Rational Moral Ignorance

Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, EarlyView

'Dressage Is Full of Queens!' Masculinity, Sexuality and Equestrian Sport

Attitudes towards sexuality are changing and levels of cultural homophobia decreasing, yet there remain very few openly gay men within sport. As a proving ground for heteromasculinity, sport has traditionally been a hostile environment for gay men. This article is based on an ethnographic study within a sporting subworld in which gay men do appear to be accepted: equestrian sport. Drawing on inclusive masculinity theory, equestrian sport is shown to offer an unusually tolerant environment for gay men in which heterosexual men of all ages demonstrate low levels of homophobia. Inclusive masculinity theory is a useful framework for exploring the changing nature of masculinities and this study demonstrates that gay men are becoming increasingly visible and accepted within once unreceptive locales, such as sport and rural communities. However, this more tolerant attitude is purchased at the expense of a subordinated feminine Other, perpetuating the dominance of men within competitive sport. © The Author(s) 2012

How Reasoning Aims at Truth

Many hold that theoretical reasoning aims at truth. In this paper, I ask what it is for reasoning to be thus aim-directed. Standard answers to this question explain reasoning’s aim-directedness in terms of intentions, dispositions, or rule-following. I argue that, while these views contain important insights, they are not satisfactory. As an alternative, I introduce and defend a novel account: reasoning aims at truth in virtue of being the exercise of a distinctive kind of cognitive power, one that, unlike ordinary dispositions, is capable of fully explaining its own exercises. I argue that this account is able to avoid the difficulties plaguing standard accounts of the relevant sort of mental teleology

Normative Alethic Pluralism

Some philosophers have argued that truth is a norm of judgement and have provided a variety of formulations of this general thesis. In this paper, I shall side with these philosophers and assume that truth is a norm of judgement. What I am primarily interested in here are two core questions concerning the judgement-truth norm: (i) what are the normative relationships between truth and judgement? And (ii) do these relationships vary or are they constant? I argue for a pluralist picture—what I call Normative Alethic Pluralism (NAP)—according to which (i) there is more than one correct judgement-truth norm and (ii) the normative relationships between truth and judgement vary in relation to the subject matter of the judgement. By means of a comparative analysis of disagreement in three areas of the evaluative domain—refined aesthetics, basic taste and morality—I show that there is an important variability in the normative significance of disagreement—I call this the variability conjecture. By presenting a variation of Lynch’s scope problem for alethic monism, I argue that a monistic approach to the normative function of truth is unable to vindicate the conjecture. I then argue that normative alethic pluralism provides us with a promising model to account for it

Blind Rule-Following and the Regress of Motivations

Normativists about belief hold that belief formation is essentially rule- or norm-guided. On this view, certain norms are constitutive of or essential to belief in such a way that no mental state not guided by those norms counts as a belief, properly construed. In recent influential work, Kathrin Glüer and Åsa Wikforss develop novel arguments against normativism. According to their regress of motivations argument, not all belief formation can be rule- or norm-guided, on pain of a vicious infinite regress. I argue that the regress of motivations argument is unsuccessful: an appeal to the notion of blind rule-following, drawn from a plausible interpretation of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s remarks on rule-following, stops the regress of motivations in its tracks

"The Bayesian Objection" - Ch 4 of Seemings and Epistemic Justification

In this chapter I analyse an objection to phenomenal conservatism to the effect that phenomenal conservatism is unacceptable because it is incompatible with Bayesianism. I consider a few responses to it and dismiss them as misled or problematic. Then, I argue that this objection doesn’t go through because it rests on an implausible formalization of the notion of seeming-based justification. In the final part of the chapter, I investigate how seeming-based justification and justification based on one’s reflective belief that one has a seeming interact with one another

Philosophy of Hope

The philosophy of hope centers on two interlocking sets of questions. The first concerns the nature of hope. Specific questions here include how to analyze hope, how hope motivates us, and whether there is only one type of hope. The second set concerns the value of hope. Key questions here include whether and when it is good to hope and whether there is a virtue of hope. Philosophers of hope tend to proceed from the first set of questions to the second. This is a natural approach, for one might expect that you must develop a basic understanding of what hope is before you can determine its value. The structure of this chapter thus follows this approach. But readers should not be misled: there is in fact a good deal of feedback between the two sets of questions. A theory of hope is more plausible to the extent that it fits well with plausible ideas about the value of hope. So the movement from hope’s nature to its value is one of emphasis rather than a strict, step-wise process

Financial control, blame avoidance and Radio Caroline: Talkin’ ‘bout my generation

This research examines the use of financial mechanisms that simultaneously impose controls and facilitate blame avoidance by public office-holders. A qualitative historical examination is used to examine legislation designed to prevent Radio Caroline, a pirate radio station, from broadcasting into Britain in the 1960s. Radio Caroline made a mockery of the British Government’s power to manage radio through a monopolist, the British Broadcasting Corporation. In addition, Radio Caroline played the type of rock music the British Government sought to suppress as representing the undesirable side of youth culture. This research examines the suppression of Radio Caroline through the Marine & Broadcasting (Offences) Act (UK) 1967 and the legislative scapegoating of Radio Caroline by targeting its revenue-earning potential. Inter-generational conflict underpinned the legislative scapegoating of Radio Caroline. This research demonstrates how financial controls can mask scapegoating and blame avoidance strategies by governments

Limitations of perturbative techniques in the analysis of rhythms and oscillations

Perturbation theory is an important tool in the analysis of oscillators and their response to external stimuli. It is predicated on the assumption that the perturbations in question are “sufficiently weak”, an assumption that is not always valid when perturbative methods are applied. In this paper, we identify a number of concrete dynamical scenarios in which a standard perturbative technique, based on the infinitesimal phase response curve (PRC), is shown to give different predictions than the full model. Shear-induced chaos, i.e., chaotic behavior that results from the amplification of small perturbations by underlying shear, is missed entirely by the PRC. We show also that the presence of “sticky” phase–space structures tend to cause perturbative techniques to overestimate the frequencies and regularity of the oscillations. The phenomena we describe can all be observed in a simple 2D neuron model, which we choose for illustration as the PRC is widely used in mathematical neuroscience