False hope: A philosophical analysis

Hope from Despair^*

This paper summarizes previous research on the contacts between the sixth Panchen Lama of Tibet and the British East India Company (EIC). Extensive research has been done on the archives and travelogues written in English, yet further attention needs to be paid to the significance of these contacts to the Panchen Lama’s historic visit to the Qing court around the same time. Although little is available in Chinese and Tibetan sources on this event, important questions have yet to be raised and discussed. Drawing upon what has been done on this topic, the author makes further use of Tibetan materials and the catalog of Manchu archives in the First Historical Archive of China, and concludes that the plan and efforts for the EIC to open its trade route to China through Tibet were essentially based on wishful thinking or false hope without thorough understanding of Tibet or Qing court, or the delicate relations between the two. Even though the EIC’s late 18th century efforts through the Hindu merchant monk Gosain Purangir were in vain, examining the many contacts between the sixth Panchen Lama and the EIC and Purangir’s trip to Beijing provide a novel perspective on the relations between Tibet and the Qing court in the second half of the 18th century. This inquiry also demonstrates that during the same period, Tibet was not a land of isolation; on the contrary, it was an integral part of “the pre-modern globalization” process.

What's wrong with the American presidency? Why is the world's oldest surviving democracy headed by a leader who lives and acts like a king? And why is that same leader so often held in low esteem by those who elected him? In this survey of presidential history, the author examines two centuries of unrealistic expectations, false hopes and willful misunderstandings that lie at the heart of America's dysfunctional with its president. Langston argues that each president becomes an icon, a stylized image of Americans' faith in themselves and in their country. Providing an investigation of how the game of presidential symbol-making is played, the author reveals how Americans' wishful thinking is encouraged and how even the best presidents are invited to deceive the public. The work concludes with a series of recommendations, including legislative changes aimed at improving the relationship between the president and the public by cutting the president's symbolic value down to size.

Avoiding cynicism and despair, the book begins with an overview of the likely impacts of oil and natural gas depletion and then outlines four options for industrial societies during the next decades: Last One Standing: the path of competition for remaining resources; Powerdown: the path of co-operation, conservation and sharing; Waiting for a Magic Elixir: wishful thinking, false hopes and denial; Building Lifeboats: the path of community solidarity and preservation. Finally, the book explores how three important groups within global society -- the power elites, (the anti-war and anti-globalisation movements, et al: the 'Other Superpower'), and ordinary people -- are likely to respond to these four options. Timely, accessible and eloquent, this book is critical reading for our times.

This mini-symposium of the European Journal of Risk Regulation focuses on the Paris Agreement on Climate Change, which was concluded at COP-21 in December 2015. It has been called the ‘world's greatest diplomatic success’ and a ‘historic achievement,’ but also an ‘epic failure’ and even a ‘fraud’ and ‘worthless words.’ Disappointed with the Paris Agreement, a group of eleven climate scientists signed a declaration stating that it suffers from “deadly flaws” and gives “false hope;” they argue that the time for “wishful thinking and blind optimism” is over, and “the full spectrum of geo engineering” should be considered. The broad disagreement over the outcome of COP-21 in Paris (in particular, over its binding effect) illustrates not only the diverging expectations of interest groups, but also the antagonisms that arise in all areas of policy-making between the dogmatic and the pragmatic, the idealistic and the realistic, and the internationalists and nationalists.

This article examines the concept of wishful thinking in philosophical literature on science and values. It suggests that this term tends to be used in an overly broad manner that fails to distinguish between separate types of bias, mechanisms that generate biases, and general theories that might explain those mechanisms. I explain how confirmation bias is distinct from wishful thinking and why it is more useful for examining the relationship between cognitive bias and beliefs about the existence of injustices.

Unconditional Love in the Face of Hatred: Applications of a Timeless Teaching Fran Grace Abstract Love is one of the most discussed virtues in theological and philosophical literature. In spite of centuries of teaching on the singular power of unconditional love, there are few examples of its actual practice in the public sphere. The world does not lack for philosophies and methods of social change, but lasting successes are few. The most effective movements (e.g., those led by Mohandes K. Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, and Martin Luther King, Jr.) were pulsed by a philosophy or theology that emphasized the power of love, inner nobility, and the innate dignity of humankind. These movements stand the test of time because they met the ultimate challenge of sustained practice of unconditional love in the face of hatred, without lapsing into naïveté and wishful thinking. The article explores this challenge in light of a recent terrorist attack, drawing on firsthand interviews with esteemed spiritual leaders from around the world. Full Text: PDF DOI: 10.15640/ijpt.v5n2a1

In the current philosophical and psychological literature, knowledge avoidance and willful ignorance seem to be almost identical conditions involved in irrational patterns of reasoning. In this paper, we will argue that not only these two phenomena should be distinguished, but that they also fall into different parts of the epistemic rationality-irrationality spectrum. We will adopt an epistemological and embodied perspective to propose a definition for both terms. Then, we will maintain that, while willful ignorance is involved in irrational patterns of reasoning and beliefs, knowledge avoidance should be considered epistemically rational under particular circumstances. We will begin our analysis by considering which of the two phenomena is involved in patterns of reasoning that are still amply recognized as irrational—as wishful thinking, self-deception, and akrasia. We will then discuss the impact of epistemic feelings—which are emotional events that depend on epistemic states—on agents' decision-making. Then, we will consider the impact of willful ignorance and knowledge avoidance on agents' autonomy. By considering these issues, we will argue that when agents are aware that they are avoiding certain information (and aware of what kind of feelings acquiring the information would trigger), knowledge avoidance should be considered a rational, autonomy-increasing, hope-depended selection of information.

The author points out and explains the quiddity of the relationship between conservatism and aesthetics as a philosophical discipline. It is shown that the aesthetic distinction between fantasy and imagination, set forth by S.T. Coleridge, is a serious tool of conservative critique and self-critique. From the conservative point of view, imagination is a creative faculty, while fantasy is a passive one, i.e. dependent hugely on passions. It is for that reason that the latter is often understood as a preliminary source for utopian or, in other words, wishful thinking. The discussed distinction fits in the general pattern of conservative epistemology, the greatest exponent of which was D. Hume. The critical uses of the distinction today are partially exposed by Roger Scruton, a British conservative philosopher, in works such as “The Uses of Pes-simism: and the Danger of False Hope”, “Modern Culture and Thinkers of the New Left”. The author argues that the distinction is apt to play not only critical but also a constructive role in shaping the conservative discourse.

Open-mindedness appears as a potential intellectual virtue from the beginning of the rise of the literature on intellectual virtues. It often takes up a special role, sometimes thought of as a meta-virtue rather than a first-order virtue: as an ingredient that makes other virtues virtuous. Jason Baehr has attempted to give a unified account of open-mindedness as an intellectual virtue. He argues that the conceptual core of open-mindedness lies in the fact that a person departs, moves beyond, or transcends a certain default cognitive standpoint. Two of his main aims are to show that (1) one does not need to assume a doxastic conflict or disagreement to be at the heart of open-mindedness—that is, there are also instances where the virtue of open-mindedness is needed when there is no opposing view to be considered—and (2) that not all forms of open-mindedness include rational assessment—that is, sometimes being open-minded is not about weighing evidence for and against a claim. So, his main aim is to show that there are various situations that afford open-mindedness, in each of which a slightly different kind of open-mindedness is called for. To unify all these different kinds of open-mindedness is then the goal of his work. He arrives at the following definition of open-mindedness (OM): an open-minded person is characteristically (a) willing and (within limits) able (b) to transcend a default cognitive standpoint (c) in order to take up or take seriously the merits of (d) a distinct cognitive standpoint. In this article, I take seriously Baehr’s suggestion of how to understand open-mindedness as an intellectual virtue and argue that the crux lies in formulating how we can be able to transcend a default cognitive standpoint. This is not as obvious as it has been taken to be in the literature on open-mindedness. Biases, overconfidence, and wishful thinking are difficult exactly because we don’t know that we are engaging in them. That is, they are systematically hidden from our consciousness, otherwise they would not be a bias, overconfidence, or wishful thinking. Hence, the crux of making open-mindedness open-minded is to see how it is possible to make something of one’s own mind visible that is systematically hidden from oneself. I argue that this problem can be solved by looking at research on attention. I base my considerations in this article on Sebastian Watzl’s account of attention, which essentially holds that paying attention is an activity of foregrounding and backgrounding mental contents. That is, attention is the activity of structuring mental contents into a priority structure of foreground and background. If I pay attention to the scene in front of me, I foreground the black letters on my screen, and I background the coffee cup next to them. In this way, I create a priority structure between the letters (as they appear to me) and the coffee cup (as it appears to me). I argue that what allows us to make something of our own mind visible that is systematically hidden from us is a special way of paying attention, hence a special way of foregrounding and backgrounding the involved mental contents. That is, the crux of what enables us to transcend a default cognitive standpoint, the conceptual core of open-mindedness, is a special kind of attention, which I will call ‘open-minded attention’ (OMA). The claim of this article is not that open-minded attention fully describes the virtue of open-mindedness (OMA is not sufficient for open-mindedness). Rather, what I try to show is that in all cases of open-mindedness it turns out that open-minded attention is the necessary component that ensures that we can indeed get rid of prior biases, that is, transcend also those implicit beliefs and expectations that are systematically hidden from us (OMA is necessary for open-mindedness).

The COVID-19 Conundrum

Crystal ball – 2013

Homunculi (Latin, diminutive of *homo, man) have a rich history in science and philosophy, but not all homunculi were created equal. As a term in biology, ‘homunculus’ is a close relative of ‘animalculus’ (‘little animal’). The latter was a generic term used by the early microscopists of the seventeenth century to refer to the microorganisms discovered under the magnifying lens (Wilson 1995). Guided by a combination of naive observations and wishful thinking, animalcule were occasionally depicted as miniature editions of full-sized animals. Probably the most famous one was invented by the Dutch microscopist Nicolaas Hartsoeker.

There is a well-developed literature on trust. Distrust, on the other hand, has gathered far less attention in the philosophical literature (though there is a burgeoning business literature on the topic). A recent exception to that trend in the philosophical literature is Hawley (2014, 2015) who develops a unified account of both trust and distrust. My aim in this paper is to present arguments against her account of trust and distrust, though then to also suggest a patch.

The connection between the probabilities of conditionals and the corresponding conditional probabilities has long been explored in the philosophical literature, but its implementation faces both technical obstacles and objections on empirical grounds. In this paper I first outline the motivation for the probabilistic turn and Lewis' triviality results, which stand in the way of what would seem to be its most straightforward implementation. I then focus on Richard Jeffrey's 'random-variable' approach, which circumvents these problems by giving up the notion that conditionals denote propositions in the usual sense. Even so, however, the random-variable approach makes counterintuitive predictions in simple cases of embedded conditionals. I propose to address this problem by enriching the model with an explicit representation of causal dependencies. The addition of such causal information not only remedies the shortcomings of Jeffrey's conditional, but also opens up the possibility of a unified probabilistic account of indicative and counterfactual conditionals.