41 found
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  1. The Vacuity of Postmodernist Methodology.Nicholas Shackel - 2005 - Metaphilosophy 36 (3):295-320.
    Many of the philosophical doctrines purveyed by postmodernists have been roundly refuted, yet people continue to be taken in by the dishonest devices used in proselytizing for postmodernism. I exhibit, name, and analyse five favourite rhetorical manoeuvres: Troll's Truisms, Motte and Bailey Doctrines, Equivocating Fulcra, the Postmodernist Fox Trot, and Rankly Relativising Fields. Anyone familiar with postmodernist writing will recognise their pervasive hold on the dialectic of postmodernism and come to judge that dialectic as it ought to be judged.
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  2. The Neural Basis of Intuitive and Counterintuitive Moral Judgement.Guy Kahane, Katja Wiech, Nicholas Shackel, Miguel Farias, Julian Savulescu & Irene Tracey - 2011 - Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience 7 (4):393-402.
    Neuroimaging studies on moral decision-making have thus far largely focused on differences between moral judgments with opposing utilitarian (well-being maximizing) and deontological (duty-based) content. However, these studies have investigated moral dilemmas involving extreme situations, and did not control for two distinct dimensions of moral judgment: whether or not it is intuitive (immediately compelling to most people) and whether it is utilitarian or deontological in content. By contrasting dilemmas where utilitarian judgments are counterintuitive with dilemmas in which they are intuitive, we (...)
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  3. Methodological Issues in the Neuroscience of Moral Judgement.Guy Kahane & Nicholas Shackel - 2010 - Mind and Language 25 (5):561-582.
    Neuroscience and psychology have recently turned their attention to the study of the subpersonal underpinnings of moral judgment. In this article we critically examine an influential strand of research originating in Greene's neuroimaging studies of ‘utilitarian’ and ‘non-utilitarian’ moral judgement. We argue that given that the explananda of this research are specific personal-level states—moral judgments with certain propositional contents—its methodology has to be sensitive to criteria for ascribing states with such contents to subjects. We argue that current research has often (...)
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  4. Bertrand’s Paradox and the Principle of Indifference.Nicholas Shackel - 2007 - Philosophy of Science 74 (2):150-175.
    The principle of indifference is supposed to suffice for the rational assignation of probabilities to possibilities. Bertrand advances a probability problem, now known as his paradox, to which the principle is supposed to apply; yet, just because the problem is ill‐posed in a technical sense, applying it leads to a contradiction. Examining an ambiguity in the notion of an ill‐posed problem shows that there are precisely two strategies for resolving the paradox: the distinction strategy and the well‐posing strategy. The main (...)
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  5. Uncertainty Phobia and Epistemic Forbearance in a Pandemic.Nicholas Shackel - 2022 - In Anneli Jefferson, S. Orestis Palermos, Panos Paris & Jonathan Webber (eds.), Values and Virtues for a Challenging World. Cambridge University Press. pp. 271-291.
    In this chapter I show how challenges to our ability to tame the uncertainty of a pandemic leaves us vulnerable to uncertainty phobia. This is because not all the uncertainty that matters can be tamed by our knowledge of the relevant probabilities, contrary to what many believe. We are vulnerable because unrelievable wild uncertainty is a hard burden to bear, especially so when we must act in the face of it. -/- The source of unrelievable wild uncertainty is that the (...)
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  6. Do abnormal responses show utilitarian bias?Nicholas Shackel & Guy Kahane - 2008 - Nature 452:E5.
  7. Cold or calculating? Reduced activity in the subgenual cingulate cortex reflects decreased emotional aversion to harming in counterintuitive utilitarian judgment.Katja Wiech, Guy Kahane, Nicholas Shackel, Miguel Farias, Julian Savulescu & Irene Tracey - 2013 - Cognition 126 (3):364-372.
    Recent research on moral decision-making has suggested that many common moral judgments are based on immediate intuitions. However, some individuals arrive at highly counterintuitive utilitarian conclusions about when it is permissible to harm other individuals. Such utilitarian judgments have been attributed to effortful reasoning that has overcome our natural emotional aversion to harming others. Recent studies, however, suggest that such utilitarian judgments might also result from a decreased aversion to harming others, due to a deficit in empathic concern and social (...)
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  8. The form of the Benardete dichotomy.Nicholas Shackel - 2005 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 56 (2):397-417.
    Benardete presents a version of Zeno's dichotomy in which an infinite sequence of gods each intends to raise a barrier iff a traveller reaches the position where they intend to raise their barrier. In this paper, I demonstrate the abstract form of the Benardete Dichotomy. I show that the diagnosis based on that form can do philosophical work not done by earlier papers rejecting Priest's version of the Benardete Dichotomy, and that the diagnosis extends to a paradox not normally classified (...)
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  9. The two-envelope paradox.Michael Clark & Nicholas Shackel - 2000 - Mind 109 (435):415--442.
    Previous claims to have resolved the two-envelope paradox have been premature. The paradoxical argument has been exposed as manifestly fallacious if there is an upper limit to the amount of money that may be put in an envelope; but the paradoxical cases which can be described if this limitation is removed do not involve mathematical error, nor can they be explained away in terms of the strangeness of infinity. Only by taking account of the partial sums of the infinite series (...)
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  10. The Infinity from Nothing paradox and the Immovable Object meets the Irresistible Force.Nicholas Shackel - 2018 - European Journal for Philosophy of Science 8 (3):417-433.
    In this paper I present a novel supertask in a Newtonian universe that destroys and creates infinite masses and energies, showing thereby that we can have infinite indeterminism. Previous supertasks have managed only to destroy or create finite masses and energies, thereby giving cases of only finite indeterminism. In the Nothing from Infinity paradox we will see an infinitude of finite masses and an infinitude of energy disappear entirely, and do so despite the conservation of energy in all collisions. I (...)
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  11. The world as a graph: defending metaphysical graphical structuralism.Nicholas Shackel - 2011 - Analysis 71 (1):10-21.
    Metaphysical graphical structuralism is the view that at some fundamental level the world is a mathematical graph of nodes and edges. Randall Dipert has advanced a graphical structuralist theory of fundamental particulars and Alexander Bird has advanced a graphical structuralist theory of fundamental properties. David Oderberg has posed a powerful challenge to graphical structuralism: that it entails the absurd inexistence of the world or the absurd cessation of all change. In this paper I defend graphical structuralism. A sharper formulation, some (...)
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  12. An fMRI study measuring analgesia enhanced by religion as a belief system.Katja Wiech, Miguel Farias, Guy Kahane, Nicholas Shackel, Wiebke Tiede & Irene Tracey - unknown
    Although religious belief is often claimed to help with physical ailments including pain, it is unclear what psychological and neural mechanisms underlie the influence of religious belief on pain. By analogy to other top-down processes of pain modulation we hypothesized that religious belief helps believers reinterpret the emotional significance of pain, leading to emotional detachment from it. Recent findings on emotion regulation support a role for the right ventrolateral prefrontal cortex, a region also important for driving top-down pain inhibitory circuits. (...)
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  13. Still waiting for a plausible Humean theory of reasons.Nicholas Shackel - 2014 - Philosophical Studies 167 (3):607-633.
    In his important recent book Schroeder proposes a Humean theory of reasons that he calls hypotheticalism. His rigourous account of the weight of reasons is crucial to his theory, both as an element of the theory and constituting his defence to powerful standard objections to Humean theories of reasons. In this paper I examine that rigourous account and show it to face problems of vacuity and consonance. There are technical resources that may be brought to bear on the problem of (...)
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  14.  78
    Brentano’s Solution To Bertrand’s Paradox.Nicholas Shackel - 2024 - Revue Roumaine de Philosophie 68 (1):161-168.
    Brentano never published on Bertrand’s paradox but claimed to have a solution. Adrian Maître has recovered from the Franz Brentano Archive Brentano’s remarks on his solution. They do not give us a worked demonstration of his solution but only an incomplete and in places obscure justification of it. Here I attempt to identify his solution, to explain what seem to me the clearly discernible parts of his justification and to discuss the extent to which the justification succeeds in the light (...)
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  15. Bertrand's Paradox and the Maximum Entropy Principle.Nicholas Shackel & Darrell P. Rowbottom - 2019 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 101 (3):505-523.
    An important suggestion of objective Bayesians is that the maximum entropy principle can replace a principle which is known to get into paradoxical difficulties: the principle of indifference. No one has previously determined whether the maximum entropy principle is better able to solve Bertrand’s chord paradox than the principle of indifference. In this paper I show that it is not. Additionally, the course of the analysis brings to light a new paradox, a revenge paradox of the chords, that is unique (...)
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  16. Shutting dretske’s door.Nicholas Shackel - 2006 - Erkenntnis 64 (3):393-401.
    Dretske proposes a theory of knowledge in terms of a theory of information, but wishes to deny that empirical knowledge settles the large question of scepticism. This leads him to deny the closure of knowledge under known entailment. In a recent paper Jäger argues that Dretske's theory of information entails closure for knowledge, 'at least for the kind of propositions here at issue'. If Jäger is right, Dretske is seriously embarrassed and must give something up. In this paper I show (...)
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  17. Constructing a Moorean ‘Open Question’ Argument: The Real Thought Move and the Real Objective.Nicholas Shackel - 2021 - Grazer Philosophische Studien 98 (3):463-88.
    How Moore’s open question argument works, insofar as it does, remains a matter of controversy. My purpose here is to construct an open question argument based on a novel interpretation of how Moore’s argument might work. In order to sidestep exegetical questions, I do not claim here to be offering Moore’s own argument. Rather, I offer a reconstruction making use of important elements of Moore’s methodology and assumptions that could be reasonable within a Moorean viewpoint. The crucial role within the (...)
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  18. Enkrasia and the Fixed Point Thesis are equivalent.Nicholas Shackel - manuscript
    Enkrasia and the Fixed Point Thesis are equivalent.
     
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  19. Theoretical reason, modifiers and probability.Nicholas Shackel - manuscript
    Theoretical reason, modifiers and probability.
     
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  20. Wild uncertainty.Nicholas Shackel - manuscript
  21. Decision theory, symmetry and causal structure: Reply to Meacham and Weisberg.Michael Clark & Nicholas Shackel - 2003 - Mind 112 (448):691-701.
    1Department of Philosophy, University of Nottingham, University Park, Nottingham NG7 2RD, UK. [email protected] of Philosophy, University of Nottingham, University Park, Nottingham NG7 2RD, UK. [email protected].
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  22. A problem for the unity of normativity.Nicholas Shackel - 2014 - Analysis 74 (3):404-411.
    A prevalent assumption is that normativity is a unity. In this paper I argue against this assumption by demonstrating the problems it poses to a well known answer to a well known problem for taking rationality to be normative. John Broome's normative requirement relation does indeed avoid that problem, but insofar as the relation is supposed to offer a general characterisation of the normativity of rationality, it fails. It fails because it cannot capture an important aspect of the normativity of (...)
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  23. Scope or Focus? Normative Focus and the Metaphysics of Normative Relations.Nicholas Shackel - 2018 - Journal of Philosophy 115 (6):281-312.
    A prolonged debate about the nature of norms has been conducted in terms of the scope of a modal operator. Here I argue that the features of what I call Normative Focus are more fundamental than scope. We shall see limitations of scope contrasted with better analysis in terms of Normative Focus. Some authors address such limitations by extending what they mean by scope. I show that scope is still not doing the work: what does it is their elicitation of (...)
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  24. Paradoxes of Probability.Nicholas Shackel - 2008 - In Tamás Rudas (ed.), Handbook of Probability Theory with Applications. SAGE. pp. 49-66.
    We call something a paradox if it strikes us as peculiar in a certain way, if it strikes us as something that is not simply nonsense, and yet it poses some difficulty in seeing how it could make sense. When we examine paradoxes more closely, we find that for some the peculiarity is relieved and for others it intensifies. Some are peculiar because they jar with how we expect things to go, but the jarring is to do with imprecision and (...)
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  25.  65
    Bangu’s random thoughts on Bertrand’s paradox.Darrell Patrick Rowbottom & Nicholas Shackel - 2010 - Analysis 70 (4):689-692.
    Bangu (2010) claims that Bertrand’s paradox rests on a hitherto unrecog nized assumption, which assumption is sufficiently dubious to throw the burden of proof back onto ‘objectors to [the principle of indifference]’ (2010: 31). We show that Bangu’s objection to the assumption is ill-founded and that the assumption is provably true.
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  26. The normativity of rationality.Nicholas Shackel - 2015 - Teorema: International Journal of Philosophy 34 (2):167-189.
    Rationality appears to have some intimate relation with normativity: exactly what relation is in dispute. John Broome devotes a chapter of his recent book to rebutting the view that rationality has 'true' normativity, which he equates with the kind of normativity that I call directivity. In particular, he offers a number of arguments against derivative accounts of thenormativity of rationality. In this paper I defend my instrumentalist account from those arguments. In so doing I bring into view the grounds of (...)
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  27. The Nothing from Infinity paradox versus Plenitudinous Indeterminism.Nicholas Shackel - 2022 - European Journal for Philosophy of Science 12 (online early):1-14.
    The Nothing from Infinity paradox arises when the combination of two infinitudes of point particles meet in a supertask and disappear. Corral-Villate claims that my arguments for disappearance fail and concedes that this failure also produces an extreme kind of indeterminism, which I have called plenitudinous. So my supertask at least poses a dilemma of extreme indeterminism within Newtonian point particle mechanics. Plenitudinous indeterminism might be trivial, although easy attempts to prove it so seem to fail in the face of (...)
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  28. Sophism and Pragmatism.Nicholas Shackel - 2010 - Logique Et Analyse 53 (210):131-149.
    A traditional pastime of philosophers is the analysis of rhetoric and the repudiation of sophistry. Nevertheless, some of what philosophers call sophistry might rather be a subtle repudiation of the traditional principles of rationality. In this paper I start by granting the Sophist his repudiation and outline some of the obstacles to settling the dispute between Sophists and Rationalists. I then suggest that we should distinguish pragmatic Sophism from nihilistic Sophism. In the hope of driving a wedge between these two (...)
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  29. Pseudoscience and Idiosyncratic Theories of Rational Belief.Nicholas Shackel - 2013 - In Massimo Pigliucci & Maarten Boudry (eds.), Philosophy of Pseudoscience: Reconsidering the Demarcation Problem. University of Chicago Press. pp. 417-438.
    I take pseudoscience to be a pretence at science. Pretences are innumerable, limited only by our imagination and credulity. As Stove points out, ‘numerology is actually quite as different from astrology as astrology is from astronomy’ (Stove 1991, 187). We are sure that ‘something has gone appallingly wrong’ (Stove 1991, 180) and yet ‘thoughts…can go wrong in a multiplicity of ways, none of which anyone yet understands’ (Stove 1991, 190). Often all we can do is give a careful description of (...)
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  30. Coherentism and the symmetry of epistemic support.Nicholas Shackel - 2008 - Analysis 68 (299):226-234.
    In this paper I prove that holistic coherentism is logically equivalent to the conjunction of symmetry and quasi-transitivity of epistemic support and a condition on justified beliefs. On the way I defend Tom Stoneham from a criticism made by Darrell Rowbottom and prove a premiss of Stoneham’s argument to be an entailment of coherentism.
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  31. The scientific study of belief and pain modulation: conceptual problems.Miguel Farias, Guy Kahane & Nicholas Shackel - 2016 - In F. P. Mario, M. F. P. Peres, G. Lucchetti & R. F. Damiano (eds.), Spirituality, Religion and Health: From Research to Clinical Practice. Springer.
    We examine conceptual and methodological problems that arise in the course of the scientific study of possible influences of religious belief on the experience of physical pain. We start by attempting to identify a notion of religious belief that might enter into interesting psychological generalizations involving both religious belief and pain. We argue that it may be useful to think of religious belief as a complex dispositional property that relates believers to a sufficiently thick belief system that encompasses both cognitive (...)
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  32. A simple theory containing its own truth predicate.Nicholas Shackel - 2018 - South American Journal of Logic 4 (1):121-131.
    Tarski's indefinability theorem shows us that truth is not definable in arithmetic. The requirement to define truth for a language in a stronger language (if contradiction is to be avoided) lapses for particularly weak languages. A weaker language, however, is not necessary for that lapse. It also lapses for an adequately weak theory. It turns out that the set of G{\"o}del numbers of sentences true in arithmetic modulo $n$ is definable in arithmetic modulo $n$.
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  33. The Nought Belief Paradox.Nicholas Shackel - 2014 - Erkenntnis 79 (3):523-529.
    A paradox is presented that the poses new problems for both the truth norm and the knowledge norm of belief.
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  34. The Dr. Psycho Paradox and Newcomb’s Problem.Michael Clark & Nicholas Shackel - 2006 - Erkenntnis 64 (1):85 - 100.
    Nicholas Rescher claims that rational decision theory “may leave us in the lurch”, because there are two apparently acceptable ways of applying “the standard machinery of expected-value analysis” to his Dr. Psycho paradox which recommend contradictory actions. He detects a similar contradiction in Newcomb’s problem. We consider his claims from the point of view of both Bayesian decision theory and causal decision theory. In Dr. Psycho and in Newcomb’s Problem, Rescher has used premisses about probabilities which he assumes to be (...)
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  35. Parting smoothly?Nicholas Shackel - 2007 - Analysis 67 (4):321–324.
    In ‘How to part ways smoothly’ Hud Hudson (2007) presents ‘two temporally-continuous spatially unextended material objects that ... share all of their temporal parts up until their very last time-slice’ (2007: 156). They share their location throughout all but the last instant of their lives, at which instant they are a metre apart. Hudson claims that they part smoothly. I shall show that they don’t.
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  36. The fragility of freedom of speech.Nicholas Shackel - 2013 - Journal of Medical Ethics 39 (5):316-316.
    Freedom of speech is a fundamental liberty that imposes a stringent duty of tolerance. Tolerance is limited by direct incitements to violence. False notions and bad laws on speech have obscured our view of this freedom. Hence, perhaps, the self-righteous intolerance, incitements and threats in response to Giubilini and Minerva. Those who disagree have the right to argue back but their attempts to shut us up are morally wrong.
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    Explaining Variation in Knowledge by Full Belief.Nicholas Shackel - 2007 - In Christoph Jäger & Winfried Löffler (eds.), Epistemology: Contexts, Values, Disagreement. Papers of the 34th International Ludwig Wittgenstein-Symposium in Kirchberg, 2011. The Austrian Ludwig Wittgenstein Society. pp. 95-102.
  38. Bertrand’s Paradox and the Principle of Indifference.Nicholas Shackel - 2024 - Abingdon: Routledge.
    Events between which we have no epistemic reason to discriminate have equal epistemic probabilities. Bertrand’s chord paradox, however, appears to show this to be false, and thereby poses a general threat to probabilities for continuum sized state spaces. Articulating the nature of such spaces involves some deep mathematics and that is perhaps why the recent literature on Bertrand’s Paradox has been almost entirely from mathematicians and physicists, who have often deployed elegant mathematics of considerable sophistication. At the same time, the (...)
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  39. Freedom of Speech.Nicholas Shackel - 2015 - In Henk ten Have (ed.), Encyclopedia of Global Bioethics. Dordrecht: Springer.
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  40.  35
    Two Rhetorical Manoeuvres.Nicholas Shackel - 2003 - Proceedings of the Ontario Society for the Study of Argumentation Conference 5.
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    GILLIES, D.-Philosophical Theories of Probability. [REVIEW]Nicholas Shackel - 2003 - Philosophical Books 44 (1):92-94.