Against Strong Cognitivism: An Argument from the Particularity of Love

According to the view we may term “strong cognitivism”, all reasons for action are rooted in normative features that the motivated subject (explicitly or implicitly) takes objects to have independently of her attitudes towards these objects. The main concern of this paper is to argue against strong cognitivism, that is, to establish the view that conative attitudes do provide subjects with reasons for action. The central argument to this effect is a top‐down argument: it proceeds by an analysis of the complex phenomenon of love and derives a conclusion regarding the (motivational and normative) nature of more basic mental phenomena—particular desires. More specifically, its starting point is the crude intuition that the significance conferred by love upon its objects is of a distinctively personal kind—an intuition that is expressed by the apparent non‐substitutability of two similar subjects only one of whom is loved with respect to their importance for the lover. I argue that the initial notion of non‐substitutability can be refined and modified so as to form a real challenge to all versions of strong cognitivism and to establish the existence of attitude‐dependent reasons.     

The Right to Self-Defense Against the State

Philosophia - The Second Amendment is accepted as protecting a right, but it is commonly accepted that the right is not unrestricted. I will explore the most commonly suggested restrictions...     

Against simulation: the argument from error

According to Simulation Theory, to understand what is going on in another person's mind, the observer uses his or her own mind as a model of the other mind. Recently, philosophers and cognitive neuroscientists have proposed that mirror neurones (which fire in response to both executing and observing a goal directed action) provide a plausible neural substrate for simulation, a mechanism for directly perceiving, or 'resonating' with, the contents of other minds. This article makes the case against Simulation Theory, using evidence from cognitive neuroscience, developmental psychology, and social psychology. In particular, the errors that adults and children make when reasoning about other minds are not consistent with the 'resonance' versions of Simulation Theory.     

Defending psychopathy: an argument from values and moral responsibility

How psychopaths and their capacity for moral action are viewed is not only philosophically interesting but is also important and relevant for policy. The philosophical discussion of psychopathy has focussed upon the psychological faculties that are prerequisites for moral responsibility and empirical findings regarding psychopathy that are relevant to philosophical accounts of moral understanding and motivation. However, there are legitimate worries about whether psychopathy is a robust scientific construct, and there are risks attached to reifying psychopathy or other psychiatric constructs. We defend the concept of psychopathy by pointing out the relevance of empirical studies about it for our ordinary practices of ascribing moral responsibility and folk psychological accounts of moral understanding and motivation.     

Defending Priority Views from the Gunk/Junk Argument

Recently, Jonathan Tallant has argued that we should reject priority views, which hold that some objects are fundamental and others are dependent. Tallant’s argument relies on two proposed mereological possibilities: a gunky world, where everything has a proper part, and a junky world, where everything is a proper part. In this paper, I criticise Tallant’s argument and argue that neither of these possibilities threaten priority views per se; at most, they threaten only particular forms of priority views that contain a certain independently controversial assumption. First, I defend priority pluralism against the gunk argument: the genuine conceivability of gunk can be plausibly doubted on the basis of a certain principle concerning metaphysical possibility, and even if this principle is false, the possibility of a gunky world poses no devastative problem for pluralism per se because it can be considered to be consistent with nonatomism. Second, I defend priority monism against the junk argument: the possibility of a junky world poses no devastative problem for monism per se because it can be considered to be consistent with nonholism in a twofold sense. Finally, I show that even monism as defined as genuinely holistic can be plausibly defended against the junk argument once the claim of the possible nonexistence of the maximal whole is reinterpreted based on the priority-based conception of existence.     

Defending the Common Life: National-Defence After Rodin

abstract   David Rodin has recently put forward a compelling but disturbing argument to the effect that the traditional justification in Just War Theory of a state's right to self-defence (what Rodin calls national-defence), which is derived from the legitimate case of personal self-defence, fails. He concludes that the only way to justify forceful responses to aggression against states by other states or non-state groups is by viewing the right to do so as falling under a form of law-enforcement, which in turn requires the existence of some overarching universal state. In this paper I argue that there exists a possible justification for national-defence that Rodin has overlooked due to an underlying commitment to what Charles Taylor calls 'the primacy of rights thesis'. My claim is that a particular family of views that see human identity as being crucially bound up with society offers the resources to avoid the pitfalls that Rodin points out befall other attempts to justify national-defence.     

Against a Minimalist Reading of Bell's Theorem: Lessons from Fine

Since the validity of Bell's inequalities implies the existence of joint probabilities for non-commuting observables, there is no universal consensus as to what the violation of these inequalities signifies. While the majority view is that the violation teaches us an important lesson about the possibility of explanations, if not about metaphysical issues, there is also a minimalist position claiming that the violation is to be expected from simple facts about probability theory. This minimalist position is backed by theorems due to A. Fine and I. Pitowsky.Our paper shows that the minimalist position cannot be sustained. To this end,we give a formally rigorous interpretation of joint probabilities in thecombined modal and spatiotemporal framework of `stochastic outcomes inbranching space-time' (SOBST) (Kowalski and Placek, 1999; Placek, 2000). We show in this framework that the claim that there can be no joint probabilities fornon-commuting observables is incorrect. The lesson from Fine's theorem is notthat Bell's inequalities will be violated anyhow, but that an adequate modelfor the Bell/Aspect experiment must not define global joint probabilities. Thus we investigate the class of stochastic hidden variable models, whichprima facie do not define such joint probabilities. The reasonwhy these models fail supports the majority view: Bell's inequalities are notjust a mathematical artifact.     

Right hemisphere involvement in the attentional blink: evidence from a split-brain patient

When two masked targets are presented in a rapid sequence, correct identification of the first hinders identification of the second. This attentional blink (AB) is thought to be the result of capacity limitations in visual information processing. Neuropsychological and neuroimaging evidence implicated the right hemisphere as the source of this processing limitation. We investigated this idea by testing a split-brain patient (JW) in a modified AB task. The targets were presented in the same visual field (VF), and thereby to the same hemisphere, or in different VFs. We observed evidence of an AB both when the targets were presented to the same hemisphere and when the targets were presented to different hemispheres. However, the AB was more severe when the second target was presented to the RH. Our results are consistent with the notion that the right hemisphere plays a critical, but not unique, role in limited-capacity visual processing.     

The Human Right to Water: The Importance of Domestic and Productive Water Rights

The United Nations (UN) Universal Declaration of Human Rights engenders important state commitments to respect, fulfill, and protect a broad range of socio-economic rights. In 2010, a milestone was reached when the UN General Assembly recognized the human right to safe and clean drinking water and sanitation. However, water plays an important role in realizing other human rights such as the right to food and livelihoods, and in realizing the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women. These broader water-related rights have been recognized but have not yet been operationalized. This paper unravels these broader water-related rights in a more holistic interpretation of existing international human rights law. By focusing on an emerging approach to water services provision—known as ‘domestic-plus’ services—the paper argues how this approach operationalizes a comprehensive range of socio-economic rights in rural and peri-urban areas. Domestic-plus services provide water for domestic and productive uses around homesteads, which challenges the widespread practice in the public sector of planning and designing water infrastructure for a single-use. Evidence is presented to show that people in rural communities are already using their water supplies planned for domestic uses to support a wide range of productive activities. Domestic-plus services recognize and plan for these multiple-uses, while respecting the priority for clean and safe drinking water. The paper concludes that domestic-plus services operationalize the obligation to progressively fulfill a comprehensive range of indivisible socio-economic rights in rural and peri-urban areas.     

Defending the bad against the worse: Education and democracy

Recent writings in philosophy of education have expressed pessimism about the possibility of educating students to think for themselves. Similarly, recent writings in political philosophy have expressed pessimism about the possibility of attaining democracy. In this paper, I suggest that such pessimism is premature and may be alleviated, if not removed, by interpreting both educational enlightenment and the democratic ideal as processes, rather than end states. They are, moreover, processes which exist in symbiotic relationship with one another. Thus educational practices may improve the prospects of attaining democracy, and political practices may strengthen education.     

Against the odds: academic underdogs benefit from incremental theories

An implicit theory of ability approach to motivation argues that students who believe traits to be malleable (incremental theorists), relative to those who believe traits to be fixed (entity theorists), cope more effectively when academic challenges arise. In the current work, we integrated the implicit theory literature with research on top dog and underdog status to predict self-efficacy in an academic context. To examine our predictions, we assessed college students’ (N  =  165) implicit theories of mathematical ability and manipulated their underdog versus top dog status in a math competition. We hypothesized that holding an incremental (vs. entity) theory would interact with competition status (underdog vs. top dog) to predict mathematical self-efficacy. When in an underdog position, incremental (vs. entity) theories boosted students’ mathematical self-efficacy. Moreover, a mediated moderation model revealed that the experience of less helplessness accounted for greater self-efficacy in mathematical ability among academic underdogs with incremental (vs. entity) theories. Implications for teaching practices are discussed.     

Defending (a modified version of) the Zygote Argument

Think of the last thing someone did to you to seriously harm or offend you. And now imagine, so far as you can, becoming fully aware of the fact that his or her action was the causally inevitable result of a plan set into motion before he or she was ever even born, a plan that had no chance of failing. Should you continue to regard him or her as being morally responsible—blameworthy, in this case—for what he or she did? Many have thought that, intuitively, you should not. Recently, Alfred Mele has employed this line of thought to mount what many have taken to be a powerful argument for incompatibilism: the “Zygote Argument”. However, in interesting new papers, John Martin Fischer and Stephen Kearns have each independently argued that the Zygote Argument fails. As I see it, the criticisms of Fischer and Kearns reveal some important questions about how the argument is meant to be—or how it would best be—understood. Once we make a slight (but important) modification to the argument, however, I think we will be able to see that the criticisms of Fischer and Kearns do not detract from its substantial force.