How are justified belief and rational belief related? Some philosophers think that justified belief and rational belief come to the same thing. Others take it that justification is a matter of how ...well a particular belief is supported by the evidence, while rational belief is a matter of how well a belief coheres with a person’s other beliefs. In this paper, I defend the view that justification is a dimension of rationality, a view that can make sense of both of these conflicting accounts. When it modifies belief, ‘rational’ is a multidimensional adjective, as there are multiple dimensions along which a belief can be rational. I will argue that one of these dimensions is justification, an account that can not only explain why philosophers give diverging theories of the relationship between justified belief and rational belief, but can also reveal why rational belief and justified belief are closely related despite being distinct.
Intersectionality as emergence Jorba, Marta; López de Sa, Dan
Philosophical studies,
07/2024, Letnik:
181, Številka:
6-7
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
Intersectionality is the notion that concerns the complexity of the experiences of individuals in virtue of their belonging to multiple socially significant categories. One of its main insights is ...that the way society is structured around categories such as gender, race, sexuality, class, etc., produces distinctive and specific forms of discrimination and privilege for groups in the intersections. In this paper, we suggest conceiving intersectionality as a general metaphysical framework wherein specific claims to the effect that the experiences of discrimination of Black women, among others, can be fruitfully formulated and examined. The main claim is that intersectional experiences
emerge
from the conjunction of social categories when social structures make them relevant vis-à-vis discrimination and privilege. We then argue that our view has three main virtues: metaphysical neutrality, explanatory flexibility and methodological openness. Explaining these virtues will allow us to contrast our proposal with alternatives from the recent literature.
It may soon be possible for neurotechnology to connect two subjects' brains such that they share a single token mental state, such as a feeling of pleasure or displeasure. How will our moral ...frameworks have to adapt to accommodate this prospect? And if this sort of mental-state-sharing might already obtain in some cases, how should this possibility impact our moral thinking? This question turns out to be extremely challenging, because different examples generate different intuitions: If two subjects share very few mental states, then it seems that we should count the value of those states twice, but if they share very many mental states, then it seems that we should count the value of those statesonce. We suggest that these conflicting intuitions can be reconciled if the mental states that matter for welfare have a holistic character, in a way that is independently plausible. We close by drawing tentative conclusions about how we ought to think about the moral significance of shared mental states.
Representationalism about consciousness is the view that the phenomenal character of an experience supervenes on the content of that experience. Much of the literature on representationalism concerns ...putative objections and replies, rather than clarifying the details of the view itself. Defenders of representationalism face a question which has thus far been largely overlooked: what, precisely, is the relationship between phenomenal character and content? The representationalist has three options: mere supervenience, building or metaphysical dependence, or identity. After examining a number of versions of the first two views, I conclude that they all face serious metaphysical difficulties. I argue instead that this relationship is identity, despite the fact that identifying content and phenomenal character requires revising our view of the content of experiences. Identifying content and phenomenal character strengthens the dialectical position of representationalists by providing them with better responses to anti-representationalist objections. In closing, I show how we can accept the implications of this revisionary view of perceptual content.
Is it good for us if the different parts of our lives are connected to each other like the parts of a good story? Some philosophers have thought so, while others have firmly rejected it. In this ...paper, I focus on the state-of-the-art anti-narrativist arguments Amy Berg has recently presented in this journal. I argue that while she makes a good case that the best kind of lives for us do not revolve around a single project or theme, the best kind of narrativist views actually encourage us to pursue a variety of different projects, as long as they are mutually supportive. I claim that when interpreted in the most plausible way, prudentially good-making narrative coherence arises precisely out of this kind of unity in diversity. Well-roundedness and narrative coherence are thus not inherently in tension, but are both good-making holistic features of our lives.
The Liar paradox arguably shows that a coherent and self-applicable notion of truth is governed by nonclassical logic. It then seems natural to conclude that classical logic is inadequate for ...defining a truth theory. In this article, we argue that this is not the case. In the spirit of Reinhardt (Math Logic Formal Syst 94:227, 1985; J Philos Logic 15:219–251, 1986), and in analogy with Hilbert’s program for the foundation of classical mathematics, we will articulate an instrumentalist justification for the use classical logic: it will be argued that classical reasoning is a
useful but dispensable instrument
, which can yield philosophically adequate truth theories.
The standard semantics for modality, together with the influential restrictor analysis of conditionals (Kratzer, 1986, 2012) renders conditional
ought
claims like “If John’s stealing, he ought to be ...stealing” trivially true. While this might seem like a problem specifically for the restrictor analysis, the issue is far more general. Any account must predict that modals in the consequent of a conditional sometimes receive obligatorily unrestricted interpretation, as in the example above, but sometimes appear restricted, as in, e.g., “If John’s speeding, he ought to pay the fine.” And the problem runs deeper, for there are non-conditional variants of the data. Thus, the solution cannot lie in adopting a particular analysis of conditionals, nor a specific account of the interaction between conditionals and modals. Indeed, with minimal assumptions, the standard account of modality will render a myriad of claims about what one ought to, must, or may, do trivially true. Worse, the problem extends to a wide range of non-deontic modalities, including metaphysical modality. But the disaster has a remedy. I argue that the source of the problem for the standard account lies in its failure to capture an inferential evidence constraint encoded in the meaning of a wide range of modal constructions. I offer an account that captures this constraint, and show it provides a general and independently motivated solution to the problem.
This paper illuminates a typically obscured ground for rectificatory obligations: harms justified as ‘lesser evils.’ Lesser-evil harms are not the result of overall morally prohibited acts but of ...acts permissibly carried out to prevent significantly greater harm. The paper argues that harms caused as unintended side effects of acting on lesser-evil justifications, notably in military rescue operations, may give rise to claims to compensation, even if (1) the military acts that caused the harms in question were justified on lesser-evil grounds and (2) the victims in question are no worse off as a result; they may even owe their survival to the act of rescue. The paper defends three claims. First, being better off as a result of a harmful rescue than one would otherwise have been does not preclude claims to be compensated for harms suffered as a side effect. Second, identifying the relevant counterfactual for purposes of compensatory justice is sometimes a prescriptive, rather than a descriptive, matter. Rather than relying on empirical speculations about what
would
have happened had a harm not occurred, we must, in certain cases, consider what agents
ought
to have done. Finally, duties of compensation need not fall on those who caused the to-be-compensated harms. That infringing rights is permissible in certain cases does not imply that no compensation is owed, but merely that it is not necessarily rights-infringers on whom duties of compensation fall.
In this paper we introduce the view that realism about a social kind K entails that the grounding conditions of K are difficult (or impossible) to manipulate. In other words, we define social kind ...realism in terms of relative frame manipulability (RFM). In articulating our view, we utilize theoretical resources from Epstein’s (Epstein,
The ant trap: Rebuilding the foundations of the Social Sciences
. Oxford University Press, 2015) grounding/anchoring model and causal interventionism. After comparing our view with causal and principle-based (Tahko,
Synthese
200(2):1–23, 2022) proposals, we motivate RFM by showing that it accommodates important desiderata about the social landscape (such as recognizing the context-relativity of social properties and the emancipatory dimension of social practice). Finally, we consider three objections. First, we tackle frame-necessitarianism (FN), the view that social kind frames are metaphysically necessary (and thus unmanipulable). Secondly, we engage with what Epstein (Epstein,
Philosophy and Phenomenological Research
, 99(3):768–781 2019a) calls UNIVERSALITY (the view that social kinds can hold in the absence of anchors) and we argue that it should also be resisted. Finally, we tackle a recent objection from Mason’s (Mason,
Philosophical Studies
, 178(12):3975–3994) essentialism about social kinds.
