This essay addresses the question of when evidence for a stronger claim H1 also constitutes evidence for a weaker claim H2. Although the answer “Always” is tempting, it is false on a natural Bayesian conception of evidence. This essay first describes some prima facie counterexamples to this answer and surveys some weaker answers and rejects them. Next, it proposes an answer, which appeals to the “Dragging Condition.” After explaining and arguing for its use of the Dragging Condition, the essay argues (...) that the Dragging Condition provides a general account of, and solution to, the counterexamples with which the essay began. The essay briefly discusses the relevance of the Dragging Condition to the recently much-discussed topic of “transmission failure” in epistemology, applies the Dragging Condition to the problem of “bootstrapping” in epistemology, and discusses three important objections to the view defended in the essay. (shrink)

Most philosophers accept some version of the requirement of total evidence (RTE), which tells us to always update on our complete evidence, which often includes ‘background information’ about how that evidence was collected. But different philosophers disagree about how to implement that requirement. In this article, I argue against one natural picture of how to implement the RTE in likelihood arguments, and I argue in favor of a different picture. I also apply my picture to the controversy over the so-called (...) ‘Objection from Anthropic Bias’ to the fine-tuning argument, and argue that the Objection from Anthropic Bias fails. (shrink)

Nico Silins has proposed and defended a form of Liberalism about perception that, he thinks, is a good compromise between the Dogmatism of Jim Pryor and others, and the Conservatism of Roger White, Crispin Wright, and others. In particular, Silins argues that his theory can explain why having justification to believe the negation of skeptical hypotheses is a necessary condition for having justification to believe ordinary propositions, even though (contra the Conservative) the latter is not had in virtue of the (...) former. I argue that Silins's explanation is unsuccessful, and hence that we should prefer either White/Wright-style Conservatism (which can explain this necessary condition) or Pryor-style Dogmatism (which denies that this is a necessary condition). (shrink)

The Bayesian Approach and the Classical Approach are two very different families of approaches to statistical inference. There are many different versions of each view, often with very substantial differences among them. But I will here endeavor to explain the philosophical core of each family of approaches, as well as to identify four main philosophical differences between them.

Philosophical Issues, Volume 31, Issue 1, Page 167-187, October 2021.

In this paper, I aim to explicate the distinction between ‘unconditional relevance’ and ‘conditional relevance’ as those terms and related concepts are applied in the context of admissibility determinations in modern trials. I take the U.S. Federal Rules of Evidence to be my model in analyzing these concepts, though on my view any reasonable approach to legal evidence will have to distinguish between these concepts and make appropriate provisions for their separate treatment. I begin by explaining how the Federal Rules (...) define and apply the concepts of relevance and conditional relevance, and I present an influential argument due to Vaughn Ball that threatens to undermine the distinction between the two concepts. I then argue that Ball's argument fails and I diagnose that failure. However, building on some insights from a variety of evidence scholars, I argue that the approach to conditional relevance adopted by the Federal Rules is crucially flawed for reasons entirely independent of the ones raised by Ball's argument. I identify the main constraints that, on my view, any reasonable approach to conditional admissibility must obey, and I argue for a specific proposal that obeys those constraints. On my positive view, two pieces of evidence should be admitted under a Conditional Admissibility Principle only when each piece of evidence would survive ordinary admissibility scrutiny, conditional on the admission of the other one. I conclude by considering the question of whether it should also be necessary for the two pieces of evidence to survive admissibility scrutiny together, as an ‘evidential package’; I argue that, though the issue may arise infrequently in practice, there is good reason to impose this additional requirement. (shrink)

Forty years ago, Vaughn Ball demonstrated that the then received notion of conditional relevance served no useful purpose, as it would only come into effect if the probability of an element were 0.0. But, if the probability of an element were 0.0, a directed verdict would be in order and so once again conditional relevancy was doing no work. I extended that analysis to include the relationship between proffers of evidence and facts of consequence to demonstrate that the work that (...) conditional relevancy was supposedly doing was isomorphic to that done by relevancy in all significant ways, and yet the Federal Rules of Evidence provide different standards for the two situations to determine admissibility. I thus proposed an amendment to FRE 104(b) to provide for the same standard to be applied to ‘relevancy’ and ‘conditional relevancy’. In a recent article, Matthew Kotzen appears to subject this work to intense scrutiny and criticism, yet at the same time reaches, so far as I can tell, identical conclusions. This raises the question, which I examine, whether this is an example of cross-disciplinary difficulties in communication. (shrink)

The first edition of The Scientific Background to Modern Philosophy took the dialogue of science and philosophy from Aristotle through to Newton. This second edition adds eight chapters, taking the dialogue through the Enlightenment and up to Darwin. This anthology is an attempt to help bridge the gap between the history of science and the history of philosophy.

Imagine I hold up a Granny Smith apple for all to see. You would thereby gain justified beliefs that it was green, that it was apple, and that it is a Granny Smith apple. Under classical foundationalism, such simple visual beliefs are mediately justified on the basis of reasons concerning your experience. Under dogmatism, some or all of these beliefs are justified immediately by your experience and not by reasons you possess. This paper argues for what I call the looks (...) view of the justification of simple visual beliefs. According to the looks view, such beliefs are mediately justified on the basis of reasons concerning how the relevant things look. Unlike under classical foundationalism, under the looks view as I develop it, these reasons are public. They are public with respect to both their content and possession: with respect to content, they are not about ourselves and our experiences, and with respect to their possession, many people can have the very same looks-related reasons. (shrink)

Abstract I provide an account of the nature of seemings that explains why they are necessary for justification. The account grows out of a picture of cognition that explains what is required for epistemic agency. According to this account, epistemic agency requires (1) possessing the epistemic aims of forming true beliefs and avoiding errors, and (2) having some means of forming beliefs in order to satisfy those aims. I then argue that seeming are motives for belief characterized by their role (...) of providing us with doxastic instructions guided by our epistemic aims. Understanding the nature of seemings allows us to underwrite recent epistemological work by Michael Huemer, and shows why he was right to claim that seemings are the source of all justification. I then look at some objections both to my arguments regarding the connection between seemings and justification, and to Huemer’s related “Principle of Phenomenal Conservatism”. Content Type Journal Article Pages 1-21 DOI 10.1007/s11098-011-9830-2 Authors Matthew Skene, Syracuse University, 8330 E. Quincy Ave., I-307, Denver, CO 80237, USA Journal Philosophical Studies Online ISSN 1573-0883 Print ISSN 0031-8116. (shrink)

One’s account of the meaning of ethical sentences should fit – roughly, as part to whole – with one’s account of the meaning of sentences in general. When we ask, though, where one widely discussed account of the meaning of ethical sentences fits with more general accounts of meaning, the answer is frustratingly unclear. The account I have in mind is the sort of metaethical expressivism inspired by Ayer, Stevenson, and Hare, and defended and worked out in more detail recently (...) by Blackburn, Gibbard, and others. So, my first aim (§1) in this paper is to pose this question about expressivism’s commitments in the theory of meaning and to characterize the answer I think is most natural, given the place expressivist accounts attempt to occupy metaethics. This involves appeal to an ideationalist account of meaning. Unfortunately for the expressivist, however, this answer generates a problem; it’s my second aim (§2) to articulate this problem. Then, my third aim (§3) is to argue that this problem doesn’t extend to the sort of account of the meaning of ethical claims that I favor, which is like expressivism in rejecting a representationalist order of semantic explanation but unlike expressivism in basing an alternative order of semantic explanation on inferential role rather than expressive function. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Categorical Prescriptiveness Uniformity as a Moral Matter Uniformity Contrasted with Neutrality The Overridingness of Moral Principles.

Assertion is governed by an epistemic norm requiring knowledge. This idea has been hotly debated in recent years, garnering attention in epistemology, philosophy of language, and linguistics. This chapter presents and extends the main arguments in favor of the knowledge norm, from faulty conjunctions, several conversational patterns, judgments of permission, excuse, and blame, and from showing how. (Paired with a chapter by Peter J. Graham and Nikolaj J. L. L. Pedersen, "Knowledge is Not Our Norm of Assertion.").

This paper explores some surprising effects of psychological trauma on memory and develops the puzzle of observer memory for trauma. Memory for trauma tends to have a third-person perspective, or observer perspective. But it appears observer memory, by having a novel visual point of view, tends to misrepresent the past. And many find it plausible that if a memory type tends to misrepresent, it cannot yield knowledge of, or justification for believing, details of past events. But it is also plausible (...) that, with respect to details of past trauma, observer memory can yield knowledge or justification. I argue for a novel set of views that offers a way out of the puzzle: observer memory does tend to misrepresent, but it still has epistemic power regarding details of the past, although with special limits; but observer memory for trauma has other epistemic powers too, in that it allows for a kind of self-awareness. (shrink)

What is it to know someone? Epistemologists rarely take up this question, though recent developments make such inquiry possible and desirable. This paper advances an account of how such interpersonal knowledge goes beyond mere propositional and qualitative knowledge about someone, giving a central place to second-personal treatment. It examines what such knowledge requires, and what makes it distinctive within epistemology as well as socially. It assesses its theoretic value for several issues in moral psychology, epistemic injustice, and philosophy of mind. (...) And it offers an account of the complex content in play if interpersonal knowledge is to be understood in terms of its mental states and their functions. (shrink)

We regularly appeal to claims of the form it seems that p in defense of a claim p. When we do so, we typically take it seems that p to be a reason for thinking that p but also a reason that “gets at” a relevant body of facts and its support for p. Other things being equal, we should want to vindicate our ordinary beliefs on this matter. We should want to vindicate the claim that facts about things seeming (...) certain ways can be reasons to think that things are that way while at the same time being somehow derivative reasons, that is, reasons only because they “get at” support from a certain body of facts. However, on the dominant view of how things seem—subjectivism—it is hard to see how to secure this result. Subjectivism takes how things seem to be a matter of how things do or would seem to some relevant subject. What we need is a defensible, nonsubjectivist account of how things seem. I propose and defend an account according to which, roughly, it seems that p iff the body of facts in the relevant perspective supports that p. (shrink)

This book examines a main theme in religious epistemology, namely, the possibility of knowledge of God. Most often philosophers consider the rationality or justification of propositional belief about God, particularly beliefs about the existence and nature of God; and they will assess the conditions under which, if there is a God, such propositional beliefs would be knowledge, particularly in light of counter-evidence or the availability of religious disagreement. This book surveys such familiar areas, then turns toward newer and less-developed terrain: (...) interpersonal epistemology, namely what it is to know another person. It then explores the prospects for understanding what it might take to know God relationally, the contours of which are significant for many theistic traditions. (shrink)

The aim in this paper is to focus on one of the proposals about successful perception that has led its adherents to advance some kind of disjunctive account of experience. The proposal is that we should understand the conscious sensory experience involved in successful perception in relational terms. I first try to clarify what the commitments of the view are, and where disagreements with competing views may lie. I then suggest that there are considerations relating to the conscious character of (...) our perception of events that speak in its favour. (shrink)

Deleuze & Guattari, Politics and Education mobilizes Deleuzian-Guattarian philosophy as a revolutionary alternative to the lingering forms of transcendence, identity politics, and nihilism endemic to Western thought. Operationalizing Deleuze and Guattari's challenge to contemporary philosophy, this book presents their view as a revolutionary alternative to the lingering forms of transcendence, identity politics, and nihilism endemic to the current state of Western formal education. This book offers an experimental approach to theorizing, creating an entirely new way for educational theorists to approach (...) their work as the task of revolutionizing life itself. Examining new conceptual resources for grappling with and mapping a sustainable political alternative to the cliche's that saturate contemporary educational theory, this collection of essays works toward extracting a genuine image of education and learning that exists in sharp contrast to both the neo-liberal educational project and the critical pedagogical tradition. (shrink)

On Sense and Direct Reference: Readings in the Philosophy of Language focuses on the debate between neo-Fregeans and neo-Russellians in philosophy of language. With a foreword by Nathan Salmon, the volume collects more than 40 of the most important papers in philosophy of language in the last 40 years; including David Kaplan's "Demonstratives" and "Afterthoughts", and a paper written by Scott Soames especially for the volume. It is suitable for advanced undergraduate and graduate courses.

In Measuring the Immeasurable Mind: Where Contemporary Neuroscience Meets the Aristotelian Tradition, Matthew Owen argues that despite its nonphysical character, it is possible to empirically detect and measure consciousness. -/- Toward the end of the previous century, the neuroscience of consciousness set its roots and sprouted within a materialist milieu that reduced the mind to matter. Several decades later, dualism is being dusted off and reconsidered. Although some may see this revival as a threat to consciousness science aimed at (...) measuring the conscious mind, Owen argues that measuring consciousness, along with the medical benefits of such measurements, is not ruled out by consciousness being nonphysical. Owen proposes the Mind-Body Powers model of neural correlates of consciousness, which is informed by Aristotelian causation and a substance dualist view of human nature inspired by Thomas Aquinas, who often followed Aristotle. In addition to explaining why there are neural correlates of consciousness, the model provides a philosophical foundation for empirically discerning and quantifying consciousness. En route to presenting and applying the Mind-Body Powers model to neurobiology, Owen rebuts longstanding objections to dualism related to the mind-body problem. With scholarly precision and readable clarity, Owen applies an oft forgotten yet richly developed historical vantage point to contemporary cognitive neuroscience. (shrink)

Does a flourishing life involve pursuing passionate attachments? Can we choose what these passionate attachments will be? This book offers an original theory of how we can actively cultivate our passionate attachments. The author argues that not only do we have reason to view passionate attachments as susceptible to growth, change, and improvement, but we should view these entities as amenable to self-cultivation. He uses Pierre Hadot's and Michel Foucault's accounts of Hellenistic self-cultivation as vital conceptual tools to formulate a (...) theory of cultivating our passionate attachments. First, their accounts offer the conceptual resources for a philosophical theory of how we can cultivate our passionate attachments. Second, the exercises of self-cultivation they focus on allow us to outline a practical method though which we can cultivate our passionate character. Doing this brings out a significantly new dimension to the role of the passionate attachments in the flourishing life and offers theoretical and practical accounts of how we can cultivate them based on the Hellenistic conception of self-directed character change. Cultivating Our Passionate Attachments will be of interest to advanced students and scholars working in virtue ethics, moral philosophy, and ancient philosophy. (shrink)

In 2005, Charles Mills published “‘Ideal Theory’ as Ideology” in Hypatia: a withering critique of much of contemporary political philosophy and ethics. For Mills such work in philosophy failed to attend to the realities of social life and politics, and in remaining silent on actual issues of domination and oppression served an ideological role in supporting the interests of white bourgeois men. Around the time that Charles Mills launched his broadside against ideal theory, trans theorists had been fighting their own (...) battle against the abstraction of theory from the realities of trans lives and oppression. Vivian Namaste (2000) and Jay Prosser (1998) argued that contemporary gender theory failed to justice to the actuality of trans life, retreating instead to understanding trans life through literary archetypes and idealized radical figures. In this chapter I’ll compare Mills’ critique of ideal theory with the transfeminist critique of 1990s gender theory, arguing that they share much in common. Centrally, both critiques share an underlying commitment to theory needing to be grounded in the actuality of oppression and power relations. This common thread, I suggest, must continue to guide transfeminist thought and action: contra Marquis Bey (2022) transfeminist thought and praxis must continue to be about trans lives, about the oppression of trans women, and about ways of actually achieving liberation from our current dire position. (shrink)

It's often thought that when we reason to new judgments in inference, we aim at believing the truth, and that this aim of ours can explain important psychological and normative features of belief. I reject this picture: the structure of aimed activity shows that inference is not guided by a truth‐aim. This finding clears the way for a positive understanding of how epistemic goods feature in our doxastic lives. We can indeed make sense of many of our inquisitive and deliberative (...) activities as undertaken in pursuit of such goods; but the evidence‐guided inferences in which those activities culminate will require a different theoretical approach. (shrink)

MacIntyre argues that management embodies emotivism, and thus is inherently amoral and manipulative. His claim that management is necessarily Weberian is, at best, outdated, and the notion that management aims to be neutral and value free is incorrect. However, new forms of management, and in particular the increased emphasis on leadership which emerged after MacIntyre’s critique was published, tend to support his central charge. Indeed, charismatic and transformational forms of leadership seem to embody emotivism to a greater degree than do (...) more Weberian, bureaucratic forms of management; hence, MacIntyre’s central contention about our emotivistic culture seems to be well founded. Having criticised the details but defended the essence of MacIntyre’s critique of management, this paper sketches a MacIntyrean approach to management and leadership by highlighting the affinities between MacIntyre’s political philosophy and Greenleaf’s concept of servant leadership. (shrink)

A recent movement within political philosophy called luck egalitarianism has attempted to synthesize the right’s regard for responsibility with the left’s concern for equality. The original motivation for subscribing to luck egalitarianism stems from the belief that one’s success in life ought to reflect one’s own choices and not brute luck. Luck egalitarian theorists differ in the decision procedures that they propose, but they share in common the general approach that we ought to equalize individuals with respect to brute luck (...) so that differences in distribution are only a consequence of the responsible choices that individuals make. I intend to show that through the application of its own distributive procedures, the interpersonal luck egalitarian approach actually undermines its original motivation by making the lives of individuals subject to brute luck. I propose two alternative methods that the luck egalitarian could use to prevent the problems suffered by the interpersonal luck egalitarian standard. (shrink)

From film theory to post-theory -- Sublime objects of cinema -- Class struggle in film studies -- Interlude: the pervert and the analyst -- Cinema, ideology, and form -- Enjoyment in the cinema -- Conclusion: theory as realism set in drive.

It has been argued that nonreductive physicalism’s problems with mental causation disappear if we abandon the intuitive but naïve production-based conception of causation in favor of one based on counterfactual dependence and difference-making. In recent years, this response has been thoroughly developed and defended by James Woodward, who contends that Kim’s causal exclusion argument, widely thought to be the most serious threat to nonreductive mental causation, cannot even be given a coherent formulation within Woodward’s preferred interventionist framework. But Woodward has, (...) even more recently, defended a pair of necessary conditions on mental causation and higher-order causation more generally, and it is here that the interventionist framework proves less friendly to nonreductive mental causation. Functionalism is arguably the most important species of nonreductive physicalism concerning specifically mental properties, but, as I argue, functional properties fail both of Woodward’s tests of causal relevance, one of them in two different ways. The problem, moreover, seems unique to functionalism, for other types of higher-order properties appear to pass Woodward’s tests. If functionalism faces defeat even in such friendly territory, its problems with mental causation are not an artifact of naïve metaphysics. They run deep. (shrink)

Brings together and interprets previously hard-to-find texts, new translations and passages detailing the interplay between philosophy and psychopathology.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:On David Bentley Hart's Account of TraditionMatthew LeveringIn Tradition and Apocalypse, David Hart argues that "the concept of 'tradition' in the theological sense, however lucid and cogent it might appear to the eyes of faith, is incorrigibly obscure and incoherent."1 This claim coheres with the New Testament scholar Ernst Käsemann's notion of apocalyptic, as set forth in Käsemann's well known rhetorical questions—to which he answers in the negative—"Has there (...) ever been a theological system which has not collapsed? Have we been promised that we should know ourselves to be in possession of a theologia perennis?"2 For Käsemann, Christian theological "continuity" (if such there is) consists in "the hope of the manifestation of the Son of Man on his way to enthronement"3—Easter hope. Hart follows his own version of this path.Hart contends that he does not intend to overthrow the truth of the Nicene Creed.4 But he bemoans the claims of various Christian communities—Catholic, [End Page 215] Orthodox, Protestant—to have faithfully communicated the Gospel: "All Christian communions of any size or duration have their distinctive traditionalisms, their myths of continuity amidst rupture and rupture amidst continuity, their claims of doctrinal pedigree and of allegiance to the authority of the Christian past."5 Hart rejects all such ecclesial claims of dogmatic continuity and fidelity. Theologically, he deems it impossible for anyone "to say with absolute finality what the one true tradition is."6 Historically, he thinks it impossible to discern any "rational unity within the course of Christian tradition that one could confidently claim has been sustained intact amid the flux of times and cultures."7There are certain rhetorical emphases that stand out as Hart describes his own constructive view of Christian "tradition." He states that tradition is "the constant creative recollection of a promise whose fulfillment and ultimate meaning are yet to be unveiled"—not in the sense that the Church awaits the fullness that is to come and that dogmatic propositions, while true, are always inadequate to divine realities, but in the stronger sense of appealing to "a future apocalyptic horizon where the tradition's ultimate meaning is to be found" and rejecting "any reduction of that final revelation to whatever formulations of belief happen to be available at any given stage of doctrinal development." Hart depicts Christian tradition as an active transmission of a gift that remains fundamentally hidden and unknown. He invokes the image of "the impartation of a gift that remains sealed, a giving always deferred toward a future not yet known." There is a giving, but this giving is "always deferred," its future is "not yet known," and the gift itself "remains sealed." Hart argues that the "gift must remain sealed until the very end, so that the glory will not dissipate into ordinary time, whose atmosphere is incapable of sustaining and nourishing it." Time—history—cannot sustain or nourish the divine gift, and so it must be "sealed" until the end of time; and yet it can be known "in and as" ever-changing, historical tradition.8Tradition accomplishes this handing on of the sealed gift, says Hart, through its "ceaseless flow of... intertwining variations." Hart adds with regard to historicity and to "the animating impulse of the tradition": "Once that vital force has moved on to assume new living configurations, the attempt unnaturally to preserve earlier forms can achieve nothing but... the perfumed repose of a cadaver."9 The "earlier forms" that once [End Page 216] contained the "vital force" must constantly be reconfigured within tradition's "ceaseless flow."Hart pictures a destabilizing "play of tension and resolution, stability and disintegration," and he holds that we must possess a "positive desire for moments of dissolution" if we are to be faithful to "whatever is most original and most final in a tradition." Only thus can whatever is "most imperishable in a tradition... be fitfully perceived, or at least sensed," by those few persons spiritually and intellectually able to do so. By comparison, I would suggest that the core realities of faith can be much more than "fitfully perceived" or "sensed"; I think dogmatic formulations serve... (shrink)

Among those enthused by Pascal’s pithy remark that “the heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing” are phenomenological value-theorists. What makes Pascal particularly attractive to these phenomenologists is the suggestion that the heart has reasons, and reasons of its own, which resonates with the quasi-cognitive function that they ascribe to feeling. Feelings apprehend values, which are genuine objects that display an essential order and a rank distinct from the objects of reason. In this paper, I introduce and evaluate (...) Pascal’s reception in phenomenological axiology. I begin by reviewing the philosophical position that for the phenomenological value-theorists corresponds to the Pascalian notion of the order of the heart (I). I then turn to Pascal and explore the notion of the order of the heart, especially in relation to the order of reason, in his thought (II). Finally, I evaluate the legitimacy of the attribution of the phenomenological position to Pascal, arguing that, while there is not a perfect correspondence, there is an affinity that warrants the phenomenologists’ allusions to Pascal (III). (shrink)

This paper argues that there is reason to distinguish between moral responsibility and blameworthiness and, in particular, that we can acknowledge that a person is responsible for the negative outcomes of their behavior without this necessarily informing our judgments about the person’s blameworthiness. This general theme is elaborated in the context of a discussion of some of Björn Petersson’s work on collective moral responsibility.