The semantics Vann McGee gives for his 1989 conditional logic is based on Stalnaker’s 1968 semantics but replaces the familiar concept of truth at a world with the novel concept of truth under a hypothesis. Developed here is a semantics of the standard type, in which sentences are true at worlds, only with additional constraints imposed on the accessibility relation and the selection function. McGee conditionals of the form A ⇒ X are translated into Stalnaker conditionals of the form \A (...) > X. An interpretation of the semantics is provided, and a few implications for the theory of indicative conditionals and their probabilities are noted. (shrink)

Internalism holds that epistemic justification is determined by what is internal to the mind, not by facts about the mind-independent world. This paper introduces and defends a new kind of internalism that is rooted in rationalist ideas that have been neglected in recent epistemology, despite inspiring internalist projects in cognitive science. Ignoring rationalist insights has, I argue, damaged the prospects for internalism, by needlessly saddling internalists with empiricist burdens. Internalists can refuse these burdens by accepting a better philosophy of mind. (...) Rather than looking to 17th century rationalists, I look to Kant, and especially his idea that normativity is grounded in the constitution of agency and mind. A Kantian approach can avoid stock objections to internalism, I argue, and can also capture all the alleged benefits of externalism. The paper is structured as follows. In §2, I get back to basics and consider more ways to satisfy the core internalist template than have become standard. I draw attention to rationalist insights about how normativity could be grounded in the constitution of mind, and hypothesize that if internalism respects these insights, some problems disappear. I develop this hypothesis in §3 with a Kantian view. I further defend this view in §4. I conclude in §5 by explaining why Kantian internalism answers the latest challenges to internalism. (shrink)

Kurt Gödel was the greatest logician of this century. This third volume of his collected works consists of previously unpublished material, both essays and lectures.

Mathematics -- Experimental physics -- Chemistry -- Natural history -- Medicine.

In William Angoff's recent article in Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology, he presented several thought-provoking philosophical issues of concern to measurement-oriented psychologists. The first of these issues, the notion of test and item bias, is the topic of the present paper. In his article, he reports that average score differences in the performance on many cognitive tests have appeared among racial or ethnic groups. Twenty to thirty years ago, differential psychologists, summarizing and critically evaluating studies demonstrating performance differences on tests and (...) in other behavior among cultural, ethnic and racial groups, agreed that such group differences indeed existed, but that causal interpretations differed markedly among the investigators at the time. More recently, the focus has shifted to what has been termed test fairness, with the focus falling more upon tests and their inadequacies than the behavior which underlies the tests. Similar findings and conclusions were frequently advanced in physiological tests of strength and endurance which are often used for civil service positions such as those in the fire fighting service and which frequently disadvantage women. The question raised is simply whether the discrimination is fair or not; that is, do given test score differences reflect variation in performance between groups which are reflective of true behavioral differences or are these differences artifactual and embedded in the assessment device itself, whether intentional or not. 2012 APA, all rights reserved). (shrink)

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS "Success has a thousand fathers" is a familiar expression. And while it is for the readers to judge the success of what follows, ...

19. yüzyıl felsefesinin önemli bir düşünürü olan Dilthey’in amacı tin bilimlerini, epistemolojik ve metodolojik açıdan temellendirmektir. Dilthey bu amacı gerçekleştirmek için tin bilimlerinin yöntemini “anlama” olarak belirlemiştir. Anlama Tin bilimleri için verimli bir zemin teşkil eder ve yeni bir dünya açan özelliğe sahiptir. Dilthey’in Tin bilimlerini temellendirmek amacı ile yazdığı en önemli eserlerinden biri “Tin Bilimlerine Giriş” adlı eseridir. Bu eserde Dilthey hem metafiziğe hem de psikolojiye getirdiği eleştiriler ile dikkat çeker. Dilthey bu eserinde psikoloji konusunda “anlamaya dayalı psikoloji” ve (...) “açıklamaya dayalı psikoloji” ayrımı yapmıştır. “Açıklamaya dayalı” psikoloji bugün bizlerin bildiği klasik psikolojidir. Dilthey’e göre bu psikoloji içsel tecrübeye yeterince önem vermez ve sadece genel yasaya dönüşebilecek durumları inceler. Buna karşılık Dilthey “anlamaya dayalı psikoloji” anlayışını ortaya koymuştur. “Anlamaya dayalı psikoloji” bireyin içsel tecrübesine önem verip onu bir bütün olarak ele alır. Dilthey metafizik konusunda ise hayatı anlamlandırmak için metafiziğe ihtiyaç duyduğumuzu fakat geleneksel metafiziğin bugün geldiği noktada hayat ile olan bağlarını kesmiş olduğuna dikkat çeker. Bu anlamda yapılması gereken şey hayat ile olan bağları koparmadan bir metafizik anlayış ortaya koymaktır. Anlama metodunun psikoloji ve metafizik üzerinden Tin bilimlerine nüfuz etmesi önemlidir. Hem metafizikte hem de psikolojinin Tin bilimlerine dâhil olabilmesin koşulu “anlama” metodunu bu iki disiplinin içerisine yerleştirilmesinden geçmektedir. (shrink)

On April 20, 1999, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold shot and killed fifteen people at their high school in Columbine, Colorado. National media dubbed the event a “school shooting.” The term grimly expanded over the next several years to include similar events at army bases, movie theaters, churches, and nightclubs. Today, we commonly use the categories “mass shooter” and “mass shooting” to organize and classify information about gun violence. I will argue that neither category is an effective tool for reducing (...) gun violence and use empirical data to show how these categories perpetuate a moral panic that harms already vulnerable demographics. I conclude that we should instead favor a narrower description of individuals and events, (e.g., “X shot Y people at Z”) because we can talk about all of the relevant cases without contributing the undue harms. (shrink)

Bioethical debate in Europe is partly a reaction to political endeavors and events. In line with the political goal of a united Europe, a European regulation is being sought for medical research and medical ethics ('Convention on Human Rights and Biomedicine'). A certain degree of ambivalence has come to the fore: whilst it does seem possible to reach a consensus (albeit a merely 'diplomatic' consensus) about complicated bioethical issues at an international level when certain controversial matters are excluded or a (...) certain vagueness maintained, new principles are also required at a national level, for example when the medical profession of one state feels obliged to assume a 'local' stance, such as in the sensitive issue of termination of treatment. The individual contributions to this publication, together with various other current fields of bioethical conflict in Europe - especially Germany - are introduced below against a common background, namely that the original dividing line between the concealed and the revealed has shifted. (shrink)

There is an emerging consensus within Natural Law that explains transgender identity as an “embodied misunderstanding.” The basic line of argument is that our sexual identity as male or female refers to our possible reproductive roles of begetting or conceiving. Since these two possibilities are determined early on by the presence or absence of a Y chromosome, our sexual identity cannot be changed or reassigned. I develop an argument from analogy, comparing gender and language, to show that this consensus is (...) premature. Language and gender imbue our body with further social meaning and so, I conclude, that just as we can learn multiple languages, so too can we learn multiple genders. Since language and gender each constitutively contribute to our wellbeing as a “second nature,” I argue against this consensus to show that the reason people who are transgender struggle to flourish is not because of a “troubled trans psyche,” but because there are conceptual, interpersonal, and institutional obstacles stacked against them. (shrink)