In this paper it is argued that sensitivity theory suffers from a fatal defect. Sensitivity theory is often glossed as: (1) S knows that p only if S would not believe that p if p were false. As Nozick showed in his pioneering work on sensitivity theory, this formulation needs to be supplemented by a further counterfactual condition: (2) S knows that p only if S would believe p if p were true. Nozick further showed that the theory needs a (...) qualification on the method used to form the belief. However, when these complications are spelled out in detail, it becomes clear that the two counterfactuals are in irresolvable tension. To jibe with the externalist intuitions that motivate sensitivity theory in the first place, (1) needs a fine-grained grouping of belief-formation methods, but (2) needs coarse-grained grouping. It is therefore suggested that sensitivity theory is in dire straits: either its proponents need to provide a workable principle of method individuation or they must retrench and give up their claims to providing sufficient conditions for knowledge. (shrink)

Protests and counter-protests seek to draw and direct attention and concern with confronting images and slogans. In recent years, as protests and counter-protests have partially migrated to the digital space, such images and slogans have also gone online. Two main ways in which these images and slogans are translated to the online space is through the use of emoji and hashtags. Despite sustained academic interest in online protests, hashtag activism and the use of emoji across social media platforms, little is (...) known about the specific functional role that emoji and hashtags play in online social movements. In an effort to fill this gap, the current paper studies both hashtags and emoji in the context of the Twitter discourse around the Black Lives Matter movement. (shrink)

This study investigates how dispute-mediators handle impasse in the re-negotiation of divorce decrees by divorced couples. Three sources of impasse and three strategies for handling impasse are identified based on analysis of mediation transcripts. The concern here lies not so much in the disputant's arguments but in the discussion procedures dispute-mediators use to craft the disputant's argumentation into a tool to solve conflict. Their moves are understood here as a practice of reconstructing argumentative discourse that is neither naïve nor critical (...) but reconstruction as design. Mediator's reconstruction reveals a type of communication work in contemporary societies involved in the crafting of forums and formats that mediate argumentative communication. This work is often invisible and strategic which makes its interpretation, judgment, and development a challenge for pragma-dialectical theory. How reconstruction as design can be understood is discussed by building on prior pragma-dialectical theory and research. (shrink)

In this chapter, we address the roles that exemplars might play in a comprehensive response to epistemic injustice. Fricker defines epistemic injustices as harms people suffer specifically in their capacity as (potential) knowers. We focus on testimonial epistemic injustice, which occurs when someone’s assertoric speech acts are systematically met with either too little or too much credence by a biased audience. Fricker recommends a virtue­theoretic response: people who do not suffer from biases should try to maintain their disposition towards naive (...) testimonial justice, and those who find themselves already biased should cultivate corrective testimonial justice by systematically adjusting their credence in testimony up or down depending on whether they are hearing from someone whom they may be biased against or in favor of. We doubt that the prominent admiration-­emulation model of exemplarism will be much use in this connection, so we propose two ways of learning from negative exemplars to better conduct one’s epistemic affairs. In the admiration-­emulation model, both the identification of what a virtue is and the cultivation of virtues identified thusly proceed through the admiration of virtuous exemplars. We show that this model has serious flaws and argue for two alternatives: the envy-­agonism model and the ambivalence-avoidance model. (shrink)

When we understand that something is a pot, is it because of one property that all pots share? This seems unlikely, but without this common essence, it is difficult to see how we could teach someone to use the word "pot" or to see something as _a_ pot. The Buddhist apoha theory tries to resolve this dilemma, first, by rejecting properties such as "potness" and, then, by claiming that the element uniting all pots is their very difference from all non-pots. (...) In other words, when we seek out a pot, we select an object that is not a non-pot, and we repeat this practice with all other items and expressions. Writing from the vantage points of history, philosophy, and cognitive science, the contributors to this volume clarify the nominalist apoha theory and explore the relationship between apoha and the scientific study of human cognition. They engage throughout in a lively debate over the theory's legitimacy. Classical Indian philosophers challenged the apoha theory's legitimacy, believing instead in the existence of enduring essences. Seeking to settle this controversy, essays explore whether apoha offers new and workable solutions to problems in the scientific study of human cognition. They show that the work of generations of Indian philosophers can add much toward the resolution of persistent conundrums in analytic philosophy and cognitive science. (shrink)

Questions about the relationship between linguistic competence and expertise will be examined in the paper. Harry Collins and others distinguish between ubiquitous and esoteric expertise. Collins places considerable weight on the argument that ordinary linguistic competence and related phenomena exhibit a high degree of expertise. His position and ones which share close affinities are methodologically problematic. These difficulties matter because there is continued and systematic disagreement over appropriate methodologies for the empirical study of expertise. Against Collins, it will be argued (...) that the term ‘expertise’ should be reserved for expertise (esoteric experts) and exclude everyday performance (ubiquitous experts). Wittgensteinian ideas will be employed to maintain that it is mistaken and misleading to derive substantive conclusions about the epistemology of expertise from ordinary linguistic competence and vice versa. Significant attention will be devoted to the notion of following a rule with particular reference to the intelligibility of tacit rule following. A satisfactory theoretical approach to expertise should not involve making important claims about ordinary linguistic competence. (shrink)

Models in decision theory and game theory assume that preferences are determinate: for any pair of possible outcomes, a and b, an agent either prefers a to b, prefers b to a, or is indifferent as between a and b. Preferences are also assumed to be stable: provided the agent is fully informed, trivial situational influences will not shift the order of her preferences. Research by behavioral economists suggests, however, that economic and hedonic preferences are to some degree indeterminate and (...) unstable, which in turn suggests that other sorts of preferences may suffer the same problem. Even fully informed agents do not always determinately prefer a to b, prefer b to a, or feel indifferent as between a and b. Seemingly trivial situational influences rearrange the order of their preferences. One could respond that decision theory and game theory are not meant to describe actual behavior, and that they instead adumbrate an ideal of rationality from which human action diverges in various ways. When the divergences are small and systematic, they help us identify the heuristics that conspire to help people approximate rationality. One such heuristic, dubbed the Wilde heuristic, is explored. However, the divergences documented by behavioral economists threaten to be too large to handle through idealization. The Rum Tum Tugger Model, in which indifference is intransitive, is spelled out as one promising way for decision and game theory to retrench. Preferences may be locally unstable and indeterminate, but when the differences between options are sufficiently large, they approximate stability and determinacy. (shrink)

The comment reflects on Reece’s presentation of different schools of interpretation of De Anima in light of some broader Peripatetic views. The connection between substance, life, and intellect is seen as undergirding the core of Aristotle’s study of nature, particularly insofar as the unmoved mover provides the final cause of the universe as a whole. This connection is discussed at both the cosmic and individual level, noting the differences in interpretation between Theophrastus and Themistius.

The emergence of ideological and political pluralism in the Soviet Union during 1990 led to a growing number of critiques of Marxism-Leninism. The development of the internal Soviet critique of orthodox Soviet Marxism-Leninism culminated in the publication of a two-part article by Georgii Shakhnazarov in Kommunist in 1991. In this article Shakhnazarov outlined a comprehensive critique of orthodox historical materialism, and many of the ideas he developed became a central part of the Draft Party Programme of July/August 1991. This programme (...) amounted to the virtual social-democratisation of Soviet Marxism-Leninism. The collapse of Soviet Marxism-Leninism can in part be explained by the internal critique of its basic tenets which developed in the period after 1988. (shrink)

Kant distinguishes concept negation from copula negation. While the latter results in a negative judgement, i.e. a judgement denying a property of certain objects, the former gives rise to a negative concept, such as ‘immortal’. Since Kant’s remarks on concept negation are scattered and inconclusive, five interpretations are worked out and put to the test: logical negation, pseudo-negation, attribution of a zero degree, possibility-restricted negation and genus-restricted negation. Whereas the first four interpretations fail for a number of reasons, genus-restricted negation (...) turns out to be tenable. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis work explores financial edgework by professional speculative traders as an explanation for the persistence of rogue trading in financial markets. The article joins in the scholarly application of “edgework,” the social psychological study of voluntary risk, to speculative trading. The discussion focuses on the origins and persistence of that subset of behavior wherein the trader knowingly creates the condition in which he or she endangers the brokerage house that employs them and even, at times, threatens the public's perception of (...) the integrity of the securities industry. Going over the edge between risk taking and unauthorized rogue trading is explained by looking at five inducements to escalate risk taking provided in the securities industry. This examination of financial edgework demonstrates how and, to a lesser degree, why rogue trading is a result of the security industry's pursuit of and desire to capitalize upon yet not publicize an occupational culture stressing a “risk‐and‐win” ethos. (shrink)

The multiverse is a hypothesis for which there is no evidence, and perhaps can never be any evidence. It is only since 1998 that it has leapt off the blackboards of a few physicists doing esoteric mathematics and lodged itself in the popular imagination. As is the way with popular science, it is easy to move from speculating that there might have been more than one big bang to proceeding on the basis that there has been more than one big (...) bang. (shrink)

While the Catholic Church has taken a number of steps to create a safe environment for children, its largely procedural approach to the sexual abuse crisis leaves a lot to be desired. If the Catholic Church wants to identify and counteract the elements that precipitated this crisis, it needs to enlist Catholic universities and parents, as universities possess the intellectual resources to understand the crisis in its full depth and breadth and parents are the most capable protectors of children in (...) the Catholic Church. Empowering these two constituencies and relying on them to lead child protection efforts represent the best chance to overcome a legacy of pain and distrust and to create a Church that is nurturing and safe for its children. (shrink)

Community of inquiry is most often seen as a dialogical procedure for the cooperative development of reasonable approaches to knowledge and meaning. This reflects a deep commitment to normatively based reasoning that is pervasive in a wide range of approaches to critical thinking and argument, where the underlying theory of reasoning is logic driven, whether formal or informal. The commitment to normative reasoning is deeply historical reflecting the fundamental distinction between reason and emotion. Despite the deep roots of the distinction (...) and its canonization in current educational thought, contemporary cognitive neuroscience presents a fundamental challenge to the viability of the distinction and thus to any effort that sees education for reasonable judgment to be based on the remediation of cognition in isolation from its roots in the emotions. Cognitive neuroscience looks at the deep connections between emotion and memory, information retrieval, and resistance to refutation. This conforms with earlier studies in experimental psychology, which showed resistance to changing beliefs in the face of evidence, including evidence based on personal experience. This paper will look at the recent research including speculations from neurological modeling that shows the depth of connection between, emotions, memory and reasoning. It will draw implications for dialogic thinking within a community of inquiry including systematic self-reflection as an essential aspect of critical thinking. (shrink)

In this chapter, the author talks about some of the finer points concerning Captain America and his eligibility to serve as a moral exemplar. The chapter explores three issues. 1) Fictional characters are simply not real. 2) Fictional characters can be perfect and we can't. 3) Fictional characters can be depicted inconsistently over the years by different writers. Fictional characters can model virtuous character traits by demonstrating their consequences in an imaginary world that readers identify with. While real‐world people can't (...) be perfect, fictional characters can be: writers just have to write them that way! Depending on how they are written, fictional characters don't have to experience difficult choices or moral weakness, and they can stick to their principles come what may. Each writer and fan will have a personal conception of a character like Captain America that leads them to regard certain behaviors as mistakes, aberrations caused by writers. (shrink)

The Argument Web is maturing as both a platform built upon a synthesis of many contemporary theories of argumentation in philosophy and also as an ecosystem in which various applications and application components are contributed by different research groups around the world. It already hosts the largest publicly accessible corpora of argumentation and has the largest number of interoperable and cross compatible tools for the analysis, navigation and evaluation of arguments across a broad range of domains, languages and activity types. (...) Such interoperability is key in allowing innovative combinations of tool and data reuse that can further catalyse the development of the field of computational argumentation. The aim of this paper is to summarise the key foundations, the recent advances and the goals of the Argument Web, with a particular focus on demonstrating the relevance to, and roots in, philosophical argumentation theory. (shrink)

Several authors have recently attempted to provide a physicalist analysis of causation by appealing to terms from physics that characterise causal processes. Accounts based on forces, energy/momentum transfer and fundamental interactions have been suggested in the literature. In this paper, I wish to show that the former two are untenable when the effect of enclosed electromagnetic fluxes in quantum theory is considered. Furthermore, I suggest that even in the classical and non-relativistic limits, a theory of fundamental interactions should not be (...) reduced to either a theory of forces or of energy/momentum transfer, but should be understood as a classical account of mutual interactions. Causal links are therefore correctly characterised by generalised potentials. This leads to some speculation regarding the fundamental ontology of interactions and, in particular, the role of the quantum mechanical phase. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This article is a reply to critical commentaries by Rebecca Bamford, Rachel Cristy, and Bernard Reginster on my 2019 monograph, Nietzsche's Moral Psychology, invited by the North American Nietzsche Society for presentation at a book symposium planned for the 2020 Pacific Division Meeting of the American Philosophical Association.

Artificial intelligence, the "science and engineering of intelligent machines", still has yet to create even a simple "Advice Taker" [McCarthy, 1959]. We have previously argued [Waser, 2011] that this is because researchers are focused on problem-solving or the rigorous analysis of intelligence (or arguments about consciousness) rather than the creation of a "self" that can "learn" to be intelligent. Therefore, following expert advice on the nature of self [Llinas, 2001; Hofstadter, 2007; Damasio, 2010], we embarked upon an effort to design (...) and implement a self-understanding, self-improving loop as the totality of a (seed) AI. As part of that, we decided to follow up on Richard Dawkins' [1976] speculation that "perhaps consciousness arises when the brain's simulation of the world becomes so complete that it must include a model of itself" by defining a number of axioms and following them through to their logical conclusions. The results combined with an enactive approach yielded many surprising and useful implications for further understanding consciousness, self, and "free-will" that continue to pave the way towards the creation of safe/moral autopoiesis. (shrink)

In previous publications on probability, I have followed I.J. Good in arguing that probability must be defined subjectively if we accept that the world is causally deterministic. In this article I go significantly beyond this position, arguing that we are forced to accept a subjective definition of probability if we use any probabilistic methods at all. In other words, all probabilistic methods tacitly assume a subjective definition of probability.

I present and explain a brief version of the "contingency" cosmological argument earlier developed by Samuel Clarke and then updated by William Rowe.

Many authors, including Oswaldo Chateaubriand, maintain that “properties” should be structured in logical grades, where the least abstract quantities comprise the lowest ranks of a hierarchy that embraces more abstract and mathematized qualities only at higher levels. But applied mathematicians warns that no quantities can be expected to possess crisp, real world extensions unless they have already been processed with a fair amount of set theoretic machinery beforehand.Muitos autores, incluindo Oswaldo Chateaubriand, sustentam que "propriedades" deveriam ser estruturadas em uma gradação (...) lógica, onde as quantidades menos abstratas ficariam num nível mais baixo de uma hierarquia que abarca qualidades mais matematizadas e abstratas somente em níveis mais elevados. Mas matemáticos aplicados advertem que não se pode esperar de nenhuma quantidade que elas possuam extensões precisas, como do mundo real, a menos que já tenham sido tratados de antemão com uma boa dose de maquinaria conjuntista. (shrink)

I argue in this article that there is a mistake in Searle's Chinese room argument that has not received sufficient attention. The mistake stems from Searle's use of the Church-Turing thesis. Searle assumes that the Church-Turing thesis licences the assumption that the Chinese room can run any program. I argue that it does not, and that this assumption is false. A number of possible objections are considered and rejected. My conclusion is that it is consistent with Searle's argument to hold (...) onto the claim that understanding consists in the running of a program. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Attribution Bias in the Trials of Accused Serial Killers Introduction The Case of Doug Clark Situationism and Destructive Behavior Attribution Biases Seeing Ghosts “Ewww…Guilty!” “You people are all…” “Aren't you the guy who…?” Doug Clark Again Conclusion.