Leave truth alone: on deflationism and contextualism

According to deflationism, grasp of the concept of truth consists in nothing more than a disposition to accept a priori (non-paradoxical) instances of the schema:(DS) It is true that p if and only if pAccording to contextualism, the same expression with the same meaning might, on different occasions of use, express different propositions bearing different truth-conditions (where this does not result from indexicality and the like).On this view, what is expressed in an utterance depends in a non-negligible way on the circumstances. Charles Travis claims that contextualism shows that ‘deflationism is a mistake’, that truth is a more substantive notion than deflationism allows. In this paper, I examine Travis's arguments in support of this ‘inflationary’ claim and argue that they are unsuccessful

(Global) Hip Hop Studies Bibliography

This bibliography documents Hip Hop scholarship outside of America, including scholarly works that may be US centric, yet expands its analysis to other parts of the world. Hip Hop Studies outside the boundaries of the United States stretches as far and wide as Hip Hop itself. This scholarship started in 1984, and the amount of scholarship beyond American boundaries has continued to grow up through present day. The first wave, before Mitchell\u27s Global Noise (2001), includes a wider range of scholarly works such as conference presentations and books written by journalists, in addition to traditional academic sources such as books and journal articles. I included the variety of scholarly works in the first wave that I do not include in the second wave because the earlier works can function as primary sources and document how the field has grown

Local Causality and Completeness: Bell vs. Jarrett

J.S. Bell believed that his famous theorem entailed a deep and troubling conflict between the empirically verified predictions of quantum theory and the notion of local causality that is motivated by relativity theory. Yet many physicists continue to accept, usually on the reports of textbook writers and other commentators, that Bell's own view was wrong, and that, in fact, the theorem only brings out a conflict with determinism or the hidden-variables program or realism or some other such principle that (unlike local causality), allegedly, nobody should have believed anyway. (Moreover, typically such beliefs arise without the person in question even being aware that the view they are accepting differs so radically from Bell's own.) Here we try to shed some light on the situation by focusing on the concept of local causality that is the heart of Bell's theorem, and, in particular, by contrasting Bell's own understanding with the analysis of Jon Jarrett which has been the most influential source, in recent decades, for the kinds of claims mentioned previously. We point out a crucial difference between Jarrett's and Bell's own understanding of Bell's formulation of local causality, which turns out to be the basis for the erroneous claim, made by Jarrett and many others, that Bell misunderstood the implications of his own theorem.Comment: 10 pages, 4 figure

Effective Altruism’s Underspecification Problem

Effective altruists either believe they ought to be, or strive to be, doing the most good they can. Since they’re human, however, effective altruists are invariably fallible. In numerous situations, even the most committed EAs would fail to live up to the ideal they set for themselves. This fact raises a central question about how to understand effective altruism. How should one’s future prospective failures at doing the most good possible affect the current choices one makes as an effective altruist? This question is important to answer not only because every effective altruist will face this question due to typical human akrasia, but also because how the question is answered will determine just how demanding effective altruism can be. I argue that no matter how effective altruists answer this question, they will have to take on some commitments seemingly antithetical to their movement. More precisely, I argue that effective altruism is subject to a dilemma. Effective altruists’, at times, implicit actualist assumptions (i) commit them to conclusions seemingly antithetical to what typical effective altruists actually believe, as well as the spirit of the movement and (ii) undermine effective altruists’ arguments against moral offsetting and giving to charities close to the heart. Yet, effective altruists’, at times, implicit possibilist assumptions (iii) also commit them to conclusions seemingly antithetical to what typical effective altruists actually believe, as well as the spirit of the movement and (iv) undermine typical responses to demandingness worries for the normative conception of effective altruism. I argue that the best way out of the dilemma is to accept hybridism, though even hybridism won’t preserve every commitment of effective altruism