90 research outputs found

    Commentary on ‘Levels of Depth in Deep Disagreement’

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    Critical Thinking Education and Debiasing

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    There are empirical grounds to doubt the effectiveness of a common and intuitive approach to teaching debiasing strategies in critical thinking courses. We summarize some of the grounds before suggesting a broader taxonomy of debiasing strategies. This four-level taxonomy enables a useful diagnosis of biasing factors and situations, and illuminates more strategies for more effective bias mitigation located in the shaping of situational factors and reasoning infrastructure—sometimes called “nudges” in the literature. The question, we contend, then becomes how best to teach the construction and use of such infrastructures

    Transforming media markets: the cases of Malaysia and Singapore

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    This paper examines contemporary transformations in media markets in Malaysia and Singapore. In both countries, dominant models of ?old? media?government relations are being contested by the emergence of ?new? online and independent media. Our analysis is grounded in new institutional approaches towards the study of news media and political communication. We argue that while legislation and law, in particular defamation law, and informal and formal organisational relations influence the possibility of public debate through the media, internet-based media are emerging as a potentially critical new voice in journalism in both countries. At the same time, analyses of these potentials need to avoid technological determinism. Rather, there is a need to examine the social, political and economic contexts, and the media markets, in which the technologies are emerging

    Peer idealization, internal examples, and the meta-philosophy of genius in the epistemology of disagreement

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    Presented at Canadian Philosophical Congress 2019. Session S50: Faculty Prize Winners and Canadian Journal of Philosophy Distinguished LectureThe epistemology of disagreement (EoD) has developed around a highly idealized notion of epistemic peers. The analysis of examples in the literature has not been very effective at mitigating this idealization, due to a tendency to focus on cases of extant philosophical disputes. This makes it difficult to spotlight the respects in which discussants are non-ideal, because the discussants are disciplinary colleagues. At the same time, widespread attitudes in academic philosophy about the importance of raw intelligence in doing philosophy can mislead us about the fragility and unpredictability of expertise. The use of such examples is not strong methodology

    Oral history and the epistemology of testimony

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    Social epistemology has paid little attention to oral historiography as a source of expert insight into the credibility of testimony. One extant suggestion, however, is that oral historians treat testimony with a default trust reflecting a standing warrant for accepting testimony. The view that there is such a standing warrant is sometimes known as the Acceptance Principle for Testimony (APT). I argue that the practices of oral historians do not count in support of APT, all in all. Experts have commonly described oral traditions as oriented towards political, cultural and entertainment ends, and not only—or not even—towards an accurate depiction of past events. Even when accuracy is the emphasis, many historians of oral tradition do not trust such testimony as APT would suggest; the importance of gathering supporting evidence is a consistent emphasis. Yet oral historiography, both of traditions and more generally, does hold out lessons for the epistemology of testimony, implicating a wider range of social and contextual factors than the philosophical literature might otherwise reflect. Perhaps most importantly, it confirms the critical epistemological role of the audience in interpreting testimony and actively constructing testimonial contexts, a point that extends quite naturally to common testimonial exchanges

    False polarization: debiasing as applied social epistemology

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    False polarization (FP) is an interpersonal bias on judgement, the effect of which is to lead people in contexts of disagreement to overestimate the differences between their respective views. I propose to treat FP as a problem of applied social epistemology—a barrier to reliable belief-formation in certain social domains—and to ask how best one may debias for FP. This inquiry leads more generally into questions about effective debiasing strategies; on this front, considerable empirical evidence suggests that intuitively attractive strategies for debiasing are not very effective, while more effective strategies are neither intuitive nor likely to be easily implemented. The supports for more effective debiasing seem either to be inherently social and cooperative, or at least to presuppose social efforts to create physical or decision making infrastructure for mitigating bias. The upshot, I argue, is that becoming a less biased epistemic agent is a thoroughly socialized project

    The informational richness of testimonial contexts

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    An influential idea in the epistemology of testimony is that people often acquire justified beliefs through testimony, in contexts too informationally poor for the justification to be evidential. This has been described as the Scarcity of Information Objection (SIO). It is an objection to the reductive thesis that the acceptance of testimony is justified by evidence of general kinds not unique to testimony. SIO hinges on examples intended to show clearly that testimonial justification arises in low‐information contexts; I argue that the common examples show no such thing. There is a great deal of information available in testimonial contexts, including in the examples alleged to show otherwise – enough information to render SIO implausible. Purported SIO examples tend to give a wrong impression about the informational richness of testimonial contexts, I argue, due to the lack of detail in which they are presented

    Critical thinking for engineers and engineering critical thinking

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    Design decisions for a critical thinking curriculum for Engineering students serves as a point of departure to briefly describe an under-appreciated reason to emphasize critical thinking in Engineering programs. An increasing focus on the role of context, environment and systems in shaping human judgement means that engineers should be especially aware of the propensity for designs and implementations to affect the reasoning of people for whom they function as lived experience. Preparing engineers to recognize and work responsibly around these issues is a secondary reason to teach critical thinking in those programs

    Bald-faced bullshit and authoritarian political speech: Making sense of Johnson and Trump

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    Donald Trump and Boris Johnson are notoriously uninterested in truthtelling. They also often appear uninterested even in constructing plausible falsehoods. What stands out above all is the brazenness and frequency with which they repeat known falsehoods. In spite of this, they are not always greeted with incredulity. Indeed, Republicans continue to express trust in Donald Trump in remarkable numbers. The only way to properly make sense of what Trump and Johnson are doing, we argue, is to give a greater role to audience relativity - and in some cases, audience participation - in notions like bullshitting and bald-faced lying. In this paper, we develop a new understanding of bullshitting, one that includes bald-faced lying, and recognizes that different communicative acts may be directed at different audiences with a single utterance. In addition, we argue for recognition of the category of bald-faced bullshitting, a particular speciality of both Trump and Johnson, and one especially useful to authoritarian leaders

    Membership, binarity and accretion among very low-mass stars and brown dwarfs of the Sigma Orionis cluster

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    Intermediate resolution (R=7000) spectroscopy is presented for 76 photometrically selected very low mass (0.04<M<0.3M_{sun}) candidate members of the Sigma Orionis cluster. More than two thirds appear to be genuine cluster members on the basis of Li I absorption, weak Na I features and radial velocities. Photometric selection alone therefore appears to be very effective in identifying cluster members in this mass range. Only 6 objects appear to be certain non-members, however a substantial subset of 13 have ambiguous or contradictory indications of membership and lack Li absorption. Four candidate binary cluster members are identified. Consideration of sampling and precision leads us to conclude that either the fraction of very low mass stars and brown dwarfs in small separation (a<1au) binary systems is larger than in field M-dwarfs, or the distribution of separations is much less skewed towards large separations. This conclusion hinges critically on the correct identification of the small number of binary candidates, but is significant even when only Li-rich candidate members are considered. Broadened H alpha emission, indicative of circum(sub)stellar accretion discs is found in 5 or 6 of the candidate cluster members, 3 of which probably have substellar masses. The fraction of accretors (10+/-5 per cent) is similar to that found in stars of higher mass in the cluster using H alpha emission as a diagnostic, but much lower than found for very low mass stars and brown dwarfs of younger clusters. The timescale for accretion rates to drop to less than 10^{-11} M_sun/yr is hence less than the age of the Sigma Ori cluster (3 to 7 Myr) for most low-mass objects (abridged).Comment: Accepted for publication in MNRA
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