Towards a More Expansive Moral Community

ABSTRACT I argue for a broader understanding of the morally considerable. I propose a neo-Aristotelian account of individuals wherein some entities, often precluded from those deserving of moral consideration, are deemed proper subjects of such treatment. The criterion suggested is, roughly, that of self-regulatory development, a teleological notion, that I argue should not be viewed as archaic and useless. Not only do many non-human animals then become legitimate subjects of moral concern, but objects outside the animal kingdom, such as plants and trees, also are to be included in our ethical arena.     

Indexicals and Reference‐Shifting: Towards a Pragmatic Approach

I propose a pragmatic approach to the kind of reference‐shifting occurring in indexicals as used in e.g. written notes and answering machine messages. I proceed in two steps. First, I prepare the ground by showing that the arguments against such a pragmatic approach raised in the recent literature fail. Second, I take a first few steps towards implementing this approach, by sketching a pragmatic theory of reference‐shifting, and showing how it can handle cases of the relevant kind. While the immediate scope of the paper is restricted to indexicals and reference‐shifting, and the discussion is confined to a specific range of theories and cases, the approach proposed is compatible with a fairly broad range of more or less semantically conservative theories, and many of the conclusions drawn are significant for the evaluation of pragmatic explanations in philosophy more generally. The overall goal is to offer a new perspective on the issues under discussion, and to prompt philosophers to reconsider some of the established methods by which pragmatic explanations are evaluated.     

Towards a More Plausible Exemplification Theory of Events

Among the most well-known accounts of events is Jaegwon Kim’s exemplification theory, which identifies each event with a property exemplification (often modeled as an “ordered triple” of an entity, property type, and time). Two of the most influential rival event theorists (Lawrence Lombard and Jonathan Bennett) have urged rejecting exemplificationism on the basis of the charge that it ultimately conflates events with facts [Lombard (1986): Events: A Metaphysical Study. Routledge & Kegan Paul; Bennett (1988):Events and their Names. Hackett Publishing Company]. In response, I offer a detailed examination of Lombard and Bennett’s arguments that exemplificationism undermines the event/fact distinction. I then develop and defend a modified version of Kim’s account that overcomes this objection, and so constitutes a more plausible exemplification theory of events.     

The Character of Temptation: Towards a More Plausible Kantian Moral Psychology

Kant maintained that dutiful action can have the fullest measure of moral worth even if chosen in the face of powerful inclinations to act immorally, and indeed that opposing inclinations only highlight the worth of the action. I argue that this conclusion rests on an implausibly mechanistic account of desires, and that many desires are constituted by tendencies to see certain features of one's circumstances as reasons to perform one or another action. I try to show that inclinations to violate moral requirements sometimes manifest a morally objectionable half-heartedness in one's commitment to those very requirements, and - by extension - to the values that undergird these requirements.     

Underestimating Youth's Commitment to Schools and Society: Toward a More Differentiated View

Many media reports contend that American youth are dangerous, self-possessed, and care too little about their personal education or the broader society. Not only are youth criticized, but their teachers and schools are subjected to exaggerated criticism. We argue that the average, undifferentiated view of youth as presented by the media is inaccurate and pejorative. Researchers have added to the chorus of unfounded negative assertions about youth and their schools. As an example, Laurence Steinberg, in Beyond the Classroom, argued that American students' levels of academic achievement were woefully inadequate. He argued that students did not do enough homework, that they cheated, and that pervasive, negative peer pressure undermined academic achievement. The purpose of our study was to examine students' attitudes and perceptions in three major areas – cheating, homework, and peer pressure. Using data from over 700 students drawn from one public high school and one junior high school, our results indicated that students' beliefs and norms concerning cheating, homework, and peer pressure varied widely in terms of gender, GPA, and school context. Our data failed to replicate the findings from Beyond in that (a) our average findings were more positive than those reported in that study, and (b) we showed that the reporting of average was highly misleading. Our findings provided evidence that one cannot describe American students in a general, sweeping way. Average statements about youth, especially adolescent youth, are apt to be very misleading.     

Testimony as Evidence: More Problems for Linear Pooling

This paper considers a special case of belief updating??when an agent learns testimonial data, or in other words, the beliefs of others on some issue. The interest in this case is twofold: (1) the linear averaging method for updating on testimony is somewhat popular in epistemology circles, and it is important to assess its normative acceptability, and (2) this facilitates a more general investigation of what it means/requires for an updating method to have a suitable Bayesian representation (taken here as the normative standard). The paper initially defends linear averaging against Bayesian-compatibility concerns raised by Bradley (Soc Choice Welf 29:609?C632, 2007), as well as problems associated with multiple testimony updates. The resolution of these issues, however, requires an extremely nuanced interpretation of the parameters of the linear averaging model??the so-called weights of respect. We go on to propose a role that the parameters of any ??shortcut?? updating function should play, by way of minimal interpretation of these parameters. The class of updating functions that is consistent with this role, however, excludes linear averaging, at least in its standard form.     

Individual Differences in Working Memory Capacity: More Evidence for a General Capacity Theory

The causes of the positive relationship between comprehension and measures of working memory capacity remain unclear. This study tests three hypotheses for the relationship by equating the difficulty, for 48 individual subjects, of processing demands in complex working memory tasks. Even with difficulty of processing equated, the relationship between number of words recalled in the working memory measure and comprehension remained high and significant. The results favour a general capacity view. We suggest that high working memory span subjects have more limited-capacity attentional resources available to them than low span subjects and that individual differences in working memory capacity will have implications for any task that requires controlled effortful processing.     

Pragmatic skills predict online counterfactual comprehension: Evidence from the N400

Counterfactual thought allows people to consider alternative worlds they know to be false. Communicating these thoughts through language poses a social-communicative challenge because listeners typically expect a speaker to produce true utterances, but counterfactuals per definition convey information that is false. Listeners must therefore incorporate overt linguistic cues (subjunctive mood, such as in If I loved you then) in a rapid way to infer the intended counterfactual meaning. The present EEG study focused on the comprehension of such counterfactual antecedents and investigated if pragmatic ability—the ability to apply knowledge of the social-communicative use of language in daily life—predicts the online generation of counterfactual worlds. This yielded two novel findings: (1) Words that are consistent with factual knowledge incur a semantic processing cost, as reflected in larger N400 amplitude, in counterfactual antecedents compared to hypothetical antecedents (If sweets were/are made of sugar). We take this to suggest that counterfactuality is quickly incorporated during language comprehension and reduces online expectations based on factual knowledge. (2) Individual scores on the Autism Quotient Communication subscale modulated this effect, suggesting that individuals who are better at understanding the communicative intentions of other people are more likely to reduce knowledge-based expectations in counterfactuals. These results are the first demonstration of the real-time pragmatic processes involved in creating possible worlds.     

Beyond Rape Myths: A More Complex View of Perceptions of Rape Victims

This research examined personal beliefs and perceptions of cultural stereotypes surrounding rape victims. Students (ages 18–21) at a primarily Caucasian University listed either their personal beliefs or their perceptions of cultural stereotypes surrounding rape victims and rated a specific rape victim either according to their personal beliefs or their perceptions of cultural stereotypes. Personal beliefs about rape victims tended to focus more on perceptions of victim reactions to the rape (e.g., depression, anxiety, etc.) rather than on rape myths (e.g., she asked for it, was promiscuous, etc.). Perceptions of cultural stereotypes, however, comprised rape myths rather than the victim's reactions to rape. We propose that perceptions of rape victims are more multifaceted than has previously been suggested.     

Peirce on Education: Nurturing the First Rule of Reason

Through an exegetic reading of Peirce’s minor texts on higher education, I find that Peirce’s conception of a “Liberal Education” is close to the Herbartian conception of Bildung. Peirce calls for a general education with the ambition of qualifying critical thinkers with the capacity to go beyond the strict rules and narrow borders of the artes liberales, – the different subject matters or sciences taught at a university. Thus, Peirce’s conception of a liberal education is closely linked to his interpretation of common sense – or sensis communis – as a critical commonsensism. To him, it is urgent to educate and nurture “the first rule of reason,” described as a will to learn, a curiosity, a dissatisfaction of what you already incline to think, and an intense desire to find things out. The nurturing of this “first rule of reason” is thus about educating an intellectual community of critical thinkers who are able to question authoritative beliefs, knowing how to debunk them, and how to turn away from obiter dictum.     

The Gym Membership Purchase Task: Early Evidence Towards Establishment of a Novel Hypothetical Purchase Task

The Psychological Record - Hypothetical purchase tasks are a widely used tool to determine the reinforcing value of commodities, especially commodities which are difficult to deliver...     

Pragmatic antirealism: a new antirealist strategy

In everyday speech we seem to refer to such things as abstract objects, moral properties, or propositional attitudes that have been the target of metaphysical and/or epistemological objections. Many philosophers, while endorsing scepticism about some of these entities, have not wished to charge ordinary speakers with fundamental error, or recommend that the discourse be revised or eliminated. To this end a number of non-revisionary antirealist strategies have been employed, including expressivism, reductionism and hermeneutic fictionalism. But each of these theories faces forceful objections. In particular, we argue, proponents of these strategies face a dilemma: either concedes that their theory is revisionary, or adopt an implausible account of speaker-meaning whereby the content of certain types of utterance is opaque to their speakers. In this paper we introduce a new type of antirealist strategy, which is thoroughly non-revisionary, and leaves speaker-meaning transparent to speakers. We draw on work on pragmatics in the philosophy of language to develop a theory we call ??pragmatic antirealism??. The pragmatic antirealist holds that while the sentences of the discourses in question have metaphysically contentious truth conditions, ordinary utterances of them are pragmatically modified in context in such a way that speakers do not incur commitment to those truth conditions. After setting out the theory, we show how it might be developed for both mathematical and ethical discourse, before responding to some likely objections.     

旧证据问题：一种动态的消解方案

旧证据问题是指贝叶斯确证理论在讨论旧证据确证新理论（假说）的问题上将出现不合理的结果,它的消解是贝叶斯确证理论辩护的一个非常重要的环节。本文倡导一种基于Levi理论的动态方案来消解这一问题。在这种方案下,知识汇集的动态性使得旧证据在新理论引入前后的置信概率可能是不相同的,在此基础上我们证明,经新理论扩充后而得到的知识汇集无论是一致扩充还是不一致扩充,均存在一个旧证据E,它对该新理论具有确证作用。