Results for 'counterexamples to consequentialism'

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  1. The Moral Murderer. A (More) Effective Counterexample to Consequentialism.Eduardo Rivera-López - 2012 - Ratio 25 (3):307-325.
    My aim in this paper is to provide an effective counterexample to consequentialism. I assume that traditional counterexamples, such as Transplant (A doctor should kill one person and transplant her organs to five terminal patients, thereby saving their lives) and Judge (A judge should sentence to death an innocent person if he knows that an outraged mob will otherwise kill many innocent persons), are not effective, for two reasons: first, they make unrealistic assumptions and, second, they do not (...)
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  2. A Counterexample to Parfit's Rule Consequentialism.Jacob Nebel - 2012 - Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy 6 (2):1-10.
    Derek Parfit argues that everyone ought to follow the principles whose universal acceptance would make things go best. I present a counterexample: a world in which no one's moral beliefs have any motivating force. I explain how Parfit's metaethical commitments imply that such a world is possible, and why this possibility is a problem for Parfit's project of reconciling Kantianism, contractualism, and consequentialism. I consider two of Parfit's responses to my counterexample.
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  3. The Alienation Objection to Consequentialism.Barry Maguire & Calvin Baker - 2020 - In Douglas W. Portmore, The Oxford Handbook of Consequentialism. New York, USA: Oup Usa.
    An ethical theory is alienating if accepting the theory inhibits the agent from fitting participation in some normative ideal, such as some ideal of integrity, friendship, or community. Many normative ideals involve non-consequentialist behavior of some form or another. If such ideals are normatively authoritative, they constitute counterexamples to consequentialism unless their authority can be explained or explained away. We address a range of attempts to avoid such counterexamples and argue that consequentialism cannot by itself account (...)
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  4. Consequentialism and Promises.Alida Liberman - 2020 - In Douglas W. Portmore, The Oxford Handbook of Consequentialism. New York, USA: Oup Usa. pp. 289 - 309.
    I explore the debate about whether consequentialist theories can adequately accommodate the moral force of promissory obligation. I outline a straightforward act consequentialist account grounded in the value of satisfying expectations, and raise and assess three objections to this account: that it counterintuitively predicts that certain promises should be broken when commonsense morality insists that they should be kept, that the account is circular, and Michael Cholbi’s argument that this account problematically implies that promise-making is frequently obligatory. I then discuss (...)
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  5.  41
    Clifford's Consequentialism.Brian Zamulinski - 2022 - Utilitas 34 (3):289-299.
    It is morally negligent or reckless to believe without sufficient evidence. The foregoing proposition follows from a rule that is a modified expression of W. K. Clifford's ethics of belief. Clifford attempted to prove that it is always wrong to believe without sufficient evidence by advancing a doxastic counterpart to an act utilitarian argument. Contrary to various commentators, his argument is neither purely nor primarily epistemic, he is not a non-consequentialist, and he does not use stoicism to make his case. (...)
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  6. (1 other version)Towards a consequentialist understanding of cognitive penetration.Dustin Stokes - 2015 - In A. Raftopoulos & J. Ziembekis, Cognitive Effects on Perception: New Philosophical Perspectives.
    Philosophers of mind and cognitive scientists have recently taken renewed interest in cognitive penetration, in particular, in the cognitive penetration of perceptual experience. The question is whether cognitive states like belief influence perceptual experience in some important way. Since the possible phenomenon is an empirical one, the strategy for analysis has, predictably, proceeded as follows: define the phenomenon and then, definition in hand, interpret various psychological data. However, different theorists offer different and apparently inconsistent definitions. And so in addition to (...)
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  7.  16
    The Main Principle.William J. Talbott - 2010 - In William Talbott, Human rights and human well-being. New York: Oxford University Press.
    This chapter introduces a consequentialist meta-theoretic sufficient condition for a change in moral practices to be a moral improvement, the main principle. The chapter introduces the main principle by considering a series of examples of exceptions to libertarianism, especially to norms against coercion. The chapter also considers various purported counterexamples to consequentialist principles, including Nozick’s Wilt Chamberlain example. The chapter presents the main principle as a multiple time-slice end-state principle of moral reciprocity and explains the key terms, though he (...)
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  8. Can it ever be better never to have existed at all? Person-based consequentialism and a new repugnant conclusion.Melinda A. Roberts - 2003 - Journal of Applied Philosophy 20 (2):159–185.
    ABSTRACT Broome and others have argued that it makes no sense, or at least that it cannot be true, to say that it is better for a given person that he or she exist than not. That argument can be understood to suggest that, likewise, it makes no sense, or at least that it cannot be true, to say that it is worse for a given person that he or she exist than that he or she never have existed at (...)
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  9. Uneasy Virtue.Julia Driver - 2001 - New York: Cambridge University Press.
    The predominant view of moral virtue can be traced back to Aristotle. He believed that moral virtue must involve intellectual excellence. To have moral virtue one must have practical wisdom - the ability to deliberate well and to see what is morally relevant in a given context. Julia Driver challenges this classical theory of virtue, arguing that it fails to take into account virtues which do seem to involve ignorance or epistemic defect. Some 'virtues of ignorance' are counterexamples to (...)
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  10.  76
    The Cost of Consequentialization.Hanno Sauer - 2019 - Metaphilosophy 50 (1-2):100-109.
    Consequentializers suggest that for all non‐consequentialist moral theories, one can come up with a consequentialist counterpart that generates exactly the same deontic output as the original theory. Thus, all moral theories can be “consequentialized.” This paper argues that this procedure, though technically feasible, deprives consequentialism of its potential for normative justification. By allowing purported counterexamples to any given consequentialist moral theory to be accommodated within that theory’s account of value, consequentializers achieve a hollow victory. The resulting deontically equivalent (...)
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  11. Another Argument Against Uniqueness.Thomas Raleigh - 2015 - Philosophical Quarterly 67 (267):327-346.
    I present an argument against the thesis of Uniqueness and in favour of Permissivism. Counterexamples to Uniqueness are provided, based on ‘Safespot’ propositions – i.e. a proposition that is guaranteed to be true provided the subject adopts a certain attitude towards it. The argument relies on a plausible principle: (roughly stated) If S knows that her believing p would be a true belief, then it is rationally permitted for S to believe p. One motivation for denying this principle – (...)
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  12. Non-Identity Matters, Sometimes.Justin Weinberg - 2014 - Utilitas 26 (1):23-33.
    Suppose the only difference between the effects of two actions is to whom they apply: either to parties who would -- or would not -- exist if the actions were not performed. Is this a morally significant difference? This is one of the central questions raised by the Non-Identity Problem. Derek Parfit answers no, defending what he calls the ‘No-Difference View’. I argue that Parfit is mistaken and that sometimes this difference is morally significant. I do this by formulating a (...)
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  13.  23
    Interventions in inquiry.Jennifer Rose Carr - 2025 - Synthese 205 (5):1-23.
    A central question on the norms of inquiry—“zetetic norms”—concerns how they relate to epistemic norms. Both centrally involve learning about the world. Epistemic norms are thought to govern beliefs and credences, while zetetic norms extend to actions. A cluster of common views of epistemic norms are consequentialist: they hold that the fundamental source of epistemic value is true beliefs/accurate credences (_veritism_), or knowledge (_gnosticism_), and that rational beliefs are those that best promote epistemic value. It’s natural, then to think of (...)
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  14. Scarce Resources and Priority Ethics: Why Should Maximizers be More Conservative?Afroogh Saleh, A. Kazemi & A. Seyedkazemi - 2021 - Ethics, Medicine, and Public Health 18.
    Summary Background The principle of maximization, which roughly means that we should save more lives and more years of life, is usually taken for granted by the health community. This principle is even more forceful in crises like the COVID-19 pandemic, where we have scarce resources which can be allocated only to some patients. However, the standard consequentialist version of this principle can be challenging particularly when we have to reallocate a resource that has already been given to a patient. (...)
     
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  15.  50
    Just Better Utilitarianism.Matti Häyry - 2021 - Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics 30 (2):343-367.
    Utilitarianism could still be a viable moral and political theory, although an emphasis on justice as distributing burdens and benefits has hidden this from current conversations. The traditional counterexamples prove that we have good grounds for rejecting classical, aggregative forms of consequentialism. A nonaggregative, liberal form of utilitarianism is immune to this rejection. The cost is that it cannot adjudicate when the basic needs of individuals or groups are in conflict. Cases like this must be solved by other (...)
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    Counterexamples to Symmetry for Partially Overdetermined Elliptic Problems.Ilaria Fragalà, Filippo Gazzola, Jimmy Lamboley & Michel Pierre - 2009 - Analysis: International mathematical journal of Analysis and its Applications 29 (1):85-93.
    We exhibit several counterexamples showing that the famous Serrin's symmetry result for semilinear elliptic overdetermined problems may not hold for partially overdetermined problems, that is when both Dirichlet and Neumann boundary conditions are prescribed only on part of the boundary. Our counterexamples enlighten subsequent positive symmetry results obtained by the first two authors for such partially overdetermined systems and justify their assumptions as well.
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  17.  53
    McGee's Counterexample to the Ramsey Test.John Cantwell, Sten Lindström & Wlodek Rabinowicz - 2017 - Theoria 83 (2):154-168.
    Vann McGee has proposed a counterexample to the Ramsey Test. In the counterexample, a seemingly trustworthy source has testified that p and that if not-p, then q. If one subsequently learns not-p, then one has reason to doubt the trustworthiness of the source and so, the argument goes, one has reason to doubt the conditional asserted by the source. Since what one learns is that the antecedent of the conditional holds, these doubts are contrary to the Ramsey Test. We argue (...)
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  18. Algorithm Evaluation Without Autonomy.Scott Hill - forthcoming - AI and Ethics.
    In Algorithms & Autonomy, Rubel, Castro, and Pham (hereafter RCP), argue that the concept of autonomy is especially central to understanding important moral problems about algorithms. In particular, autonomy plays a role in analyzing the version of social contract theory that they endorse. I argue that although RCP are largely correct in their diagnosis of what is wrong with the algorithms they consider, those diagnoses can be appropriated by moral theories RCP see as in competition with their autonomy based theory. (...)
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  19. A Counterexample to Modus Tollens.Seth Yalcin - 2012 - Journal of Philosophical Logic 41 (6):1001-1024.
    This paper defends a counterexample to Modus Tollens, and uses it to draw some conclusions about the logic and semantics of indicative conditionals and probability operators in natural language. Along the way we investigate some of the interactions of these expressions with 'knows', and we call into question the thesis that all knowledge ascriptions have truth-conditions.
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  20. A Counterexample to the Uniqueness Thesis.Matthew Kopec - 2015 - Philosophia 43 (2):403-409.
    In this essay, I present a straightforward counterexample to the Uniqueness Thesis, which holds, roughly speaking, that there is a unique rational response to any particular body of evidence.
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  21.  45
    Another Counterexample to Markov Causation from Quantum Mechanics: Single Photon Experiments and the Mach-Zehnder Interferometer.Nina Retzlaff - 2017 - Kriterion - Journal of Philosophy 31 (2):17-42.
    The theory of causal Bayes nets [15, 19] is, from an empirical point of view, currently one of the most promising approaches to causation on the market. There are, however, counterexamples to its core axiom, the causal Markov condition. Probably the most serious of these counterexamples are EPR/B experiments in quantum mechanics (cf. [13, 23]). However, these are also the only counterexamples yet known from the quantum realm. One might therefore wonder whether they are the only phenomena (...)
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  22. A counterexample to modus ponens.Vann McGee - 1985 - Journal of Philosophy 82 (9):462-471.
  23. Alleged Counterexamples to Uniqueness.Ryan Ross - 2021 - Logos and Episteme 12 (2):203-13.
    Kopec and Titelbaum collect five alleged counterexamples to Uniqueness, the thesis that it is impossible for agents who have the same total evidence to be ideally rational in having different doxastic attitudes toward the same proposition. I argue that four of the alleged counterexamples fail, and that Uniqueness should be slightly modified to accommodate the fifth example.
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  24. On a Theological Counterexample to the Principle of Alternate Possibilities.W. Craig - 2002 - Faith and Philosophy 19 (2):94-94.
  25. Counterexamples to Some Characterizations of Dilation.Michael Nielsen & Rush T. Stewart - 2021 - Erkenntnis 86 (5):1107-1118.
    We provide counterexamples to some purported characterizations of dilation due to Pedersen and Wheeler :1305–1342, 2014, ISIPTA ’15: Proceedings of the 9th international symposium on imprecise probability: theories and applications, 2015).
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  26. On Some Counterexamples to the Transitivity of Grounding.Jon Erling Litland - 2013 - Essays in Philosophy 14 (1):19-32.
    I discuss three recent counterexamples to the transitivity of grounding due to Jonathan Schaffer. I argue that the counterexamples don’t work and draw some conclusions about the relationship between grounding and explanation.
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  27. (1 other version)Counterexamples to the transitivity of better than.Stuart Rachels - 1998 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 76 (1):71 – 83.
    Ethicists and economists commonly assume that if A is all things considered better than B, and B is all things considered better than C, then A is all things considered better than C. Call this principle Transitivity. Although it has great conceptual, intuitive, and empirical appeal, I argue against it. Larry S. Temkin explains how three types of ethical principle, which cannot be dismissed a priori, threaten Transitivity: (a) principles implying that in some cases different factors are relevant to comparing (...)
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  28. Two New Counterexamples to the Truth-Tracking Theory of Knowledge.Tristan Haze - 2015 - Logos and Episteme 6 (3):309-311.
    I present two counterexamples to the recently back-in-favour truth-tracking account of knowledge: one involving a true belief resting on a counterfactually robust delusion, one involving a true belief acquired alongside a bunch of false beliefs. These counterexamples carry over to a recent modification of the theory due to Briggs and Nolan (2012), and seem invulnerable to a recent defence of the theory against known counterexamples, by Adams and Clarke (2005).
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  29.  16
    Counterexamples” to modus ponens.Angelina S. Bobrova & Elena G. Dragalina-Chernaya - 2024 - Epistemology and Philosophy of Science 61 (4):117-128.
    The paper deals with the epistemological problems posed by the application of the modus ponens rule in cognitive processing of distributed information. Distinguishing the deductive correctness of a rule of inference from its normativity for rational belief, we consider ‘counterexamples’ of modus ponens proposed in modern epistemology of logic that endanger not its model-theoretic validity, but epistemic rationality for boundedly rational cognitive agents. We explain the epistemic lacunas in the closure of knowledge according to modus ponens revealed by Dretske’s (...)
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    Counterexamples to Recovery and the Filtering Condition.Isaac Levi - 2003 - Studia Logica 73 (2):209-218.
    David Makinson has argued that the compelling character of counterexamples to the Recovery Condition on contraction is due to an appeal to justificational structure. In “naked theories” where such structure is ignored or is not present, Recovery does apply. This note attempts to show that Makinson is mistaken on both counts. Recovery fails when no appeal is made to justificational structure.
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  31. Five counterexamples to a definition of dirt.Terence Rajivan Edward - 2023 - IOSR Journal Of Humanities And Social Science (IOSR-JHSS) 28 (12):73-74.
    This paper considers five counterexamples to Mary Douglas's definition of dirt, one of which is extracted from a scene from George Eliot's novel Middlemarch and another from Marilyn Strathern's essay on anthropology at home.
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  32. The inefficacy objection to consequentialism and the problem with the expected consequences response.Mark Bryant Budolfson - 2019 - Philosophical Studies 176 (7):1711-1724.
    Collective action problems lie behind many core issues in ethics and social philosophy—for example, whether an individual is required to vote, whether it is wrong to consume products that are produced in morally objectionable ways, and many others. In these cases, it matters greatly what we together do, but yet a single individual’s ‘non-cooperative’ choice seems to make no difference to the outcome and also seems to involve no violation of anyone’s rights. Here it is argued that—contrary to influential arguments (...)
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  33.  49
    A Counterexample to Polynomially Bounded Realizability of Basic Arithmetic.Mohammad Ardeshir, Erfan Khaniki & Mohsen Shahriari - 2019 - Notre Dame Journal of Formal Logic 60 (3):481-489.
    We give a counterexample to the claim that every provably total function of Basic Arithmetic is a polynomially bounded primitive recursive function.
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  34.  31
    (1 other version)Heuristics and Biases in a Purported Counterexample to the Acyclicity of "Better Than".Alex Voorhoeve - 2007 - CPNSS Working Paper 3 (2).
    Stuart Rachels and Larry Temkin have offered a purported counterexample to the acyclicity of the relationship “all things considered better than”. This example invokes our intuitive preferences over pairs of alternatives involving a single person’s painful experiences of varying intensity and duration. These preferences, Rachels and Temkin claim, are confidently held, entirely reasonable, and cyclical. They conclude that we should drop acyclicity as a requirement of rationality. I argue that, together with the findings of recent research on the way people (...)
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  35. A counterexample to the contrastive account of knowledge.Jason Rourke - 2013 - Philosophical Studies 162 (3):637-643.
    Many epistemologists treat knowledge as a binary relation that holds between a subject and a proposition. The contrastive account of knowledge developed by Jonathan Schaffer maintains that knowledge is a ternary, contrastive relation that holds between a subject, a proposition, and a set of contextually salient alternative propositions the subject’s evidence must eliminate. For the contrastivist, it is never simply the case that S knows that p; in every case of knowledge S knows that p rather than q. This paper (...)
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  36.  47
    Strong counterexamples to Borel hyperdeterminacy.C. Ward Henson - 1992 - Archive for Mathematical Logic 31 (3):215-220.
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  37. Counterexamples to Testimonial Transmission.Peter Graham & Zachary Bachman - 2019 - In Miranda Fricker, Peter Graham, David Henderson & Nikolaj Jang Pedersen, The Routledge Handbook of Social Epistemology. New York, USA: Routledge. pp. 61-77.
    Commonsense holds that testimony transfers knowledge from a speaker to the hearer. If the speaker has knowledge, then the hearer acquires it. Call that sufficiency. And a hearer acquires knowledge only if the speaker has it to transfer. Call that necessity. This article reviews counterexamples--and some replies to those counterexamples--to both claims.
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  38. Counterexamples to the Unique and Cofinal Branches Hypotheses.Itay Neeman & John Steel - 2006 - Journal of Symbolic Logic 71 (3):977 - 988.
    We produce counterexamples to the unique and cofinal branches hypotheses, assuming (slightly less than) the existence of a cardinal which is strong past a Woodin cardinal.
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  39. A Counterexample to Modus Ponenses.Matthew Mandelkern - 2020 - Journal of Philosophy 117 (6):315-331.
    McGee argued that modus ponens was invalid for the natural language conditional ‘If…then…’. Many subsequent responses have argued that, while McGee’s examples show that modus ponens fails to preserve truth, they do not show that modus ponens fails to preserve rational full acceptance, and thus modus ponens may still be valid in the latter informational sense. I show that when we turn our attention from indicative conditionals to subjunctive conditionals, we find that modus ponens does not preserve either truth or (...)
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  40. A Counterexample to the Breckenridge-Magidor Account of Instantial Reasoning.Tristan Haze - 2016 - Journal of Philosophical Research 41:539-541.
    In a recent paper, Breckenridge and Magidor argue for an interesting and counterintuitive account of instantial reasoning. According to this account, in arguments such as one beginning with 'There is some x such that x is mortal. Let O be such an x. ...', the 'O' refers to a particular object, although we cannot know which. I give and defend a simple counterexample involving the notion of an unreferred-to object.
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  41. A counterexample to six fundamental principles of belief formation.Hans Rott - 2004 - Synthese 139 (2):225 - 240.
    In recent years there has been a growing consensus that ordinary reasoning does not conform to the laws of classical logic, but is rather nonmonotonic in the sense that conclusions previously drawn may well be removed upon acquiring further information. Even so, rational belief formation has up to now been modelled as conforming to some fundamental principles that are classically valid. The counterexample described in this paper suggests that a number of the most cherished of these principles should not be (...)
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  42. A counterexample to the Stalnaker-Lewis analysis of counterfactuals.Pavel Tichý - 1976 - Philosophical Studies 29 (4):271 - 273.
  43. Fittingness Objections to Consequentialism.Richard Yetter Chappell - 2018 - In Christian Seidel, Consequentialism: New Directions, New Problems. Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press.
    New work in the foundations of ethics—extending the fitting attitudes analysis of value to yield a broader notion of normative fittingness as a (or perhaps even the) fundamental normative concept—provides us with the resources to clarify and renew the force of traditional character-based objections to consequentialism. According to these revamped fittingness objections, consequentialism is incompatible with plausible claims about which attitudes are truly fitting. If a theory’s implications regarding the fittingness facts are implausible, then this can be taken (...)
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  44. A Counterexample to Plantinga’s Free Will Defense.Alexander R. Pruss - 2012 - Faith and Philosophy 29 (4):400-415.
    Plantinga’s Free Will Defense is an argument that, possibly, God cannot actualize a world containing significant creaturely free will and no wrongdoings. I will argue that if standard Molinism is true, there is a pair of worlds w1 and w2 each of which contains a significantly free creature who never chooses wrongly, and that are such that, necessarily, at least one of these worlds is a world that God can actualize.
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  45. Counterexamples to Principle Beta: A Response to Crisp and Warfield.Erik Carlson - 2003 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 66 (3):730-737.
    The well‐known “Consequence Argument” for the incompatibility of freedom and determinism relies on a certain rule of inference; “Principle Beta”. Thomas Crisp and Ted Warfield have recently argued that all hitherto suggested counterexamples to Beta can be easily circumvented by proponents of the Consequence Argument. I present a new counterexample which, I argue, is free from the flaws Crisp and Warfield detect in earlier examples.
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  46. Counterexamples to Nozick’s Account of Transmission of Knowledge via Proof.Adam Thompson - 1986 - Philosophy Research Archives 12:261-265.
    This paper reveals and corrects a flaw in Nozick’s account of knowledge via inference. First, two counterexamples are provided by considering cases which would not typically be regarded as instances of knowledge although they are counted as such by Nozick’s theory. Then the general form of these counterexamples is given. From this it is apparent that the counterexamples show that Nozick’s theory fails to take account of cases in which the subject infers q from p, but in (...)
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  47. Some counterexamples to causal decision theory.Andy Egan - 2007 - Philosophical Review 116 (1):93-114.
    Many philosophers (myself included) have been converted to causal decision theory by something like the following line of argument: Evidential decision theory endorses irrational courses of action in a range of examples, and endorses “an irrational policy of managing the news”. These are fatal problems for evidential decision theory. Causal decision theory delivers the right results in the troublesome examples, and does not endorse this kind of irrational news-managing. So we should give up evidential decision theory, and be causal decision (...)
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  48.  67
    Large cardinals and definable counterexamples to the continuum hypothesis.Matthew Foreman & Menachem Magidor - 1995 - Annals of Pure and Applied Logic 76 (1):47-97.
    In this paper we consider whether L(R) has “enough information” to contain a counterexample to the continuum hypothesis. We believe this question provides deep insight into the difficulties surrounding the continuum hypothesis. We show sufficient conditions for L(R) not to contain such a counterexample. Along the way we establish many results about nonstationary towers, non-reflecting stationary sets, generalizations of proper and semiproper forcing and Chang's conjecture.
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  49. Counterexamples to a likelihood theory of evidence.Malcolm R. Forster - 2006 - Minds and Machines 16 (3):319-338.
    The likelihood theory of evidence (LTE) says, roughly, that all the information relevant to the bearing of data on hypotheses (or models) is contained in the likelihoods. There exist counterexamples in which one can tell which of two hypotheses is true from the full data, but not from the likelihoods alone. These examples suggest that some forms of scientific reasoning, such as the consilience of inductions (Whewell, 1858. In Novum organon renovatum (Part II of the 3rd ed.). The philosophy (...)
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  50.  84
    A Counterexample to Two Accounts of Harm.Duncan Purves - 2014 - Southwest Philosophy Review 30 (1):243-250.
    Two alternative accounts have emerged as viable competitors to the forerunning counterfactual comparative account in the recent debate concerning the nature of harm. These are the “non-comparative statebased account of harm ” defended by Elizabeth Harman, the “event-based account of harm ” defended by Matthew Hanser. I raise one simple but serious counterexample involving “non-regrettable disabilities” that applies to both of these alternative accounts but that is avoided by the counterfactual comparative account. I point out that my counterexample is one (...)
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