Who cares about winning?

Why do we so often care about the outcomes of games when nothing is at stake? There is a paradox here, much like the paradox of fiction, which concerns why we care about the fates and threats of merely fictional beings. I argue that the paradox threatens to overturn a great deal of what philosophers have thought about caring, severing its connection to value and undermining its moral weight. I defend a solution to the paradox that draws on Kendall Walton's solution to the paradox of fiction, developing his idea that it be extended to games. The solution takes games to involve make-believe: in particular, players and spectators make-believe that the outcome of the game matters. I also explore how the phenomenon extends beyond games. And I explore some moral implications: in particular, my view preserves the idea that we have reason not to impede others in their pursuit of what they care about.     

What do our intuitions about the experience machine really tell us about hedonism?

Robert Nozick’s experience machine thought experiment is often considered a decisive refutation of hedonism. I argue that the conclusions we draw from Nozick’s thought experiment ought to be informed by considerations concerning the operation of our intuitions about value. First, I argue that, in order to show that practical hedonistic reasons are not causing our negative reaction to the experience machine, we must not merely stipulate their irrelevance (since our intuitions are not always responsive to stipulation) but fill in the concrete details that would make them irrelevant. If we do this, we may see our feelings about the experience machine becoming less negative. Second, I argue that, even if our feelings about the experience machine do not perfectly track hedonistic reasons, there are various reasons to doubt the reliability of our anti-hedonistic intuitions. And finally, I argue that, since in the actual world seeing certain things besides pleasure as ends in themselves may best serve hedonistic ends, hedonism may justify our taking these other things to be intrinsically valuable, thus again making the existence of our seemingly anti-hedonistic intuitions far from straightforward evidence for the falsity of hedonism.     

Remembering the past and thinking about the future: Is it really about time?

In this paper we discuss some literature relating to episodic memory, future episodic thinking and mental time travel in humans and non-human animals. We discuss the concept of mental time travel and argue that the concept relies on subjective phenomena such as consciousness and on this basis is not useful when studying episodic memory and future episodic thinking, particularly in non-human animals. We discuss recent work which emphasizes views of both episodic memory and future thinking which do not rely on such mental time travel and, more importantly, give less prominence to the concept of time. The implications of such a view for research into future thinking in non-human animals are considered.     

Should Marxists care about alienation?

Conclusion We have found that a sparse version of the claim that alienated labor is a bad thing can inform a political morality without turning that morality into one which makes more comment on people's ends than the liberal can accept. We have also seen that a modification of the ideas of alienation from our species being can play a limited role in a liberal political morality, but that the rational kernel of the critique from species alienation is already a familiar part of the liberal tradition. However, the substantive view of the good life - as one which essentially involves engagement in communal ties and satisfying labor - cannot play the role which certainly many Marxists would like it to play in their critique of capitalism, at least if their critique is to be recognizably liberal.Why should it matter so much that Marxists be able to accommodate central liberal insights? It is not because a political morality has to be liberal in order to be successful in the real world: history and the contemporary world are full of examples of political views which command wide assent despite (or because of) their illiberality. But the foreseeable stages of a socialist society will be plagued by the circumstances of justice as they have been classically conceived. A socialism which is sufficiently better than capitalism to be worth the significant risk and sacrifice it is likely to require must be liberal in the sense that it can be regarded as defensible to each person who is actually subject to it. This does not require that it accommodate the greed of the greedy or the injustice of the unjust. But it does require that it not presume the unworthiness of the moral commitments of its reasonable citizens.⁴⁷     

What about proactive language control?

Psychonomic Bulletin & Review - While several reviews provide an in-depth discussion on reactive language control, which is the language control process that is initiated when the non-target...     

What's so special about medicine?

Health care has increasingly come to be understood as a commodity. The ethical implications of such an understanding are significant. The author argues that health care is not a commodity because health care (1) is non-proprietary, (2) serves the needs of persons who, as patients, are uniquely vulnerable, (3) essentially involves a special human relationship which ought not be bought or sold, (4) helps to define what is meant by ‘necessity’ and cannot be considered a commodity when subjected to rigorous conceptual analysis. The Oslerian conception that medicine is a calling and not a business ought to be reaffirmed by both the profession and the public. Such a conception would have significant ramifications for patient care and health care policy.     

What's Special about Moral Ignorance?

According to an influential view by Elizabeth Harman, moral ignorance, as opposed to factual ignorance, never excuses one from blame. In defense of this view, Harman appeals to the following considerations: (i) that moral ignorance always implies a lack of good will, and (ii) that moral truth is always accessible. In this paper, I clearly distinguish these considerations, and present challenges to both. If my arguments are successful, sometimes moral ignorance excuses.     

Why Talk about Chinese Metaphysics?

Chinese philosophy in the twentieth century has often been related to some sort of cultural or other particularism or some sort of philosophical universalism. By and large, these still seem to be the terms along which academic debates are carried out. The tension is particularly manifest in notions such as “Chinese philosophy,” “Daoist cosmology,” “Neo-Confucian idealism,” or “Chinese metaphysics.” For some, “Chinese metaphysics” may be a blatant contradictio in adiecto, while others may find it a most ordinary topic to be discussed at the beginning of the twenty-first century. In this article, I set out to examine two major discourses in which talk about “metaphysics” is frequent and popular and to which talk of “Chinese metaphysics” may wish to contribute: the history of philosophy and analytic philosophy. My contention is that it is usually far from obvious what reasons are behind putting “Chinese metaphysics” on the academic agenda and to what precise purpose this is done. What my discussion seeks to highlight is the as yet often largely unarticulated dimension of the politics of comparative philosophy—of which talk about “Chinese metaphysics” may but need not be an example.     

Thinking about non‐being∗

There are genuine references to non‐existent objects, as can be seen through elucidating reference in common language and applying the criteria enumerated to expressions used in writing and speaking about fiction. The concept of a fictitious entity is simply accepted in the adoption of the ‘language‐game’ of fiction and has no undesirable ontological consequences. To think otherwise is to fail to attend to the conceptual status of such talk. Accounts of fictional discourse by Russell, Ryle, and Chisholm are found objectionable. The concept of existence is touched on, and consequences concerning reference to abstract and other objects and also concerning method in ontology mentioned.     

What's social about social learning?

Research on social learning in animals has revealed a rich variety of cases where animals--from caddis fly larvae to chimpanzees--acquire biologically important information by observing the actions of others. A great deal is known about the adaptive functions of social learning, but very little about the cognitive mechanisms that make it possible. Even in the case of imitation, a type of social learning studied in both comparative psychology and cognitive science, there has been minimal contact between the two disciplines. Social learning has been isolated from cognitive science by two longstanding assumptions: that it depends on a set of special-purpose modules--cognitive adaptations for social living; and that these learning mechanisms are largely distinct from the processes mediating human social cognition. Recent research challenges these assumptions by showing that social learning covaries with asocial learning; occurs in solitary animals; and exhibits the same features in diverse species, including humans. Drawing on this evidence, I argue that social and asocial learning depend on the same basic learning mechanisms; these are adapted for the detection of predictive relationships in all natural domains; and they are associative mechanisms--processes that encode information for long-term storage by forging excitatory and inhibitory links between event representations. Thus, human and nonhuman social learning are continuous, and social learning is adaptively specialized--it becomes distinctively "social"--only when input mechanisms (perceptual, attentional, and motivational processes) are phylogenetically or ontogenetically tuned to other agents.     

Is Skepticism about Self-Knowledge Coherent?

In previous work I argued that skepticism about the compatibility ofanti-individualism with self-knowledge is incoherent. Anthony Brueckner isnot convinced by my argument, for reasons he has recently explained inprint. One premise in Brueckner's reasoning is that a person'sself-knowledge is confined to what she can derive solely from herfirst-person experiences of using her sentences. I argue that Brueckner'sacceptance of this premise undermines another part of his reasoning – hisattempt to justify his claims about what thoughts our sincere utterances ofcertain sentences would express in various possible worlds. I describe aweird possible world in which a person who uses Brueckner's reasoning endsup with false beliefs about what thoughts her sincere utterances of certainsentences would express in various possible worlds. I recommend that wereject Brueckner's problematic conception of self-knowledge, and adopt onethat better fits the way we actually ascribe self-knowledge.     

What's new about evidence-based assessment?

A clear consensus has emerged around the world concerning the desirability and even the urgency of basing health care delivery systems on evidence. Among behavioral health care providers such as psychologists, evidence-based practice (EBP) has been focused largely on interventions. Psychologists have long emphasized a scientifically based psychometric approach to the development of assessment procedures. Nevertheless, the era of evidence-based assessment highlights 2 somewhat different issues. First, sophisticated assessment is closely integrated with our emerging conceptions of psychopathology, rather than standing separate from these conceptions. Second, broad-based ongoing outcomes assessment systems are increasingly required for EBP on the part of governments and health care policymakers. This article summarizes these developments and looks to the future.     

What's basic about basic emotions?

A widespread assumption in theories of emotion is that there exists a small set of basic emotions. From a biological perspective, this idea is manifested in the belief that there might be neurophysiological and anatomical substrates corresponding to the basic emotions. From a psychological perspective, basic emotions are often held to be the primitive building blocks of other, nonbasic emotions. The content of such claims is examined, and the results suggest that there is no coherent nontrivial notion of basic emotions as the elementary psychological primitives in terms of which other emotions can be explained. Thus, the view that there exist basic emotions out of which all other emotions are built, and in terms of which they can be explained, is questioned, raising the possibility that this position is an article of faith rather than an empirically or theoretically defensible basis for the conduct of emotion research. This suggests that perhaps the notion of basic emotions will not lead to significant progress in the field. An alternative approach to explaining the phenomena that appear to motivate the postulation of basic emotions is presented.     

Who published what about whom?

Each study (n = 1,170) in the Journal of Personality Assessment and its predecessor (1968 through 1982) was reviewed to determine the affiliation of authors, personality measures commonly used, type of study methodologies employed, and characteristics of subjects studied. Generally, there were no large trends or shifts in any of these across the 15-year survey period. The Rorschach continues to be a common subject for study, as does the MMPI; authors have typically been from academic rather than applied settings; validity and normative studies have been most common; and the most frequently used subjects have been college students. Objective tests have increased in frequency in JPA articles, while projectives, except for the Rorschach, have declined; and the majority of research subjects have been drawn from nonpathological populations. Implications for editorial policies and reader interest are discussed.     

Worries about Pritchard’s safety

I take issue with two claims that Duncan Pritchard makes in his recent book, Epistemic Luck. The first concerns his safety-based response to the lottery problem; the second his account of the relationship between safety and intellectual virtue.