Psychological essentialism is the hypothesis that humans represent some categories as having an underlying essence that unifies members of a category and is causally responsible for their typical attributes and behaviors. Throughout the past several decades, psychological essentialism has emerged as an extremely active area of research in cognitive science. More recently, it has also attracted attention from philosophers, who put the empirical results to use in many different philosophical areas, ranging from philosophy of mind and cognitive science to social (...) philosophy. This article aims to give philosophers who are new to the topic an overview of the key empirical findings surrounding psychological essentialism, and some of the ways the hypothesis and its related findings have been discussed, extended, and applied in philosophical research. (shrink)

In this paper, I defend Non-Inferentialism about mental states, the view that we can perceive some mental states in a direct, non-inferential way. First, I discuss how the question of mental state perception is to be understood in light of recent debates in the philosophy of perception, and reconstruct Non-Inferentialism in a way that makes the question at hand—whether we can perceive mental states or not—scientifically tractable. Next, I motivate Non-Inferentialism by showing that under the assumption of the widely-accepted Principle (...) of Cognitive Economy, any account that treats mental state perception as an inferential process commits itself to an unrealistically inefficient picture of our cognitive architecture. Drawing on research in cognitive science, I will then show that my Non-Inferentialist view receives direct support by the available empirical evidence. I conclude that there is no psychologically relevant sense in which perception of mental states differs from paradigmatic cases of perception, such as the perception of ordinary objects. (shrink)

Elmer John Thiessen; Two Concepts or Two Phases of Liberal Education?, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 21, Issue 2, 30 May 2006, Pages 223–234, https.

One prominent criticism of John Rawls’s The Law of Peoples is that it treats certain non-liberal societies, what Rawls calls ‘decent hierarchical societies’, as equal participants in a just international system. Rawls claims that these non-liberal societies should be respected as equals by liberal democratic societies, even though they do not grant their citizens the basic rights of democratic citizenship. This is presented by Rawls as a consequence of liberalism’s commitment to the principle of toleration. A number of critics have (...) claimed that Rawls’s treatment of these non-liberal societies is symptomatic of a more general problem with political liberalism, namely, its reliance on toleration as its ‘fundamental principle’. Against this view, I argue that the principle of toleration should not be understood as political liberalism’s ‘fundamental principle’. This is revealed through a consideration of the normative basis of what Rawls calls the ‘Liberal Principle of Legitimacy’. A correct understanding of political liberalism’s ‘fundamental principle’, which I claim is a principle of equal ‘civic respect’ for citizens, shows that Rawls’s toleration of non-liberal societies is in fact a misapplication of political liberalism to the global domain. Moreover, I explain that political liberalism must assert that the principle of equal civic respect for citizens is the correct principle to govern the public political relations of citizens in all pluralist societies, and that most ‘decent hierarchical societies’ are pluralist in nature. Identifying political liberalism’s fundamental principle as that of equal civic respect for citizens helps to render political liberalism, in both the domestic and international domains, a more coherent and compelling approach to thinking about fundamental political issues. Key Words: civic respect • international relations • justice • political liberalism • Rawls • toleration. (shrink)

In paradigmatic cases of subtweeting, one Twitter user critically or mockingly tweets about another person without mentioning their username or their name. In this chapter, we give an account of the strategic aims of subtweeting and the mechanics through which it achieves them. We thereby hope to shed light on the distinctive communicative and moral texture of subtweeting while filling in a gap in the philosophical literature on strategic speech in social media. We first specify what subtweets are and identify (...) the central features that give rise to their strategic mechanics. Next, we draw attention to problematic aspects of subtweeting and consider conditions under which subtweeting can be justified on moral and prudential grounds. The chapter concludes by discussing practical upshots and noting avenues for future work. (shrink)

Some theorists—including Elizabeth Anderson, Gerald Gaus, and Amartya Sen—endorse versions of 'public reason' as the appropriate way to justify political decisions while rejecting 'ideal theory'. This chapter proposes that these ideas are not easily separated. The idea of public reason expresses a form of mutual 'civic' respect for citizens. Public reason justifications for political proposals are addressed to citizens who would find acceptable those justifications, and consequently would comply freely with those proposals should they become law. Hence public reasoning involves (...) 'local ideal theorizing': the justification of political proposals includes their consideration and evaluation under conditions of compliance with them by the citizens to whom those justifications are addressed. Local ideal theorizing, moreover, can lead to 'full ideal theorizing', wherein citizens outline and evaluate an amended version of their society’s 'basic structure'. This argument is illustrated by some recent empirical work on inequality within the United States. (shrink)

According to an influential research program in cognitive science, philosophy, and linguistics, there is a deep, special connection between generics and pernicious aspects of social cognition such as stereotyping. Specifically, generics are thought to exacerbate our propensity to essentialize, lead us to overgeneralize based on scarce evidence, and lead to other epistemically dubious patterns of inference. Recently, however, several studies have put empirical and theoretical pressure on some of the main tenets of this research program. The goal of this paper (...) is to bring these results together in a comprehensive narrative and systematically evaluate their impact on the hypothesis that generics have a uniquely problematic effect on our social and cognitive capacities. (shrink)

In this article I revise and defend a core feature of political liberalism, namely, the idea that principles of political justice should be limited in their scope of application to what John Rawls calls the ‘basic structure of society.’ I refer to this feature as the ‘basic structure restriction’ of political liberalism. According to my account of the basic structure restriction, the basic structure includes all and only those institutions that have a profound effect on the lives of all citizens, (...) and thus those institutions that citizens would want to organize as parts of a fair system of social cooperation. Moreover, maintaining the basic structure as a fair system of social cooperation vis-à-vis all citizens requires the exercise of coercive political power. This account of the basic structure, which I call the ‘legitimacy of coercion account,’ shows that limiting the basic structure to those institutions that are maintained by legally coercive means is not arbitrary, contrary to the claims of critics like G. A. Cohen. Furthermore, by recognizing explicitly that there exist certain institutions – and, in particular, the family – that ought to be regulated partially by coercively maintained principles, my formulation of the basic structure provides a more satisfactory account of the way in which principles of justice should apply to the family than does Rawls’s most considered account. Finally, I explain how my account of the basic structure can incorporate many of S. M. Okin’s proposed policies for promoting gender equality in society. (shrink)

Emerging research shows that undergraduate students are searching for a deeper meaning in their lives from their university studies. Leading students forth into this kind of meaningful action is the primary responsibility of the Philosopher of Education. This paper describes how such meaningful action can be accomplished by integrating the pedagogical ontology of Martin Heidegger into a course in the history and philosophy of Education. The course challenges students to engage in the cooperative project of what John Sallis calls “world (...) building” by posing strategic questions, designing appropriate content, and demonstrating artful signs. Heidegger expects his students to rethink what it means for them to be a human being. When this identity is transformed, a new calling to think and an invocation to teach that calling can flow from that instruction. This paper describes this kind of instruction in practice by specifically characterizing what a “professor of learning to think” would be. (shrink)

How feasible are conceptual engineering projects of social concepts that aim for the engineered concept to be deployed in people's ordinary conceptual practices? Predominant frameworks on the psychology of concepts that shape work on stereotyping, bias, and machine learning have grim implications for the prospects of conceptual engineers: conceptual engineering efforts are ineffective in promoting certain social‐conceptual changes. Since conceptual components that give rise to problematic social stereotypes are sensitive to statistical structures of the environment, purely conceptual change won't be (...) possible without corresponding world change. This tradition, however, tends to ignore that concepts don't only encode statistical, but also causal information. Paying attention to this feature of concepts, I argue, shows that conceptual engineering is not only possible. There is an imperative to conceptually‐engineer. (shrink)

This article explores a concept of artistic transgression I call aesthetic disobedience that runs parallel to the political concept of civil disobedience. Acts of civil disobedience break some law in order to publicly draw attention to and recommend the reform of a conflict between the commitments of a legal system and some shared commitments of a community. Likewise, acts of aesthetic disobedience break some entrenched artworld norm in order to publicly draw attention to and recommend the reform of a conflict (...) between artworld commitments and some shared commitments of a community. Considering artistic transgressions under the concept of aesthetic disobedience highlights often-overlooked features of modern artworld practices. Most significantly, it draws attention to the deliberative participation of a wide variety of citizens of the artworld, including not just artists and performers but also members of audiences, in the transformation of the rules and boundaries of the artworld itself. (shrink)

In this paper we argue that John Rawls’s account of political liberalism requires a conception of mutual respect that differs from the one advanced in A Theory of Justice. We formulate such a political liberal form of mutual respect, which we call ‘civic respect.’ We also maintain that core features of political liberalism – in particular, the ideas of ‘the burdens of judgment’ and ‘public reason’ – do not commit political liberalism to an ideal of personal autonomy, contrary to claims (...) made by various commentators. Furthermore, we maintain that teaching the idea of ‘public reason’ to students in civic education courses does not threaten their ‘ethical integrity.’ On the basis of these points, we maintain – against political and educational theorists like Eamonn Callan and Amy Gutmann – that political liberalism permits a wider range of educational policy options, including some ‘school choice’ policies, than most forms of comprehensive liberalism. We conclude the article by considering some such policies. (shrink)

Susan Okin criticizes John Rawls’s ‘political liberalism’ because it does not apply principles of justice directly to gender relations within households. We explain how one can be a ‘political liberal feminist’ by distinguishing between two kinds of justice: the first we call ‘legitimacy justice’, conceptions of which apply to the ‘legally coercive structure’ of society; the second we call ‘ethos justice’, conceptions of which apply to citizens’ ‘non-coercive’ relations. We agree with Okin that a society in which most persons act (...) in accordance with ‘gender equal’ ethos justice is morally superior to one in which most persons do not. A shared commitment to a particular conception of ethos justice, however, cannot be required by a conception of legitimacy justice. A political liberal feminist is committed to promoting gender equality with respect to both legitimacy justice and ethos justice, but recognizes that different means are necessary to do so. (shrink)

We formulate a distinctly 'political liberal' conception of mutual respect, which we call 'civic respect', appropriate for governing the public political relations of citizens in pluralist democratic societies. A political liberal account of education should aim at ensuring that students, as future citizens, learn to interact with other citizens on the basis of civic respect. While children should be required to attend educational institutions that will inculcate in them the skills and concepts necessary for them to be free and equal (...) citizens, parents should be granted as much freedom as is compatible with the requirements of civic respect to raise their children in accordance with their respective 'comprehensive doctrines' (systems of beliefs and values, including religious doctrines). We consider an objection to our position drawn from the account of upbringing recently advanced by Matthew Clayton, namely, that the conception of civic respect that we advance rests on an implausible view about the limited scope of the requirements of political justice. We develop an account of the 'basic structure of society' as the appropriate subject of political justice that can overcome this objection. (shrink)

It is widely assumed that there is a blanket norm requiring the performer to present the work “in the best light possible,” and that the performer “make the ends of the work his own” or “live the work” in performance. Through careful consideration of a particular performance, I suggest that this is an inadequate conception of a performer’s obligations. I argue that the form of identification between performer and work commonly propounded by philosophers, musicologists, music teachers, and performers alike is (...) illuminated by what I take to be an exemplary metaphor deployed by Roger Scruton: the life in music. The problems with requiring a performer to identify with and affirm a work are made vivid by careful consideration of the requirements of “living the work,” or understanding the “life in tones.” I argue that this call for identification and affirmation ultimately denies the performer the capacity for critical interpretation and amounts either to a denial of modernity or to a desire to step behind it. (shrink)

In 2014, widespread reports in the popular media that a chatbot named Eugene Goostman had passed the Turing test became further grist for those who argue that the diversionary tactics of chatbots like Goostman and others, such as those who participate in the Loebner competition, are enabled by the open-ended dialog of the Turing test. Some claim a new kind of test of machine intelligence is needed, and one community has advanced the Winograd schema competition to address this gap. We (...) argue to the contrary that implicit in the Turing test is the cooperative challenge of using language to build a practical working understanding, necessitating a human interrogator to monitor and direct the conversation. We give examples which show that, because ambiguity in language is ubiquitous, open-ended conversation is not a flaw but rather the core challenge of the Turing test. We outline a statistical notion of practical working understanding that permits a reasonable amount of ambiguity, but nevertheless requires that ambiguity be resolved sufficiently for the agents to make progress. (shrink)

Chariton’s novel, Chaereas and Callirhoe, is intensely interested not only in the emotional experience of the protagonists but also in the emotional effect the narrative has on readers. Among the many emotions depicted within the text, one stands out for its architectonic function: jealousy. Jealousy articulates the plot and propels it forward. Jealousy is also represented as a fundamentally “readerly” emotion: scenes of reading focus on the potential of written texts to stir jealous emotions. Similarly, scenes of embedded narration focus (...) on the jealous reactions of narratees. The plot achieves closure when Chaereas learns to manage his jealousy as narratee and narrator. His experience, however, has implications also for Chariton and his readers. The text’s representation of jealousy as a narrative and textual force speaks both to the experience of writing in a culture that prizes the imitation of prestigious models and to the experience of reading a text that self-consciously hybridizes those models. (shrink)

The first principle of Rawls’s conception of justice secures a set of ‘basic liberties’ equally for all citizens within the constitutional structure of society. The ‘worth’ of citizens’ liberties, however, may vary depending upon their wealth. Against Rawls, Cohen contends that an absence of money often can directly constrain citizens’ freedom and not simply its worth. This is because money often can remove legally enforced constraints on what citizens can do. Cohen’s argument – if modified to apply to citizens’ ‘moral (...) powers’ rather than ‘negative liberty’ – threatens a core feature of Rawls’s conception of justice, as it is unclear why the parties within the ‘original position’ would endorse the lexical priority of the first principle over the ‘difference principle’ if both principles similarly shape citizens’ freedom. I concede Cohen’s point regarding the relation between freedom and money but argue that it is not fatal to Rawls’s conception of justice if the ‘basic needs principle’ is understood to enjoy lexical priority over the first principle and is modified to include a right to adequate discretionary time. Nonetheless, Cohen’s argument helpfully highlights the infelicitous nature of Rawls’s terminology with respect to liberty: the basic needs principle, the first principle and the difference principle all should be understood as shaping citizens’ freedom to exercise their moral powers. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Archive, The Native American, and Jefferson’s ConvulsionsJonathan Elmer (bio)1 Saxa loquunturTrauma theory proposes that there are inscriptions that befuddle any clean divide between present and past, records that have been neither selected nor destroyed by evolutionary veto but remain in some kind of limbo, “in abeyance,” as Jacques Lacan phrases it, “awaiting attention.” In a typical maneuver, Lacan emphasizes a double meaning in the French—the “reality” awaiting (...) attention is “en souffrance” [Lacan 56]. Lacan’s wordplay injects a note of pathos into what might otherwise seem a merely cognitive or epistemological question about how, or whether, we can adequately access the historical archive, whether of individuals or of cultures. At its most basic, the psychoanalytic concept of trauma insists on this ambiguous coupling between affect and event, feeling and knowing: trauma names a happening about which one never fully knows how to feel, or feels how to know. In trauma theory—as in its various avatars in current debates about canons, about historical memory and forgetting, about cultural identity as imperiled or reclaimed or repressed—this ambiguity about the relation between affect and event becomes codified as an entanglement between the ethical and the cognitive. In “Archive Fever,” Jacques Derrida notes that the term “archive” itself harbors this ambiguity: the archive is at once the beginning and the authority, it puts into play two “orders of order,” the “sequential” and the “jussive,” “the commencement and the commandment” [9]. The divine fiat of creation is an image of the perfect coincidence of these two orders of order, while historical consciousness, in the West at least, might be understood as the progressive elaboration of the dissociation of commencement and commandment. Such a dissociation is never, perhaps, complete, which is why the question of knowing the commencement, the order of sequence of past events, always seems shadowed by an encounter with commandment, authority, ethical obligation.Derrida emphasizes a drive toward unification in the archive, what he calls the act of “consignation,” or “gathering together signs”: “Consignation aims to coordinate a single corpus, in a system or a synchrony in which all the elements articulate the unity of an ideal configuration. In an archive, there should not be any absolute dissociation, any heterogeneity or secret which could separate... or partition, in an absolute manner” [10]. Because his primary topic in this essay is Freud, Derrida goes on to demonstrate how this practice and ideal of consignation deconstruct themselves in the psychoanalytic archive. On the one hand, Freud’s innovations “made possible,” or so Derrida contends, the notion of an archive that “cannot be reduced to memory: neither to memory as conscious reserve, nor to memory as rememoration, as act of recalling” [58]. On the other hand, and despite his development of this concept of an immemorial archive, however, Freud “was incessantly [End Page 5] tempted to redirect the original interest he had for the psychic archive toward archeology.” Derrida quotes an astonishing passage from the 1896 paper “The Aetiology of Hysteria,” in which Freud indulges in the fantasy that never leaves psychoanalysis, and that evinces the profound implication of this theory with other archival projects, here the imperialist dramas of ethnography. The fantasy is one in which “stones talk”:Imagine that an explorer arrives in a little-known region where his interest is aroused by an expanse of ruins, with remains of walls, fragments of columns, and tablets with half-effaced and unreadable inscriptions. He may content himself with inspecting what lies exposed to view, with questioning the inhabitants—perhaps semi-barbaric people—who live in the vicinity, about what tradition tells them of the history and meaning of these archaeological remains, and with noting down what they tell him—and he may then proceed on his journey. But he may act differently. He may have brought picks, shovels and spades with him, and he may set the inhabitants to work with these implements. Together with them he may start upon the ruins, clear away the rubbish, and, beginning from the visible remains, uncover what is buried. If his work is crowned with success, the discoveries are self-explanatory: the ruined walls are part of the ramparts of... (shrink)

We live in polarizing times. In this book Elmer Thiessen dares to suggest that the solution to the deep divides in our contemporary world and in the church is not to be found in more information, more education, more rationality, or more critical thinking. Instead, we need to cultivate intellectual virtues, such as the love of knowledge and truth, intellectual humility, and committed openness. The penultimate chapter treats intellectual virtues that are more relational in nature--intellectual forbearance, fairmindedness, and intellectual (...) courage. The book explores the biblical and theological grounding of each intellectual virtue and reveals its practical importance for our fractious times, making use of concrete examples throughout. Each of the central chapters begins with a questionnaire aimed at promoting self-examination and stimulating reflection about the virtues and vices under consideration. This is a book for the thoughtful Christian reader aimed at transforming the way we think. (shrink)

This book is an examination of the philosophy of G.E. Moore, one of the foremost Anglo-American, analytic philosophers of the twentieth century. It focuses on Moore's epistemological writings and aims to present an exhaustive overview of Moore's work on analytic epistemology. This book seeks to redress an imbalance in analytic philosophy by making a case for the relevance of analytically oriented historical studies to contemporary problems.

Why do religious people attempt to persuade others of their beliefs? What are the current objections to the religious practice of proselytizing? Is proselytizing an ethically defensible practice? Are there kinds of proselytizing activities that are ethically questionable? Elmer John Thiessen responds to questions like these in an effort to provide a philosophical defense of proselytization, or religious persuasion, as an ethical practice. Thiessen examines and refutes current cultural and academic objections to religious proselytizing and offers a thorough ethics (...) of evangelism. (shrink)

This book defends Christian nurture and education against the frequently made charge of indoctrination. It argues that Christian education is fully compatible with a liberal education.

Featuring nine new articles chosen by coeditor Steven M. Cahn, the third edition of E. D. Klemke's The Meaning of Life offers twenty-two insightful selections that explore this fascinating topic. The essays are primarily by philosophers but also include materials from literary figures and religious thinkers. As in previous editions, the readings are organized around three themes. In Part I the articles defend the view that without faith in God, life has no meaning or purpose. In Part II the selections (...) oppose this claim, defending instead a nontheistic, humanistic alternative--that life can have meaning even in the absence of theistic commitment. In Part III the contributors ask whether the question of the meaning of life is itself meaningful. The third edition adds substantial essays by Moritz Schlick, Joel Feinberg, and John Kekes as well as selections from the writings of Louis P. Pojman, Emil L. Fackenheim, Robert Nozick, Susan Wolf, and Steven M. Cahn. The only anthology of its kind, The Meaning of Life: A Reader, Third Edition, is ideal for courses in introduction to philosophy, human nature, and the meaning of life. It also offers general readers an accessible and stimulating introduction to the subject. (shrink)

It is often argued that religious schools and colleges promote intolerance, divisiveness, and fanaticism and that they violate the principle of academic freedom. Some writers also suggest that economic support for religious schools by the state violates the principle of the separation of church and state. Elmer Thiessen provides a philosophical defence of religious schools and colleges against these and other standard objections. He concludes with a radical proposal: a pluralistic educational system will better prepare students for citizenship in (...) pluralist liberal democracies than a monopolistic state-maintained school system. In placing his argument within the context of liberal-democratic values Thiessen gives concrete examples of objections to religious schools and offers practical suggestions that follow from the philosophical treatment of the problem. In Defence of Religious Schools and Colleges bridges the gap between philosophical argument and educational practice. It will be of interest not only to philosophers and educational theorists but also to practitioners in education. Academics, policy makers, political theorists, lay-people, teachers, administrators, and parents – those who object to religious schools and colleges and those who find themselves trying to answer the objections – will benefit from reading this book. (shrink)

Social stimuli grab our attention: we attend to them in an automatic and bottom-up manner, and ascribe them a higher degree of saliency compared to non-social stimuli. However, it has rarely been investigated how variations in attention affect the processing of social stimuli, although the answer could help us uncover details of social cognition processes such as action understanding. In the present study, we examined how changes to bottom-up attention affects neural EEG-responses associated with intentional action processing. We induced an (...) increase in bottom-up attention by using hypnosis. We recorded the electroencephalographic µ-wave suppression of hypnotized participants when presented with intentional actions in first and third person perspective in a video-clip paradigm. Previous studies have shown that the µ-rhythm is selectively suppressed both when executing and observing goal-directed motor actions; hence it can be used as a neural signal for intentional action processing. Our results show that neutral hypnotic trance increases µ-suppression in highly suggestible participants when they observe intentional actions. This suggests that social action processing is enhanced when bottom-up attentional processes are predominant. Our findings support the Social Relevance Hypothesis, according to which social action processing is a bottom-up driven attentional process, and can thus be altered as a function of bottom-up processing devoted to a social stimulus. (shrink)

English philosopher George Edward Moore (1873-1958) developed the chief modern theory of ethics, Ideal Utilitarianism. A Defense of Realism examines Moore's conception of philosophy and his views on the importance of metaphysics, presenting and evaluating the Principia Ethica author's criticisms and refutations of certain philosophical positions, especially idealism, naive realism, phenomenalism, and pragmatism. Klemke gives a detailed analysis and an appraisal of Moore's defense of common sense, and concentrates on Moore's realism, beginning with the reality of entities in the natural (...) universe, and proofs of the external world. Finally, Klemke analyzes and enhances through personal argument Moore's views on the reality of various nonnatural entities crucial to Moore's defense of philosophical realism. (shrink)

Elmer J Thiessen; Indoctrination and Doctrines, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 16, Issue 1, 30 May 2006, Pages 3–17, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-.