METAPHILOSOPHY最新文献

A queue-jumping argument concludes that some course of action is impermissible by likening it to the presumptively impermissible act of jumping a queue. Arguments of this sort may be found in a disparate range of contexts and in support of policies favoured by both left and right. Examples include arguments against private education and private health care but also arguments against accommodations for learning disabilities, refugee resettlement, and birthright citizenship. We infer that, although queue-jumping arguments are strictly analogies, they constitute a sufficiently distinct class of arguments to justify their separate treatment. The paper proposes an argumentation scheme for queue-jumping arguments and demonstrates its applicability to some existing arguments of this type.

That there is a “crisis of peer review” at the moment is not in dispute, but sufficient attention has not yet been paid to the normative potential that lies in current calls for reform. In contrast to approaches to “fixing” the problems in peer review, which tend to maintain the status quo in terms of professionalising opportunities, this paper addresses the needs of philosophers and how peer-review reform can be an opportunity to improve the academic discipline of philosophy, whereby progress is understood as making the discipline more fair to the global academic community and more conducive to the flourishing of academic philosophers. The paper evaluates recent categories of relevant norms and correlating reforms. In conclusion, it recommends that philosophy pursue the norms of transparency and democracy explicitly when proposing peer-review reform and suggest that proposals for forum-based models of peer review are most likely to support those norms.

This article introduces a novel theoretical framework for addressing epistemic injustice—a phenomenon where certain groups or individuals are systematically excluded from knowledge creation and dissemination processes—by employing ontological relativity and conceptual analysis. “Ontological relativity” refers to a philosophical perspective that posits our understanding of reality as being shaped by our toolbox of concepts, categories, language, and social practices; “conceptual analysis” is a method of inquiry that involves the rigorous examination and deconstruction of a particular concept or set of concepts in order to uncover their constituent elements, relationships, and underlying assumptions. To exemplify the effectiveness of the ontology-based approach, two paradigmatic applications are explored: (a) educational practices and (b) clinical practice and access to health care. Through the presentation of these applications and the step-by-step illustration of the applied methodology, the aim of the article is to showcase the efficacy of ontology in tackling epistemic injustices, suggesting innovative paths for future research in this domain.

What are academic hoaxes, and what should we make of them? This paper argues that academic hoaxes are exercises in pretense, with a complex structure involving both a focal item and a self-revealing dimension, all governed by attitudes about the relevant sort of academic work, that are derivative yet different from the attitudes found in normal participation in publication. Hoaxes done primarily for humorous purposes are unproblematic. Serious academic hoaxes are both inherently risky and poorly suited to accomplish their ends, making them an undesirable feature of the contemporary academic landscape.

Metaphysics is the inquiry having categorial form as its aim. Once all but defunct, metaphysics has now revived, though without disciplinary focus. Nine points of entry dominate current studies, each separate from and largely oblivious to the others. This essay characterizes the nine, expressing its preference for a discipline grounded in the empirical sciences while pursuing issues they ignore.

According to a common philosophical intuition, the deep nature of things is hidden from us, and the world as we know it through perception and science is, just like a dream, shadows, or a computer simulation, somehow shallow and lacking in reality. This “intuition of unreality” clashes with a strong, but perhaps more naive, intuition to the effect that the world as we know it seems perfectly real. Shadows, dreams, or informational structures appear too unreal to be identical to the world as we know it! This clash between the two intuitions forms the basis of the “problem of reality.” In the late nineteenth century psychiatrists encountered patients they referred to as “metaphysician doubters” who constantly questioned the reality of the world. This essay draws on studies of these patients in order to reject, and indeed diagnose, the intuition of unreality and recent metaphysical doctrines drawing on it, such as structuralism, digitalism, and virtual realism.

It might be that intuitions are central to philosophy, and it might be that this is true because when philosophers give case-based arguments for philosophical claims (in published philosophy), the case verdict is typically (a) an intuited proposition and (b) either left undefended or defended on the grounds that it is an intuited proposition. This paper remains neutral on these global issues, however, and instead focuses on whether there is a nontrivial (or many-membered) class of case-based arguments in philosophy in which the case verdict is defended by appeal to background beliefs and not on the grounds that it is an intuited proposition. The paper argues that the answer is affirmative by examining seven such arguments that are referred to as “paradigm cases” of case-based arguments in which the verdict is justified via an appeal to intuition.

The actual or potential epistemic vices of a given discipline or field of study are its disciplinary vices. This paper identifies three actual or potential disciplinary vices of vice epistemology. Vice epistemology explains people's epistemic misconduct by reference to their supposed epistemic vices. Such vice explanations are contrasted with attempts to achieve Verstehen of people's epistemic conduct and understand it from their point of view. Although vice explanations do not preclude Verstehen, vice epistemology is in danger of overlooking alternatives to its preferred mode of explanation. In some cases, Verstehen calls into question the assumption that a person is guilty of epistemic misconduct. Vice explanations also risk attaching insufficient weight to politico-strategic factors in the explanation of political action. Care needs to be taken by vice epistemologists to avoid intellectual myopia, political naivety, and overconfidence in attributing vices.

Philosophers ponder on how to do philosophy and how to do it well. This pondering has divided metaphilosophers' concern about philosophical methodology into two groups, which we could label “pro-history” and “pro-intuition.” The claim (and belief) of philosophers who are in the “pro-history” group can be found in this sentence by Robert Pasnau (2011): “The discipline of philosophy benefits from a serious, sustained engagement with its history.” Those in the “pro-intuition” group believe that for philosophy not to slide into the realm of irrelevance it must rely on intuitions to make sense of our present ontologies, rather than study history of philosophy. This paper argues that both proponents of the pro-history and those of the pro-intuition approach are wrongheaded. It argues for what it calls protohistory. Protohistory here refers to the method of doing philosophy in which the intuitions of philosophers are informed by the history of philosophy (though not directly influenced by it but indirectly informed by it).