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Fictional Creationism and Negative Existentials Canadian Journal of Philosophy Pub Date : 2024-03-11 Jeonggyu Lee
In this paper, I defend fictional creationism, the view that fictional objects are abstract artifacts, from the objection that the apparent truth of fictional negative existentials, such as “Sherlock Holmes does not exist,” poses a serious problem for creationism. I develop a sophisticated version of the pragmatic approach by focusing on the inconsistent referential intentions of ordinary speakers:
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The Validity of the Argument from Inductive Risk Canadian Journal of Philosophy Pub Date : 2024-01-15 Matthew J. Brown, Jacob Stegenga
Joyce Havstad has argued in this journal that the argument from inductive risk is deductively valid and sound. As far as we know, this is the best reconstruction of the argument in the literature. Unfortunately, it suffers from a small flaw that renders the argument invalid. We identify this flaw, show that it is superficial, and show that a small amendment to the argument rescues the claim of its
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Do We Look Material? Human Ontology and Perceptual Evidence Canadian Journal of Philosophy Pub Date : 2023-12-13 Aaron Segal
According to certain views about human ontology, the way we seem is very different from the way we are. The appearances are a threat to such views. Here I take up and defuse the threat to one such view. Pure immaterialism says that each of us is wholly immaterial. The appearances suggest otherwise. I argue that despite the fact that we might sometimes appear to be at least partly material, and that
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On the Practical Significance of Irrelevant Factors Canadian Journal of Philosophy Pub Date : 2023-12-06 Seyed Mohammad Yarandi
I focus on an overlooked aspect of the challenge of irrelevant influences. The challenge is often framed in terms of whether recognizing the presence of irrelevant factors in the pedigree of a belief provides a defeater. I argue that the epistemic significance of irrelevant factors goes beyond their status as defeaters. I focus on what I call gray cases, where learning about such factors causes epistemic
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Against the Entitlement Model of Obligation Canadian Journal of Philosophy Pub Date : 2023-11-13 Mario Attie-Picker
The purpose of this paper is to reject what I call the entitlement model of directed obligation: the view that we can conclude from X is obligated to Y that therefore Y has an entitlement against X. I argue that rejecting the model clears up many otherwise puzzling aspects of ordinary moral interaction. The main goal is not to offer a new theory of obligation and entitlement. It is rather to show that
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Natural Kinds: The Expendables Canadian Journal of Philosophy Pub Date : 2023-11-10 François Papale, David Montminy
Theoreticians that defend a form of realism regarding natural kinds minimally entertain the belief that the world features divisions into kinds and that the natural kind concept is a useful tool for philosophy of science. The objective of this paper is to challenge these assumptions. First, we challenge realism toward natural kinds by showing that the main arguments for their existence, which rely
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How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Ignore Unwelcome Epistemic Company Canadian Journal of Philosophy Pub Date : 2023-10-23 Adam Piovarchy
The problem of unwelcome epistemic company refers to the problem of encountering agreement with your beliefs from an unwelcome source, such as someone who is known to form unreliable beliefs or have values you reject. Blanchard (2023) and Levy (2023) argue that when we encounter unwelcome agreement, we may have reason to reduce our confidence in our matching beliefs. I argue that unwelcome epistemic
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Hume on the Temporal Priority of Cause Over Effect Canadian Journal of Philosophy Pub Date : 2023-10-12 David Palmer
In A Treatise of Human Nature, David Hume claims that causes must temporally precede their effects. However, his main argument for this claim has long puzzled commentators. Indeed, most commentators have dismissed this argument as confused, but beyond this dismissal, the argument has provoked relatively little critical attention. My aim in this paper is to rectify this situation. In what follows, I
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There Is No Such Thing as Expected Moral Choice-Worthiness Canadian Journal of Philosophy Pub Date : 2023-09-28 Nicolas Côté
This paper presents some impossibility results for certain views about what you should do when you are uncertain about which moral theory is true. I show that under reasonable and extremely minimal ways of defining what a moral theory is, it follows that the concept of expected moral choiceworthiness is undefined, and more generally that any theory of decision-making under moral uncertainty must generate
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Clearing up Clouds: Underspecification in Demonstrative Communication Canadian Journal of Philosophy Pub Date : 2023-09-25 Rory Harder
This paper explains how an assertion may be understood despite there being nothing said or meant by the assertion. That such understanding is possible is revealed by cases of the so-called “felicitous underspecification” of demonstratives: cases where there is understanding of an assertion containing a demonstrative despite the interlocutors not settling on one or another object as the one the speaker
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Self-Determination and Secession: Why Nations Are Special Canadian Journal of Philosophy Pub Date : 2023-09-22 Ruairi Maguire
In this paper, I consider the objection that unilateral secession by a national group (e.g., the Scots) from a legitimate, nonusurping state would wrong minority nationalities within the seceding territory. I show first that most proponents of this objection assume that the ground of the right to national self-determination is the protection of the group’s culture. I show that there are alternative
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Responsibility Skeptics Should Be More Skeptical Canadian Journal of Philosophy Pub Date : 2023-09-11 Aarthy Vaidyanathan
Menges (2022) seeks to identify the kind of blame that should be at issue in debates between skeptics and anti-skeptics about responsibility. Menges argues that such blame is constituted by responses that the target has a claim against, and by the blamer’s thought that they have forfeited this claim due to their bad action and state while engaged in that action. I identify a class of blame responses
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Akaike and the No Miracle Argument for Scientific Realism Canadian Journal of Philosophy Pub Date : 2023-08-03 Alireza Fatollahi
The “No Miracle Argument” for scientific realism contends that the only plausible explanation for the predictive success of scientific theories is their truthlikeness, but doesn’t specify what ‘truthlikeness’ means. I argue that if we understand ‘truthlikeness’ in terms of Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence, the resulting realist thesis (RKL) is a plausible explanation for science’s success. Still, RKL
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The Contents of Imagination Canadian Journal of Philosophy Pub Date : 2023-07-28 Jordi Fernández
Our imaginings seem to be similar to our perceiving and remembering episodes in that they all represent something. They all seem to have content. But what exactly is the structure and the source of the content of our imaginings? In this paper, I put forward an account of imaginative content. The main tenet of this account is that, when a subject tries to imagine a state of affairs by having some experience
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Reductive Evidentialism and the Normativity of Logic Canadian Journal of Philosophy Pub Date : 2023-07-28 Nader Shoaibi
‘Reductive Evidentialism’ seeks to explain away all ‘structural’ requirements of rationality—including norms of logical coherence—in terms of ‘substantive’ norms of rationality, i.e., responsiveness to evidence. While this view constitutes a novel take on the source of the normativity of logic, I argue that it faces serious difficulties. My argument, in a nutshell, is that on the assumption that individuals
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A Rawlsian Solution to the New Demarcation Problem Canadian Journal of Philosophy Pub Date : 2023-07-11 Frank Cabrera
In the last two decades, a robust consensus has emerged among philosophers of science, whereby political, ethical, or social values must play some role in scientific inquiry, and that the ‘value-free ideal’ is thus a misguided conception of science. However, the question of how to distinguish, in a principled way, which values may legitimately influence science remains. This question, which has been
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The Taming of the Grounds Canadian Journal of Philosophy Pub Date : 2023-06-23 Noël Blas Saenz
As it is presently employed, grounding permits grounding many things from one ground. In this paper, I show why this is a mistake by pushing for a uniqueness principle on grounding. After arguing in favor of this principle, I say something about it and kinds of grounding, discuss a similar principle, and consider its import on a formal feature of grounding, ontology, and ontological simplicity.
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Reductive Views of Knowledge and the Small Difference Principle Canadian Journal of Philosophy Pub Date : 2023-06-13 Simon Wimmer
I develop a challenge to reductive views of knowing that $ \phi $ that appeal to what I call a gradable property. Such appeal allows for properties that are intrinsically very similar to the property of knowing that $ \phi $, but differ significantly in their normative significance. This violates the independently plausible claim Pautz (2017) labels the ‘small difference principle.’
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Two Faces of Responsibility for Beliefs Canadian Journal of Philosophy Pub Date : 2023-05-19 Giulia Luvisotto
The conception of responsibility for beliefs typically assumed in the literature mirrors the practices of accountability for actions. In this paper, I argue that this trend leaves a part of what it is to be responsible unduly neglected, namely the practices of attributability. After offering a diagnosis for this neglect, I bring these practices into focus and develop a virtue-theoretic framework to
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Lying with Uninformative Speech Acts Canadian Journal of Philosophy Pub Date : 2023-05-08 Grzegorz Gaszczyk
I propose an analysis of lying with uninformative speech acts. The orthodox view states that lying is restricted to assertions. However, the growing case for non-assertoric lies made by presuppositions or conventional implicatures challenges this orthodoxy. So far, the only presuppositions to have been considered as lies were informative presuppositions. In fact, uninformative lies were not discussed
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Metaphysically Opaque Grounding Canadian Journal of Philosophy Pub Date : 2023-04-24 Henrik Rydéhn
This article explores the concept of metaphysically opaque grounding, a largely neglected form of metaphysical grounding that challenges the commonly held assumptions that grounding is an especially intimate and powerful connection between facts and that it is necessarily connected with the essences of things. I provide a definition of opaque grounding, identify some interesting philosophical views
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Ideology Critique and Game Theory Canadian Journal of Philosophy Pub Date : 2023-04-20 Jacob Barrett
Ideology critics believe that many bad social practices persist because of ideology, and that critiquing ideology is an effective way to promote social reform. Skeptics draw on game theory to argue that the persistence of such practices is better explained by collective action problems, and that ideology critique is causally inefficacious. In this paper, I reconcile these camps. I show that while game
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A Critique of Scanlon’s Contractualism Canadian Journal of Philosophy Pub Date : 2023-04-13 Ashley Purdy
Part of T. M. Scanlon’s project in What We Owe to Each Other (1998) is to explain the importance and priority of moral reasons. But Scanlon also argues that this priority of moral reasons is compatible with the pursuit of other things we value, such as friendship. To this end, Scanlon claims that contractualist moral reasons internally accommodate our interests in such values. In this paper, I argue
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Against Convergence Liberalism: A Feminist Critique Canadian Journal of Philosophy Pub Date : 2023-04-11 Christie Hartley, Lori Watson
Convergence liberalism has emerged as a prominent interpretation of public reason liberalism. Yet, while its main rival in the public reason literature—the Rawlsian consensus account of public reason—has faced serious scrutiny regarding its ability to secure equal citizenship for all members of society, especially for members of historically subordinated groups, convergence liberalism has not. With
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Trust and Contingency Plans Canadian Journal of Philosophy Pub Date : 2023-04-04 Lee-Ann Chae
Trusting relationships are both valuable and risky. Where the risks are high and the fears of betrayal are also high, it might seem rational to try to mitigate the risks, while still enjoying the benefits of the trusting relationship, by forming a contingency plan. A contingency plan—in the sense I am interested in—involves contingent punishments for defection, which are primarily meant to encourage
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The Problem of Hard and Easy Problems Canadian Journal of Philosophy Pub Date : 2023-03-31 Tudor M. Baetu
David Chalmers advocates the view that the phenomenon of consciousness is fundamentally different from all other phenomena studied in the life sciences, positing a uniquely hard problem that precludes the possibility of a mechanistic explanation. In this paper, I evaluate three demarcation criteria for dividing phenomena into hard and easy problems: functional definability, the puzzle of the accompanying
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Internal and External Paternalism Canadian Journal of Philosophy Pub Date : 2023-03-27 Nir Ben-Moshe
I introduce a new distinction between two types of paternalism, which I call ‘internal’ and ‘external’ paternalism. The distinction pertains to the question of whether the paternalized subject’s current evaluative judgments are mistaken relative to a standard of correctness that is internal to her evaluative point of view—which includes her ‘true’ or ‘ideal’ self—as opposed to one that is wholly external
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Indifference to Anti-Humean Chances Canadian Journal of Philosophy Pub Date : 2023-03-10 J. Dmitri Gallow
An indifference principle says that your credences should be distributed uniformly over each of the possibilities you recognise. A chance deference principle says that your credences should be aligned with the chances. My thesis is that if we are anti-Humeans about chance, then these two principles are incompatible. Anti-Humeans think that it is possible for the actual frequencies to depart from the
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Potentialism and S5 Canadian Journal of Philosophy Pub Date : 2023-03-08 Jonas Werner
Modal potentialism as proposed by Barbara Vetter (2015) is the view that every possibility is grounded in something having a potentiality. Drawing from work by Jessica Leech (2017), Samuel Kimpton-Nye (2021) argues that potentialists can have an S5 modal logic. I present a novel argument to the conclusion that the most straightforward way of spelling out modal potentialism cannot validate an S5 modal
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Against Universal Epistemic Instrumentalism Canadian Journal of Philosophy Pub Date : 2023-03-02 James Bernard Willoughby
Beliefs should conform to some norms. Epistemic instrumentalism holds that your beliefs should conform to these epistemic norms just because conforming is useful. But there seems to be cases where conforming to the epistemic norms isn’t useful at all, as in so-called “too-few-reasons” cases. In response to these cases, universal epistemic instrumentalists argue that despite first appearances, it is
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Reason in Kant’s Theory of Cognition Canadian Journal of Philosophy Pub Date : 2023-02-28 Nabeel Hamid
This paper reconstructs and defends Kant’s argument for the transcendental status of reason’s principles of the systematic unity of nature in the Appendix to the Transcendental Dialectic. On the present account, these principles neither contain mere methodological recommendations for conducting scientific inquiry nor do they have the normative force of categorical imperatives—two extant interpretations
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Lotze on Comparison and the Unity of Consciousness Canadian Journal of Philosophy Pub Date : 2023-02-16 Mark Textor
Hermann Lotze argued that the fact that consciousness simultaneously “holds objects together as well as apart” such that they can be compared implies (a) that there is a simple thinker and (b) that consciousness is an ‘indivisible unity.’ I offer a reconstruction and evaluation of Lotze’s Argument from Comparison. I contend that it does not deliver (a) but makes a good case for (b). I will relate Lotze’s
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Well-Being and Meaning in Life Canadian Journal of Philosophy Pub Date : 2023-02-16 Matthew Hammerton
Many philosophers now see meaning in life as a key evaluative category that stands alongside well-being and moral goodness. Our lives are assessed not only by how well they go for us and how morally good they are, but also by their meaningfulness. In this article, I raise a challenge to this view. Theories of meaning in life closely resemble theories of well-being, and there is a suspicion that the
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Acting on Behalf of Another Canadian Journal of Philosophy Pub Date : 2023-02-10 Alexander Edlich, Jonas Vandieken
This paper provides an analysis of the phrase ‘acting on behalf of another.’ To do this, acting on behalf is first distinguished from ‘acting for the sake of another,’ the latter being a matter of other-directed motivation, the former of what we call ‘normative other-directedness’—i.e., acting on the claims and duties of the other. Second, we provide a distinction between two kinds of acting on behalf
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In Leibniz’s Wake: Rationalist Paradise Lost Canadian Journal of Philosophy Pub Date : 2022-12-22 Joe Stratmann
The eighteenth-century German rationalist tradition is, broadly speaking, committed to (what I call) ‘the principle of rational cognition’: the grounded must be rationally cognizable from its sufficient ground. Whereas the prevailing view takes the fundamental challenge to rationalist paradise to stem from the principle of sufficient reason, I argue that it instead stems from this principle: How is
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Essence, Triviality, and Fundamentality Canadian Journal of Philosophy Pub Date : 2022-12-19 Ashley Coates
I defend a new account of constitutive essence on which an entity’s constitutively essential properties are its most fundamental, nontrivial necessary properties. I argue that this account accommodates the Finean counterexamples to classic modalism about essence, provides an independently plausible account of constitutive essence, and does not run into clear counterexamples. I conclude that this theory
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The Epistemic Significance of Social Pressure Canadian Journal of Philosophy Pub Date : 2022-12-12 Hrishikesh Joshi
This paper argues for the existence of a certain type of defeater for one’s belief that P—the presence of social incentives not to share evidence against P. Such pressure makes it relatively likely that there is unpossessed evidence that would provide defeaters for P because it makes it likely that the evidence we have is a lopsided subset. This offers, I suggest, a rational reconstruction of a core
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Mental Imagery and the Epistemology of Testimony Canadian Journal of Philosophy Pub Date : 2022-12-12 Daniel Munro
Mental imagery often occurs during testimonial belief transmission: a testifier often episodically remembers or imagines a scene while describing it, while a listener often imagines that scene as it’s described to her. I argue that getting clear on imagery’s psychological roles in testimonial belief transmission has implications for some fundamental issues in the epistemology of testimony. I first
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A Satisficing Theory of Epistemic Justification Canadian Journal of Philosophy Pub Date : 2022-11-18 Raimund Pils
There is now a significant body of literature on consequentialist ethics that propose satisficing instead of maximizing accounts. Even though epistemology recently witnessed a widespread discussion of teleological and consequentialist theories, a satisficing account is surprisingly not developed yet. The aim of this paper is to do just that. The rough idea is that epistemic rules are justified if and
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Engaging with Science, Values, and Society: Introduction Canadian Journal of Philosophy Pub Date : 2022-10-20 Ingo Brigandt
Philosophical work on science and values has come to engage with the concerns of society and of stakeholders affected by science and policy, leading to socially relevant philosophy of science and socially engaged philosophy of science. This special issue showcases instances of socially relevant philosophy of science, featuring contributions on a diversity of topics by Janet Kourany, Andrew Schroeder
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Humanizing Science and Philosophy of Science: George Sarton, Contextualist Philosophies of Science, and the Indigenous/Science Project Canadian Journal of Philosophy Pub Date : 2022-10-20 Alison Wylie
A century ago historian of science George Sarton argued that “science is our greatest treasure, but it needs to be humanized or it will do more harm than good” (1924). The systematic cultivation of an “historical spirit,” a philosophical appreciation of the dynamic nature of scientific inquiry, and a recognition that science is irreducibly a “collective enterprise” was, on Sarton’s account, crucial
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The Concept of Legitimacy Canadian Journal of Philosophy Pub Date : 2022-10-07 N. P. Adams
I argue that legitimacy discourses serve a gatekeeping function. They give practitioners telic standards for riding herd on social practices, ensuring that minimally acceptable versions of the practice are implemented. Such a function is a necessary part of implementing formalized social practices, especially including law. This gatekeeping account shows that political philosophers have misunderstood
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Social Groups Are Concrete Material Particulars Canadian Journal of Philosophy Pub Date : 2022-09-28 Kevin Richardson
It is natural to think that social groups are concrete material particulars, but this view faces an important objection. Suppose the chess club and nature club have the same members. Intuitively, these are different clubs even though they have a common material basis. Some philosophers take these intuitions to show that the materialist view must be abandoned. I propose an alternative explanation. Social
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How Does Trust Relate to Faith? Canadian Journal of Philosophy Pub Date : 2022-09-26 Daniel J. McKaughan, Daniel Howard-Snyder
How does trust relate to faith? We do not know of a theory-neutral way to answer our question. So, we begin with what we regard as a plausible theory of faith according to which, in slogan form, faith is resilient reliance. Next, we turn to contemporary theories of trust. They are not of one voice. Still, we can use them to indicate ways in which trust and faith might both differ from and resemble
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Leibniz on Agential Contingency and Inclining but not Necessitating Reasons Canadian Journal of Philosophy Pub Date : 2022-09-16 Juan Garcia
I argue for a novel interpretation of Leibniz’s conception of the kind of contingency that matters for freedom, which I label ‘agential contingency.’ In brief, an agent is free to the extent that she determines herself to do what she judges to be the best of several considered options that she could have brought about had she concluded that these options were best. I use this novel interpretation to
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A Neglected Aspect of Hume’s Nominalism Canadian Journal of Philosophy Pub Date : 2022-09-16 Ruth Weintraub
In this paper, I point to two problems engendered by two assumptions that Hume makes. The first is his nominalism: the view that all ideas are fully determinate with respect to all the aspects that are represented in them. The second, perhaps hitherto unnoticed, is that names denote ideas. I propose some solutions, aiming to find one that is Humean.
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The Limits of Metalinguistic Negotiation: The Role of Shared Meanings in Normative Debate Canadian Journal of Philosophy Pub Date : 2022-08-30 François Schroeter, Laura Schroeter, Kevin Toh
According to philosophical orthodoxy, the parties to moral or legal disputes genuinely disagree only if their uses of key normative terms in the dispute express the same meaning. Recently, however, this orthodoxy has been challenged. According to an influential alternative view, genuine moral and legal disagreements should be understood as metalinguistic negotiations over which meaning a given term
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The Political Philosophy of Data and AI Canadian Journal of Philosophy Pub Date : 2022-08-05 Annette Zimmermann, Kate Vredenburgh, Seth Lazar
We are increasingly subject to the power of technological systems relying on big data and AI. These systems are reshaping the welfare state and the administration of criminal justice. They are used to police tax evasion, track down child abusers, and model the spread of the pandemic. And they are used to weaponize vast surveillance networks through facial recognition technology. But algorithmic power
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Why Be a Subjectivist about Wellbeing? Canadian Journal of Philosophy Pub Date : 2022-07-18 Peter Königs
Subjectivism about wellbeing rests on the idea that what is good for a person must ‘fit’ her, ‘resonate’ with her, not be ‘alien’ to her, etc. This idea has been called the ‘beating heart’ of subjectivism. In this article, I present the No-Beating-Heart Challenge for subjectivism, which holds that there is no satisfactory statement of this idea. I proceed by first identifying three criteria that any
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Editor’s Introduction Canadian Journal of Philosophy Pub Date : 2022-06-22
In this issue we publish memorial notices about two of the CJP’s founders, Terence Penelhum and Kai Nielsen. In addition to conveying their personal qualities and professional accomplishments, each of them vividly reminds one that it is owing largely to the supererogatory efforts of some of us, that the infrastructure is in place to help all of us thrive as philosophers. We here at the CJP are, of
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Adam Smith and Richard Price on a Free Society of Equals Canadian Journal of Philosophy Pub Date : 2022-06-13 Nicole Whalen
In this article, I examine two competing republican ideals of a free society of equals in the eighteenth century. I claim that while the value of nondependency was central to the economic outlooks of both Adam Smith and Richard Price, their evaluations of free-market practices were dramatically distinct. In doing so, I introduce a new interpretation of the typologies of republicanism in the eighteenth
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Hope, Worry, and Suspension of Judgment Canadian Journal of Philosophy Pub Date : 2022-05-26 James Fritz
In this paper, I defend an epistemic requirement on fitting hopes and worries: it is fitting to hope or to worry that p only if one’s epistemic position makes it rational to suspend judgment as to whether p. This view, unlike prominent alternatives, is ecumenical; it retains its plausibility against a variety of different background views of epistemology. It also has other important theoretical virtues:
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Thinking Reasonably about Indeterministic Choice Beliefs Canadian Journal of Philosophy Pub Date : 2022-05-11 Andrew Kissel
Recent research suggests that, regardless of the truth of libertarianism about free will, there appears to be a widespread belief among nonphilosopher laypersons that the choices of free agents are not causally necessitated by prior states of affairs. In this paper, I propose a new class of debunking explanation for this belief which I call ‘reasons-based accounts’ (RBAs). I start the paper by briefly
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The Future Is Not What It Used to Be: Longevity and the Curmudgeonly Attitude to Change Canadian Journal of Philosophy Pub Date : 2022-05-10 Kathy Behrendt
Boredom has dominated discussions about longevity thanks to Bernard Williams’s influential “The Makropulos Case.” I reveal the presence in that paper of a neglected, additional problem for the long-lived person, namely alienation in the face of unwanted change. Williams gestures towards this problem but does not pursue it. I flesh it out on his behalf, connecting it to what I call the ‘curmudgeonly
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Anti-Exceptionalism about Logic and the Burden of Explanation Canadian Journal of Philosophy Pub Date : 2022-05-02 Ben Martin
Considerable attention recently has been paid to anti-exceptionalism about logic (AEL), the thesis that logic is more similar to the sciences in important respects than traditionally thought. One of AEL’s prominent claims is that logic’s methodology is similar to that of the recognised sciences, with part of this proposal being that logics provide explanations in some sense. However, insufficient attention
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Reliabilism Defended Canadian Journal of Philosophy Pub Date : 2022-04-25 Jeffrey Tolly
Reliabilism about knowledge states that a belief-forming process generates knowledge only if its likelihood of generating true belief exceeds 50 percent. Despite the prominence of reliabilism today, there are very few if any explicit arguments for reliabilism in the literature. In this essay, I address this lacuna by formulating a new independent argument for reliabilism. As I explain, reliabilism
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Making Sense of Shame in Response to Racism Canadian Journal of Philosophy Pub Date : 2022-04-08 Aness Kim Webster
Some people of colour feel shame in response to racist incidents. This phenomenon seems puzzling since, plausibly, they have nothing to feel shame about. This puzzle arises because we assume that targets of racism feel shame about their race. However, I propose that when an individual is racialised as non-White in a racist incident, shame is sometimes prompted, not by a negative self-assessment of
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Empty Space, Silence, and Absence Canadian Journal of Philosophy Pub Date : 2022-03-25 Laura Gow
The idea that we can perceive absences is becoming increasingly popular in contemporary philosophy of mind, and seeing empty space and hearing silence are alleged to be two paradigmatic examples. In this paper, I remain neutral over the question of whether empty space experiences and experiences of silence are genuinely perceptual phenomena, however, I argue that these experiences do not qualify as
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The Focus of Love Canadian Journal of Philosophy Pub Date : 2022-03-14 Sharon Krishek
It is widely agreed that the focus of love is ‘the beloved herself’—but what does this actually mean? Implicit in J. David Velleman’s view of love is the intriguing suggestion that to have ‘the beloved herself’ as the focus of love is to respond to her essence. However, Velleman understands the beloved’s essence to amount to the universal quality of personhood, with the result that the beloved’s particularity
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A Neo-Searlean Theory of Intentionality Canadian Journal of Philosophy Pub Date : 2022-03-14 Nicholas Georgalis
I present Searle’s theory of intentionality and defend it against some objections. I then significantly extend his theory by exposing and incorporating an ambiguity in the question as to what an intentional state is about as between a subjective and an objective reading of the question. Searle implicitly relies on this ambiguity while applying his theory to a solution to the problem of substitution