Robert Audi is a contemporary exponent of intuitionism within the field of moral epistemology. That is, his answer to the question "how do we know what is right" involves an appeal to a quasi-sensory and non-inferential recognition one might call intuition for lack of a better term. His 2013 book MORAL PERCEPTION is one of those that puts this view forward. My understanding is that Audi specifically thinks of duties and their breach as the objects of this intuition. We intuit things like "lying is prima facie wrong." We neither infer it nor are we making a statement of subjective preference when we say such a thing. We intuit it and we are sensing something objectively true when we do so. I think there is something both importantly right and importantly wrong in this. I think that it is appropriate to ground moral judgments in intuitions, but those intuitions are of the goodness of events, not the rightness of actions. Intuitionism, that is, works better wit...
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I like the fact that the English speaking world still uses the term "movies" for these two hour blocks of audio-visual entertainment. One could play an endless language game with what counts as a movie. Once some level of audience interactivity is involved doesn't it cease to be a movie and become a "video game"? Do we want to privilege av entertainment designed to be shown (as first run) in a theater, as a collective experience, over stuff made for television? The former are still called "movies" without adjective, the latter are usually called "TV movies" or something else. Or is that distinction fading as obsolete? Language games aside, I like the fact that we still use the term "movies" because it reminds us of the longer expression "motion pictures" and THAT in turn reminds us of the original surprise that the first viewers more than a century ago might have expressed. "Wow! ... those pictures MOVE!"...
Do we have direct introspective access into our own minds, or (if you believe in distinguishing, say, between ego and id) into some portion of our own minds? In The Opacity of Mind (2011), Peter Carruthers offered a "no," answer, along with an explanation of why we think we do. Carruthers argues that natural selection has bred into us an ability to read each other's minds. My ability to infer that an acquaintance is angry at me, and perhaps scheming up an ambush to kill me, is of obvious survival significance, and the gene lines that led to such an ability were naturally the ones that account for our dedicated mental subsystem for understanding one another. This system involves observations of behavior, facial expressions, tones of voice, etc. The SAME system, which of course relies upon behavior, facial expressions, etc., is also responsible for our understanding of our selves, Carruthers submits. There is no "inner sense" to it, though the subsyste...
Really? This one had to be argued? McCoy was on trial for his life. He made very clear to his lawyer that he did not want to plead guilty and wanted an alibi defense. His lawyer bluntly told the jury that McCoy was guilty. McCoy is now on death row. It is possible to extend some sympathy to Mr English, McCoy's lawyer. He may well have believed that the best chance to save his client's life was to admit guilt and ask for a life sentence as an act of mercy. Nonetheless, that wasn't his call. A lawyer is the agent of his client, not the principal. .
Three days ago I mentioned an episode of The Jeffersons in which the etymology of the word "sincere" was discussed. I thought for a bit that I had tracked down the ep and that it was Season 2, Episode 4, "Harry and Daphne," which aired on October 4, 1975. Alas, though, I had focused on the wrong culprit. Harry never there discusses Daphne's sincerity at all, and the only etymological discussion involves the name Keller (which we're told means "cellar," -- big whoop.) If any reader of this blog can help me identify the episode where Harry or someone else DOES discuss "sincerity," I will be grateful.
"We can conduct certain tests assuming that certain memeplexes (e.g., science, logic, rationality) are foundational, but at a later time we might want to bring these latter memeplexes into question too. The more comprehensively we have tested our interlocking memeplexes, the more confident we can be that we have not let a meme virus enter into our mindware." Keith Stanovich, THE ROBOT'S REBELLION (2004).
William James made the following points about Hegelian philosophy in an 1882 article. 1. We cannot eat our cake and have it; that is, the only real contradiction there can be between thoughts is where one is true, the other false. When that happens, one must go forever, nor is there any 'higher synthesis' in which both can wholly revive. 2. A chasm is not a bridge in any utilizable sense; that is, no mere negation can be the instrument of a positive advance in thought. 3. The continua, time, space, and the ego, are bridges because they are without chasm. 4. But they bridge over the chasms between represented qualities only partially. 5. Their partial bridging, however, makes the qualities share in a common world. 6. The other characteristics of the qualities are separate facts. 7. But the same quality appears in many times and space. Generic sameness of the quality wherever found becomes thus a further means by which the jolts are reduced. 8. But between different q...
The word sincere certainly looks like it could have come from the expression "without wax," or sine cero in Latin. My understanding is that this was a folk etymology which serious scholars dispute, but it had a venerable history to it even before Lionel Trilling cited it in a 1971 book on the development of the ideas of sincerity and authenticity. Trilling said that this fanciful etymology serves a purpose to remind us that the adjective described materials before it came to describe people -- materials that were in fact what they were sold as. There's an episode of the television show THE JEFFERSONS, made not long after the publication of Trilling's book, in which the word "sincere" is expounded by one of the characters in this way. As I remember the sitcom episode, the word began with medieval apple merchants who would hide the flaws in their product by the astute application of patches of wax -- red wax, presumably. Skeptical buye...
The current round of protests in Iran now seem to have gone far beyond anyone's original intent, and the demands of the leaders emerging from the movement are inflated compared to the more modest demands that were being put forward in the final days of the old year. I believe this is typical of the dynamics of a revolution. Let's look back on those days for a moment. The sequence of events I have in mind began on December 28 among people angry that factory workers were owed a lot of back pay, and that prices of important commodities were heading up. Within just a day or so, videos available on social media showed protesters chanting "Not Gaza, not Lebanon, my life for Iran." That may sound more like a chant in Farsi than it does in English. It was symptomatic of the way an agenda increases. The focus was still on jobs and prices, BUT the idea was that the country's leaders weren't focusing on jobs or prices because they were focusing instead...
1. Ernest Sosa, virtue epistemology. It is now generally accepted that, in ethical philosophy, the dichotomy between teleological and deontological ethics is too simple. There is a new (old) kid at the table, "virtue ethics." The idea behind that label is that if one has certain character traits (virtues) then what one does will be right. The traits can be isolated and discussed independent of ideas of rightness, so that justice isn't a virtue because it leads to just decisions: rather, we know certain decisions to be just because just people make them! With Sosa and others, "virtue ethics" has expanded into "virtue epistemology." The idea is the same: evaluation passes from the acts to the doers in the former case, it passes from knowledge to the knowers in the latter. 2. John McDowell, a disjunctive theory of perceptual experience McDowell (portrayed above) is a realist about the external world. He sees a certain "tempting"line of...
The word "good" is sometimes contrasted with "evil" and at other times with "bad." I might ask you, as I watch you sip a glass of wine, whether the wine is good. The negative answer would be, "no, quite bad, vinegary even!" Or I might ask you whether you think Donald Trump a good President. There the negative answer could well be that you think him, and/or his presidency, and/or its existing or likely consequences, "evil." Some writers have made heavy water out of this. They have said that the “good” in the phrase “good versus evil” is a moral good whereas the “good” in the phrase “good or bad” is a non-moral good. Thus, morality only deals with one particular sort of good out of the vast realm of possible goods, it only deals with the contrast-to-evil sort of good. I don’t propose to go down that route. Insofar as neurologically normal, full function adults are concerned, my own view is that all good is moral good...
Coptic Christians are in the news again, as targets of violence in Egypt. I'll just use today's post as a convenient format for leaving interested readers three links to sources for reading up on the history of the Copts. First, a basic encyclopedic discussion: http://www.copticchurch.net/topics/patrology/schoolofalex/I-Intro/chapter1.html Second, an admiring account of Coptic Christianity as the vessel that has preserved the Christian faith "in its earliest and purest form." http://www.coptic.net/articles/CoptsThroughTheAges.txt Finally, a discussion (by an evangelical-Protestant source) of a key distinction between Coptic Christianity and western Protestant Christianity. https://www.gotquestions.org/Coptic-Christianity.html That key distinction is: Miaphysitism. "Belief in mixed nature." Whereas the Chalcedon Creed of AD 451 declared that Christ was and is one person with two natures, both fully human and fully divine, the Copts, who di...
And so the utmost a student of sociology can ever predict is that if a genius of a certain sort show the way, society will be sure to follow. It might long ago have been predicted with great confidence that both Italy and Germany would reach a stable unity if someone could but succeed in starting the process. It could not have been predicted, however, that the modus operandi in each case would be subordination to a paramount state rather than federation, because no historian could have calculated the freaks of birth and fortune which gave at the same moment such positions of authority to such peculiar individuals as Napoleon III, Bismarck, and Cavour. William James, "Great Men and their Environment," 1880. James was here rehabilitating something akin to the Carlylean theory of history as a set of the biographies of certain extraordinary individuals. Not exactly Carlylean -- there are important differences -- but this passage indicates the real similarity. Napoleon II...
Let us pick up our thread about logical deduction. Our humble example of ‘trash day before laundry day’ may help us see that even our greatest (apparent) certainties have a probabilistic element to them. Consider our first premise. It probably is not the case that the trash collectors ALWAYS arrive on a Friday. There may have been one or more times since I’ve lived here when blizzard or wildcat strike or other disturbance in The Force has brought it about that the Friday collection didn’t happen. There must be some chance, however slight, that this Friday was one of those exceptional Fridays, so the collection I’m remembering didn’t happen until Saturday. Which means (if the other premises hold up) that today is actually Sunday. I better get busy on my laundry before my clothes get any more ripe! At any rate, let's bring this in contact with my theory of the right. The right is dependent upon the good, and the good is intuitively known. I am wIlling to embrace a ...