Neven Sesardić

The article focuses on prosecutor's fallacy and interrogator's fallacy, the two kinds of reasoning in inferring a suspect's guilt. The prosecutor's fallacy is a combination of two conditional probabilities that lead to unfortunate commission of error in the process due to the inclination of the prosecutor in the establishment of strong evidence that will indict the defendant. It provides a comprehensive discussion of Gerd Gigerenzer's discourse on a criminal case in Germany explaining the perils of prosecutor's fallacy in his application of probability to practical problems. It also discusses the interrogator's fallacy which was introduced by Robert A. J. Matthews as the error on the assumption that confessional evidence can never reduce the probability of guilt.

In the first stage of his thinking Karl Marx founded his revolutionary politics on philosophical speculation, while in the second (mature) stage he relied on economics and the theory of exploitation based on his theory of surplus value. Marxism, however, developed in the opposite direction. After Marx's economic doctrine became vulnerable to powerful objections, Marxists tried to find a refuge in his early philosophical writings and in this way avoid refutation. Ultimately this attempt proved unsuccessful too.

More attention perhaps could have been given to the implications of Aristotle’s repeated insistence that education should be relevant to the constitution, that democrats should be educated democratically and oligarchs oligarchically. Curren claims (p. 101) that, because education to preserve any constitution must aim to moderate the constitution, education for both oligarchs and democrats will be essentially the same. Certainly, Aristotle believes that oligarchies and democracies will be more secure if they tend toward the moderate, “middle” constitution (‘polity’). Nonetheless, if education were always to be the same, why does Aristotle stress the need for relativism (as well as insisting on the difference between the good person and the good citizen [Politics 3.5])? Interesting modern questions suggest themselves. For instance, how should public education differ in relation to the differing political cultures of different countries? What needs to be taught to “preserve the constitution”? Should the British be brought up to respect monarchy? Should Americans be educated to be suspicious of government? What of education in, say, South Africa or Russia?

This article deals with the changing relationship between philosophy and modern science. in the beginning there was a rivalry of the two approaches due to the interest in the same subject areas. the strict demarcation between science and philosophy, which was established afterwords by logical positivists, prevented the breaking out of conflicts, but it prevented the mutual communication as well. today we are the witnesses of a greater and greater cooperation of science and philosophy and of a fruitful exchange of ideas between these two disciplines

In his criticism of my paper on the concept of race (Sesardic, 2010), Adam Hochman raises many issues that deserve further clarification. First, I will comment on Hochman’s claim that I attack a straw man version of racial constructionism. Second, I will try to correct what I see as a distorted historical picture of the debate between racial naturalists and racial constructionists. Third, I will point out the main weaknesses in Hochman’s own defense of constructionism about race. And fourth, I will briefly comment on why I think that Hochman unjustifiably dismisses one of the potential sources of racial differentiation that were suggested in my paper. Before I start, though, a preliminary clarification is in order. Hochman kindly calls my article ‘‘one of the strongest defenses of racial naturalism in recent times’’, which might suggest to the reader that my goal was to offer a full-fledged biological explication of the concept of race. But in fact my ambition was more limited. As I explained: My aim in this paper was not to prove the biological reality of race. Rather, more modestly, I have tried to show that typical attempts to disconnect the concept of race from genetics have too quickly and too uncritically been accepted by many ‘‘race critics’’. (Sesardic, 2010, p. 160; italics added) I will continue defending the same position in this article.

In this book, Neven Sesardic defends the view that it is both possible and useful to measure the separate contributions of heredity and environment to the explanation of human psychological differences. He critically examines the view - very widely accepted by scientists, social scientists and philosophers of science - that heritability estimates have no causal implications and are devoid of any interest. In a series of clearly written chapters he introduces the reader to the problems and subjects the arguments to close philosophical scrutiny. His conclusion is that anti-heritability arguments are based on conceptual confusions and misunderstandings of behavioural genetics. His book is a fresh and compelling intervention in a very contentious debate.

My aim in this paper is to take a closer look at an influential argument that purports to prove that the existence of cultural prohibitions could never be explained by biological inhibitions. The argument is two-pronged. The first prong reduces to the claim: inhibitions cannot cause prohibitions simply because inhibitions undermine the raison dêtre of prohibitions. The second strategy consists in arguing that inhibitions cannot cause prohibitions because the two differ importantly in their contents. I try to show that both claims fail.

This article presents a criticism of the widespread assumption that the programme of the Vienna Circle has been proven to be unrealizable and, therefore, that it is today quite uninteresting and to be entirely abandoned. The basic aim of logical positivists was to raise philosophy to the rigour and high standards of contemporary science. It must be admitted that they were unsuccessful in their attempts to eliminate old-fashioned and conservative philosophy by proving it to be senseless. There is in fact no clearcut formal procedure to distinguish scientific philosophy from metaphysics. Nevertheless, the Vienna Cirlcle established its aimin a rather unusual, roundabout way. Its method of dealing with various concrete problems gave a picture of what scientific philosophy should be like. Two main features of its method were first, logical precision and clarity in thinking, and second, sticking to facts regardless of our emotional attitude towards them. Thiswas a major turning point in philosophy representing a break with its tradition of irrationalism and sentimentalism.

The critics of "hereditarianism" often claim that any attempt to explain human behavior by invoking genes is confronted with insurmountable methodological difficulties. They reject the idea that heritability estimates could lead to genetic explanations by pointing out that these estimates are strictly valid only for a given population and that they are exposed to the irremovable confounding effects of genotype-environment interaction and genotype-environment correlation. I argue that these difficulties are greatly exaggerated, and that we would be wrong to regard them as presenting a fundamental obstacle to the search for genetic explanations. I also show that, to the extent they are cogent, these objections may prove to be even more damaging to the "environmentalist" standpoint

Political imputations in science are notoriously a tricky business. I addressed this issue in the context of the nature–nurture debate in the penultimate chapter of my book Making Sense of Heritability (Cambridge U. P. 2005). Although the book mainly dealt with the logic of how one should think about heritability of psychological differences, it also discussed the role of politics in our efforts to understand the dynamics of that controversy. I first argued that if a scholar publicly defends a certain view (say, hereditarianism) in the debate about IQ, race and genetics this fact alone cannot justify attributing a political motivation to that person. But then later I suggested that the pressure of political correctness could explain some peculiarities of the contemporary controversy about the heritability of group differences in IQ. Several reviewers of my book raised a tu quoque objection. Am I not doing here the same thing that I condemn others for?

A number of philosophers attribute the underrepresentation of women in philosophy largely to bias against women or some kind of wrongful discrimination. They cite six sources of evidence to support their contention: (1) gender disparities that increase along the path from undergraduate student to full time faculty member; (2) anecdotal accounts of discrimination in philosophy; (3) research on gender bias in the evaluation of manuscripts, grants, and curricula vitae in other academic disciplines; (4) psychological research on implicit bias; (5) psychological research on stereotype threat; and (6) the relatively small number of articles written from a feminist perspective in leading philosophy journals. In each case, we find that proponents of the discrimination hypothesis have tended to present evidence selectively. Occasionally they have even presented as evidence what appears to be something more dubious.