering finds that it is only on questionable initial descriptions of psychological conditions that such conditions appear to share the features that, in physical conditions, would be taken to be indicative of illness. That is to say, theorists who deploy the likeness argument to urge either the reality or unreality of mental illnesses typically presuppose what both we and they had all along hoped would be demonstrated in their argument. In terms of the above example, we might say that a certain psychological condition can count as an illness if it involves psychic pain. The concept of psychic pain is however (so the argument would have it) contestable; there exist other descriptions that make no reference to pain and in so doing fail to provide what a user of the likeness argument would need to substantiate the claim that a conception of the condition as an illness is more than a façon de parler.By way of arriving at this conclusion the following precondition for the applicability of the likeness argument (Pickering's "assumption" (2)) is insisted on: "That, with respect to the presence or absence of [those features of conditions which features decide whether or not the conditions are illnesses], a condition such as schizophrenia [must be] describable independently of the category it is assigned to." This can seem a quite reasonable restriction, for—it could be said—one can only win an argument if it is first allowed that there is actually something to argue about. That is, it is only if both partisans and detractors of the illness conception first accept a certain description of schizophrenia as spelling out what schizophrenia essentially involves that they can then progress to determining whether or not such a condition so described is or is not an illness.Yet, whereas this seems like a perfectly reasonable requirement, it is I believe uncertain whether it will always capture the form of the intuitions of adherents and detractors of the illness conception—or of the form of philosophical arguments more generally. To be sure, some philosophical discussions can perhaps be reconstructed as debates about the validity of certain inferences [End Page 255] from mutually understood premises (i.e., given X, does Y follow or not?). Yet if this were the case, then genuinely interesting philosophical arguments would probably be few and far between. If we are agreed as to the precise significance of our premises, and are not furthermore just making straightforward mistakes in reasoning, it is hard to see how or why we could all fail to arrive at the same conclusions.In the Philosophical Investigations paragraph 128 Wittgenstein wrote that "If one tried to advance theses in philosophy, it would never be possible to question them, because everyone would agree to them" (Wittgenstein 1953). Now that proposition might seem on rather weak grounds, because all one has to do to actually disprove it is merely disagree with it. But presumably Wittgenstein is rather articulating his intuition that although philosophical arguments often take the form of clashes concerning what conclusions can be drawn from what premises, most of their substance comes from a prior failure to unpack the intrinsic significance... (shrink)