A Mizzou alumnus and former contributor to Show Me the Argument, Ted Poston, has published an article on Internalism and Externalism on the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.  It’s a nice article, and I recommend it. See here.
Archive for April, 2008
Internalism and Externalism Internet Encyclopedia Article
Sunday, April 27th, 2008Thoughts on Disagreements
Friday, April 25th, 2008I have been thinking about a couple scenarios concerning disagreements and I would like to see what show-me folks think about them.
Scenario 1:
S is interested in the compatibilism/incompatibilism debate. As of yet, she has only considered the proposition ‘Freewill is compatible with determinism’ (that is she has no evidence for or against; and she has no intuition concerning the proposition). Additionally, S believes that expert opinions on such matters are important and that disagreement among epistemic peers can render one’s position unjustified. So, S consults (more…)
Please Help Me Get My Bearings on ‘Person’
Thursday, April 24th, 2008I don’t think I have an adequate grasp of what people mean when they claim that fetuses (for example) are or are not persons. My confusion has to do with different ways in which ‘person’ is used in this debate. In particular, ‘person’ is sometimes used in such a way that persons are *by definition* beings with full moral status, while at other times it used in such a way that the relationship between being a person and having full moral status is not one of definition but rather one of *grounding*. That is, on this second understanding, ‘person’ can be defined in wholly nonmoral terms (e.g., being with a will, being with a P-Soul, being with consciousness,…) and it is intuitive that satisfying that definition bestows full moral status.
I would very much like to know if you folks use ‘person’ in either of these ways.
Thanks!
Some thoughts on personhood
Tuesday, April 22nd, 2008It seems to me that human beings that lack a high level of rationality or cognitive ability  are persons (I’m thinking of fetuses and people in comas) while some animals that have more cognitive ability are not persons. And yet it also seems to me that rationality or cognitive ability has something to do with being a person. Here’s a way to make sense of this:
X is a person iff there is a possible world in which X has degree of rationality Y. (Where Y is a degree of rationality had by some human beings in the actual world but not by any non-human animals of which we are aware.)
If this is right I can claim that human beings who lack degree of rationality Y in this world have it in some other worlds and thus are persons.
Now how can I explain why animals cannot have degree of rationality Y in any possible world? I claim that in order to achieve degree of rationality Y you must have a soul. Or perhaps a certain type if soul if one is inclined to think that animals have souls. (Call the necessary type of soul a P-soul.) All human beings have P-souls but all animals essentially lack P-souls. This is because if you united the body of an animal with a P-soul the animal would not gain a P-soul but rather a new object would be created which had a P-soul. Thus, no animal can achieve degree of rationality Y and thus no animal is a person. But all human beings can achieve degree of rationality Y so all human beings are people.
I like this view because it captures the two intuitions I expressed at the beginning of the post and because I am already a substance dualist.
Thoughts?
Roark to Millikin!
Saturday, April 12th, 2008
Congratulations to Show-Me’s own Eric Roark who has just accepted a tenure-track offer from Millikin University! Eric is writing his dissertation under Peter Vallentyne and is defending a left-libertarian account of the use and appropriation of natural resources. His specializations are social & political philosophy and applied ethics.
Melnyk on Millikan on New Referential Terms
Monday, April 7th, 2008In a paper for the Kline Colloquium, Melnyk defends Millikan’s view of the introduction of new referential terms (e.g. names). For those not familiar, I’m not going to rehash all of the details of his defense or Millikan’s view here. I will only mention that Millikan’s view stands in contrast to Kripke’s causal-historical view of the introduction of new referential terms. Melnyk presents the following slight modification on her view, (which he seems to think presents the spirit of Millikan’s position):
MM:Term token T refers to entity E iff (1) T is a token of some type t such that there is some population P of two or more speakers each member of which has in his or her repertoire the practice of uttering a token of t when he or she speaker-refers to E, and (2) T is a copy of a copy…of a copy of, or identical with, some token of t uttered by a member of P who was speaker-referring to E (Melnyk, “What Explains the Introduction of New Referential Terms?â€, Kline Workshop Paper, p. 16).
Two objections come to mind. First, MM requires that (i) two or more people are in the population in order for the copying to occur. The copying is a necessary condition of the successful introduction of new referential terms. Second, MM seems to imply that (ii) the necessary copying must occur verbally (cf. “uttering a tokenâ€) to be successfully. I don’t believe either of these hold.
The New Blackwell Epistemology Anthology
Saturday, April 5th, 2008is out. I thought this second edition deserved special mentioning since Mizzou’s very own Matthew McGrath is one of the editors (along with Ernest Sosa, Jaegwon Kim, and Jeremy Fantl). I got to thumb through a copy, and I noticed that it had a new section devoted to pragmatic encroachment and sensitive invariantism. It looks excellent!Â