Economic globalization looks like the "powerless" expansion of communications and markets, but allows the United States to harness the rest of the world to its rhythms and fortify its empire-like power. Action by Europe, China, and East Asia is a vent for hope.

Many developing and transitional countries have grown faster than advanced countries in the past decade, resulting in a shift in the distribution of world income in their favor. China is now the second largest economy in the world, behind the United States and ahead of Japan. As the relative economic weight of China and several others has come to match or exceed that of the middle-ranking G7 economies, the world economy has shifted from “unipolar” toward “multipolar,” less dominated by the (...) G7. How is this change being translated into changes in authority and influence within multilateral organizations like the G20, the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund? Alarm bells are ringing in G7 capitals about G7 loss of influence. According to a WikiLeaks cable from the senior U.S. official for the G20 process, from January 2010, “It is remarkable how closely coordinated the BASIC group of countries [Brazil, South Africa, India, China] have become in international fora, taking turns to impede US/eu initiatives and playing the US and EU off against each other.” This essay suggests that the shift in power is much smaller than the headlines or private alarm bells suggest. The United States remains the dominant state, and the G7 states together continue to exercise primacy, but now more fearfully and defensively. China is split between asserting itself as “the wave of the future” and defending itself as too poor to take on global responsibilities. The combination of G7 defensiveness and emerging states’ jealous guarding of sovereignty produces a spirit of Westphalian assertion in international fora, or “every state for itself.” On the assumption that the world economy is in a transitional period, the article suggests reforms in the G20 and the World Bank that would boost their role and legitimacy as multilateral organizations in a more multipolar world. (shrink)

We cannot understand contemporary psychology without first researching its history. Unlike other books on the history of psychology, which are chronologically ordered, this Handbook is organized topically. It covers the history of ideas in multiple areas of the field and reviews the intellectual history behind the major topics of investigation. The evolution of psychological ideas is described alongside an analysis of their surrounding context. Readers learn how eminent psychologists draw on the context of their time and place for ideas and (...) practices, and also how innovation in psychology is an ongoing dialogue between past, present, and anticipated future. (shrink)

This article describes answerability, a fundamental component of social reason and action. "Holding answerable" and "being answerable" are characterized in terms of their roles in the drama of human relations, and our general tendency to anticipate answerable, rather than ethical, behavior in situations that are ethically problematic is discussed.

Was Durkheim an apologist for the authoritarianism? Is the sociology founded upon his work incapable of critical perspective; and must it operate under the presumption that social agents, including sociologists themselves, are incapable of reflexivity? Certainly some have said so, but they may be wrong. In this essay, I address these questions in the light of Durkheim's revisionary sociology of morals. I elaborate on unfinished elements in Durkheim's abruptly concluded (because of his early and unexpected death) scholarship, pointing out Durkheim's (...) recognition that co-present moral spheres always exist in an organically complex society, and explaining how these co-present spheres obligate social agents to untether from any absolute moral affiliations. Ultimately, then, the argument shows how the solidarity/social-order relationship is transcended within Durkheim's sociology, even by Durkheim himself. (shrink)

This book introduces Robert Corrington’s “ecstatic naturalism,” a new perspective in understanding “sacred” nature and naturalism, and explores what can be done with this philosophical thought. This is an excellent resource for scholars of Continental philosophy, philosophy of religion, and American pragmatism.

The present essay tries to address certain questions arising from the conjunction of biological and political issues by entering into the debate surrounding what Nicolas Agar has called “liberal eugenics.”1 The advocates of liberal eugenics argue for the moral validity of both ‘negative’ and ‘positive’ eugenics: genetic interventions which target the prevention of diseases are ‘negative’ while ‘positive’ interventions ‘enhance’ the hereditary capacities of future persons. But is there a necessary contradiction, or at least pronounced tension, between the liberal eugenicist’s (...) emphasis on parental choice in the realm of genetic decision-makingand liberal principles, such as pluralism and autonomy? If so, why? In this paper, I examine Agar’s defense of liberal eugenics. I then discuss the criticisms raised by Jurgen Habermas in “The Debate on the Ethical Self-Understanding of the Species,” concluding that it is necessary to pursue a cautious strategy in the utilization of genetic technologies. (shrink)

The present essay tries to address certain questions arising from the conjunction of biological and political issues by entering into the debate surrounding what Nicolas Agar has called “liberal eugenics.”1 The advocates of liberal eugenics argue for the moral validity of both ‘negative’ and ‘positive’ eugenics: genetic interventions which target the prevention of diseases are ‘negative’ while ‘positive’ interventions ‘enhance’ the hereditary capacities of future persons. But is there a necessary contradiction, or at least pronounced tension, between the liberal eugenicist’s (...) emphasis on parental choice in the realm of genetic decision-makingand liberal principles, such as pluralism and autonomy? If so, why? In this paper, I examine Agar’s defense of liberal eugenics. I then discuss the criticisms raised by Jurgen Habermas in “The Debate on the Ethical Self-Understanding of the Species,” concluding that it is necessary to pursue a cautious strategy in the utilization of genetic technologies. (shrink)

Individuals shift their language to converge with interlocutors. Recent work has suggested that convergence can target not only observed but also expected linguistic behavior, cued by social information. However, it remains uncertain how expectations and observed behavior interact, particularly when they contradict each other. We investigated this using a cooperative map task experiment, in which pairs of participants communicated online by typing messages to each other in a miniature “alien” language that exhibited variation between alien species. The overall task comprised (...) three phases, in each of which participants were told that they would be paired with a different partner. One member of the pair was given explicit linguistic expectations in each phase, while the software controlled whether or not observed behavior from their partner would be consistent or inconsistent with these expectations. The other participant was given no such expectations, allowing us to control for the role of expectation. Participants converged to both observed and expected linguistic behavior, and convergence was boosted when observation and expectation were aligned. When expected and observed behavior were misaligned, participants updated their expectations, though convergence levels did not drop. Furthermore, participants generalized what they learned about one partner to apparent novel partners of the same alien species. We also discuss individual variation in convergence patterns and the lack of a relationship between linguistic convergence and success at the map task. Findings are consistent with observations outside the laboratory that language users converge toward expected linguistic behavior. They also have broader implications for understanding linguistic accommodation and the influence of social information on linguistic processing and production. (shrink)

In this essay, I examine both the neoliberalization of higher education, as well as a powerful alternative which is implicitly sketched out in the work of Hannah Arendt. This paper is divided into three parts. In part one, I briefly discuss important neoliberal features of contemporary American higher education, with a specific focus on the ways in which neoliberal ideology is transforming contemporary higher education along vocational and utilitarian lines. In the second part of the essay I argue that there (...) are ways in which thinking (as Arendt describes it) is an especially powerful ideal for proponents of the liberal arts to seize upon in order to establish a contrast with the demand that we reconfigure higher education along vocational and corporatist lines in order to fulfill neoliberal imperatives. In the third and final part of the paper, I will attempt to address objections to this proposal. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that the widespread use of liberal eugenics would establish a biopolitical horizon for class conflict. In the course of my discussion, I examine Foucault’s discussion of the origins of class racism in Society Must Be Defended . I then turn to an examination of how a widespread use of genetic engineering could aggravate class divisions and produce new forms of class racism. I conclude the essay with an overview of the political options which are available (...) to opponents of liberal eugenics. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Rhetoric 36.4 (2003) 379-383 [Access article in PDF] Husserl at the Limits of Phenomenology: Including Texts by Edmund Husserl. Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Ed. Leonard Lawlor with Bettina Bergo. Trans. Leonard Lawlor. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2002. Pp. 192. $19.95 pbk. The most striking characteristic of this volume is the manner that it presents layers of interpretation to the reader, particularly in that the writing is not intended (...) as a postmodern fête, and has limited value as a hermeneutic enterprise. Ultimately the book's true contribution is the seventy-nine pages devoted to the translation and printing of lecture notes used by [End Page 379] Merleau-Ponty in a class he gave at College de France, shortly before his death. However, the explanation of why this is so will have to be withheld until the end of this review.The course that Merleau-Ponty gave was organized around three essays published by Edmund Husserl. These essays are included in the volume reviewed here and must be briefly dealt with, as they are the core of whatever thinking occurs within and around this book. Interesting essays all, they deal with three longstanding issues of philosophical debate. The first essay challenges the classical notion of a transcendent ideal. Husserl attempts to show, through an examination of geometry, that an ideal is first called into existence when it is called into the realm of human experience, and he does this without ever resorting to the quality of detached being that Plato attributes to ideals. Then, in his second essay, Husserl attempts to defeat modernist cosmology, arguing, against Galileo, that the earth is a fixed point in the universe. Finally, his third essay hearkens back to Heraclitus and Parmenides, examining how human experience is able to extract a sense of atemporal quiddity in a world that is constantly falling into a past. A reader might be baffled that an intellectual could make such claims, but they are made from within the framework of phenomenology, and, within this paradigm as Husserl explains it, the claims he makes do not seem ridiculous at all. "The Origins of Geometry," "The Originary Ark, The Earth, Does Not Move," and "The World of the Living Present,"— these are the three essays that Merleau-Ponty forms his lecture course around. At sixty pages within this volume, they constitute one third of the text itself. For intellectual worth, I would say that these essays are the finest contribution in the text, but that claim is discounted because much of the essay material was already available in English translation. Nevertheless, it only makes sense to have it included in this volume in order to conveniently work back and forth between Merleau-Ponty's notes and Husserl's actual essays.However, that brings us to a significant problem within the text itself. If readers are like me, they will realize that it is often difficult to draw conclusions from the notes of others. Like secretarial shorthand, notes rely on a reader's ability to read both what has been written and what has been withheld in an expressive passage. There is no code that will allow us to recover what Merleau-Ponty recovered as he looked down on his podium at these notes and then raised his head to speak to his class. All that we have are the fragments, and they do not make a coherent argument, lacking both the clarity and the painstaking thoroughness that we find in books [End Page 380] such as The Phenomenology of Perception and The Visible and the Invisible. Certainly one cannot fault Merleau-Ponty for this—he did not write these notes for us, but for himself. His course might have been magnificent, even transcendent, but we will not know that from these fragments.I suppose it could be argued that the ambiguity inherent in such fragments liberates the text and opens it for some sort of radical hermeneutic exegesis; however, I sigh at the very thought of such an argument. Unless we intend to transform... (shrink)

Doctored images can cause people to believe in and remember experiences that never occurred, yet the underlying mechanism responsible are not well understood. How does compelling false evidence distort autobiographical memory? Subjects were filmed observing and copying a Research Assistant performing simple actions, then they returned 2 days later for a memory test. Before taking the test, subjects viewed video-clips of simple actions, including actions that they neither observed nor performed earlier. We varied the format of the video-clips between-subjects to (...) tap into the source-monitoring mechanisms responsible for the ‘doctored-evidence effect.’ The distribution of belief and memory distortions across conditions suggests that at least two mechanisms are involved: doctored images create an illusion of familiarity, and also enhance the perceived credibility of false suggestions. These findings offer insight into how external evidence influences source-monitoring. (shrink)

Late in 1990, the Center for the Study of Ethics in the Professions at Illinois Institute of Technology (lIT) received a grant of more than $200,000 from the National Science Foundation to try a campus-wide approach to integrating professional ethics into its technical curriculum.! Enough has now been accomplished to draw some tentative conclusions. I am the grant's principal investigator. In this paper, I shall describe what we at lIT did, what we learned, and what others, especially philosophers, can learn (...) from us. We set out to develop an approach that others could profitably adopt. I believe that we succeeded. (shrink)

What role, if any, should the government perform in a society? Two very different answers to this question have been provided by John Rawls and Robert Nozick. For Rawls, the government plays an important role in ensuring that the principles of justice are realized in the workings of society. For Nozick, the role of government is limited to that of providing protection. The debate over these two views has led to the questioning of the entire liberal doctrine, a questioning that (...) has taken place not only within intellectual circles, but also within the society at large. (shrink)

This paper considers recent heated debates led by Jerry A. Coyne andMichael J. Wade on issues stemming from the 1929–1962 R.A. Fisher-Sewall Wrightcontroversy in population genetics. William B. Provine once remarked that theFisher-Wright controversy is central, fundamental, and very influential.Indeed,it is also persistent. The argumentative structure of therecent (1997–2000) debates is analyzed with the aim of eliminating a logicalconflict in them, viz., that the two sides in the debates havedifferent aims and that, as such, they are talking past each (...) other. Given aphilosophical analysis of the argumentative structure of the debates,suggestions supportive of Wade's work on the debate are made that areaimed, modestly, at putting the persistent Fisher-Wright controversy on thecourse to resolution. (shrink)

Criticism of court decisions is a favored American pastime. Typically, such criticisms are grounded in extra-legal criteria such as common sense (or lack of it) and morality (or immorality). Thus Tennessee Valley Authority v. Hill (1978) in which the Supreme Court halted the construction of the nearly completed Tellico Dam because it endangered the habitat of the snail darter, an action forbidden by the Endangered Species Act, was said to confound common sense; and many have called immoral Roe v. (...) class='Hi'>Wade (1973) which said the right to abortion, at least through the first trimester, was constitutionally guaranteed. 1 However, even if such criticisms are justified, they do not address the legal issue, which is whether the court got the law wrong. (shrink)

: This paper explores the calibration of laboratory models in population genetics as an experimental strategy for justifying experimental results and claims based upon them following Franklin (1986, 1990) and Rudge (1996, 1998). The analysis provided undermines Coyne et al.'s (1997) critique of Wade and Goodnight's (1991) experimental study of Wright's (1931, 1932) Shifting Balance Theory. The essay concludes by further demonstrating how this analysis bears on Diamond's (1986) claims regarding the weakness of laboratory experiments as evidence, and further (...) how the calibration strategy fits within Lloyd's (1987, 1988) account of the confirmation of ecological and evolutionary models. (shrink)

Wading into the thicket of science, naturalism, and theism in the context of psychology can seem quite daunting. One prerequisite for avoiding confusions and missteps is to properly distinguishing two forms of naturalism that are logically independent of each other: metaphysical and methodological. Once this underbrush is cleared away, interesting and important questions about psychology’s compatibility with theism, the psychological study of religion and other topics can be fruitfully engaged. 2012 APA, all rights reserved).

Inferencjalizm semantyczny Roberta B. Brandoma jest ważną i nową teorią znaczenia we współczesnej, analitycznej filozofii języka. Wyłożona została w bardzo obszerny sposób w monografii pt. Making It Explicit: Reasoning, Representing and Discursive Commitment. Jest to teoria jednocześnie pragmatyczna, normatywna, holistyczna i dyskursywna. Stanowisko Brandoma jest z jednej strony gloryfikowane, natomiast z drugiej strony wzbudza kontrowersje. Powstaje zatem metafilozoficzne pytanie: Jak ocenić wkład tej teorii w filozofię języka? Inferencjalizm akcentuje wnioskowania materialne, askrypcje de re i użycie wyrażeń deiktycznych. Są to kategorie (...) „wertykalne”, akcentujące „związek” z rzeczywistością. Brandom jednak kładzie nacisk także na anaforyczną koncepcję referencji i prawdy. To czyni jego podejście wartościowym, anaforyczne bowiem rozumienie referencji i prawdy dostarcza dodatkowego objaśnienia użycia słów „odnosi się” i „ jest prawdziwe”. Ale kategorie te są „horyzontalne”. Brandom dostrzega problem nabywania empirycznego znaczenia przez wyrażenia inicjujące łańcuchy anaforyczne i proponuje — jako próbę rozwiązania problemu — zmodyfikowanie inferencjalizmu semantycznego przez poszerzenie go o epistemologią rewizyjną i fallibilistyczną. Dodatkowo wspomaga on swoją teorię przez pragmatykę normatywną, aplikującą kategorię asercji, uprawnienia, różnorodnych zobowiązań, czy „zdobywania punktów”. Wydaje się jednak, że wciąż brakuje pojęcia prawdziwości mocniejszego niż to zaproponowane w koncepcji anaforycznej — pojęcie prawdy, wyrażone przy użyciu relacji korespondencji między językiem a rzeczywistością. Idea korespondencji ma tę wadę, że trudno jest ją satysfakcjonująco zdefiniować. Ważną jednak zaletą takiej relacji jest to, że jest ona relacją „język–rzeczywistość”, a nie tylko anaforyczną relacją „język–język”. Postawiony zarzut nie dyskwalifikuje inferencjalizmu. Wyraża on jedynie ogólno-epistemologiczną trudność z definicją prawdy. Natomiast doniosłością inferencjalizmu jest to, że próbuje on łączyć różne elementy, a przez to — w bardziej adekwatny sposób — objaśnić czym jest znaczenie i wyjaśnić, jak wyrażenia je nabywają. (shrink)

Essays cover the abortion situation before Roe v. Wade, Christians and abortion, abortion and the Constitution, abortion and moral philosophy, and the feminist perspective.

The dissertation is a critical examination of theory evaluation in population genetics. There are three main philosophical approaches to theory evaluation in philosophy of science: confirmation and hypothesis testing, scientific change, and experimentation. Accounts that champion each of the main philosophical approaches to scientific theory evaluation are represented in philosophy of biology: confirmation and hypothesis testing by Elisabeth A. Lloyd, scientific change by Lindley Darden, and experimentation by David W. Rudge. I argue that each of the main approaches is insufficient (...) for evaluating population genetics theories. However, the accounts I critique are not fundamentally incompatible. I modify, unify, and extend them into a comprehensive account of theory evaluation for population genetics. ;My philosophical analysis is driven by a complex, important, and ongoing controversy in population genetics, viz., the R. A. Fisher-Sewall Wright controversy in population genetics. I use my historical case study to assess the adequacy of both the extant philosophical analyses of theory evaluation and my own account. Between 1929 and 1962 Fisher and Wright debated the main differences emanating from their alternative approaches to evolutionary theorizing. The debates between Fisher and Wright functionally ended with Fisher's death. However, Wright continued to clarify his position in the controversy until his death in 1988, and other biologists have continued work on the core debates. ;Recently, four scientific papers led by biologists Jerry A. Coyne and Michael J. Wade have been key in revisiting and rekindling the Fisher-Wright controversy with analyses of old theoretical and empirical issues as well as new developments that have spun off the older work. Four decades after the debates between Fisher and Wright, these papers have staked out, with substantial disagreement, claims about the evaluative status of the two predominant population genetics approaches to evolution in the field. A further task of this dissertation is to provide a non-partisan evaluation of the last 40 years of work on the controversy, i.e., the controversy since Fisher's death in 1962. It is hoped that such a critical analysis of the controversy will advance it to some extent. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Rhetoric 35.4 (2002) 267-296 [Access article in PDF] Allegory and Democratic Public Culture in the Postmodern Era Robert Hariman The man lies on the hotel bed, clad only in his underwear, as he watches the TV screen just beyond his feet. His right hand holds the remote control, which he uses to scan through the cable channels. To his left sits Abraham Lincoln, clothed in long-sleeved white (...) shirt and black pants and reading a book. Lincoln's long, angular frame is just a bit stooped, and his brow is slightly furrowed, as if long accustomed to thinking on the edge of melancholy. Lincoln is mulling over a statement by Walter Benjamin: "Allegories are, in the realm of thoughts, what ruins are in the realm of things" (Benjamin 1977, 178). 1Seated to the man's right is a woman wearing the terry cloth bathrobe provided by the hotel. She leans slightly forward, legs crossed, as she reads the New York Times Magazine cover story about President Clinton. "Listen to this," she says with a bemused smile. "In the clutter around his desk in the Oval Office stands not a single bust of a favorite predecessor, but five: Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, Truman and two of F.D.R., plus a statuette of Will Rogers for good measure. If governing is choosing, this collection is a metaphor for this President's trouble with choices, and he himself allows, 'That's the story of my Presidency, that desk'" (Purdum 1996, 36).The man says nothing as he continues to watch the succession of images on the screen: a lizard flicks its tongue in the desert heat; a child in a stroller laughs as she holds a strawberry ice cream cone; a congressman in blue suit, white shirt, and red tie jabs his finger into the air as he talks earnestly; cars plastered with automotive product logos curl around a race track; Fred and Ginger swirl around the dance floor; soldiers wade ashore at Omaha Beach; the Space Shuttle lifts off; Groucho lifts his eyebrows; Regis smiles; mushrooms and peppers simmer in a pan.The succession of images could go on indefinitely. The tableau remains static. The composition is an allegory: a figural presentation that organizes multiple interpretations regarding collective experience. It also contains and comments on other forms of itself: Clinton's desk is an example [End Page 267] of the figural anecdote that has been a staple of American public address. The manifold of televisual images exemplifies the allegorical encoding that operates within postmodern art forms, including fragmentary appropriation, paratactic association, encyclopedic range, and non-linear temporality. The statement by Benjamin illuminates the nature of allegory in a specific genre and historical period, and as it is a general mode of representation, and perhaps as it is a model for all textual interpretation.The composition also evokes a set of dialectical tensions that are characteristic of both allegory in general and fundamental anxieties in the contemporary period. Past and present sit side by side, but incongruously, as if by artifice alone. So it is also with the print and visual media, which are held together by mutual competencies but otherwise in figural isolation that perhaps represents different destinies. Likewise, one might wonder about the peculiar relationship between public affairs and private life: the succession of images on the screen adhere to no hierarchy of values, no principle of loyalty or sacrifice, no basis for discerning obligations or maintaining rights, yet they are replete with the paraphernalia of these concerns, and the arrangement of figures in the room likewise is at once suggestive yet inconclusive. If this tableau contains familiar features of the mass-mediated experience that now saturates American politics, one might wonder: Is the democratic tradition in ruins?Allegories give us dynamic juxtapositions in a static frame. This principle of composition seems particularly suited to periods of cultural change. To the extent that the genre of allegory has a history, it is one of eternal recurrence at periods of loss and fragmentation produced by the expansion of a new, somewhat... (shrink)

I must admit that I had some reservations about reading this book, as all I was told was that it chronicled the author’s signs received from a discarnate friend. The prospect of wading through yet another book about pennies sent from deceased loved ones seemed onerous and a task to which I did not look forward. Not that I am averse to such manifestations and after-death communication, quite the contrary. I just prefer the evidence to be more convincing. Finding a (...) coin that has become so devalued in our currency that half the people who drop them no longer bother to pick them up doesn’t do it for me. However, to my great delight, Michael’s message is no more about the signs than calligraphy is about the paper. The death of a loved one is often a trigger for exploration and a search for meaning, and it certainly was for the author. Following the death of a close friend, he was witness to an unfolding symphony of communications, first dismissed as coincidences, but eventually embraced and treasured in an awakened consciousness. In this case, a journey began as the result of the appearance of a simple marble that was owned by the deceased. After Michael’s friend Frank had passed, he decided to engage in an experiment by placing the marble with Frank in his coffin, specifically in his suit pocket. His initial motivation was simply to return the treasured item to its owner, but in the recesses of his mind Michael also contemplated a possible confirmation from his friend that he still survived in some fashion. He wrapped the marble in the paper on which Frank’s eulogy was written, and on the top of the paper wrote “If you are ever around, toss this back.”. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Playing the Blues Defining the Blues Wittgenstein to the Rescue Good Blues, Bad Blues, Walking Dead Blues Notes.

From 1945 on for two decades, Father William Wade was Chairman of the Department of Philosophy at St. Louis University. This volume, a recovery of his own 1935 Ph.D dissertation, was originally written under the direction of Vernon J. Bourke, later himself a renowned interpreter of both St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas. In his dissertation, Wade displays deep understanding of relationships between Greek and medieval thought as well as of the different influences of Plato and Aristotle by (...) way of Augustine and Thomas. (shrink)

Pezdek and Lam [Pezdek, K. & Lam, S. . What research paradigms have cognitive psychologists used to study “False memory,” and what are the implications of these choices? Consciousness and Cognition] claim that the majority of research into false memories has been misguided. Specifically, they charge that false memory scientists have been misusing the term “false memory,” relying on the wrong methodologies to study false memories, and misapplying false memory research to real world situations. We review each of these claims (...) and highlight the problems with them. We conclude that several types of false memory research have advanced our knowledge of autobiographical and recovered memories, and that future research will continue to make significant contributions to how we understand memory and memory errors. (shrink)

People frequently report that, at times, their thought has a vocal character. Thinking commonly appears to be accompanied or constituted by silently ‘talking’ to oneself in inner speech. In this paper, we explore the specifically epistemic role of inner speech in conscious reasoning. A plausible position—but one I argue is ultimately wrong—is that inner speech plays asolelyfacilitative role that is exhausted by (i) serving as the vehicle of representation for conscious reasoning, and/or (ii) allowing one to focus on certain types (...) of objects or relations, e.g., causal relations, abstracta, counterfactuals, etc., or to consciously entertain structured propositional contents that it would be hard (or impossible) to focus on or entertain with representations in other (e.g., imagistic) formats. According to this position, inner speech doesn't figure as a justificatory element in our reasoning or as the partial epistemic basis of our conclusions—it merely facilitates reasoning through (i) and/or (ii). In contrast to the view that inner speech is amerefacilitator, I establish that (outside of potentially playing roles (i) and/or (ii)) the language we use itself serves as a crucial source of information in reasoning. In other words, we reason from propositions about the language we use in inner speech as opposed to exclusively reasoning from the semantic contents of the speech. My conclusion follows from how we use language as a cognitive tool to keep track of information, e.g., the contents of premises, lemmas, previous reasoning results, etc., in reasoning. (shrink)

The abstract structure of inquiry - the process of acquiring and changing beliefs about the world - is the focus of this book which takes the position that the "pragmatic" rather than the "linguistic" approach better solves the philosophical problems about the nature of mental representation, and better accounts for the phenomena of thought and speech. It discusses propositions and propositional attitudes (the cluster of activities that constitute inquiry) in general and takes up the way beliefs change in response to (...) potential new information, suggesting that conditional propositions should be understood as projections of epistemic policies onto the world.Robert C. Stalnaker is a professor in the Sage School of Philosophy at Cornell University. A Bradford Book. (shrink)

Winner of the 1975 National Book Award, this brilliant and widely acclaimed book is a powerful philosophical challenge to the most widely held political and social positions of our age--liberal, socialist, and conservative.

The US populace appears to be increasingly polarized on partisan lines. Political fissures bifurcate the country even on empirical matters like vaccine safety and anthropogenic climate change. There now exists an ever-expanding interdisciplinary research program in which theorists attempt to explain increases in political polarization and myriad other phenomena collected under the “post-truth” heading by appeal to social-epistemic structures, like echo chambers and epistemic bubbles, that affect the flow and uptake of information in various communities. In this paper, I critically (...) analyze C. Thi Nguyen’s important and popular analysis of echo chambers and epistemic bubbles. As I demonstrate, the explanatory mechanisms on which Nguyen focuses are, arguably, overly cognitive and obscure significant effects of social-epistemic structures on our affective lives. The broader lesson to draw from my discussion is the following: commonly used expressions intended to refer to social-epistemic problems, like “political polarization”, possess no univocal definition across theorists, and various ways of making the terms precise are differentially successful in characterizing verifiable phenomena. Theorizing about social-epistemic structures should be responsive to relevant empirical work on various phenomena that we have good reason to believe constitute real and substantive problems that result from the flow and uptake of information. (shrink)

People frequently report that their thought has, at times, a vocal character. Thinking commonly appears to be accompanied or constituted by silently ‘talking’ to oneself in inner speech. In this paper, I argue that inner speech ‘utterances’ can constitute occurrent propositional attitudes, e.g., occurrent judgments, suppositions, etc., and, thereby, we can consciously reason through tokening a series of inner speech utterances in working memory. As I demonstrate, the functional role a mental state plays in working memory is determined in a (...) flexible and context sensitive manner by metacognitive monitoring and control procedures. An inner speech utterance functions as an occurrent judgment (and, thus, as a premise, lemma, or conclusion in a line of conscious reasoning) when it is experienced with a level of certainty that exceeds one’s threshold of confidence for acceptance. In virtue of an agent experiencing an inner speech utterance with a sufficient level of certainty, the utterance plays the functional role of an occurrent judgment through, e.g., terminating inquiry and causing overt actions (like overtly asserting the words rehearsed in inner speech). (shrink)

Before we can resolve or avoid an ethical dilemma, we need to understand what makes something ethical. Practical and Professional Ethics : Key Concepts introduces us to a series of real cases where the stakes can be high, the situations complex, and the ethical issues often difficult to see. Drawing on examples from medicine, law and science, it offers a practical approach to thinking critically about the ethical problems that occur in our professions, teaching us how to: focus on the (...) ethical aspects of any situation distinguish between different kinds of ethical problems tailor our response to the kind of problem we face construct arguments we can plausibly attribute to those involved identify the role of power, discretion and moral blindness By guiding us through the concepts, issues and skills at play when we face an ethical problem, we learn how to find a solution. Ideal for students or professionals, this book provides the grounding required to become a more complex moral thinker, a quality that can be applied in a number of fields and jobs. (shrink)

In light of recent social psychological literature, I expand Miranda Fricker’s important notion of testimonial injustice. A fair portion of Fricker’s account rests on an older paradigm of stereotype and prejudice. Given recent empirical work, I argue for what I dub prescriptive credibility deficits in which a backlash effect leads to the assignment of a diminished level of credibility to persons who act in counter-stereotypic manners, thereby flouting prescriptive stereotypes. The notion of a prescriptive credibility deficit is not merely an (...) interesting conceptual addendum that can be appended to Fricker’s theory without need for further emendation. I develop the wider implications of prescriptive credibility deficits and argue that they pose a challenge to Fricker’s conception of the function of credibility assignments in conversational exchange and how a virtuous listener should respond to the potential threat of a prejudicial stereotype affecting her credibility assignments. (shrink)

Robert B. Brandom is one of the most original philosophers of our day, whose book Making It Explicit covered and extended a vast range of topics in metaphysics, epistemology, and philosophy of language--the very core of analytic philosophy. This new work provides an approachable introduction to the complex system that Making It Explicit mapped out. A tour of the earlier book's large ideas and relevant details, Articulating Reasons offers an easy entry into two of the main themes of Brandom's work: (...) the idea that the semantic content of a sentence is determined by the norms governing inferences to and from it, and the idea that the distinctive function of logical vocabulary is to let us make our tacit inferential commitments explicit. Brandom's work, making the move from representationalism to inferentialism, constitutes a near-Copernican shift in the philosophy of language--and the most important single development in the field in recent decades. Articulating Reasons puts this accomplishment within reach of nonphilosophers who want to understand the state of the foundations of semantics. Table of Contents: Introduction 1. Semantic Inferentialism and Logical Expressivism 2. Action, Norms, and Practical Reasoning 3. Insights and Blindspots of Reliabilism 4. What Are Singular Terms, and Why Are There Any? 5. A Social Route from Reasoning to Representing 6. Objectivity and the Normative Fine Structure of Rationality Notes Index Displaying a sovereign command of the intricate discussion in the analytic philosophy of language, Brandom manages successfully to carry out a program within the philosophy of language that has already been sketched by others, without losing sight of the vision inspiring the enterprise in the important details of his investigation ' Using the tools of a complex theory of language, Brandom succeeds in describing convincingly the practices in which the reason and autonomy of subjects capable of speech and action are expressed. --J'rgen Habermas. (shrink)

Inan earlier paper on this topic, ‘Eupatridai, Archons, and Areopagus,'3I was primarily concerned to recover the views of Aristotle, as expressed in the ‘Αθ. πολ., on such elements of Attic Society as Eupatridai, Gennetai, etc. I sought to establish that to him at least these two were not identical: that, more precisely, he recorded two stages of development—(a) ‘Ion’: in whose day the whole body of Athenians was composed of Gennetai, whileEupatridaihad not yet been created.(b) ‘Theseus’: who created the Eupatridai—distinguishing (...) them, as a Third Estate, from those two Estates (Georgoi and Demiourgoi) which had hitherto, since Ion, composed the body of Athenians. (shrink)

Evidentialism as an account of epistemic justification is the position that a doxastic attitude, D, towards a proposition, p, is justified for an intentional agent, S, at a time, t, iff having D towards p fits S’s evidence at t, where the fittingness of an attitude on one’s evidence is typically analyzed in terms of evidential support for the propositional contents of the attitude. Evidentialism is a popular and well-defended account of justification. In this paper, I raise a problem for (...) evidentialism on the grounds that there can be epistemic circumstances in which a proposition is manifestly and nonmisleadingly supported by an agent’s total evidence, and yet believing the proposition is not justified for the agent. As I argue, in order for an agent to have justification to believe a proposition, it needs to be the case that the belief as possessed by the agent could exhibit certain epistemic good making features, e.g., the propositional content of the belief as possessed by the agent would be supported by the agent’s evidence. As I demonstrate, the fact that a proposition, p, is supported by an agent’s total evidence at a time, t, doesn’t guarantee that a belief in p as possessed by the agent at t could exhibit any epistemic good making features, including having propositional contents (i.e., p) that would be supported by the agent’s evidence. Thus, the fact that a proposition is supported by an agent’s evidence doesn’t guarantee that the agent has justification to believe the proposition. (shrink)