Experimental philosophy brings empirical methods to philosophy. These methods are used to probe how people think about philosophically interesting things such as knowledge, morality, and freedom. This paper explores the contribution that qualitative methods have to make in this enterprise. I argue that qualitative methods have the potential to make a much greater contribution than they have so far. Along the way, I acknowledge a few types of resistance that proponents of qualitative methods in experimental philosophy might encounter, and provide (...) reasons to think they are ill-founded. (shrink)

Aesthetic testimony is testimony about aesthetic properties. For example, in aone straightforward case, one person might tell another that something is beautiful. Philosophical discussion about aesthetic testimony centers on the question of whether there are any important differences between aesthetic testimony and testimony about non-aesthetic descriptive matters. In particular, the focus is often on the respective epistemic credentials of aesthetic and non-aesthetic testimony relative to firsthand judgments in the respective domains. Most are inclined to think that in some way and (...) to some degree we typically treat aesthetic testimony as being epistemically inferior to testimony about non-aesthetic matters. Assuming an asymmetry in the way we typically treat aesthetic and non-aesthetic testimony, the philosophical debate then asks a number of questions. Is aesthetic testimony actually epistemically inferior? If so, in what ways, and what explains its inferiority? If not, why do our ordinary ways of thinking, talking, and engaging with aesthetic testimony treat it as being inferior? In this chapter, I consider various ways in which experimental philosophy can contribute to these debates. Drawing on extant work and some new empirical studies, this chapter provides an overview of what experimental philosophy has told us so far, and summarizes the implications for philosophical debate. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Conceptual engineering aims to improve our concepts. That's plausibly an extremely difficult thing to do. Should this make us sceptical of the idea that philosophers should try to do it? You might think so. Cappelen, in his Fixing Language: an Essay on Conceptual Engineering, thinks it shouldn't stop us – but his stated reasons are not really encouraging. In this paper, I say what I think Cappelen should have said, on the basis of a very rough cost-benefit analysis.

Various studies show moral intuitions to be susceptible to framing effects. Many have argued that this susceptibility is a sign of unreliability and that this poses a methodological challenge for moral philosophy. Recently, doubt has been cast on this idea. It has been argued that extant evidence of framing effects does not show that moral intuitions have an unreliability problem. I argue that, even if the extant evidence suggests that moral intuitions are fairly stable with respect to what intuitions we (...) have, the effect of framing on the strength of those intuitions still needs to be taken into account. I argue that this by itself poses a methodological challenge for moral philosophy. (shrink)

In the past decade, a number of empirical researchers have suggested that laypeople have compatibilist intuitions. In a recent paper, Feltz and Millan have challenged this conclusion by claiming that most laypeople are only compatibilists in appearance and are in fact willing to attribute free will to people no matter what. As evidence for this claim, they have shown that an important proportion of laypeople still attribute free will to agents in fatalistic universes. In this paper, we first argue that (...) Feltz and Millan’s error-theory rests on a conceptual confusion: it is perfectly acceptable for a certain brand of compatibilist to judge free will and fatalism to be compatible, as long as fatalism does not prevent agents from being the source of their actions. We then present the results of two studies showing that laypeople’s intuitions are best understood as following a certain brand of source compatibilism rather than a “free-will-no-matter-what” strategy. (shrink)

Recent decades have seen a surge in interest in metaphilosophy. In particular there has been an interest in philosophical methodology. Various questions have been asked about philosophical methods. Are our methods any good? Can we improve upon them? Prior to such evaluative and ameliorative concerns, however, is the matter of what methods philosophers actually use. Worryingly, our understanding of philosophical methodology is impoverished in various respects. This article considers one particular respect in which we seem to be missing an important (...) part of the picture. While it is a received wisdom that the word “ intuition ” has exploded across analytic philosophy in recent decades, the article presents evidence that the explosion is apparent across a broad swathe of academia. It notes various implications for current methodological debates about the role of intuitions in philosophy. (shrink)

Do philosophers use intuitions? Should philosophers use intuitions? Can philosophical methods (where intuitions are concerned) be improved upon? In order to answer these questions we need to have some idea of how we should go about answering them. I defend a way of going about methodology of intuitions: a metamethodology. I claim the following: (i) we should approach methodological questions about intuitions with a thin conception of intuitions in mind; (ii) we should carve intuitions finely; and, (iii) we should carve (...) to a grain to which we are sensitive in our everyday philosophising. The reason is that, unless we do so, we don’t get what we want from philosophical methodology. I argue that what we want is information that will aid us in formulating practical advice concerning how to do philosophy responsibly/well/better. (shrink)

Are philosophers’ intuitions more reliable than philosophical novices’? Are we entitled to assume the superiority of philosophers’ intuitions just as we assume that experts in other domains have more reliable intuitions than novices? Ryberg raises some doubts and his arguments promise to undermine the expertise defence of intuition-use in philosophy once and for all. In this paper, I raise a number of objections to these arguments. I argue that philosophers receive sufficient feedback about the quality of their intuitions and that (...) philosophers’ experience in philosophy plausibly affects their intuitions. Consequently, the type of argument Ryberg offers fails to undermine the expertise defence of intuition-use in philosophy. (shrink)

Direct epistemic consequentialism is the idea that X is epistemically permissible iff X maximizes epistemic value. It has received lots of attention in recent years and is widely accepted by philosophers to have counterintuitive implications. There are various reasons one might suspect that the relevant intuitions will not be widely shared among non-philosophers. This paper presents an initial empirical study of ordinary intuitions. The results of two experiments demonstrate that the counterintuitiveness of epistemic consequentialism is more than a philosophers' worry---the (...) folk seem to agree! (shrink)

Is there a problem with believing based on moral testimony? The intuition that there is a problem is a starting point for much research on moral testimony. To arbitrate between various attempts to account for intuitions about moral testimony, we need to know the exact nature of those intuitions. The current study investigates this empirically. The study confirms an asymmetry in the way we think about testimony about moral and descriptive matters and explores the extent to which this asymmetry is (...) explained by different metaphysical beliefs about the relevant domains, or beliefs about the relative background levels of deception or disagreement. (shrink)

In the past few years there has been a turn towards evaluating the empirical foundation of epistemic contextualism using formal (rather than armchair) experimental methods. By-and-large, the results of these experiments have not supported the original motivation for epistemic contextualism. That is partly because experiments have only uncovered effects of changing context on knowledge ascriptions in limited experimental circumstances (when contrast is present, for example), and partly because existing experiments have not been designed to distinguish between contextualism and one of (...) its main competing theories, subject-sensitive invariantism. In this paper, we discuss how a particular, "third-person", experimental design is needed to provide evidence that would support contextualism over subject-sensitive invariantism. In spite of the theoretical significance of third-person knowledge ascriptions for debates surrounding contextualism, no formal experiments evaluating such ascriptions that assess contextualist claims have previously been conducted. In this paper, we conduct an experiment specifically designed to examine that central gap in contextualism’s empirical foundation. The results of our experiment provide crucial support for epistemic contextualism over subject-sensitive invariantism. (shrink)

Various studies have reported that moral intuitions about the permissibility of acts are subject to framing effects. This paper reports the results of a series of experiments which further examine the susceptibility of moral intuitions to framing effects. The main aim was to test recent speculation that intuitions about the moral relevance of certain properties of cases might be relatively resistent to framing effects. If correct, this would provide a certain type of moral intuitionist with the resources to resist challenges (...) to the reliability of moral intuitions based on such framing effects. And, fortunately for such intuitionists, although the results can’t be used to mount a strident defence of intuitionism, the results do serve to shift the burden of proof onto those who would claim that intuitions about moral relevance are problematically sensitive to framing effects. (shrink)

Experimental philosophy of aesthetics has explored to what extent ordinary people are committed to aesthetic realism. Extant work has focused on attitudes to normativism – a key commitment of realist positions in aesthetics – the claim that aesthetic judgments/statements have correctness conditions, invariant between subjects, such that there is a fact of the matter in cases of aesthetic disagreement. The emerging picture is that ordinary people strongly and almost universally reject normativism and thus there is no strong realist tendency in (...) ordinary people’s thinking about the aesthetic. This has been taken to dissolve the traditional puzzle in aesthetics of how to best account for the fact that (a) aesthetic judgments seem intersubjectively valid, while (b) aesthetic experience seems subjective. This paper presents studies which further enrich our understanding of ordinary thinking about the aesthetic: ordinary thinking about the aesthetic may not be so vehement in its rejection of normativism; and where previous results suggested that, in many cultures, the dominant trend is to reject correctness conditions for aesthetic judgments, the current results suggest participants think aesthetic judgments have correctness conditions (albeit perhaps very finely relativized to specific circumstances of judgment). (shrink)

Intuitions is presented as a counterpart of Rethinking Intuition ( DePaul and Ramsey 1998 ). 1 After 16 years, it revisits the topic of the place of intuitions in philosophy in light of two developments...

The word “intuition” is one frequently used in philosophy. It is often assumed that the way in which philosophers use the word, and others like it, is very distinctive. This claim has been subjected to little empirical scrutiny, however. This article presents the first steps in a qualitative analysis of the use of intuition talk in the academy. It presents the findings of two preliminary empirical studies. The first study examines the use of intuition talk in spoken academic English. The (...) second examines the use of intuition talk in written academic English. It considers what these studies tell us about the distinctiveness of philosophical language and methods and considers some implications for evaluative and ameliorative methodology. (shrink)

Recent metaphilosophical debates have focused on the methods/epistemology of philosophy, and the structure of the discipline. The paper reports the results of an exploratory study examining the relationship between personality and both kinds of metaphilosophical view. The findings reported are No important link between personality and attitudes to intuitions, Apparent differences between experts and non-experts as to which subfields are considered central, Only limited evidence that perceptions of centrality are related to personality in minor ways. Although no dramatic relationships between (...) personality and metaphilosophical view are found, the results nonetheless prompt some reflection about the role played by judgements about the centrality of subfields within the discipline. (shrink)

A reorientation is needed in methodological debate about the role of intuitions in philosophy. Methodological debate has lost sight of the reason why it makes sense to focus on questions about intuitions when thinking about the methods or epistemology of philosophy. The problem is an approach to methodology that focuses almost exclusively on questions about some evidential role that intuitions may or may not play in philosophers’ arguments. A new approach is needed. Approaching methodological questions about the role of intuitions (...) in philosophy with an abductive model of philosophical inquiry in mind will help ensure the debate doesn't lose sight of what motivates the debate. (shrink)

It has been argued that geoengineering research should not be pursued because of a slippery slope from research to problematic deployment. These arguments have been thought weak or defective on the basis of interpretations that treat the arguments as relying on dubious premises. The paper urges a new interpretation of these arguments as precautionary arguments, i.e. as relying on a precautionary principle. This interpretation helps us better appreciate the potential normative force of the worries, their potential policy relevance, and the (...) kind of evidence required by slippery slope arguments. Understood as precautionary arguments, it is clear that slippery slope arguments against geoengineering capture concerns that are worth taking seriously. (shrink)

Complete information dispositional metasemantics says that our expressions get their meaning in virtue of what our dispositions to apply those terms would be given complete information. The view has recently been advanced and argued to have a number of attractive features. I argue that that it threatens to make the meanings of our words indeterminate and doesn’t do what it was that made a dispositional view attractive in the first place.

Much recent work on philosophical methodology has focused on whether we should accept evidence: the claim that philosophers use intuitive judgments about cases as evidence for/against philosophical theories. This paper outlines a new way of thinking about the philosophical method of appealing to cases such that evidence is true but not as it is typically understood. The idea proposed is that, when philosophers appeal to cases, they are engaged in a project of conceptual engineering and that, within that project, intuitions (...) about cases provide evidence as to the normative constraints which are relevant within that project. The paper demonstrates that this is a feasible interpretation of the way that cases are appealed to in recent journal issues, and makes the case that this would be a better way to think of what philosophers are doing when they appeal to cases. (shrink)

There is something peculiar about aesthetic testimony. It seems more difficult to gain knowledge of aesthetic properties based solely upon testimony than it is in the case of other types of property. In this paper, I argue that we can provide an adequate explanation at the level of the semantics of aesthetic language, without defending any substantive thesis in epistemology or about aesthetic value/judgement. If aesthetic predicates are given a non-invariantist semantics, we can explain the supposed peculiar difficulty with aesthetic (...) testimony. (shrink)

I bet you don’t practice your philosophical intuitions. What’s your excuse? If you think philosophical training improves the reliability of philosophical intuitions, then practicing intuitions should improve them even further. I argue that philosophers’ reluctance to practice their intuitions highlights a tension in the way that they think about the role of intuitions in philosophy.

Philosophical enquiry stands to benefit from the inclusion of methods from the digital humanities to study language use. Empirical studies using the methods of the digital humanities have the potential to contribute to both conceptual analysis and intuition-based enquiry, two important approaches in contemporary philosophy. Empirical studies using the methods of the digital humanities can also provide valuable metaphilosophical insights into the nature of philosophical methods themselves. The use of methods from the digital humanities in philosophy should be expected to (...) follow a similar trajectory to another attempt to introduce empirical methods in philosophy. Experimental philosophers use empirical methods from the cognitive sciences to bear on philosophical questions. At first, we should expect the main contribution of methods from the digital humanities in philosophy to be at the metaphilosophical level. Then, given the right impetus and support, we are optimistic that methods from the digital humanities can make important and sustained contributions to first-order philosophical enquiry. This chapter gives two case studies of recent studies in which methods from the digital humanities are used to address metaphilosophical questions about the use of the word ‘intuition’ and the methods of philosophy and physics. It gives three examples of contemporary first-order philosophical debates to which methods fromthe digital humanities could make an important contribution in epistemology, metaphysics and philosophy of language. The chapter discusses some methodological challenges and limitations which are of particular importance when considering the application of methods from the digital humanities in philosophy, including concerns about the demographic representativeness of widely available corpora. (shrink)

Direct Epistemic Consequentialism faces the Truth Fairy. Indirect Epistemic Consequentialism promises to avoid this issue. But there are worse fairies than the Truth Fairy. There is the Worse Fairy. The case of the Worse Fairy helps demonstrate that epistemic consequentialists who would solve problems like the Truth Fairy by ‘going indirect’ face a dilemma.

Colour relationalism holds that the colours are constituted by relations to subjects. Anti-relationalists have claimed that this view stands in stark contrast to our phenomenally-informed, pre-theoretic intuitions. Is this claim right? Cohen and Nichols’ recent empirical study suggests not, as about half of their participants seemed to be relationalists about colour. Despite Cohen and Nichols’ study, we think that the anti-relationalist’s claim is correct. We explain why there are good reasons to suspect that Cohen and Nichols’ experimental design skewed their (...) results in favour of relationalism. We then run an improved study and find that most of our participants seem to be anti-relationalists. We find some other interesting things too. Our results suggest that the majority of ordinary people find it no less intuitive that colours are objective than that shapes are objective. We also find some evidence that when those with little philosophical training are asked about the colours of objects, their intuitions about colour and shape cases are similar, but when asked about people’s colour ascriptions, their intuitions about colour and shape cases differ. (shrink)

Bernard Molyneux presents some new arguments against descriptive evidentialism about intuitions. Descriptive evidentialism is the thesis that philosophers use intuitions as evidence. Molyneux's arguments are that: the propositions that intuition putatively supports are treated as having a degree and kind of certainty and justification that they could not have got from being intuited; intuitions influence us in ways we cannot explain by supposing we treat them as evidence; and certain strong intuitions that persuade us of their contents are treated as (...) inadmissible in the context of justification. This article presents a partial defence of descriptive evidentialism against these new arguments. (shrink)

The word ‘intuition’ is used frequently both in philosophy and in discussions about philosophical methods. It has been argued that this intuition-talk makes no semantic contribution and that intuition-talk is thus a bad habit that ought to be abandoned. I urge caution in making this inference. There are many pragmatic roles intuition-talk might play. Moreover, according to one plausible story, there is reason to think intuition-talk is actually a good habit for philosophers to have.

An epistemic deontology modelled on Kant’s ethics—in particular the humanity formula of the categorical imperative—is a promising alternative to epistemic consequentialism because it can forbid intuitively impermissible epistemic trade-offs which epistemic consequentialism seems doomed to permit and, most importantly, it can do so in a way that is not ad hoc.

Recent empirical work on non-philosophers’ intuitions about epistemic normativity reveals patterns that cannot be fully accounted for by direct epistemic consequentialism. On the basis of these results, one might picture participants as “epistemic deontologists.” We present the results of two new experiments that support a more nuanced picture. We examine intuitions about guesses and hypotheses, and about beliefs. Our results suggest a two-factor model of intuitions, wherein both consequentialist and non-consequentialist considerations affect participants’ judgments about epistemic permissibility.

Mallon, Machery, Nichols and Stich (Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 79: 332–356, 2009) argue that the use of intuitions in the philosophy of reference is problematic as recent studies show intuitions about reference vary both within and between cultures. I use some ideas from the recent literature on disagreement and truth relativism to shed light on the debate concerning the appropriate reaction to these studies. Mallon et al. argue that variation is problematic because if one tries to use intuitions which vary (...) to find the correct theory of reference one will end up endorsing an absurd position: referential pluralism. I argue that there is hope for intuition-based philosophy of reference. One can avoid endorsing referential pluralism (as Mallon et al. understand it). Furthermore, referential pluralism may not be so absurd after all. (shrink)

What is the experience of someone who is “colour‐blind” like? This paper presents the results of a study that uses qualitative research methods to better understand the lived experience of colour blindness. Participants were asked to describe their experiences of a variety of coloured stimuli, both with and without EnChroma glasses—glasses which, the manufacturers claim, enhance the experience of people with common forms of colour blindness. More generally, the paper provides a case study in the nascent field of experimental philosophy (...) of experience. (shrink)

_What is this thing called Philosophical Methodology?_ is the ideal introduction for students challenged with the idea of ‘doing’ philosophy for the first time. This textbook explores this socially-engaged and collaborative discipline in an accessible and comprehensive way by carefully weighing up the costs and benefits of philosophical theories, embracing new tools for philosophical progress, and scrutinizing the practice of philosophical methodology to help improve philosophy for generations to come. James Andow encourages newcomers to think carefully about the (...) nature and value of the various philosophical methods introduced and provides a way into contemporary metaphilosophical debates about philosophical methods. Chapter summaries, annotated further reading and a glossary make this an indispensable introduction for students grappling with this topic for the first time. (shrink)

Strevens’s Thinking Off Your Feet promises to vindicate philosophical analysis. My comments take a narrow, critical focus. I argue that Strevens doesn’t deliver on this promise. Given my understanding of (i) what is required from a vindication of philosophical analysis and (ii) Strevens’s grounds for ‘optimism’ about philosophical analysis, Strevens hasn’t done enough to vindicate philosophical analysis. Indeed, Strevens’s supposed grounds for optimism about armchair philosophy in fact provide motivation for philosophical analysis to give up some ground to experimental philosophy. (...) Although my comments are critical, my overall view of the book is not. Strevens does important and interesting work presenting and analysing various models of how armchair philosophy might work and what it might achieve. The book deserves a central place in future discussions about these issues. (shrink)

The chapter highlights four themes within the psychology of climate change that illustrate how psychological findings bear on the philosophy of climate change. The chapter first considers how psychological research has explored the ways in which individuals think about the ethics of the relationship between humans and the environment, developing new constructs capturing various ways of thinking about that relationship and developing tools with which to measure the extent to which participants think about the relationship in the relevant ways. The (...) remaining sections look at why people might find it difficult to act ethically in relation to the environment, the psychological impacts of the climate crisis, and at what psychology can teach us about developing effective interventions to practically respond to the climate crisis. (shrink)

This special issue is on the topic of Experimental Philosophy as Applied Philosophy. The issue is the result of the 2016 Annual Ratio Conference held at the University of Reading, 23–24 April 2016. The conference was also the seventh annual conference of Experimental Philosophy Group UK.

In recent decades, intuitions' role in philosophy has been hotly debated. Many claim intuitions play an important role. Others, some armed with data, challenge the use of intuitions. This thesis reflects on this debate and advances the debate in two main ways. Having a clear understanding of the challenge which intuition-use in philosophy faces is important. Part I focuses on this. Chapters 1-2 introduce the topic of intuitions, motivate the methodological study of intuitions, and present the historical background to recent (...) empirical challenges to intuition-use. Chapters 3-5 concern the contemporary challenge. I present the empirical evidence the challenge uses, present what I argue to be the strongest version of the challenge, and defend that challenge against some objections. How one characterises intuitions is incredibly important in philosophical methodology. If we are to properly evaluate philosophical methods vis-a-vis their use of something called intuitions { if we are to assess the empirical challenge { it is important to be clear exactly what we mean by `intuitions'. Part II focuses on this. Chapter 6 argues there is little consensus among philosophers as to what intuitions are and their role in philosophy. Chapter 7 questions whether philosophers have developed an idiolect in which `intuition' has distinctive meaning | as frequently supposed. Chapter 8 points out a common misunderstanding about intuitions in philosophy; using quantitative tools to challenge the idea that an increased use of `intuition' in philosophy is the result of an increased use of intuition. So, the developing picture is one of confusion, without a clear idea of what sense of `intuition' is important. Fortunately, Chapter 9 sets us back on the right track. It sets out a positive programme for evaluative methodology: methodologists should adopt a permissive conception of intuitions and make fine distinctions between different intuitions, so long as we can track those distinctions while philosophising. (shrink)

Responding to recent concerns about the reliability of the published literature in psychology and other disciplines, we formed the X-Phi Replicability Project to estimate the reproducibility of experimental philosophy. Drawing on a representative sample of 40 x-phi studies published between 2003 and 2015, we enlisted 20 research teams across 8 countries to conduct a high-quality replication of each study in order to compare the results to the original published findings. We found that x-phi studies – as represented in our sample (...) – successfully replicated about 70% of the time. We discuss possible reasons for this relatively high replication rate in the field of experimental philosophy and offer suggestions for best research practices going forward. (shrink)

Appendix 1 was incomplete in the initial online publication. The original article has been corrected.

In previous work we proposed a sketch of a disposition-based metasemantictheory, which has recently been criticized by James Andow. Andow claims, first, that our dispositionalmetasemantics threatens to render the meanings of our words indeterminate, and second, that our viewrisks a 'semantic apocalypse' according to which most of our terms fail to refer. We respond to Andow'scriticism by modifying and expanding our orignial, underspecified view. In particular, we propose that a viewthat appeals to actual dispositions rather than (...) counterfactual dispositions avoids many difficulties that might confront a disposition-based metasemantics - issues even beyond those that Andow raises. (shrink)

Structural realism is considered by many realists and antirealists alike as the most defensible form of scientific realism. There are now many forms of structural realism and an extensive literature about them. There are interesting connections with debates in metaphysics, philosophy of physics and philosophy of mathematics. This entry is intended to be a comprehensive survey of the field.

Moral philosophy is the study of what morality is and what it requires of us. As Socrates said, it's about "how we ought to live"-and why. It would be helpful if we could begin with a simple, uncontroversial definition of what morality is. Unfortunately, we cannot. There are many rival theories, each expounding a different conception of what it means to live morally, and any definition that goes beyond Socrates's simple formula-tion is bound to offend at least one of them. (...) This should make us cautious, but it need not paralyze us. In this chapter, I will describe the "minimum conception" of morality. (shrink)

For this 1897 publication, the American philosopher William James brought together ten essays, some of which were originally talks given to Ivy League societies. Accessible to a broader audience, these non-technical essays illustrate the author's pragmatic approach to belief and morality, arguing for faith and action in spite of uncertainty. James thought his audiences suffered 'paralysis of their native capacity for faith' while awaiting scientific grounds for belief. His response consisted in an attitude of 'radical empiricism', which deals (...) practically rather than ideologically with real-world phenomena. When facing a 'momentous' decision about belief, he says, we both can and must choose the best hypothesis. The first four essays apply this principle to religious faith, and the rest explore the pragmatic approach to such topics as determinism, ethics and individual achievement. James developed his ideas further in The Varieties of Religious Experience and Pragmatism, both of which are reissued in this series. (shrink)

One of the most influential men of his time, philosopher, psychologist, educator, and author William James (1842-1910) helped lead the transition from a predominantly European-centered nineteenth-century philosophy to a new "pragmatic" American philosophy. Helping to pave the way was his seminal book Pragmatism (1907), in which he included a chapter on "Truth," an essay which provoked severe criticism. In response, he wrote the present work, an attempt to bring together all he had ever written on the theory of knowledge, (...) including an article on the function of cognition, later polemic and expository contributions, and some replies to previous criticism. The result was a full and definitive expression of the pragmatist "epistemology" from James' point of view. In the book, he urges the reader to "turn away from abstractions, verbal solutions, fixed principles, and pretended absolutes and look for concreteness and facts, action and power," arguing that "the ultimate test for us of what a truth means is the conduct it dictates or inspires." For students, scholars--anyone interested in William James or the history of American philosophical thought--this book offers an in-depth exposition of the influential ideas of one of the greatest American thinkers. Unabridged republication of the edition originally published by Longmans, Green and Co., New York and London, 1909. (shrink)

We have several intuitive paradigms of defeating evidence. For example, let E be the fact that Ernie tells me that the notorious pet Precious is a bird. This supports the premise F, that Precious can fly. However, Orna gives me *opposing* evidence. She says that Precious is a dog. Alternatively, defeating evidence might not oppose Ernie's testimony in that direct way. There might be other ways for it to weaken the support that Ernie's testimony gives me for believing F, without (...) the new evidence itself intuitively constituting reasons to believe one way or the other about Precious's flight ability. An example: Ursula tells me that Ernie has no idea what Precious's species is; he's just guessing. She may not herself want to or be in a position to weigh in about Precious's real species or flight ability. I call defeating evidence of this sort *undermining evidence. (shrink)

It is our job now - the job of this book - to influence and develop the unsettled discourse of human rights so as to complete the incomplete idea.

Two books bound together, from the religious period of one of the most renowned and representative thinkers. Written for laymen, thus easy to understand, it is penetrating and brilliant as well. Illuminations of age-old religious questions from a pragmatic perspective, written in a luminous style.