Epistemic Luck

Epistemic luck is a generic notion used to describe any of a number of ways in which it can be accidental, coincidental, or fortuitous that a person has a true belief. For example, one can form a true belief as a result of a lucky guess, as when one believes through guesswork that “C” is the right answer to a multiple-choice question and one’s belief just happens to be correct. One can form a true belief via wishful thinking; for example, an optimist’s belief that it will not rain may luckily turn out to be correct, despite forecasts for heavy rain all day. One can reason from false premises to a belief that coincidentally happens to be true. One can accidentally arrive at a true belief through invalid or fallacious reasoning. And one can fortuitously arrive at a true belief from testimony that was intended to mislead but unwittingly reported the truth. In all of these cases, it is just a matter of luck that the person has a true belief. Until the twenty-first century, there was nearly universal agreement among epistemologists that epistemic luck is incompatible with knowledge. Call this view “the incompatibility thesis.” In light of the incompatibility thesis, epistemic luck presents epistemologists with three distinct but related challenges. The first is that of providing an accurate analysis of knowledge (in terms of individually necessary and jointly sufficient conditions for “S knows that p,” where ‘S’ represents the knower and ‘p’ represents the proposition known). An adequate analysis of knowledge must succeed in specifying conditions that rule out all instances of knowledge-destroying epistemic luck. The second challenge is to resolve the skeptical paradox that the ubiquity of epistemic luck generates: As will become clear in section 2c, epistemic luck is an all-pervasive phenomenon. Coupling this fact with the incompatibility thesis entails that we have no propositional knowledge. The non-skeptical epistemologist must somehow reconcile the strong intuition that epistemic luck is not compatible with knowledge with the equally evident observation that it must be. The third challenge concerns the special skeptical threat that epistemic luck seems to pose for more reflective forms of knowledge, such as knowing that one knows. Each of these challenges will be explored in the present article

Taking Hunger Seriously

An argument is advanced to show that affluent and moderately affluent people, like you and me, are morally obligated: To provide modest financial support for famine relief organizations and/or other humanitanan organizations working to reduce the amount of unnecessary suffering and death in the world, and To refrain from squandering food that could be fed to humans in situations of food scarcity. Unlike other ethical arguments for the obligation to assist the world’s absolutely poor, my argument is not predicated on any highly contentious ethical theory that you likely reject. Rather, it is predicated on your beliefs. The argument shows that the things you currently believe already commit you to the obligatoriness of helping to reduce malnutrition and famine-related diseases by sending a nominal percentage of your income to famine relief organizations and by not squandering food that could be fed to them. Consistency with your own beliefs implies that to do any less is to be profoundly immoral

Determination of biaxial creep strength of T-111 tantalum alloy Semiannual report, Mar. 8 - Sep. 8, 1967

Creep behavior of T-111 alloy tubing under biaxial stress and stress effects on corrosion behavior of T-111 alloy with potassiu

Determination of biaxial creep strength of T-111 tantalum alloy

Biaxial creep strength of T-111 tantalum alloy tubing in high temperature, high vacuum environmen

Understanding Tax Evasion Dynamics

Americans who are caught evading taxes in one year may be audited for prior years. While the IRS does not disclose its method of selecting tax returns to audit, it is widely believed that a taxpayer's probability of being audited is an increasing function of current evasion. Under these circumstances, a rational taxpayer's current evasion is a decreasing function of prior evasion, since, if audited and caught for evading this year, the taxpayer may incur penalties for past evasions. The paper presents a model that formalizes this notion, and derives its implications for the responsiveness of individual and aggregate tax evasion to changes in the economic environment. The aggregate behavior of American taxpayers over the 1947 - 1993 period is consistent with the implications of this model. Specifically, aggregate tax evasion is higher in years in which past evasions are small relative to current tax liabilities -- which is the case when incomes or tax rates rise. Furthermore, aggregate audit-related fines and penalties imposed by the IRS are positively related not only to aggregate current-year evasion but also to evasion in prior years. The estimates imply that the average tax evasion rate in the United states over this period is 42% lower than it would be if taxpayers were unconcerned about retrospective audits.

Demystifying Animal Rights

According to the mysteriousness objection, moral rights are wholly mysterious, metaphysically suspect entities. Given their unexplained character and dubious metaphysical status, the objection goes, we should be ontologically parsimonious and deny that such entities exist. I defend Tom Regan\u27s rights view from the mysteriousness objection. In particular, I argue that what makes moral rights seem metaphysically mysterious is the mistaken tendency to reify such rights. Once we understand what moral rights are and what they are not, we will see that rights talk is neither mysterious nor nonsensical. I then consider a second aspect of Regan’s rights view that some critics have found “mystifying.” I circumvent this objection by identifying and defending an alternative rights-conferring property. I conclude by pointing out the moral significance of these findings vis-à-vis our current treatment of nonhuman animals

Fishy Reasoning and the Ethics of Eating

Ethical vegetarians believe that it is morally wrong to eat meat. Yet, many self-ascribed “ethical vegetarians” continue to eat fish. The question I explore here is this: Can one coherently maintain that it is morally wrong to eat meat, but morally permissible to eat fish? I argue that it is morally inconsistent for ethical vegetarians to eat fish, not on the obvious yet superficial ground that fish flesh is meat, but on the morally substantive ground that fish are sentient intelligent beings capable of experiencing morally significant pain and thus deserve moral consideration equal to that owed birds and mammals

Colb and Dorf on Abortion and Animal Rights

In their recent book, Sherry Colb and Michael Dorf defend the following ethical theses: (1) sentience is sufficient for possessing the right not to be harmed and the right not to be killed; (2) killing sentient animals for food is almost always seriously wrong; (3) aborting pre-sentient fetuses raises no moral concerns at all; and (4) aborting sentient fetuses is wrong absent a reason weighty enough to justify killing the fetus. They also discuss strategies and tactics for activists: They oppose the use of graphic images by activists on tactical grounds, and they categorically oppose the use of violence by activists in either movement. In the present review article, I provide additional support for theses (1) and (2); I raise concerns for their defense of thesis (3); and I argue that their discussion of thesis (4) is incomplete in important ways. Finally, I defend the judicious use of graphic images and videos on epistemic, psychological, and pedagogical grounds

Personal and Doxastic Variants of Epistemic Justification and Their Roles in the Theory of Knowledge

Most epistemologists agree that epistemic justification is required for knowledge. This requirement is usually formulated in one of two ways: S knows that p only if S is justified in believing that p. S knows that p only if S's belief that p is justified. Surprisingly and are generally regarded as synonymous formulations of the justification condition. In Chapter 1, I argue that such a synonymy thesis is mistaken and that, in fact, and specify substantively different requirements. requires that the person be justified, whereas requires that the belief in question be justified, and intuitively, these constitute different requirements. Thus, it is concluded that and employ inherently different kinds of epistemic justification in their respective analysantia. I dub them "personal justification" and "doxastic justification", respectively. The remainder of the dissertation is devoted to demonstrating both the legitimacy and the importance of the personal/doxastic justification distinction. For example, the distinction helps account for the divergent intuitions that regularly arise regarding justificatory evaluations in demon-world contexts. ;In Chapters 2 and 3 I provide analyses for doxastic and personal justification. Chapter 2 spells out an externalist reliabilist account of doxastic justification which safely avoids demon-world counterexamples. Chapter 3 advances an internalist coherence account of personal justification. In defending this coherence theory, I argue that all foundation theories are false and that the regress argument on which they are predicated is unsound. ;In Chapter 4, I propose an analysis of ordinary knowledge which only requires doxastic justification. Nevertheless personal justification plays a negative, undermining role in the analysis. I then demonstrate that this analysis of knowledge is immune to typical Gettier examples. It also remains unscathed by Harman's beefed-up Gettier cases. Finally, I consider a stronger analysis of knowledge requiring both doxastic and personal justification. Though the latter analysis proves too strong for ordinary knowledge, it remains interesting as an analysis of a more intellectualistic kind of knowledge. ;The final chapter examines the internalist/externalist controversy and demonstrates that this controversy is yet another manifestation of the personal/doxastic justification conflatio

The Commonsense Case for Ethical Vegetarianism

The article defends ethical vegetarianism, which, for present purposes, is stipulatively taken to be the view that it is morally wrong to eat animals when equally nutritious plant-based foods are available. Several examples are introduced (i) to show that we all agree that animals deserve some direct moral consideration and (ii) to help identify and clarify several commonsense moral principles—principles we all accept. These principles are then used to argue that eating animals is morally wrong. Since you no doubt accept these principles, the argument demonstrates that consistency with your own beliefs and values commits you to the immorality of eating meat and requires you to alter your eating behavior accordingly