You Make Your Own Luck

This essay takes up two questions. First, what does it mean to say that someone creates her own luck? At least colloquially speaking, luck is conceived as something out of an agent's control. So how could an agent increase or decrease the likelihood that she'll be lucky? Building on some recent work on the metaphysics of luck, the essay argues that there is a sense in which agents can create their own luck because people with more skill tend to have more opportunities to benefit from luck. Second, what implications does this conception of luck have for related topics such as how we evaluate performances (like shooting an arrow), including coming to know something? The ubiquitous presence of luck in our actions is often underappreciated. The essay argues that when we combine an expected outcomes view of luck with a counterfactual view of causation, the distinction between environmental and intervening veritic luck seems to disappear. We need a more nuanced view of how luck sometimes undermines credit for success in agents' actions. The upshot of this view is that while luck may undermine the creditworthiness of an agent's success, it only partially undermines creditworthiness.     

人虽老矣精神莫衰

中国老龄委、中国老龄协会及13个老年社团的代表召开座谈会揭批法轮功时表示,要抓好老年人的理想信念教育.与会者指出,有些老年人参与法轮功的事实表明,世界观的改造并不是一劳永逸的,一些老年人离开工作岗位后,由于社会角色的转变和生活环境的变化,闲暇时间较多,情感交流圈相对缩小,对退休和晚年生活没有充分的思想准备和科学的心理调适,思想上难免会产生失落感和孤独感.加上放松要求自己,不注意加强学习,搞自我封闭,结果让法轮功邪教组织钻了空子.因此,对老年人进行崇尚科学,反对迷信的再教育,使老年人“老有所教“,是新形势下加强老年人思想政治工作,同法轮功邪教组织进行坚决斗争的重要任务.……     

命运掌握在自己的手心里

我永远忘不了16岁刚上高中的那个晚上.妈妈的一个内地来的朋友来我家做客.妈妈介绍说,"她"是一个出名的"神算子",请"她"给我看一看手相.当"她"的目光在我的手心上停留的时候,我头脑中一下子就浮现出<射雕英雄传>里也有"神算子"之称的瑛姑的那一章节内容.我还记得妈妈的那个朋友当时目光灼灼,仿佛穿越我的肩膀,延伸到无限的未来."她"严肃的神情使得满不在乎的我和妈妈,也不由得紧张起来了.如果真的能未卜先知的话,我倒真想知道自己的未来--能否考入大学?     

If You Want to Do Something About Your Own Craziness, Have Your Own Experiential Sessions

If a person is troubled by worries or fears about being crazy, out of one's mind, psychotic, the person can learn to have one's own experiential sessions aimed at two goals. One is to undergo a deep-seated, qualitative change toward becoming the person one is capable of becoming. The related other goal is to be free of the worrisome, fearful scenes or situations of being crazy, out of one's mind, psychotic. An illustration is given of how to achieve these goals by having one's own experiential session.     

Deferring to Others about One's Own Mind

Pessimists about moral testimony hold that there is something suboptimal about forming moral beliefs by deferring to another. This paper motivates an analogous claim about self‐knowledge of the reason‐responsive attitudes. When it comes to your own mind, it seems important to know things “from the inside”, in the first‐personal way, rather than putting your trust in another. After motivating pessimism, the paper offers an explanation of its truth. First‐person knowledge is distinctive because it involves knowing a state of mind and finding it intelligible from one's point of view. It concludes by considering the value of this form of self‐understanding.     

Speaking Your Mind: Large Inarticulateness Constitutional and Circumstantial

When someone is asked to speak his mind, it is sometimes possible for him to furnish what his utterance appears to have omitted. In such cases we might say that he had a mind to speak. Sometimes, however, the opposite is true. Asked to speak his mind, our speaker finds that he has no mind to speak. When it is possible to speak one's mind and when not is largely determined by the kinds of beings we are and by the kinds of resources we are able to draw upon. In either case, not speaking one's mind is leaving something out whose articulation would or could matter for the purposes for which one was speaking in the first place. Inarticulation is no fleetingly contingent and peripheral phenomenon in human thinking and discourse. It is a substantial and dominant commonplace. In Part One I attempt to say something about what it is about the human agent that makes inarticulateness so rife. In Part Two, I consider various strategies for making the unarticulated explicit, and certain constraints on such processes. I shall suggest, among other things, that standard treatments of enthymematic reconstruction are fundamentally misconceived.     

IX—On Being Bored Out of Your Mind

The contemporary philosophical debate over practical reasoning—over how one ought to figure out what to do—has been almost entirely focused on whether there is more to it than means-ends reasoning. But a prior and very difficult question has to do with why instrumental deliberation is so important an aspect of our cognitive life (regardless of whether there is anything else). I consider an answer broached by Harry Frankfurt, that having ends is the alternative to being literally bored out of one's mind, and adapt an argument from John Stuart Mill's political and psychological writings to show what more there is to not being bored than just having something to aim for.     

In Your Right Mind: Right Hemisphere Contributions to Language Processing and Production

The verbal/nonverbal account of left and right hemisphere functionality is the prevailing dichotomy describing the cerebral lateralization of function. Yet the fact that the left hemisphere is the superior language processor does not necessarily imply that the right hemisphere is completely lacking linguistic ability. This paper reviews the growing body of research demonstrating that, far from being nonverbal, the right hemisphere has significant language processing strength. From prosodic and paralinguistic aspects of speech production, reception, and interpretation, to prelexical, lexical and postlexical components of visual word recognition; strong involvement of the right hemisphere is implicated. The evidence reviewed challenges the notion that language is solely a function of the “verbal” left hemisphere, indicating that the right cerebral hemisphere makes significant and meaningful contributions to normal language processing as well.     

Choose Your Own Adventure: Examining the Fictional Content of Video Games as Interactive Fictions

This article explores the unique philosophical challenges that video games pose as forms of interactive fiction and examines the different types of fictional truth which they present in order to lay the groundwork for further discussion of video games as fictions not only by generating useful vocabulary and an ontological framework to aid continued study but also by using the fictional truths found in video games to challenge one of the most influential models of fictional truth: that of Kendall Walton. I argue that Walton's definition of fictional truth cannot account for all of the fictional content presented by video games and use video games to provide two counterexamples to his claims. By shedding light on these challenges, this article establishes video games as an interesting and unique form of narrative art worthy of the attention of philosophers not only for the fictional content which they present but also for the way in which they present it.