Individuals frequently make use of the body and environment when engaged in a cognitive task. For example, individuals will often spontaneously physically rotate when faced with rotated objects, such as an array of words, to putatively offload the performance costs associated with stimulus rotation. We looked to further examine this idea by independently manipulating the costs associated with both word rotation and array frame rotation. Surprisingly, we found that individuals’ patterns of spontaneous physical rotations did not follow patterns of performance (...) costs or benefits associated with being physically rotated, findings difficult to reconcile with existing theories of strategy selection involving external resources. Individuals’ subjective ratings of perceived benefits, rather, provided an excellent match to the patterns of physical rotations, suggesting that the critical variable when deciding on-the-fly whether to incorporate an external resource is the participant's metacognitive beliefs regarding expected performance or the effort required for each approach. Implications for metacognition's future in theories of cognitive offloading are discussed. (shrink)

This volume looks outward to the twenty-first century and to the dynamics of this first truly global age. It asks the fundamental question: how might human societies live? In contrast to the orthodoxies of academic Philosophy and International Relations in much of the twentieth century, which marginalised or rejected the study of ethics, the contributors here believe that there is nothing more political than ethics, and therefore deserving of scholarly analysis. By exploring some of the oldest questions about duties and (...) obligations within and beyond humanly constructed boundaries, the essays help us ponder the most profound question in world politics today: who will the twenty-first century be for? (shrink)

Crowdfunding platforms have revolutionized entrepreneurial finance, with 200 billion dollars expected to be dispersed annually to entrepreneurs and small business owners by 2020. Despite the importance of this growing phenomenon, our knowledge of the dynamics of successful lending-based prosocial crowdfunding and its implications for the business ethics literature remain limited. We use a social responsibility lens to examine whether crowdfunders on a lending-based prosocial platform lend their money based on altruistic or strategic motives. Our results indicate that the dynamics of (...) prosocial lending-based crowdfunding are somewhat consistent with traditional forms of financing. Specifically, despite a prosocial setting in nature, crowdfunders tend to act strategically, positively responding to signals of quality and low risk. Notably, we also find that projects that are high on both financial and social appeal receive the highest average amount of funding. Furthermore, language on the lender’s profile indicating ability to pay is positively related to both funding success and funding amount. Our study contributes to filling the gap in the business ethics literature about the dynamics of lending-based prosocial crowdfunding, and the strategic and altruistic ethical motives that drive lenders in such endeavors. (shrink)

This paper is a response to “Inferential Evidence” by Jeffrey Dunn, in which he argues that my account of evidence is internally inconsistent, and that any form of Bayesian epistemology excludes evidence gained by inductive inference (which my account allows). In response, I show how the alleged inconsistency dissolves once the process of gaining evidence by inductive inference is fully articulated into the relevant stages, with due attention to the potential role of recognitional capacities.

Consider: -/- The Evidence Question: When, and under what conditions does an agent have proposition E as evidence (at t)? -/- Timothy Williamson's (2000) answer to this question is the well-known E = K thesis: -/- E = K: E is a member of S's evidence set at t iff S knows E at t. -/- I will argue that this answer is inconsistent with the version of Bayesianism that Williamson advocates. This is because E = K allows an (...) agent to garner evidence via inductive inference whereas standard Bayesian views disallow such a thing. Since Williamson's version of Bayesianism shares the key features with the standard Bayesian view, there is an inconsistency. (shrink)

Inference has long been a concern in epistemology, as an essential means by which we extend our knowledge and test our beliefs. Inference is also a key notion in influential psychological or philosophical accounts of mental capacities, from perception via utterance comprehension to problem-solving. Consciousness, on the other hand, has arguably been the defining interest of philosophy of mind over recent decades. Comparatively little attention, however, has been devoted to the significance of consciousness for the proper understanding of the nature (...) and role of inference. It is commonly suggested that inference may be either conscious or unconscious. Yet how unified are these various supposed instances of inference? Does either enjoy explanatory priority in relation to the other? In what ways or senses, can an inference be conscious, or fail to be conscious, and how does this matter? This book brings together original essays from established scholars and emerging theorists that illustrate how several current debates in epistemology, philosophy of psychology, and philosophy of mind can benefit from reflections on these and related questions about the significance of consciousness for inference. Contributors include: Kirk Ludwig and Wade Munroe; Michael Rescorla; Federico Bongiorno and Lisa Bortolotti; Berit Brogaard; Nicholas Allott; Jake Quilty-Dunn and Eric Mandelbaum; Corine Besson; Anders Nes; David Henderson, Terry Horgan, and Matjaž Potrč; Elijah Chudnoff; and Ram Neta. (shrink)

Timothy Williamson; VII*—Equivocation and Existence, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 88, Issue 1, 1 June 1988, Pages 109–128, https://doi.org/10.

This study provides a comprehensive reinterpretation of the meaning of Locke's political thought. John Dunn restores Locke's ideas to their exact context, and so stresses the historical question of what Locke in the Two Treatises of Government was intending to claim. By adopting this approach, he reveals the predominantly theological character of all Locke's thinking about politics and provides a convincing analysis of the development of Locke's thought. In a polemical concluding section, John Dunn argues that liberal and (...) Marxist interpretations of Locke's politics have failed to grasp his meaning. Locke emerges as not merely a contributor to the development of English constitutional thought, or as a reflector of socio-economic change in seventeenth-century England, but as essentially a Calvinist natural theologian. (shrink)

This chapter aims to attempt no more than to make some informal and unsystematic remarks on the transformation of analytic philosophy. It deals with a few sketchy remarks on the historiography of recent analytic philosophy. Writing in 1981, David Lewis described “a reasonable goal for a philosopher” as bringing one’s opinions into stable equilibrium. A natural comparison is between Lewis’s Quinean or at least post‐Quinean methodology and the methodology of Peter Strawson, Quine’s leading opponent from the tradition of ordinary language (...) philosophy. Analytic epistemology provides a good case study of the philosophical application of Gricean pragmatics outside the philosophy of language. On Michael Dummett picture of the history of philosophy, Descartes had made epistemology first philosophy, the engine for the rest of philosophy, and then Frege had replaced epistemology by the philosophy of language as first philosophy. The chapter suggests that philosophy sometimes already uses an abductive methodology and ought to use it more in the future. (shrink)

In this paper we set forth what we believe to be a relatively controversial argument, claiming that 'bioethics' needs to undergo a fundamental change in the way it is practised. This change, we argue, requires philosophical bioethicists to adopt reflexive practices when applying their analyses in public forums, acknowledging openly that bioethics is an embedded socio-cultural practice, shaped by the ever-changing intuitions of individual philosophers, which cannot be viewed as a detached intellectual endeavour. This said, we argue that in order (...) to manage the personal, social and cultural embeddedness of bioethics, philosophical bioethicists should openly acknowledge how their practices are constructed and should, in their writing, explicitly deal with issues of bias and conflict of interest, just as empirical scientists are required to do. (shrink)

Realizing the benefits of translating psychiatric genomics research into mental health care is not straightforward. The translation process gives rise to ethical challenges that are distinctive from challenges posed within psychiatric genomics research itself, or that form part of the delivery of clinical psychiatric genetics services. This article outlines and considers three distinct ethical concerns posed by the process of translating genomic research into frontline psychiatric practice and policy making. First, the genetic essentialism that is commonly associated with the genomics (...) revolution in health care might inadvertently exacerbate stigma towards people with mental disorders. Secondly, the promises of genomic medicine advance a narrative of individual empowerment. This narrative could promote a fatalism towards patients' biology in ways that function in practice to undermine patients' agency and autonomy, or, alternatively, a heightened sense of subjective genetic responsibility could become embedded within mental health services that leads to psychosocial therapeutic approaches and the clinician-patient therapeutic alliance being undermined. Finally, adopting a genomics-focused approach to public mental health risks shifting attention away from the complex causal relationships between inequitable socio-economic, political, and cultural structures and negative mental health outcomes. The article concludes by outlining a number of potential pathways for future ethics research that emphasizes the importance of examining appropriate translation mechanisms, the complementarity between genetic and psychosocial models of mental disorder, the implications of genomic information for the clinician-patient relationship, and funding priorities and resource allocation decision making in mental health. (shrink)

This paper argues that business can be helpfully conceived of as a mediating institution. Drawing upon neo-conservative theology, the author argues that mediating institutions serve a vital function in a free society to provide social justice out of an expanded civil society and provide a framework for a flourishing free market. Such institutions also nourish the attitudinal orientation of solidarity in applying the principle of subsidiarity by which self-interest becomes fulfilled through concern for others.The author further argues that businesses also (...) be conceived of as mediating institutions and thereby be held to criteria of meeting associationalneeds. In addition to normative reasons for revising the social contract so that businesses do serve the role of mediating institutions, contemporary management theories demonstrate that businesses can also meet their social obligations of creating wealth while meeting associational needs. (shrink)

First, some reminiscences. In the years 1973-80, when I was an undergraduate and then graduate student at Oxford, Michael Dummett’s formidable and creative philosophical presence made his arguments impossible to ignore. In consequence, one pole of discussion was always a form of anti-realism. It endorsed something like the replacement of truth-conditional semantics by verification-conditional semantics and of classical logic by intuitionistic logic, and the principle that all truths are knowable. It did not endorse the principle that all truths are known. (...) Nor did it mention the now celebrated argument, first published by Frederic Fitch (1963), that if all truths are knowable then all truths are known. (shrink)

Operational epistemology is, to a first approximation, the attempt to provide cognitive rules such that one is in principle always in a position to know whether one is complying with them. In Knowledge and its Limits, I argue that the only such rules are trivial ones. In this paper, I generalize the argument in several ways to more thoroughly probabilistic settings, in order to show that it does not merely demonstrate some oddity of the folk epistemological conception of knowledge. Some (...) of the generalizations involve a formal semantic framework for treating epistemic probabilities of epistemic probabilities and expectations of expectations. The upshot is that operational epistemology cannot work, and that knowledge-based epistemology has the right characteristics to avoid its problems. (shrink)

The purpose of this response piece is to summarize what is meant by “critical religion” as a contribution to the ongoing debates within the discipline, and specifically in relation to critical research on religion.

Arnon Avron has written: “Dunn-McCall logic RM is by far the best understood and the most well-behaved in the family of logics developed by the school of Anderson and Belnap.” I agree. There is the famous saying: “Do not let the perfect become the enemy of the good.” I might say: “good enough.” In this spirit, I will examine the logic R-Mingle, exploring how it is only a “semi-relevant logic” but still a paraconsistent logic. I shall discuss the history (...) of RM, and compare RM to Anderson and Belnap’s system R of relevant implication and to classical two-valued logic. There is a “consumer’s guide,” evaluating these logics as “tools,” in the light of my recent work on “Humans as Rational Toolmaking Animals.”. (shrink)

Probability is increasingly important for our understanding of the world. What is probability? How do we model it, and how do we use it? Timothy Childers presents a lively introduction to the foundations of probability and to philosophical issues it raises. He keeps technicalities to a minimum, and assumes no prior knowledge of the subject.

According to the epistemic conception of vagueness defended in Williamson 1994, what we use vague terms to say is true or false, but in borderline cases we cannot know which. Our grasp of what we say does not open its truth-value to our view. Crispin Wright 1995 offers a lively critique of this conception. A reply may help to clarify the issues.

This response takes up some of the editorial comments for further clarification and critique. My point has been that ‘politics’ is as much a modern invention as ‘religion’. We cannot understand the rhetorical function of ‘religion’ if we treat it as a stand-alone category referring to some supposed object or objects in the world. I am especially concerned here to keep in view the oscillating binary categories of which ‘religion' forms one parasitic half, and ‘politics' or ‘science' the other. This (...) critical problematization of the liberal categories of the understanding opposes and challenges their current institutionalization in the liberal academy, where they now serve the Neoliberal agenda and the reproduction of the dominant, globalising imperatives of private property. (shrink)

Saul Kripke’s work on the semantics of modal logics is well known, unlike his work on Anderson and Belnap’s system E of Entailment (a modal relevance logic), which included his proof of the decidability of its implicational fragment E_>, and also a counterexample to the conjecture of Belnap that E_> is the intersection of the implicational fragments of the relevance logic R and the modal logic S4. This led to Storrs McCall’s suggesting that the “mingle” axiom might be added to (...) E_>, and that this system might be used instead of S4_>. We give a counterexample to this conjecture. We also disprove the conjecture Anderson and Belnap attribute to McCall, in which “restricted mingle” is added to E_>. We use a modal extension of the lattice M_0 and follow ideas of Meyer. In the 1970s, Dunn showed that RM (R with the mingle axiom) can be modeled using a binary accessibility relation, like the accessibility relation in Kripke’s semantics for normal modal logics and his semantics for intuitionistic logic. Dunn also gave a variant interpretation for EM (E with the mingle axiom). We explore some other variations of these binary relational semantics. (shrink)

Why does democracy—as a word and as an idea—loom so large in the political imagination, though it has so often been misused and misunderstood? Setting the People Free starts by tracing the roots of democracy from an improvised remedy for a local Greek difficulty 2,500 years ago, through its near extinction, to its rebirth amid the struggles of the French Revolution. Celebrated political theorist John Dunn then charts the slow but insistent metamorphosis of democracy over the next 150 years (...) and its apparently overwhelming triumph since 1945. He examines the differences and the extraordinary continuities that modern democratic states share with their Greek antecedents and explains why democracy evokes intellectual and moral scorn for some, and vital allegiance from others. Now with a new preface and conclusion that ground this landmark work firmly in the present, Setting the People Free is a unique and brilliant account of an extraordinary idea. (shrink)

By employing the theoretical template provided by agency theory, this article contributes a detailed clinical analysis of a large multinational Canada-headquartered telecommunications company, Nortel. Our analysis reveals a twenty-first century norm of usual suspects: a CEO whose compensation is well above those of his peers, a dysfunctional board of directors, acts of income smoothing to preserve the confidence of volatile investors, and revelations of financial irregularities followed by a downfall. In many ways, the spectacular rise and – sudden – fall (...) of Nortel illustrates excesses of actors within, and contradictions of the system of corporate governance implied by the agency model. Furthermore, this case illustrates limitations of the agency framework in complex situations with short-term oriented investors. (shrink)

By employing the theoretical template provided by agency theory, this article contributes a detailed clinical analysis of a large multinational Canada-headquartered telecommunications company, Nortel. Our analysis reveals a twenty-first century norm of usual suspects: a CEO whose compensation is well above those of his peers, a dysfunctional board of directors, acts of income smoothing to preserve the confidence of volatile investors, and revelations of financial irregularities followed by a downfall. In many ways, the spectacular rise and – sudden – fall (...) of Nortel illustrates excesses of actors within, and contradictions of the system of corporate governance implied by the agency model. Furthermore, this case illustrates limitations of the agency framework in complex situations with short-term oriented investors. (shrink)

The main result of this paper is that KT is closed under a cancellation principle. This result extends to KTG1, but it does not extend to modal systems associated with the provability interpretation of L, such as KW and KT4Grz. Following Williamson, these results are applied to philosophical concerns about the proper form for theories of meaning, via the interpretation of L as some kind of veriflability. The cancellation principle can then be read as saying that verifilability conditions and falsiflability (...) conditions jointly determine truth conditions. (shrink)

Current approaches to cyber-security are not working. Rather than producing more security, we seem to be facing less and less. The reason for this is a multi-dimensional and multi-faceted security dilemma that extends beyond the state and its interaction with other states. It will be shown how the focus on the state and “its” security crowds out consideration for the security of the individual citizen, with detrimental effects on the security of the whole system. The threat arising from cyberspace to (...) (national) security is presented as possible disruption to a specific way of life, one building on information technologies and critical functions of infrastructures, with relatively little consideration for humans directly. This non-focus on people makes it easier for state actors to militarize cyber-security and (re-)assert their power in cyberspace, thereby overriding the different security needs of human beings in that space. Paradoxically, the use of cyberspace as a tool for national security, both in the dimension of war fighting and the dimension of mass-surveillance, has detrimental effects on the level of cyber-security globally. A solution out of this dilemma is a cyber-security policy that is decidedly anti-vulnerability and at the same time based on strong considerations for privacy and data protection. Such a security would have to be informed by an ethics of the infosphere that is based on the dignity of information related to human beings. (shrink)

Four-valued semantics proved useful in many contexts from relevance logics to reasoning about computers. We extend this approach further. A sequent calculus is defined with logical connectives conjunction and disjunction that do not distribute over each other. We give a sound and complete semantics for this system and formulate the same logic as a tableaux system. Intensional conjunction and its residuals can be added to the sequent calculus straightforwardly. We extend a simplified version of the earlier semantics for this system (...) and prove soundness and completeness. Then, with some modifications to this semantics, we arrive at a mathematically elegant yet powerful semantics that we call generalized Kripke semantics. (shrink)

In recent years, a number of prominent scholars have touted the use of litigation as an effective tool for making public health policy. For example, Stephen Teret and Michael Jacobs have asserted that product liability claims against car makers have played a significant role in reducing automobile-related injuries, Peter Jacobson and Kenneth Warner have argued that litigation against cigarette manufacturers has advanced the cause of tobacco control, and Phil Cook and Jens Ludwig have suggested that lawsuits against the firearms industry (...) can reduce gun violence. Critics have attacked this use of litigation as doing more harm than good to public health and as a misuse of the courts. This debate involves two distinct controversies: one over whether the public health benefits of litigation outweigh its costs and the other over the proper role of courts within our system of government. (shrink)

This paper defends the morality of hunting for sport, also known as recreational or trophy hunting. Using an argument from analogy, I argue that there is no morally relevant difference between trop...

This study used fMRI to investigate the neural substrates of moral cognition in health resource allocation decision problems. In particular, it investigated the cognitive and emotional processes that underpin utilitarian approaches to health care rationing such as Quality Adjusted Life Years. Participants viewed hypothetical medical and nonmedical resource allocation scenarios which described equal or unequal allocation of resources to different groups. In addition, participants were assigned to 1 of 2 treatments in which they either did or did not receive advanced (...) instructions about the principles of utilitarianism. In all cases, participants were asked to judged the proposed allocations as “fair” or “unfair.” More brain activity was observed within the superior parietal lobe, angular gyrus, middle temporal gyrus, and bilateral caudate nucleus when participants viewed scenarios depicting equal divisions of resources. Conversely, unequal resource divisions were associated with more activity in the inferior frontal gyrus and insula cortex. Furthermore, instructions about the principles of utilitarianism led to significant activation differences within the inferior frontal gyrus and the middle frontal gyrus. Significant differences in activity were also found within the inferior frontal cortex and anterior insula between medical and nonmedical scenarios. The implications for cognitive control mechanisms and the cognitive and neural bases of utilitarian ethical judgment are discussed. (shrink)

The Relevance of Higher Education: Exploring a Contested Notion, edited by Timothy L. Simpson, examines the relevance of higher education from diverse disciplinary perspectives to grasp its historical and philosophical assumptions, and its implications for the relationship bet...

Considerable effort has been devoted over the last fifteen years by faculty and administrators in numerous colleges and universities, and by organizations such as the Aspen Institute and Teagle Foundation, to enhancing business education through broad infusion of the perspectives and content of the liberal arts. The emphasis has been on integration of the social sciences and especially the humanities. The author—a natural scientist—recounts a seminal experience that motivated him to work more intensively on this initiative with his colleagues across (...) academic divisions at his home institution and beyond. He also argues for more engagement by natural science faculty in this process and examines the transdisciplinary re-visioning required to transform business teaching, learning, and practice into a new paradigm consistent with ecological reality. (shrink)