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Displaying: 1-20 of 42 documents


1. The Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 115 > Issue: 12
David J. Chalmers

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Cartesian arguments for global skepticism about the external world start from the premise that we cannot know that we are not in a Cartesian scenario such as an evil-demon scenario, and infer that because most of our empirical beliefs are false in such a scenario, these beliefs do not constitute knowledge. Veridicalist responses to global skepticism respond that arguments fail because in Cartesian scenarios, many or most of our empirical beliefs are true. Some veridicalist responses (suggested by Bouswma, Putnam, and Davidson) have been motivated using verificationism, externalism, and coherentism. I argue that a more powerful veridicalist response to global skepticism can be motivated by structuralism, on which physical entities are understood as those that play a certain structural role. I develop the structuralist response and address objections.

2. The Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 115 > Issue: 12
Remco Heesen

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Recent philosophical work has praised the reward structure of science, while recent empirical work has shown that many scientific results may not be reproducible. I argue that the reward structure of science incentivizes scientists to focus on speed and impact at the expense of the reproducibility of their work, thus contributing to the so-called reproducibility crisis. I use a rational choice model to identify a set of sufficient conditions for this problem to arise, and I argue that these conditions plausibly apply to a wide range of research situations. Currently proposed solutions will not fully address this problem. Philosophical commentators should temper their optimism about the reward structure of science.

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3. The Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 115 > Issue: 12
Paul Teller

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4. The Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 115 > Issue: 12

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5. The Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 115 > Issue: 12

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6. The Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 115 > Issue: 11
Chandra Sripada

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There is an ongoing debate about loss of control in addiction: Some theorists say at least some addicts’ drug-directed desires are irresistible, while others insist that pursuing drugs is a choice. The debate is long-standing and has essentially reached a stalemate. This essay suggests a way forward. I propose an alternative model of loss of control in addiction, one based not on irresistibility, but rather fallibility. According to the model, on every occasion of use, self-control processes exhibit a low, but non-zero, rate of failure due to error. When these processes confront highly recurrent drug-directed desires, the cumulative probability of a self-control lapse steadily grows. The model shows why the following statement—which has an air of paradox—can in fact be true: Each drug-directed desire the addict faces is fully resistible, but the addict nonetheless has significantly diminished control over eventually giving in.

7. The Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 115 > Issue: 11
Johan E. Gustafsson

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John Rawls argues that the Difference Principle (also known as the Maximin Equity Criterion) would be chosen by parties trying to advance their individual interests behind the Veil of Ignorance. Behind this veil, the parties do not know who they are and they are unable to assign or estimate probabilities to their turning out to be any particular person in society. Much discussion of Rawls’s argument concerns whether he can plausibly rule out the parties’ having access to probabilities about who they are. Nevertheless, I argue that, even if the parties lacked access to probabilities about who they are in society, they would still reject the Difference Principle. I argue that there are cases where it is still clear to the parties that it is not in any of their individual interests that the Difference Principle is adopted.

8. The Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 115 > Issue: 11
Reuben Stern, Stephan Hartmann

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McGee (1985) argues that it is sometimes reasonable to accept both x and x → (y → z) without accepting y → z, and that modus ponens is therefore invalid for natural language indicative conditionals. Here, we examine McGee’s counterexamples from a Bayesian perspective. We argue that the joint acceptance of x and x → (y → z) does not generally imply synchronic constraints on the acceptability of y → z, but we use the distance-based approach to Bayesian learning to show that applications of modus ponens are nevertheless guaranteed to be successful in an important diachronic sense. Roughly, if an agent becomes convinced of the premises of a modus ponens argument, then she should likewise become convinced of the argument’s conclusion. Thus we take McGee’s counterexamples to disentangle and reveal two distinct ways in which arguments can convince. Any general theory of argumentation must take stock of both.

9. The Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 115 > Issue: 11

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10. The Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 115 > Issue: 11

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11. The Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 115 > Issue: 10
Paolo Santorio

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Natural language conditionals seem to be subject to three logical requirements: they invalidate Antecedent Strengthening, they validate so-called Simplification of Disjunctive Antecedents, and they allow for the replacement of logically equivalent clauses in antecedent position. Unfortunately, these requirements are jointly inconsistent. Conservative solutions to the puzzle drop Simplification, treating it as a pragmatic inference. I show that pragmatic accounts of Simplification fail, and develop a truthmaker semantics for conditionals that captures all the relevant data. Differently from existing truthmaker semantics, my semantics extends, rather than replaces, standard possible worlds semantics. The main innovation is the notion of a truthmaker in play: this notion is cognitive, rather than metaphysical, and can be defined in a purely syntactic way.

12. The Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 115 > Issue: 10
Michael Johnson

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The name theory has largely been discarded in the literature on quotation. In this paper, I resurrect the theory under the heading of the natural name theory. According to the natural name theory, a pure quotation is a natural, rather than an arbitrary, name of a linguistic item. As with other natural names, like onomatopoeia, pure quotations resemble their referents. I argue that this observation allows us to deflate the arguments traditionally thought to undermine the name theory. Then I argue for the “multiplicity thesis,” that pure quotations name a wide variety of linguistic items, such as expression types, graphemes, spellings, phonemes, pronunciations, meanings, and senses. Then I show that while the natural name theory easily accommodates the multiplicity thesis, none of the major, viable alternatives to it likewise do.

13. The Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 115 > Issue: 10

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14. The Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 115 > Issue: 9
Peter Koellner

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Gödel argued that his incompleteness theorems imply that either “the mind cannot be mechanized” or “there are absolutely undecidable sentences.” In the precursor to this paper I examined the early arguments for the first disjunct. In the present paper I examine the most sophisticated argument for the first disjunct, namely, Penrose’s new argument. It turns out that Penrose’s argument requires a type-free notion of truth and a type-free notion of absolute provability. I show that there is a natural such system, DTK. I prove a series of results which show that (1) Gödel’s disjunction is provable in the system, (2) Penrose’s argument is invalid in the system, (3) there can be no proof or refutation of either disjunct in the system, (4) the independence results are robust in that they persist when one strengthens the principles governing absolute provability, and (5) there are reasons to believe that the situation will not improve under any plausible alteration of the underlying theory of truth.

15. The Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 115 > Issue: 9
William Roche

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It is widely thought in philosophy and elsewhere that parsimony is a theoretical virtue in that if a theory T1 is more parsimonious than another theory T2, then T1 is preferable to T2, other things being equal. This thesis admits of many distinct precisifications. I focus on a relatively weak precisification on which preferability is a matter of probability, and argue that it is false. This is problematic for various alternative precisifications, and even for Inference to the Best Explanation as standardly understood.

16. The Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 115 > Issue: 9

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17. The Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 115 > Issue: 9

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18. The Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 115 > Issue: 8
Stephan Leuenberger

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Does the global supervenience of one class on another entail reductionism, in the sense that any property in the former class is definable from properties in the latter class? This question appears to be at the same time formally tractable and philosophically significant. It seems formally tractable because the concepts involved are susceptible to rigorous definition. It is philosophically significant because in a number of debates about inter-level relationships, there are prima facie plausible positions that presuppose that there is no such entailment: standard versions of non-reductive physicalism and of normative non-naturalism accept global supervenience while rejecting reductionism. I identify a gap in an influential argument for the entailment, due to Frank Jackson and Robert Stalnaker, and draw on the model theory of infinitary languages to argue that some globally supervening properties are not reducible.

19. The Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 115 > Issue: 8
Gabriel Uzquiano

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Groups are ubiquitous in our lives. But while some of them are highly structured and appear to support a shared intentionality and even a shared agency, others are much less cohesive and do not seem to demand much of their individual members. Queues, for example, seem to be, at a given time, nothing over and above some individuals as they exemplify a certain spatial arrangement. Indeed, the main aim of this paper is to develop the more general thought that at a given time, a group is nothing over and above some individual members as they exemplify a certain complex condition. The general conception of groups that emerges is able to accommodate a variety of constraints on a reasonable answer to the question of what are groups.

20. The Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 115 > Issue: 7
Peter Koellner

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In this paper I address the question of whether the incompleteness theorems imply that “the mind cannot be mechanized,” where this is understood in the specific sense that “the mathematical outputs of the idealized human mind do not coincide with the mathematical outputs of any idealized finite machine.” Gödel argued that his incompleteness theorems implied a weaker, disjunctive conclusion to the effect that either “the mind cannot be mechanized” or “mathematical truth outstrips the idealized human mind.” Others, most notably, Lucas and Penrose, have claimed more—they have claimed that the incompleteness theorems actually imply the first disjunct. I will show that by sharpening the fundamental concepts involved and articulating the background assumptions governing them, one can prove Gödel’s disjunction, one can show (by invoking results of Reinhardt and Carlson) that the arguments of Lucas and Penrose fail, and one can see what likely led proponents of the first disjunct astray.