Tag: Believing What’s True
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Wikileaks and War
Is this the argument? 1. (Our) wars are unjust. 2. Stopping (our) wars will prevent further injustice. combined with: 3. (Our) wars depend on secrecy in inception and in daily practice. 4. Thus, (our) wars can be prevented by eliminating the secrecy in inception. 5. Moreover, (our) wars can be stopped by eliminating the secrecy…
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Heuristics and Biases Bleg
I’m revamping my Critical Thinking syllabus, and I’m looking to ramp up the heuristics and biases section, perhaps to four or five weeks. Most of the material I’ve reviewed is either too technical or too simplistic, akin to the “memorize a list of fallacies” model. I’d like something a bit more in-depth, but I’m balking…
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Deliberation and Evolutionary Psychology
Hugo Mercier and Helene Landemore describe an evolutionary psychological theory of deliberative polarization in their paper, “Reasoning is for Arguing: Understanding the Successes and Failures of Deliberation.” From the paper: We suggest that the function of reasoning is not the betterment of beliefs and judgments through private ratiocination and this is why reasoning does not accomplish this task well. According to…
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Borderline Personality Disorder, Utility, and Maximin Strategies
Most liberals adopt some version of the Rawlsian principle that changes in the distribution of goods ought to benefit the least advantaged. This is a principle easily adopted on utilitarian grounds: the marginal utility to be derived from redistribution is quite high. For instance, the difference between the pleasure I currently experience and the pleasure…
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Books that Have Changed My Mind
Here’s a question: what books, stories, or essays have changed your mind, and how? (via) It’s pretty common to talk about the books that influence us, but I tend to think that these texts make us more ourselves or cement already existing biases: anti-authoritarian teenagers read Ayn Rand, young people of faith read C. S.…
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The Principle of Insufficient Reason and the Hiddenness of God
One of the most common philosophical conversations on the internet is the argument between atheists and agnostics as to which is the more reasonable position. This comes up so often that I thought I’d record some of my reflections on it. In particular, I am mindful that my position is somewhat at odds with my…
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Against Deference: Epistemic Privilege Considered
Following up on my claim in the last post that “honor produces error,” in my view, the problem is epistemic privilege, i.e. deference. By deference, I mean the epistemic privileges that some people receive or earn through demonstrating their erudition or looking like they know what they’re talking about. When you think of deference, you…
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The Politics of Crazies
Dr. Trott has a nice post over at Mahogany Feed on Terry Jones’ threat to burn Korans over the weekend to commemorate the attacks of September 11th and to remind Muslims “not to push their agenda on us.” Dr. Trott suggests that this threat to burn the holy book of a cultural group, with an…
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Consent Revisited in Light of New Facts
In a previous post, I argued deception robbed sexual and marriage partners of their capacity to grant informed consent: attempts to reduce consent to the simple act of saying “yes” actually ignore the ways in which fraudulently representing oneself may be coercive. We can hate the bigotry and prejudice that make the lies seem necessary…
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Consent
If you lie about your ethnicity in order to procure consent for sex, is that rape? Sabbar Kashur, 30, was sentenced to 18 months in prison on Monday after the court ruled that he was guilty of rape by deception. According to the complaint filed by the woman with the Jerusalem district court, the two…