No Trust is Hybrid: Reply to Faulkner

Philosophia - There is a well-developed literature on trust. In his important article Faulkner (Analysis, 75(3), 424?429, 2015) distinguishes three-place, two-place and one-place trust...     

No logic of cogency: Reply to Oakley

Despite the fact that the nature of the properties of causation is rarely discussed within the mental causation debate, the implicit assumption is that they are universals as opposed to tropes. However, in recent literature on the problem of mental causation, a new solution has emerged which aims to address the problem by appealing to tropes. It is argued that if the properties of causation are tropes rather than universals, then a psychophysical reductionism can be advanced which does not face the problem of multiple realizability. However, the 'trope solution' rests upon the assumption that one can combine a trope monism with a type dualism. I argue that such a combination cannot be allowed. Given a plausible interpretation of types within a trope ontology, trope monism in fact entails type monism. Consequently, if one identifies mental tropes with physical tropes, one must also identify mental and physical types and in doing so face a modified version of the multiple realizability argument.     

Sorites Is No Threat to Modus Ponens: A Reply to Kochan

A recent article by Jeff Kochan contains a discussion of modus ponens that among other thing alleges that the paradox of the heap is a counterexample to it. In this note I show that it is the conditional major premise of a modus ponens inference, rather than the rule itself, that is impugned. This premise is the contrapositive of the inductive step in the principle of mathematical induction, confirming the widely accepted view that it is the vagueness of natural language predicates, not modus ponens, that is challenged by Sorites.     

Also No Support for the Youth Bias: Reply to Koppel and Berntsen

In this reply, I discuss three reasons why the results of Koppel and Berntsen's original study and my study do not offer support for the youth bias. First, participants in Koppel and Berntsen's original study could have used their own memories of public events to indicate how old a typical person would most likely be when the most important public event during that person's life would occur. Second, the absence of the age effect in the second experiment seemed to be caused by the lack of power, making it unlikely that the expectations about the timing of important public events are shared by younger and older participants. Third, participants in my study expected that more events would occur in the period in which a prototypical person would be between 0 and 10 years old than in the period in which the person would be between 11 and 30 years old. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

谁代表了应用伦理学的“本质”？——对《究竟是“无本质”，还是“无根据”？》一文的答复

本文仅对甘绍平教授《究竟是“无本质”,还是“无根据”?》一文中值得讨论的几个观点作了回应。     

Sadism,Penetration, and the Negotiation of Desire: Commentary on Paper by Csillag

The author takes up Csillag’s idea of sadism as the wish to penetrate in the context of a patient who withholds from his analyst. With such a patient, the analyst has to bear the strain stemming from a lack of both satisfaction and recognition–the feeling of not having an impact. The defenses against sadism are examined along with the absence of intentionality in both clinical cases presented, an absence that places sadism in the realm of something that is unconscious or preconscious. Alternative views are offered on the enactment between Csillag and her patient with a focus on the unspoken negotiation of desire and (drawing on Fairbairn) the analyst’s attempt to breach her patient’s closed system of internal objects.     

Reply to: Roberts

In his critique of my views on supererogation, Rodney Roberts (Philosophia, 2014) claims that I treat care ethics as having a more general moral validity than other care ethicists do. He also claims that the kind of sentimentalism I espouse doesn’t sufficiently emphasize sentiment and then goes on to question what I say about supererogation. But in fact other care ethicists also think care ethics can cover the whole of morality, and my sentimentalism emphasizes sentiment just as much and as little as that paradigm sentimentalist Francis Hutcheson does. Further, the critique Roberts makes of my view on supererogation doesn’t allow for the full range of possible cases of supererogation.     

Reply to Psarros: Popper and Chemistry

In this article I reply to criticism of my published work by N. Psarros (Journal for the General Philosophy of Science 28: 297–305,1997). I show that I had already answered the first criticism in my published work and not overlooked his supposed refutation. However I offer a plausible argument which he could have used to strengthen his claim. Psarros cites my work on Hopkins in his opening paragraph, but then makes no further reference to it in the text. I indicated to Psarros verbally at Ilkley 1994 (and reiterate the message here) that Hopkins' work on Vitamins is the exemplar of a Popperian historical episode and must require addressing by the opponents of critical rationalism. This revised version was published online in August 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Emergence and reduction: Reply to Kim

In this paper I examine Jaegwon Kim’s view that emergent properties are irreducible to the base properties on which they supervene. Kim’s view assumes a model of ‘functional reduction’ which he claims to be substantially different from the traditional Nagelian model. I dispute this claim and argue that the two models are only superficially different, and that on either model, properly understood, it is possible to draw a distinction between a property’s being reductively identifiable with its base property and a property’s being reductively explainable in terms of it. I propose that we should take as the distinguishing feature of emergent properties that they be truly novel properties, i.e., ontologically distinct from the ‘base’ properties which they supervene on. This only requires that emergent properties cannot be reductively identified with their base properties, not that they cannot be reductively explained in terms of them. On this conception the set of emergent properties may well include mental properties as conceived by nonreductive physicalists.