In Defense of the Kantian Account of Knowledge: Reply to Whiting

In this paper I defend the view that knowledge is belief for reasons that are both objectively and subjectively sufficient from an important objection due to Daniel Whiting, in this journal. Whiting argues that this view fails to deal adequately with a familiar sort of counterexample to analyses of knowledge, fake barn cases. I accept Whiting’s conclusion that my earlier paper offered an inadequate treatment of fake barn cases, but defend a new account of basic perceptual reasons that is consistent with the account of knowledge and successfully deals with fake barns

Knowledge Based on Seeing

In Epistemological Disjunctivism, Duncan Prichard defends his brand of epistemological disjunctivism from three worries. In this paper I argue that his responses to two of these worries are in tension with one another

Desiring under the Proper Guise

According to the thesis of the guise of the normative, all desires are associated with normative appearances or judgments. But guise of the normative theories differ sharply over the content of the normative representation, with the two main versions being the guise of reasons and the guise of the good. Chapter 6 defends the comparative thesis that the guise of reasons thesis is more promising than the guise of the good. The central idea is that observations from the theory of content determination can be used in order to constrain possible theories of the representational contents associated with desire. The authors argue that the initially most promising versions of the guise of the good fail to meet these constraints, and then explain the steep challenge confronting any who wish to craft a new guise of the good theory which meets the constraints while also preserving the initial motivations for adopting any guise of the normative theory at all. But a simple version of the guise of reasons not only avoids the troubles besetting the guise of the good but proceeds immediately from a deep diagnosis of the source of its difficulties

Doxastic Wronging

In the Book of Common Prayer’s Rite II version of the Eucharist, the congregation confesses, “we have sinned against you in thought, word, and deed”. According to this confession we wrong God not just by what we do and what we say, but also by what we think. The idea that we can wrong someone not just by what we do, but by what think or what we believe, is a natural one. It is the kind of wrong we feel when those we love believe the worst about us. And it is one of the salient wrongs of racism and sexism. Yet it is puzzling to many philosophers how we could wrong one another by virtue of what we believe about them. This paper defends the idea that we can morally wrong one another by what we believe about them from two such puzzles. The first puzzle concerns whether we have the right sort of control over our beliefs for them to be subject to moral evaluation. And the second concerns whether moral wrongs would come into conflict with the distinctively epistemic standards that govern belief. Our answer to both puzzles is that the distinctively epistemic standards governing belief are not independent of moral considerations. This account of moral encroachment explains how epistemic norms governing belief are sensitive to the moral requirements governing belief

Towards Interoperability of Biomedical Ontologies

Report on Dagstuhl Seminar 07132, Schloss Dagstuhl, March 27-30 , 2007

Keeping the “Free” in Teacher Speech Rights: Protecting Teachers and their Use of Social Media to Communicate with Students Beyond the Schoolhouse Gates

Debate is raging within many school districts around the country about public school teachers’ interactions with their students outside of school through social media sites, such as Facebook and MySpace

Duck Hunting in Mississippi River Pools: A Geographer\u27s Assessment

Terrain, ducks, and hunters combine to provide an environment of land, water, and air space above that constitutes a great waterfowl hunting region along the Mississippi River between the mouths of the Black River and Wisconsin River and touching boundaries of three states -Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Iowa. The marshes of the floodplain have provided excellent waterfowl habitat, particularly since the 1930\u27s when development of river navigation channels created pools of relatively consistent water level and land conditions. Many types of ducks, with canvasbacks especially numerous, utilize the region during annual migrations. Major highways offer access to the region for hunters, who indicate preference for travel on an east-west axis. Research information and a field survey by the author of this paper revealed locational data on home towns of duck hunters and other demographic information