Weaker Claim Research Articles

Sensory Modality and Perceptual Reasons

Abstract Perception can provide us with a privileged source of evidence about the external world – evidence that makes it rational to believe things about the world. In Reasons First, Mark Schroeder offers a new view on how perception does so. The central motivation behind Schroeder's account is to offer an answer to what evidence perception equips us with according to which it is what he calls world-implicating but non-factive, and thereby to glean some of the key advantages of both externalism and internalism, respectively. He answers this motivation by developing a more specific view that he calls the Apparent Factive Attitude view, which pairs an answer to what evidence is provided by a perceptual experience with an answer to why having that perceptual experience provides you with that evidence. In this paper, we advance two interconnected problems for Schroeder's Apparent Factive Attitude view. A traditional intuitive judgment that often motivates internalists is the idea that internal duplicates must necessarily be equally rational in whatever beliefs they have. Schroeder's arguments rely on a weaker claim – that people who are both internal and historical external duplicates but differ only in the veridicality of a single perceptual experience must be equally rational in whatever beliefs they have. In this way he preserves what he argues to be a more compelling internalist intuition. But our arguments will show that Schroeder's view is committed to denying an even more compelling internalist intuition yet – that internal duplicates must have the same phenomenology.

Mystical Emulations, Inverted Echoes

Mystical Emulations, Inverted Echoes

Armstrong on Justice, Well-being and Natural Resources

This paper argues first that Armstrong is led to see natural resources primarily as objects of consumption. But many natural resources are better seen as objects of enjoyment, where one person’s access to a resource need not prevent others from enjoying equal access, or as objects of production, where granting control of a resource to one person may produce collateral benefits to others. Second, Armstrong’s approach to resource distribution, which requires that everyone must have equal access to welfare, conceals an ambiguity as to whether this means equal opportunity for welfare, or simply equal welfare – the underlying issue being how far individuals (or countries) should be held responsible for the use they make of the resources they are allocated. Third, when Armstrong attacks arguments that appeal to ‘improvement’ as a basis for claims to natural resources, he treats them as making comparative desert claims: if country A makes a claim to the improved resources on its territory, it must show that their comparative value accurately reflects the productive deserts of its members compared to those of countries B. But in fact, A needs only to make the much weaker claim that its members have done more than others to enhance the value of its resources. Overall, Armstrong’s welfarist approach fails to appreciate the dynamic advantages of allocating resources to those best able to use them productively.

Children's Conceptions of Ownership for Self and Other: Categorical Ownership Versus Strength of Claim.

Children are capable of viewing object ownership as categorical and exclusive, but ownership claims can also vary by degree. This study investigated how children use these different conceptions of ownership in a giving and a taking task. In two studies, 4- to 7-year olds (N=105) could give and take craft objects that they or another child had found (weaker claim) and made (stronger claim). In Study 1, no additional ownership information was given, and in Study 2 categorical ownership was stated ("these belong to you"). The results showed that children used categorical ownership for their own objects but used ownership strength for the other child's objects, taking more of the found items.

NOTES ON NICOMACHEAN ETHICS 1173a2–5

In Nicomachean Ethics (= Eth. Nic.) 10.2, Aristotle addresses Eudoxus' argument that pleasure is the chief good in his characteristically dialectical manner. The argument is that pleasure is the chief good, since all creatures, rational (ἔλλογα) and non-rational (ἄλογα) alike, are perceived to aim at pleasure (1172b9–11). At 1172b35–1173a5, Aristotle turns to an objection against Eudoxus' argument. For some object (οἱ δ’ἐνιστάμενοι) to the argument by questioning one of its premisses, namely that what all creatures aim at is the good (1172b12–15). Instead, they claim that what all creatures aim at is not good (ὡς οὐκ ἀγαθὸν οὗ πάντ’ ἐφίεται, 1172b36). This claim is reasonably taken to mean that not everything that all creatures aim at is good. But, as we shall shortly see, Aristotle dismisses it in a way suggesting a less charitable interpretation. At any rate, the significance of this objection is that it challenges the strong claim that what all creatures aim at is the good with an argument against the weaker claim that what all creatures aim at is good (or a good). For if the weaker claim is refuted, then the strong claim is refuted as well. Aristotle takes issue with the argument against the weaker claim, but without committing himself to the strong claim.

Is Top 10 Better than Top 9? The Role of Expectations in Consumer Response to Imprecise Rank Claims

Many marketing communications are carefully designed to cast a brand in its most favorable light. For example, marketers may prefer to highlight a brand's membership in the top 10 tier of a third-party list instead of disclosing the brand's exact rank. The authors propose that when marketers use these types of imprecise advertising claims, subtle differences in the selection of a tier boundary (e.g., top 9 vs. top 10) can influence consumers’ evaluations and willingness to pay. Specifically, the authors find a comfort tier effect in which a weaker claim that references a less exclusive but commonly used tier boundary can actually lead to higher brand evaluations than a stronger claim that references a more exclusive but less common tier boundary. This effect is attributed to a two-stage process by which consumers evaluate imprecise rank claims. The results demonstrate that consumers have specific expectations for how messages are constructed in marketing communications and may make negative inferences about a brand when these expectations are violated, thus attenuating the positive effect such claims might otherwise have on consumer responses.

Virtue, Happiness, and Well-Being

1. INTRODUCTIONWhat is the relation between well-being and virtue?1 One option is to say that virtue or, more specifically, virtuous activity, i.e., activity exercised in accordance with virtue, is both necessary and sufficient for well-being. In other words, well-being consists entirely in virtuous activity (e.g., Annas 1993; Russell 2012). However, this option has been met with considerable resistance. At the least, it seems that other conditions must be fulfilled, in addition to virtuous activity, in order for an individual's life to go well. For instance, some think that the individual must possess some relevant external goods (e.g., Badhwar 2014). Others think that the individual must have appropriate experiences, e.g., she must appreciate or value the activities that she virtuously accomplishes (e.g., Darwall 2002). These objections have led many to endorse an alternative, weaker option. According to it, virtuous activity is necessary, but not sufficient, for well-being. In other words, virtuous activity is only one of the constituents of an individual's well-being, but not the sole one (Nussbaum 1993; Foot 2001; Darwall 2002; Badhwar 2014). However, even this weaker claim is not immune from criticisms. As some authors have pointed out (e.g., Hooker 1996; Haybron 2007, 2008; Dorsey 2010), virtuous activity may sometimes prevent, rather than promote, an individual's well-being. For instance, this may happen when virtue leads an individual to sacrifice her life for the sake of other people's well-being. In fact, it does not seem impossible to imagine cases where a person's Ufe goes well for her not just despite the fact that she is utterly vicious, but precisely because of that. If this is the case, virtuous activity is not only insufficient, but also unnecessary for well-being.Suppose we grant the soundness of these objections. What should we conclude about the relation between well-being and virtue? One possibdity is to concede that there is no interesting relation between the two. Another possibdity is to hold that, although virtue (or virtuous activity) sometimes increases an individual's well-being, it does so in a merely contingent way. In this paper, however, we want to explore a third possibdity. According to it, there is a sense in which virtue necessarily tends to make the life of the person possessing it go well for her. Our goal in this paper is to clarify the exact sense in which this claim may be true and to offer a positive defence of it. Our central idea is that, by its very nature, virtue itself (rather than virtuous activity) tends to have a positive impact on an individual's well-being, because of the connection existing between virtue and psychological happiness, on the one hand, and between psychological happiness and well-being, on the other hand.Before proceeding, it is worth emphasising that, unlike most authors working in the Aristotelian tradition, in what follows we shall use the terms 'happiness' and 'well-being' in a distinct and nonsynonymous way. More specifically, we shall use 'happiness' as a purely psychological term, referring to a psychological state or a combination of psychological states. By contrast, we shall use 'well-being' in its standard evaluative sense, that is, as a term designating the life that is good for the individual living it.With this in mind, in order to give substance to our idea, we shall consider and discuss the following three theses:1. Virtue is constituted by a disposition to experience fitting emotions.2. Fitting emotions are constituents of fitting happiness.3. Fitting happiness is a constituent of well-being.In the next sections, we will show that these three theses can be successfully defended.2 We will argue that they are compatible with a variety of theories of virtue, happiness, and well-being, including those that we find most plausible. When stated in the previous form, the three theses appear to lead to the conclusion that virtue involves a disposition to experience well-being-constituting states. …

Emotion, Cognition, and the Value of Literature: The Case of Nietzsche's Genealogy

ABSTRACT One striking feature of On the Genealogy of Morals is how it is written. Nietzsche employs a literary style that provokes his readers' emotions. In Beyond Selflessness, Christopher Janaway argues that such a literary approach is integral to Nietzsche's philosophical goals. Feeling the emotions Nietzsche's style arouses is necessary for understanding the views he defends. I argue that Janaway's position is mistaken. The evidence at our disposal fails to establish that emotion is ever necessary for cognition. However, I maintain that we do have good evidence for a slightly weaker claim. The emotionally sensitive person is epistemically better off than the cold and dispassionate person. There are some truths he or she will be more likely to believe and will have better reasons for believing. I conclude that Janaway is right to defend the philosophical importance of Nietzsche's literary writing style. His error is simply that he overstates the case.

Textual DNA

For the first time, this paper studies the evolution of photojournalists' bylines compared to reporters' bylines, which proved a sensitive barometer of longitudinal changes in reporters' status, professionalism, creativity and authorship. Based on a sample of 8800 photographs and news items published across the twentieth century in five quality national dailies: New York Times, The Times of London, Le Figaro, Irish Times and Ha'aretz, this paper shows that photojournalists were discriminated against substantially, consistently and internationally throughout the entire century, lagging not only behind reporters, but also behind the growing centrality of their own photographs. This paper suggests that attribution of photojournalists was hindered by the perception of photography as an objective reproduction of reality that has a weaker claim to attribution; by publishers being attributed of photographic authorship; by the efforts of textual journalists to preserve their superior jurisdiction over news reporting, constructing the inferiority of photojournalism and restricting it to denotative functions; and by the conceptual separation between the growing significance of photography, and the secondary status of its creators, who remain visual creatures in a predominantly textual kingdom. Findings indicate how textual the DNA of the Western press is, which makes its survival more difficult in an increasingly visual world.

E-type interpretation without E-type pronoun: how Peirce’s Graphs capture the uniqueness implication of donkey pronouns in discourse anaphora

In this essay, we propose that Peirce’s Existential Graphs can derive the desired uniqueness implication (or in a weaker claim, the definite description readings) of donkey pronouns in conjunctive discourse (A man walks in the park. He whistles), without postulating a separate category of E-type pronouns.

Does deliberative democracy need deliberative democrats? Revisiting Habermas’ defence of discourse ethics

Many political theorists today appeal to, or assume the existence of, a political culture in which the public values of Western liberal democracies are embedded – a political culture that is necessary to render their ideas plausible and their proposals feasible. This article contrasts this approach with the more ambitious arguments advanced by Jurgen Habermas in his original account of discourse ethics – a moral theory to which, he supposed, all human beings were demonstrably and ineluctably bound by the communicative constitution of collective life. Although these arguments have been largely discredited, I argue that Habermas’ analysis can be enlisted in defence of a weaker claim: namely, that principled commitment to discussion is not always necessary for genuine deliberative engagement to occur. As a result, there may be hope for democratic deliberation in contexts where a liberal democratic political culture is lacking.

Should autonomous robots be pacifists?

Currently, the central questions in the philosophical debate surrounding the ethics of automated warfare are (1) Is the development and use of autonomous lethal robotic systems for military purposes consistent with (existing) international laws of war and received just war theory?; and (2) does the creation and use of such machines improve the moral caliber of modern warfare? However, both of these approaches have significant problems, and thus we need to start exploring alternative approaches. In this paper, I ask whether autonomous robots ought to be programmed to be pacifists. The answer arrived at is "Yes", if we decide to create autonomous robots, they ought to be pacifists. This is to say that robots ought not to be programmed to willingly and intentionally kill human beings, or, by extension, participate in or promote warfare, as something that predictably involves the killing of humans. Insofar as we are the ones that will be determining the content of the robot's value system, then we ought to program robots to be pacifists, rather than `warists'. This is (in part) because we ought to be pacifists, and creating and programming machines to be "autonomous lethal robotic systems" directly violates this normative demand on us. There are no mitigating reasons to program lethal autonomous machines to contribute to or participate in warfare. Even if the use of autonomous lethal robotic systems could be consistent with received just war theory and the international laws of war, and even if their involvement could make warfare less inhumane in certain ways, these reasons do not compensate for the ubiquitous harms characteristic of modern warfare. In this paper, I provide four main reasons why autonomous robots ought to be pacifists, most of which do not depend on the truth of pacifism. The strong claim being argued for here is that automated warfare ought not to be pursued. The weaker claim being argued for here is that automated warfare ought not to be pursued, unless it is the most pacifist option available at the time, and other alternatives have been reasonably explored, and we are simultaneously promoting a (long term) pacifist agenda in (many) other ways. Thus, the more ambitious goal of this paper is to convince readers that automated warfare is something that we ought not to promote or pursue, while the more modest--and I suspect, more palatable--goal is to spark sustained critical discussion about the assumptions underlying the drive towards automated warfare, and to generate legitimate consideration of its pacifist alternatives,in theory, policy, and practice.

Natalie Stoljar's Wishful Thinking and One Step Beyond: What Should Conceptual Legal Analysis Become?

Praising wishful thinking is a serious risk that I am willing to run not only in this article commenting of Natalie Stoljar’s work but also elsewhere in my own scholarship. Although I will analyze her claims and will agree mostly with them, I will criticize her for stopping one step short adopting the desirability or weaker claim, when in it is not merely possible but necessary to go one step beyond arguing for the necessity or stronger claim. Accordingly, I intend to present further grounds for endorsing “conceptual (legal) analysis pluralism” by distinguishing the three different inquiry or projects that are and must be integrated and stating the normative priority of one of them, i.e. the prescriptive, interpretive, and moral.

Statistical methods for paleodemography on fossil assemblages having small numbers of specimens: an investigation of dinosaur survival rates

We describe statistical methods to formulate and validate statements about survival rates given a small number of individuals. These methods allow one to estimate the age-specific survival rate and assess its uncertainty, to assess whether the survival rates during some age range differ from the survival rates during another age range, and to assess whether the survivorship curve has a particular shape. We illustrate these methods by applying them to a sample of 22 Albertosaurus sarcophagus individuals. We show that this sample is too small to provide any confidence in the claim that this species had a “convex” survivorship curve arising from age-specific survival rates that decreased monotonically with age. However, we show that a sample of 50 to 100 individuals has reasonable statistical power to support such a claim. There is evidence for the much weaker claim that average survival rates for ages 2 to 15 were higher than survival rates for later ages. Finally, we describe one way to account for size-dependent fossilization rates and show that a plausible positively-size-dependent fossilization rate results in a substantially non-convex survivorship curve for A. sarcophagus.

Trying to Think with Emily Dickinson (review)

Reviewed by: Trying to Think with Emily Dickinson Melanie Hubard (bio) Jed Deppman . Trying to Think with Emily Dickinson. Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 2008. Cloth: $80. Paper: $26.95. Jed Deppman's catchily titled book takes Emily Dickinson seriously as a thinker. In Deppman's account, Dickinson, who was familiar with the available philosophical vocabularies of her day, adroitly steers between the Scylla of a materialistic Scottish Common Sense philosophy and the Charybdis of Transcendental idealisms based on Immanuel Kant. Deppman's careful close readings of rarely discussed (as well as familiar) poems make the case that Dickinson is a post-metaphysical thinker for our time. Engaging notions of Gianni Vattimo's "weak thought," Rortian neo-pragmatic "conversation," reader-centric [End Page 108] and process-oriented hermeneutic theory, and a generalized anti-foundationalism, Deppman demonstrates that Dickinson's poetry eschews a metaphysics of presence and that her poems do philosophy in their own right. Her writings constitute an artful appropriation of linguistic experience for philosophical experiment: if experience is mediated, linguistic, processual, and collective, then poetry is the site of especially fruitful investigations because, by instantiating such theories, it can then test and interrogate them. So Dickinson is a postmodern poet, in effect. If this is the strong claim of the book, the weaker claim is that "certain strains in postmodern thought can help make visible central aspects of her poetry, and her poetry has the power to illuminate and respond to contemporary situations"(8). The first two chapters set out to demonstrate both Dickinson's affinity with contemporary postmodern discourse and her poetry's ability to critique, say, Richard Rorty's insufficient accounting for the other in conversation (37). Deppman roots Dickinson's critical power in the vocabularies available to her, including Christianity and the radical experimental ethos of Francis Bacon. Such public schoolmasters as Isaac Watts make the "mind the site of resistance, study, and experiment" through which a thinker like Dickinson "produces the proto-Kantian results of failure, dissatisfaction, and repetition"(57). The finest statement of Dickinson's philosophical influences takes place in chapter three—alone worth the price of the book—as it sets out in helpful detail which thinkers were being taught at Amherst Academy and the College, who taught them, what their prejudices and predilections were, which books were read and borrowed in and out of the Dickinson household, and what sort of thoughtful conversations would have been available to Dickinson among her college-age (mostly male) peers. As Deppman puts it, "[o]n historical grounds alone the subject [of Dickinson's readings in philosophy] deserves to be integrated into the critical conversations"(78). After treating in detail both Scottish Common Sense philosophers (a heterogenous bunch) and the American interpreters of Kantian thought, Deppman deftly focuses on associationism as the site of contestation over the "irreconcilable vocabularies of 'Mind' and 'Brain'"(99). Chapter four pursues description (or definition) as such, demonstrating that the names we attach to things and the metaphysical (or cultural) logics that guarantee the validity of those names turn out to have high philosophical stakes, a point of which nineteenth-century lexicographers such as Noah Webster and Joseph Worcester were perfectly well aware. Dickinson's definition poems actively weaken certitude and fixity—reference—by emphasizing process, experience, and [End Page 109] conversation, and in this she echoes the theologian Horace Bushnell, who in 1849 startlingly averred that "'language as an instrument' is 'wholly inadequate to the exact representation of thought'"(qtd. in Deppman 119), let alone truth. Chapter five explores Dickinson's thinking about reading as a trope for female self-definition and negotiation with society, and chapter six treats death as the limit-thought that marks both our nearness to the sublime and our human inability to contain or think it. Deppman anticipates, in his introduction, the objection that his approach might be considered ahistorical (10), and it is, I think, a weakness that the book argues that there are affinities with postmodern thinkers otherwise quite alien to Dickinson, but not why. How, indeed, did Dickinson come to reject both Common Sense and Transcendentalism—especially Transcendentalism? The answer has to involve yet further historicizing. My money's on the...

Selecting Capabilities for Quality of Life Measurement

The capability approach advocates that interpersonal comparisons be made in the space of functionings and capabilities. However, Amartya Sen has not specified which capabilities should be selected as the relevant ones. This has provoked two types of criticism. The stronger critique is Martha Nussbaum’s claim that Sen should endorse one specific list of relevant capabilities. The weaker claim is that some systematic methodological reasoning should be conducted on how such a selection could be done. I will first suggest that Nussbaum’s claim can be better understood by looking at some of the core differences between her and Sen’s version of the capability approach. Then I will argue against the use of Nussbaum’s list for quality of life measurement on grounds of epistemology and legitimacy. However, procedural methods also have their problems, notably the danger of selection biases. The paper concludes by sketching one possible way to minimize such biases and by briefly discussing a set of methods for the selection of capabilities for quality of life measurement.

Blameworthy Action and Character

A number of philosophers from Hume on have claimed that it does not make sense to blame people for acting badly unless their bad acts were rooted in their characters. In this paper, I distinguish a stronger and a weaker version of this claim. The claim is false, I argue, if it is taken to mean that agents can only be blamed for bad acts when those acts are manifestations of character paws. However, what is both true and important is the weaker claim that an act is not blameworthy unless it is rooted in some enduring aspect or aspects of the agent's character that may or may not be flaws, and that, if flaws, may or may not be bad in the same way that the act itself is.

Facts and Interpretations of Personality Trait Stability

The strong claim that the stability of personality is not falsifiable is wrong because it has been falsified under some conditions. The weaker claim that it is trivial because traits are defined as transcontextual consistencies does not hold because the transcontextual nature of traits has no implications for long-term stability. Traits are important both because of their pervasive influence on thoughts, feelings and actions, and because of their centrality in many people's identity. Nevertheless, there is more to personality than traits, and many other psychological phenomena also merit study by personality psychologists.

Was Wittgenstein a Plagiarist?

Laurence Goldstein has ‘re-created’ Wittgenstein's doctoral viva, arguing that had Wittgenstein's dissertation, his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, ‘been judged by normal standards of originality and philosophical argumentation, it would have failed’. Goldstein claims that Wittgenstein ‘lifted’ central doctrines from Russell and from Bernard Bolzano. I point out that passages allegedly plagiarized from Russell are actually criticisms of his doctrines, and that there is no evidence that Wittgenstein even knew Bolzano's work, directly or indirectly. I argue that alleged similarities, substantial and stylistic, between his work and Bolzano's give no support even to a weaker claim of influence.

A developmental study of the acquisition of Russian colour terms.

We report a study of the acquisition of colour terms by Russian children which had two main aims: first, to test Berlin & Kay's (1969) theory of colour universals using acquisition order as a measure of basicness; and secondly, to see if the two BLUE terms of Russian are genuinely basic. Two hundred children aged from three to six-years-old were tested on three colour-tasks--colour term listing, colour term production and colour term comprehension. To a reasonable approximation, the order of colour term acquisition was in accord with Berlin & Kay's theory, but the data are also consistent with the weaker claim that primary terms tend to be learned before derived terms. On balance the data were consistent with Russian exceptionally, having an extra term for the BLUE region. But, the two BLUE terms--goluboj 'light blue' and sinij 'dark blue'--were confused more often than other pairs of terms even by the five- to six-year-old sample.