In this paper, I consider a form of skepticism that has a permissive conclusion, according to which we are rationally permitted to suspend judgment in an area, or to have beliefs in that area. I argue that such a form of skepticism is resistant to some traditional strategies of refutation. It also carries a benefit, namely that it increases voluntary control over doxastic states by introducing options, and therefore greater freedom, into the realm of belief. I argue that intellectual preferences (...) and dispositions provide decisive reasons that can settle our doxastic states in such cases. (shrink)

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Immanuel Kant’s critical philosophy pays little explicit attention to the concept of ‘wisdom’ in its taxonomy of the functions of human reason in its work of rendering intelligible the world and the human place in the world. On the basis of some crucial texts in Kant’s writings, this essay argues that wisdom has a role to play in the task Kant assigns to practical reason; this task is to make the world in which humans dwell intelligible morally, i.e., to make (...) sense of the world as locus in which good and evil take form in function of the exercise of human freedom. In such a world, the function of wisdom is ‘cosmopolitan’ in that it provides a horizon of a social hope that recognizes human solidarity, vulnerability, and otherness, as signal instances of the inclusive moral relationality necessary for sustaining both an ‘outer’ world order for peace and the ‘inner’ dynamic of full moral relationality that Kant terms ‘the ethical commonwealth’. (shrink)

For many years the prevailing paradigm for medical decision making for children has been the best interest standard. Recently, some authors have proposed that Mill’s “harm principle” should be used to mediate or to replace the best interest standard. This article critically examines the harm principle movement and identifies serious defects within the project of using Mill’s harm principle for medical decision making for children. While the harm principle proponents successfully highlight some difficulties in present-day use of the best interest (...) standard, the use of the harm principle suffers substantial normative and conceptual problems. A medical decision-making framework for children is suggested, grounded in the four principles. It draws on the best interest standard, incorporates concepts of harm, and provides two questions that can act as guide and limit in medical decision making for children. (shrink)

In his monograph On Numbers and Games, J. H. Conway introduced a real-closed field containing the reals and the ordinals as well as a great many less familiar numbers including $-\omega, \,\omega/2, \,1/\omega, \sqrt{\omega}$ and $\omega-\pi$ to name only a few. Indeed, this particular real-closed field, which Conway calls No, is so remarkably inclusive that, subject to the proviso that numbers—construed here as members of ordered fields—be individually definable in terms of sets of NBG, it may be said to contain (...) “All Numbers Great and Small.” In this respect, No bears much the same relation to ordered fields that the system ℝ of real numbers bears to Archimedean ordered fields. In Part I of the present paper, we suggest that whereas $\mathbb{R}$should merely be regarded as constituting an arithmetic continuum, No may be regarded as a sort of absolute arithmetic continuum, and in Part II we draw attention to the unifying framework No provides not only for the reals and the ordinals but also for an array of non-Archimedean ordered number systems that have arisen in connection with the theories of non-Archimedean ordered algebraic and geometric systems, the theory of the rate of growth of real functions and nonstandard analysis. In addition to its inclusive structure as an ordered field, the system No of surreal numbers has a rich algebraico-tree-theoretic structure—a simplicity hierarchical structure—that emerges from the recursive clauses in terms of which it is defined. In the development of No outlined in the present paper, in which the surreals emerge vis-à-vis a generalization of the von Neumann ordinal construction, the simplicity hierarchical features of No are brought to the fore and play central roles in the aforementioned unification of systems of numbers great and small and in some of the more revealing characterizations of No as an absolute continuum. (shrink)

This is the first complete English translation of Gottlob Frege's Grundgesetze der Arithmetik, with introduction and annotation. The importance of Frege's ideas within contemporary philosophy would be hard to exaggerate. He was, to all intents and purposes, the inventor of mathematical logic, and the influence exerted on modern philosophy of language and logic, and indeed on general epistemology, by the philosophical framework.

When we are faced with a choice among acts, but are uncertain about the true state of the world, we may be uncertain about the acts’ “choiceworthiness”. Decision theories guide our choice by making normative claims about how we should respond to this uncertainty. If we are unsure which decision theory is correct, however, we may remain unsure of what we ought to do. Given this decision-theoretic uncertainty, meta-theories attempt to resolve the conflicts between our decision theories...but we may be (...) unsure which meta-theory is correct as well. This reasoning can launch a regress of ever-higher-order uncertainty, which may leave one forever uncertain about what one ought to do. There is, fortunately, a class of circumstances under which this regress is not a problem. If one holds a cardinal understanding of subjective choiceworthiness, and accepts certain other criteria, one’s hierarchy of metanormative uncertainty ultimately converges to precise definitions of “subjective choiceworthiness” for any finite set of acts. If one allows the metanormative regress to extend to the transfinite ordinals, the convergence criteria can be weakened further. Finally, the structure of these results applies straightforwardly not just to decision-theoretic uncertainty, but also to other varieties of normative uncertainty, such as moral uncertainty. (shrink)

In this review I describe research conducted in my laboratory concerning implicit mood-congruent memory (MCM) bias in clinical depression. MCM is the tendency for depressed individuals to retrieve more unpleasant information from memory than nondepressed controls, and may be an important maintenance mechanism in depression. MCM has been studied frequently with explicit memory tests, but relatively few studies have investigated MCM using implicit memory tests. I describe several implicit memory studies which show that: (a) an implicit MCM bias does not (...) appear to exist when perceptually driven tests are used; (b) implicit memory bias can be found when conceptually driven tests are used, but (c) not all conceptually driven tests show implicit MCM bias. I conclude that conceptual processing is necessary, but is not sufficient for demonstrating implicit memory bias in depression. Future studies should investigate specific components of conceptual elaboration that support implicit memory bias in depression. (shrink)

Many of the features that distinguish the vertebrates from other chordates are derived from the neural crest, and it has long been argued that the emergence of this multipotent embryonic population was a key innovation underpinning vertebrate evolution. More recently, however, a number of studies have suggested that the evolution of the neural crest was less sudden than previously believed. This has exposed the fact that neural crest, as evidenced by its repertoire of derivative cell types, has evolved through vertebrate (...) evolution. In this light, attempts to derive a typological definition of neural crest, in terms of molecular signatures or networks, are unfounded. We propose a less restrictive, embryological definition of this cell type that facilitates, rather than precludes, investigating the evolution of neural crest. While the evolutionary origin of neural crest has attracted much attention, its subsequent evolution has received almost no attention and yet it is more readily open to experimental investigation and has greater relevance to understanding vertebrate evolution. Finally, we provide a brief outline of how the evolutionary emergence of neural crest potentiality may have proceeded, and how it may be investigated. BioEssays 30:530–541, 2008. © 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

We suggest that, far from establishing an inconsistency in the standard theory of the geometrical linear continuum, Zeno’s Paradox of Extension merely establishes an inconsistency between the standard theory of geometrical magnitude and a misguided system of length measurement. We further suggest that our resolution of Zeno’s paradox is superior to Adolf Grünbaum’s now standard resolution based on Lebesgue measure theory.

I review three problems that have historically motivated pessimism about artificial intelligence: (1) the Problem of Consciousness, according to which artificial systems function without the right sort of conscious oversight; (2) The Problem of Global Relevance, according to which artificial systems cannot solve fully general theoretical and practical problems; (3) The Problem of Semantic Irrelevance, according to which artificial systems cannot be guided by semantic comprehension. I connect the dots between all three problems by drawing attention to non-syntactic inferences—inferences that (...) are made on the basis of insight into the rational relationships among thought-contents. Consciousness alone affords such insight, I argue, and such insight alone confers positive epistemic status on the execution of the inferences. Only when artificial systems can execute inferences that are rationally guided by phenomenally conscious states will such systems count as intelligent in a literal sense. (shrink)

This article responds to Richard Kilminster’s critique of my earlier article published in Philosophy of the Social Sciences (2014), which raised questions about the status and limits of Norbert Elias’s sociology of knowledge. The article takes issue with Kilminster’s claim that the earlier piece identified “fatal” flaws in Elias’s approach and aimed at re-asserting philosophical authority over the social sciences. It is argued that, on the contrary, the earlier article was broadly sympathetic to Elias’s visions of both the sociology of (...) knowledge and of the social sciences more generally. However, some of the concepts that Elias regarded as central to these, especially the key notion of “social processes,” are highly problematic, and others have been superseded by more recent developments. This article also defends the need for “under-laboring” within the social sciences, arguing that it does not carry the kinds of connotations that Kilminster imagines. (shrink)

The Many Faces of Patriotism debate the consequences of the 21st century's patriotic resurgence, examining it both in theoretical and comparative terms that draw on examples of patriotism from ancient Greece to post-apartheid South Africa.

In my introduction to Kontinuität und Mechanismus, I expressed surprise at the lack of work which was being done at the time on the young Leibniz in spite of the fact that conditions for investigating the period up to 1676 are almost ideal—certainly in Leibnizian terms. Most of the letters and papers from this period of immediate philosophical significance have now been published in the Akademie-Ausgabe so that there is here an incomparably better starting point for detailed studies than in (...) the case of his later work. (shrink)

Physiological evidence predicts a model of concept categorisation that evolves through direct interaction with object feature selection. The requirement stated by Schyns et al. for feature plasticity is supported, but important caveats raise a question about the level at which feature identification can occur. Visual attribute selection for feature creation is likely to be directed by top-down and attentional processes.

Several interesting and important quantum field theories must contain the coupling constant in the boundary conditions. The theories considered include quantum electrodynamics of spin-1/2 fermions and gauge field theories.

This paper shows that the non-Boolean logic of quantum measurements is more naturally represented by a relatively new 4-operation system of Boolean fractions—conditional events—than by the standard representation using Hilbert Space. After the requirements of quantum mechanics and the properties of conditional event algebra are introduced, the quantum concepts of orthogonality, completeness, simultaneous verifiability, logical operations, and deductions are expressed in terms of conditional events thereby demonstrating the adequacy and efficacy of this formulation. Since conditional event algebra is nearly Boolean (...) and consists merely of ordered pairs of standard events or propositions, quantum events and the so-called “superpositions” of states need not be mysterious, and are here fully explicated. Conditional event algebra nicely explains these non-standard “superpositions” of quantum states as conjunctions or disjunctions of conditional events, Boolean fractions, but does not address the so-called “entanglement phenomena” of quantum mechanics, which remain physically mysterious. Nevertheless, separating the latter phenomena from superposition issues adds clarity to the interpretation of quantum entanglement, the phenomenon of influence propagated at faster than light speeds. With such treacherous possibilities present in all quantum situations, an observer has every reason to be completely explicit about the environmental–instrumental configuration, the conditions present when attempting quantum measurements. Conditional event algebra allows such explication without the physical and algebraic remoteness of Hilbert space. (shrink)