Epistemic Courage is a timely and thought-provoking exploration of the ethics of belief, which shows why epistemology is no mere academic abstraction - the question of what to believe couldn't be more urgent. Jonathan Ichikawa argues that a skeptical, negative bias about belief is connected to a conservative bias that reinforces the status quo.

Ichikawa and Jarvis offer a new rationalist theory of mental content and defend a traditional epistemology of philosophy. They argue that philosophical inquiry is continuous with non-philosophical inquiry, and can be genuinely a priori, and that intuitions do not play an important role in mental content or the a priori.

How do we know what's (metaphysically) possible and impossible? Arguments from Kripke and Putnam suggest that possibility is not merely a matter of (coherent) conceivability/imaginability. For example, we can coherently imagine that Hesperus and Phosphorus are distinct objects even though they are not possibly distinct. Despite this apparent problem, we suggest, nevertheless, that imagination plays an important role in an adequate modal epistemology. When we discover what is possible or what is impossible, we generally exploit important connections between what is (...) possible and what we can coherently imagine. We can often come to knowledge of metaphysical modality a priori. (shrink)

I argue that “consent” language presupposes that the contemplated action is or would be at someone else’s behest. When one does something for another reason—for example, when one elects independently to do something, or when one accepts an invitation to do something—it is linguistically inappropriate to describe the actor as “consenting” to it; but it is also inappropriate to describe them as “not consenting” to it. A consequence of this idea is that “consent” is poorly suited to play its canonical (...) central role in contemporary sexual ethics. But this does not mean that nonconsensual sex can be morally permissible. Consent language, I’ll suggest, carries the conventional presupposition that that which is or might be consented to is at someone else’s behest. One implication will be a new kind of support for feminist critiques of consent theory in sexual ethics. (shrink)

According to some critics, traditional armchair philosophical methodology relies in an illicit way on intuitions. But the particular structure of the critique is not often carefully articulated—a significant omission, since some of the critics’ arguments for skepticism about philosophy threaten to generalize to skepticism in general. More recently, some experimentalist critics have attempted to articulate a critique that is especially tailored to affect traditional methods, without generalizing too widely. Such critiques are more reasonable, and more worthy of serious consideration, than (...) are blunter critiques that generalize far too widely. I argue that a careful (empirical!) examination of extant philosophical practices shows that traditional philosophical methods can meet these more reasonable challenges. (shrink)

In “Against Arguments from Reference” (Mallon et al., 2009), Ron Mallon, Edouard Machery, Shaun Nichols, and Stephen Stich (hereafter, MMNS) argue that recent experiments concerning reference undermine various philosophical arguments that presuppose the correctness of the causal-historical theory of reference. We will argue three things in reply. First, the experiments in question—concerning Kripke’s Gödel/Schmidt example—don’t really speak to the dispute between descriptivism and the causal-historical theory; though the two theories are empirically testable, we need to look at quite different data (...) than MMNS do to decide between them. Second, the Gödel/Schmidt example plays a different, and much smaller, role in Kripke’s argument for the causal-historical theory than MMNS assume. Finally, and relatedly, even if Kripke is wrong about the Gödel/Schmidt example—indeed, even if the causal-historical theory is not the correct theory of names for some human languages—that does not, contrary to MMNS’s claim, undermine uses of the causalhistorical theory in philosophical research projects. (shrink)

I argue that evaluating the knowledge norm of practical reasoning is less straightforward than is often assumed in the literature. In particular, cases in which knowledge is intuitively present, but action is intuitively epistemically unwarranted, provide no traction against the knowledge norm. The knowledge norm indicates what it is appropriately to hold a particular content as a reason for action; it does not provide a theory of what reasons are sufficient for what actions. Absent a general theory about what sorts (...) of reasons, if genuinely held, would be sufficient to justify actions—a question about which the knowledge norm is silent—many of the kinds of cases prevalent in the literature do not bear on the knowledge norm. (shrink)

We argue that stereotypes associated with concepts like he-said–she-said, conspiracy theory, sexual harassment, and those expressed by paradigmatic slurs provide “normative inference tickets”: conceptual permissions to automatic, largely unreflective normative conclusions. These “mental shortcuts” are underwritten by associated stereotypes. Because stereotypes admit of exceptions, normative inference tickets are highly flexible and productive, but also liable to create serious epistemic and moral harms. Epistemically, many are unreliable, yielding false beliefs which resist counterexample; morally, many perpetuate bigotry and oppression. Still, some normative (...) inference tickets, like some activated by sexual harassment, constitute genuine moral and hermeneutical advances. For example, our framework helps explain Miranda Fricker’s notion of “hermeneutical lacunae”: what early victims of “sexual harassment” — as well as their harassers — lacked before the term was coined was a communal normative inference ticket — one that could take us, collectively, from “this is happening” to “this is wrong.”. (shrink)

On a version of consent theory that tempts many, predatory sexual relations involving significant power imbalances (e.g. between professors and students, adults and teenagers, or employers and employees) are wrong because they violate consent-centric norms. In particular, the wronged party is said to have been _incapable_ of consenting to the predation, and the sexual wrong is located in the encounter’s nonconsensuality. Although we agree that these are sexual wrongs, we resist the idea that they are always nonconsensual. We argue instead (...) that it is possible for students, teenagers, employees, etc. to fully consent to sexually predatory encounters; denying as much renders survivors of predation vulnerable to compounding harms. Survivors face a dilemma: give up either their understanding of their experience as wrong, or their self-conception as an agent capable of consenting. We call the latter phenomenon _agential demotion_. (shrink)

Cet article s’intéresse aux mutations de la famille japonaise au XXe siècle à travers les manga de Machiko Hasegawa (Sazae-san), première dessinatrice de bande dessinée au Japon, et de Kyoko Okazaki (La maison du bonheur et Au bord de la rivière), qui appartient à la génération actuelle. L’analyse comparée de plusieurs de leurs albums montre, notamment à travers les scènes de repas, la déstructuration de la famille japonaise d’après-guerre, dans un contexte d’industrialisation qui a poussé les Japonaises à délaisser en (...) partie le foyer familial pour travailler. (shrink)

We consider the complex interactions between rape culture and epistemology. A central case study is the consideration of a deferential attitude about the epistemology of sexual assault testimony. According to the deferential attitude, individuals and institutions should decline to act on allegations of sexual assault unless and until they are proven in a formal setting, i.e., a criminal court. We attack this deference from several angles, including the pervasiveness of rape culture in the criminal justice system, the epistemology of testimony (...) and norms connecting knowledge and action, the harms of tacit idealizations away from important contextual factors, and a contextualist semantics for 'knows' ascriptions. (shrink)

This chapter has four central aims. First, in §1, I distinguish two ideas within epistemology that sometimes travel under the name ‘contextualism’ — the ‘situational contextualist’ idea that an individual’s context, especially their social context, can make for a difference in what they know, and the ‘linguistic contextualist’ idea that discourse using the word ‘knows’ and its cognates is context-sensitive, expressing dif- ferent contents in different conversational contexts. -/- Second, in §2, I situate contextualism with respect to several influential ideas (...) in feminist epistemology. These ideas are thoroughgoingly contextualist in the situational sense; I’ll explore the prospects for linguistic contextualist analogues or implementations of them. Simple connections between these feminist ideas and linguistic contextualism will prove elusive, but more subtle ones are possible, and sometimes attractive. -/- §3 considers the degree to which contextual epistemic parameters are determined interpersonally, as opposed to individualistically. Should contextualists hold that speakers can individually determine the contextual parameters that influence the truth- conditions of their utterances? Or are they fixed at a broader social level? I’ll rehearse some influential reasons to opt for the latter, more social, form of contextualism. -/- In §4 I discuss the practical and moral significance of speakers’ choices of epistemic parameters, given contextualism. For example, I’ll consider how standards-raising can be used to discredit evidential sources, with an eye towards the social and moral consequences of such moves. (shrink)

EEGs were analyzed to investigate the effect of experiences in listening to preferred music in dancers and non-dancers. Participants passively listened to instrumental music of their preferred genre for 2 min, alternate genres, and silence. Both groups showed increased activity for their preferred music compared to non-preferred music in the gamma, beta, and alpha frequency bands. The results suggest all participants' conscious recognition of and affective responses to their familiar music, appreciation of the tempo embedded in their preferred music and (...) emotional arousal, and enhanced attention mechanism for cognitive operations such as memory retrieval. The observed alpha activity is considered in the framework of the alpha functional inhibition hypothesis, in that years of experience listening to their favorite type of music may have honed the cerebral responses to achieve efficient cortical processes. Analyses of the electroencephalogram activity over 100s-long music pieces revealed a difference between dancers and non-dancers in the magnitude of an initial alpha event-related desynchronization and the later development of an alpha event-related synchronization for their preferred music. Dancers exhibited augmented alpha ERD, as well as augmented and uninterrupted alpha ERS over the remaining 80s. This augmentation in dancers is hypothesized to be derived from creative cognition or motor imagery operations developed through their dance experiences. (shrink)

清朝末から中華人民共和国建国までの世界的激動期、中国の知識人は儒教的世界観の更新に立ち会い、西洋の知と格闘した。社会進化論や立憲思想の衝撃はナショナリズムと革命思想に展開し、雑誌メディアには生命論から 民族論まで様々な論争と漫画表現が花開く。貴重な資料と最新の研究から読み解く労作。.

dai 1-kan. Ōgi ; Matsuri no genri -- dai 2-kan. Nihon kodai jujutsu ; Kakusareta kamigami -- dai 3-kan. Inʼyō gogyō shisō kara mita Nihon no matsuri -- dai 4-kan. Hebi ; Kitsune -- dai 5-kan. Nihonjin no shiseikan ; Inʼyō gogyō to Nihon no minzoku -- dai 6-kan. Eki to Nihon no saishi ; Inʼyō gogyō to jidō saishi -- dai 7-kan. Daijōsai ; Jitō Tennō -- dai 8-kan. Yama no kami ; Kamigami no tanjō -- dai 9-kan. Gogyō (...) junkan ; Jūnishi -- dai 10-kan. Daruma no minzokugaku ; In'yo gogyō to Nihon no tennō -- dai 11-kan. Eki, gogyō to Genji no sekai ; In'yo gogyō to Nihon no bunka -- dai 12-kan. Kodai Nihon no josei tennō ; Zassan. (shrink)

As Funayama has shown, Dharmakīrti’s successors had an animated discussion on the nature and function of the initial statement of scientific treatises in terms of its effectiveness and requisites. Arcaṭa in his comments on the initial statement of the Hetubindu considers that the initial statement, which contains the purpose of the treatise, is useless in prompting people to undertake the activity of reading the treatise because judicious people are supposed to undertake action only due to certainty which never arises from (...) something that is not a pramāṇa. For Arcaṭa, the initial statement is set forth only to dispel the objection of an opponent who criticizes the treatise for not having a purpose. Kamalaśīla criticizes Arcaṭa on this point; for him the initial statement is effective to prompt people to undertake the reading of the treatise because people act also on the basis of doubt, which arises from the initial statement that is not a pramāṇa but an abhyupāya for action. This paper attempts to consider how such doubt can cause reading by examining the debate in the Tattvasaṅgrahapañjikā and related texts. As Kamalaśīla presupposes, when people act due to doubt, they may attain the desired purpose by chance but cannot escape the risks of not attaining an desired purpose and also of attaining an undesired purpose. Taking these risks into consideration, it is reasonable for Granoff to take up Kamalaśīla’s position as an example of the maxim of kākatālīya in the introduction of her paper in the present volume. However, the probability for the readers of the Tattvasaṅgraha to achieve easy comprehension of tattva as a result of reading a full treatise, which they undertake due to doubt out of the initial statement, is higher than that for a crow being suddenly killed by a falling palm-fruit. According to Kamalaśīla, the risk of not attaining the desired purpose does not prevent people from reading because such fear equally occurs in activities based on certainty. Furthermore, there is no risk of attaining an undesired purpose from the treatise because authors are supposed to undertake action only for the sake of others. Therefore, doubt which arises from an abhyupāya can make people undertake action. (shrink)

This paper aims at examining the arguments between Śubhagupta (c.720–780) and Śāntarakṣita (c.725–788) over the Buddha’s cognition of other minds and shows how the question of the Buddha’s cognition of other mindsis incorporated into the proof of vijñaptimātratā or “consciousness-only” by Śāntarakṣita. According to Śāntarakṣita, Śubhagupta assumes that the Buddha’s cognition, which is characterized as “the cognition [of the Blessed One] which follows the path of cognition” (aupalambhikadarśana), grasps other minds when the Buddha’s cognition is similar (sārūpya) to other minds. (...) For Śāntarakṣita, the Buddha’s cognition cannot be aupalambhika. If the Buddha’s cognition were similar to the other minds, it would follow that the Buddha, whose cognition erroneously grasps other minds as something distinct from it, has not yet removed the hindrance constituted by objects of knowledge (jñeyāvaraṇa). But if it is accepted that the Buddha’s cognition is beyond the grasped-grasper duality, can the Buddha, who does not know other minds, be called sarvajña “omniscient”? According to Śāntarakṣita, even though the Buddha has no seeing (adarśana), the Buddha causes all sentient beings to gain benefits by virtue of seeing other minds and hence deserves to be called sarvajña. What underlies this argument is that the Buddha knows other minds without making a distinction between his own mind and other minds, which is possible only on the basis of self-cognition (ātmasaṃvedana). (shrink)

Having fascinated some of the greatest philosophers from the earliest times, dreaming figures importantly in the history of philosophy, as in Plato’s Theaetetus, Augustine’s Confessions, and, perhaps most famously, Descartes’s Mediations. By far the greatest philosophical focus on dreaming has been epistemic: Socrates suggests to Theaetetus that since he cannot tell whether he is dreaming, he cannot trust his senses to know contingent facts about the world around him. And a similar worry drives Descartes’s radical doubt in the First Meditation. (...) We might think that dream skepticism is, among the radical Cartesian skeptical scenarios, a particularly worrying one, since dreams, unlike evil demons, are a commonplace of everyday life. (shrink)

This paper examines the recent events following the bhikkhuni revival in Sri Lanka, and looks at the position of the Burmese Sangha, which has traditionally seen itself as the custodian of an ‘authentic’ Buddhist legacy, thrown into a debate by the action of a Burmese bhikkhuni who was recently ordained in Sri Lanka. It introduces the early initiatives of revivalist monks in Burma as well as the viewpoints of Burmese Sangha and the nuns in regard to the bhikkhuni issue. Since (...) most debate on the position of nuns take place without much reference to the local political contexts in which they stand, the state monastic organization in Burma is introduced to aid understanding of the framework in which the nuns operate today. At another level, the paper draws attention to the tension created between the international bhikkhunis who promote liberal ideologies of gender equality, individual rights and universalism into a faith based community, and local nuns who adhere to the traditional norms of religious duty, moral discipline and service to the community, and questions the ultimate aim in endorsing such secular ideals. (shrink)

In the present super-aging society, issues concerning what treatment should be given for incapacitated patients have become more important than ever before. This paper discusses whether or not an incapacitated patient’s refusal of treatment should be respected. The authors present a complete hypothetical scenario involving a 75-year-old moderately demented man suffering from malignant lymphoma. Of primary importance are the respect for patient dignity and the protection of human rights. Acts such as coercion, disregard, restriction, and surveillance can be unethical in (...) many situations. The effectiveness of chemotherapy for malignant lymphoma and its adverse outcomes could offset each other, leaving no net benefits for the patient. The patient is vulnerable and this very vulnerability requires the utmost protection and care. However, protection must be sensitive and comprehensive and the protection of his life at the expense of many other valuable factors is not justifiable. Coercing unwanted treatment would be intrusion, not protection, because of the physical and psychological suffering. When the refusal is explicit, consistent, and stable enough, it should to be viewed as true and current desire. Due to moderate dementia, the patient has lost his rational capacity, but his emotional capacity remains. If the remaining portion of his personality is rooted in his feelings, these feelings should be respected as much as possible. Those involved in the care of the patients who refuse treatment should not force them to undergo it simply on the grounds that it may be an established standard in their own country. What must be asked first is whether or not forced treatment would promote the patient’s subjective well-being. Additionally, treatment decisions should not be distorted due to the selfishness or discriminatory feelings of those involved in his care. In situations in which patients lack decisionmaking capacities, overriding the patients’ refusals of treatment should be regarded as an exception, rather than a standard course of action. Even in patients who are incapacitated, treatment refusal could stem from the feelings of the individual. Their subjective wellbeing would not be improved through close observation, restraint, denial, and coercion, the purpose of which they does not understand. (shrink)

This paper employs conversation analysis to examine the inter-connection between grammar and displays of contextual understanding, social identity, and social relationships as well as other activities clustering around turn-endings in Japanese talk-in-interaction, while undertaking a restricted comparison with the realisation of similar activities in English. A notable feature of turn-endings in Japanese is the particular salience of grammatical construction on the interactional activities they accomplish. Complete turns which are also syntactically complete are shown to be associated with the explicit display (...) of contextual features, whereas syntactically incomplete turns are designed to circumvent or minimise such displays. The explicit or implicit display of one's social and contextual relationship to the interactional environment is therefore seen to be an integral part of the performance of social actions in Japanese. On the other hand, in English, it is more difficult to establish a clear association between grammar and the inclusion or avoidance of contextual displays. (shrink)