Robert Fogelin has argued that in deep disagreements, resolution cannot be achieved by rational argumentation. In response, Richard Feldman has claimed that deep disagreements can be resolved in a ...similar way to more everyday disagreements. I argue that Feldman’s claim is based on a relatively superficial notion of “resolution” of a disagreement whereas the notion at stake in Fogelin’s argument is more substantive. Furthermore, I argue that Feldman’s reply is based on a particular reading of Fogelin’s argument. There is an alternative reading, which takes the central concern to be the role of common ground in argumentation. Engaging with this version of Fogelin’s argument is also a worthwhile endeavour.
Vision: Director's Cut (2017) is a short comic series about Vision, a lonely robot Avenger superhero who builds his own robotic family out of his desire for love and happiness. The story focuses on ...the Vision family as they struggle to lead a 'normal' suburban life under Vision's tutelage. As beings of artificial intelligence (AI), they are subject to social ostracism and abuse by a neighbourhood that refuses to accept them as part of the human community. In doing so, Director's Cut enters into the long-standing literary debate about humanness versus monstrousness, what it means to be a human, and who gets to dictate the definition. The storyline is a contemporary science-fiction rendition of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818), which dramatises the dangers of trying to artificially create a human life. Both texts are in agreement that once these beings are created, because they are sentient and self-aware, then they ought to be treated with dignity, respect and equality. Director's Cut is additionally comparable to Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice in exploring the act of vengeance by the traumatised outsider, and how said acts ironically prove their humanness because revenge is a motive inimitable by any other life form.
Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White (1860) and Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890) are novels significant for their distinct awareness of the socio-political power of the gaze. In this ...essay, I will reveal how these authors use the male and female gaze in similar and contrasting ways. In particular, I shall explore the ways they denounce the patriarchal Victorian system, which renders the act of gazing a power that is both objectifying and degrading. Gazing enacts itself to varying degrees through the social hierarchy, indicating whom can objectify whom, and can enact upon what they choose to see. This hierarchy of Victorian English society is so varied by class, wealth, gender, and race that the gaze in these texts does not always operate in the same way. These complicated intricacies of the gaze are what make these novels require such in-depth analysis, because of the multiple ways in which the gaze can work according to individual scenarios. Both authors portray these complicated intricacies by using both the male and female gaze in the text. While academic critique usually separates these two gazes due to their gender, the novels of Collins and Wilde reveal how important it is to study them together, because while the gaze affects people individually, it is essentially a collective interaction. Collins and Wilde take separate approaches in depicting the gaze: the former testing the capability of the reader to look beyond the coercive statements of the first-person narrator, and the latter an omnipresent third-person narrator. Together, these different approaches increase reader understanding of the mechanical workings of the gaze and therefore complements a comparative analysis of the two novels.
There has been considerable puzzlement over how to respond to higher‐order evidence. The existing dilemmas can be defused by adopting a ‘two‐dimensional’ representation of doxastic attitudes which ...incorporates not only substantive uncertainty about which first‐order state of affairs obtains but also the degree of conviction with which we hold the attitude. This makes it possible that in cases of higher‐order evidence the evidence sometimes impacts primarily on our conviction, rather than our substantive uncertainty. I argue that such a two‐dimensional representation is naturally developed by making use of imprecise probabilities.
Connection to culture in Australian First Peoples children is an important social determinant of health in child development and wellbeing. The current study draws upon the collective knowledge of ...Australian First Peoples Elders and community leaders to collaboratively develop the first theoretical conceptualisation of connection to culture in Australian First Peoples children. Through participatory action research, we integrated both Western and Indigenist methodologies. One-on-one qualitative narrative interviews were conducted with six Australian First Peoples Elders and community leaders. Their knowledge was summarised through a process of Western thematic analysis and Indigenist arts-based participatory analysis to identify core concepts and mechanisms of connection to culture in First Peoples children. The outcome was a theory of connection to culture in Australian First Peoples children. By better understanding how children connect to culture, we can better support children in connecting to culture, targeting an important factor of health and wellbeing.
Jeff Bub has developed an information-theoretic interpretation of quantum mechanics on the basis of the programme to reaxiomatise the theory in terms of information-theoretic principles. According to ...the most recent version of the interpretation, reaxiomatisation can dissolve some of the demands for explanation traditionally associated with the task of providing an interpretation for the theory. The key idea is that the real lesson we should take away from quantum mechanics is that the ‘structure of information’ is not what we thought it was. In particular a feature of the new structure is intrinsic randomness of measurement, which allegedly dissolves a significant part of the measurement problem. I argue that it is difficult to find an appropriate argument to support the claim that measurement is intrinsically random in the relevant sense.
•There are three distinct versions of the information theoretic interpretation of quantum theory.•The most recent version relies on the idea that quantum measurements are ‘intrinsically random’.•There is no good argument for the intrinsic randomness of quantum measurements.•Nonetheless, developing information theoretic interpretations is worthwhile.
Two of the most influential theories about scientific inference are inference to the best explanation (IBE) and Bayesianism. How are they related? Bas van Fraassen has claimed that IBE and ...Bayesianism are incompatible rival theories, as any probabilistic version of IBE would violate Bayesian conditionalization. In response, several authors have defended the view that IBE is compatible with Bayesian updating. They claim that the explanatory considerations in IBE are taken into account by the Bayesian because the Bayesian either does or should make use of them in assigning probabilities (priors and/or likelihoods) to hypotheses. I argue that van Fraassen has not succeeded in establishing that IBE and Bayesianism are incompatible, but that the existing compatibilist response is also not satisfactory. I suggest that a more promising approach to the problem is to investigate whether explanatory considerations are taken into account by a Bayesian who assigns priors and likelihoods on his or her own terms. In this case, IBE would emerge from the Bayesian account, rather than being used to constrain priors and likelihoods. I provide a detailed discussion of the case of how the Copernican and Ptolemaic theories explain retrograde motion, and suggest that one of the key explanatory considerations is the extent to which the explanation a theory provides depends on its core elements rather than on auxiliary hypotheses. I then suggest that this type of consideration is reflected in the Bayesian likelihood, given priors that a Bayesian might be inclined to adopt even without explicit guidance by IBE. The aim is to show that IBE and Bayesianism may be compatible, not because they can be amalgamated, but rather because they capture substantially similar epistemic considerations.
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