1. 32111.547416
    A common objection to Sosa’s epistemology is that it countenances, in an objectionable way, unsafe knowledge. This objection, under closer inspection, turns out to be in far worse shape than Sosa’s critics have realised. Sosa and his defenders have offered two central response types to the idea that allowing unsafe knowledge is problematic: one response type adverts to the animal/reflective knowledge distinction that is characteristic of bi-level virtue epistemology. The other less-discussed response type appeals to the threat of dream scepticism, and in particular, to the idea that many of our everyday perceptual beliefs are unsafe through the nearness of the dream possibility. The latter dreaming response to the safety objection to Sosa’s virtue epistemology has largely flown under the radar in contemporary discussions of safety and knowledge. We think that, suitably articulated in view of research in the philosophy and science of dreaming, it has much more going for it than has been appreciated. This paper further develops, beyond what Sosa does himself, the dreaming argument in response to those who think safety (as traditionally understood) is a condition on knowledge and who object to Sosa’s account on the grounds that it fails this condition. The payoffs of further developing this argument will be not only a better understanding of the importance of insights about dreaming against safety as a condition on knowledge, but also some reason to think a weaker safety condition, one that is relativised to SSS (i.e., skill/shape/situation) conditions for competence exercise, gets better results all things considered as an anti-luck codicil on knowledge.
    Found 8 hours, 55 minutes ago on PhilPapers
  2. 41260.547663
    A large majority of American college students — almost three-quarters — go to public schools. For four-year colleges, it’s about two-thirds. Yet strangely, these “public” schools aren’t equally open to the entire public. …
    Found 11 hours, 27 minutes ago on Bet On It
  3. 84064.547685
    In my last post, I sketched some first remarks I would have made had I been able to travel to London to fulfill my invitation to speak at a Royal Statistical Society conference, March 4 and 5, 2024, on “the promises and pitfalls of preregistration.” This is a continuation. …
    Found 23 hours, 21 minutes ago on D. G. Mayo's blog
  4. 147563.547703
    Stewart, Todd M. "When Is a Belief Formed in an Epistemically Circular Way?" Grazer Philosophische Studien 100, 3 (2023): 336-353. https://doi.org/10.1163/18756735-00000192 been accepted for inclusion in Faculty Publications - Philosophy by an authorized administrator of ISU ReD: Research and eData. For more information, please contact ISUReD@ilstu.edu.
    Found 1 day, 16 hours ago on PhilPapers
  5. 208183.547729
    Randomized Controlled Trials: Could you be any more scientific? The book I’m now writing, Unbeatable: The Brutally Honest Case for Free Markets, insists that the randomistas of the economics profession actually have a thinly-veiled political agenda. …
    Found 2 days, 9 hours ago on Bet On It
  6. 208242.547744
    This paper investigates the connection between temporal attitudes (attitudes characterised by a concern (or lack thereof) about future and past events), beliefs about temporal ontology (beliefs about the existence of future and past events) and temporal preferences (preferences regarding where in time events are located). Our aim is to probe the connection between these preferences, attitudes, and beliefs, in order to better evaluate the normative status of these preferences. We investigate the hypothesis that there is a three-way association between (a) being present-biased (that is, preferring that positive events are located in the present, and negative events are located in the non-present), (b) believing that past and future events do not exist and (c) tending to have present-focused rather than non-present-focused temporal attitudes. We find no such association. This suggests that insofar as temporal preferences and temporal attitudes are connected to the ways we represent time, they are not connected to the ways we represent temporal ontology; rather, they are more likely connected to the ways we represent relative movement in, or of, time. This has important consequences for, first, explaining why we exhibit these preferences and, second, for their normative evaluation.
    Found 2 days, 9 hours ago on Natalja Deng's site
  7. 208532.547766
    I am very grateful to Sebastian Gäb, Eva Schmidt and Michael Scott for their generous and thoughtful comments on my paper. While there are some significant differences of opinion, it was gratifying to find some points of agreement. In particular, each of them accepts that there is something to what I am calling the ‘puzzle’: the apparent failure, in paradigm cases of religious belief, to integrate one’s beliefs, and a common lack of concern with this among believers. Does the failure to integrate what one says and does show that we need to treat what are commonly called beliefs as different psychological phenomena? I do not pretend that this is a new question, or that I have a fully worked out answer, but I am happy that each of my commentators treats the question as a serious one. However, each contributor has criticisms of my proposals in the paper, and here I try to address them briefly.
    Found 2 days, 9 hours ago on Tim Crane's site
  8. 209980.547788
    It is a commonplace view in contemporary philosophy that commonsense psychology consists in explaining people’s behaviour in terms of their beliefs and desires. Familiar examples typically involve people going to the kitchen and getting something from the fridge, because they desired water (Zalabardo 2019), beer (Kriegel 2019, Smithies and Weiss 2019), wine (Crane 2003:186), yellow mango (Schroeder 2020) or something to eat (Fiebich and Michael 2015), and they believed that it was in the fridge.
    Found 2 days, 10 hours ago on Tim Crane's site
  9. 262983.547806
    According to MODERATISM, perceptual justification requires that one independently takes for granted propositional hinges like <There is an external world>, <I am not a brain in a vat (BIV)>, and so on. This view faces the truth problem: to offer an account of truth for hinges that is not threatened by skepticism. Annalisa Coliva has tried to solve the truth problem by combining the claim that external world propositions have a substantive truth property like correspondence with the claim that hinges have a deflationary truth property. I argue that the resulting view cannot offer a coherent characterization of ‘skeptical switch scenarios’ while providing an effective anti-skeptical strategy. In a more positive vein, I defend an approach that combines a correspondence conception of truth with epistemological disjunctivism. KEYWORDS. Epistemic justification; hinge epistemology; alethic pluralism; epistemological disjunctivism; skepticism.
    Found 3 days, 1 hour ago on PhilPapers
  10. 308468.54782
    (See all posts in this series here.) I conclude with Chapters 6 and 7 of the book, which apply the theory to reasoning and introspecting consciousness. Investigating these as forms of attending, mental actions, illuminates. …
    Found 3 days, 13 hours ago on The Brains Blog
  11. 378485.547843
    In metaethics, evolutionary debunking arguments combine empirical and epistemological premises to purportedly show that our moral judgments are unjustified. One objection to these arguments has been to distinguish between those judgments that evolutionary influence might undermine versus those that it does not. This response is powerful but not well understood. In this paper I flesh out the response by drawing upon a familiar distinction in the natural sciences, where it is common to distinguish folk judgments from theoretical judgments. I argue that this in turn illuminates the proper scope of the evolutionary debunking argument, but not in an obvious way: it is a very specific type of undermining argument that targets those theories where theoretical judgments are inferred merely from folk judgments. One upshot of this conclusion is that it reveals a verboten methodology in metaethics. The evolutionary debunking argument is therefore much less powerful than its proponents have supposed, but it nevertheless rules out what is perhaps a common way of attempting to justify moral judgments.
    Found 4 days, 9 hours ago on PhilPapers
  12. 383476.547857
    According to pragmatic encroachment, whether an epistemic attitude towards p has some positive epistemic status (e.g., whether a belief is epistemically rational or justified, or it amounts to knowledge) partially depends on practical factors such as the costs of being wrong or the practical goals of the agent. Depending on such factors, a belief may count as justified or as knowledge in some circumstances but not in others. Pragmatic encroachment is typically contrasted with purism, according to which the epistemic status of an individual depends exclusively on truth-relevant factors, such as the quantity and quality of evidence or the reliability of belief-forming methods. Pragmatic encroachment comes in many varieties. This survey article provides an overview of different kinds of pragmatic encroachment (hereafter, PE). It focuses on three dimensions under which kinds of PE differ: the type of epistemic status affected by practical factors (§1), the type of practical factors affecting the epistemic status (§2), and the type of normative considerations encroaching on the epistemic status (§3).
    Found 4 days, 10 hours ago on Jie Gao's site
  13. 383524.547872
    For much of the twentieth century, most epistemologists held views according to which the epistemic realm is independent of the practical realm, and epistemic concepts are independent from practical ones. This ‘purist’ orthodoxy has been challenged since the beginning of the twenty-first century. According to pragmatic encroachment, whether an epistemic attitude towards p has some positive epistemic status (e.g., whether a belief is epistemically rational or justified, or it amounts to knowledge) partially depends on practical factors such as the costs of being wrong or the practical goals of the subject. Depending on such factors, a belief may count as justified or as knowledge in some circumstances but not in others. Among the many varieties of pragmatic encroachment, encroachment on knowledge is one of the most important and controversial.
    Found 4 days, 10 hours ago on Jie Gao's site
  14. 387341.54789
    (See all posts in this series here.) Philosophers have been debating implicit biases for some time. In Chapter 5 of MoM, I argue that automatic attention provides a scrutable type of implicit bias, scrutable because we understand well automatic attention across various domains and the automatic biases that engender it. …
    Found 4 days, 11 hours ago on The Brains Blog
  15. 421656.547908
    Analytic debates about truth are wide-ranging, but certain key themes tend to crop up time and again. The three themes that we will examine in this paper are (i) the nature and behaviour of the ordinary concept of truth, (ii) the meaning of discourse about truth, and (iii) the nature of the property truth. We will start by offering a brief overview of the debates centring on these themes. We will then argue that cross-linguistic experimental philosophy has an indispensable yet underappreciated role to play in all of these debates. Recognising the indispensability of cross-linguistic experimental philosophy should compel philosophers to significantly revise the ways in which they inquire about truth. It should also prompt analytic philosophers more generally to consider whether similar revisions might be necessary elsewhere in the field.
    Found 4 days, 21 hours ago on Jeremy Wyatt's site
  16. 436194.547924
    : We argue that S is in a position to know that p iff S can know that p. Thus, what makes position-to-know-ascriptions true is just a special case of what makes ability-ascriptions true: compossibility. The novelty of our compossibility theory of epistemic modality lies in its subsuming epistemic modality under agentive modality, the modality characterizing what agents can do.
    Found 5 days, 1 hour ago on PhilPapers
  17. 444611.547938
    Many important debates in contemporary ethics centre on idealized thought experiments in which agents are assumed to have perfect information about the effects of their actions and other morally relevant features of the choices they face. If Abe turns the trolley, one person will certainly be killed; if he does not, five people will certainly be killed (Foot 1967); how the one and the five got into that situation, whether blamelessly or recklessly (Thomson 1976: 210–11), is also a matter of certainty. If Betty conceives a child now, it will certainly have a life that is hard but worth living, while if she waits, her child’s life will certainly be better—and the two choices will certainly result in different children being born (Parfit 1984: 358).
    Found 5 days, 3 hours ago on Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
  18. 466418.547952
    Here’s a fun variant of the black-and-white Mary thought experiment. Mary has been brought up in a black-and-white environment, but knows all the microphysics of the universe from a big book. One day she sees a flash of green light. …
    Found 5 days, 9 hours ago on Alexander Pruss's Blog
  19. 501806.547968
    I propose a revision of Cantor’s account of set size that understands comparisons of set size fundamentally in terms of surjections rather than injections. This revised account is equivalent to Cantor’s account if the Axiom of Choice is true, but its consequences differ from those of Cantor’s if the Axiom of Choice is false. I argue that the revised account is an intuitive generalization of Cantor’s account, blocks paradoxes—most notably, that a set can be partitioned into a set that is bigger than it—that can arise from Cantor’s account if the Axiom of Choice is false, illuminates the debate over whether the Axiom of Choice is true, is a mathematically fruitful alternative to Cantor’s account, and sheds philosophical light on one of the oldest unsolved problems in set theory.
    Found 5 days, 19 hours ago on PhilSci Archive
  20. 553886.547983
    It’s no secret that I like (something close enough to) utilitarianism as a moral theory. But there’s one area where I think the utilitarian tradition really falls short, which is that it tends not to acknowledge the full range of normative concepts. …
    Found 6 days, 9 hours ago on Good Thoughts
  21. 557076.548
    I recently stumbled upon Wikipedia’s article on the “Model minority myth.” Which instantly raises the question: “What precisely is mythical about this ‘myth’?” The article’s bias is so astounding that I shall critique it line-by-line. …
    Found 6 days, 10 hours ago on Bet On It
  22. 800368.548015
    According to a traditional interpretation of Kierkegaard, he endorses a strong form of direct doxastic voluntarism on which we can, by brute force of will, make a “leap of faith” to believe propositions that we ourselves take to be improbable and absurd. Yet most leading Kierkegaard scholars now wholly reject this reading, instead interpreting Kierkegaard as holding that the will can affect what we believe only indirectly. This paper argues that Kierkegaard does in fact endorse a restricted, sophisticated, and plausible version of direct doxastic voluntarism. On Kierkegaard’s view, when we take ourselves to be in an epistemically permissive situation, we have the ability to form outright beliefs (but not credences) at will in virtue of our ability to voluntarily 1) open or close inquiry and 2) determine our attitude towards epistemic risk.
    Found 1 week, 2 days ago on PhilPapers
  23. 800410.548023
    This is widely agreed: liberalism, and by extension, the social and political order we call “liberal democracy,” are in crisis. The sources of this crisis are many, some essentially exogenous and others more endogenously tied to liberal thought and the way liberal democracies actually work. …
    Found 1 week, 2 days ago on The Archimedean Point
  24. 834044.548029
    When does power dominate? This discussion explores whether a version of James Bohman’s status-centric view of domination (Bohman 2012) can provide a promising general answer to this question. Roughly, on this view, power dominates where it harmfully denies statuses that power should not deny. I shall suggest that, properly understood, the view meets various desiderata that a general view of the conditions of domination should meet. En route, I critically engage prominent arbitrary power views of (non)domination and explore the impact of domination in epistemic and discursive status in public justification. Before I say more on the aims of this discussion, I provide some needed context.
    Found 1 week, 2 days ago on PhilPapers
  25. 891779.548035
    Researchers have argued that believing in conspiracy theories is dangerous and harmful, both for the individual and the community. In the philosophical debate, the divide is between the generalists, who argue that conspiracy theories are prima facie problematic, and the particularists, who argue that since conspiracies do occur, we ought to take conspiracy theories seriously, and consider them on merit. Much of the empirical research has focused on correlations between conspiracy belief and personality traits, such as narcissism, illusory pattern perception, and paranoia, in the spirit of a generalist account. However, there is also ample empirical evidence that conspiracy belief is widespread in the population at large, which would be surprising and in need of explanation if the generalists were correct. In sociology and political science studies have demonstrated the role of group motivation and social aspects of belief in conspiracies. There is currently lacking a unified account of what motivates conspiracy belief that can capture the different intuitions, if possible, in one framework.
    Found 1 week, 3 days ago on PhilPapers
  26. 905588.548041
    According to Phenomenal Conservatism (PC), if a subject S has an appearance that P, in the absence of defeaters, S has justification for believing P by virtue of her appearance’s inherent justifying power. McCain and Moretti (2021) have argued that PC is affected by the problem of reflective awareness: if a subject S becomes reflectively aware of an appearance, the appearance loses its inherent justifying power. This limits the explanatory power of PC and reduces its anti-sceptical bite. This article provides a novel argument to the same conclusion and contends that it does not apply to Phenomenal Explanationism, the appearance-based account of justification alternative to PC defended by McCain and Moretti (2021).
    Found 1 week, 3 days ago on Kevin McCain's site
  27. 949690.548047
    We provide a general argument against value incomparability, based on a new style of impossibility result. In particular, we show that, against plausible background assumptions, value incomparability creates an incompatibility between two very plausible principles for ranking lotteries: a weak “negative dominance” principle (to the effect that Lottery 1 can be better than Lottery 2 only if some possible outcome of Lottery 1 is better than some possible outcome of Lottery 2) and a weak form of ex ante Pareto (to the effect that, if Lottery 1 gives an unambiguously better prospect to some individuals than Lottery 2, and equally good prospects to everyone else, then Lottery 1 is better than Lottery 2). After spelling out our results, and the arguments based on them, we consider which principle the proponent of incomparability ought to reject.
    Found 1 week, 3 days ago on PhilPapers
  28. 1007389.548053
    More philosophical effort is spent articulating evolutionary rationales for the development of belief-like capacities than for precursors of desires or preferences. Nobody, though, seriously expects naturally evolved minds to be disinterested epistemologists. We agree that world-representing states won’t pay their way without supporting capacities that prioritise from an organism’s available repertoire of activities in light of stored (and occurrent) information. Some concede that desire-like states would be one way of solving this problem. Taking preferences as my starting point instead of belief-like states, I defend two conclusions. First, psychologically real preference states, which approximately token expected utilities, have a quite general evolutionary rationale. They are a solution to the problem of efficiently allocating capacities with incompatible uses. This argument is a version of the Environmental Complexity Thesis. Second, preferences can plausibly function and naturally evolve without belief-like states, even though the converse claim is incredible. Preferences, that is, can mediate between discriminations of occurrent states (‘internal’ or ‘external’) and the processes selecting activity without mediation by stored indicative representations. By tokening expected utilities of actions conditional on discriminated state, they can increase the rate at which the ‘right thing’ is done at appropriate times, and they can do this without the support of belief-like, world-representing states.
    Found 1 week, 4 days ago on PhilPapers
  29. 1032861.548059
    I had been invited to speak at a Royal Statistical Society meeting, held March 4 and 5, 2024, on “the promises and pitfalls of preregistration”—a topic in which I’m keenly interested. The meeting was organized by Dr Tom Hardwicke, Professor Marcus Munafò, Dr Sophia Crüwell, Professor Dorothy Bishop FRS FMedSci, and Professor Eric-Jan Wagenmakers. …
    Found 1 week, 4 days ago on D. G. Mayo's blog
  30. 1065130.548066
    We may succeed in the fulfilment of our desires but still fail to properly own our practical life, perhaps because we acted as addicts, driven by desires that are alien to our will, or as “wantons,” satisfying the desires that we simply happen to have (Frankfurt, 1988). May we equally fail to own the outcomes of our epistemic life? If so, how may we attain epistemic ownership over it? This paper explores the structural parallelism between practical and epistemic rationality, building on Williamson’s (2002) suggestion that we should commence with successful performances as the foundation for both domains, be it action or knowledge. By highlighting the limitations of higher-order regulative approaches in epistemology, exemplified by Sosa (2007, 2011, 2015, 2021), the paper introduces a form of teleological epistemic constitutivism inspired by Velleman (2000, 2009). The proposal is that epistemic ownership is not attained in the mere pursuit of truth or knowledge, but requires furthermore a struggle to understand what we know. Keywords Ownership, practical rationality, epistemic rationality, knowledge-first, virtue epistemology, wanton, understanding, constitutivism.
    Found 1 week, 5 days ago on PhilPapers