Stop Making Sense? On a Puzzle about Rationality

In this paper, I present a puzzle about epistemic rationality. It seems plausible that it should be rational to believe a proposition if you have sufficient evidential support for it. It seems plausible that it rationality requires you to conform to the categorical requirements of rationality. It also seems plausible that our first‐order attitudes ought to mesh with our higher‐order attitudes. It seems unfortunate that we cannot accept all three claims about rationality. I will present three ways of trying to resolve this tension and argue that the best way to do this is to reject the idea that strong evidential support is the stuff rationality is made of. In the course of doing this, I shall argue that there is a special class of propositions about the requirements of rationality that we cannot make rational mistakes about and explain how this can be.     

Energy and spirit: Extraction,thermodynamics, and change

This article suggests new ways to think about energy and thermodynamics beyond an extractive, fossil-fuel model. The predominant economic model of the modern world has been driven by the extraction and exploitation of fossil fuels—first coal and then oil. These are powerful forces, although their development is more complicated than we might suspect. At the same time, they influence the new science of thermodynamics, which is tied to heat and heat engines that are fueled by carbon-based inputs extracted from the earth. By attending to the work of Nicolas Georgescu-Roegen, however, we can see how energy and thermodynamics can be linked to a different economic model that is not primarily extractive. And this opens up to new perspectives on energy and change, including one that views energy more explicitly in terms of spirit. We can think about energy as something that avoids the dichotomy of matter and spirit in a way such that it participates in both.     

Being More Realistic About Reasons: On Rationality and Reasons Perspectivism

This paper looks at whether it is possible to unify the requirements of rationality with the demands of normative reasons. It might seem impossible to do because one depends upon the agent's perspective and the other upon features of the situation. Enter Reasons Perspectivism. Reasons perspectivists think they can show that rationality does consist in responding correctly to reasons by placing epistemic constraints on these reasons. They think that if normative reasons are subject to the right epistemic constraints, rational requirements will correspond to the demands generated by normative reasons. While this proposal is prima facie plausible, it cannot ultimately unify reasons and rationality. There is no epistemic constraint that can do what reasons perspectivists would need it to do. Some constraints are too strict. The rest are too slack. This points to a general problem with the reasons‐first program. Once we recognize that the agent's epistemic position helps determine what she should do, we have to reject the idea that the features of the agent's situation can help determine what we should do. Either rationality crowds out reasons and their demands or the reasons will make unreasonable demands.     

A justification for excuses: Brown’s discussion of the knowledge view of justification and the excuse manoeuvre

In Fallibilism: Evidence and Knowledge, Jessica Brown identifies a number of problems for the so-called knowledge view of justification. According to this (unorthodox) view, we cannot justifiably believe what we do not know. Most epistemologists reject this view on the grounds that false beliefs can be justified if, say, supported by the evidence or produced by reliable processes. We think this is a mistake and that many epistemologists are (mistakenly) classifying beliefs as justified because they have properties that indicate that something should be excused. Brown thinks that previous attempts to make this case have been unsuccessful. While the difficulties Brown points to are genuine, I think they show that attempts to explain a classificatory judgment haven't been successful. Still, I would argue that the classification is correct. We need a better explanation of this classificatory judgment. (The situation is similar to the one in which we correctly distinguish knowledge from non-knowledge but then embarrass ourselves trying to explain what this difference consists in.) I will try to clarify the justification-excuse distinction and explain why it's a mistake to insist that beliefs that violate epistemic norms might be justified. Just as it's possible for a rational agent to act without justification in spite of her best intentions (e.g., by using force or violence in trying to defend another from a merely apparent threat), it's possible that a rational thinker who follows the evidence and meets our expectations might nevertheless believe without sufficient justification. If our justified beliefs are supposed to guide us in deciding what to do, we probably should draw on discussions from morality and the law about the justification/excuse distinction to inform our understanding of the epistemic case.

     

A response duration schedule: effects of training, extinction, and deprivation

Rats were trained to hold down a lever for at least 40 consecutive seconds. When the lever had been held down for 40 sec, white noise came on. Releasing the bar in the presence of the noise turned off the noise and operated a feeder that delivered a pellet of food. At the end of training, frequency distributions of response durations peaked at 40 to 41 sec. If as in training, holding down the lever produced white noise at the end of 40 sec, and release of the lever terminated the noise and operated the feeder, but no food delivery occurred, duration distributions and several other measures were initially not very different from when food was delivered. However, if during extinction white noise was never produced by lever holding, and feeder operation did not occur upon lever release, most responses were shorter than 1 sec in duration, some were much longer than 41 sec, and duration distributions did not peak at 40 to 41 sec. When reinforcement was reinstated after extinction, performance quickly returned to pre-extinction measures. Further sessions at different levels of deprivation produced only temporary disruptions in performance.     

Reactions to Social Categorization: Evaluating One Argument Against Affirmative Action1

One argument made against affirmative action is that it is undesirable or inappropriate to treat people on the basis of their group membership. The present study attempts to evaluate college students' opinions about this type of social categorization. Two variables were manipulated: type of social group (i.e., one based on race, gender, religion, sexual orientation, or college major), and the purpose of the categorization (to identify, to form a social group, to form a political group, or for affirmative action purposes). Results indicated that students were, in general, opposed to such social categorizations. The presence of interaction effects, however, suggests that opposition to affirmative action is not uniform across different target groups and is not based solely on objections to social categorization. Implications are discussed.