In Our Shoes or the Protagonist’s? Knowledge, Justification, and Projection

Sackris and Beebe (2014) report the results of a series of studies that seem to show that there are cases in which many people are willing to attribute knowledge to a protagonist even when her belief is unjustified. These results provide some reason to conclude that the folk concept of knowledge does not treat justification as necessary for its deployment. In this paper, we report a series of results that can be seen as supporting this conclusion by going some way towards ruling out an alternative account of Sackris and Beebe’s results—the possibility that the knowledge attributions that they witnessed largely stem from protagonist projection, a phenomenon in language use and interpretation in which the speaker uses words that the relevant protagonist might use to describe her own situation and the listener interprets the speaker accordingly. With that said, we do caution the reader against drawing the conclusion too strongly, on the basis of results like those reported here and by Sackris and Beebe. There are alternative possibilities regarding what drives the observed knowledge attributions in cases of unjustified true belief that must be ruled out before, on the basis of such results, we can conclude with much confidence that the folk concept of knowledge does not treat justification as necessary for its deployment

Mythical systems: mathematic and logical theory

The process of elaboration of the symbolic universe leads to exciting insights regarding the search for human emotional security. The symbols end up as explanatory axes of universal reality and on them are constructed myths that form a superstructure for belief systems. Human society is a multi-level system with a material structure (society), an ideological superstructure (belief systems, values, etc.) and a super superstructure with two parts: mythical (origin and justification) and utopic (final goal). All mythical belief systems have a numinous-religious nature

Sellars, Scientific Realism, and the Philosophy of Mind

My thesis is an analysis and application of Wilfrid Sellars’ philosophy of science. Twenty years after his death, his philosophical significance remains only partly understood. This is acutely true in the philosophy of mind, where Sellars’ proposals have directly shaped the contemporary problem space. I will show how the competing views of Paul Churchland, Daniel Dennett, and Jerry Fodor all find their conceptual and historical roots in Sellars’ work. Sellars is the source and watershed for their various conceptions of mind in the world. First, they all share a commitment to scientific realism (SR). The ways that the doctrine of SR impacts the philosophy of mind were first explored by Sellars in his famous Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind (1956). In chapter one, I give a detailed account of SR and examine some empiricist alternatives to that view. I argue that Sellars’ view of science and theoretical explanation provides a comprehensive defense of SR’s central commitments. In chapter two, I highlight two important methodological claims inherited from Sellars. The first is that that the mind-body problem is “the problem of formulating a philosophically adequate account of the various mental phenomena within the context of the ontology provided by theoretical science.” (Loux, 1977) The second claim is that our knowledge of mind is theoretical knowledge. This groundbreaking claim stands in stark contrast to the Cartesian legacy which takes our knowledge of mind as immediate and incorrigible. In chapter three, I employ Sellars’ framework to analyze contemporary philosophy of mind. The methodological commitments of Sellars’ SR provide a rich philosophical model for evaluating various theories of mind. This conceptual apparatus casts into sharp relief the extent to which Churchland’s eliminative materialism, Dennett’s inter- pretivism, and Fodor’s intentional realism each betray and embody Sellars’ fundamental proposals

Computing Nash equilibria and evolutionarily stable states of evolutionary games

Stability analysis is an important research direction in evolutionary game theory. Evolutionarily stable states have a close relationship with Nash equilibria of repeated games, which are characterized by the folk theorem. When applying the folk theorem, one needs to compute the minimax profile of the game in order to find Nash equilibria. Computing the minimax profile is an NP-hard problem. In this paper we investigate a new methodology to compute evolutionary stable states based on the level-k equilibrium, a new refinement of Nash equilibrium in repeated games. A level-k equilibrium is implemented by a group of players who adopt reactive strategies and who have no incentive to deviate from their strategies simultaneously. Computing the level-k equilibria is tractable because the minimax payoffs and strategies are not needed. As an application, this paper develops a tractable algorithm to compute the evolutionarily stable states and the Pareto front of n-player symmetric games. Three games, including the iterated prisoner’s dilemma, are analyzed by means of the proposed methodology

Probability and uncertainty in Keynes's The General Theory

Book description: John Maynard Keynes is undoubtedly the most influential Western economist of the twentieth century. His emphasis on the nature and role of uncertainty in economic thought is a dominant theme in his writings. This book brings together a wide array of experts on Keynes' thought such as Gay Tulip Meeks, Sheila Dow and John Davis who discuss, analyse and criticise such themes as Keynesian probability and uncertainty, the foundations of Keynes' economics and the relationship between Keynes' earlier and later thought. The Philosophy of Keynes' Economics is a readable and comprehensive book that will interest students and academics interested in the man and his thought

Myth, Language, and Complex Ideologies

Ideologies use for their conservation and propagation persuasive methods of communication: rhetoric. Rhetoric is analyzed from the semiotic and logical-mathematical points of view. The following hypotheses are established: (1) language L is a self-explanatory system, mediated by a successive series of systems of cultural conventions, (2) connotative significances of an ideological advertising rhetoric must be known, and (3) the notion of ideological information is a neutral notion that does not imply the valuation of ideology or its conditions of veracity or falsification. Rhetorical figures like metonymy, metaphor, parable analogy, and allegory are defined as relations. Metaphor and parable are order relations. Operations of metonymic and metaphoric substitution are defined and several theorems derived from these operations have been deduced