The Epistemological Role of Episodic Recollection

In what respects is episodic recollection active, and subject to the will, like perceptual imagination, and in what respects is it passive, like perception, and how do these matters relate to its epistemological role? I present an account of the ontology of episodic recollection that provides answers to these questions. According the account I recommend, an act of episodic recollection is not subject to epistemic evaluation—it is neither justified nor unjustified—but it can provide one with a distinctive source of warrant for judgements about the past when it is accompanied by knowledge that one is recollecting, as well as knowledge of what one is recollecting. While the account concedes that when one recollects one’s attitude to what is recollected cannot be one of observation, it nevertheless accommodates the notion that episodic recollection involves a form of mental time‐travel—a case of re‐visiting, or re‐acquaintance with, some past episode.     

FREEDOM OF THE HEART

Philosophical accounts of freedom typically fail to capture an important kind of freedom—freedom to change what one cares about—that is central to our understanding of what it is to be a person. This paper articulates this kind of freedom more clearly, distinguishing it from freedom of action and freedom of the will, and gives an account of how it is possible. Central to this account is an understanding of the role of emotions in determining what we value, thus motivating a rethinking of the importance of emotions in the mental lives of persons.     

Psychopaths and blame: The argument from content

The recent debate over the moral responsibility of psychopaths has centered on whether, or in what sense, they understand moral requirements. In this paper, I argue that even if they do understand what morality requires, the content of their actions is not of the right kind to justify full-blown blame. I advance two independent justifications of this claim. First, I argue that if the psychopath comes to know what morality requires via a route that does not involve a proper appreciation of what it means to cause another harm or distress, the content of violations of rules against harm will be of a lower grade than the content of similar actions by normal individuals. Second, I argue that in order to intend a harm to a person—that is, to intend the distinctive kind of harm that can only befall a person—it is necessary to understand what personhood is and what makes it valuable. The psychopath's deficits with regard to mental time travel ensure that s/he cannot intend this kind of harm.     

Can a Young Person Write His Own Obituary?

ABSTRACT: A definition of an obituary—what it is and what it is not—is given. The criteria for a New York Times obituary are reported. From a sample of over 100 obituaries elicited from college students at Harvard in 1969 some typical examples and reactions are cited. In general, it is concluded that young people have difficulty objectifying themselves or seeing themselves as dead. “Only the young are immortal” is the main theme of this brief paper.     

Supererogation Across Normative Domains

The phenomenon of moral supererogation—action that goes beyond what moral duty requires—is familiar. In this paper, I argue that the concept of supererogation is applicable beyond the moral domain. After an introductory section 1, I outline in section 2 what I take to be the structure of moral supererogation, explaining how it comes to be an authentic normative category. In section 3, I show that there are structurally similar phenomena in other normative domains—those of prudence, etiquette, and the epistemic—and give examples of acts of supererogation of each of these types.     

The force and the content of judgment

This essay explores what it means to reject Frege's distinction of force and content: the rejection completes Frege's anti‐psychologism as it leaves no space for a psychological concept of judgment distinct from the logical concept, which is the concern of no empirical science, but of logic. It emerges that logic, as the science of judgement, is — not a metaphysics of judgement, but — metaphysics. And it emerges that the opposition of subject to subject — the elementary nexus of thinker to thinker in dialogue — is contained within the logical concept of judgment.     

Promise and Ontological Ambiguity in the In vitro Meat Imagescape: From Laboratory Myotubes to the Cultured Burger

In vitro meat (IVM), also known as cultured meat, involves growing cells into muscle tissue to be eaten as food. The technology had its most high-profile moment in 2013 when a cultured burger was cooked and tasted in a press conference. Images of the burger featured in the international media and were circulated across the Internet. These images—literally marks on a two-dimensional surface—do important work in establishing what IVM is and what it can do. A combination of visual semiotics and narrative analysis shows that images of IVM afford readings of their story that are co-created by the viewer. Before the cultured burger, during 2011, images of IVM fell into four distinct categories: cell images, tissue images, flowcharts, and meat in a dish images. The narrative infrastructure of each image type affords different interpretations of what IVM can accomplish and what it is. The 2013 cultured burger images both draw upon and depart from these image types in an attempt to present IVM as a normal food stuff, and as ‘matter in place’ when placed on the plate. The analysis of individual images and the collection of images about a certain object or subject—known as the imagescape—is a productive approach to understanding the ontology and promise of IVM and is applicable to other areas of social life.     

Some Internal Problems with Revisionary Gender Concepts

Philosophia - Feminism has long grappled with its own demarcation problem—exactly what is it to be a woman?—and the rise of trans-inclusive feminism has made this problem more urgent. I...     

Against Limited Foreknowledge

Theological fatalists contend that if God knows everything, then no human action is free, and that since God does know everything, no human action is free. One reply to such arguments that has become popular recently— a way favored by William Hasker and Peter van Inwagen—agrees that if God knows everything, no human action is free. The distinctive response of these philosophers is simply to say that therefore God does not know everything. On this view, what the fatalist arguments in fact bring out is that it was logically impossible for God to have known the truths about what we would freely do in the future. And this is no defect in God’s knowledge, for infallible foreknowledge of such truths is a logical impossibility. It has commonly been assumed that this position constitutes an explanation of where the fatalist argument goes wrong. My first goal is to argue that any such assumption has in fact been a mistake; Hasker and van Inwagen have in effect said only that something does go wrong with the argument, but they have not explained what goes wrong with it. Once we see this result, we’ll see, I think, that they need such an account—and that no such account has in fact been provided. The second goal of this paper is therefore to develop— and to criticize— what seems to be the most promising such account they might offer. As I see it, this account will in fact highlight in an intuitively compelling new way what many regard to be the view’s chief liability, namely, that the truths about the future which God is said not to know will now appear even more clearly (and problematically)‘ungrounded’.     

The Burdens of Love

While we primarily love individual persons, we also love our work, our homes, our activities and causes. To love is to be engaged in an active concern for the objective well-being—the thriving—of whom and what we love. True love mandates discovering in what that well-being consists and to be engaged in the details of promoting it. Since our loves are diverse, we are often conflicted about the priorities among the obligations they bring. Loving requires constant contextual improvisatory adjustment of priorities among our commitments. Besides delighting in—and being enhanced by—the presence and existence of another person (a place, an institution, profession), love requires extended reflection and work.     

A puzzle about epistemic akrasia

In this paper I will present a puzzle about epistemic akrasia, and I will use that puzzle to motivate accepting some non-standard views about the nature of epistemological judgment. The puzzle is that while it seems obvious that epistemic akrasia must be irrational, the claim that epistemic akrasia is always irrational amounts to the claim that a certain sort of justified false belief—a justified false belief about what one ought to believe—is impossible. But justified false beliefs seem to be possible in any domain, and it’s hard to see why beliefs about what one ought to believe should be an exception. I will argue that when we get clearer about what sort of psychological state epistemic akrasia is, we can resolve the puzzle in favor of the intuitive view that epistemic akrasia is always irrational.     

The Emergence of Creativity

Creativity is one of the central dimensions of human achievement and social development and has always fascinated scientists and non-scientists alike. But what is the essential nature of creativity? And what is the role of consciousness in the emergence of creativity? If it is true that it has been explored in many aspects in the cognitive and neurobiological field, it is also true that the lore chest—from which the conscious mind through unconscious mechanisms extracts the rough material that is then brought to the surface—has been less investigated. The purpose of this article is to give an account of how the multiplicity of levels of awareness is made possible by a spontaneous order that has nothing to do with a monolithic view of creativity.     

The Nonworseness Claim and the Moral Permissibility of Better-Than-Permissible Acts

Grounded in what Alan Wertheimer terms the “nonworseness claim,” it is thought by some philosophers that what will be referred to herein as “better-than-permissible acts”—acts that, if undertaken, would make another or others better off than they would be were an alternative but morally permissible act to be undertaken—are necessarily morally permissible. What, other than a bout of irrationality, it may be thought, would lead one to hold that an act (such as outsourcing production to a “sweatshop” in a developing country) that produces more benefits for others than an act that is itself morally permissible (such as not doing business in the developing country at all) with respect to those same others, is not morally permissible? In this article, I argue that each of the two groups of philosophers that are most likely to accept the nonworseness claim—consequentialists and non-consequentialists—have reason to reject it, and thereby also have reason to reject the belief that better-than-permissible acts are necessarily morally permissible.     

The Body and the Sacred in the Digital Age: Thoughts on Posthuman Sexuality

Abstract

Considerable scholarly discussion has been given to the idea that we are moving toward a state of "posthumanism." In this essay, I examine some possible implications of a posthuman existence, specifically as it relates to that most basic of human needs—sexuality. More specifically, I am interested in exploring the spiritual aspects of sexuality to see what is lost and what is gained in technologically mediated forms of sexuality. To that end, I consider the interplay between sexual behaviour and our conceptions of the sacred, how technologies are changing our views of—and realities concerning—our bodies, and the potential for a sacred posthuman sexuality.     

Women’s ‘Ethical’ Pornographic Spectatorship

‘Ethics’ has assumed prominence in the neoliberal iteration of responsibilized and self-governing individuals. Spectatorship—what we view and how we view it—has been conceptualized under this frame as a disciplinary practice where concerns of ethics and ethical conduct come to the fore. This paper seeks to connect pornographic spectatorship with the neoliberal project of responsibilized and ethical self-regulation and decision-making, in order to commence the conversation surrounding how women not only watch pornography, but how normative gender boundaries constrain how women talk about their spectatorship and how they make decisions of what to watch. Based on in-depth focus group and individual interviews of 26 women on their experiences of using pornography, this paper explores the sorts of ‘ethical’—and fundamentally gendered—spectatorial decision-making these women engaged in vis-à-vis their use of pornographic materials.     

Are we free to imagine what we choose?

It has long been recognized that we have a great deal of freedom to imagine what we choose. This paper explores a thesis—what we call “intentionalism (about the imagination)”—that provides a way of making this evident (if vague) truism precise. According to intentionalism, the contents of your imaginings are simply determined by whatever contents you intend to imagine. Thus, for example, when you visualize a building and intend it to be of King’s College rather than a replica of the college you have imagined the former rather than the latter because you intended to imagine King’s College. This is so even if the visual image you conjure up equally resembles either. This paper proposes two kinds of counterexamples to intentionalism and discusses their significance. In particular, it sketches a positive account of how many sensory imaginings get to be about what they are about, which explains how the causal history of our mental imagery can prevent us from succeeding in imagining what we intended.

     

Evidence: A Guide for the Uncertain

Assume that it is your evidence that determines what opinions you should have. I argue that since you should take peer disagreement seriously, evidence must have two features. (1) It must sometimes warrant being modest: uncertain what your evidence warrants, and (thus) uncertain whether you’re rational. (2) But it must always warrant being guided: disposed to treat your evidence as a guide. It is surprisingly difficult to vindicate these dual constraints. But diagnosing why this is so leads to a proposal—Trust—that is weak enough to allow modesty but strong enough to yield many guiding features. In fact, I argue that Trust is the Goldilocks principle—for it is necessary and sufficient to vindicate the claim that you should always prefer to use free evidence. Upshot: Trust lays the foundations for a theory of disagreement and, more generally, an epistemology that permits self-doubt—a modest epistemology.     

Knowledge ascriptions and the psychological consequences of changing stakes

One of the many ways that ‘deflationary’ and ‘inflationary’ theories of truth are said to differ is in their attitude towards truth qua property. This difference used to be very easy to delineate, with deflationists denying, and inflationists asserting, that truth is a property, but more recently the debate has become a lot more complicated, owing primarily to the fact that many contemporary deflationists often do allow for truth to be considered a property. Anxious to avoid inflation, however, these deflationists are at pains to point out that the truth property, on their view, is not a property of any significant interest. Correspondingly, inflationists have seen this as an opportunity to refine what kind of property they think truth is, which—according to them—moves their views beyond deflationism. The upshot of this is that there are number of different accounts in the literature of what distinguishes an inflationary truth property from a deflationary one, or—as it is sometimes put—what distinguishes a ‘substantive’ property from an ‘insubstantive’ one. This has made it hard to pin down exactly what is at issue at the metaphysical level between deflationists and inflationists, which makes it increasingly hard to see how debates between them are properly phrased. Given that these positions represent the two central attitudes towards truth in contemporary debates, this makes for a serious obstacle for the project of discerning the correct theory of truth. The aim of this paper is to discern the best way to distinguish between substantive and insubstantive properties, and thus to restore some focus to these debates. I argue that the three central distinctions in the literature fail, and offer what I take to be a more promising distinction in terms of a graded distinction between abundant and sparse properties.     

Optimising self-regulated study: The benefits—and costs—of dropping flashcards

Self-regulation of study activities is a constant in the lives of students—who must decide what to study, when to study, how long to study, and by what method to study. We investigated self-regulation in the context of a common study method: flashcards. In four experiments we examined the basis and effectiveness of a metacognitive strategy adopted almost universally by students: setting aside (dropping) items they think they know. Dropping has a compelling logic—it creates additional opportunities to study undropped items—but it rests on two shaky foundations: students’ metacognitive monitoring and the value they assign to further study. In fact, being allowed to drop flashcards had small but consistently negative effects on learning. The results suggest that the effectiveness of self-regulated study depends on both the accuracy of metacognitive monitoring and the learner's understanding, or lack thereof, of how people learn.     

The Decision-Theoretic Lockean Thesis

Abstract

Certain philosophers maintain that there is a ‘constitutive threshold for belief’: to believe that p just is to have a degree of confidence that p above a certain threshold. On the basis of this view, these philosophers defend what is known as ‘the Lockean Thesis’, according to which it is rational to believe that p just in case it is rational to have a degree of confidence that p above the constitutive threshold for belief. While not directly speaking to the controversy over the Lockean Thesis, this paper defends the general idea behind it—namely, the thesis that there is some threshold such that it is rational to believe that p if and only if it is rational to have a degree of confidence greater than that threshold. This paper identifies the threshold in question—not with the alleged constitutive threshold for belief—but with what I call ‘the practical threshold for rational belief’. Roughly, the thesis defended here is that it is rational to believe that p if and only if it is rational to have a degree of confidence that p that rationalizes engaging in certain types of practical reasoning.