THE FRESHMAN OBJECTION TO EXPRESSIVISM AND WHAT TO MAKE OF IT

Cognitivism is the view that the primary function of moral judgements is to express beliefs that purport to say how things are; expressivism is the contrasting view that their primary function is to express some desire-like state of mind. I shall consider what I call the freshman objection to expressivism. It is pretty uncontroversial that this objection rests on simple misunderstandings. There are nevertheless interesting metaethical lessons to learn from the fact that the freshman objection is prevalent among undergraduates and non-philosophers. It leaves for expressivists two awkward explanatory tasks. Number one is that of explaining why natural selection – which, by expressivism's own lights, favoured moral thought and talk because of their socially useful regulative and coordinating functions – did not favour a stance that would make moral thought and talk more effective in fulfilling these functions. Number two is that of explaining how moral thought and talk survive in cultural evolution, despite the prevalence of the freshman objection and related worries. I conclude that expressivism as a theory of actual moral discourse rather than a revisionist theory is either false or committed to an implausible error theory, according to which ordinary speakers are systematically mistaken about what they are up to when they make moral judgements.     

Graduate Student Selection: Graduate record examination,socioeconomic status,and undergraduate grade point average as predictors of study success in a western European University

Graduate students' mobility has increased within Europe. Yet, empirical evidence on the validity of standardized admission tests in Europe is still scarce. The aim of the present study was therefore to investigate the incremental validity of the GRE® revised general test above undergraduate grade point average (U‐GPA) by focusing on a multinational sample of master students (N = 282) enrolled at a Dutch university. Results indicated that the Analytical Writing part of the GRE predicts graduate grade point average above and beyond U‐GPA. Furthermore, the results suggest that the relationship is independent of students' socioeconomic status as indexed by parental education. Implications for graduate student selection in a European context are discussed.     

Differentiating insight from non-insight problems

This study aimed to investigate whether a range of tasks that have been generally classed as requiring insight form an empirically separable group of tasks distinct from tasks generally classed as non-insight. In this study, 24 insight tasks, 10 non-insight tasks, and tests of individual differences in cognitive abilities and working memory were administered to 60 participants. Cluster analysis of the problem-solving tasks indicated that the presumed insight problems did tend to cluster with other presumed insight problems, and similarly the presumed non-insight problems tended to cluster with other presumed non-insight tasks. Performance on presumed insight problems was particularly linked to measures of ideational flexibility with a different pattern of results for the non-insight tasks. Spatial insight problems were linked to spatial flexibility and verbal insight tasks were linked to vocabulary scores. The results are discussed in relation to recent developments of dual process theories of thinking.     

Battling over the public sphere: Islamic reactions to the music of today

This article analyses discussions about music in the new public sphere of the Arab world. First, it focuses on what states do to control musical expressions and what functions religious actors have in that control. Four cases are looked into: Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Lebanon and Palestine. Then the article discusses theological arguments, in the public sphere, about music. The theologians are divided into three positions: moderates, hard-liners and liberals. It is argued that structural changes of the public sphere—especially with regards to new media and consumer culture—have caused a heated debate about music and morality. While hard-liners and moderates engage in a discussion about the legal and the forbidden in Islam, liberals stress the importance of allowing competing norms. Examples of extremist violence against musicians is discussed and contextualised.

Buck-Passing and the Wrong Kind of Reasons

According to T.M. Scanlon's buck-passing account of value, to be valuable is not to possess intrinsic value as a simple and unanalysable property, but rather to have other properties that provide reasons to take up an attitude in favour of their owner or against it. The 'wrong kind of reasons' objection to this view is that we may have reasons to respond for or against something without this having any bearing on its value. The challenge is to explain why such reasons are of the wrong kind. This is what I set out to do, after illustrating the objection more thoroughly.     

Non-Cognitivism and Fundamental Moral Certitude: Reply to Eriksson and Francén Olinder

Accommodating degrees of moral certitude is a serious problem for non-cognitivism about ethics. In particular, non-cognitivism has trouble accommodating fundamental moral certitude. John Eriksson and Ragnar Francén Olinder [2016] have recently proposed a solution. In fact, Eriksson and Francén Olinder offer two different proposals—one ‘classification’ account and one ‘projectivist’ account. We argue that the classification account faces the same problem as previous accounts do, while the projectivist account has unacceptable implications. Non-cognitivists will have to look elsewhere for a plausible solution to the problem of accommodating fundamental moral certitude.     

Indexicals and Reference‐Shifting: Towards a Pragmatic Approach

I propose a pragmatic approach to the kind of reference‐shifting occurring in indexicals as used in e.g. written notes and answering machine messages. I proceed in two steps. First, I prepare the ground by showing that the arguments against such a pragmatic approach raised in the recent literature fail. Second, I take a first few steps towards implementing this approach, by sketching a pragmatic theory of reference‐shifting, and showing how it can handle cases of the relevant kind. While the immediate scope of the paper is restricted to indexicals and reference‐shifting, and the discussion is confined to a specific range of theories and cases, the approach proposed is compatible with a fairly broad range of more or less semantically conservative theories, and many of the conclusions drawn are significant for the evaluation of pragmatic explanations in philosophy more generally. The overall goal is to offer a new perspective on the issues under discussion, and to prompt philosophers to reconsider some of the established methods by which pragmatic explanations are evaluated.     

Access Problems and explanatory overkill

I argue that recent attempts to deflect Access Problems for realism about a priori domains such as mathematics, logic, morality, and modality using arguments from evolution result in two kinds of explanatory overkill: (1) the Access Problem is eliminated for contentious domains, and (2) realist belief becomes viciously immune to arguments from dispensability, and to non-rebutting counter-arguments more generally.     

Core self-evaluations as a moderator of the relationship between task complexity,job resources,and performance

In this study we examined the role of trait core self-evaluations (CSE) as a person-related resource, hypothesizing that the relationship between task complexity and performance would be positive for people high in trait CSE and negative for people low in trait CSE. Moreover, we hypothesized that trait CSE would influence the buffering effect of job-related resources on the complexity–performance relationship, with such a buffering effect showing for people high but not for people low in trait CSE. To test our hypotheses, we conducted a five-day spanning experience sampling study. Our results showed that trait CSE indeed influenced the complexity–performance relationship in the sense that this relationship was only positive for employees high in CSE. Results on the hypothesized three-way interaction between task complexity, job-related resources, and CSE were less univocal as only one out of four three-way interactions approached conventional levels of significance. By showing that the complexity–performance relationship is only positive for employees high in CSE, our results go against the well-accepted idea that challenge demands act as a two-edged sword for all employees alike. Instead, the effect of challenge demands on performance depends on the individual’s level of person-related resources.