Hilary Kornblith presents a new account of mental reflection, and its importance for knowledge, reasoning, freedom, and normativity. He argues that reflection cannot solve the philosophical problems it has traditionally been thought to, and offers a more realistic, demystified view of its nature which draws on dual process approaches to cognition.

This article is concerned with reflection principles in the context of Cantor’s conception of the set-theoretic universe. We argue that within such a conception reflection principles can be formulated that confer intrinsic plausibility to strong axioms of infinity.

How should you take into account the opinions of an advisor? When you completely defer to the advisor's judgment, then you should treat the advisor as a guru. Roughly, that means you should believe what you expect she would believe, if supplied with your extra evidence. When the advisor is your own future self, the resulting principle amounts to a version of the Reflection Principle---a version amended to handle cases of information loss. When you count an advisor as an (...) epistemic peer, you should give her conclusions the same weight as your own. Denying that view---call it the ``equal weight view''---leads to absurdity: the absurdity that you could reasonably come to believe yourself to be an epistemic superior to an advisor simply by noting cases of disagreement with her, and taking it that she made most of the mistakes. Accepting the view seems to lead to another absurdity: that one should suspend judgment about everything that one's smart and well-informed friends disagree on, which means suspending judgment about almost everything interesting. But despite appearances, the equal weight view does not have this absurd consequence. Furthermore, the view can be generalized to handle cases involving not just epistemic peers, but also epistemic superiors and inferiors. (shrink)

Action is not always guided by conscious deliberation; in many circumstances, we act intuitively rather than reflectively. Tamar Gendler (2014) contends that because intuitively guided action can lead us away from our reflective commitments, it limits the power of knowledge to guide action. While I agree that intuition can diverge from reflection, I argue that this divergence does not constitute a restriction on the power of knowledge. After explaining my view of the contrast between intuitive and reflective thinking, this (...) paper argues against the conclusions Gendler draws from empirical work on implicit bias. (shrink)

Reflection without Rules offers a comprehensive, pointed exploration of the methodological tradition in economics and the breakdown of the received view within the philosophy of science. Professor Hands investigates economists' use of naturalistic and sociological paradigms to model economic phenomena and assesses the roles of pragmatism, discourse, and situatedness in discussions of economic practice before turning to a systematic exploration of more recent developments in economic methodology. The treatment emphasizes the changes taking place in science theory and its relationship (...) to the movement away from a rules-based view of economic methodology. The work will be of interest to all economists concerned with methodological issues as well as philosophers and others studying the relationships between economics and contemporary science theory. (shrink)

Contextualist approaches to the Liar Paradox postulate the occurrence of a context shift in the course of the Liar reasoning. In particular, according to the contextualist proposal advanced by Charles Parsons and Michael Glanzberg, the Liar sentence L doesn’t express a true proposition in the initial context of reasoning c, but expresses a true one in a new, richer context c', where more propositions are available for expression. On the further assumption that Liar sentences involve propositional quantifiers whose domains may (...) vary with context, the Liar reasoning is blocked. But why should context shift? We argue that the paradox involves principles of contextualist reflection that explain, by analogy with well-known reflection principles for arithmetic, why context must shift from c to c' in the course of the Liar reasoning. This provides a diagnosis of the Liar Paradox—one that equally applies to two revenge arguments against contextualist approaches, one recently advanced by Andrew Bacon, the other mentioned by Charles Parsons and more recently revived by Cory Juhl. (shrink)

“What do you see when you look at your face in the mirror?” asks J. David Velleman in introducing his philosophical theory of action. He takes this simple act of self-scrutiny as a model for the reflective reasoning of rational agents: our efforts to understand our existence and conduct are aided by our efforts to make it intelligible. Reflective reasoning, Velleman argues, constitutes practical reasoning. By applying this conception, Practical Reflection develops philosophical accounts of intention, free will, and the (...) foundation of morals. This new edition of Practical Reflection contains the original 1989 text along with a new introduction and is the latest entry in The David Hume Series of Philosophy and Cognitive Science Reissues, which keeps in print previously published indispensable works in the area of cognitive science. (shrink)

This paper explores an initially attractive principle connecting beliefs in general with beliefs about what beliefs are rational. The principle turns out to be violated by intuitively rational beliefs in some situations. The paper lays out some options for reacting to this fact.

A common line of thought claims that we are responsible for ourselves and our actions, while less sophisticated creatures are not, because we are, and they are not, self-aware. Our self-awareness is thought to provide us with a kind of control over ourselves that they lack: we can reflect upon ourselves, upon our thoughts and actions, and so ensure that they are as we would have them to be. Thus, our capacity for reflection provides us with the control over (...) ourselves that grounds our responsibility. I argue that this thought is subtly, but badly, confused. It uses, as its model for the control that grounds our responsibility, the kind of control we exercise over ordinary objects and over our own voluntary actions: we represent to ourselves what to do or how to change things, and then we bring about that which we represent. But we cannot use this model to explain our responsibility for ourselves and our actions: if there is a question about why or how we are responsible for ourselves and our actions, it cannot be answered by appeal to a sophisticated, self-directed action. There must be some more fundamental account of how or why we are responsible. I replace the usual account with a novel but natural view: responsible mental activity can be modeled, not as an ordinary action, but as the settling of a question. This shift will require abandoning the tempting but troublesome thought that responsible activity involves discretion and awareness—which, I argue, we must abandon in any case. (shrink)

_Self-Reflection for the Opaque Mind_ attempts to solve a grave problem about critical self-reflection. Psychological studies indicate not just that we are bad at detecting our own "ego-threatening" thoughts; they also suggest that we are ignorant of even our ordinary thoughts. However, self-reflection presupposes an ability to know one’s own thoughts. So if ignorance is the norm, why attempt self-reflection? While admitting the psychological data, this book argues that we are infallible in a limited range of (...) self-discerning judgments—that in some cases, these judgments are self-fulfilling or self-verifying. Even so, infallibility does not imply indubitability, and the author does not wish to provide a "foundation" for empirical knowledge. The point is rather to explain how self-reflection as a rational activity is possible. The book will be of interest to scholars working on the issue of self-reflection across a wide range of disciplines, including philosophy, psychology, and cognitive science. (shrink)

ABSTRACT In ethics, the use of empirical data has become more and more popular, leading to a distinct form of applied ethics, namely empirical ethics. This ‘empirical turn’ is especially visible in bioethics. There are various ways of combining empirical research and ethical reflection. In this paper we discuss the use of empirical data in a special form of Reflective Equilibrium (RE), namely the Network Model with Third Person Moral Experiences. In this model, the empirical data consist of the (...) moral experiences of people in a practice. Although inclusion of these moral experiences in this specific model of RE can be well defended, their use in the application of the model still raises important questions. What precisely are moral experiences? How to determine relevance of experiences, in other words: should there be a selection of the moral experiences that are eventually used in the RE? How much weight should the empirical data have in the RE? And the key question: can the use of RE by empirical ethicists really produce answers to practical moral questions? In this paper we start to answer the above questions by giving examples taken from our research project on understanding the norm of informed consent in the field of pediatric oncology. We especially emphasize that incorporation of empirical data in a network model can reduce the risk of self‐justification and bias and can increase the credibility of the RE reached. (shrink)

Diachronic Dutch book arguments seem to support both conditionalization and Bas van Fraassen's Reflection principle. But the Reflection principle is vulnerable to numerous counterexamples. This essay addresses two questions: first, under what circumstances should an agent obey Reflection, and second, should the counterexamples to Reflection make us doubt the Dutch book for conditionalization? In response to the first question, this essay formulates a new "Qualified Reflection" principle, which states that an agent should obey Reflection (...) only if he or she is certain that he or she will conditionalize on veridical evidence in the future. Qualified Reflection follows from the probability calculus together with a few idealizing assumptions. The essay then formulates a "Distorted Reflection" principle that approximates Reflection even in cases where the agent is not quite certain that he or she will conditionalize on veridical evidence. In response to the second question, the essay argues that contrary to a common misconception, not all Dutch books dramatize incoherence—some dramatize a less blameworthy sort of epistemic frailty that the essay calls "self-doubt." The distinction between Dutch books that dramatize incoherence and those that dramatize self-doubt cross-cuts the distinction between synchronic and diachronic Dutch books. The essay explains why the Dutch book for conditionalization reveals true incoherence, whereas the Dutch book for Reflection reveals only self-doubt. (shrink)

Ever since the introduction of reflective equilibrium in ethics, it has been argued that reflective equilibrium either leads to moral relativism, or that it turns out to be a form of intuitionism in disguise. Despite these criticisms, reflective equilibrium remains the most dominant method of moral justification in ethics. In this paper, I therefore critically examine the most recent attempts to defend the method of reflective equilibrium against these objections. Defenders of reflective equilibrium typically respond to the objections by saying (...) that either reflective equilibrium can in fact safeguard moral objectivity or alternatively, even if it cannot, that there simply are no reasonable alternatives. In this paper, I take issue with both responses. First, I argue that given the non-foundationalist aspirations of reflective equilibrium, moral objectivity cannot be maintained. Second, I argue that reflective equilibrium is not the only game in town once intuitionism has been discarded. I argue that given their own normative ambitions, combined with their rejection of intuitionism, proponents of reflective equilibrium have reason to take alternative methods of moral justification, and more specifically transcendental arguments, more seriously than they have done so far. I end by sketching the outlines of what this alternative methodology might look like. (shrink)

According to a predominant view, reflection is constitutive of personhood. In this paper I first indicate how it might seem that such an account cannot do justice to the socially embedded nature ofpersonhood. I then present a phenomenologically-inspired account of reflection as critical stance taking and show how it accommodates the social embeddedness of persons. In concluding, I outline how this phenomenological account is also not vulnerable to a number of additional challenges that have been raised against accounts (...) that consider reflection to be constitutive of personhood and what matters for responsibility. (shrink)

Reflection Principles are commonly thought to produce only strong axioms of infinity consistent with V = L. It would be desirable to have some notion of strong reflection to remedy this, and we have proposed Global Reflection Principles based on a somewhat Cantorian view of the universe. Such principles justify the kind of cardinals needed for, inter alia , Woodin’s Ω-Logic.

“What do you see when you look at your face in the mirror?” asks J. David Velleman in introducing his philosophical theory of action. He takes this simple act of self-scrutiny as a model for the reflective reasoning of rational agents: our efforts to understand our existence and conduct are aided by our efforts to make it intelligible. Reflective reasoning, Velleman argues, constitutes practical reasoning. By applying this conception, _Practical Reflection_ develops philosophical accounts of intention, free will, and the foundation (...) of morals. This new edition of _Practical Reflection_ contains the original 1989 text along with a new introduction and is the latest entry in The David Hume Series of Philosophy and Cognitive Science Reissues, which keeps in print previously published indispensable works in the area of cognitive science. _ _ _ _. (shrink)

Existing interpretations of Kant’s appeal to the spontaneity of the mind focus almost exclusively on the discussion of pure apperception in the Transcendental Deduction. The risk of such a strategy lies in the considerable degree of abstraction at which the argument of the Deduction is carried out: existing interpretations fail to reconnect adequately with any ground-level perspective on our cognitive lives. This paper works in the opposite direction. Drawing on Kant’s suggestion that the most basic picture we can have of (...) our cognitive capacity already makes reference to its state of excellence, or health (“sound understanding”), I set out by assembling Kant’s normative ground-level view of our cognitive lives, and then search for the fundamental condition of its possibility. This leads me to Kant’s conception of reflection as a normative requirement of judgment. Through examination of Kant’s remarks on reflection, I connect Kant’s preoccupation with the enlightenment ideal of originality (thinking for oneself) with his central appeal to the spontaneity of the mind. (shrink)

Drawing on recent cognitive theories of the emotions, this article develops an account of critical reflection as requiring emotional flexibility and involving the ability to envisage alternative reasons for action. The focus on the role of emotions in critical reflection, and in agents' resistance to reflection, suggests the need to move beyond an introspective to a more social and relational conception of the process of reflection. It also casts new light on the intractable problem of explaining (...) how oppressive socialisation impairs the capacity for autonomy. (shrink)

There can be no doubt that Kant thought we should be reflective: we ought to care to make up our own minds about how things are and what is worth doing. Philosophical objections to the Kantian reflective ideal have centred on concerns about the excessive control that the reflective person is supposed to exert over her own mental life, and Kantians who feel the force of these objections have recently drawn attention to Kant’s conception of moral virtue as it is (...) developed in his later work, chiefly the Metaphysics of Morals. Melissa Merritt’s book is a distinctive contribution to this recent turn to virtue in Kant scholarship. Merritt argues that we need a clearer, and textually more comprehensive, account of what reflection is, in order not only to understand Kant’s account of virtue, but also to appreciate how it effectively rebuts long-standing objections to the Kantian reflective ideal. (shrink)

Reflection is a method of learning and teaching professional maturity through the critical analysis of experience. An illuminative research approach was used over a period of five years in collaboration with students on a palliative care course to investigate the effects of learning moral and ethical reasoning by reliving clinical experiences through story telling. This study concludes that: self-concept is enhanced; communication skills are increased; and insight development is part of learning to reason fairly and ethically, and is achieved (...) through a cathartic process, leading to the conceptualization and discovery of theories of nursing through reflective practice. (shrink)

Van Fraassen famously endorses the Principle of Reflection as a constraint on rational credence, and argues that Reflection is entailed by the more traditional principle of Conditionalization. He draws two morals from this alleged entailment. First, that Reflection can be regarded as an alternative to Conditionalization – a more lenient standard of rationality. And second, that commitment to Conditionalization can be turned into support for Reflection. Van Fraassen also argues that Reflection implies Conditionalization, thus offering (...) a new justification for Conditionalization. I argue that neither principle entails the other, and thus neither can be used to motivate the other in the way van Fraassen says. There are ways to connect Conditionalization to Reflection, but these connections depend on poor assumptions about our introspective access, and are not tight enough to draw the sorts of conclusions van Fraassen wants. Upon close examination, the two principles seem to be getting at two quite independent epistemic norms. (shrink)

“What do you see when you look at your face in the mirror?” asks J. David Velleman in introducing his philosophical theory of action. He takes this simple act of self-scrutiny as a model for the reflective reasoning of rational agents: our efforts to understand our existence and conduct are aided by our efforts to make it intelligible. Reflective reasoning, Velleman argues, constitutes practical reasoning. By applying this conception, _Practical Reflection_ develops philosophical accounts of intention, free will, and the foundation (...) of morals. This new edition of _Practical Reflection_ contains the original 1989 text along with a new introduction and is the latest entry in The David Hume Series of Philosophy and Cognitive Science Reissues, which keeps in print previously published indispensable works in the area of cognitive science. _ _ _ _. (shrink)

Proof-theoretic reflection principles are schemas which attempt to express the soundness of arithmetical theories within their own language, e.g., ${\mathtt{{Prov}_{\mathsf {PA}} \rightarrow \varphi }}$ can be understood to assert that any statement provable in Peano arithmetic is true. It has been repeatedly suggested that justification for such principles follows directly from acceptance of an arithmetical theory $\mathsf {T}$ or indirectly in virtue of their derivability in certain truth-theoretic extensions thereof. This paper challenges this consensus by exploring relationships between (...) class='Hi'>reflection principles and principles of mathematical and transfinite induction as well as the status of the latter with respect to various foundational characterizations of number theory. (shrink)

How far, if at all, do our intrapersonal and our interpersonal epistemic obligations run in parallel? This paper treats the question as addressing the stability of doxastic commitment in the two dimensions. In the background lies an analogy between doxastic and practical commitment. We’ll pursue the question of doxastic stability by coining a doxastic analogue of Gregory Kavka’s much-discussed toxin case. In this new case, you foresee that you will rationally abandon a doxastic commitment by undergoing a shift in the (...) context in which you doxastically deliberate. The case reveals an important stability condition on doxastic commitment that plays no role in cases modeled on Ulysses and the Sirens, the scenario that has shaped previous attempts to draw an analogy between doxastic and practical commitment. The stability condition thereby revealed is not diachronic -- it does not involve a shift in belief -- but we can construct specifically diachronic cases that reveal an important intrapersonal epistemic obligation. This obligation arises when you expect the shift in belief by ‘projecting’ yourself into a future doxastic context -- thus vindicating a restricted, but only this restricted, application of Bas van Fraassen’s Reflection Principle. Despite some important differences, we can use these diachronic cases as a model for interpersonal cases that reveal an important role for doxastic context in the epistemology of disagreement. But the roles played by projection and context in disagreement ensure that there is no general obligation to be responsive to the opinion of an epistemic peer who disagrees with you. (shrink)

This is a book about two stories of education. In one story there is a vocabulary of means, efficiency, bureaucracy, inspection and science; in the other, one of autonomy, democracy, emancipation and action research. One is the story of positivist managerialist approaches to education, the other is the story of reflective teaching. This book displaces both of these stories. By applying the techniques of deconstruction, Stuart Parker overturns the assumptions common to both of these positions and, in doing so, jettisons (...) some widely cherished beliefs about education, autonomy and rationality. Moving beyond current debates, this book articulates a new manifesto for education in postmodernity and highlights the implications for educational practices and institutions. (shrink)

The late Middle Ages witnessed a recapitulation of medieval reflection on beauty. Jean Gerson is an important representative of these philosophical and theological contributions, although he has been largely neglected up to this time. A first dimension of his ideas on beauty is the incorporation of beauty (pulchrum) into the number of transcendentals, i.e., the concepts “convertible” with the notion of being (ens), that is, unity, truth, and goodness (unum, verum and bonum). This article revisits Monica Calma’s study on (...) Gerson’s theory of beauty and suggests new hypothetical sources that may have inspired this aspect of his thought. The second aspect emphasised here is Gerson’s classification of beauty, which entails some similarities to the one of Ulrich of Strasbourg, but also differs from it. Moreover, its incorporation of a division entirely devoted to artistic beauty is highly remarkable. (shrink)

Numerous authors have defended the rough idea that it is irrational to fail to conform to one’s judgments about what it would be rational to do, or what doxastic states it would be rational to be in. This chapter examines rational reflection principles as an attempt to implement this idea in contexts of uncertainty about what credence distributions are rational. After outlining some problems with Old Rational Reflection, the chapter discusses what seems like a well-motivated fix, New Rational (...) Reflection. It is argued that an intuitive way of trying to motivate the principle fails, and that it faces counterexamples. To say the least, the principle imposes substantial and controversial constraints on the kinds of epistemic situations it is possible to be in. A more general problem is that rational reflection principles seem doomed to take seriously certain kinds of uncertainty about what is rational, but not others. (shrink)

Two-boxers in Newcomb Problems face the question: Why aren't you rich? The essay argues that one-boxers have a false sense of advantage. They fail to align their credences during deliberation with the credences they will have when they act. This puts them in violation of the so-called Principle of Reflection, and it exposes them to a dynamic Dutch Book that will leach any gains they achieve away.

Recently, the ethical rather than just the economic resonance of entrepreneurship has attracted attention with researchers highlighting entrepreneurship and ethics as interwoven processes of value creation and management. Recognising that traditional normative perspectives on ethics are limited in application in entrepreneurial contexts, this stream of research has theorised entrepreneurship and ethics as the pragmatic production of useful effects through the alignment of public—private values. In this article, we critique this view and use Kant's concept of reflective judgement as discussed in (...) his Critique of the Power of Judgement to theorise ethical entrepreneurial practice as the capacity to routinely break free from current conventions through the imaginative creation and use of self-legislating maxims. Through an analysis of the narratives of 12 entrepreneurs, we suggest there are three dimensions to reflective judgement in entrepreneurial contexts: (1) Social Performance; (2) Public Challenge and; (3) Personal Autonomy. Whilst the entrepreneurs were alive to the importance of commercial return, their narratives demonstrated further concern for, and commitment to, standards that they rationally and imaginatively felt as being appropriate. In our discussion, we integrate the findings into existing theoretical categories from entrepreneurship studies to better appreciate ethics within the context of value creation. (shrink)

Journal of Mathematical Logic, Volume 22, Issue 02, August 2022. Motivated by results of Bagaria, Magidor and Väänänen, we study characterizations of large cardinal properties through reflection principles for classes of structures. More specifically, we aim to characterize notions from the lower end of the large cardinal hierarchy through the principle [math] introduced by Bagaria and Väänänen. Our results isolate a narrow interval in the large cardinal hierarchy that is bounded from below by total indescribability and from above by (...) subtleness, and contains all large cardinals that can be characterized through the validity of the principle [math] for all classes of structures defined by formulas in a fixed level of the Lévy hierarchy. Moreover, it turns out that no property that can be characterized through this principle can provably imply strong inaccessibility. The proofs of these results rely heavily on the notion of shrewd cardinals, introduced by Rathjen in a proof-theoretic context, and embedding characterizations of these cardinals that resembles Magidor’s classical characterization of supercompactness. In addition, we show that several important weak large cardinal properties, like weak inaccessibility, weak Mahloness or weak [math]-indescribability, can be canonically characterized through localized versions of the principle [math]. Finally, the techniques developed in the proofs of these characterizations also allow us to show that Hamkin’s weakly compact embedding property is equivalent to Lévy’s notion of weak [math]-indescribability. (shrink)

Current accounts suggest that self-referential thought serves a pivotal function in the human ability to simulate the future during mind-wandering. Using experience sampling, this hypothesis was tested in two studies that explored the extent to which self-reflection impacts both retrospection and prospection during mind-wandering. Study 1 demonstrated that a brief period of self-reflection yielded a prospective bias during mind-wandering such that participants’ engaged more frequently in spontaneous future than past thought. In Study 2, individual differences in the strength (...) of self-referential thought — as indexed by the memorial advantage for self rather than other-encoded items — was shown to vary with future thinking during mind-wandering. Together these results confirm that self-reflection is a core component of future thinking during mind-wandering and provide novel evidence that a key function of the autobiographical memory system may be to mentally simulate events in the future. (shrink)

We study reflection principles in Kelley-Morse set theory with urelements (KMU). We first show that First-Order Reflection Principle is not provable in KMU with Global Choice. We then show that KMU + Limitation of Size + Second-Order Reflection Principle is mutually interpretable with KM + Second-Order Reflection Principle. Furthermore, these two theories are also shown to be bi-interpretable with parameters. Finally, assuming the existence of a κ+-supercompact cardinal κ in KMU, we construct a model of KMU (...) + Second-Order Reflection Principle where Limitation of Size fails. (shrink)

This chapter aims to deepen Donald Schön’s insight about jazz playing as an example of what he calls “reflection-in-action” (RiA) by situating this notion within the enactive view of humans as linguistic bodies. Our main claim is that the knowl-edge or skills displayed by expert jazz musicians must be understood as aural and communicative in nature. After presenting the notions of RiA and linguistic bodies, we develop our view through a critical discussion of four statements from Schön’s passage on (...) jazz musicianship, before wrapping up and clarifying the position we are advocating. This way, we suggest a revised version of Schön’s concept, which we call “reflection in communicative jazz action.". (shrink)

This article reviews research on counterfactual, social, and temporal comparisons and proposes a Reflection and Evaluation Model (REM) as an organizing framework. At the heart of the model is the assertion that 2 psychologically distinct modes of mental simulation operate during comparative thinking: reflection, an experiential (“as if”) mode of thinking characterized by vividly simulating that information about the comparison standard is true of, or part of, the self; and evaluation, an evaluative mode of thinking characterized by the (...) use of information about the standard as a reference point against which to evaluate one’s present standing. Reflection occurs when information about the standard is included in one’s self-construal, and evaluation occurs when such information is excluded. The result of reflection is that standard–consistent cognitions about the self become highly accessible, thereby yielding affective assimilation; whereas the result of evaluation is that comparison information is used as a standard against which one’s present standing is evaluated, thereby yielding affective contrast. The resulting affect leads to either an increase or decrease in behavioral persistence as a function of the type of task with which one is engaged, and a combination of comparison-derived causal inferences and regulatory focus strategies direct one toward adopting specific future action plans. (shrink)

In this short review I present my personal reflections on Zeilinger–Brukner information interpretation of quantum mechanics.In general, this interpretation is very attractive for me. However, its rigid coupling to the notion of irreducible quantum randomness is a very complicated issue which I plan to address in more detail. This note may be useful for general public interested in quantum foundations, especially because I try to analyze essentials of the information interpretation critically. This review is written in non-physicist friendly manner. Experts (...) actively exploring this interpretation may be interested in the paper as well, as in the comments of “an external observer” who have been monitoring the development of this approach to QM during the last 18 years. The last part of this review is devoted to the general methodology of science with references to views of de Finetti, Wigner, and Peres. (shrink)

Highlights popular debates about the contribution of reflection to teacher education and emphasizes the role of the mentor in facilitating teachers' professional development. Each chapter is concerned with exploring the concept of reflection and considering its contributions to teacher education.

Gödel initiated the program of finding and justifying axioms that effect a significant reduction in incompleteness and he drew a fundamental distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic justifications. Reflection principles are the most promising candidates for new axioms that are intrinsically justified. Taking as our starting point Tait’s work on general reflection principles, we prove a series of limitative results concerning this approach. These results collectively show that general reflection principles are either weak ) or inconsistent. The philosophical (...) significance of these results is discussed. (shrink)

In A Theory of Justice, John Rawls defines a hypothetical contract situation and argues rational people will agree on reflection it is fair to contractors. He solves the rational choice problem it poses by deriving two lexically-ordered principles of justice and suggests the derivation justifies the principles. Its soundness aside, just what justificatory force does such a derivation have?On one view, there is no justificatory force because the contract is rigged specifically to yield principles which match our pre-contract moral (...) judgments. Rawls provides ammunition for this claim: “By going back and forth, sometimes altering the conditions of the contractual circumstances, at others withdrawing our judgments [about what is just] and conforming them to principle, I assume that eventually we shall find a description of the initial situation that both expresses reasonable conditions and yields principles which match our considered judgments duly pruned and adjusted.”. (shrink)