anotherpanacea

Tag: Judging with Your Gut

  • Cultural Cognition is Not a Bias

    Some recent posts by Dan Kahan on the subject of “cultural cognition” deserve attention: (Cultural cognition refers to the tendency of individuals to conform their beliefs about disputed matters of fact (e.g., whether global warming is a serious threat; whether the death penalty deters murder; whether gun control makes society more safe or less) to values that…

  • Empathy, Cognition, and In-Group Preferences

    The speculative post on empathy generated a great set of comments over on Facebook, but I think the discussion was weighed down by the framing from the original article regarding “Extreme Female Brain.” Those (like Cordelia Fine) who have rejected the account of autism-spectrum disorders as “Extreme Male Brain” have largely done so because of the…

  • The Fallacy Fallacy [sic] of Mood Affiliation (Workplace Domination Part Two)

    In his initial response to the the Crooked Timber bloggers, Cowen also suggests that he doesn’t like the “mood affiliation” of the CT bloggers: I am not comfortable with the mood affiliation of the piece.  How about a simple mention of the massive magnitude of employee theft in the United States, perhaps in the context…

  • Crazyism about Ethics

    Crazyism about X is the view that something it would be crazy to believe must be among the core truths about X. It’s probably more common than we’d like to think. Some significant portion of professional philosophers can be manipulated into accepting or refusing the Doctrine of Double Effect on the basis of the order…

  • Deciding Whether or Not to Tell a Story

    When I was an undergraduate, I took a class called “Truth and Beauty” with the poet Ann Lauterbach. It was basically a class on reading and writing essays, but I took it because I was a philosophy major and I thought it would be about aesthetics, i.e. about whether judgments about beauty can be true…

  • Marriage is Magic

    I made the mistake of teaching a set of essays on gay marriage at the end of the semester. I call it a “mistake” because I find it very difficult to give my traditional charitable interpretation to the work of folks like John Finnis and Robert George, who make arguments from a definition of marriage…

  • Emotions: Appropriate or True?

    One of the major debates in the philosophy of emotions is whether they ought to be treated as propositional attitudes and judgments capable of truth-tracking or simply as moods that can be appropriate or inappropriate to a context, but not falsifiable or verifiable. The question is whether emotions are a kind of intentional cognition or not.…

  • Calliagnosia

    In Ted Chiang’s short story, “Liking What You See: A Documentary,” he offers us a typical science-fictional hypothetical, in the form of a staged debate regarding the value of seeing beauty in others. What if you could remove your own capacity to see the beauty in a human face? While at first this seems like…

  • Reasons, Evidence, and Proof

    I have a tendency to speak in a way that conflates “evidence” and “reasons.” I’m pretty sure they are interchangeable. When we discover evidence, we discover a reason to believe some proposition. At the same time, reason-giving is the exchange of evidence, even when it is nothing more than the exchange of priors and ungrounded…

  • Democracy, Bureaucracy and the Fear of Statisticians

    Often when I am trying to explain problems in the modern political landscape or my own approach to political philosophy, I will return to Max Weber’s account of bureaucracy as more efficient than private office. Yes, I’ve heard all the jokes about “efficiency” in bureaucracy, but Weber’s argument rested on the contrast between private and…