Four experiments examined people’s folk-psychological concept of intentional action. The chief question was whether or not _evaluative _considerations — considerations of good and bad, right and wrong, praise and blame — played any role in that concept. The results indicated that the moral qualities of a behavior strongly influence people’s judgements as to whether or not that behavior should be considered ‘intentional.’ After eliminating a number of alternative explanations, the author concludes that this effect is best explained by the hypothesis (...) that evaluative considerations do play some role in people’s concept of intentional action.<b> </b>. (shrink)

It is widely believed that the primary function of folk psychology lies in the prediction, explanation and control of behavior. A question arises, however, as to whether folk psychology has also been shaped in fundamental ways by the various other roles it plays in people’s lives. Here I approach that question by considering one particular aspect of folk psychology – the distinction between intentional and unintentional behaviors. The aim is to determine whether this distinction is best understood as a tool (...) used in prediction, explanation and control or whether it has been shaped in fundamental ways by some other aspect of its use. (shrink)

An extremely brief (3 page) review of recent work on the ways in which people's moral judgments can influence their use of folk-psychological concepts.

Our interest in this paper is to drive a wedge of contention between two different programs that fall under the umbrella of “experimental philosophy”. In particular, we argue that experimental philosophy’s “negative program” presents almost as significant a challenge to its “positive program” as it does to more traditional analytic philosophy.

Experimental philosophy is a comparatively new field of research, and it is only natural that many of the key methodological questions have not even been asked, much less answered. In responding to the comments of our critics, we therefore find ourselves brushing up against difficult questions about the aims and techniques of our whole enterprise. We will do our best to address these issues here, but the field is progressing at a rapid clip, and we suspect that it will be (...) possible to provide more adequate answers a few years down the line. (shrink)

Contemporary Kant scholarship generally takes 'humanity' in Kant's ethical writings to refer to beings with rational capacities. However, his claims that only the good will has unqualified goodness and that humanity is unconditionally valuable suggests that humanity might be the good will. This problem seems to have infiltrated some prominent scholarship, and Richard Dean has recently argued that, in fact, humanity is indeed the good will. This paper defends, and tries to make sense of, the more conventional view that humanity (...) and the good will are distinct. (shrink)

Today, liberals face a predicament: how to defend liberal principles, when adherence to them seems to constitute a fatal disadvantage against unprincipled opponents. The challenge is not new. In the early years of the twentieth century, liberalism was attacked, by critics on both the right and, especially, the left for being hypocritical, naïve, irresponsible, and impotent. It couldn't, for example (anti-liberalists thought), address the acute inequality of imperial rule, racial segregation, and socio-economic poverty. These issues of social justice it was (...) claimed by critics required a politics marked by an uncompromising commitment to ultimate ends, and an unrelenting use of power. Faced with such sentiments and the practical successes of anti-liberal ideologies (i.e. Fascism, Nazism, and Communism) liberals felt pressure to silence their scruples and doubts, and embrace the confidence, ruthlessness, and intransigence exhibited by their opponents. But doing so seemed tantamount to abandoning liberal hopes for, and commitments to, human freedom and all they valued in the first place. In Liberalism for Dark Times, Cherniss tells the story of the liberal response to this challenge in the twentieth century. Through a close study of five leading intellectuals engaged in these debates-Max Weber, Raymond Aron, Albert Camus, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Isaiah Berlin-Cherniss reconstructs a distinctive, neglected strand of liberal thought. This strand defines and defends liberalism as a political ethos: a complex of dispositions, temperament, and sensibility and style-which include skepticism; openness to experience; and careful, discriminating judgment-that shape how individuals make choices, meet challenges, understand and pursue possibilities, and conduct themselves toward others in the course of political struggle. In reconstructing the history of, what he calls, a tempered liberalism, and formulating it as a distinctive political perspective, Cherniss offers an alternative to the prevalent ways of thinking about both, liberalism's history and the intellectual resources available to it today. (shrink)

A singular thought about an object o is one that is directly about o in a characteristic way—grasp of that thought requires having some special epistemic relation to the object o, and the thought is ontologically dependent on o. One account of the nature of singular thought exploits a Russellian Structured Account of Propositions, according to which contents are represented by means of structured n-tuples of objects, properties, and functions. A proposition is singular, according to this framework, if and only (...) if it contains an object as a constituent. One advantage of the framework of Russellian Structured propositions is that it promises to provide a metaphysical basis for the notion of a singular thought about an object, grounding it in terms of constituency. In this paper, we argue that the attempt to ground the peculiar features of singular thoughts in terms of metaphysical constituency fails, and draw some consequences of our discussion for other debates. (shrink)

The concept of valuing plays an important role in the way we think about people’s attitudes toward the things they care about most. We invoke this concept in sentences like: I value your friendship. We need to find a leader who truly values political equality. To live a good life, one must always return to the things one values most. Yet there also seem to be cases in which a person has a strong desire for a particular object but in (...) which we would not say that he or she ‘values’ this object. Thus, consider the typical heroin addict. It would sound wrong to say of such a person. (shrink)

Many philosophers claim that intuitions are evidential. Yet it is hard to see how introspecting one's mental states could provide evidence for such synthetic truths as those concerning, for example, the abstract and the counterfactual. Such considerations have sometimes been taken to lead to mentalism---the view that philosophy must concern itself only with matters of concept application or other mind-dependent topics suited to a contemplative approach---but this provides us with a poor account of what it is that philosophers take themselves (...) to be doing, for many of them are concerned with the extra-mental facts about the universe. Evidentialism therefore gestates a disaster for philosophy, for it ultimately demands an epistemology for the investigation into such matter as the abstract and the modal that simply will not be forthcoming. We make a different suggestion: That intuitions are inclinations to believe. Hence, according to us, a philosophical argument does well, as a socio-rhetorical matter of fact, when it is founded on premises philosophers are generally inclined to believe, whether or not those inclinations to believe connect appropriately to the extra-mental facts. Accordingly, the role of intuitions (inclinations to believe) in philosophical methodology is non-evidential, and the question of how they could be used as evidence falls away. (shrink)

I defend the claim that propositional religious faith that p implies belief that p. While this claim might seem trivial, it has been criticized by Alston, Pojman, Audi, and McKaughan and Howard-Snyder. I begin by defending this view against four objections. In addition to criticizing the belief-plus model, each of the above philosophers have offered their own alternatives to the belief-plus model. I focus on McKaughan’s recent accounts of faith: ”trusting acceptance’ and ”hopeful affirmation’. I argue, following Howard-Snyder, that hopeful (...) affirmation fails to give sufficient conditions for faith. I then argue that there is no reason to think that the token acceptances in faith as trusting acceptance are not instances of belief. (shrink)

“The will to truth,” says Nietzsche, “is merely a form of the will to illusion”; it’s not the opposite of “the will to ignorance, to the uncertain, to the untrue,” but instead “its refinement.” What can this mean? How could a quest for knowledge ever serve a desire to remain in the dark? I answer this question by means of an example in Proust, whose protagonist expends huge quantities of energy apparently trying to find out whether his love partner is (...) faithful. The efforts, it turns out, are designed not to yield any concrete information but only to give him the impression that he’s left no stone unturned. So they serve what we might call a second-order will to ignorance: a drive to remain unaware of just how much we don’t know. This, too, is what Nietzsche’s “Wissenschaftler” are up to—and maybe, in some contexts, it’s what we should all be up to. (shrink)

In this article we want to argue that mission models of inculturation and contextualization are not apt responses to the enlightenment model of mission or colonial mission and that the ‘mission as translation’ model is one way forward. We propose this explorative model of mission by engaging mission studies with translation studies in philosophy of language. The realization that mission studies, with its focus on the gospel text, missionary-interpreter and receptor community, shares structural commonalities with the central categories of translation (...) studies inspires this engagement between disciplines. Our proposal is that mission as translation is necessarily a fusion of these three horizons. Finally, we test this model in the Lotha Naga context, ending with broad implications for mission studies. (shrink)

There has recently been a renewed interest in the “force” interpretation of evolutionary biology. In this article, I present the general structure of the arguments for the force interpretation and identify a problem in its overly permissive conditions for being a Newtonian force. I then attempt a solution that (1) helps to illuminate the difference between forces and other types of causes and (2) makes room for random genetic drift as a force. In particular, I argue that forces are not (...) different in kind from other types of causes but rather that forces are situated on a continuum of causes distinguished by their unifying power. †To contact the author, please write to: Department of Philosophy, University of Wisconsin–Madison, 5185 Helen C. White Hall, Madison, WI 53706; e‐mail: [email protected]. (shrink)

Guy Kahane asks an axiological question: what value would (or does) God’s existence bestow on the world? Supposing God’s existence is a matter of necessity, this axiological question faces a problem because answering it will require assessing the truth-value of counterpossibles. I argue that Kahane, Paul Moser, and Richard Davis and Paul Franks fail in their attempts to render the axiological question substantive. I then offer my own solution by bringing work in cognitive psychology and philosophy of mind to bear (...) on the possibility of assessing counterpossibles. I argue that humans can engage in counterpossible reasoning by “accepting” or “supposing” that the antecedent is true and “screening out” those beliefs that would result in contradictions when combined in inferences with the acceptance or supposition. These screened out propositions are not treated as false, but are ignored. I offer a three-valued logic for counterpossible reasoning. I conclude by outlining some implications for the axiological question. (shrink)

Despite all the attention given to Kant’s universalizability tests, one crucial aspect of Kant’s thought is often overlooked. Attention to this issue, I will argue, helps us resolve two serious problems for Kant’s ethics. Put briefly, the first problem is this: Kant, despite his stated intent to the contrary, doesn’t seem to use universalization in arguing for duties to oneself, and, anyway, it is not at all clear why duties to oneself should be grounded on a procedure that envisions a (...) world in which everyone wills the contrary of those duties. The second, more global problem is that if we follow Barbara Herman in holding that Kantian ethics can provide a structure for moral deliberation, we need an interpretation of the universalization procedure that unproblematically allows it to generate something like prima facie duties to guide that deliberation; but it is not at all clear that we have such an interpretation. I argue here that if we expand our limited way of thinking about universalization, we can solve the first problem and work towards a solution to the second. We can begin by recalling that Kant’s ‘Law of Nature’ formulation (FLN) of the Categorical Imperative obligates us to ‘act as if the maxim of your action were to become by your will a universal law of nature’ (G, 421). (shrink)

ABSTRACTNew methods of calculating indices from the dot-probe task measure temporal dynamics in attention bias or fluctuations in attention bias towards and away from emotional stimuli over time. H...

Florida State University, Tallahassee, FL 32306-1500 USA.

Isaiah Berlin was a central figure in twentieth-century political thought. This volume highlights Berlin's significance for contemporary readers, covering not only his writings on liberty and liberalism, the Enlightenment and Romanticism, Russian thinkers and pluralism, but also the implications of his thought for political theory, history, and the social sciences, as well as the ethical challenges confronting political actors, and the nature and importance of practical judgment for politics and scholarship. His name and work are inseparable from the revival of (...) political philosophy and the analysis of political extremism and defense of democratic liberalism following World War II. Berlin was primarily an essayist who spoke through commentary on other authors and, while his own commitments and allegiances are clear enough, much in his thought remains controversial. Berlin's work constitutes an unsystematic and incomplete, but nevertheless sweeping and profound, defense of political, ethical, and intellectual humanism in an anti-humanistic age. (shrink)

Tenseless theories of time entail that earlierthan, later than and simultaneous with (i.e.,McTaggart's `B-series') are the only temporalproperties exemplified by events. Such theories oftencome under attack for being unable to satisfactorilyaccount for tensed language. In this essay I arguethat tenseless theories of time are capable of twofeats that critics, such as Quentin Smith, argue arebeyond their grasp: (1) They can coherently explainthe impossibility of translating all tensed sentencesby tenseless counterparts; (2) They can account forcertain obviously valid entailment relations betweentensed sentence (...) types. In analyzing tensed entailmentrelations tenselessly, I favor a date analysis oftensed language over a token-reflexive theory. Theupshot is that tenseless theories of time are notundermined by the linguistic facts. (shrink)

This book offers the first full-length study of philosophical dialogue during the English Enlightenment. It explains why important philosophers - Shaftesbury, Mandeville, Berkeley and Hume - and innumerable minor translators, imitators and critics wrote in and about dialogue during the eighteenth century; and why, after Hume, philosophical dialogue either falls out of use or undergoes radical transformation. Philosophical Dialogue in the British Enlightenment describes the extended, heavily coded, and often belligerent debate about the nature and proper management of dialogue; and (...) it shows how the writing of philosophical fictions relates to the rise of the novel and the emergence of philosophical aesthetics. Novelists such as Fielding, Sterne, Johnson and Austen are placed in a philosophical context, and philosophers of the empiricist tradition in the context of English literary history. (shrink)

In this essay I respond to Quentin Smith's chargethat `the date-analysis version ofthe tenseless theory of time cannot give adequateaccounts of the truth conditions ofthe statements made by tensed sentence-tokens'(Smith 1999, 236). His argument isbased on an analysis of certain counterfactualsituations that is at odds with thedate-analysis account of language and hence succeedsonly in begging the questionagainst that theory. To anticipate: his argumentfails if one allows that temporalindexicals such as `now' rigidly designate theirtime of utterance, something thedate-analyst can happily admit (...) whether she adheresto an absolute or relationalmetaphysics of time. (shrink)

McTaggart's argument that time is unreal was agreed by few philosophers, but it opened up a great split among twentieth‐century philosophers of time over the question of whether time must form an A‐series (“A‐theory”) or whether a B‐series suffices for the reality of time (“B‐theory”). This chapter discusses the most prominent twentieth‐century arguments in favor of the negative responses to questions that were seen to be especially important in deciding this matter. It begins with the puzzle of change because if (...) one accepts that temporal predicates indeed any predicates that can report change are in fact relations, then the appeal of the four pillars of the B‐theory becomes apparent. The pillars of B‐theory are (i) any conception of temporal passage as the gain and loss of non‐relational, tensed properties is incoherent; (ii) the underlying, logical structure of tensed language is tenseless; (iii) eternalism; and (iv) temporal experience is explainable B‐theoretically. (shrink)

In this paper I ask how Timaeus explains change within the trianglebased part of his cosmos. Two common views are that change among physical items is somehow caused or enabled by either the forms or the demiurge. I argue for a competing view, on which the physical items are capable of bringing about change by themselves, prior to the intervention of the demiurge, and prior to their being turned into imitations of the forms. I outline three problems for the view (...) that physical things depend on the forms for their causal powers, and show how the view I propose solves each. I then add further arguments for my view, based on (a) statements by Timaeus that seem to favor my view directly, (b) implications of Timaeus’ positions that favor the view, and (c) Timaeus’ explanatory practice in the second half of his speech. (shrink)

Liberalism in Dark Times seeks to reconstruct an ethically oriented form of liberalism that is demanding, skeptical, and non-perfectionist. My friendly, astute interlocutors appropriately hold me t...

Congress passed the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act of 2008 in order to remove a perceived barrier to clinical genetic testing. By banning health insurance companies and employers from discriminating against an individual based on his or her genetic information, legislators hoped that patients would be encouraged to seek genetic testing that could improve health outcomes and provide opportunities for preventive measures. Their explicit legislative goal was to fully protect the public from discrimination and allay their concerns about the potential for (...) discrimination, thereby allowing individuals to take advantage of genetic testing, technologies, research, and new therapies.However, GINA left a number of issues unresolved, most notably failing to define the concept of disease manifestation. GINA was structured such that it only provides protection against misuse of genetic information up until the point when an individual's disease has manifested. It protects an individual with a genetic predisposition for a disease, but not an individual actively suffering from that disease. (shrink)

1. IntroductionThe Emotional Construction of Morals is a tour de force that combines empirical data and philosophical argument in an impressively coherent way. Certainly it resists any sweeping assessment; a mere presentation of the principal lines of argument would itself take the space of an article. Also, and despite its systematic structure, I do not think Prinz's view places decisive weight on any small number of points. Consequently, I do not think it can be refuted in any wholesale way. Nevertheless, (...) I often find myself in very sharp disagreement with Prinz. What I would like to do in this article, therefore, is to focus on what seem to be some broad issues of perspective, and see if I can convince readers that taking a slightly different perspective on certain matters might undermine the apparent force of much of what he has to say. In particular, I will focus on the analogy between moral properties and colour properties: an analogy to which Prinz himself appeals. As a corollary I will also try to show that Prinz's focus, for many purposes, on cannibalism and issues of sexual morality undermines the relevance of much of the empirical data he brings to bear in defending his sentimentalist moral theory.According to Prinz, moral judgements are manifestations of complex emotional dispositions that he calls ‘sentiments’. But unlike the expressivist, who might easily embrace the spirit of this claim, Prinz also holds that the existence of these sentiments is sufficient to generate moral properties and facts; moral properties are simply powers to activate our moral sentiments, and it is often a fact that an action has such a property. In holding moral properties to be powers of this sort, Prinz embraces both an analogy with colours, and a certain understanding of what colours are: secondary qualities understood …. (shrink)

Race is often epistemically relevant, but encoding racial stereotypes can lead to implicitly biased behavior. Thus, given the way race structures society, it seems to be impossible to be both epist...

How many minds do you have? If you are a normal human, I think only one, but a number of dual-process theorists have disagreed. As an explanation of human irrationality, they divide human reasoning into two: Type-1 is fast, associative, and automatic, while Type-2 is slow, rule-based, and effortful. Some go further in arguing that these reasoning processes constitute (or are partly constitutive of) two minds. In this paper, I use the Star Trek ‘Trill’ species to illuminate the condition for (...) the existence of “two minds in one brain” (Evans 2010, 3). After carefully outlining the two dominate versions of dual-process theory (default-interventionism, espoused by Evans, Stanovich, and Kahneman, and parallel-competitive theory, espoused by Sloman, Frankish, and Carruthers) and contrasting each with a one-system alternative, I argue that these three views should be understood as existing on a continuum: there are some theories that could plausibly be characterized as either one-system or default-interventionist, and the distinction between default-interventionism and parallelcompetitive theory is not as clean-cut as usually assumed. I then argue, using the conceptual claims I defended using the science fiction cases, that default-interventionist dual-process theory is not compatible with the claim that humans have two minds (contra Evans and Stanovich). (shrink)

How should those who value reasonable pluralism navigate ethical and epistemological challenges related to speech and inquiry in higher education? We propose the ethical pursuit of public knowledge as a guiding vision for public colleges and universities with the understanding that other institutions will serve different purposes. The ethical criterion of mutuality calls for engagement across difference and reciprocal recognition of others’ basic equality and liberty. To maintain epistemic legitimacy, knowledge-production processes in these institutions should elevate ideas warranted by public (...) reasons that have withstood rigorous critical scrutiny above those that have not. Some forms of speech—including the expression of extremist views on both the Right and the Left—will prove unreasonable and incompatible with the guiding vision and should therefore be marginalized within these institutions. (shrink)