In 1974 a British biologist, John Randal Baker , published a large and controversial book simply entitled Race that reiterated persistent eugenicist themes concerning the relation between race, intelligence, and progress. The history of Baker’s book is a case study in the politics of scientific publishing, and his ideas influenced scholars associated with later works such as The Bell Curve. Baker, a student of Julian Huxley, was a longtime participant in the British eugenics movement and opponent of what he took (...) to be a facile belief in human equality. In 1942, together with Michael Polanyi, he founded the Society for Freedom in Science to oppose those who advocated the central planning of scientific research. Baker’s eugenics, political activities, and views on race express an elitist individualism, associated with the conservative wing of the eugenics movement, that this paper explores in the context of his career as a whole. (shrink)

This collection includes papers by such leading thinkers as Michael Ayers, J.A. Passmore, Ian Hacking, Hide Ishiguro, G.E.M. Anscombe, David Pears, A.M. Quinton, and Richard Wollheim.

The articles in this theme issue seek to understand the evolutionary bases of social learning and the consequences of cultural transmission for the evolution of human behaviour. In this introductory article, we provide a summary of these articles and a personal view of some promising lines of development suggested by the work summarized here.

ACTION, EMOTION AND WILL "This a clear and persuasive book which contains as many sharp points as a thorn bush and an array of arguments that as neat and ...

The nature and worth of Michael Oakeshott’s contribution as a political thinker have long been the subject of deep disagreement within the community of Anglophone political theory. This is partly the product of a partial familiarity with Oakeshott’s corpus. During his lifetime, his body of published work had a rather slender appearance, comprising two major monographs, separated by some forty years, and two rather more accessible collections of essays on politics and history. Following his death in 1990, however, a (...) much larger body of writings has become available. In particular, with the publication of his Notebooks, we are afforded the chance to form a nuanced and informed understanding of how the thinking in his texts interconnected, and to appreciate the range of intellectual influences and political preoccupations that characterised his work. (shrink)

In order to take advantage of the potential offered by the medium of virtual reality, it will be essential to develop an understanding of how to maximize the desirable experience of ‘presence’ in a virtual space (‘being there’), and how to minimize the undesirable feeling of ‘cybersickness’ (a constellation of discomfort symptoms experienced in virtual reality). Although there have been frequent reports of a possible link between the observer’s sense of presence and the experience of bodily discomfort in virtual reality, (...) the amount of literature that discusses the nature of the relationship is limited. Recent research has underlined the possibility that these variables have shared causes, and that both factors may be manipulated with a single approach. This review paper summarizes the concepts of presence and cybersickness and highlights the strengths and gaps in our understanding about their relationship. We review studies that have measured the association between presence and cybersickness, and conclude that the balance of evidence favours a negative relationship between the two factors which is driven principally by sensory integration processes. We also discuss how system immersiveness might play a role in modulating both presence and cybersickness. However, we identify a serious absence of high-powered studies that aim to reveal the nature of this relationship. Based on this evidence we propose recommendations for future studies investigating presence, cybersickness, and other related factors. (shrink)

This book evaluates the claim that in order to explore the changing social foundations of global power relations today, we need to include in our analysis an understanding of global civil society, particularly if we also wish to raise ethical questions about the changing political and institutional practices of transnational governance. The authors engage directly with the notion of global civil society in order to examines the ethical, social, and political conditions that make certain kinds of globalizing practices a reality (...) today. They explore and utilize the normative dimensions of the civil discourse to further debate about the meaning of citizenship in a world of multi-level governance, as well as the changing characteristics of political community and democracy. Bridging the normative concerns of political theorists with the historical and institutional focus of scholars of international relations and international political economy, this book will be of broad interest to students and researchers concerned with international relations, civil society, global governance and ethics. (shrink)

Michael G. Titelbaum presents a new Bayesian framework for modeling rational degrees of belief—the first of its kind to represent rational requirements on agents who undergo certainty loss.

The question of how intellectuals ought to relate to the ideological traditions of the political cultures of modern societies has been a recurrent theme of European social and political thought over the last two centuries. This chapter explores earlier traditions of European thinking, associated with the work of Karl Mannheim, Julien Benda, and Antonio Gramsci, which established the major lines of debate about the relationship of intellectuals to a sense of nationhood and the political traditions of the polities they inhabited. (...) These ideas form the backdrop to the analysis of the drift towards post-national thinking among important groups of intellectual practitioners in the UK towards the end of the twentieth century. Cosmopolitan thinking, the article suggests, has tended to obscure the ideological character of the main lines of political thinking associated with globalization, and ensured that progressive intellectuals tended to abandon the ‘national-popular’ to their counterparts on the political right, with fateful consequences. (shrink)

A common objection to sense-datum theories of perception is that they cannot give an adequate account of the fact that introspection indicates that our sensory experiences are directed on, or are about, the mind-independent entities in the world around us, that our sense experience is transparent to the world. In this paper I point out that the main force of this claim is to point out an explanatory challenge to sense-datum theories.

The disjunctive theory of perception claims that we should understand statements about how things appear to a perceiver to be equivalent to statements of a disjunction that either one is perceiving such and such or one is suffering an illusion (or hallucination); and that such statements are not to be viewed as introducing a report of a distinctive mental event or state common to these various disjoint situations. When Michael Hinton first introduced the idea, he suggested that the burden (...) of proof or disproof lay with his opponent, that what was needed was to show that our talk of how things look or appear to one.. (shrink)

This article defends the Fixed Point Thesis: that it is always a rational mistake to have false beliefs about the requirements of rationality. The Fixed Point Thesis is inspired by logical omniscience requirements in formal epistemology. It argues to the Fixed Point Thesis from the Akratic Principle: that rationality forbids having an attitude while believing that attitude is rationally forbidden. It then draws out surprising consequences of the Fixed Point Thesis, for instance that certain kinds of a priori justification are (...) indefeasible and that misleading all-things-considered evidence about rational requirements is impossible. Finally, the Fixed Point Thesis is applied to defend the Right Reasons position on peer disagreement, according to which an agent who has drawn the correct conclusion from her evidence should retain belief in that conclusion even in the face of disagreeing peers. (shrink)

'Fundamentals of Bayesian Epistemology' provides an accessible introduction to the key concepts and principles of the Bayesian formalism. This volume introduces degrees of belief as a concept in epistemology and the rules for updating degrees of belief derived from Bayesian principles.--.

This article explores the genealogy and character of the pro-market thinking about Higher Education that has come to the fore within the UK policy community. It charts the rise to prominence of one of the most important sources of such thinking in postwar politics—the “economic liberalism” propounded by a number of New Right intellectuals, commentators and politicians from the late 1950s, and excavates one of the key intellectual paradigms that sustained a more pro-market orientation in policy discourse. It also seeks (...) to shed light on the limits and contingent character of this emerging discourse, emphasising the complex and tense relationship between economic-liberal ideas and different conservative arguments, and exploring the political factors which enabled the former to gain some traction in these years. It ends with some reflections on the implications of this account for the contemporary debate about Higher Education funding in the UK. (shrink)

Disjunctivism about perceptual appearances, as I conceive of it, is a theory which seeks to preserve a naïve realist conception of veridical perception in the light of the challenge from the argument from hallucination. The naïve realist claims that some sensory experiences are relations to mind-independent objects. That is to say, taking experiences to be episodes or events, the naïve realist supposes that some such episodes have as constituents mind-independent objects. In turn, the disjunctivist claims that in a case of (...) veridical perception like this very kind of experience that you now have, the experiential episode you enjoy is of a kind which could not be occurring were you having an hallucination. The common strategy of arguments from hallucination set out to show that certain things are true of hallucinations, and hence must be true of perceptions. For example, it is argued that hallucinations must have non-physical objects of awareness, or that such states are not relations to anything at all, but are at best seeming relations to objects. In insisting that veridical perceptual experience is of a distinct kind from hallucination, the disjunctivist denies that any of these conceptions of hallucination challenges our conception of veridical perceptions as relations to mind-independent objects. More specifically, I assume that the disjunctivist advocates naïve realism because they think that this position best articulates how sensory experience seems to us to be just through reflection. If the disjunctivist is correct in this contention, then anyone who accepts the conclusion of the argument from hallucination must also accept that the nature of sensory experience is other than it seems to us to be. In turn, one may complain that any such error theory is liable to lead to sceptical consequences. A Humean scepticism about the senses launches a challenge about our knowledge of the world through questioning the conception we have of what sense experience is, and how it can provide knowledge of the world. (shrink)

'Fundamentals of Bayesian Epistemology' provides an accessible introduction to the key concepts and principles of the Bayesian formalism. Volume 2 introduces applications of Bayesianism to confirmation and decision theory, then gives a critical survey of arguments for and challenges to Bayesian epistemology.--.

Different people reason differently, which means that sometimes they reach different conclusions from the same evidence. We maintain that this is not only natural, but rational. In this essay we explore the epistemology of that state of affairs. First we will canvass arguments for and against the claim that rational methods of reasoning must always reach the same conclusions from the same evidence. Then we will consider whether the acknowledgment that people have divergent rational reasoning methods should undermine one’s confidence (...) in one’s own reasoning. Finally we will explore how agents who employ distinct yet equally rational methods of reasoning should respond to interactions with the products of each others’ reasoning. We find that the epistemology of multiple reasoning methods has been misunderstood by a number of authors writing on epistemic permissiveness and peer disagreement. (shrink)

This book evaluates the claim that in order to explore the changing social foundations of global power relations today, we need to include in our analysis an understanding of global civil society, particularly if we also wish to raise ethical questions about the changing political and institutional practices of transnational governance. The authors engage directly with the notion of global civil society in order to examines the ethical, social, and political conditions that make certain kinds of globalizing practices a reality (...) today. They explore and utilize the normative dimensions of the civil discourse to further debate about the meaning of citizenship in a world of multi-level governance, as well as the changing characteristics of political community and democracy. Bridging the normative concerns of political theorists with the historical and institutional focus of scholars of international relations and international political economy, this book will be of broad interest to students and researchers concerned with international relations, civil society, global governance and ethics. (shrink)

Book description: The capacity to represent and think about time is one of the most fundamental and least understood aspects of human cognition and consciousness. This book throws new light on central issues in the study of the mind by uniting, for the first time, psychological and philosophical approaches dealing with the connection between temporal representation and memory. Fifteen specially written essays by leading psychologists and philosophers investigate the way in which time is represented in memory, and the role memory (...) plays in our ability to reason about time. They offer insights into current theories of memory processes and of the mechanisms and cognitive abilities underlying temporal judgements, and draw out fundamental issues concerning the phenomenology and epistemology of memory and our understanding of time. The chapters are arranged into four sections, each focused on one area of current research: Keeping Track of Time, and Temporal Representation; Memory, Awareness and the Past; Memory and Experience; Knowledge and the Past: The Epistemology and Metaphysics of Time. A general introduction gives an overview of the topics discussed and makes explicit central themes which unify the different philosophical and psychological approaches. (shrink)

Begins by explaining then proving a generalized language dependence result similar to Goodman's "grue" problem. I then use this result to cast doubt on the existence of an objective evidential favoring relation (such as "the evidence confirms one hypothesis over another," "the evidence provides more reason to believe one hypothesis over the other," "the evidence justifies one hypothesis over the other," etc.). Once we understand what language dependence tells us about evidential favoring, our options are an implausibly strong conception of (...) the a priori, a hard externalism on which agents are unable to determine what their evidence favors, or a subjectivist view that makes evidential favoring relative to features of the agent. (shrink)

Can self-locating beliefs be relevant to non-self-locating claims? Traditional Bayesian modeling techniques have trouble answering this question because their updating rule fails when applied to situations involving contextsensitivity. This essay develops a fully general framework for modeling stories involving context-sensitive claims. The key innovations are a revised conditionalization rule and a principle relating models of the same story with different modeling languages. The essay then applies the modeling framework to the Sleeping Beauty Problem, showing that when Beauty awakens her degree (...) of belief in heads should be one-third. This demonstrates that it can be rational for an agent who gains only self-locating beliefs between two times to alter her degree of belief in a non-self-locating claim. (shrink)

The Sleeping Beauty Problem attracts so much attention because it connects to a wide variety of unresolved issues in formal epistemology, decision theory, and the philosophy of science. The problem raises unanswered questions concerning relative frequencies, objective chances, the relation between self-locating and non-self-locating information, the relation between self-location and updating, Dutch Books, accuracy arguments, memory loss, indifference principles, the existence of multiple universes, and many-worlds interpretations of quantum mechanics. After stating the problem, this article surveys its connections to all (...) of these areas. (shrink)

Abstract. Richard Feldman’s Uniqueness Thesis holds that “a body of evidence justifies at most one proposition out of a competing set of proposi- tions”. The opposing position, permissivism, allows distinct rational agents to adopt differing attitudes towards a proposition given the same body of evidence. We assess various motivations that have been offered for Uniqueness, including: concerns about achieving consensus, a strong form of evidentialism, worries about epistemically arbitrary influences on belief, a focus on truth-conduciveness, and consequences for peer disagreement. (...) We argue that each of these motivations either misunderstands the commitments of permissivism or is question-begging. Better understanding permissivism makes it a much more plausible position. (shrink)

Recent discussion of Vogel-style “bootstrapping” scenarios suggests that they provide counterexamples to a wide variety of epistemological theories. Yet it remains unclear why it’s bad for a theory to permit bootstrapping, or even exactly what counts as a bootstrapping case. Going back to Vogel's original bootstrapping example, I note that an agent who could gain justification through the method Vogel describes would have available a “no-lose investigation”: an investigation that can justify a proposition but has no possibility of undermining it. (...) The main suggestion of this article is that an epistemological theory should not permit no-lose investigations. I identify necessary and sufficient conditions for such investigations, then explore epistemological theories that rule them out. If we want to avoid both skepticism and no-lose investigations, we must eschew either Closure or epistemic externalism. (shrink)

Roger White argued for a principle of indifference. Hart and Titelbaum showed that White’s argument relied on an intuition about conditioning on biconditionals that, while widely shared, is incorrect. Hawthorne, Landes, Wallmann, and Williamson argue for a principle of indifference. Remarkably, their argument relies on the same faulty intuition. We explain their intuition, explain why it’s faulty, and show how it generates their principle of indifference. 1Introduction 2El Caminos and Indifference 2.1Overview 2.2Fins and antennas 2.3HLWW in the example 2.4The restrictiveness (...) of Condition 2 2.5Summary 3The Specifics of HLWW s Argument 3.1Mapping their conditions to our equations 3.2HLWW’s responses to objections. (shrink)

A response to G.A. Cohen's argument that a prevailing "ethos" of justice would prevent a Rawlsian just society from having any income inequalities. I suggest that Cohen's argument fails because a Rawlsian ethos would involve correlates of both of Rawls' principles of justice.

I argue that given standard deontic logic, wide-scope rational requirements entail narrow-scope rational requirements. In particular, the widely-embraced Enkratic Principle entails that if a particular combination of attitudes is rationally forbidden, it is also rationally forbidden to believe that that combination of attitudes is required.

Metaethicists have recently devoted a great deal of attention to questions about when a fact counts as a reason for or against a particular conclusion, and how such reasons interact. Chapter 9 asks a broader question: When a set of facts counts in favor of some conclusion, is that always because at least one of those facts is a reason for that conclusion? Examples are offered in which a set supports a conclusion without any fact in that set’s being a (...) reason for. The chapter then assesses the significance of such examples for philosophical methodology, the ‘reasons-first’ program, and metanormative realism. (shrink)

A plea: If you're going to propose a Bayesian framework for updating self-locating degrees of belief, please read this piece first. I've tried to survey all the extant formalisms, group them by their general approach, then describe challenges faced by every formalism employing a given approach. Hopefully this survey will prevent further instances of authors' re-inventing updating rules already proposed elsewhere in the literature.

“Double-halfers” think that throughout the Sleeping Beauty Problem, Beauty should keep her credence that a fair coin flip came up heads equal to 1/2. I introduce a new wrinkle to the problem that shows even double-halfers can't keep Beauty's credences equal to the objective chances for all coin-flip propositions. This leaves no way to deny that self-locating information generates an unexpected kind of inadmissible evidence.