Archive for January, 2007

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Philosophers’ Carnival #42

Monday, January 29th, 2007

THE PHILOSOPHERS’ CARNIVAL, VOLUME 42: INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY

NOW FULLY COLLECTED,
WITH SELECTIONS FROM ACROSS THE WEB

EDITED BY

JUSTIN MCBRAYER AND GARRETT PENDERGRAFT

ON BEHALF OF

SHOW-ME THE ARGUMENT

Preface
Philosophy is the search for reasoned answers to important, non-empirical questions. These questions include, but are not limited to, the following: Is there a God? What might God be like? If there isn’t a God, what implications does this have for human life? What does it mean to be me? Am I free? Am I responsible? Are there moral facts? What makes an action right or wrong? How ought I to live? Can we know anything? What does it mean to know something or to have a justified belief in something? What makes something beautiful? What makes something art? What is the meaning of life?

In this introductory anthology we present selections from real philosophers wrestling with real problems. With few exceptions, each of these entries was written in the last month or so and published on blogs in philosophy. In keeping with the purposes of the Philosophers’ Carnival, we have included only pieces that were nominated for publication in this issue of the Carnival. In keeping with the purposes of Show-Me the Argument (the philosophy graduate student blog of the University of Missouri), we have included only pieces that make rigorous and clear arguments concerning important philosophical questions. Political drivel and autobiographical musings didn’t make the cut.

Table of Contents

I. WHAT IS PHILOSOPHY? … 1

II. METAPHYSICS
1. Cognitive Biases and Free Will Part Two … 4
The Garden of Forking Paths

2. Presentism, Actualism, and the Triviality Objection … 8
The Alanyzer

3. A Trouble for Possible Worlds as Maximally Consistent Sets of Propositions … 11
Florida Student Philosophy Blog

4. Chalmers on Ontological Anti-realism … 22
Lemmings

III. EPISTEMOLOGY
1. May we say what we don’t know? … 26
Think Tonk

2. Disagreeing about Disagreement … 28
Thoughts, Arguments, and Rants

3. Justification, Inconsistencies, Contradictions, and Contradictories … 42
Certain Doubts

4. Epistemic ‘Ought’ Does Not Imply ‘Can’ … 73
Long Words Bother Me

6. Contradictions Rational and Justified? … 77
Knowability

IV. ETHICS
1. Desire Satisfaction Accounts of the Concept of Welfare and The Scope Problem … 80
Reflective Equilibrium

2. Philosophical Utilitarianism … 84
PEA Soup

3. Beliefs and Moral Judgments (see also Oughts and Desires on Show-Me the Argument) … 89
Atheist Ethicist

4. Infant Euthanasia and Utilitarianism … 92
Show-Me the Argument

5. Moral Intuitions and the Darwinist Dilemma (see also Moral Intuitions and Evolution on Atopian) … 105
Siris

6. Posthumous Procreation … 110
Philosophy, et cetera

V. PHILOSOPHY OF MIND
1. Consciousness and the Brainstem … 116
Brains

2. Content Internalism … 120
Brain Pains

3. Human Echolocation … 155
The Splintered Mind

VI. PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
1. Uniform Experience Against Miracles … 158
Fides Quaerens Intellectum

2. Prophecy Argument Against Open Theism … 163
Show-Me the Argument

VII. PHILOSOPHY OF LANGUAGE
1. Language and Color … 174
Language Hat

2. Talking to the Future … 177
Semantics etc.

VIII. AESTHETICS
1. Aesthetics and the Problem of Evil … 200
Prosblogion

2. The story of your life, or life as a work of art … 205
Philosophy Blog

IX. SPECIAL TOPICS
1. Thoughts about True Temp … 217
Experimental Philosophy

2. Why Truth is the Norm of Credibility … 221
Opiniatrety

3. Philosophical Failure: Peter van Inwagen and John Martin Fischer … 227
Garden of Forking Paths

4. A book review of John Searle’s Freedom and Neurobiology … 231
Show-Me the Argument

Posted in Action Theory, Aesthetics, Applied Ethics, Epistemology, Ethical Theory, History of Philosophy, Metaphysics, Philosophy of Language, Philosophy of Mind, Philosophy of Religion, Social/Political | 5,324 Comments »

I will post this post, but I might not…

Sunday, January 28th, 2007

You will read the rest of this post (and provide valuable comments), but you might not.

The Colts will win the Super Bowl, but they might not. 

I’ll pass the course, but I might not.

I will win the lottery, but I might not.

We might not win the game, but we will. 

Is there something amiss about these statements?  I think so.  Do you? I think it is odd to say “X will occur, but it might not.”  That is, I think that “will” and “might not” are contradictories.  If X is such that it will occur, then it’s false that X might not occur.  And if X is such that it might not occur, then it’s false that X will occur. 

But why’s this important?  Because the standard semantic line is that “will” and “will not” are contradictories, not “will” and “might not”.  But I think that some future X can be such that it is not true that it will occur or that it will not occur.  (Namely, when all that’s true is that X might or might not occur.) That is, I think “will” and “will not” are contraries, not contradictories.  Both can be false, but not both true.  This thesis is supported by the seeming oddness of saying of something both that it will and might not occur.  Or am I wrong in thinking that it’s odd to say the above sorts of things? 

Posted in Uncategorized | 1,480 Comments »

A Big Enough Lottery?

Sunday, January 28th, 2007

Intuitively, I don’t know that I won’t get in to Rutgers, and I don’t think most of the other applicants know that they won’t get in either.  This is so even though the chances are quite slim against my (or their) getting in.

Such is the intuitive pull of lottery situations.  It just really seems that “Andrew knows that he won’t get in to Rutgers” is false and it also seems that “Andrew knows he will not win the lottery with the one ticket that he has” is also false.

I want to ask people out there if they think the intuitions change if the numbers get big enough.  Does the sentence “Andrew knows he will not win the lottery” give us an intuitive pull to a different truth value if we change the odds?  Many philosophers think that even if the number of tickets is literally astronomical, our intuitions remain the same.  But my intuitions aren’t like that.  My intuitions go from “definitely not true” (in a 1000 ticket lottery) to “maybe not true” or “true” (in lottery with an astronomical number of tickets).  Do other people’s intuitions follow mine?  (Note: I am asking only about our intuitions - nothing else.)

Posted in Epistemology | 5 Comments »

Junk Disjunctive Knowledge

Thursday, January 25th, 2007

In Knowledge and Lotteries (p. 71), Hawthorne motivates his interesting discussion of junk disjunctive knowledge with the following scenario:

People are inclined to say I know I will live a while. Suppose I point to someone who is by all accounts a similarly healthy person but who in fact, by chance, will die in ten minutes. I say: ‘Either we will both live a while or else he but not I will die soon’. Even though this disjunction is deducible from ‘I will live a while’, people are not inclined to say that I know it.

But I just don’t share this intuition, and I was surprised to hear his report about people’s intuitions. Do other people share this intuition? It’s not exactly a case of closure, but it seems pretty close. (While I don’t share Hawthorne’s intuition, this doesn’t mean that I think his discussion of junk disjunctive knowledge on the next page isn’t very interesting.)

Posted in Epistemology | 9 Comments »

Plausibility

Thursday, January 25th, 2007

An interesting question popped up on the Insolubilia and Fundamental Disagreement post. What does it mean to say that a premise (or proposition, or statement, or belief) is plausible? Specifically, what conditions must be met for a premise to be plausible in a dialectic? I bring this question to the floor since I am unaware of any credible discussion on the question. So, I hope to either learn about such credible discussion from historical or contemporary sources, or I hope we can generate such discussion. In this post, I will put forth some tentative ideas. However, I think only one of them shows any promise. (more…)

Posted in Logic | 72 Comments »

Knowing Lottery Propositions

Tuesday, January 23rd, 2007

There are roughly 4 solutions to the lottery paradox:

1) concede that we don’t know the ordinary propositions (the skeptical solution)

2) argue that we do–contrary to initial reactions–know the lotter propositions

3) deny that knowledge is closed under known implication

4) retreat to some kind of context sensitivity for knowledge

I think (2) is the right solution. Kenny asked for a story about why we are initially loathe to ascribe knowledge in cases of lottery propositions. I offer a suggestion below the fold. (more…)

Posted in Epistemology | 289 Comments »

Maja Spener’s Paper

Tuesday, January 23rd, 2007

I read Maja Spener’s paper and found it be clear and well-argued. The gist of the paper is that most philosophers of perception seem to agree on the following principle:

(IO) Phenomenal character is naively obvious in introspection.

In other words, they agree that we have direct, privileged (but not necessarily infallible) access to the content of our experiences. We get at that content by mere introspection. Even rival theories of perception accept (IO)–and therein lies the rub. If (IO) is true, then why do these theories have conflicting descriptions of phenomenal experience? Her core argument thus runs: (more…)

Posted in Philosophy of Mind | 333 Comments »

Insolubilia and Fundamental Disagreements

Monday, January 22nd, 2007

According to Rescher, a modern insolubilia (hereafter, simply insolubilia) is “represented by a question that cannot be answered satisfactorily one way or another because every possible answer is unavailable on grounds of an evidential insufficiency of accessible information.” (Rescher, Philosophical Dialectics, 100) He provides the following as an example: Is the sentence “This sentence is false” true or false? The defining characteristic of an insolubilia is that an answer to a question is sought, but the answer cannot be discovered. More specifically, the answer cannot be discovered due to a lack of evidence or a lack of reason. (more…)

Posted in Logic | 3 Comments »

Prophecy Argument Against Open Theism

Thursday, January 18th, 2007

Philip and Michael raised a very interesting argument today against Open Theism (the view that God does not know what creatures will freely do in the future) which I want to develop more clearly.

The argument is for Christian open theists:
1)    Open theism entails that God did not know at the time of Isaiah that Jesus would be crucified by morally responsible individuals.
2)    God did know at the time of Isaiah that Jesus would be crucified by morally responsible individuals.
3)    Therefore, open theism is false. (more…)

Posted in Philosophy of Religion | 4,133 Comments »

Infant Euthanasia

Tuesday, January 16th, 2007

Here’s a brief article on infant euthanasia in Britain.

The article piqued my curiosity about the justification for infant euthanasia, and what follows are some thoughts on the subject, culminating in an argument against infant euthanasia. My remarks below apply to both passive euthanasia (allowing X to die) and active euthanasia (killing X), but they only explicitly consider the latter. Keep in mind that we’re talking about euthanasia in regards to handicapped newborns. I take it for granted that no sane person is calling for the euthanasia of handicapped adults and that advocates of infant euthanasia would find adult euthanasia reprehensible. (more…)

Posted in Applied Ethics | 4,195 Comments »

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