Fodor and Lepore, in their recent book "Holism," maintain that if an inference from semantic anatomism to semantic holism is allowed, certain fairly deleterious consequences follow. In Section 1 Fodor and Lepore's terminology is construed and amended where necessary with the result that the aforementioned deleterious consequences are neither so apparent nor straightforward as they had suggested. In Section 2 their "Argument A" is considered in some detail. In Section 3 their "argument attributed to Quine" is examined at length and (...) a shorter and more perspicacious argument suggested which avoids their charge that the Quinean argument is guilty of an equivocation on the word 'statement'. (shrink)

My goal in this essay is to say something helpful about the philosophical foundations of deontic restraints, i.e., moral restraints on actions that are, roughly speaking, grounded in the wrongful character of the actions themselves and not merely in the disvalue of their results. An account of deontic restraints will be formulated and offered against the backdrop of three related, but broader, contrasts or puzzles within moral theory. The plausibility of this account of deontic restraints rests in part on how (...) well this account resolves the puzzles or illuminates the contrasts which make up this theoretical backdrop. (shrink)

1. Introduction This essay deals with the hard topic of the permissible killing of the innocent. The relevance of this topic to the morality of war is obvious. For even the most defensive and just wars, i.e., the most defensive and just responses to existing or imminent large-scale aggression, will inflict harm upon – in particular, cause the deaths of – innocent bystanders. 1 The most obvious and relevant example is that of innocent Soviet noncombatants who would be killed by (...) even the most precise defensive strike against Soviet strategic weapons or troop formations that is now possible. Should there be no vindication or, at least, no excuse for some killings of such innocent bystanders, morality would dictate that even defensive counterforce measures against largescale attacks should be renounced. (shrink)

Optimal protective responses to long-term risks depend on rational perceptions of ambiguous risks and uncertain time horizons. Our study examined the joint influence of uncertain delay and risk in an original sample of business owners and managers. We found that many subjects disliked uncertainty in the timing of an outcome, a reaction we term ``lottery timing risk aversion.'' Such aversion to uncertain timing was positively related to aversion to ambiguous probabilities for lotteries involving storm damage risks. This association suggests that (...) uncertainty may be processed similarly in both the risk and time dimensions. (shrink)

Problem-Based Learning has become an increasingly popular instructional method for a variety of disciplines at all levels. Many studies and meta-analyses of these studies have shown the efficacy of this method for developing knowledge and skills. I adopted this method for teaching Engineering Ethics at Carnegie Mellon University, which has as its main course objectives the development of moral reasoning skills, as well as collaboration and communication skills, with special attention given to ethical dilemmas that may arise in the normal (...) course of an engineer’s professional career. In the most recent iteration of the course, I used the Engineering and Science Issues Test as a pretest and posttest to test the development of my students’ moral reasoning skills over the course of the semester. Based on the results of these tests, I argue that the students in my Engineering Ethics course did in fact significantly develop their moral reasoning skills. (shrink)

Michael Mack joins a number of thinkers - including Louis Althusser, Gilles Deleuze, Antonio Negri, and Jonathan Israel - in the effort to locate Spinoza within an alternative current of modernity. Akin especially to Israel's portrait, Mack presents Spinoza as an enlightenment thinker who deepens and radicalises the major concepts associated with the modern age: equality, fraternity, and liberty. Distinguishing Mack's study from either Israel's sweeping history of ideas or the Marxist effort to produce an anomalous thread (...) in the history of philosophy is his alliance of Spinoza with Herder's philosophical anthropology, the literary productions of Goethe and Eliot, and the thought of Rosenzweig and Freud. Mack links these figures within a "spectral" constellation, not only because they together sketch an alternative to the dominant Kantian tradition, but also because they recognise and affirm the "undecidability" of the human condition. A spectre is between worlds, a disquieting figure of present absence, and thus blurs definitions, boundaries, and categories. Indebted significantly to feminist analyses of Spinoza (Gatens and Lloyd), Mack thematises Spinoza's influence on these thinkers primarily as a confounder of binary oppositions between mind/body, reason/passion, nature/culture, private/public, and self/other. The undecidability of frontiers and concepts that characterises this alter-tradition, according to Mack, yields a profound suspicion of hierarchies of any kind and a keen interest in narrative as "the constitutive fabric of politics, identity, society, religion, and the larger sphere of culture.". (shrink)

Arien Mack and Irvin Rock make the radical claim that there is no conscious perception of the visual world without attention to it.

The Ellsberg Paradox documented the aversion to ambiguity in the probability of winning a prize. Using an original sample of 266 business owners and managers facing risks from climate change, this paper documents the presence of departures from rationality in both directions. Both ambiguity-seeking behavior and ambiguity-averse behavior are evident. People exhibit ‘fear’ effects of ambiguity for small probabilities of suffering a loss and ‘hope’ effects for large probabilities. Estimates of the crossover point from ambiguity aversion (fear) to ambiguity seeking (...) (hope) place this value between 0.3 and 0.7 for the risk per decade lotteries considered, with empirical estimates indicating a crossover mean risk of about 0.5. Attitudes toward the degree of ambiguity also reverse at the crossover point. (shrink)

ObjectivesThe end of life is an ethically challenging time requiring complex decision-making. This study describes ethical frameworks among physician trainees, explores how these frameworks manifest and relates these frameworks to experiences delivering end-of-life care.DesignWe conducted semistructured in-depth exploratory qualitative interviews with physician trainees about experiences of end-of-life care and moral distress. We analysed the interviews using thematic analysis.SettingAcademic teaching hospitals in the United States and United Kingdom.ParticipantsWe interviewed 30 physician trainees. We purposefully sampled across three domains we expected to be (...) associated with individual ethics in order to elicit a diversity of ethical and experiential perspectives.ResultsSome trainees subscribed to a best interest ethical framework, characterised by offering recommendations consistent with the patient’s goals and values, presenting only medically appropriate choices and supporting shared decision-making between the patient/family and medical team. Others endorsed an autonomy framework, characterised by presenting all technologically feasible choices, refraining from offering recommendations and prioritising the voice of patient/family as the decision-maker.ConclusionsThis study describes how physician trainees conceptualise their roles as being rooted in an autonomy or best interest framework. Physician trainees have limited clinical experience and decision-making autonomy and may have ethical frameworks that are dynamic and potentially highly influenced by experiences providing end-of-life care. A better understanding of how individual physicians’ ethical frameworks influences the care they give provides opportunities to improve patient communication and advance the role of shared decision-making to ensure goal-aligned end-of-life care. (shrink)

In a multi-study naturalistic quasi-experiment involving 269 students in a semester-long introductory philosophy course, we investigated the effect of teaching argument diagramming on students’ scores on argument analysis tasks. An argument diagram is a visual representation of the content and structure of an argument. In each study, all of the students completed pre- and posttests containing argument analysis tasks. During the semester, the treatment group was taught AD, while the control group was not. The results were that among the different (...) pretest achievement levels, the scores of low-achieving students who were taught AD increased significantly more than the scores of low-achieving students who were not taught AD, while the scores of the intermediate- and high-achieving students did not differ significantly between the treatment and control groups. The implication of these studies is that learning AD significantly improves low-achieving students’ ability to analyze arguments. (shrink)

Maralee Harrell. The Improvement of Critical Thinking Skills in What Philosophy.

The dynamic nature of physics cannot be captured through an exclusive focus on the static mathematical formulations of physical theories. Instead, we can more fruitfully think of physics as a set of distinctively social, cognitive, and theoretical/methodological practices. An emphasis on practice has been one of the most notable aspects of the recent “naturalistic turn” in general philosophy of science, in no small part due to the arguments of many feminist philosophers of science. A major project of feminist philosophy of (...) physics has been to shine a critical light on the social and cognitive practices in physics, and how those ultimately influence other aspects of the science. Here we argue that traditional philosophy of physics has focused exclusively on the theoretical/methodological practices of physics, and that feminist philosophy of physics seeks to broaden the focus to include the social and cognitive practices as well. (shrink)

Learning to argue in a computer-mediated and structured fashion is investigated in this research. A study was conducted to compare dyads that were scripted in their computer-mediated collaboration with dyads that were not scripted. A process analysis of the chats of the dyads showed that the scripted experimental group used significantly more words, engaged in significantly more broadening and deepening of the discussion, and appeared to engage in more critical and objective argumentation than the non-scripted control group.

Erken modern Avrupa'nın seçkin bir tarihçisi olarak uzun kariyerine dayanan John Miles Headley, yakın zamanda bakışlarını Avrupa'nın daha geniş dünyadaki etkisine çevirdi. “Dünyanın Avrupalılaşması” adlı kitabında Headley, Avrupa değerlerinin - özellikle insan hakları ve demokrasinin - benzersizliği konusunda ısrarcı bir açıklama yapıyor ve bu değerlerin Avrupa'nın daha geniş dünyaya en değerli armağanları olduğunu savunuyor. Avrupa halklarının dikkate değer entelektüel ve kültürel başarılarını küçültmeye çalışmadan, bu sunum Avrupa ve daha geniş dünya arasındaki ilişkilere daha incelikli bir bakış açısı önerecektir. İnsan hakları (...) ve demokrasi, farklı zamanlarda farklı bağlamlarda farklı insanlar için farklı şeyler ifade eder ve aslında Avrupa dışındaki toplumlarda her ikisinin de sayısız ifadesi vardır. Dahası, Avrupalı insan hakları ve demokrasi teorisyenleri Avrupa'nın ötesindeki toplumlardan da etkilendiler. Bu bağlamda dünyanın Avrupalılaşmasının ikna edici bir fikir olması, ancak Avrupa'nın önceden küreselleşmesi sebebiyle mümkündür. (shrink)

The importance of teaching critical thinking skills at the college level cannot be overemphasized. Teaching a subcategory of these skills—argument analysis—we believe is especially important for first-year students with their college careers, as well as their lives, ahead of them. The struggle, however, is how to effectively teach argument analysis skills that will serve students in a broad range of disciplines.