The indifference argument

I argue against motivational internalism. First I recharacterise the issue over moral motivation. Second I describe the indifference argument against motivation internalism. Third I consider appeals to irrationality that are often made in the face of this argument, and I show that they are ineffective. Lastly, I draw the motivational externalist conclusion and reflect on the nature of the issue. Thanks for helpful comments to Philippa Foot and especially to an anonymous referee. Distant ancestors of the paper were given as talks in an American Philosophical Association conference in New Orleans and in St Andrews.     

Defenses against goodness

This paper examines the fantasies and conflicts of analysands who avoid the experience and expression of positive reactions to the goodness of others and who hide feelings that would elicit that goodness. Envious wishes to spoil good objects, attachments to bad objects, defenses against gratitude and dependence, negative therapeutic reactions, and other such conflictual developments can help forestall depressive anxiety in these analysands. They dread abandoning narcissistic, omnipotent, sadomasochistic, and persecutory paranoidschizoid positions, and fear moving toward the mature depressive position, with its burdens of seemingly intolerable guilt, concern, felt ambivalence, and vulnerability to humiliation and disappointment.     

Moore on beauty and goodness

The Journal of Value Inquiry -     

Power-ing up neo-aristotelian natural goodness

Something is good insofar as it achieves its end, so says a neo-Aristotelian view of goodness. Powers/dispositions are paradigm cases of entities that have an end, so say many metaphysicians. A question therefore arises, namely, can one account for neo-Aristotelian goodness in terms of an ontology of powers? This is what I shall begin to explore in this paper. I will first provide a brief explication of both neo-Aristotelian goodness and the metaphysics of powers, before turning to investigate whether one can give an account of neo-Aristotelian goodness in terms of powers. I will suggest that the answer to this question is yes.

     

A geometric principle of indifference

That one's degrees of belief at any one time obey the axioms of probability theory is widely regarded as a necessary condition for static rationality. Many theorists hold that it is also a sufficient condition, but according to critics this yields too subjective an account of static rationality. However, there are currently no good proposals as to how to obtain a tenable stronger probabilistic theory of static rationality. In particular, the idea that one might achieve the desired strengthening by adding some symmetry principle to the probability axioms has appeared hard to maintain. Starting from an idea of Carnap and drawing on relatively recent work in cognitive science, this paper argues that conceptual spaces provide the tools to devise an objective probabilistic account of static rationality. Specifically, we propose a principle that derives prior degrees of belief from the geometrical structure of concepts.     

Induction,indifference and guessing

Pragmatism in semantics is hampered by its proponents' tendency to tie understanding too closely to our mastery of epistemic practice. Both Brandom's inferentialist semantics and the anti-realist semantics championed by Dummett and Tennant amply illustrate this tendency. As a consequence, neither theory can successfully handle cases of the innocuously unknowable in which two sentences, though mutually consistent, nonetheless cannot be known to be true together. On Brandom's account, such sentences are treated as being mutually inconsistent after all. According to both Dummett's and Tennant's version of anti-realist semantics, we cannot know that there are any true sentences of this kind. Neither result is the least acceptable, whence either theory fails. The lesson to be learnt from this failure is that understanding should not be identified with the ability to reach warranted verdicts, but with the ability to think, where thinking is constitutively involved in, but nonetheless distinct from judging.     

Stimulus-specific processing consequences of pattern goodness

Two issues concerning the effects of visual pattern goodness on information processing time were investigated: the role of memory vs. encoding and the role of individual stimulus goodness vs. stimulus similarity. A sequential “same-different” task was used to provide differentiation of target item or memory effects from display item or encoding effects. Experiment 1 used four alternative stimuli in each block of trials. The results showed that good patterns were processed faster than poor patterns for both “same” and “different” responses. Furthermore, the goodness of the target item had a greater effect on reaction time than did the goodness of the display item, indicating that memory is more important than encoding in producing faster processing of good stimuli. Effects of interstimulus similarity on processing time were minimal, although isolation of good stimuli in a similarity space could explain many of the results. Experiment 2 replicated the results of Experiment 1, despite the fact that differences in similarity space had been minimized by using only two alternative stimuli in each block. In addition, the speed of processing a “same” pair was essentially independent of the particular alternative stimulus in a block. These results suggest that in this task, there is a processing advantage for good stimuli that is stimulus specific, with the effect operating primarily in memory.     

Evil and the god of indifference

International Journal for Philosophy of Religion - The evidential problem of evil involves a rarely discussed challenge, namely the challenge of defending theism against the hypothesis of a morally...     

Multidimensional scaling by optimizing goodness of fit to a nonmetric hypothesis

Multidimensional scaling is the problem of representingn objects geometrically byn points, so that the interpoint distances correspond in some sense to experimental dissimilarities between objects. In just what sense distances and dissimilarities should correspond has been left rather vague in most approaches, thus leaving these approaches logically incomplete. Our fundamental hypothesis is that dissimilarities and distances are monotonically related. We define a quantitative, intuitively satisfying measure of goodness of fit to this hypothesis. Our technique of multidimensional scaling is to compute that configuration of points which optimizes the goodness of fit. A practical computer program for doing the calculations is described in a companion paper.     

Pattern goodness and speed of encoding

Two experiments attempted to resolve a conflict in the literature about whether good patterns are encoded faster than poor patterns in speeded classification tasks. The results showed clear effects of goodness on the memory component of such tasks, but no effect on speed of encoding. The conflicts appear to be due in part to varying encoding requirements of different tasks.