In this article, I argue that arguments from the history of science against scientific realism, like the arguments advanced by P. Kyle Stanford and Peter Vickers, are fallacious. The so-called Old Induction, like Vickers's, and New Induction, like Stanford's, are both guilty of confirmation bias—specifically, of cherry-picking evidence that allegedly challenges scientific realism while ignoring evidence to the contrary. I also show that the historical episodes that Stanford adduces in support of his New Induction are indeterminate between a pessimistic and (...) an optimistic interpretation. For these reasons, these arguments are fallacious, and thus do not pose a serious challenge to scientific realism. (shrink)

This essay will criticize Peter Lamarque’s claim in The Opacity of Narrative that reading for ‘opacity’ is the way to read literature as literature. I will summarize the idea of ‘opacity’ and consider the plausibility of this claim through an examination of Lamarque’s related comments on translation. The argument for ‘opacity’, although it insists on the importance of attention to a work’s form in the apprehension of its content, involves, at the same time, a certain obliviousness to form, indicated in (...) the first instance by an unpersuasive conflation of lyric poetry and prose fiction. Through a comparison of opposing approaches to the translation of a novel written in verse, and an analysis of why the translation of poetry is generally understood to be more challenging than the translation of prose, I will argue that reading for ‘opacity’ does not adequately capture what it means to read literature as literature. (shrink)

This paper explores the impacts of neurological intervention on selfhood with reference to recipients’ claims about changes to their self-understanding following Deep Brain Stimulation for treatment of Parkinson’s Disease. In the neuroethics literature, patients’ claims such as: “I don’t feel like myself anymore” and “I feel like a machine”, are often understood as expressing threats to identity. In this paper I argue that framing debates in terms of a possible threat to identity—whether for or against the proposition, is mistaken and (...) occludes what is ethically salient in changes from DBS. Rather, by adopting a relational narrative approach to identity and autonomy, I show that the ethically salient issue from DBS is impacts on autonomous agency—whether one’s actions and beliefs are one’s own, and how DBS may hinder, or foster, embodied, relational autonomy competences. This approach recognizes that if sufficiently significant, impacts on autonomy competences may pose a threat to one’s ability to contribute to the process of authoring one’s own life and so pose a threat to identity formation. I argue this approach resolves the confusion in the literature about whether and how DBS threatens identity and provides a complex picture of how DBS may affect selfhood by disrupting narrative identity formation and revision, distorting agency and/or undermining autonomy. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Radical Change Theory and Synergistic Reading for Digital Age YouthEliza T. Dresang (bio) and Bowie Kotrla (bio)Books with digital age characteristics... stimulate curiosity and foster community.—Elizabeth Lennox Keyser, 1999Today’s students think and process information fundamentally differently from their predecessors.—Marc Prensky, 2001PrologueOne of our favorite books is McGillis’s The Nimble Reader: Literary Criticism and Children’s Literature.1 McGillis applies various literary theories—among them the New Criticism, structuralism, feminism, and postmodernism—to much-loved, (...) time-honored books such as E. B. White’s Charlotte’s Web (1952), in each case coming up with a fresh interpretation of a well-known text. The Nimble Reader makes the point that the meaning of any object, experience, or creative endeavor can be evasive and changes according to the lens through which it is viewed. Theory uncovers, illuminates, reveals, explains, predicts, and adds value and dimensions to what otherwise might have been overlooked. [End Page 92]That is what we hope Radical Change Theory does—we hope that it stimulates thinking, brings new perspectives, and adds value to what is already recognized as an immense treasure: the body of children’s literature and the young (and old) readers who love and appreciate it. As an addition to the assortment of approaches McGillis covered, we anticipate that Radical Change Theory is a way to see the mosaic of contemporary children’s literature in a new light, to examine and explain some parts of it that may have gone unnoticed. We offer it as a way to think about contemporary youth in relation to their literature, and we suggest applying Radical Change Theory in retrospect in order to highlight and appreciate “radical” authors and illustrators of the past who wrote for “radical readers” in their times. Radical Change Theory is only one perspective among many, and we realize that the phenomena it addresses could be explained or augmented in other ways, as McGillis demonstrated.IntroductionThe 2008 Caldecott Award for the most outstanding picture book for children published in the United States in the previous year was presented to Brian Selznick, author and illustrator of The Invention of Hugo Cabret, which is hundreds of pages longer than an ordinary picture book.2 Approximately 300 of its 533 pages are wordless black and white sketches that tell the story—not illustrating the text but replacing it. Hugo Cabret is a twelve-year-old boy living in the walls of a Paris train station in 1931; he becomes involved in a mystery adventure with the pioneer silent film maker George Méliès, a fitting element for a largely visual book. Selznick notes that he thinks of the book as somewhere between a graphic novel, a picture book, and a film.3 Each sequence of drawings can itself become a miniature silent move if the reader employs a flipbook technique. Hugo Cabret offers a highly interactive reading experience with vivid visual appeal, intertextuality, and multiple layers of meaning. It also provides a dramatic departure from the typical picture-book tradition and joins a number of other radically changed books that have special appeal for digital age youth.While it was perfectly clear to almost everyone during the 1990s that technology was changing, almost no one acknowledged the concomitant change in a sizeable and growing cadre of handheld books for youth. Some of those who did notice expressed puzzlement and regret at the break from a more traditional form and format; others expressed curiosity. Some others sought explanations.4 One purpose of this essay is to provide one explanation for the nature and character of these “changed” books and to demonstrate that they are somewhat different from but firmly rooted in more traditional children’s literature.But not only are books changing—at least some young readers are as well. In the 1990s, as youth who were born in the late 1970s began to mature, [End Page 93] we, along with some other educators and scholars, noted what seemed to be a change from previous generations in how many youth approached thinking, learning, creating, and engaging with media, including reading handheld books. Various terms, including the net generation, digital natives... (shrink)

Decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) are a new, rapidly-growing class of organizations governed by smart contracts. Here we describe how researchers can contribute to the emerging science of DAOs and other digitally-constituted organizations. From granular privacy primitives to mechanism designs to model laws, we identify high-impact problems in the DAO ecosystem where existing gaps might be tackled through a new data set or by applying tools and ideas from existing research fields such as political science, computer science, economics, law, and organizational (...) science. Our recommendations encompass exciting research questions as well as promising business opportunities. We call on the wider research community to join the global effort to invent the next generation of organizations. (shrink)

In this paper, I respond to Philip Atkins’ reply to my attempt to explain why Gettier cases (and Gettier-style cases) are misleading. I have argued that Gettier cases (and Gettier-style cases) are misdealing because the candidates for knowledge in such cases contain ambiguous designators. Atkins denies that Gettier’s original cases contain ambiguous designators and offers his intuition that the subjects in Gettier’s original cases do not know. I argue that his reply amounts to mere intuition mongering and I explain why (...) Gettier cases, even Atkins’ revised version of Gettier’s Case I, still contain ambiguous designators. (shrink)

Recent research into LGBTQ kinship has suggested that reproductive technology might stabilise and/or disrupt dominant ideals about the importance of biogenetic relatedness in family formation. This article examines the way adults raised in lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans and queer (LGBTQ) households are interested in tracing queer family histories, rather than solely their biological relations. Data comes from biographical narrative interviews with twenty-two adult children raised by LGBTQ parents. The article examines how participants’ kinship stories relate to parents’ identities and journeys (...) to, and through, LGBTQ parenthood. Knowledge of queer kinship was pivotal in the process of self-making and enabled participants to produce and express connections between themselves and their LGBTQ parents. Furthermore, queer social histories allowed them to articulate their affinity to LGBTQ communities and culture more widely, particularly noting their knowledge and experience of socio-legal discrimination against LGBTQ people. Thus, kinship narratives of people raised by LGBTQ parents highlight that the desire to ‘know where we come from’ is not rooted exclusively in biogenetics. In this case, kinship stories disrupted the established biogenetic narrative, stressing the importance of LGBTQ culture and history for constructing a connection between collective and individual identity. (shrink)

Os usos do passado e da tradição em uma sociedade pós-tradicional, na perspectiva de Zygmunt Bauman, é resultado dos desdobramentos da modernidade em sua produção da ambivalência. O objetivo do presente artigo é rastrear esse pensamento na obra de Bauman a partir da suturação do conceito de tradição com a obra mais ampla do filósofo. Buscaremos, então, pontos de contato com outros autores que também trabalharam esta temática – notadamente, Hannah Arendt – a partir da ótica de que a modernidade (...) é marcada pela dependência de um passado ressignificado. (shrink)

Inside the Constitutional Court of South Africa hangs Judith Mason’s artwork, entitled The Man Who Sang and the Woman Who Kept Silent, more commonly known as The Blue Dress. Mason created the artwork to commemorate Phila Ndwandwe and Harold Sefola after hearing testimony from the perpetrators of their deaths at the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). In this article I explore how The Blue Dress contributes to the reimagining of human rights culture in South Africa in three key (...) ways. First, the artwork is a symbolic reparation that recognizes the harm suffered under apartheid. Second, the artwork is an alternative record of women’s experiences of sexual violence; experiences which are largely absent from the official TRC record. Third, the artwork is a form of judicial consciousness which keeps the past alive so that a different future can be imagined. I argue that The Blue Dress instantiates an “ethics of responsibility” in post-apartheid human rights discourse. That is, the responsibility to remember past violations of human rights in order to prevent future ones and the responsibility to recognize past triumphs of human rights in order to support future ones. The article draws on seven months of participant observation fieldwork at the Court, which included fifty-four interviews with judges, clerks, staff members, advocates, artists, curators, and visitors, as well as visual and archival research. (shrink)

I propose a description of one aspect of the philosophical problem about the ontology of colors by formulating and motivating six plausible premises that seem to be hard to deny in isolation but that are jointly incoherent. I briefly sketch a solution and comment on the views presented in this volume from the perspective of the puzzle.

I discuss an argument given by Dorothy Edgington for the conclusion that indicative conditionals cannot express propositions. The argument is not effective against Robert Stalnaker's context-dependent propositional theory. I isolate and defend the feature of Stalnaker's theory that allows it to evade the argument.

The study aims to measure the link between CSR and economic growth. This study investigates whether CSR expenses shown by the banks are contributing to the sustainability of an emerging economy like India. For this study, CSR spending of 21 commercial banks, on nine development areas of the Indian economy, the human development index of India, and its indicators along with the growth rate of GDP of India and state-wise GDP for the year 2014-2015 to 2017-2018 have been taken as (...) secondary data. The research techniques used are the case analysis method, correlation, and descriptive analysis. The study highlights that CSR activities are more of a myth and a far-reaching possibility in developing nations like India, where most institutions are engrossed in such activities to gain laurels and secure investors from the globe. (shrink)

In this article, the authors take up the historical figure of Dr Betty Paërl, who has surprisingly turned up in very different kinds of specialised archives. The white mathematics professor was located in IHLIA LGBT+ Heritage, the largest queer heritage collection in Europe, as a notable SM sexpert and spokesperson on transgender politics, and also found during archival research into the anti-(neo)colonial struggles of Suriname against the Dutch. Upon closer inspection of the materials, the authors find the recurrent image/item of (...) the whip that presses them to carefully think through how the archive of Dr Paërl casts light on a history that Katherine McKittrick calls being ‘in the shadow of the whip’. The article aims to combine an analysis of these versions of the whip in different visual and discursive registers to detect the liberatory politics underlying her activisms. To do so, the authors develop the intersectional model of the kaleidoscope employed by Dutch Black, migrant and refugee (BMR) feminist theorists to grasp the shifting patterns of power that Paërl battled and embodied as an activist of the anticolonial struggle, for sex workers’ rights, for kinky sex and for transgender people. This is all the more important in the historical study of transgender visual materials that most often arrive in archives via medical and police photography or pornographic materials. The historical researcher, the article argues, should be wary of (re)producing a static vision that would reduce transgender figures to sex and gender politics, or eclipse a vision of trans politics that dilates beyond sexuality. (shrink)

This article aims to show how discourse analysis can help identify and reinterpret the communicative practices of individuals with autism spectrum disorder, presenting them as co-constructed by the neurotypical interlocutor. The data described in the article come from three interviews with autistic adolescents. The participants completed two tasks: picture description and narrative production. The interviews were further analysed with the use of discourse analysis. The study demonstrates how the participants oriented to the interviewer’s utterances and what communicative strategies they used (...) throughout the interview. Discourse analysis is presented as an approach to the study of autistic communication, which can substantially contribute to the current state of knowledge about autism spectrum disorder, and be an invaluable help for practitioners. (shrink)

What is poetry’s so-called ‘form-content unity’? In this paper, I argue that the idea of ‘form-content unity’, as derived from A. C. Bradley’s 1901 lecture, has been misconstrued by Peter Kivy, who believes that it is confused and vague. I argue that it has also been misconstrued, however, by the philosophers who find the idea insightful and instructive and present themselves as defending and developing it against Kivy’s criticisms. Crucially, Bradley’s argument emphasizes that hearing is necessary to any ‘poetic’ reading (...) of a metrical poem, but this focus on sound and metre tends to be ignored. A precision of terminology—particularly a reformulation of the paraphrase ‘form-content unity’—offers an improved understanding of Bradley’s claims. The lecture, I argue, properly understood, in fact supports the call for a shift of attention away from understanding poems as ‘form-content unities’ in the philosophy of poetry. (shrink)

Timothy Brown's piece "Building Intricate Partnerships with Neurotechnology" makes a valuable contribution to ethical discussion of questions about human identity and agency raised by Deep Brain Stimulation. The paper brings together a number of relational approaches to narrative identity and autonomy, drawing on first-personal empirical accounts, to extend a relational account of agency to include neurostimulators. In doing so, it builds on the contributions relational approaches have made to making sense of changes to aspects of selfhood following neurological intervention while (...) also helpfully reframing concerns away from the threat that DBS may pose to aspects of self-hood. This approach directs... (shrink)

CRITIQUE OF THE ARAB MIND. CONTEMPORARY ARAB THOUGHT IN THE CONTEXT OF THE ISSUES OF REASON AND COGNITION In this article I will present different stands of Arab scholars with respect to one of the key issues of Orientalism — the Arab mind. The assumption of individuality and invariable nature of Arab mind was one of the foundations of the oriental thought. With the development of postcolonial thought in the second half of the 20th century, some Arab scholars rejected this (...) assumption, while the others tried to redefine its essence. Hence, the study of such issues as reason and cognition was so important. According to Mohammad Abed Al-Jabri, what distinguishes Arab reason is the fact that in Islamic philosophy the connection between epistemology and ideology was much stronger than in the European culture. As a result, Islamic philosophy used epistemology and logic not for the sake of uncovering the ‘truth’, but in the defence of its own ideological claims. Al-Jabri argues that in order to understand contemporary Arab-Islamic thought it is necessary to study its beginning (VII–IX centuries AD), since instruments of reason established in that period have remained until today. Other philosophers, like Mohammed Arkoun place Arab reason in wider context of reason as such. The knowledge of the way of cognition within Arab culture seems to be the key to understanding of their world. (shrink)

The “received wisdom” in contemporary analytic philosophy is that intuition talk is a fairly recent phenomenon, dating back to the 1960s. In this paper, we set out to test two interpretations of this “received wisdom.” The first is that intuition talk is just talk, without any methodological significance. The second is that intuition talk is methodologically significant; it shows that analytic philosophers appeal to intuition. We present empirical and contextual evidence, systematically mined from the JSTOR corpus and HathiTrust’s Digital Library, (...) which provide some empirical support for the second rather than the first hypothesis. Our data also suggest that appealing to intuition is a much older philosophical methodology than the “received wisdom” alleges. We then discuss the implications of our findings for the contemporary debate over philosophical methodology. (shrink)

In this study I examine some uses of connectives, and in particular co-ordinate conjunction, from a critical discourse perspective; these uses, in my view, cannot find a satisfactory explanation within current frameworks. It is suggested that we need to identify a conceptual level at which connectives function as hypo-textual signals, activating systematic law-like conditional statements (IF-THEN), which form default specifications of consistent structured knowledge frames. I argue that an account of connectives at the conceptual level of their function that does (...) not take into consideration such tightly structured background schemata, representing both general knowledge and ideologies, cannot afford any generality. As a result, ¿deviant¿ or ¿subversive¿ uses of these connectives can neither be identified as such nor find an adequately general explication within existing accounts, whereas in the proposed framework such uses find a ready explanation of sufficient generality. This framework lies at the intersection of disciplines: Linguistic pragmatics (empirical pragmatics, critical discourse analysis), on the one hand, and cognitive science, on the other. Consequently, this proposal, too, can be regarded as a plea for crossing boundaries and joining forces. (shrink)

In this study I examine some uses of connectives, and in particular co-ordinate conjunction, from a critical discourse perspective; these uses, in my view, cannot find a satisfactory explanation within current frameworks. It is suggested that we need to identify a conceptual level at which connectives function as hypo-textual signals, activating systematic law-like conditional statements, which form default specifications of consistent structured knowledge frames. I argue that an account of connectives at the conceptual level of their function that does not (...) take into consideration such tightly structured background schemata, representing both general knowledge and ideologies, cannot afford any generality. As a result, ‘deviant’ or ‘subversive’ uses of these connectives can neither be identified as such nor find an adequately general explication within existing accounts, whereas in the proposed framework such uses find a ready explanation of sufficient generality. This framework lies at the intersection of disciplines: Linguistic pragmatics, on the one hand, and cognitive science, on the other. Consequently, this proposal, too, can be regarded as a plea for crossing boundaries and joining forces. (shrink)

Impostor syndrome or Impostor phenomenon is a belief that a person thinks their success is due to luck or external factors, not their abilities. This psychological trait is present in certain groups like women. In this paper, we propose a neutrosophic trait measure to represent the psychological concept of the trait-anti trait using refined neutrosophic sets. This study analysed a group of 200 undergraduate students for impostor syndrome, perfectionism, introversion and self-esteem: after the COVID pandemic break in 2021. Data labelling (...) was carried out using these neutrosophic trait measures. Machine learning models like Support Vector Machine(SVM), K-nearest neighbour (K-NN), and random forest were used to model the data; SVM provided the best accuracy of 92.15%. (shrink)

I’m grateful to Aleta Quinn and Studies in History and Philosophy of Science for hosting this book forum for my book, The Relativity of Theory (Springer, 2020). I’m also grateful to Margaret Greta Turnbull and Joseph Martin for their commentaries. In what follows, I address their comments as I understand them.

In this paper, I present the results of an experimental study on intuitions about moral obligation (ought) and ability (can). Many philosophers accept as an axiom the principle known as “Ought Implies Can” (OIC). If the truth of OIC is intuitive, such that it is accepted by many philosophers as an axiom, then we would expect people to judge that agents who are unable to perform an action are not morally obligated to perform that action. The results of my experimental (...) study show that participants were more inclined to judge that an agent ought to perform an action than that the agent can perform the action. Overall, participants said that an agent ought to perform an action even when they said that the agent cannot do it. I discuss the implications of these results for the debate over OIC. (shrink)

In “What’s So Bad about Scientism?” (Mizrahi 2017), I argue that Weak Scientism, the view that “Of all the knowledge we have, scientific knowledge is the best knowledge” (Mizrahi 2017, 354; emphasis in original) is a defensible position. That is to say, Weak Scientism “can be successfully defended against objections” (Mizrahi 2017, 354). In his response to Mizrahi (2017), Christopher Brown (2017) provides more objections against Weak Scientism, and thus another opportunity for me to show that (...) Weak Scientism is a defensible position, which is what I will do in this reply. In fact, I think that I have already addressed Brown’s (2017) objections in Mizrahi (2017), so I will simply highlight these arguments here. (shrink)

Literatura audialna, zarówno fikcjonalna (słuchowiska radiowe), jak i dokumentalna (audycje dokumentalne, feature’y) podejmuje temat Zagłady. Dyskurs postpamięci traktuje o ofiarach i ocalałych, oddaje też głos drugiemu pokoleniu ocalałych i badaczom Zagłady. Celem artykułu jest analiza wybranych dzieł sztuki audio o Holocauście pod kątem ich specyfiki gatunkowej oraz wskazanie pól tematycznych, które znajdują się na peryferiach narracji radiowych. Ma to na celu odpowiedź na pytanie o przyczyny decentralizacji wskazanych tematów. Metodą badawczą jest analiza treści konkretnych tytułów słuchowisk radiowych oraz cech ich (...) dramaturgii i konstrukcji. (shrink)

Radio art evolves due to technological changes. Radio drama is becoming an interactive piece of artwork which exists on the borderland of genres. An interactive audio play uses characteristic features of the classical radio art and unites them with the hypertextual structure. Due to these modifications, there emerges not only a new type of audio play, but also a lot of alternative ways of listening and interpretation. The aim of the article is to present interactive radio drama Alicja 0700, its (...) genre’s determinants in reference to the idea of “the open work”. (shrink)

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be (...) preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. To ensure a quality reading experience, this work has been proofread and republished using a format that seamlessly blends the original graphical elements with text in an easy-to-read typeface. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

Philosophy, theology and engineering are each characterised by striking, yet similar, low participation rates by female academics. While these disciplines seem very different, and so the diagnosis of the causes of this under-representation might likewise be expected to differ, we show a commonality of analysis in the diagnoses of, and responses to, women's under-representation. In each, we find a shared argument that concepts and methodologies central to that discipline are gendered male. We also find a shared response which urges engagement (...) in projects of critical re-imagination. We conclude with a case study of critical re-imagination in philosophy and draw some lessons from its successes and failures for the potential of gendered innovations to transform male dominated disciplines. While critical re-imagination of key concepts, presuppositions, and methodologies in these disciplines may be a necessary condition for improving participation rates by women, it is by no means sufficient. (shrink)

In his latest attack, even though he claims to be a practitioner of “close reading” (Wills 2018b, 34), it appears that Wills still has not bothered to read the paper in which I defend the thesis he seeks to attack (Mizrahi 2017a), or any of the papers in my exchange with Brown (Mizrahi 2017b; 2018a), as evidenced by the fact that he does not cite them at all. This explains why Wills completely misunderstands Weak Scientism and the arguments (...) for the quantitative superiority (in terms of research output and research impact) as well as qualitative superiority (in terms of explanatory, predictive, and instrumental success) of scientific knowledge over non-scientific knowledge. (shrink)

This book offers a close and rigorous examination of the arguments for and against scientific realism and introduces key positions in the scientific realism/antirealism debate, which is one of the central debates in contemporary philosophy of science. On the one hand, scientific realists argue that we have good reasons to believe that our best scientific theories are approximately true because, if they were not even approximately true, they would not be able to explain and predict natural phenomena with such impressive (...) accuracy. On the other hand, antirealists argue that the success of science does not warrant belief in the approximate truth of our best scientific theories. This is because the history of science is a graveyard of theories that were once successful but were later discarded. The author eventually settles on a middle ground position between scientific realism and antirealism called "relative realism.". (shrink)

In search for the “missing links” of queer posthumanist discourses, some nonhuman animals play a crucial role in setting up new possible ontologies of sexual diversity. However, the desire to trace “natural” evidence for sexual diversity and a non-binary gender system that goes beyond the simplistic “social constructionism” vs. “biological essentialism” dichotomy in the nonhuman world should be critically examined. In this article I analyze both the scientific and popular representations of “wild and weird” nonhuman animals that became rich semiotic-material (...) referents to human sexuality and gender diversity in order to propose “transpecies intimacies” as a strategy for overcoming the deadlock present in naturalizing and essentializing discourses. This essay focuses on the case of the spotted hyena, because this nonhuman animal functions as an important signifier and material resource for sexual differences on multiple levels of power relations – institutional, scientific, educational, somatic, discursive, and even affective. I consider how biomedical narratives on sexualized nonhuman animals employ hegemonic economies of sexual difference to build stories of a naturalized sexuality and an embodied gender difference wherein some chemical substances, like hormones, and some body parts, like genitals, serve as primary actors in this semiotic-material system. (shrink)

In my (2017a), I defend a view I call Weak Scientism, which is the view that knowledge produced by scientific disciplines is better than knowledge produced by non-scientific disciplines. Scientific knowledge can be said to be quantitatively better than non-scientific knowledge insofar as scientific disciplines produce more impactful knowledge–in the form of scholarly publications–than non-scientific disciplines (as measured by research output and research impact). Scientific knowledge can be said to be qualitatively better than non-scientific knowledge insofar as such knowledge is (...) explanatorily, instrumentally, and predictively more successful than non-scientific knowledge. Brown (2017a) raises several objections against my defense of Weak Scientism and I have replied to his objections (Mizrahi 2017b), thereby showing again that Weak Scientism is a defensible view. Since then, Brown (2017b) has reiterated his objections in another reply on SERRC. In this paper, I respond to Brown's objections, thereby showing once more that Weak Scientism is a defensible view. (shrink)

Accounts of arguments from expert opinion take it for granted that expert judgments count as (defeasible) evidence for propositions, and so an argument that proceeds from premises about what an expert judges to a conclusion that the expert is probably right is a strong argument. In Mizrahi (2013), I consider a potential justification for this assumption, namely, that expert judgments are significantly more likely to be true than novice judgments, and find it wanting because of empirical evidence suggesting that (...) expert judgments under uncertainty are not significantly more likely to be true than novice judgments or even chance. In this paper, I consider another potential justification for this assumption, namely, that expert judgments are not influenced by the cognitive biases novice judgments are influenced by, and find it wanting, too, because of empirical evidence suggesting that experts are vulnerable to pretty much the same cognitive biases that novices are vulnerable to. If this is correct, then the basic assumption at the core of accounts of arguments from expert opinion, namely, that expert judgments count as (defeasible) evidence for propositions, remains unjustified. (shrink)

The phenomenological effects of deep brain stimulation (DBS) on the self of the patient remains poorly understood and under described in the literature, despite growing evidence that a significant number of patients experience postoperative neuropsychiatric changes. To address this lack of phenomenological evidence, we conducted in-depth, semistructured interviews with 17 patients with Parkinson's disease who had undergone DBS. Exploring the subjective character specific to patients' experience of being implanted gives empirical and conceptual understanding of the potential phenomenon of DBS-induced self-estrangement. (...) Our study concluded that (1) the more patients preoperatively felt alienated by their illness, the more they experienced postoperative self-estrangement, and (2) the notion of self-estrangement seems to exist in association with certain common qualitative characters, namely, loss of control, which reflects a deteriorative estrangement, and distorted perception of capacities, which reveals a restorative estrangement. These findings indicate that subjective self-reports help us to understand some aspects of the potential phenomenon of DBS-induced self-estrangement. (shrink)

Bernard Wills (2018) joins Christopher Brown (2017, 2018) in criticizing my defense of Weak Scientism (Mizrahi 2017a, 2017b, 2018a). Unfortunately, it seems that Wills did not read my latest defense of Weak Scientism carefully, nor does he cite any of the other papers in my exchange with Brown.

In this paper, I propose that the debate in epistemology concerning the nature and value of understanding can shed light on the role of scientific idealizations in producing scientific understanding. In philosophy of science, the received view seems to be that understanding is a species of knowledge. On this view, understanding is factive just as knowledge is, i.e., if S knows that p, then p is true. Epistemologists, however, distinguish between different kinds of understanding. Among epistemologists, there are those who (...) think that a certain kind of understanding—objectual understanding—is not factive, and those who think that objectual understanding is quasi-factive. Those who think that understanding is not factive argue that scientific idealizations constitute cognitive success, which we then consider as instances of understanding, and yet they are not true. This paper is an attempt to draw lessons from this debate as they pertain to the role of idealizations in producing scientific understanding. I argue that scientific understanding is quasi-factive. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that appeals to intuition are strong arguments just in case there is an agreement among the relevant philosophers concerning the intuition in question. Otherwise, appeals to intuition are weak arguments.