Puzzling Pairs

Philosophical Studies - Propositional attitude ascribing sentences seem to give rise to failures of substitution. Is this phenomena best accounted for semantically, by constructing a semantics for...     

Puzzling cases about killing and letting die.

Discussions of euthanasia often appeal to the distinction between killing people and letting them die. Favor asks whether this distinction is morally important--in particular, whether killing is worse than merely letting someone die, even when the motivations and consequences are the same. She explores our moral intuitions via a discussion of various subtly different hypothetical examples.     

Beliefs and responsibility

I am grateful to R.S. Downie and Elizabeth Telfer for their comments on an earlier draft of this paper.     

看法与论证

本文的主导问题是:我们为自己已经具有的看法进行论证是否多余甚至虚伪?为回答这一问题,我们需要澄清关于论证的一些误解。论证并不只是为了说服别人。从根本上说,论证是把东一处西一处的道理联系起来,使我们获得整体的眼光,或日综观。尽管我们在着手论证之前已经有为之进行论证的看法,但获得了论证的看法,在上述意义上,是一种新的看法。即使我们并没有通过论证达到"共识",论证也并非徒劳,因为它可能有助于多样性之间的相互理解。     

Disputing Irrational Beliefs Among Convicted Terrorists and Extremist Beliefs

This study investigated the most common irrational beliefs among samples of: (1) convicted terrorists and (2) extremists, all of whom were prisoners in the country of Jordan. It also investigated the effectiveness of a program of disputing irrational beliefs (DIBP) with the same populations. The subjects were assigned randomly to two groups: an experimental group (EG) that consisted of 43 prisoners who received an training program, and a control group that consisted of 48 prisoners who received no training. The irrational beliefs scale (IBS) scores were assessed for both groups before and after exposure to the DIBP. To test the hypotheses of the study, means and standard deviations of the IBS measures were submitted to a two-way analysis of covariance. The results revealed that the most common irrational belief loaded on the factors of musts, exaggerations, and perfectionism. Moreover, the results revealed significant differences between the means of the two groups on the total IBS scores at post-test, with the EG scoring lower, which indicated the effectiveness of the training program in reducing the level of IBS. The results yielded significant differences in the effect of the reason for imprisonment in favor of extremists and the interaction between the reason for prison and treatment in favor of the EG and extremists.     

Comparativist Rationality and

US testing of nuclear weapons has resulted in about 800,000 premature fatal cancers throughout the globe, and the nuclear tests of China, France, India, Russia, and the UK have added to this total. Surprisingly, however, these avoidable deaths have not received much attention, as compared, for example, to the smaller number of US fatalities on 9-11-01. This essay (1) surveys the methods and models used to assess effects of low-dose ionizing radiation from above-ground nuclear weapons tests and (2) explains some of the epistemological and logical problems (with these methods and models) that have caused scientists to decide against health screening of the most likely test victims. It also (3) argues that, once the faulty presuppositions and question-begging frames about testing and screening are recognized, there are compelling arguments in favor of nuclear-test nations' screening fallout victims, at least among their citizens. Finally, it (4) suggests that logically and epistemically flawed fallout studies/recommendations against screening are more like to occur when scientists adopt a Laudan-style comparativist rationality, rather than when they adopt a metascience more like that of Kuhn and others.     

Rationality and reflection

Christine Korsgaard claims that an agent is less than fully rational if she allows some attitude to inform her deliberation even though she cannot justify doing so. I argue that there is a middle way, which Korsgaard misses, between the claim that our attitudes neither need nor admit of rational assessment, on the one hand, and Korsgaard's claim that the attitudes which inform our deliberation always require justification, on the other: an agent needs reasons to opt out of her concerns – not reasons to opt into them or to stay in. As long as an agent has no good reason to abandon some concern of hers, she is reasonable to harbour it, and to allow it to inform her view of what reasons she has. A rational agent must therefore have the capacity to form higher-order attitudes toward her concerns; but rationality only requires that she exercise that capacity when she has some good reason to do so.     

Rationality and Judgment

Abstract: Philosophical/epistemic theories of rationality differ over the role of judgment in rational argumentation. According to the “classical model” of rationality, rational justification is a matter of conformity with explicit rules or principles. Critics of the classical model, such as Harold Brown and Trudy Govier, argue that the model is subject to insuperable difficulties. They propose, instead, that rationality be understood, ultimately, in terms of judgment rather than rules. In this article I respond to Brown's and Govier's criticisms of the classical model, and to the “judgment model” they propose in its place. I argue that that model is unable both to distinguish between rational and irrational judgment and to avoid recourse to rules, and is therefore inadequate as an account of rationality, critical thinking, or argument appraisal. More positively, I argue that an adequate account of rationality must include a place for both rules and judgment.     

Self-Knowledge and Rationality

The topic of this article is the dependency or, maybe, the interdependency of rationality and self-knowledge. Here two questions may be distinguished, viz. (1) whether being rational is a necessary condition for a creature to have self-knowledge, and (2) whether having self-knowledge is a necessary condition for a creature to be rational. After a brief explication of what I mean by self-knowledge, I deal with the first question. There I defend the Davidsonian position, according to which rationality is, indeed, a necessary condition for self-knowledge. In addition, I distinguish two aspects of rationality which I call basic and local rationality. After that I concentrate on the second question for the remaining larger part of this article. Here I proceed in two stages: first I examine whether self-knowledge is necessary for basic rationality, and then whether it is necessary for local rationality.

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