bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Rights and Risk
Authors: McKerlie Dennis 
Published: June 2016

Robert Nozick has suggested that risky actions are a problem for a moral view based on rights. We ordinarily think that some actions are too dangerous to be permissible, taking into account both the harm risked and the degree of the risk. Other actions, although they run some risk of serious harm, are thought permissible. The problem is to draw this distinction in a principled way by looking to rights.I think that Nozick's argument about risk can be answered but a different argument has convinced me that the rights view cannot handle risk in a satisfactory way. The inability is a function of the basic nature of the view.
Nuclear Hardware and Power: The War of Perceptions
Authors: Govier Trudy 
Published: June 2016

Nations possessing nuclear weapons have seen them as useful for many purposes. These include classic nuclear deterrence (preventing a nuclear attack), extended nuclear deterrence (preventing a conventional attack on the nuclear nation or allied countries), the fighting of a nuclear war ‘if deterrence fails,’ and a ‘diplomatic’ use in which the weapons are seen as implements of coercive political power. Concerning all these uses profound ethical questions arise. It is the last use which will be the focus of attention in this paper.I have chosen this subject partly because I believe that it has received insufficient attention from those reflecting on nuclear policies from an ethical point of view. Discussions tend to focus on the use, threat to use, or intention to use nuclear weapons in response to a nuclear attack or threat of nuclear attack. The retention of nuclear weapons for such a purpose is far easier to rationalize than is the development of such weapons for extended deterrence, nuclear ‘diplomacy,’ or the actual waging of a nuclear war. Historically, nuclear weapons have been held by nuclear states for all these purposes. In fact, there are natural relations between the functions. When a power possesses nuclear weapons, the ultimate token of military power in the modern world, it is natural that it will seek to use them for purposes less restricted than the sole one of deterring nuclear war. Hence there is a natural development from classic deterrence to extended deterrence and the coercive use of nuclear weapons in the pursuit of national interest. There is also a natural connection between classic deterrence and the development and deployment of nuclear weapons for the purpose of fighting and ‘prevailing’ in a nuclear war. An opposing state is to be prevented from attacking by the belief that an attack would be followed by retaliation. That requires that a nuclear state indicate the will and capacity to retaliate-that is, to use these weapons in a real war if necessary.
Aristotle on Making Other Selves
Authors: Millgram Elijah 
Published: June 2016

There is still a relative paucity of discussion of the views on friendship that Aristotle presents in the Nicomachean Ethics, although some recent work may indicate a new trend. One suspects that this paucity reflects a belief that those views are not very interesting; if true, this witnesses to an unfortunate underestimation of Aristotle's account. This account is in fact quite surprising, for – I shall argue – Aristotle believes that one makes one's friends in the most literal sense of the verb.Aristotle takes virtue-friendship, i.e., the friendship of virtuous people who are friends for virtue, as ‘friendship in the primary way.’ Other ‘friendships’ – for utility and for pleasure – are only so-called by way of similarity to friendship proper, i.e., virtue-friendship (1157a30ff). Accordingly, proper friendship must be non-instrumental, or, more carefully, not essentially instrumental, unlike the friendship-analogs that fall outside the scope of friendship proper (1157a17-20). While ‘friends of utility … were never friends of each other, but of what was expedient for them’ (1157a14ff), a true ‘friend is taken to be someone who wishes and does goods or apparent goods to his friend for the friend's own sake’ (1166a3). The theme of desiring and acting for the friend's own sake is repeated many times in the Ethics; in the Rhetoric it is explicitly taken as definitive of friendship (1361b35-40). Since the contrast between true friendship and mere friendship-analogs is that between the not essentially instrumental (for the sake of the friend) and the essentially instrumental (using the friend as a means to pleasure or utility), a successful account of Aristotle's views on friendship must preserve and explain this contrast in all its centrality.
Out-Gunning Skepticism
Authors: Carrier L. S. 
Published: June 2016

Bredo C. Johnsen1 misconceives my strictures concerning acceptance of the following principle (where ‘p’ stands for any empirical proposition):(1) If A both knows that p and knows that p entails q, then A can come to know that q.Johnsen seems unaware that my criticism was intended to apply only after (1) is made to appear in its most plausible light; that is, only after its consequent is interpreted as: ’It is logically possible for A to know that q.’ Without this interpretation (1) might be dismissed simply on the grounds that A suffers from some physical or psychological disability that prevents him from drawing inferences from what he knows.Properly interpreted, (1) remains acceptable as long as the propositions substituted for p and q are such that it is at least logically possible for A to get evidence enough to make them known. Agreement on this point is itself enough to render Johnsen's own examples irrelevant. For instance, even though it may be physically impossible for A to get adequate evidence that in the constellation Andromeda there is a planet intermediate in size between Venus and Earth, the foregoing is still a fit substitution instance for q; but since such a q does not suffice to falsify the consequent of (1), it does nothing to generate any skeptical argument, either.
What Is Evolutionary Altruism?
Authors: Sober Elliott 
Published: June 2016

In this paper I want to clarify what biologists are talking about when they talk about the evolution of altruism. I’ll begin by saying something about the common sense concept. This familiar idea I’ll call ‘vernacular altruism.’ One point of doing this is to make it devastatingly obvious that the common sense concept is very different from the concept as it’s used in evolutionary theory. After that preliminary, I’ll describe some features of the evolutionary concept. Then I’ll conclude by briefly considering what explanatory relation might obtain between vernacular altruism and evolutionary altruism.Although the points I’ll make are rather elementary ones, their interest is not restricted to those who have never heard of the evolutionary problem. The reason for this is that there is some amount of confusion about evolutionary altruism among evolutionary biologists themselves.
Galen Explains the Elephant
Authors: Hankinson R. J. 
Published: June 2016

Q: What did the elephant say to the naked man?A: It looks O.K., but can you breathe through it?Let me begin by justifying that joke for those of you didn’t find it funny. The relationship between the morphology of the physical organs and their activities has long been a vexed issue in the philosophy of biology: the question of whether structure determines function is of course of contemporary importance in evolutionary theory. That there was a relationship between structure and function was not in general a matter of doubt to the Greek theoretical biologists: but both the extent, and crucially the direction, of the dependence was. And the question need not be restricted to a consideration of the function of a particular part in isolation: when Aristotle takes issue with Anaxagoras for asserting that humans are the most intelligent species because they have hands, claiming rather that they have hands because they are intelligent, he is making a claim not just about the direction of explanation involved, but he is also implicitly at least indicating the scope of such explanations. For Aristotle, intelligence is one of the human functions: and that function necessitates the existence and development of certain organic structures.
Liberalism and Communitarianism
Authors: Kymlicka Will 
Published: June 2016

It is a commonplace amongst communitarians, socialists and feminists alike that liberalism is to be rejected for its excessive ‘individualism’ or ‘atomism,’ for ignoring the manifest ways in which we are ‘embedded’ or ‘situated’ in various social roles and communal relationships. The effect of these theoretical flaws is that liberalism, in a misguided attempt to protect and promote the dignity and autonomy of the individual, has undermined the associations and communities which alone can nurture human flourishing.My plan is to examine the resources available to liberalism to meet these objections. My primary concern is with what liberals can say in response, not with what particular liberals actually have said in the past. Still, as a way of acknowledging intellectual debts, if nothing else, I hope to show how my arguments are related to the political morality of modem liberals from J.S. Mill through to Rawls and Dworkin. The term ‘liberal’ has been applied to many different theories in many different fields, but I’m using it in this fairly restricted sense. First, I’m dealing with a political morality, a set of moral arguments about the justification of political action and political institutions. Second, my concern is with this modem liberalism, not seventeenth-century liberalism, and I want to leave entirely open what the relationship is between the two. It might be that the developments initiated by the ‘new liberals’ are really an abandonment of what was definitive of classical liberalism. G.A. Cohen, for example, says that since they rejected the principle of ‘self-ownership’ which was definitive of classical liberalism (e.g. in Locke), these new liberals should instead be called ‘social democrats.’My concern is to defend their political morality, whatever the proper label.
A Reply to Bickenbach
Authors: Duff R. Antony 
Published: June 2016

Jerome Bickenbach has provided a fair and sympathetic account of my argument in Trials and Punishments, and has clarified some of the book’s obscurities - for which I am very grateful: I will focus my response on his main objection to my account of punishment, since I am not persuaded that the objection holds.Bickenbach argues that my ideal account of what punishment ought to be if it is to be adequately justified would actually show, if it succeeds, that criminal punishment (or at least punishment involving hard treatment) cannot be justified at all. ‘Criminal punishment, it would appear, is unjustifiable when it is needed, but justifiable only if it is no longer required’ (786). It would be justifiable if it was imposed on a criminal who shared the values embodied in the laws of the true community to which she belonged: but it would then be unnecessary, since in such cases ‘blame alone’ (or, one might add, a formal conviction or a purely symbolic punishment) would suffice for the communicative and persuasive purposes which punishment should ideally serve. It would be necessary if the criminal was a committed nonconformist who rejected the community’s values: but it would then be unjustifiable, since in such cases it could not serve the purposes which punishment should ideally serve.
Possibility and Combinatorialism: Wittgenstein versus Armstrong
Authors: Bradley Raymond 
Published: June 2016

In his recently published paper, ‘The Nature of Possibility,’ David Armstrong presents an account of possibility which, he correctly claims, is partly an elaboration of the early Wittgenstein's. Both are combinatorialists. That is to say, both hold that there is a fixed ontology of individuals, properties and relations whose combinations determine the range of all possible states of affairs, and therewith the range of all those totalities of states of affairs which they call possible worlds.But Armstrong's account, I believe, is fatally flawed in ways that Wittgenstein's isn't. And this, I shall argue, is mainly because Armstrong is both an actualist, whose fixed ontology is one of actual individuals, properties and relations, and a reductionist, who tries to reduce the notion of possibility to that of ߢallߣ their combinations. Armstrong seems to think that Wittgenstein at least shares his actualism, and perhaps even his reductionism.
Rawls and the Collective Ownership of Natural Abilities
Authors: Kernohan Andrew 
Published: June 2016

In two passages ofA Theory of JusticeRawls suggests that, as a consequence of his egalitarian theory, the natural talents of persons are common property.We see then that the difference principle represents, in effect, an agreement to regard the distribution of natural talents as a common asset and to share in the benefits of this distribution whatever it turns out to be.The two principles are equivalent, as I have remarked, to an undertaking to regard the distribution of natural abilities as a collective asset so that the more fortunate are to benefit only in ways that help those who have lost out.
Aristotle's Horror Vacui 1
Authors: Thorp John 
Published: June 2016

At Physics IV,8, 216a26-7, Aristotle cracks a joke. It is one of the relatively few deliberate jokes in the corpus, and its occurrence here is not without significance. Aristotle in these chapters is arguing against those who believe in the existence of the void, or vacuum, or empty space; he says, ‘even if we consider it on its own merits the so-called vacuum will be found to be really vacuous.'To be sure, this is not a very funny joke; what is interesting about it, though, is that it underlines the general attitude of dismissive flippancy that seems to run through Aristotle's consideration of the void. He seems to refuse to take the hypothesis of the void at all seriously. He never argues directly that the void does not or cannot exist, but contents himself with criticizing the arguments that other thinkers had advanced in its favour.
Two Dogmas in Retrospect
Authors: Quine W. V. 
Published: June 2016

In retrospecting ‘Two Dogmas’ I find myself overshooting the mark by twenty years. I think back to college days, 61 years ago. I majored in mathematics and was doing my honors reading in mathematical logic, a subject that had not yet penetrated the Oberlin curriculum. My new love, in the platonic sense, was Whitehead and Russell’s Principia Mathematica.I was taken with the clear, clean incisiveness of its formulas. But this was not true of its long introduction to volume 1, nor of some of the explanatory patches of prose that were interspersed through the three volumes. In those pages and passages the distinction between sign and object, or use and mention, was badly blurred. Partly in consequence, there was vague recourse to intensional properties, or ideas, under the disarmingly technical name of propositional functions. These ill-conceived mentalistic notions paraded as the philosophical foundation for the clean-cut classes, truth functions, and quantification that would have been a far better starting point in their own right.
Pro Buridano; Contra Hazenum
Authors: Hinckfuss Ian 
Published: June 2016

Alan Hazen has claimed that Buridan’s theory of truth does not escape semantic paradox.In this paper, I claim that Buridan's theory is untouched by Hazen's case.My solution to Hazen's paradox requires the recognition of the exceptionability of what I shall call T-Elimination, namely, the principle (to be clarified later) that from a statement that such and such is true, we may deduce such and such. The exceptions are explained by reference to the role of what I shall call the meta-content of a locution, that is, that information conveyed by any locution that tells us what sort of a locution it is intended to be. The exceptionability of T-Elimination turns out to be shared by other well-accepted principles of deduction also—and for the same reasons.
The Metaphysics Of Freedom
Authors: Dretske Fred 
Published: June 2016

I offer Jimmy a dollar to wiggle his ears. He wiggles them because he wants the dollar and, as a result of my offer, thinks he will earn it by wiggling his ears. So I cause him to believe something that explains, or helps to explain, why he wiggles his ears. If I push a button, and a bell, wired to the button, rings because the button is depressed, I cause the bell to ring. I make it ring. Indeed, I ring it. So why don’t I, by offering him a dollar, make Jimmy wiggle his ears? Why, indeed, don’t I wiggle them? If I ring a bell by pushing a button, why don’t I wiggle Jimmy’s ears by offering him a dollar?That is a question that has always vexed a compatibilist’s vision of human freedom. If an intentional act–say, wiggling one’s ears in order to earn a dollar–is caused by one’s beliefs and desires (the reasons one has for wiggling one’s ears), then, by the transitivity of the causal relation, it appears to follow that it is (also) caused by whatever causes one to have those beliefs and desires. But the causes of belief and desire are often (in fact, if we trace the causal chain far enough backward, always) factors over which one has no control. So intentional behavior is often (or always) something one is made (caused) to do by factors over which one has no control. This, however, robs intentional behaviorand, presumably, also voluntary action–of its autonomy. Deliberate acts–Jimmy wiggling his ears to earn a dollar–have the same causal structure as does a bell that rings because a button is pushed. The only difference is the switch.
Some Remarks on Indiscernibility
Authors: Kazmi Ali 
Published: June 2016

If α and α’ are distinct variables and ϕ and ϕ’ are open sentences of some language, where ϕ’ is the result of replacing one or more free occurrences of a in α with free occurrences of α’ in ϕ’, then a universal closure of ⌜(α=α’ → (ϕ → ϕ’))⌝, is an indiscernibility principle of that language. For instance, (1) is an indiscernibility principle.The existence of opaque constructions falsifies the familiar unrestricted principle of substitution which affirms that co-referential expressions are intersubstitutable in all contexts without change of truth-value. But indiscernibility principles are another matter. Not every counter-example to the unrestricted principle of substitution is a counter-example to some indiscernibility principle. Indeed, it is likely to be thought that there is no counter-example to any indiscernibility principle, and that the semantics of variables and objectual quantification ensures that all indiscernibility principles are true.
A Dilemma For Causal Reliabilist Theories of Knowledge
Authors: Lipson Morris , Savitt Steven 
Published: June 2016

In a ‘Letter from Washington’ in The New Yorker, Elizabeth Drew reported some speculation regarding the mental processes of Ronald Reagan. In Drew’s words:The curious process Drew describes is clearly important in many ways -historically, politically, and perhaps legally. We contend that there is even some epistemological significance to Reagan’s method for the fixation of belief. We shall argue, in particular, that some of those curiously insulated beliefs which (if we are to believe Drew) Reagan possesses qualify as knowledge under at least one leading causal reliabilist theory of knowledge- that presented by F. Dretske in Knowledge and the Flow of Information (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press 1981). But, as we detail the structure of such beliefs, what is probably evident already will emerge quite clearly, viz., that these beliefs do not amount to knowledge.
Knowledge, Society, and History1
Authors: Kitcher Philip 
Published: June 2016

Here is a traditional way of thinking about human knowledge.(1) Knowledge is a species of true belief. The crucial difference between knowledge and other kinds of true belief is that propositions that are known have a special property (they are justified, or warranted).(2a) Justified (warranted) propositions either have intrinsic justification (they are self-warranting for the knower) or else they are obtainable by means of a justification-conferring argument from other justified propositions that the knower believes.(3a) The only propositions with intrinsic justification are those that fall into one of two classes: the set of a priori truths (logic, mathematics, etc.) and the set of propositions recording the sensory experiences of the knower.
Swampman of La Mancha1
Authors: Brown Deborah J. 
Published: June 2016

I was dreaming about Delores when the phone interrupted us. It was the Chief, or ‘Stress,’ as we liked to call him, telling me to get part of my anatomy down to Shakey’s Funeral Parlor. My head ached. I thought I must be the only sucker who gets a hangover from being drunk on life. I got up, put two eggs, a spoonful of wheatgerm, the remains of the scotch, and the phonebill into the blender and fed the whole lot to the cat. It helped, but not as much as Delores would have. I should have married her even if she was a Hubot. At least she could play chess. I was still Rumanating over Delores as I hit the curb outside Shakey’s.I had the notion that Shakey’s was once a pizza joint but I could have been wrong. I found Stress, disheveled as usual, in the lobby.‘You’re late,’ he said. I wasn’t, but he’s thatkinda guy. He says ‘Jump!’ and you say ‘With or without my legs?’ We got our free Cokes from Shakey himself, who led us down the hall.
Computational Tractability and Conceptual Coherence: Why Do Computer Scientists Believe thatP≠NP?
Authors: Thagard Paul 
Published: June 2016

According to Church’s thesis, we can identify the intuitive concept of effective computability with such well-defined mathematical concepts as Turing computability and partial recursiveness. The almost universal acceptance of Church’s thesis among logicians and computer scientists is puzzling from some epistemological perspectives, since no formal proof is possible of a thesis that involves an informal concept such as effectiveness. Elliott Mendelson has recently argued, however, that equivalencies between intuitive notions and precise notions need not always be considered unprovable theses, and that Church’s thesis should be accepted as true.I want to discuss a thesis that is nearly as important in current research in computer science as Church’s thesis. I call the newer thesis the tractabilitythesis, since it identifies the intuitive class of computationally tractable problems with a precise class of problems whose solutions can be computed in polynomial time. After briefly reviewing the theory of intractability, I compare the grounds for accepting the tractability thesis with the grounds for accepting Church's thesis. Intimately connected with the tractability thesis is the mathematical conjecture, whose meaning I shall shortly explain, that P≠NP. Unlike Church's thesis, this conjecture is precise enough to be capable of mathematical proof, but most computer scientists believe it even though no proof has been found. As we shall see below, understanding the grounds for acceptance of the conjecture that P≠NP has implications for general questions in the philosophy of mathematics and science, especially concerning the epistemological importance of explanatory and conceptual coherence.