16,955 research outputs found
What Acquaintance Teaches
In her black and white room, Mary doesnât know what it is like to see red. Only after undergoing an experience as of something red and hence acquainting herself with red can Mary learn what it is like. But learning what it is like to see red requires more than simply becoming acquainted with it. To be acquainted with something is to know it, but such knowledge, as we argue, is object-knowledge rather than propositional-knowledge. To know what it is like one must know an appropriate propositional answer to the question âwhat is it like?â. Despite this mismatch between object-knowledge and knowing an answer, we believe that acquaintance is crucial to Maryâs epistemic progress.
When Mary leaves her black and white room, her new knowledge tempts one to think that she must come to know a candidate answer (a coarse-grained fact) that she didnât know in her room. Since Mary already knows all the physical facts in her room, any additional facts she might learn appear to threaten physicalism. In reply, many physicalists have been attracted to the phenomenal concept strategy according to which Mary can come to have new knowledge and hence know a new answer to the question âwhat is it like to see red?â by entertaining a coarse-grained fact under a concept she didnât possess in her room â Mary learns a new fine-grained fact. We believe both of these accounts of Maryâs epistemic progress are mistaken. As we argue, Mary could know every fact (coarse-grained and fine-grained) that might serve as an answer to the question âwhat is it like to see red?â and still not know what it is like. The physical world leaves no leftover coarse-grained facts for Mary to learn and because concepts are sharable, easy to possess, and easy to introduce, there are possible situations in which Mary, while in her black and white room, has every concept that might make a fine-grained difference. In short, even when Mary is granted a great deal of factual knowledge and vast conceptual resources, she may still not know an appropriate answer to the question âwhat is it like to see red?â. But in any such situation, Mary lacks acquaintance with red and on this basis we argue that in order to know what it is like, in order for Mary to know an appropriate answer, Maryâs propositional knowledge must be appropriately related to her acquaintance with red
Can Capital Punishment Survive if Black Lives Matter?
Drawing upon empirical studies of racial discrimination dating back to the 1940âs, the Movement for Black Lives platform calls for the abolition of capital punishment. Our purpose here is to defend the Movementâs call for death penalty abolition in terms congruent with its claim that the death penalty in the U.S. is a âracist practiceâ that âdevalues Black lives.â We first sketch the jurisprudential history of race and capital punishment in the U.S., wherein courts have occasionally expressed worries about racial injustice but have usually taken such evidence to warrant reform but not outright abolition. We argue that the racial discrimination at issue flows in significant part from implicit biases concerning race, criminality, and violence, which do not fit comfortably within the picture of racial bias advanced by the courts. The case for abolition, we contend, rests on Black Americans as a class (not merely those who interact with the criminal justice system as capital defendants or as murder victims) being subject to such bias and thereby not being accorded equal status under the law
Cross-Section Alignment of Oblate Grains
This paper provides a quantitative account of a recently introduced mechanism
of mechanical alignment of suprathermally rotating grains. These rapidly
rotating grains are essentially not susceptible to random torques arising from
gas-grain collisions, as the timescales for such torques to have significant
effect are orders of magnitude greater than the mean time between crossovers.
Such grains can be aligned by gaseous torques during the short periods of
crossovers and/or due to the difference in the rate at which atoms arrive at
grain surface. The latter is a result of the difference in orientation of a
grain in respect to the supersonic flow. This process, which we call
cross-section alignment, is the subject of our present paper. We derive
expressions for the measure of cross-section alignment for oblate grains and
study how this measure depends upon the angle between the interstellar magnetic
field and the gaseous flow and upon the grain shape.Comment: 24 pages, Post Script file. To appear in The Astrophysical Journal,
Vol. 466, p. 274 - 281, July 199
Black Lives Matter and the Call for Death Penalty Abolition
The Black Lives Matter movement has called for the abolition of capital punishment in response to what it calls âthe war against Black peopleâ and âBlack communities.â This article defends the two central contentions in the movementâs abolitionist stance: first, that US capital punishment practices represent a wrong to black communities rather than simply a wrong to particular black capital defendants or particular black victims of murder, and second, that the most defensible remedy for this wrong is the abolition of the death penalty
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