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Adaptive abilities Philosophical Issues Pub Date : 2023-09-02 Erasmus Mayr, Barbara Vetter
Abilities, in contrast to mere dispositions, propensities, or tendencies, abilities seem to be features of agents that put the agent herself in control. But what is the distinguishing feature of abilities vis-à-vis other kinds of powers? Our aim in this paper is to point, in answer to this question, to a crucial feature of abilities that existing accounts have tended to neglect: their adaptivity. Adaptivity
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Freedom, foreknowledge, and betting Philosophical Issues Pub Date : 2023-08-30 Amy Seymour
Certain kinds of prediction, foreknowledge, and future-oriented action appear to require settled future truths. But open futurists think that the future is metaphysically unsettled: if it is open whether p is true, then it cannot currently be settled that p is true. So, open futurists—and libertarians who adopt the position—face the objection that their view makes rational action and deliberation impossible
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Practical understanding Philosophical Issues Pub Date : 2023-08-27 Lilian O'Brien
Well-functioning agents ordinarily have an excellent epistemic relationship to their intentional actions. This phenomenon is often characterized as knowledge of what one is doing and labeled “practical knowledge”. But when we examine it carefully, it seems to require a particular kind of understanding - understanding of the normative structure of one's action. Three lines of argument are offered to
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Freedom, moral responsibility, and the failure of universal defeat Philosophical Issues Pub Date : 2023-08-27 Andrew J. Latham, Hannah Tierney, Somogy Varga
Proponents of manipulation arguments against compatibilism hold that manipulation scope (how many agents are manipulated) and manipulation type (whether the manipulator intends that an agent perform a particular action) do not impact judgments about free will and moral responsibility. Many opponents of manipulation arguments agree that manipulation scope has no impact but hold that manipulation type
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A timid response to the consequence argument Philosophical Issues Pub Date : 2023-08-22 Michael McKenna
In this paper, I challenge the Consequence Argument for Incompatibilism by arguing that the inference principle it relies upon is not well motivated. The sorts of non-question-begging instances that might be offered in support of it fall short.
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Reasons-responsiveness, control and the negligence puzzle Philosophical Issues Pub Date : 2023-08-22 Yael Loewenstein
A longstanding puzzle about moral responsibility for negligence arises from three plausible yet jointly inconsistent theses: (i) an agent can, in certain circumstances, be morally responsible for some outcome O, even if her behavior with respect to O is negligent (i.e., even if she never adverted to the possibility that the behavior might result in O), (ii) an agent can be morally responsible for O
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Free will and self expression: A compatibilist garden of forking paths Philosophical Issues Pub Date : 2023-08-22 Robyn Repko Waller
Free will is often understood as the control an agent exercises over her actions that is required for the agent to be held morally responsible for her conduct. This necessary control has been classified in the literature as of two varieties, sourcehood and leeway control. According to accounts of sourcehood free will and moral responsibility, an agent must be a significant source of her actions for
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Responsibility and iterated knowledge Philosophical Issues Pub Date : 2023-08-21 Alex Kaiserman
I defend an iterated knowledge condition on responsibility for outcomes: one is responsible for a consequence of one's action only if one was in a position to know that, for all one was in a position to know, one's action would have that consequence.
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Practical reasons to believe, epistemic reasons to act, and the baffled action theorist Philosophical Issues Pub Date : 2023-08-21 Nomy Arpaly
I argue that unless belief is voluntary in a very strict sense – that is, unless credence is simply under our direct control – there can be no practical reasons to believe. I defend this view against recent work by Susanna Rinard. I then argue that for very similar reasons, barring the truth of strict doxastic voluntarism, there cannot be epistemic reasons to act, only purely practical reasons possessed
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“Free will” is vague Philosophical Issues Pub Date : 2023-08-19 Santiago Amaya
This paper argues that “free will” is vague. The argument has two steps. First, I argue that free will is a matter of degrees and, second, that there are no sharp boundaries separating free decisions and actions and non-free ones. After presenting the argument, I focus on one significant consequence of the thesis, although others are mentioned along the way. In short, considerations of vagueness help
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Incompatibilism and the garden of forking paths Philosophical Issues Pub Date : 2023-08-19 Andrew Law
Let (leeway) incompatibilism be the thesis that causal determinism is incompatible with the freedom to do otherwise. Several prominent authors have claimed that incompatibilism alone can capture, or at least best captures, the intuitive appeal behind Jorge Luis Borges's famous “Garden of Forking Paths” metaphor. The thought, briefly, is this: the “single path” leading up to one's present decision represents
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Determination from Above Philosophical Issues Pub Date : 2023-08-19 Kenneth Silver
There are many historical concerns about freedom that have come to be deemphasized in the free will literature itself—for instance, worries around the tyranny of government or the alienation of capitalism. It is hard to see how the current free will literature respects these, or indeed how they could even find expression. This paper seeks to show how these and other concerns can be reintegrated into
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Epistemic control without voluntarism Philosophical Issues Pub Date : 2023-08-19 Timothy R. Kearl
It is tempting to think (though many deny) that epistemic agents exercise a distinctive kind of control over their belief-like attitudes. My aim here is to sketch a “bottom-up” model of epistemic agency, one that draws on an analogous model of practical agency, according to which an agent's conditional beliefs are reasons-responsive planning states that initiate and sustain mental behavior so as to
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It would be bad if compatibilism were true; therefore, it isn't Philosophical Issues Pub Date : 2023-08-17 Patrick Todd
I want to suggest that it would be bad if compatibilism were true, and that this gives us good reason to think that it isn't. This is, you might think, an outlandish argument, and the considerable burden of this paper is to convince you otherwise. There are two key elements at stake in this argument. The first is that it would be - in a distinctive sense to be explained - bad if compatibilism were
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A new solution to the problem of luck Philosophical Issues Pub Date : 2023-08-17 Ann Whittle
The issue of whether and how we have the control necessary for freedom and moral responsibility is central to all control accounts of freedom and moral responsibility. The problem of luck for libertarians aims to show that indeterministic agents are ill-equipped with the control required for freedom and moral responsibility. In view of this, we must either endorse scepticism about the possibility of
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Agency: Let's mind what's fundamental1 Philosophical Issues Pub Date : 2023-08-17 Robert H. Wallace
The standard event-causal theory of action says that an intentional action is caused in the right way by the right mental states. This view requires reductionism about agency. The causal role of the agent must be nothing over and above the causal contribution of the relevant mental event-causal processes. But commonsense finds this reductive solution to the “agent-mind problem”, the problem of explaining
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Libertarianism and agentive experience Philosophical Issues Pub Date : 2023-08-17 Justin A. Capes
Libertarianism about free will conjoins the thesis that free will requires indeterminism with the thesis that we have free will. Here the claim that we have experiential evidence for the libertarian position is assessed. It is argued that, on a straightforward reading, the claim is false, for our experiences as agents don't support the claim that free will requires indeterminism. However, our experiences
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I didn't think of that Philosophical Issues Pub Date : 2023-08-17 Randolph Clarke
Consider cases in which an agent simply doesn.t think to do a certain thing, or doesn't think of a crucial consideration favoring doing a certain thing, or intends to do a certain thing but forgets to do it. In such a case, is the agent able to do the thing that she fails to do? Assume that commonly we all-in can do things that we do not do. Here I argue that, given this assumption, in the cases under
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Flickering the W-Defense Philosophical Issues Pub Date : 2023-08-17 Michael Robinson
One way to defend the Principle of Alternative Possibilities (PAP) against Frankfurt-style cases is to challenge the claim that agents in these scenarios are genuinely morally responsible for what they do. Alternatively, one can grant that agents are morally responsible for what they do in these cases but resist the idea that they could not have done otherwise. This latter strategy is known as the
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Higher-order omissions and the stacked view of agency Philosophical Issues Pub Date : 2023-08-17 Joseph Metz
Omissions are puzzling, and theyraise myriad questions for many areas of philosophy. In contrast, omissions ofomissions are not usually taken to be very puzzling since they are oftenthought to just be a fancy way of describing ordinary “positive” events, statesof affairs, or actions. This paper contends that – as far as agency isconcerned – at least some omissions of omissions are omissions, not actions
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Agency and responsibility: The personal and the political Philosophical Issues Pub Date : 2023-08-17 Sofia Jeppsson
In this paper, I review arguments according to which harsh criminal punishments and poverty are undeserved and therefore unjust. Such arguments come in different forms. First, one may argue that no one deserves to be poor or be punished, because there is no such thing as desert-entailing moral responsibility. Second, one may argue that poor people in particular do not deserve to remain in poverty or
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Why history matters for moral responsibility: Evaluating history-sensitive structuralism Philosophical Issues Pub Date : 2023-08-17 Taylor W. Cyr
Is moral responsibility essentially historical, or does an agent's moral responsibility for an action depend only on their psychological structure at that time? In previous work, I have argued that the two main (non-skeptical) views on moral responsibility and agents’ histories—historicism and standard structuralism—are vulnerable to objections that are avoided by a third option, namely history-sensitive
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Public artifacts and the epistemology of collective material testimony Philosophical Issues Pub Date : 2022-11-14 Quill R Kukla
1 INTRODUCTION Many artifacts that are part of the public landscape—including monuments, memorials, murals, and many viewing towers, arches, gardens, public sculptures, and buildings—are designed to communicate knowledge. It is common to describe such public artifacts as speech,1 and also to describe them as transmitting knowledge of one sort or another.2 But the claim that these artifacts can be
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Valuable and pernicious collective intellectual self-trust1 Philosophical Issues Pub Date : 2022-11-09 Nadja El Kassar
Recent years have seen a shift in epistemological studies of intellectual self-trust or epistemic self-trust: intellectual self-trust is not merely epistemologists’ tool for silencing epistemic skepticism or doubt, it is recognized as a disposition of individuals and collectives interesting in its own rights. In this exploratory article I focus on a particular type of intellectual self-trust—collective
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On the independence of belief and credence Philosophical Issues Pub Date : 2022-11-06 Elizabeth Jackson
Much of the literature on the relationship between belief and credence has focused on the reduction question: that is, whether either belief or credence reduces to the other. This debate, while important, only scratches the surface of the belief-credence connection. Even on the anti-reductive dualist view, belief and credence could still be very tightly connected. Here, I explore questions about the
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Trust as performance Philosophical Issues Pub Date : 2022-11-02 J. Adam Carter
It is argued that trust is a performative kind and that the evaluative normativity of trust is a special case of the evaluative normativity of performances generally. The view is shown to have advantages over competitor views, e.g., according to which good trusting is principally a matter of good believing (e.g., Hieronymi, 2008; McMyler, 2011), or good affect (e.g., Baier, 1986; Jones, 1996), or good
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Responsibility in epistemic collaborations: Is it me, is it the group or are we all to blame? Philosophical Issues Pub Date : 2022-11-01 S. Orestis Palermos
According to distributed virtue reliabilism (Palermos, 2020b), epistemic collaborations—such as Transactive Memory Systems and Scientific Research Teams—can be held epistemically responsible at the collective level. This raises the question of whether participants of epistemic collaborations are exempt from being held individually responsible. In response, this paper explores two possible ways in which
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Epistemic bootstrapping as a failure to use an independent source Philosophical Issues Pub Date : 2022-10-28 Miguel Ángel Fernández-Vargas
The problem of epistemic bootstrapping requires explaining, in a principled manner, why a subject who engages in bootstrapping fails to know the conclusion of her reasoning. Existing proposed solutions to the problem provide unsatisfactory explanations regarding the bootstrapper's ignorance. This paper puts forward a novel solution and argues that it satisfactorily explains the ignorance of the bootstrapper
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Radical internalism Philosophical Issues Pub Date : 2022-10-28 Zoë Johnson King
In her paper “Radical Externalism”, Amia Srinivasan argues that externalism about epistemic justification should be preferred to internalism by those who hold a “radical” worldview (according to which pernicious ideology distorts our evidence and belief-forming processes). I share Srinivasan's radical worldview, but do not agree that externalism is the preferable approach in light of the worldview
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Group-deliberative competences and group knowledge Philosophical Issues Pub Date : 2022-10-26 Fernando Broncano-Berrocal, Moisés Barba
Under what conditions is a group belief resulting from deliberation constitutive of group knowledge? What kinds of competences must a deliberating group manifest when settling a question so that the resulting collective belief can be considered group knowledge? In this paper, we provide an answer to the second question that helps make progress on the first question. In particular, we explain the epistemic
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Collective practical knowledge is a fragmented interrogative capacity Philosophical Issues Pub Date : 2022-10-26 Joshua Habgood-Coote
What does it take for a group of people to know how to do something? An account of collective practical knowledge ought to be compatible with the linguistic evidence about the semantics for collective knowledge-how ascriptions, be able to explain the practicality of collective knowledge, be able to explain both the connection between individual and collective know-how and the possibility of a group
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Socio-functional foundations in science: The case of measurement Philosophical Issues Pub Date : 2022-10-26 Kareem Khalifa, Sanford C. Goldberg
We present a novel kind of “socio-functional” foundationalism rooted in the division of scientific labor. Our foundationalism is social in that it involves a socio-epistemic phenomenon we dub epistemic outsourcing, whereby claims from one group of scientists provide epistemological foundations for another group of scientists. We argue that: (1) epistemic outsourcing results in a legitimate form of
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Outlaw epistemologies: Resisting the viciousness of country music's settler ignorance Philosophical Issues Pub Date : 2022-10-25 Shelbi Nahwilet Meissner, Bryce Huebner
Settler colonial imaginaries are constructed through the repeated, intergenerational layering of settler ecologies onto Indigenous ecologies; they result in fortified ignorance of the land, Indigenous peoples, and the networks of relationality and responsibility that sustain co-flourishing. Kyle Whyte (2018) terms this fortification of settler ignorance vicious sedimentation. In this paper, we argue
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Collective and extended knowledge Philosophical Issues Pub Date : 2022-10-23 Paul Faulkner
As individuals we know things. The epistemological investigation of knowledge then naturally starts from the assumption that knowledge is some state of an individual's mind with the most common assumption being that knowledge is a species of belief—the justified and true. This individualistic epistemic approach has then been criticised along the following two fronts. First, it has been argued that
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Belief as emotion Philosophical Issues Pub Date : 2022-10-23 Miriam Schleifer McCormick
It is commonly held that (i) beliefs are revisable in the face of counter-evidence and (ii) beliefs are connected to actions in reliable and predictable ways. Given such a view, many argue that if a mental state fails to respond to evidence or doesn't result in the kind of behavior typical or expected of belief, it is not a belief after all, but a different state. Yet, one finds seeming counter examples
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Scaffolding knowledge Philosophical Issues Pub Date : 2022-10-23 Alessandra Tanesini
In this article I argue that often propositional knowledge is acquired and retained by extensive reliance on physical and social scaffolds that create an environment or niche conducive to knowledge. It is incumbent on epistemologists to subject these aids to epistemic assessments. I show that several of the activities involved in the creation of niches within which inquiry can thrive are carried out
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Challenging the ability intuition: From personal to extended to distributed belief-forming processes Philosophical Issues Pub Date : 2022-10-20 Joseph Shieber
Much of what we know results from information sources on which we epistemically rely. This fact about epistemic reliance, however, stands in tension with a very powerful intuition governing knowledge, an intuition that Pritchard (e.g., 2010) has termed the “ability intuition,” the idea that a believer's “reliable cognitive faculties are the most salient part of the total set of causal factors that
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Epistemic institutions: A joint epistemic action-based account Philosophical Issues Pub Date : 2022-10-20 Seumas Miller
1 INTRODUCTION Contemporary social institutions include complex organizations, or systems of organizations such as governments, police services, business corporations, universities, welfare institutions and the like; they also include, criminal justice systems (comprised of a police organization, courts, correctional facilities etc.), legal systems (comprised of a legislature, the law, courts, legal
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Towards an epistemology of cultural learning Philosophical Issues Pub Date : 2022-10-20 Benjamin McMyler
1 INTRODUCTION The secret of our species’ success resides not in the power of our individual minds, but in the collective brains of our communities. Our collective brains arise from the synthesis of our cultural and social natures—from the fact that we readily learn from others (are cultural) and can, with the right norms, live in large and widely interconnected groups (are social). The striking technologies
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Skepticism, naturalism, pyrrhonism Philosophical Issues Pub Date : 2022-10-20 Otávio Bueno
Skepticism and naturalism bear important connections with one another. Do they conflict or are they different sides of the same coin? In this paper, by considering the ways in which Sextus and Hume have examined these issues, I offer a Pyrrhonian response to Penelope Maddy's attempt to reject skepticism within the form of naturalism that she calls “second philosophy” (Maddy, 2007, 2017) and to Timothy
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Understanding phenomena: From social to collective? Philosophical Issues Pub Date : 2022-10-20 Federica I. Malfatti
In making sense of the world, we typically cooperate, join forces, and draw on one another's competence and expertise. A group or community in which there is a well-functioning division of cognitive-epistemic labor can achieve levels of understanding that a single agent who relies exclusively on her own capacities would probably never achieve. However, is understanding also collective? I.e., is understanding
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Knowing failably and Moorean assertions Philosophical Issues Pub Date : 2022-10-20 Stephen Hetherington
Knowledge-fallibilism is a species of a genus that I call knowledge-failabilism. Each is a theory of knowledge's nature. One apparent challenge to knowledge-failabilism's truth is the prima facie absurdity of Moorean assertions like ‘It's raining but I do not believe that it is.’ Does each such assertion convey an implicit and unfortunate contrast, even a contradiction? I argue that this Untenable
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Defeat and proficiencies Philosophical Issues Pub Date : 2022-10-20 Christoph Kelp
Virtue epistemology is the view that beliefs are attempts at truth (or perhaps knowledge) and, as a result, can be assessed as successful, competent, and apt. Moreover, virtue epistemology identifies central epistemic properties with normative properties of beliefs as attempts. In particular, knowledge is apt belief and justified belief is competent belief. This paper develops a systematic virtue epistemological
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Group agential epistemic injustice: Epistemic disempowerment and critical defanging of group epistemic agency1 Philosophical Issues Pub Date : 2022-10-20 José Medina
Expanding Miranda Fricker's (2007) concept of epistemic injustice, recent accounts of agential epistemic injustice (Lackey, 2020; Medina, 2021; Pohlhaus, 2020) have focused on cases in which the epistemic agency of individuals or groups is unfairly blocked, constrained, or subverted. In this article I argue that agential epistemic injustice is perpetrated against marginalized groups not only when their
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Group evidence Philosophical Issues Pub Date : 2022-10-17 Jessica Brown
1 INTRODUCTION1 To date, most work in group epistemology has focused on group doxastic states such as belief, justified belief and knowledge. But an important question for group epistemology is the nature of group evidence. For, a subject's evidence affects whether her beliefs and actions are justified. For instance, if a subject receives evidence that these are poisonous mushrooms, then that affects
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Opacity of Character: Virtue Ethics and the Legal Admissibility of Character Evidence Philosophical Issues Pub Date : 2021-10-27 Jacob Smith, Georgi Gardiner
Many jurisdictions prohibit or severely restrict the use of evidence about a defendant's character to prove legal culpability. Situationists, who argue that conduct is largely determined by situational features rather than by character, can easily defend this prohibition. According to situationism, character evidence is misleading or paltry. Proscriptions on character evidence seem harder to justify
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Norms of criminal conviction Philosophical Issues Pub Date : 2021-10-27 Jennifer Lackey
In this paper, I offer three different arguments against the view that knowledge is the epistemic norm governing criminal convictions in the Anglo-American system. The first two show that neither the truth of a juror's verdict nor the juror's belief in the defendant's guilt is necessary for voting to convict in an epistemically permissible way. Both arguments challenge the necessity dimension of the
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Eleven angry men Philosophical Issues Pub Date : 2021-10-11 Clayton Littlejohn
While many of us would not want to abandon the requirement that a defendant can only be found guilty of a serious criminal offence by a unanimous jury, we should not expect epistemology to give us the resources we need for justifying this requirement. The doubts that might prevent jurors from reaching unanimity do not show that, say, the BARD standard has not been met. Even if it were true, as some
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Proof Paradoxes, Agency, and Stereotyping Philosophical Issues Pub Date : 2021-10-05 Aness Kim Webster
Many have attempted to justify various courts’ position that bare or naked statistical evidence is not sufficient for findings of liability. I provide a particular explanation by examining a different, but related, issue about when and why stereotyping is wrong. One natural explanation of wrongness of stereotyping appeals to agency. However, this has been scrutinised. In this paper, I argue that we
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Justification, excuse, and proof beyond reasonable doubt Philosophical Issues Pub Date : 2021-10-05 Hock Lai Ho
The law requires criminal guilt to be proved beyond a reasonable doubt. There are two different approaches to construing this legal rule. On an epistemic approach, the rule is construed in terms of justified belief or knowledge; on a probabilistic approach, the rule is construed in terms of satisfying a probabilistic threshold. An epistemic construction of the rule has this advantage over a probabilistic
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Justice in epistemic gaps: The ‘proof paradox’ revisited Philosophical Issues Pub Date : 2021-10-03 Lewis Ross
This paper defends the heretical view that sometimes we ought to assign legal liability based on statistical evidence alone. Recent literature focuses on potential unfairness to the defending party if we rely on bare statistics. Here, I show that capitulating in response to ‘epistemic gaps’—cases where there is a group of potential harmers but an absence of individuating evidence—can amount to a serious
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A probabilistic analysis of cross-examination using Bayesian networks Philosophical Issues Pub Date : 2021-10-03 Marcello Di Bello
The legal scholar Henry Wigmore asserted that cross-examination is ‘the greatest legal engine ever invented for the discovery of truth.’ Was Wigmore right? Instead of addressing this question upfront, this paper offers a conceptual ground clearing. It is difficult to say whether Wigmore was right or wrong without becoming clear about what we mean by cross-examination; how it operates at trial; what
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Realizing the value of public input: Mini‐public consultation on agency rulemaking 1 Philosophical Issues Pub Date : 2021-10-01 Eduardo J. Martinez
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The state's right to evidence and duties of citizenship Philosophical Issues Pub Date : 2021-10-01 Youngjae Lee
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Does legal epistemology rest on a mistake? On fetishism, two‐tier system design, and conscientious fact‐finding Philosophical Issues Pub Date : 2021-10-01 David Enoch,Talia Fisher,Levi Spectre
Legal epistemology seems to be exploding. More and more philosophers seem to be taking an interest in the theory of evidence law, and to bring along with them to legal theory the freshest news from the abstract study of epistemology . This is understandable, of course: The law in general, and evidence law in particular, seems to be employing the same natural-language terms epistemologists are (or are
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Pragmatic encroachment and legal proof Philosophical Issues Pub Date : 2021-10-01 Sarah Moss
This paper uses some modest claims about knowledge to identify a significant problem for contemporary American trial procedure. First, suppose that legal proof requires knowledge. In particular, suppose that the defendant in a jury trial is proven guilty only if the jury knows that the defendant is guilty. Second, suppose that knowledge is subject to pragmatic encroachment. In particular, whether the
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Political action, epistemic detachment, and the problem of white‐mindedness Philosophical Issues Pub Date : 2021-10-01 Darien Pollock
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Statistical evidence and incentives in the law Philosophical Issues Pub Date : 2021-10-01 John Hawthorne,Yoaav Isaacs,Vishnu Sridharan
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The pragmatist school in analytic jurisprudence Philosophical Issues Pub Date : 2021-10-01 Raff Donelson