anotherpanacea

Tag: Believing What’s True

  • The Weak Man Fallacy

    Is paranoia and militancy the core of the Tea Party Movement? In the context of my recent foray into the Tea Party movement, I’ve been thinking recently about fallacies and bad critical thinking in the public sphere. My friend Robert Talisse has an article with Scott Aikin that I think all philosophers should read. In…

  • Tea Party Follow-up

    So after my last Tea Party post, I’ve been trying to track down more information about the movement. One interview does not an investigation make. Here’s what I’ve dug up:

  • The Tea Party Movement

    The New York Times’ article on Tea Party ‘founder’ Keli Carender, struck me as an interesting corrective to much of the treatment of the movement as either a Fox News ‘stunt’ or a wing of the Republican Party run by the same old white men with a few token non-males and non-whites. Carendar is apparently…

  • Citizens United v. FEC: Yes, corporations are people, too.

    Let’s get the jokes out of the way: “If corporations are people, do they get to vote?” “If corporations are people, can we start incarcerating them when they commit crimes?” “Does this mean I can marry my bank?” “Does charging a fee for incorporation constitute an unconstitutional violation of their reproductive rights?” “Thank God we’ve…

  • Earthquakes and Providence

    My old boss Ted Kinnaman has a piece in the Huffington Post on Pat Robertson’s claim that Haitians deserved the recent earthquake because they made a pact with the devil in order free themselves from colonial slavery. Others have developed the historical case for such a pact. Where many have taken Robertson to task for…

  • Advice

    Ever since the markets became front page news, I’ve been caught in some sort of economics blog vortex. At this point, most of my reading is no longer directed towards macro-economic issues and institutional critique, but rather focuses on the economics department at George Mason. The problem is that it seems like these people really…

  • Appreciative Thinking

    I’ve been having a debate on a friend’s Facebook page about the value of Martha Nussbaum’s work (I’m a fan) and serendipitously I found this post on “appreciative thinking” via Tyler Cowen. It’s a kind of inverted critical thinking, from Seth Roberts: When it comes to scientific papers, to teach appreciative thinking means to help…

  • Beyond ‘Real’ and ‘Relative’: What are moral propositions about?

    Dr. J responds on moral realism. It appears that our dispute focuses on the role that ‘the world’ plays in verifying our moral propositions. Dr. J is  right to note that I’ve made an important and potentially dispositive claim in asserting that agent-neutrality requires that one’s account be “either verified by the world or not.”  However, I…

  • The Will-Be/Ought Gap: Marking Ideas to Market and Moral Realism

    (What follows are some reflections on two related problems. One is Robin Hanson’s discussion of prediction markets to counteract status quo bias, and the other is my friend Leigh Johnson’s meditation on strong moral relativism. Because of length, I have cut my extended reflections on Dr. J’s “strong relativism” for a post tomorrow.) If there’s…