Conservatism and Pragmatism illustrates the intersections between classical British Conservative thought and classical American Pragmatist philosophy with regard to methodology in politics, ethics, and law.

Like many philosophy instructors throughout the academy, one of my primary services to the university is teaching 100-level logic, a required course for all undergraduate students. In many ways I relish the responsibility and consider teaching the course one of my more valuable roles at the university. Furthermore, that the university requires logic makes me hopeful that higher education still values the cultivation of critical thinking, which should be a primary function of a logic class. However, required courses at the (...) university follow a mandated assessment process that involves the administration of entry and exit exams, and a comparison of the test results to track teaching effectiveness. Passing the exit .. (shrink)

In a 2001 article entitled “The Classical Conservative Challenge to Dewey,” Shawn O’Dwyer puts John Dewey’s understanding of method to the test of criticisms made by conservative theorist Michael Oakeshott. Oakeshott criticizes the view that technical knowledge is superior to the reliance on custom, tradition, and habit in practical knowledge, that moral intelligence can be taught, and that moral intelligence consists of the application of techniques to resolve problems. O’Dwyer concludes that Dewey’s reflections on moral deliberation pass Oakeshott’s challenge to (...) rationalism “with its central themes intact, if not unscathed.”1 In light of O’Dwyer’s article, we see that the classical conservatives and the .. (shrink)

Social Darwinism covers a set of particulars bearing a family resemblance including, but not limited to the extension of evolutionary biology to social phenomena, a biological explanation for the success of certain more biologically "fit" groups over others, an acceptance of the use of force by the "fit" to succeed over the "unfit" in the life struggle, and a preference for competition in the marketplace and a laissez-faire ideology. The serpent of Social Darwinism leaves a trail of the eugenics movement (...) in its wake. Evidence can be found that Oliver Wendell Holmes's judicial and non-judicial philosophy fits each of these instantiations.This paper first explains the origins of Social... (shrink)

The Pragmatism and Prejudice of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. examines the varied categories scholars have used to describe the philosophy of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. These include, “Jobbist,” Nihilist, Realist, Social Darwinist, Utilitarian, Positivist, Natural Law Theorist, and Pragmatist.

Sport, Ethics and Philosophy, Volume 6, Issue 1, Page 90-94, February 2012.

The utilitarian and consumerist model of higher education undervalues the importance and worth of the liberal arts in higher education, both globally and locally. Globally speaking, it does not take long to flip through a national newspaper or to click through the Chronicle of Higher Education to find either some call for the academy to train students for the current set of jobs available, especially for which there is high demand, low supply, and a national need, or critical responses to (...) such a call. Andy Delbanco wrote in The Chronicle Review of the problem, citing our “need to respond to the public demand for some demonstrable utility in what we teach: literature, history, philosophy, the arts.”1 How many... (shrink)

In this article I present two theories of historical inquiry, which I characterize as conservative and pragmatic. I argue that these two views of history, John Dewey’s and Hans Georg Gadamer’s, provide an excluded middle between the extremes of positivism and relativism. They are pragmatic insofar as they accept the anti-foundationalist critique of positivism; they are conservative insofar as they refuse to reduce historical inquiry to mere discourse or narrative. Both focus on the situatedness of historical inquiry, paying special attention (...) to the culturally emergent conceptual schemes and prejudices of the historian, but they constrain historical inquiry by providing an improved understanding of the relationship between the problems which give rise to our inquiries and the tools which help resolve them. Dewey, in the key of naturalism, and Gadamer, in the key of phenomenology, provide conservative and pragmatic philosophies of historical inquiry, which refuse to pose as science, but do not fall into narrative fiction. Additionally, their approaches to historical inquiry share a concern for the practical application of the study of history. In this concern for application, both Dewey and Gadamer provide a theory of historical inquiry consonant with a conservative and pragmatic judicial theory, which rejects both the formalism of legal positivism and the model of unconstrained judicial radicalism. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that Michael Oakeshott’s metaphysics of experience shares significant features with the pragmatism of C.S. Peirce and John Dewey and that these similarities highlight methodological norms guiding inquiry into philosophy’s value fields. Oakeshott, Peirce, and Dewey agree on (1) the primacy of experience in philosophical inquiry, (2) the dismissal of the capacity of intuition as a valid mode of experience contributing to a reliable epistemology, (3) a refusal of metaphysical dualism and a resulting continuity principle, and (...) (4) consonant notions of the conditions and pattern of inquiry. This comparative analysis opens up new possibilities for prudently advancing the value fields in philosophy. Inquiry into legal, moral, and political philosophies, given the insights of Oakeshott, Peirce, and Dewey, can proceed prudently upon these shared premises and the skepticism of rationalism in politics, ethics, and law which ensues from them. (shrink)

In this article, I address the question of whether or not the use of instant replay in sports improves the ability of officials to make correct calls. I pay special attention to the use of instant reply in American gridiron football. I first explain the method of static phenomenology, by recourse to Edmund Husserl's work and apply a static phenomenological method to the official's quest for evidence in the analysis of a still frame of video. Second, I expose Husserl's genetic (...) method of phenomenology and apply it to the official's search for evidence and accuracy when assessing a play in a frame-by-frame or super-slow-motion analysis. I then look critically at the intersection of these two methods in instant replay analysis. My conclusion is that in cases calling only for a static analysis, I think that instant replay is beneficial. In other cases, the application of a static, frame-by-frame analysis, abstracted from lived experience, to a context of movement, can disrupt the normality of perception such that it yields problematic evidence. The problems that ensue from employing a static analysis to a situation calling for a genetic analysis cause me to recommend a limited use of instant replay in the types of cases which involve a genetic analysis. Epistemologically, I think that lived-time analysis is the optimal mode of perceiving and judging certain events. Humanistically, my concern is that the use of instant replay can disrupt the life-world of sport. (shrink)

In this review essay, I offer a summary of Brian E. Butler’s The Democratic Constitution: Experimentalism and Interpretation. Butler’s democratic experimentalism offers the thesis that democracy needs to be protected democratically rather than by relying on the judicial supremacy over constitutional interpretation by the Supreme Court. Butler illustrates what democratic experimentalism looks like through a close reading of key cases showing the virtues of an on-going, open-ended, empirical, fallibilist, and collaborative approach to constitutional interpretation against rival formalist and exclusionary theories. (...) Butler relies on Richard Posner’s iconoclastic empirical approach to adjudication in advancing his thesis. However, Posner is skeptical of the Deweyan democracy Butler deploys to illustrate the democratic constitution. Further, Posner dismisses the philosophical pragmatism of Peirce and Dewey that Butler uses to ground his theory. Because of Butler’s reliance on Posner’s judicial practice and his side-stepping of Posner’s views on democracy and philosophical pragmatism, I ask how Butler’s proposal stands in relation to the ways it departs from Posner’s theory, if not his practice. (shrink)

In this paper I measure the progressive potentiality of art against Russell Kirk’s notion of “normative art”. Kirk argues that good literature cultivates virtue according to a transcendent norm, a law of nature. I interrogate the extent to which this art can be conservative according to Kirk’s own meaning of conservatism and read his own conservatism against itself in an effort to show which of its tenets detrimentally supersede and contradict its others. The criticism of Kirk’s discussion of normative art (...) makes use of Charles Sanders Peirce’s more sophisticated epistemology, metaphysics, and normative science of aesthetics. Ultimately, Kirk’s conservatism and his position on normative art rely on metaphysical dualism and the gratuitous capacity of intuition. This ends in an unjustified discounting of his principles of variety, imperfectability, prescription, and continuity and their subordination to his principle of transcendence. (shrink)

Seth Vannatta identifies the common law as a central feature of the jurisprudence of former United States Supreme Court justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. Holmes treated the common law as if it were an epistemology or a reliable mode for knowledge transmission over successive generations. Against the grand notion that the common law reflected a priori principles consistent with the natural law, Holmes detected that the common law was historical, aggregated, and evolutionary, the sum of the concrete facts (...) and operative principles of innumerable cases with reasonable solutions to complex problems. This view of the common law is both conservative and pragmatic. Vannatta’s analysis of Holmes opens new directions for the study of conservatism and pragmatism—and pragmatic conservatism—demonstrating that common-law processes and practices have much in common with the form of communal inquiry championed by C.S. Peirce. (shrink)

Seth Vannatta’s book Conservatism and Pragmatism in Law, Politics, and Ethics is a thought-provoking inquiry challenging the reader to go beyond the clichés imposed by contemporary American everyday discourse, namely, to overcome associating conservatism with right wing politics, and pragmatism with the formula that practice determines what should work best in politics. He sets the ambitious goal of demonstrating how comparing rather than contrasting the visions of classical British conservative thought and classical American pragmatist philosophy contributes to revealing (...) the complex genealogy of a normative methodology that can be applied in many disciplines. The normative methodology can question the universal.. (shrink)

Seth Vannatta argues that there can be a fruitful synthesis of pragmatism and classical conservatism. In doing this, he focuses the methodological commitments of pragmatism and conservatism. However, I will demonstrate with a reading of Dewey’s Liberalism and Social Action that other commitments might prevent this synthesis—at least a synthesis between the thought of John Dewey and Edmund Burke. My conclusion is that pragmatism and conservativism might travel parallel to one another but that we have good reasons for (...) keeping some separation between the theories based upon their fundamental commitments. Deweyan pragmatism remains tied to democracy; conservatism remains tied to history. (shrink)

In Conservatism and Pragmatism, Seth Vannatta posits and explores several major conceptual and practical affinities between classical pragmatism and conservatism. Characterizing both as essentially methods rather than ideologies, he argues that the two ought to be understood as mutually supportive and corrective, and that they conjointly supply an especially robust set of intellectual resources relevant to contemporary moral, political, and legal concerns. This essay critically examines Vannatta’s marriage of conservatism and pragmatism in the realm of legal theory. (...) It argues that while Vannatta’s work provides a rigorous pragmatist alternative to the familiar legal formalism adopted by many American conservatives, its foundations may be narrower than Vannatta appreciates and the resulting theory may have little necessary connection to the dispositional, methodological conservatism upon which it is purportedly based. (shrink)

This paper critiques a number of standard ways of understanding the role of the metalanguage in a semantic theory for natural language, including the idea that disquotation plays a nontrivial role in any explanatory natural language semantics. It then proposes that the best way to understand the role of a semantic metalanguage involves recognizing that semantics is a model-based science. The metalanguage of semantics is language for articulating features of the theorist's model. Models are understood as mediating instruments---idealized structures used (...) to represent select aspects of the world, aspects the theorist is seeking some theoretical understanding of. The aspect of reality we are seeking some understanding of in semantics is a dimension of human linguistic competence---informally, knowledge of meaning. (shrink)

Materialist metaphysicians want to side with physics, but not to take sides within physics.Ifwetook literally the claim of a materialist that his position is simply belief in the claim that all is matter, as currently conceived, we would be faced with an insoluble mystery. For how would such a materialist know how to retrench when his favorite scientific hypotheses fail? How did the 18thcentury materialist know that gravity, or forces in general, were material? How did they know in the 19thcentury (...) that the electromagnetic field was material, and persisted in this conviction after the aether had been sent packing?The doctrine of physicalism casts a long shadow in contemporary philosophy, configuring all kinds of philosophical issues and projects. Unsurprisingly, its proponents argue that physicalism has all the obvious features necessary for a scientific hypothesis to be in what we will call ‘good standing,’ i.e. being worthy of serious scientific investigation. In fact, many claim much more, arguing that physicalism is a well-confirmed hypothesis and possibly amongst the best of our theories. But, as our second opening passage makes clear, a persistent worry has been that physicalism, or ‘materialism’ as van Fraassen terms it, is an edifice built on sand. For many philosophers question whether the ‘physical’ can be specified at all, or at least in a manner that will produce a physicalism that would be in good standing. (shrink)

This article considers the implications for film analysis of the presence or absence of a manual crank. More specifically, it looks at the 16 mm Time and Motion Study Projector as used in behavioral research in the 1960s and 1970s. The controversial concept of ‘interactional synchrony’, or the dance-like coordination of people in conversation, emerged from the use of this hand-turned projector. William S. Condon developed the concept along with the technique of microanalysis. Starting with the projector manufactured by Bell (...) & Howell, he made numerous improvements to facilitate observation—‘sweeping’ over segments of very short duration to discover the rhythmic synchrony of all filmed participants. It led him to a theory of ‘process’ in communication, and in the reception of speech in particular. People always ‘danced’ to the tune of their own voice, and their listeners ‘danced’ to the tune of the speaker—at intervals of one-sixth or one-eighth of a second. This also led Condon to an epistemology of discovery derived partly from philosophy but mostly from his machinery. The universe, he said, is a ‘continuum of order’ whose structures are preserved through translations of order: of thought into speech, speech into vibrations, vibrations into neurons, and back into behavior. The only exceptions are people with disabilities, like the autistics Condon studied from the 1970s onward. But the very distinction of normal and pathological was epiphenomenal to his scanning technique; it was rooted in material and formal qualities of film and of the projector whose crank he turned often. (shrink)

Epistemic modal operators give rise to something very like, but also very unlike, Moore's paradox. I set out the puzzling phenomena, explain why a standard relational semantics for these operators cannot handle them, and recommend an alternative semantics. A pragmatics appropriate to the semantics is developed and interactions between the semantics, the pragmatics, and the definition of consequence are investigated. The semantics is then extended to probability operators. Some problems and prospects for probabilistic representations of content and context are explored.

By leveraging the case of Hindu sati, this paper elucidates the ways in which structure and culture condition suicidal behavior by way of social psychological and emotional dynamics. Conventionally, sati falls under Durkheim's discussion of altruistic suicides, or the self-sacrifice of underindividuated or excessively integrated peoples like widows in traditional societies. In light of the fact that Durkheim's interpretation was based on uneven data, nineteenth century Eurocentric beliefs, and a theoretical framework that can no longer resist modification and elaboration, by (...) reconsidering sati it is possible to sketch a new model that strengthens Durkheim's theory by making it more robust and generalizable. The following model is built on five principles. First, integration and regulation are not distinct causal forces, but overlapping contextual conditions. Second, to better explain the variation in suicidality across time and space, we must also pay attention to culture as it provides the underlying meanings of suicide that can increase the odds a person or class of persons become suicidal or are protected against suicidality. Third, structure still matters, but in many cases, the role power and power-differentials play must be considered. Fourth, understanding why and how people choose suicide depends on incorporating identity and status processes. Fifth, because the expression of social emotions like shame are patterned by structural and cultural conditions, to understand how suicidality is socioculturally patterned we must further explore the link between identity/status, social emotions, and structure and culture. (shrink)

Purpose This paper aims to formalize long-term trajectories of human civilization as a scientific and ethical field of study. The long-term trajectory of human civilization can be defined as the path that human civilization takes during the entire future time period in which human civilization could continue to exist. -/- Design/methodology/approach This paper focuses on four types of trajectories: status quo trajectories, in which human civilization persists in a state broadly similar to its current state into the distant future; catastrophe (...) trajectories, in which one or more events cause significant harm to human civilization; technological transformation trajectories, in which radical technological breakthroughs put human civilization on a fundamentally different course; and astronomical trajectories, in which human civilization expands beyond its home planet and into the accessible portions of the cosmos. -/- Findings Status quo trajectories appear unlikely to persist into the distant future, especially in light of long-term astronomical processes. Several catastrophe, technological transformation and astronomical trajectories appear possible. -/- Originality/value Some current actions may be able to affect the long-term trajectory. Whether these actions should be pursued depends on a mix of empirical and ethical factors. For some ethical frameworks, these actions may be especially important to pursue. (shrink)

A central theme in the scholarly literature on Enlightenment Europe concerns the increased focus on the role of reason in the development of European thought, especially in the development of the new science by the natural philosophers. As a consequence, there is a tendency in both philosophical scholarship and teaching to bind philosophy and science tightly together. While there is certainly much that is correct in this approach, one motivation for pluralizing philosophy’s past is that this story leaves out a (...) great deal that is important in Enlightenment views of reason. We argue, using as an example the work of figures like Margaret Cavendish, that reason was significantly broader in scope—and that developments in science were paralleled by equally important advances in music, art, literature, medicine, philosophy, and other areas. In recognizing the lack of a sharp boundary between these areas, an inclusive canon of Enlightenment philosophy gives us this richer notion of reason. Integrating figures such as Cavendish into the canon helps us to see that the narrow focus on the scientific version of reason within Enlightenment scholarship creates a false distinction between science and the humanities and misses out on the humanistic ends for which we engage in philosophy. (shrink)

This paper discusses means for promoting artificial intelligence that is designed to be safe and beneficial for society. The promotion of beneficial AI is a social challenge because it seeks to motivate AI developers to choose beneficial AI designs. Currently, the AI field is focused mainly on building AIs that are more capable, with little regard to social impacts. Two types of measures are available for encouraging the AI field to shift more toward building beneficial AI. Extrinsic measures impose constraints (...) or incentives on AI researchers to induce them to pursue beneficial AI even if they do not want to. Intrinsic measures encourage AI researchers to want to pursue beneficial AI. Prior research focuses on extrinsic measures, but intrinsic measures are at least as important. Indeed, intrinsic factors can determine the success of extrinsic measures. Efforts to promote beneficial AI must consider intrinsic factors by studying the social psychology of AI research communities. (shrink)

I provide a novel, non-reductive, action-first skill-based account of active imagining. I call it the Skillful Action Account of Imagining (the skillful action account for short). According to this account, to actively imagine something is to form a representation of that thing, where the agent’s forming that representation and selecting its content together constitute a means to the completion of some imaginative project. Completing imaginative projects stands to the active formation of the relevant representations as an end. The account thus (...) bakes in the means-end order that some in action theory take to be definitional of intentional action. Moreover, in the spirit of this conception of intentional action, I hold that a central feature of the means-end order exhibited in active imagining is the agent’s direct non-observational knowledge both of her act of imagining and of its having this order. The agent knows that she’s actively imagining (that-)p and knows why she actively imagines this–to carry on the pretense, engage in the fiction, predict another’s behavior, reason about possibility or necessity, reason about contingent matters of fact, just imagine for its own sake, and so on. I show that the account accounts for the possibility of misimagining while holding onto the idea that we imagine what we intend to imagine. I likewise show that the account unifies imagining across types of imaginative project like those just listed in a way that tolerates conflict in the roles that imagining plays in the mental economy across those projects. Finally, I show that the account can accommodate passive imagining like involuntary and automatic imagining as well as mind wandering. (shrink)

When I tell you that it’s raining, I describe a way the world is—viz., rainy. I say something whose truth turns on how things are with the weather in the world. Likewise when I tell you that the weatherman thinks that it’s raining. Here the truth of what I say turns on how things are with the weatherman’s state of mind in the world. Likewise when I tell you that I think that it’s raining. Here the truth of what I (...) say turns on how things are with my state of mind in the world. (shrink)