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Representation without Informative Signalling Br. J. Philos. Sci. (IF 3.2) Pub Date : 2025-02-10 Gerardo Viera
The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, Ahead of Print.
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Zetetic rights and wrong(ing)s Philos. Q. (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2025-02-11 Daniel C Friedman
What do we owe those with whom we inquire? Presumably, quite a bit. Anything beyond what is necessary to secure knowledge? Yes. In this paper, I argue for a class of ‘zetetic rights.’ These are rights distinctive to participants in group inquiry. Zetetic rights help protect important central interests of inquirers. These include a right to aid, a right against interference, and a right to exert influence
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On the Mathematics and Metaphysics of the Hole Argument Br. J. Philos. Sci. (IF 3.2) Pub Date : 2025-02-10 Oliver Pooley, James Read
The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, Ahead of Print.
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Invention and Evolution of Correlated Conventions Br. J. Philos. Sci. (IF 3.2) Pub Date : 2025-02-10 Daniel A. Herrmann, Brian Skyrms
The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, Ahead of Print.
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Self-referring as self-directed action Philosophical Studies (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2025-02-07 Krisztina Orbán
I propose that examining pointing and, especially, self-pointing helps us to better understand Self-Referring (knowingly and intentionally self-referring). I explain basic features of pointing and self-pointing, such as referring, reference-fixing and the subject’s knowledge of the referent. I propose to treat Self-Referring as a self-directed action. Self-pointing makes it explicit how Self-Referring
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What is appreciation? Philosophical Studies (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2025-02-07 Auke Montessori
It is commonplace amongst epistemologists to note the importance of grasping or appreciating one’s evidence. The idea seems to be that agents cannot successfully utilize evidence without it. Despite the popularity of this claim, the nature of appreciating or grasping evidence is unclear. This paper develops an account of what it takes to appreciate the epistemic relevance of one’s evidence, such that
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Grievance politics and identities of resentment Philosophical Studies (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2025-02-07 Paul Katsafanas
Does it make sense to say that certain evaluative outlooks and political ideologies are essentially negative or oppositional in structure? Intuitively, it seems so: there is a difference between outlooks and ideologies that are expressive of hatred, resentment, and contempt, on the one hand, and those expressive of more affirmative emotions. But drawing this distinction is more difficult than it seems
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Bias, Norms, and Function: comments on Thomas Kelly’s Bias: a Philosophical Study Philosophical Studies (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2025-02-07 Gabbrielle M. Johnson
This commentary on Thomas Kelly’s Bias: A Philosophical Study compares his Norm-Theoretic Account, which defines bias as involving systematic deviations from genuine norms, with the Functional Account of Bias, which instead conceptualizes bias as a functional response to the problem of underdetermination. While both accounts offer valuable insights, I explore their compatibility and differences, arguing
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Fat-calling: ascriptions of fatness that subordinate Philosophical Studies (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2025-02-08 Chris Cousens
Calling someone fat is not only cruel and unkind—it also subordinates them. While the sharpest and most immediate harms of fatphobic bullying are emotional and psychological, these vary according to the resilience of the target. What one person can laugh off, another feels deeply, perhaps for years. But ‘fat-calling’ does not only have individual harms—it also perpetuates a subordinating social structure
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Definition by proxy Philosophical Studies (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2025-02-08 Samuel Z. Elgin
I take some initial steps toward a theory of real definition, drawing upon recent developments in higher-order logic. The resulting account allows for extremely fine-grained distinctions (it can distinguish between any relata that differ in their syntactic structure, while avoiding the Russell-Myhill problem). It is the first account that can consistently embrace three desirable logical principles
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Insight, perceptio, and Sosa on firsthand knowledge Philosophical Studies (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2025-02-08 Jack Lyons
Sosa emphasizes "firsthand intuitive insight" as a distinctive kind of epistemic aim and argues that this is a characteristic epistemic goal of humanistic inquiry. He draws from this some importantly antiskeptical conclusions for the epistemology of disagreement. I try to further develop this idea of insight, which I call ‘perceptio’, in which we "see" some truth to obtain. I agree that it is a distinctive
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Introspecting bias Philosophical Studies (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2025-02-08 Daniel Greco
In his recent book, (Bias: A Philosophical Study, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2022). Thomas Kelly argues that various phenomena that look initially like examples of how irrational we are in thinking about bias—especially our own biases—turn out to be exactly what you’d expect from ideally rational agents. The phenomena he discusses which I’ll focus on are (1) our inability to introspectively identify
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Does the No Alternatives Argument Need Gerrymandering to Be Significant? Br. J. Philos. Sci. (IF 3.2) Pub Date : 2025-02-06 Richard Dawid
The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, Ahead of Print.
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Defining consciousness and denying its existence. Sailing between Charybdis and Scylla Philosophical Studies (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2025-02-05 Fran?ois Kammerer
Ulysses, the strong illusionist, sails towards the Strait of Definitions. On his left, Charybdis defines “phenomenal consciousness” in a loaded manner, which makes it a problematic entity from a physicalist and naturalistic point of view. This renders illusionism attractive, but at the cost of committing a potential strawman against its opponents – phenomenal realists. On the right, Scylla defines
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Restricted Auditory Aspatialism Br. J. Philos. Sci. (IF 3.2) Pub Date : 2025-02-05 Douglas C. Wadle
The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, Ahead of Print.
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From singular to plural. . . and beyond? Philos. Phenomenol. Res. (IF 1.3) Pub Date : 2025-02-05 Jonathan D. Payton
A growing number of philosophers and logicians advocate for plural languages in which we can refer to and quantify over pluralities of individuals. Some go further, advocating for higher‐level languages in which we can refer to and quantify over, not just pluralities of individuals, but pluralities of pluralities, pluralities of pluralities of pluralities, and so on. These languages suggest a metaphysical
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Mere Recurrence and Cumulative Culture at the Margins Br. J. Philos. Sci. (IF 3.2) Pub Date : 2025-02-03 Andrew Buskell, Claudio Tennie
The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, Ahead of Print.
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An interpersonal form of faith Philos. Phenomenol. Res. (IF 1.3) Pub Date : 2025-02-03 Yuan Tian
An athlete has faith in her unathletic partner to run a marathon, a teacher has faith in her currently poor‐performing students to improve in the future, and your friend has faith in you to succeed in the difficult project that you have been pursuing, even, and especially, when your chance of failing is non‐trivial. This paper develops and defends a relational view of interpersonal faith by considering
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A new obstacle for phenomenal contrast Philos. Q. (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2025-02-03 Matthew Fulkerson, Jonathan Cohen
Phenomenal Contrast Arguments (PCAs) are a prominent method in philosophy of mind for, among other uses, investigating how specific mental features shape the phenomenal character of experience. This paper identifies a general and underexplored obstacle to the success of PCAs: The necessity of demonstrating that the contrasts employed in these arguments are genuinely phenomenal, rather than merely cognitive
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Hinge trust* Philos. Phenomenol. Res. (IF 1.3) Pub Date : 2025-02-02 Annalisa Coliva
Trust is central to epistemology, particularly in accounts of testimony, where it describes the relationship between a hearer and a speaker (or trustor and trustee), enabling the acquisition of information. The speaker's trustworthiness—marked by sincerity and knowledge—is essential for testimony to transmit knowledge or justified belief. However, trust's nature and role remain conceptually elusive
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Comments on Kelly: Against Positing a Non-Pejorative Sense of ‘Bias’ Philosophical Studies (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2025-01-31 Selim Berker
In Bias: A Philosophical Study, Thomas Kelly posits a distinction between two senses of the word ‘bias’, one pejorative, the other non-pejorative, and he puts this distinction to work in two crucial portions of the book: first, when he defends his central account of the nature of bias against would-be counterexamples; and, second, when he develops a new way of replying to external-world skepticism
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Becoming authentic: A social conception of the self Philos. Q. (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2025-01-30 Samuel A Mortimer
Two approaches to authenticity have gained currency in the recent analytic philosophical literature. The first takes authenticity to be a property of how people act (authentic agency). The second takes it to be a property of who people are (authentic self). This paper motivates both views, then argues that there is a dependency between the two: the exercise of authentic agency depends on the possession
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A thomistic argument for the containment view of pregnancy Philos. Q. (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2025-01-28 Patrick Toner
The ‘containment view’ of pregnancy is widely held, but it has recently been subjected to sustained criticism by Elselijn Kingma. According to the containment view, human foetuses (among others) are animals in their own right, contained within their mothers. Kingma's alternative to this is the ‘parthood view,’ according to which a foetus is a maternal part. Despite the prevalence of the containment
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On corrective and distributive requirements: The case of the beneficiary pays principle Philos. Q. (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2025-01-25 Giulio Fornaroli
According to the beneficiary pays principle (BPP), following an injustice that has produced damages, agents that have received benefits from it may incur a duty to redress the victim even if they are not at fault for it. In this paper, I do not offer either a full-blown defense or a refutation of the principle. Instead, I take issue with the common view, accepted by both sympathetic and critical authors
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Unreliable emotions and ethical knowledge Philos. Q. (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2025-01-25 James Hutton
How is ethical knowledge possible? One promising answer is Moral Empiricism: we can acquire ethical knowledge through emotional experiences. But Moral Empiricism faces a serious problem. Our emotions are unreliable guides to ethics, frequently failing to fit the ethical status of their objects, so the habit of basing ethical beliefs on one's emotions seems too unreliable to yield knowledge. I develop
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Loops and the geometry of chance No?s (IF 1.8) Pub Date : 2025-01-21 Jens J?ger
Suppose your evil sibling travels back in time, intending to lethally poison your grandfather during his infancy. Determined to save grandpa, you grab two antidotes and follow your sibling through the wormhole. Under normal circumstances, each antidote has a 50% chance of curing a poisoning. Upon finding young grandpa, poisoned, you administer the first antidote. Alas, it has no effect. The second
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Agnostic Wrongs and Pragmatic Disencroachment Philos. Phenomenol. Res. (IF 1.3) Pub Date : 2025-01-21 Mark Schroeder
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Similarity accounts of counterfactuals: A reality check1 Philos. Phenomenol. Res. (IF 1.3) Pub Date : 2025-01-21 Alan Hájek
To an unusual extent, philosophers agree that counterfactuals have truth conditions involving the most similar possible worlds where their antecedents are true, in the style of the celebrated and path‐breaking Stalnaker/Lewis accounts. Roughly, these accounts say that the counterfactual if A were the case, C would be the case is true if and only if at the most similar A‐worlds, C is true. I will argue
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Love first Philos. Phenomenol. Res. (IF 1.3) Pub Date : 2025-01-21 P. Quinn White
How should we respond to the humanity of others? Should we care for others' well‐being? Respect them as autonomous agents? Largely neglected is an answer we can find in the religious traditions of Judaism, Christianity and Buddhism: we should love all. This paper argues that an ideal of love for all can be understood apart from its more typical religious contexts and moreover provides a unified and
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Epistemic akrasia and treacherous propositions Philos. Q. (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2025-01-20 Bar Luzon
I argue that one ought not be epistemically akratic. Although this position may look self-evident, it is hard to pin down exactly what's wrong with the akratic subject. Indeed, some philosophers argue that epistemic akrasia is permissible. The standard anti-akratic response focuses on the weird downstream implications of this state for action and assertion. This approach, however, is unsatisfactory
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The do‐able solution to the interface problem Philos. Phenomenol. Res. (IF 1.3) Pub Date : 2025-01-19 Yair Levy
Philosophers and cognitive scientists increasingly recognize the need to appeal to motor representations over and above intentions in attempting to understand how action is planned and executed. But doing so gives rise to a puzzle, which has come to be known as “the Interface Problem”: How is it that intentions and motor representations manage to interface in producing action? The question has semed
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Deception and manipulation in generative AI Philosophical Studies (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2025-01-18 Christian Tarsney
Large language models now possess human-level linguistic abilities in many contexts. This raises the concern that they can be used to deceive and manipulate on unprecedented scales, for instance spreading political misinformation on social media. In future, agentic AI systems might also deceive and manipulate humans for their own purposes. In this paper, first, I argue that AI-generated content should
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A trope‐theoretic solution to the missing value problem No?s (IF 1.8) Pub Date : 2025-01-18 Paul Audi
One metaphysical problem about laws is how to find appropriate truthmakers for fully general functional laws. What makes it true, for instance, that an uninstantiated mass would interact with others as prescribed by laws concerning mass? This is the missing value problem. D. M. Armstrong attempted to solve it by appeal to determinable universals. I will offer a trope‐theoretic solution that, while
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The simplicity of physical laws No?s (IF 1.8) Pub Date : 2025-01-18 Eddy Keming Chen
Physical laws are strikingly simple, yet there is no a priori reason for them to be so. I propose that nomic realists—Humeans and non‐Humeans—should recognize simplicity as a fundamental epistemic guide for discovering and evaluating candidate physical laws. This proposal helps resolve several longstanding problems of nomic realism and simplicity. A key consequence is that the presumed epistemic advantage
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How to Be a Prudential Expressivist Mind (IF 1.8) Pub Date : 2025-01-14 James L D Brown
This paper examines the prospects for an expressivist theory of prudential thought and discussion, or thought and discussion about what is good for us or what makes our lives go well. It is becoming increasingly common to view prudential thought and discussion as a kind of normative thought and discussion. If this is right, then expressivism, like any other meta-normative view, must be able to explain
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Proportionality in the Aggregate Philosophical Studies (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2025-01-08 Elad Uzan
Much of revisionist just war theory is individualistic in nature: morality in war is just an extension of morality in interpersonal circumstances, so that killing in war is subject to the same moral principles that govern personal self-defense and defense of others. Recent work in the ethics of self-defense suggests that this individualism leads to a puzzle, which I call the puzzle of aggregation,
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Moral deference and morally worthy attitudes Philosophical Studies (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2025-01-08 Max Lewis
This paper defends a novel version of moderate pessimism about moral deference, i.e., the view that we have pro tanto reason to try to avoid moral deference. The problem with moral deference is that it puts one in a bad position to form what I call morally worthy attitudes, i.e., non-cognitive attitudes that have moral worth in the same sense that certain actions have moral worth. Forming morally worthy
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From seeing to knowing: the case of propositional perception Philosophical Studies (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2025-01-08 Miloud Belkoniene
This paper examines the question as to whether propositional seeing is best thought of as a way of knowing a proposition to be true. After showing how Pritchard’s distinction between objective and subjective goodness motivates a negative answer to this question, I examine a challenge raised by Ghijsen for Pritchard’s construal of that distinction. I then turn to the connection between propositional
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The normative significance of God’s self Philosophical Studies (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2025-01-08 Troy Seagraves
This paper argues that God plausibly has facts of self that function as modifiers of the normative reasons that apply to him. Facts of self are subjective facts like the fact that one has certain commitments, the fact that one has a certain character, the fact that one has a certain practical identity, the fact that one has certain projects. There is a widespread intuition (the normative significance
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Front Matter Br. J. Philos. Sci. (IF 3.2) Pub Date : 2025-01-07
The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, Volume 75, Issue 4, December 2024.
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Essence Facts and the Source of Normativity Mind (IF 1.8) Pub Date : 2025-01-05 Umut Baysan
What is the source of normativity? According to Bengson, Cuneo and Shafer-Landau (2023), we can answer this question by identifying non-normative grounds of fundamental normative facts. To illustrate how this can be achieved, they argue that facts concerning essences of normative properties are non-normative facts, and such facts can be seen as non-normative grounds of fundamental normative facts.
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Visual attention and representational content Philos. Q. (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2024-12-29 Kim Soland
Attention makes a phenomenal difference to visual experience, but the nature of this difference is controversial. There are three possibilities. The first is that the phenomenology of visual attention has deflationary content, which is to say that attention makes a phenomenal difference only by modulating the appearance of an attended object's visible features. Secondly, it has novel content—attention
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Understanding and how-possibly explanations: Why can’t they be friends? Philosophical Studies (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2024-12-26 Philippe Verreault-Julien, Till Grüne-Yanoff
In the current debate on the relation between how-possibly explanations (HPEs) and understanding, two seemingly irreconcilable positions have emerged, which either deny or assert HPEs’ contribution to understanding. We argue, in contrast, that there is substantial room for reconciliation between these positions. First, we show that a shared assumption is unfounded: HPEs can be interpreted as being
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Temporal holism Philosophical Studies (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2024-12-26 John Michael Pemberton
How can a persisting object change whilst remaining the same object? Lewis, who frames this as the problem of temporary intrinsics, presents us with the perdurance solution: objects persist by having temporal parts which may have differing properties. And in doing so he characterises the opposing view as persisting but not by having temporal parts – a view he calls endurance. But this dichotomous picture
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Understanding and veritism Philosophical Studies (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2024-12-26 Duncan Pritchard
My interest is in an apparent tension between two epistemological theses. The first is veritism, which is roughly the claim that truth is the fundamental epistemic good. The second is the idea that understanding is the proper goal of inquiry. The two theses seem to be in tension because the former seems to imply that the proper goal of inquiry should be truth rather than understanding. And yet there
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Can rules ground moral obligations? Philos. Phenomenol. Res. (IF 1.3) Pub Date : 2024-12-27 Luke Robinson
What are the principles that ground our moral obligations? One obvious answer is that they are prescriptive rules that govern conduct by imposing obligations much like (certain) legal rules govern conduct by imposing legal obligations. This rule conception of moral principles merits our attention for at least three reasons. It's the obvious and most straightforward way to develop the analogy between
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A Universal Money Pump for the Myopic, Naive, and Minimally Sophisticated Mind (IF 1.8) Pub Date : 2024-12-21 Johan E Gustafsson
The money-pump argument aims to show that cyclic preferences are irrational. The argument can be based on a number of different exploitation schemes that vary in what needs to be assumed about the agent. The Standard Money Pump works for myopic and naive agents, but not for sophisticated agents who use backward induction. The Upfront Money Pump works for sophisticated agents, but not for myopic or
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Evaluating action possibilities: a procedural metacognitive view of intentional omissions Philosophical Studies (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2024-12-19 Kaisa K?rki
How do we control what we do not do? What are the relevant guiding mental states when an agent intentionally omits to perform an action? I argue that what happens when an agent intentionally omits is a two-part metacognitive process in which a representation of an action is brought to the agent’s mind for further processing and evaluated by her as something not to be done. Without a representation
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Overdetermination and causal connections Philosophical Studies (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2024-12-19 Ezra Rubenstein
Some theories are alleged to be implausible because they are committed to systematic ‘overdetermination’. In response, some authors defend ‘compatibilism’: the view that the putative overdetermination is benign, like other unproblematic cases of a single effect having many sufficient causes. The literature has tended to focus on the following question: which relations between sufficient causes of a
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Causal inference from clinical experience Philosophical Studies (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2024-12-19 Hamed Tabatabaei Ghomi, Jacob Stegenga
How reliable are causal inferences in complex empirical scenarios? For example, a physician prescribes a drug to a patient, and then the patient undergoes various changes to their symptoms. They then increase their confidence that it is the drug that causes such changes. Are such inferences reliable guides to the causal relation in question, particularly when the physician can gain a large volume of
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Knowledge and merely predictive evidence Philosophical Studies (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2024-12-20 Haley Schilling Anderson
A jury needs “proof beyond a reasonable doubt” in order to convict a defendant of a crime. The standard is vexingly difficult to pin down, but some legal epistemologists have given this account: knowledge is the standard of legal proof. On this account, a jury should deliver a guilty verdict just in case they know that the defendant is guilty. In this paper, I’ll argue that legal proof requires more
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‘Racism without racists’: A clarification and refutation of the hypothesis Philos. Q. (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2024-12-20 Alberto G Urquidez
Sally Haslanger's notion of ‘pure structural oppression’ is the idea of an institution or structure that is unjust independent of any and all agential wrongdoing, and for which no agent is liable. Haslanger argues that pure structural oppression is possible, but she does not defend it as a viable phenomenon in the actual world. The rough equivalent of ‘pure structural oppression’ in the racial domain
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Block on perceptual variation, attribution, discrimination, and adaptation Philos. Phenomenol. Res. (IF 1.3) Pub Date : 2024-12-19 Susanna Schellenberg, Andrew J. P. Fink, Carl E. Schoonover, Mary A. Peterson
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Iconicity, 2nd‐order isomorphism, and perceptual categorization Philos. Phenomenol. Res. (IF 1.3) Pub Date : 2024-12-19 Steven Gross
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Précis of The Border between Seeing and Thinking Philos. Phenomenol. Res. (IF 1.3) Pub Date : 2024-12-19 Ned Block
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Remnants of perception: Comments on Block and the function of visual working memory Philos. Phenomenol. Res. (IF 1.3) Pub Date : 2024-12-19 Jake Quilty‐Dunn