The Limitations of the Open Mind

When should you engage with difficult arguments against your cherished controversial beliefs? The primary conclusion of this book is that your obligations to engage with counterarguments are more limited than is often thought. In some standard situations, you shouldn't engage with difficult counterarguments and, if you do, you shouldn't engage with them open-mindedly. This conclusion runs counter to aspects of the Millian political tradition and political liberalism, as well as what people working in informal logic tend to say about argumentation. Not all misleading arguments wear their flaws on their sleeve. Each step of a misleading argument might seem compelling and you might not be able to figure out what's wrong with it. Still, even if you can't figure out what's wrong with an argument, you can know that it's misleading. One way to know that an argument is misleading is, counterintuitively, to lack expertise in the methods and evidence-types employed by the argument. When you know that a counterargument is misleading, you shouldn't engage with it open-mindedly and sometimes shouldn't engage with it at all. You shouldn't engage open-mindedly because you shouldn't be willing to reduce your confidence in response to arguments you know are misleading. And you sometimes shouldn't engage closed-mindedly, because to do so can be manipulative or ineffective. In making this case, Jeremy Fantl discusses echo chambers and group polarization, the importance in academic writing of a sympathetic case for the opposition, the epistemology of disagreement, the account of open-mindedness, and invitations to problematic academic speakers

Circumferential pressure probe

A probe for measuring circumferential pressure inside a body cavity is disclosed. In the preferred embodiment, a urodynamic pressure measurement probe for evaluating human urinary sphincter function is disclosed. Along the length of the probe are disposed a multiplicity of deformable wall sensors which typically comprise support tube sections with flexible side wall areas. These are arranged along the length of the probe in two areas, one just proximal to the tip for the sensing of fluid pressure inside the bladder, and five in the sensing section which is positioned within the urethra at the point at which the urinary sphincter constricts to control the flow of urine. The remainder of the length of the probe comprises multiple rigid support tube sections interspersed with flexible support tube sections in the form of bellows to provide flexibility

Urinary Incontinence in Women

The adult bladder and urethra acting as a unit allow for the voluntary dual function of urine collection and evacuation. Urinary continence is an acquired, “learned” state, and normal anatomy and function of the nervous and genitourinary systems are necessary to maintain it. Urinary incontinence is defined as “a condition where involuntary loss of urine is a social or hygienic problem and is objectively demonstrable.” This definition takes into account both sociocultural aspects and the need for objective clinical assessment of urinary leakage. Marked individual variations in physical activity, occupation and hygienic standards call for appropriate clinical judgment when evaluation this condition. Although excessive vaginal discharge may be confused with urine loss, incontinence is often evoked to obtain psychologic or socioeconomic secondary gains. The element of the reproducibility is therefore of marked clinical importance. Eleven percent of patients evaluated in our urodynamic unit at the Medical College of Virginia had no objective evidence of urinary leakage during their evaluation

Critical Study of John Hawthorne, Knowledge and Lotteries and Jason Stanley, Knowledge and Practical Interests

This is a preprint of an article published in Noûs, Volume 43, Issue 1, March 2009, Pages: 178-192,. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1468-0068.2008.01701.x/abstract. The definitive version is available at www3.interscience.wiley.com doi: 10.1111/j.1468-0068.2008.01701.xIn two important recent books, John Hawthorne and Jason Stanley each argue that non-evidential factors, such as the cost of being wrong and salience of possible error, have a place in epistemological theorizing. This point is familiar from the work of epistemological contextualists, who emphasize non-evidential speaker factors: factors which, when present in a speaker's conversational context, affect the semantic content of her knowledge attributions. According to Hawthorne and Stanley, the appropriate focus is on the subject, rather than the speaker: when the relevant non-evidential factors are present in a subject they can affect whether the subject knows. This suggests a reorientation for epistemology, away from the standard “intellectualist” (Stanley's term) model, endorsed even by contextualists, according to which only evidential or more broadly truth-related factors (evidence, safety, sensitivity, reliability, etc.) bear on whether a subject knows. If Hawthorne and Stanley are right, then the contextualist program should give way to a program of anti-intellectualist invariantism, or to use a more common label, subject-sensitive invariantism (SSI)

On Pragmatic Encroachment in Epistemology

This is a preprint of an article published in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Volume 75, Issue 3, pages 558-589, November 2007. The definitive version is available at www3.interscience.wiley.com doi: 10.1111/j.1933-1592.2007.00093.xWe argue, contrary to epistemological orthodoxy, that knowledge is not purely epistemic—that knowledge is not simply a matter of truth-related factors (evidence, reliability, etc.). We do this by arguing for a pragmatic condition on knowledge, KA: if a subject knows that p, then she is rational to act as if p. KA, together with fallibilism, entails that knowledge is not purely epistemic. We support KA by appealing to the role of knowledge-citations in defending and criticizing actions, and by giving a principled argument for KA, based on the inference rule KB: if a subject knows that A is the best thing she can do, she is rational to do A. In the second half of the paper, we consider and reject the two most promising objections to our case for KA, one based on the Gricean notion of conversational implicature and the other based on a contextualist maneuver

Pragmatic Encroachment

This is a preprint of a book chapter. The final version was published in The Routledge companion to epistemology, edited by Sven Bernecker and Duncan Pritchard; New York: Routledge, 2011.In his classic (1953) article, Richard Rudner claims that "in accepting a hypothesis the scientist must make the decision that the evidence is sufficiently strong or that the probability is sufficiently high to warrant the acceptance of the hypothesis. Obviously, our decision regarding the evidence and respecting how strong is 'strong enough', is going to be a function of the importance, in the typically ethical sense, of making a mistake in accepting or rejecting the hypothesis… How sure we need to be before we accept a hypothesis will depend on how serious a mistake would be." According to Rudner, an adequate account of the conditions of warranted hypothesis acceptance must include reference to an ethical or more broadly a pragmatic factor. Rudner explicitly confines his discussion to the evidence or probability needed to be warranted in accepting a hypothesis, where acceptance for him seems to be subject to voluntary control, at least in certain cases: we decide the evidence is sufficiently strong. But in the past decade a number of philosophers have offered views similar to Rudner's about a broader range of epistemic concepts. For example, regarding knowledge, Jeremy Fantl and Matthew McGrath ((2002) and (2007)), John Hawthorne (2004), and Jason Stanley (2005) have recommended views according to which, whether a subject knows something to be the case depends on their practical situation