Essentialists suppose that for every individual, if that individual exists at any possible world, then necessarily that individual exemplifies some non-trivial qualitative property essential to it, as such. Anti-essentialists deny this. One important argument leveled by some anti-essentialists against essentialism takes the form of a thought experiment, one originally introduced by Chisholm (Nous 1(1):1–8, 1967), sometimes referred to as Chisholm’s Paradox (CP). In this essay, I defend essentialism against CP. I begin by presenting the argument and showing how it leads to a contradiction of the essentialist thesis. I then consider one of the most popular solutions to CP to date, that given by Salmon (Midwest Stud Philos 11:75–120, 1986, Philos Rev 98(1):3–34, 1989, Philos Top 21(2):187–197, 1993). Next, I critique Salmon’s proposal and show that it is an insufficient response on behalf of the essentialist. And finally, I propose a novel solution to the paradox and discuss why it is that many metaphysicians in the past have found CP plausible, despite being fallacious.
相似文献Know-how has a distinctive, non-instrumental value that a mere reliable ability lacks. Some, including Bengson and Moffett (in: Bengson, Moffett (eds) Knowing how, Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp 161–195, 2011) and Carter and Pritchard (Australas J Philos 93(4):799–816, 2015b) have cited a close relation between knowhow and cognitive achievement, and it is tempting to think that the value of know-how rests in that relation. That’s not so, however. The value of know-how lies in its relation to the fundamental value of autonomy.
相似文献This paper provides results on a form of adaptive testing that is used frequently in intelligence testing. In these tests, items are presented in order of increasing difficulty. The presentation of items is adaptive in the sense that a session is discontinued once a test taker produces a certain number of incorrect responses in sequence, with subsequent (not observed) responses commonly scored as wrong. The Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scales (SB5; Riverside Publishing Company, 2003) and the Kaufman Assessment Battery for Children (KABC-II; Kaufman and Kaufman, 2004), the Kaufman Adolescent and Adult Intelligence Test (Kaufman and Kaufman 2014) and the Universal Nonverbal Intelligence Test (2nd ed.) (Bracken and McCallum 2015) are some of the many examples using this rule. He and Wolfe (Educ Psychol Meas 72(5):808–826, 2012. https://doi.org/10.1177/0013164412441937) compared different ability estimation methods in a simulation study for this discontinue rule adaptation of test length. However, there has been no study, to our knowledge, of the underlying distributional properties based on analytic arguments drawing on probability theory, of what these authors call stochastic censoring of responses. The study results obtained by He and Wolfe (Educ Psychol Meas 72(5):808–826, 2012. https://doi.org/10.1177/0013164412441937) agree with results presented by DeAyala et al. (J Educ Meas 38:213–234, 2001) as well as Rose et al. (Modeling non-ignorable missing data with item response theory (IRT; ETS RR-10-11), Educational Testing Service, Princeton, 2010) and Rose et al. (Psychometrika 82:795–819, 2017. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11336-016-9544-7) in that ability estimates are biased most when scoring the not observed responses as wrong. This scoring is used operationally, so more research is needed in order to improve practice in this field. The paper extends existing research on adaptivity by discontinue rules in intelligence tests in multiple ways: First, an analytical study of the distributional properties of discontinue rule scored items is presented. Second, a simulation is presented that includes additional scoring rules and uses ability estimators that may be suitable to reduce bias for discontinue rule scored intelligence tests.
相似文献Viebahn (Pac Philos Q 99:749–762, 2018. https://doi.org/10.1111/papq.1222) has recently argued that several tests for ambiguity, such as the conjunction-reduction test, are not reliable as tests for polysemy, but only as tests for homonymy. I look at the more fine-grained distinction between regular and irregular polysemy and I argue for a more nuanced conclusion: the tests under discussion provide systematic evidence for homonymy and irregular polysemy but need to be used with more care to test for regular polysemy. I put this conclusion at work in the context of the debate over the alleged referential-attributive ambiguity of the definite article. In reply to various criticisms, defenders of the ambiguity view argue that this is a case of polysemy. But opponents object that the dual use of the definite article fails tests for ambiguity. The debate seems to have come to stalemate, unless the relevance of the tests is determined for cases of alleged polysemy. I conclude that the balance of considerations incline towards rejecting the ambiguity thesis.
相似文献To investigate contextual influences on gender differences and similarities, we compared adolescents’ endorsement of gender-typed communal/other-focused and agentic/self-focused conflict-management strategies in three relationship contexts: same-gender friends, other-gender friends, and other-gender heterosexual romantic partners. Our 2 Participant Gender (between-subjects) × 3 Relationship Context (within-subjects) mixed factorial design addressed whether findings of prior research (Keener and Strough 2017) with college-aged participants would generalize to adolescents. Participants (n?=?103; 47 male adolescents; 56 female adolescents, 14–17 years-old) from the U.S. South Atlantic and Middle Atlantic regions read nine hypothetical conflict scenarios (three per each relationship context) and rated their likelihood of using gender-typed strategies. Young women and men endorsed communal and agentic strategies significantly more in same- and other-gender friendships than in romantic relationships. Across all three relationship contexts, young women reported using significantly more agentic strategies than young men did. In contrast to previous research on college students (Keener and Strough 2017), the predicted Participant Gender x Relationship Context interaction was not significant in the present study. Our findings suggest that developmental processes such as age differences in gender socialization and lack of experience with romantic relationships might explain why findings from college students did not generalize to adolescents.
相似文献Epistemic reasons are meant to provide justification for beliefs. In this paper, I will be concerned with the requirements that have to be met if reasons are to discharge this function. It is widely recognized, however, that only possessed reasons can justify beliefs and actions. But what are the conditions that have to be satisfied in order for one to possess reasons? I shall begin by motivating a particular condition, namely, the ‘treating’ requirement that has been deemed to be necessary for possessing reasons. In Sect. 1, I explain and criticize some of the existing accounts of the treating requirement for reason-possession. In Sect. 2, I will suggest a dispositional account of reason-possession in which the treating condition features prominently. Section 3 will deal with the some of the consequences of this account for such issues as the structure of epistemic defeat, the immediacy of perceptual justification and logical knowledge.
相似文献There is much to like about the idea that justification should be understood in terms of normality or normic support (Smith in Between probability and certainty, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2016; Goodman and Salow in Philosophical Studies 175: 183–196, 2018). The view does a nice job explaining why we should think that lottery beliefs differ in justificatory status from mundane perceptual or testimonial beliefs. And it seems to do that in a way that is friendly to a broadly internalist approach to justification. In spite of its attractions, we think that the normic support view faces two serious challenges. The first is that it delivers the wrong result in preface cases. Such cases suggest that the view is either too sceptical or to externalist. The second is that the view struggles with certain kinds of Moorean absurdities. It turns out that these problems can easily be avoided. If we think of normality as a condition on knowledge, we can characterise justification in terms of its connection to knowledge and thereby avoid the difficulties discussed here. The resulting view does an equally good job explaining why we should think that our perceptual and testimonial beliefs are justified when lottery beliefs cannot be. Thus, it seems that little could be lost and much could be gained by revising the proposal and adopting a view on which it is knowledge, not justification that depends directly upon normality.
相似文献