What are the philosophical views of professional philosophers, and how do these views change over time? The 2020 PhilPapers Survey surveyed around 2000 philosophers on 100 philosophical questions. The results provide a snapshot of the state of some central debates in philosophy, reveal correlations and demographic effects involving philosophers' views, and reveal some changes in philosophers' views over the last decade.

Do psychological traits predict philosophical views? We administered the PhilPapers Survey, created by David Bourget and David Chalmers, which consists of 30 views on central philosophical topics (e.g., epistemology, ethics, metaphysics, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of language) to a sample of professional philosophers (N = 314). We extended the PhilPapers survey to measure a number of psychological traits, such as personality, numeracy, well-being, lifestyle, and life experiences. We also included non-technical ‘translations’ of these views for (...) eventual use in other populations. We found limited to no support for the notion that personality or demographics predict philosophical views. We did, however, find that some psychological traits were predictive of philosophical views, even after strict correction for multiple comparisons. Findings include: higher interest in numeracy predicted physicalism, naturalism, and consequentialism; lower levels of well-being and higher levels of mental illness predicted hard determinism; using substances such as psychedelics and marijuana predicted non-realist and subjectivist views of morality and aesthetics; having had a transformative or self-transcendent experience predicted theism and idealism. We discuss whether or not these empirical results have philosophical implications, while noting that 68% of our sample of professional philosophers indicated that such findings would indeed have philosophical value. (shrink)

As we write this, philosophers all over the world are in a state of temporary, collective self-scrutiny. Tey are poring over the results of the PhilPapers Survey, conducted by David Chalmers and David Bourgeta grand-scale survey of the professions views on 30 major philosophical issues, ranging from aesthetic value to zombies. More than 3000 people have responded, andmanymore are currently absorbing and analyzing the results.

Cognitive scientists have revealed systematic errors in human reasoning. There is disagreement about what these errors indicate about human rationality, but one upshot seems clear: human reasoning does not seem to fit traditional views of human rationality. This concern about rationality has made its way through various fields and has recently caught the attention of philosophers. The concern is that if philosophers are prone to systematic errors in reasoning, then the integrity of philosophy would be threatened. In this paper, I (...) present some of the more famous work in cognitive science that has marshaled this concern. Then I present reasons to think that those with training in philosophy will be less prone to certain systematic errors in reasoning. The suggestion is that if philosophers could be shown to be less prone to such errors, then the worries about the integrity of philosophy could be constrained. Then I present evidence that, according to performance on the CRT (Frederick 2005), those who have benefited from training and selection in philosophy are indeed less prone to one kind of systematic error: irrationally arbitrating between intuitive and reflective responses. Nonetheless, philosophers are not entirely immune to this systematic error, and their proclivity for this error is statistically related to their responses to a variety of philosophical questions. So, while the evidence herein puts constraints on the worries about the integrity of philosophy, it by no means eliminates these worries. The conclusion, then, is that the present evidence offers prima facie reasons to ascribe a mitigated privilege to philosophers' ability to rationally arbitrate between intuitive and reflective responses. (shrink)

I examine the degree of specialization in various sub-fields of philosophy, drawing on data from the PhilPapers Survey. The following three sub-fields are highly specialized: Ancient philosophy, seventeenth/eighteenth century philosophy, and philosophy of physics. The following sub-fields have a low level of specialization: metaphilosophy, philosophy of religion, philosophy of probability, philosophy of the social sciences, decision theory, and philosophy of race and gender. Highly specialized sub-fields tend to require extensive knowledge in some area beyond the typical training of (...) a philosopher, and outside of philosophy proper. In addition, there is a correlation between sub-field size and degree of specialization. Larger sub-fields tend to be more specialized. (shrink)

What are the philosophical views of contemporary professional philosophers? We surveyed many professional philosophers in order to help determine their views on 30 central philosophical issues. This article documents the results. It also reveals correlations among philosophical views and between these views and factors such as age, gender, and nationality. A factor analysis suggests that an individual's views on these issues factor into a few underlying components that predict much of the variation in those views. The results of a metasurvey (...) also suggest that many of the results of the survey are surprising: philosophers as a whole have quite inaccurate beliefs about the distribution of philosophical views in the profession. (shrink)

Data about attitude reports provide some of the most interesting arguments for, and against, various theses of semantic relativism. This paper is a short survey of three such arguments. First, I’ll argue (against recent work by von Fintel and Gillies) that relativists can explain the behaviour of relativistic terms in factive attitude reports. Second, I’ll argue (against Glanzberg) that looking at attitude reports suggests that relativists have a more plausible story to tell than contextualists about the division of labour (...) between semantics and meta-semantics. Finally, I’ll offer a new argument for invariantism (i.e. against both relativism and contextualism) about moral terms. The argument will turn on the observation that the behaviour of normative terms in factive and non-factive attitude reports is quite unlike the behaviour of any other plausibly context-sensitive term. Before that, I’ll start with some taxonomy, just so as it’s clear what the intended conclusions below are supposed to be. (shrink)

We have identified a sample of 53 societies outside of the classical Himalayan and Marquesean area that permit polyandrous unions. Our goal is to broadly describe the demographic, social, marital, and economic characteristics of these societies and to evaluate some hypotheses of the causes of polyandry. We demonstrate that although polyandry is rare it is not as rare as commonly believed, is found worldwide, and is most common in egalitarian societies. We also argue that polyandry likely existed during early human (...) history and should be examined from an evolutionary perspective. Our analysis reveals that it may be a predictable response to a high operational sex ratio favoring males and may also be a response to high rates of male mortality and, possibly, male absenteeism. Other factors may contribute, but our within-polyandry sample limits analysis. (shrink)

The matched papers of 17 topic in Philpapers, with its original bibliographical records and WoS UT number. The matched progress can be referred in the paper "Measuring the Isolation of Research Topics in Philosophy" by Pei-Shan Chi and Stijn Conix. Chi, P.S. & Conix, S.. Measuring the Isolation of Research Topics in Philosophy, Scientometrics.

BackgroundContemporary medical practice is complicated by many dilemmas requiring ethical sensitivity and moral reasoning.ObjectiveTo investigate physicians’ experience in ethical decision-making and their attitude towards ethics consultation.MethodsIn a cross-sectional survey 126 physicians representing the main clinics of Pleven University hospital were investigated by a self-administered questionnaire. The following variables were measured: occurrence, nature and ways of resolving ethical problems; physicians’ attitudes towards ethics consultation; physicians’ opinions on qualities and skills of an ethics consultant, and socio-demographic characteristics. Data analysis included descriptive (...) statistics, χ2 and t-test.ResultsResponse rate was 88.9% (n = 112). Men and women were equally represented (48.2%–51.8%). The sample consisted of experienced physicians: 42.9% had 11–20 years experience, and 33% had 21–30 years. According to 84.8% of respondents, ethical problems have been discussed in their specialty. Predominant dilemmas included relationships with patients and relatives (76.8%) and team work (67.6%). Over ¾ of physicians needed an advice in solving ethical problems. Ninety six percent responded positively to ethics consultation. They would mainly request it for resolving conflicts (72.5%), and in case of concern for the rightness of their decisions (52.7%). The image of an ethics consultant was built of clinical competence (70.9%), ability to deal with conflicts (59.1%), communication skills (58.2%), tolerance for different views (55.4%), and a special qualification in ethics (52.7%).ConclusionsThe study underlined that Pleven University hospital physicians face similar ethical dilemmas as their colleagues in other countries do. The expressed positive attitudes to ethics consultation should serve as a basis for further research and development of ethics consultation services. (shrink)

Despite well-established results in survey methodology, many experimental philosophers have not asked whether and in what way conclusions about folk intuitions follow from people’s responses to their surveys. Rather, they appear to have proceeded on the assumption that intuitions can be simply read off from survey responses. Survey research, however, is fraught with difficulties. I review some of the relevant literature—particularly focusing on the conversational pragmatic aspects of survey research—and consider its application to common experimental philosophy (...) surveys. I argue for two claims. First, that experimental philosophers’ survey methodology leaves the facts about folk intuitions massively underdetermined; and second, that what has been regarded as evidence for the instability of philosophical intuitions is, at least in some cases, better accounted for in terms of subjects’ reactions to subtle pragmatic cues contained in the surveys. (shrink)

Philosophers working in the nascent field of ‘experimental philosophy’ have begun using methods borrowed from psychology to collect data about folk intuitions concerning debates ranging from action theory to ethics to epistemology. In this paper we present the results of our attempts to apply this approach to the free will debate, in which philosophers on opposing sides claim that their view best accounts for and accords with folk intuitions. After discussing the motivation for such research, we describe our methodology of (...) surveying people’s prephilosophical judgments about the freedom and responsibility of agents in deterministic scenarios. In two studies, we found that a majority of participants judged that such agents act of their own free will and are morally responsible for their actions. We then discuss the philosophical implications of our results as well as various difficulties inherent in such research. (shrink)

The specific characteristics of mathematical argumentation all depend on the centrality that writing has in the practice of mathematics, but blindness to this fact is near universal. What follows concerns just one of those characteristics, justification by proof. There is a prevalent view that long proofs pose a problem for the thesis that mathematical knowledge is justified by proof. I argue that there is no such problem: in fact, virtually all the justifications of mathematical knowledge are ‘long proofs’, but because (...) these real justifications are distributed in the written archive of mathematics, proofs remain surveyable, hence good. (shrink)

This exploratory study examines how managers and professionals regard the ethical and social responsibility reputations of 60 well-known Australian and International companies, and how this in turn influences their attitudes and behaviour towards these organisations. More than 350 MBA, other postgraduate business students, and participants in Australian Institute of Management (Western Australia) management education programmes were surveyed to evaluate how ethical and socially responsible they believed the 60 organisations to be. The survey sought to determine what these participants considered (...) ‘ethical’ and ‘socially responsible’ behaviour in organisations to be. The survey also examined how the participants’ beliefs influenced their attitudes and intended behaviours towards these organisations. The results of this survey indicate that many managers and professionals have clear views about the ethical and social responsibility reputations of companies. This affects their attitudes towards these organisations which in turn has an impact on their intended behaviour towards them. These findings support the view in other research studies that well-educated managers and professionals are, to some extent, taking into account the ethical and social responsibility reputations of companies when deciding whether to work for them, use their services or buy shares in their companies. (shrink)

This exploratory study examines how managers and professionals regard the ethical and social responsibility reputations of 60 well-known Australian and International companies, and how this in turn influences their attitudes and behaviour towards these organisations. More than 350 MBA, other postgraduate business students, and participants in Australian Institute of Management management education programmes were surveyed to evaluate how ethical and socially responsible they believed the 60 organisations to be. The survey sought to determine what these participants considered 'ethical' and (...) 'socially responsible' behaviour in organisations to be. The survey also examined how the participants' beliefs influenced their attitudes and intended behaviours towards these organisations. The results of this survey indicate that many managers and professionals have clear views about the ethical and social responsibility reputations of companies. This affects their attitudes towards these organisations which in turn has an impact on their intended behaviour towards them. These findings support the view in other research studies that well-educated managers and professionals are, to some extent, taking into account the ethical and social responsibility reputations of companies when deciding whether to work for them, use their services or buy shares in their companies. (shrink)

A systematic overview of modern metaphysics, A Survey of Metaphysics covers all of the most important topics in the field. It adopts the fairly traditional conception of metaphysics as a subject that deals with the deepest questions that can be raised concerning the fundamental structure of reality as a whole. The book is divided into six main sections that address the following themes: identity and change, necessity and essence, causation, agency and events, space and time, and universals and particulars. (...) It focuses on contemporary views and issues throughout, rather than on the history of metaphysics. (shrink)

The use of robots in therapy for children with autism spectrum disorder raises issues concerning the ethical and social acceptability of this technology and, more generally, about human–robot interaction. However, usually philosophical papers on the ethics of human–robot-interaction do not take into account stakeholders’ views; yet it is important to involve stakeholders in order to render the research responsive to concerns within the autism and autism therapy community. To support responsible research and innovation in this field, this paper identifies a (...) range of ethical, social and therapeutic concerns, and presents and discusses the results of an exploratory survey that investigated these issues and explored stakeholders’ expectations about this kind of therapy. We conclude that although in general stakeholders approve of using robots in therapy for children with ASD, it is wise to avoid replacing therapists by robots and to develop and use robots that have what we call supervised autonomy. This is likely to create more trust among stakeholders and improve the quality of the therapy. Moreover, our research suggests that issues concerning the appearance of the robot need to be adequately dealt with by the researchers and therapists. For instance, our survey suggests that zoomorphic robots may be less problematic than robots that look too much like humans. (shrink)

The purpose of this survey was to gather individual’s attitudes and feelings towards privacy and the selling of data. A total (N) of 1,107 people responded to the survey. -/- Across continents, age, gender, and levels of education, people overwhelmingly think privacy is important. An impressive 82% of respondents deem privacy extremely or very important, and only 1% deem privacy unimportant. Similarly, 88% of participants either agree or strongly agree with the statement that ‘violations to the right to (...) privacy are one of the most important dangers that citizens face in the digital age.’ The great majority of respondents (92%) report having experienced at least one privacy breach. -/- People’s first concern when losing privacy is the possibility that their personal data might be used to steal money from them. Interestingly, in second place in the ranking of concerns, people report being concerned about privacy because ‘Privacy is a good in itself, above and beyond the consequences it may have.’ -/- People tend to feel that they cannot trust companies and institutions to protect their privacy and use their personal data in responsible ways. The majority of people believe that governments should not be allowed to collect everyone’s personal data. Privacy is thought to be a right that should not have to be paid for. (shrink)

This Article provides a comprehensive, critical overview of proposals to use happiness surveys for steering public policy. Happiness or “subjective well-being” surveys ask individuals to rate their present happiness, life-satisfaction, affective state, etc. A massive literature now engages in such surveys or correlates survey responses with individual attributes. And, increasingly, scholars argue for the policy relevance of happiness data: in particular, as a basis for calculating aggregates such as “gross national happiness,” or for calculating monetary equivalents for non-market goods (...) based on coefficients in a happiness equation. But is individual well-being equivalent to happiness? The happiness literature tends to blur or conflate important concepts: well-being, subjective well-being, happiness, utility, satisfaction. A preference-realization account of well-being denies the equivalence of happiness and welfare, since someone can have preferences for non-mental attributes, such as health, autonomy, goal-fulfillment, knowledge or the quality of her relationships. It is critical, therefore, to differentiate two potential policy roles for happiness surveys. First, the survey response may provide prima facie evidence of the respondent’s preference-utility: the extent to which her preferences are realized. Second, it may indicate her experience-utility: the quality of her mental states. The Article clarifies these two, very different, ideas. It then criticizes, in turn, the preference-utility and the experience-utility defenses of the policy relevance of happiness surveys. Enthusiasm about happiness is premature. (shrink)

AimThe aim of this study was to determine the presence of depressive symptoms and understand the potential factors associated with these symptoms among physicians in Bangladesh during the COVID-19 pandemic.MethodsA cross-sectional study using an online survey was conducted in between April 21 and May 10, 2020, among physicians living in Bangladesh. Participants completed a series of demographic questions, COVID-19-related questions, and the Patient Health Questionnaire-9. Descriptive statistics, test statistics were performed to explore the association between physicians’ experience of depression (...) symptoms and other study variables. Stepwise binary logistic regression was followed while conducting the multivariable analysis.ResultA total of 390 physicians completed the survey. Of them, 283 were found to be experiencing depressive symptoms. Predictors which were significantly associated with depressive symptoms were gender, the presence of sleep disturbance, being highly exposed to media coverage about the pandemic, and fear around COVID-19 infection, being assaulted/humiliated by regulatory forces and by the general public, while traveling to and from the hospital and treating patients during the countrywide lockdown.ConclusionThe findings of this study demonstrate that there is a high prevalence of depressive symptom among physicians especially among female physicians in Bangladesh during the COVID-19 pandemic. Immediate, adequate and effective interventions addressing gender specific needs are required amid this ongoing crisis and beyond. (shrink)

"A Survey of Ranking Theory": The paper gives an up-to-date survey of ranking theory. It carefully explains the basics. It elaborates on the ranking theoretic explication of reasons and their balance. It explains the dynamics of belief statable in ranking terms and indicates how the ranks can thereby be measured. It suggests how the theory of Bayesian nets can be carried over to ranking theory. It indicates what it might mean to objectify ranks. It discusses the formal and (...) the philosophical aspects of the tight relation and the complementarity of ranks and probabilities. It closes with comparative remarks on predecessors and other philosophical proposals as well as formal models developed in AI. (shrink)

This paper rejoins the debate surrounding Thomas Tymockzko’s paper on the surveyability of proof, first published in the Journal of Philosophy, and makes the claim that by attending to certain broad features of modern conceptions of proof we may understand ways in which the debate surrounding the surveyability of proof has heretofore remained unduly circumscribed. Motivated by these historical reflections, I suggest a distinction between local and global surveyability which I believe has the promise to open up significant new advances (...) in the philosophy of mathematics. (shrink)

A survey form sent to psychologists (Pope, Keith-Spiegel, & Tabachnick, 1986) was adapted and sent to 1,000 clinical social workers (return rate = 45%). Most participants reported sexual attraction to a client, causing (for most) guilt, anxiety, or confusion. Some reported having sexual fantasies about a client while engaging in sex with someone other than a client. Relatively few (3.6% men; 0.5% women) reported sex with a client; training was related to likelihood of offending, though the effect is small (...) and complex. An analysis of eight national studies (data from 5,148 therapists) found significant effects for gender (more male offenders) and year of study (about 10% annual decrease in reported offenses since 1977) but not profession (i.e., no difference among psychiatrists, psychologists, and social workers). Most social workers reported no graduate training whatsoever about sexual attraction; only 10% reported adequate training. (shrink)

The paper provides an interpretation of Wittgenstein’s claim that a mathematical proof must be surveyable. It will be argued that this claim specifies a precondition for the applicability of the word ‘proof’. Accordingly, the latter is applicable to a proof-pattern only if we can come to agree by mere observation whether or not the pattern possesses the relevant structural features. The claim is problematic. It does not imply any questionable finitist doctrine. But it cannot be said to articulate a feature (...) of our actual usage of the word ‘proof’. The claim can be dissociated, however, from two tenable doctrines of Wittgenstein, namely that proofs can be used as paradigms for corresponding proof concepts and that a proof is not an experiment. (shrink)

This paper addresses the definition and the operational use of intuitions in philosophical methods in the form of a research study encompassing several regions of the globe, involving 282 philosophers from a wide array of academic backgrounds and areas of specialisation. The authors tested whether philosophers agree on the conceptual definition and the operational use of intuitions, and investigated whether specific demographic variables and philosophical specialisation influence how philosophers define and use intuitions. The results obtained point to a number of (...) significant findings, including that philosophers distinguish between intuitions used to formulate (discovery) and to test (justification) philosophical theory. The survey results suggest that strategies implemented to characterise philosophical intuition are not well motivated since, even though philosophers do not agree on a single account of intuition, they fail to capture a preferred usage of intuitions as aspects of discovery. The quantitative summary of survey findings informs the debate on this topic, and advances more defined routes for subsequent approaches to the study of intuitions. (shrink)

David Lewis [1973] offers a possible worlds approach to a theory of counterfactuals. He attempts to specify necessary and sufficient conditions according to which a given counterfactual is true or false. This MA Thesis surveys Lewis's theory of counterfactuals in detail. Although for the most part I defend Lewis's account from several objections, in the final chapter I reason that his theory is susceptible to skepticism, which threatens any philosophical theory that relies on Lewis's theory to distinguish between non-paradigmatically true (...) and false counterfactuals. As for the more sympathetic portion of my project, while I show how Lewis's canonical account cannot handle some paradigmatically false counterfactuals--viz., those containing true components--I try to repair his analysis in the spirit of Alan Penczek [1997]. I then discuss Lewis's extension or enhancement to his original theory, which he gives in order to foil an objection advanced by Kit Fine [1975] and Jonathan Bennett [1984]. Finally, I outline and raise several worries inherent in Bennett's rival theory. As for the less then sympathetic section of this paper, I exploit arguments put forward by G. Lee Bowie [1979] as well as by Daniel Krasner and Mark Heller [1994], which are designed to undermine any systematic procedure to circumscribe Lewis's crucial three-place comparative similarity relation between possible worlds. (shrink)

South Africa continues to be plagued by gender-based violence (GBV). Recurring incidents of GBV cram news tabloids, social and electronic media, creating the impression of a country at war with itself. Of great concern is that, at the centre of these killings, men are allegedly the main culprits. This then has unleashed national protest campaigns, one notably, by the name #menaretrash, led by activists, mostly women, who angrily voice their disquiet against men. As a response, it was followed by another, (...) namely, #notinmyname, led by those, mostly men, who say, there are many good and proud men who will not allow the image of manhood to be tarnished. At risk is ‘trust’ which is an important social asset, the demise of which plunges any society into a state of parody. This article then seeks to establish the damage GBV causes in terms of trust, especially of women to men. To do this, a survey was conducted to test levels of trust under different circumstances and in respect of different categories of people and public figures. The findings partly confirm existing surveys elsewhere whilst also making contradicting and worrying revelations. The article tries to reconcile these divergent positions socioculturally and theologically and conclude with proposals towards addressing the scourge of GBV. (shrink)

Over the last few years, automatic facial micro-expression analysis has garnered increasing attention from experts across different disciplines because of its potential applications in various fields such as clinical diagnosis, forensic investigation and security systems. Advances in computer algorithms and video acquisition technology have rendered machine analysis of facial micro-expressions possible today. Although the study of facial micro-expressions is a well-established field in psychology, it is still relatively new from the computational perspective with many interesting problems. In this survey, (...) we present a comprehensive review of state-of-the-art databases and methods for micro-expressions spotting and recognition. Individual stages involved in the automation of these tasks are also described and reviewed at length. In addition, we also deliberate on the challenges and future directions in this growing field of automatic facial micro-expression analysis. (shrink)

Following Snyderman and Rothman, we surveyed expert opinions on the current state of intelligence research. This report examines expert opinions on causes of international differences in student assessment and psychometric IQ test results. Experts were surveyed about the importance of culture, genes, education, wealth, health, geography, climate, politics, modernization, sampling error, test knowledge, discrimination, test bias, and migration. The importance of these factors was evaluated for diverse countries, regions, and groups including Finland, East Asia, sub-Saharan Africa, Southern Europe, the Arabian-Muslim (...) world, Latin America, Israel, Jews in the West, Roma, and Muslim immigrants. Education was rated by N = 71 experts as the most important cause of international ability differences. Genes were rated as the second most relevant factor but also had the highest variability in ratings. Culture, health, wealth, modernization, and politics were the next most important factors, whereas other factors such as geography, climate, test bias, and sampling error were less important. The paper concludes with a discussion of limitations of the survey. (shrink)

This article surveys and analyses the reflections on medical ethics teaching by colleagues teaching in United Kingdom (UK) medical schools in the early 2020s. Participants were recruited mainly by using the worldwide web to identify 64 people from 41 UK medical schools who were thought to contribute to teaching medical ethics based on their internet profiles. Twenty-three people responded. The survey data reveals that many staff are happy with the provision of medical ethics teaching, but also that some are (...) concerned about the quality of provision due to concerns with staff expertise and teaching time. In spite of the fact that the General Medical Council (GMC) and other organisations are perceived to have contributed to raising the profile of medical ethics, there is significant concern with how it is embedded within local UK medical curricula. Some participants contributed hardly or not at all to research in medical ethics, where one attributed this decline in research to the pandemic. Future work will need to address what can be done to improve the provision of medical ethics teaching to address some of these findings and to survey and analyse how perceptions might have changed in light of recent challenges and developments. (shrink)

My purpose in this chapter is to survey some of the principal approaches to inductive inference in the philosophy of science literature. My first concern will be the general principles that underlie the many accounts of induction in this literature. When these accounts are considered in isolation, as is more commonly the case, it is easy to overlook that virtually all accounts depend on one of very few basic principles and that the proliferation of accounts can be understood as (...) efforts to ameliorate the weaknesses of those few principles. In the earlier sections, I will lay out three inductive principles and the families of accounts of induction they engender. In later sections I will review standard problems in the philosophical literature that have supported some pessimism about induction and suggest that their import has been greatly overrated. In the final sections I will return to the proliferation of accounts of induction that frustrates efforts at a final codification. I will suggest that this proliferation appears troublesome only as long as we expect inductive inference to be subsumed under a single formal theory. If we adopt a material theory of induction in which individual inductions are licensed by particular facts that prevail only in local domains, then the proliferation is expected and not problematic. (shrink)

Logical realism is a view about the metaphysical status of logic. Common to most if not all the views captured by the label ‘logical realism’ is that logical facts are mind- and language-independent. But that does not tell us anything about the nature of logical facts or about our epistemic access to them. The goal of this paper is to outline and systematize the different ways that logical realism could be entertained and to examine some of the challenges that these (...) views face. It will be suggested that logical realism is best understood as a metaphysical view about the logical structure of the world, but this raises an important question: does logical realism collapse into standard metaphysical realism? It will be argued that this result can be accommodated, even if it cannot be altogether avoided. (shrink)

We survey the theory of Mucnik and Medvedev degrees of subsets of $^{\omega}{\omega}$with particular attention to the degrees of $\Pi_{1}^{0}$ subsets of $^{\omega}2$. Sections 1-6 present the major definitions and results in a uniform notation. Sections 7-6 present proofs, some more complete than others, of the major results of the subject together with much of the required background material.

Recent research in empirical moral psychology attempts to understand (rather than place judgment on) the salient normative differences that laypeople have when making moral decisions by using survey methodology that is based on the operationalized principles from moral theories. The PPIMT is the first measure designed to assess respondents’ preference for the precepts implied in the three dominant moral theories: virtue ethics, deontology, and consequentialism. The current study used a latent modeling approach to determine the most theoretically and psychometrically-sound (...) model for the PPIMT using a combined sample of college students from a southeastern university in U.S. and MTurk respondents. The PPIMT model fit was acceptable (χ2 = 84.125, df = 40, p = 0.001; RMSEA = 0.052, 90%CI = 0.037 to 0.068; CFI = 0.980; SRMR = 0.035) with four items for Virtue, four items for Deontology, and three items for Consequentialism. (shrink)

Introduction Contrary to a widespread assumption the modern history of modal logic did not start with C. I. Lewis’ Survey of Symbolic Logic [Lewis 1918]. His eminent work was preceded by some 20 years by H. MacColl’s fifth article on ‘The Calculus of Equivalent Statements’. This article was read at the London Mathematical Society on 12 November 1896. Some months later it was published in the Society’s Proceedings [MacColl 1896-1897]. During the following years MacColl presented his logic prim...

Introduction Contrary to a widespread assumption the modern history of modal logic did not start with C. I. Lewis’ Survey of Symbolic Logic [Lewis 1918]. His eminent work was preceded by some 20 years by H. MacColl’s fifth article on ‘The Calculus of Equivalent Statements’. This article was read at the London Mathematical Society on 12 November 1896. Some months later it was published in the Society’s Proceedings [MacColl 1896-1897]. During the following years MacColl presented his logic prim...

A survey of three types of cell population models is presented in this paper. The main issue in all the surveyed words is whether or not there exists astable type distribution (s.t.d.). In the last few years, many efforts were directed towards describing the most general models which still exhibits.t.d. Progress made in the case ofsize density models are discussed. A slightly extended version of atime continous daughter cell model, studied in Arino et al. (1991), is presented. Recently, some (...) authors have undertaken the task of comparing models of various origins and types. Such works are alluded to in a discussion. (shrink)

College campus-based surveys of sexual assault in the United States have generated one of the most high-profile and contentious figures in the history of social science: the ‘1 in 5’ statistic. Referring to the number of women who have experienced either attempted or completed sexual assault since their time in college, ‘1 in 5’ has done significant work in making the prevalence of this experience legible to the public and to policy-makers. Here I examine how sexual assault surveys have participated (...) in structuring the ontology of date/acquaintance rape from the 1980s to today. I review the foundational work of feminist social scientists Diana Russell and Mary Koss, with particular attention to the methodological practices through which the concept of the ‘hidden’ or ‘unacknowledged’ rape victim emerged. I then examine a selection of early 21st-century sexual assault surveys and highlight the ongoing preoccupation with survey methodology in responses to their results. I argue that the survey itself has been a central actor in the ontological politics of sexual assault, and only by closely attending to its performativity can we understand the paradoxical persistence both of critical responses to the ‘1 in 5’ statistic and of its effective deployment in anti-violence policy. (shrink)

I argue that it is possible and useful for moral philosophy to provide surveyable representations of moral vocabulary. I proceed in four steps. First, I present two dominant interpretations of the concept “surveyable representation”. Second, I use these interpretations as a background against which I present my own interpretation. Third, I use my interpretation to support the claim that Wittgenstein’s “Lecture on Ethics” counts as an example of a surveyable representation. I conclude that, since the lecture qualifies as a surveyable (...) representation, it is possible to provide surveyable representations of moral vocabulary. Fourth, I argue that it is useful for contemporary moral philosophy to provide surveyable representations, because it may help to dissolve problems in current debates. I provide an example of such a debate, namely, the debate between cognitivists and non-cognivitists. (shrink)

Surveys are used extensively in social research and, despite a lack of conclusive evidence of their ‘representativeness,’ probability internet panel surveys are being increasingly used to make inferences about knowledge, attitude and behavior in the general population regarding a range of socially relevant issues. A large-scale survey of Australian public attitudes and behavior toward the red meat industry was undertaken. Samples were obtained using a random digit dialing telephone survey and a PIP survey to examine differences between (...) the two samples regarding attitudes and behavior relating to livestock use and welfare. There was little difference in demographics between the CATI and the PANEL surveys apart from highest level of education. However, there were differences between the two samples in both attitudes and behavior toward the red meat industry after controlling for education levels. The PANEL respondents gave generally more conservative responses than did the CATI respondents in the sense that they were more positive toward the livestock industries and animal welfare within these industries. Differences were also found between the respondents of the two samples regarding behavior that relates to the red meat industry, both community and consumer behavior. PANEL respondents were less engaged in community behaviors performed in opposition of the red meat industry when compared with the CATI sample. The majority of CATI and PANEL respondents were red meat eaters and there was no difference between respondents of the two samples in relation to red meat consumption, however, there were fewer vegetarians and vegans in the PANEL survey. Possible reasons for the observed differences are discussed, however, a definitive answer will depend on further research to identify the specific psychological factors that differ between samples derived from different survey methodologies. (shrink)