In this paper, I contend that Brandom’s interpretive oversights leave his inferentialist program vulnerable to Hegelian critique. My target is Brandom’s notion of “conceptual realism,” or the thesis that the structure of mind-independent reality mimics the structure of thought. I show, first, that the conceptual realism at the heart of Brandom’s empiricism finds root in his interpretation of Hegel. I then argue that conceptual realism is incompatible with Hegel’s thought, since the Jena Phenomenology, understood as a “way of despair,” includes (...) a critique of the philosophical framework upon which conceptual realism relies. Finally, I offer the Hegelian critique of Brandom that results from these textual infidelities. (shrink)

This paper offers a limited defence of two seemingly disparate interpretive approaches to free thought in Hegel’s JenaPhenomenology of Spirit. On the one hand, I defend the view of so-called post-Kantian Hegelians, that Kant’s synthetic unity of apperception is central to Hegel’s account of free thinking in thePhenomenology. On the other hand, I argue that the notions ofdas Offenein Heidegger’sVom Wesen der WahrheitandAb-Lösungin his 1930/31 lectures on Hegel’sPhenomenologyare no less crucial to an understanding of free thought in Hegel’s work. I (...) show that absolution is a condition for the possibility ofdas Offene, which is a condition for the possibility of apperception in its reflexive capacity. (shrink)

I criticize the normative and interpretive practices of recognition that underlie discursive exchanges within Robert Brandom’s so-called ‘game of giving and asking for reasons.’ The central criticisms illuminate the shortcomings of Brandom’s approach on both descriptive and prescriptive grounds. As concerns the former, I show that Brandom’s account of the practices of discursive recognition cannot explain the means by which discursive beings acquire facility with the norms that guide their discursive dealings with others. As concerns the latter, I argue that (...) a Brandomian recognizer would fail to discursively recognize others that she, by rights, ought to so recognize. I then show how Brandom’s commitment to this form of discursive recognition undermines his commitment to the broadly Kantian picture of discursive freedom and constraint by norms. (shrink)

This paper concerns Hegel's early treatment of the productive imagination in his 1803–1804 Faith and Knowledge. I show how he articulates that activity in terms of a pair of speculative unities, which solve lingering problems of self-knowledge and self-constitution from Kant's B-deduction. On the one hand, I argue that the familiar unity of spontaneity and receptivity makes possible knowledge of the moment of self-positing. On the other hand, I contend that Hegel's talk of imagination as both an “organic idea” and (...) an “intuitive intellect” refers to a self-constituting capacity that intellects like ours possess. I show that self-constitution is possible, for Hegel, only in so far as intellects like ours possess a capacity to unify possibility and actuality in thought, or to think themselves into being. (shrink)

American psychologist and pragmatist philosopher James (1842- 1910) is generally considered too individualistic to have had any interest in politics, but Miller argues that political concerns were in fact central to his intellectual work. He finds in James a theorist of action, explores the complexities of his theory, and related his thought to Miller's own experience as a political activist and scholar. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR.

_ Source: _Volume 23, Issue 2, pp 161 - 195 The Greek tradition of political philosophy, with its prominent focus on the forms of government, should be distinguished from the discourse typical of many rabbinic sources, with its concern for collective goals. This discourse commonly deploys broad, mid-level goals to mediate between abstract theology and practical law. Among these goals, yishuv medinah focuses on the economic and social development of a region or district, articulating the character of local needs. This (...) is compared to related goals—the settling of the world and the ordering of the world —and contrasted with Aristotle’s approach, which in many ways typifies the Greek tradition. (shrink)

Plato's 'Republic' constructs an ideal city composed of three parts, parallel to the soul's reason, appetites, and fighting spirit. But confusion and controversy have long surrounded this three-way division and especially the prominent role it assigns to angry and competitive spirit. In Plato's Three-fold City and Soul, Joshua I. Weinstein argues that, for Plato, determination and fortitude are not just expressions of our passionate or emotional natures, but also play an essential role in the rational agency of persons and (...) polities. In the Republic's account, human life requires spirited courage as much as reasoned thought and nutritious food. The discussion ranges over Plato's explication of the logical and metaphysical foundations of justice and injustice, the failures of incomplete and dysfunctional cities, and the productive synergy of our tendencies and capacities that becomes fully evident only in the justice of a self-sufficient political community. (shrink)

In the Euthydemus, Socrates is presented as an eager student of seemingly trivial arts, earning derision both for desiring to master the peculiar art of Euthydemus and Dionysodorus and for studying the harp in his old age. I explain Socrates’ interest in these apparently trivial arts by way of a novel reading of the first protreptic argument, suggesting that the wisdom Socrates praises is complex in nature, securing the happiness of its possessor only insofar as it is composed of both (...) ordinary productive knowledge and ethically productive knowledge. This reading of the first protreptic makes sense of the otherwise perplexing second protreptic, explaining why Socrates is so keen to identify an art which makes what it uses. Wisdom acts as a reliable source of benefit only insofar as it is a complex composed of multiple different arts and types of knowledge. These arts, however, can only be acquired one at a time – if no single art is capable of combining the powers of both ordinary productive knowledge and ethically productive knowledge in the way that wisdom as a whole does, then the pursuit of wisdom will fail to offer reliable benefit despite the reliably beneficial nature of its possession. Thus, it is appropriate for the Euthydemus to conclude with Socrates telling Crito to take courage and pursue philosophy despite the seemingly harmful effects that its pursuit has had on others. Euthydemus and Dionysodorus represent the danger facing the aspiring philosopher, the possibility of being ruined by independent possession of the particular kind of ordinary productive knowledge on which philosophical activity depends – verbal mastery, the grasp of subtle conceptual distinctions needed both to argumentatively reveal reality and to argumentatively obscure it, to reliably equivocate and to reliably avoid equivocation. (shrink)

Legal inference is fundamental for building and verifying hypotheses in police investigations. In this study, we build a Natural Language Inference dataset in Korean for the legal domain, focusing on criminal court verdicts. We developed an adversarial hypothesis collection tool that can challenge the annotators and give us a deep understanding of the data, and a hypothesis network construction tool with visualized graphs to show a use case scenario of the developed model. The data is augmented using a combination of (...) Easy Data Augmentation approaches and round-trip translation, as crowd-sourcing might not be an option for datasets with sensible data. We extensively discuss challenges we have encountered, such as the annotator’s limited domain knowledge, issues in the data augmentation process, problems with handling long contexts and suggest possible solutions to the issues. Our work shows that creating legal inference datasets with limited resources is feasible and proposes further research in this area. (shrink)

BackgroundAn increasing number of studies utilize intracranial electrophysiology in human subjects to advance basic neuroscience knowledge. However, the use of neurosurgical patients as human research subjects raises important ethical considerations, particularly regarding informed consent and undue influence, as well as subjects’ motivations for participation. Yet a thorough empirical examination of these issues in a participant population has been lacking. The present study therefore aimed to empirically investigate ethical concerns regarding informed consent and voluntariness in Parkinson’s disease patients undergoing deep brain (...) stimulator (DBS) placement who participated in an intraoperative neuroscience study.MethodsTwo semi-structured 30-minute interviews were conducted preoperatively and postoperatively via telephone. Interviews assessed participants’ motivations for participation in the parent intraoperative study, recall of information presented during the informed consent process, and participants’ postoperative reflections on the research study.ResultsTwenty-two participants (mean age = 60.9) completed preoperative interviews at a mean of 7.8 days following informed consent and a mean of 5.2 days prior to DBS surgery. Twenty participants completed postoperative interviews at a mean of 5 weeks following surgery. All participants cited altruism or advancing medical science as “very important” or “important” in their decision to participate in the study. Only 22.7% (n = 5) correctly recalled one of the two risks of the study. Correct recall of other aspects of the informed consent was poor (36.4% for study purpose; 50.0% for study protocol; 36.4% for study benefits). All correctly understood that the study would not confer a direct therapeutic benefit to them.ConclusionEven though research coordinators were properly trained and the informed consent was administered according to protocol, participants demonstrated poor retention of study information. While intraoperative studies that aim to advance neuroscience knowledge represent a unique opportunity to gain fundamental scientific knowledge, improved standards for the informed consent process can help facilitate their ethical implementation. (shrink)

(2013). Brandom and Gadamer on the Hermeneutical (Il)legitimacy of Rational Reconstruction. International Journal of Philosophical Studies. ???aop.label???

This article offers a series of critical theorizations on the biopolitical dimensions of methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), with specific attention to what has recently been referred to in the United States as the ‘MRSA Epidemic’. In particular, we reflect on the proliferation of biomedical discourses around the ‘spread’, and the pathogenic potentialities, of community-associated methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (CA-MRSA). We turn to the work of Roberto Esposito and Jean-Luc Nancy to better make sense of how, during this immunological crisis, the individualized (...) fleshy and fluid body is articulated to dimensions of community and corporeal proximity; the body is thus conceived in popular biopolitical framings as a site of transmission, inoculation, and isolation – as a living ecological and pathological vessel. We give emphasis to the spatial relations of flesh, namely in how biomedical ‘experts’ have sought to (bio-)technologize spaces of heightened communal bodily contact (such as playgrounds or gymnasia). (shrink)

It took time for Hegel’s star to rise. But once it did, it rose quickly. In a span of two years, Hegel went from teaching at a Gymnasium, relying on the benevolence of friend and professional conta...

Hegel regarded his Enyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences as the work which most fully presented the scope of his philosophical system and its method. It is somewhat surprising, therefore, that scholars regularly accord it only a secondary status. This Critical Guide seeks to change that, with sixteen newly-written essays from an international group of leading Hegel scholars that shed much-needed light on both the whole and the parts of the Encyclopedia system. Topics include the structure and aim of the Encyclopedia (...) system as a whole, the differences between the greater and lesser Logics, the role of nature in Hegel's thinking, and the shapes of absolute spirit as art, religion, and philosophy. This book will be invaluable to students and scholars with an interest in Hegel and the history of philosophy. (shrink)

This book discusses the most comprehensive of Hegel's works: his long-neglected Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences in Outline. It contains original essays by internationally renowned and emerging voices in Hegel scholarship. Their contributions elucidate fundamental aspects of Hegel's encyclopedic system with an eye to its contemporary relevance. The book thus addresses system-level claims about Hegel's unique conceptions of philosophy, philosophical "science" and its method, dialectic, speculative thinking, and the way they relate to both Hegelian and contemporary notions of nature, history, (...) religion, freedom, and cultural praxis. (shrink)

Ageing is associated with a decline in autophagy and elevated reactive oxygen species (ROS), which can breach the capacity of antioxidant systems. Resulting oxidative stress can cause further cellular damage, including DNA breaks and protein misfolding. This poses a challenge for longevous organisms, including humans. In this review, we hypothesise that in the course of human evolution selective autophagy receptors (SARs) acquired the ability to sense and respond to localised oxidative stress. We posit that in the vicinity of protein aggregates (...) and dysfunctional mitochondria oxidation of key cysteine residues in SARs induces their oligomerisation which initiates autophagy. The degradation of damaged cellular components thus could reduce ROS production and restore redox homeostasis. This evolutionarily acquired function of SARs may represent one of the biological adaptations that contributed to longer lifespan. Inversely, loss of this mechanism can lead to age‐related diseases associated with impaired autophagy and oxidative stress. (shrink)

We chart how neuroscience and philosophy have together advanced our understanding of moral judgment with implications for when it goes well or poorly. The field initially focused on brain areas associated with reason versus emotion in the moral evaluations of sacrificial dilemmas. But new threads of research have studied a wider range of moral evaluations and how they relate to models of brain development and learning. By weaving these threads together, we are developing a better understanding of the neurobiology of (...) moral judgment in adulthood and to some extent in childhood and adolescence. Combined with rigorous evidence from psychology and careful philosophical analysis, neuroscientific evidence can even help shed light on the extent of moral knowledge and on ways to promote healthy moral development. (shrink)

Experimental philosophy has emerged as a very specific kind of response to an equally specific way of thinking about philosophy, one typically associated with philosophical analysis and according to which philosophical claims are measured, at least in part, by our intuitions. Since experimental philosophy has emerged as a response to this way of thinking about philosophy, its philosophical significance depends, in no small part, on how significant the practice of appealing to intuitions is to philosophy. In this paper, I defend (...) the significance of experimental philosophy by defending the significance of intuitions—in particular, by defending their significance from a recent challenge advanced by Timothy Williamson. (shrink)

Food charity in the United States has grown into a critical appendage of agro-food supply chains. In 2016, 4.5 billion pounds of food waste was diverted through a network of 200 regional food banks, a fivefold increase in just 20 years. Recent global trade disruptions and the COVID-19 pandemic have further reinforced this trend. Economic geographers studying charitable food networks argue that its infrastructure and moral substructure serve to revalue food waste and surplus labor in the capitalist food system. The (...) political–legal framework undergirding this revaluation process however is still poorly understood. Drawing on a 6-year institutional ethnography of the food banking economy in West Virginia, this paper takes a supply-side approach to examine the material and moral values driving the expansion of food waste recovery as hunger relief. Empirically, it focuses on the laws, contracts and fiscal incentives regulating charitable food procurement at the U.S. Department of Agriculture and Feeding America. The assemblage of government agencies, private businesses and non-profit organizations enrolled into this gift economy at different scales I argue, serves to enclose food waste into a public–private governance structure that regulates food surpluses and ensures these will not disrupt the scarcity logics driving profitability along primary food circuits. (shrink)

Introduction Marxism did not come to China simply as one of the many waves from abroad that inundated Chinese intellectual life during the late Ch'ing ...

One of the most pressing ethical challenges facing phase I cancer research centres is the process of informed consent. Historically, most scholarship has been devoted to redressing therapeutic misconception, that is, the conflation of the nature and goals of research with those of therapy. While therapeutic misconception continues to be a major ethical concern, recent scholarship has begun to recognise that the informed consent process is more complex than merely a transfer of information and therefore cannot be evaluated only according (...) to how well an individual understands such information. Other components of decision-making operate independently of understanding and yet still may compromise the quality of informed consent. Notable among these components is unrealistic optimism, an event-specific belief that one has a better chance of receiving benefit than others similarly situated. In this article, we consider responses to interviews with parents who had recently completed an informed consent conference for enrolling their child in a phase I cancer clinical trial to examine how this influence manifests and how investigators might address it during informed consent. (shrink)

The National Health Service (NHS) was the first healthcare system globally to declare ambitions to become net carbon zero. To achieve this, a shift away from metered-dose inhalers which contain powerful greenhouse gases is necessary. Many patients can use dry powder inhalers which do not contain greenhouse gases and are equally effective at managing respiratory disease. This paper discusses the ethical issues that arise as the NHS attempts to mitigate climate change. Two ethical issues that pose a barrier to moving (...) away from metered-dose inhalers are considered: patients who decline an inhaler with a smaller carbon footprint and increased cost. I argue that while a patient is not morally justified in refusing a more environmentally sustainable inhaler due to the expected harms, a doctor may still prescribe a metered-dose inhaler if they believe that switching without consent might undermine trust or substantially worsen the patient’s health. Turning to cost, I argue that the imperative to combat climate change means the NHS should accept small increased financial costs for lower carbon inhalers, even though this provides no additional direct benefit for the patient. I then go on to consider the implications of the preceding analysis for policy and practice. I argue for a policy that minimises the impact of inhalers on the climate by advocating for a principle of environmental prescribing and explore decision-making in practice. While the arguments here pertain primarily to inhalers, the discussion has broader implications for debates around healthcare’s responsibility to be environmentally sustainable. (shrink)

In this interesting paper, Lavazza and Massimini draw attention to a subset of the ethical issues surrounding the development and potential uses of cerebral organoids. This subset concerns the possibility that cerebral organoids may one day develop phenomenal consciousness, and thereby qualify as conscious subjects—that there may one day be something it is like to be an advanced cerebral organoid. This possibility may feel outlandish. But as Lavazza and Massimini demonstrate, the science of organoids is moving fast, and I agree (...) that the ethical issues now deserve careful scrutiny. The ethical issues are not entirely separate from epistemological issues concerning how certain we could ever be (a) that an organoid is conscious or (b) that regarding any conscious state or process, an organoid is capable of tokening that state or undergoing that process. Lavazza and Massimini’s approach is theory-based—they claim that ‘we need a general theory of consciousness that attempts to explain what experience is and what type of physical systems can have it’. I am not convinced, however, that a theory of consciousness is what we need. Nor am I convinced that detecting the presence of consciousness is the most important moral issue. Let me say a word regarding theories of consciousness first. In general, to the extent that pervasive disagreement characterises expert discussion of some phenomenon P, one should modify one’s credence downward regarding any theory of the nature of P. In my view, this is the case regarding expert discussion of consciousness. Although most philosophers are confident that consciousness is an entirely physical phenomenon, a …. (shrink)

Background: Notwithstanding near-universal agreement on the theoretical importance of truthfulness, empirical research has documented gaps between ethical norms and physician behaviors. Although prior research has explored situations in which physicians may not be truthful with patients, it has focused on contexts within specialty practice. In this article, we report on a qualitative study of truthfulness in primary care. Methods: We conducted a qualitative study during December 2014–March 2015 involving both focus groups and in-depth, semistructured interviews with 32 primary care physicians (...) from the Boston, MA, and Baltimore, MD, metro areas in three specialties: internal medicine, family practice, and pediatrics. Interviews and focus groups were led using a semistructured guide, which explored situations in which primary care physicians find it difficult to be honest with patients; factors shaping truthfulness; and rationales for truthful and untruthful communication. Results: While physicians described outright lying to patients as rare, other deviations from truthfulness were not uncommon, including slanting and deliberately withholding information. Physicians described a range of factors as influencing truthfulness, from patient-level characteristics such as educational background to societal considerations including avoiding unnecessary tests and procedures. Physicians described truthfulness as an ethical requirement, deviations from which required further justification. Perceived justifications included promoting patient well-being and avoiding harm. Conclusions: Our results suggest a potential need to augment opportunities for training in “everyday ethics” challenges, such as the appropriateness of deception in response to patient requests for inappropriate tests or pain medications. Furthermore, they indicate that, in various circumstances encountered in primary care, physicians perceive other moral duties as potentially in conflict with the duty of truthfulness. Further ethical analysis should focus on identifying when deviations from complete truthfulness do and do not serve patients' interests, to guide physicians in striking a reasonable balance among principles of medical ethics that may conflict with one another. (shrink)

In “Epistemic Modals,” Seth Yalcin argues that what explains the deficiency of sentences containing epistemic modals of the form ‘p and it might be that not-p’ is that sentences of this sort are strictly contradictory, and thus are not instances of a Moore-paradox as has been previous suggested. Benjamin Schnieder, however, argues in his Yalcin’s explanation of these sentences’ deficiency turns out to be insufficiently general, as it cannot account for less complex but still defective sentences, such as ‘Suppose it (...) might be raining.’ Consequently, Schnieder proposes his own, expressivist treatment of epistemic modals which he thinks can explain the deficiency of both the original sentence type as well as more complex cases of embedded sentences containing epistemic modals. In this study, I argue that although Schnieder is right to draw our attention to the explanatory failure of Yalcin’s account, we aren’t forced to adopt Schnieder’s expressivist account of epistemic modals. I defend instead a contextualist-friendly alternative which explains the deficiencies of all the relevant sentence types, while avoiding both the defects of Yalcin’s account and the intuitive costs of expressivism. (shrink)

The last 15 years or so has seen the development of a fascinating new area of cognitive science: the cognitive science of religion (CSR). Scientists in this field aim to explain religious beliefs and various other religious human activities by appeal to basic cognitive structures that all humans possess. The CSR scientific theories raise an interesting philosophical question: do they somehow show that religious belief, more specifically belief in a god of some kind, is irrational? In this paper I investigate (...) this question and argue that CSR does not show that belief in god is irrational. (shrink)

Facial electromyography (EMG) was used to investigate patterns of facial mimicry in response to partial facial expressions in two contexts that differ in how naturalistic and socially significant the faces are. Experiment 1 presented participants with either the upper- or lower-half of facial expressions and used a forced-choice emotion categorisation task. This task emphasises cognition at the expense of ecological and social validity. Experiment 2 presented whole heads and expressions were occluded by clothing. Additionally, the emotion recognition task is more (...) open-ended. This context has greater social validity. We found mimicry in both experiments, however mimicry differed in terms of which emotions were mimicked and the extent to which the mimicry involved muscle sites that were not observed. In the more cognitive context, there was relatively more motor matching (i.e. mimicking only what was seen). In the more socially valid context, participants were less likely to mimic only what they saw – and instead mimicked what they knew. Additionally, participants mimicked anger in the cognitive context but not the social context. These findings suggest that mimicry involves multiple mechanisms and that the more social the context, the more likely it is to reflect a mechanism of social regulation. (shrink)

Recently the idea that race is biologically real has gained more traction. One argument against this claim is that the populations identified by science do not sufficiently map onto the concept of race as deployed in the relevant racial discourse, namely folk racial discourse. Call that concept the concept of race-f. Robin Andreasen (2005) argues that this "mismatch" criticism fails, on a variety of grounds including: ordinary folk semantically defer to scientists; scientists can disagree about facts; historians disagree about the (...) origins of the term 'race'; 'race' has had a diversity of meanings; some of those meanings privileges geography over visible traits; and that the scientific definition of 'race' is autonomous from the folk definition of 'race.' It is argued here that all of these responses to the mismatch criticism do not succeed, and that the last in fact vindicates it. Similar arguments to the last, autonomy argument, are also examined. (shrink)

In response to the claim that the properties typically used to distinguish System 1 from System 2 crosscut one another, Carruthers, Evans, and Stanovich have abandoned the System 1/System 2 distinction. Evans and Stanovich both opt for a dual-process theory, according to which Type-1 processes are autonomous and Type-2 processes use working memory and involve cognitive decoupling. Carruthers maintains a two-system account, according to which there is an intuitive system and a reflective system. I argue that these defenses of dual-process (...) theory face two problems. First, as pointed out by Sloman, these new dual-process theories cast the net of “reasoning” too wide. Second, and more importantly, this singular distinction cannot accomplish the explanatory work needed to support dual-process theory. These theorists must fall back on using various properties from the Standard Menu in explanations, thereby committing these accounts to a “Standard View” that they had hoped to avoid. Thus, these theorists face a.. (shrink)

Some authors have attempted to defend Leibniz’s Identity of Indiscernibles through weak discernibility. The idea is that if there is a symmetric, nonreflexive physical relation that holds between two particles, then those particles cannot be identical. In this article I focus only on Muller and Saunders’s account and argue that the means by which they achieve weak discernibility is not through a quantum mechanical observable but an alternate mathematical construction that is both unorthodox and incomplete.

One of Laurence BonJour’s main arguments for the existence of the a priori is an argument that a priori justification is indispensable for making inferences from experience to conclusions that go beyond experience. This argument has recently come under heavy fire from Albert Casullo, who has dubbed BonJour’s argument, “The Generality Argument.” In this paper I (i) defend the Generality Argument against Casullo’s criticisms, and (ii) develop a new, more plausible, version of the Generality Argument in response to some other (...) objections of my own. Two of these objections stem out of BonJour’s failing to fully consider the importance of the distinction between being justified in believing that an inference is good and being justified in making an inference. The final version of the argument that I develop sees the Generality Argument as one part of a cumulative case argument for the existence of a priori justification, rather than as a stand-alone knock-down argument. (shrink)

Epistemic trespassers are experts who pass judgment on questions in fields where they lack expertise. What’s wrong with epistemic trespassing? I identify several limitations with a seminal analysis to isolate three desiderata on an answer to this question and motivate my own answer. An answer should explain what’s wrong in the cases that motivate inquiry into epistemic trespassing, should explain what’s wrong with epistemic trespassing even if trespassers do not acknowledge their trespassing, and these explanations should not be independent of (...) the fact that epistemic trespassing involves expertise. I also independently motivate a fourth desideratum: this account should explain the evaluative difference between different kinds of trespassing. To satisfy these desiderata, I develop a social analysis: epistemic trespassing is wrong because it is an abuse of expert authority that neglects novice vulnerabilities. (shrink)

What are the folk-conceptual connections between free will and consciousness? In this paper I present results which indicate that consciousness plays central roles in folk conceptions of free will. When conscious states cause behavior, people tend to judge that the agent acted freely. And when unconscious states cause behavior, people tend to judge that the agent did not act freely. Further, these studies contribute to recent experimental work on folk philosophical affiliation, which analyzes folk responses to determine whether folk views (...) are consistent with the view that free will and determinism are incompatible (incompatibilism) or with the opposite view (compatibilism). Conscious causation of behavior tends to elicit pro-free will judgments, even when the causation takes place deterministically. Thus, when controlling for consciousness, many folk seem to be compatibilists. However, participants who disagree with the deterministic or cognitive scientific descriptions given of human behavior tend to give incompatibilist responses. (shrink)

Epistemic trespassing, science denial, refusal to guard against bias, mishandling higher-order evidence, and the development of vice are troubling intellectual behaviors. In this paper, I advance work done by psychologists on moral self-licensing to show how all of these behaviors can be explained in terms of a parallel phenomenon of epistemic self-licensing. The paper situates this discussion at the intersection of three major epistemological projects: epistemic explanation and intervention (the project of explaining troubling intellectual phenomena in the hopes of deriving (...) ameliorative strategies), hostile epistemology (the study of how intellectual vulnerabilities might be exploited), and the promise of higher- order evidence (the hope that higher-order evidence leads to epistemic improvement). Analyzing epistemic licensing allows us to explain and offer modest interventions aimed at mitigating these behaviors, while illuminating exploitable vulnerabilities and tempering optimism about the promise of higher-order evidence. -/- . (shrink)