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426The normativity of rationalityTeorema: International Journal of Philosophy 34 (2): 167-189. 2015.Rationality appears to have some intimate relation with normativity: exactly what relation is in dispute. John Broome devotes a chapter of his recent book to rebutting the view that rationality has 'true' normativity, which he equates with the kind of normativity that I call directivity. In particular, he offers a number of arguments against derivative accounts of thenormativity of rationality. In this paper I defend my instrumentalist account from those arguments. In so doing I bring into view …Read more
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1025Paradoxes of ProbabilityIn Tamas Rudas (ed.), Handbook of Probability Theory with Applications, Sage. pp. 49-66. 2008.We call something a paradox if it strikes us as peculiar in a certain way, if it strikes us as something that is not simply nonsense, and yet it poses some difficulty in seeing how it could make sense. When we examine paradoxes more closely, we find that for some the peculiarity is relieved and for others it intensifies. Some are peculiar because they jar with how we expect things to go, but the jarring is to do with imprecision and misunderstandings in our thought, failures to appreciate the br…Read more
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29Two Rhetorical ManoeuvresProceedings of the Ontario Society for the Study of Argumentation Conference 5. 2003.
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402A problem for the unity of normativityAnalysis 74 (3): 404-411. 2014.A prevalent assumption is that normativity is a unity. In this paper I argue against this assumption by demonstrating the problems it poses to a well known answer to a well known problem for taking rationality to be normative. John Broome's normative requirement relation does indeed avoid that problem, but insofar as the relation is supposed to offer a general characterisation of the normativity of rationality, it fails. It fails because it cannot capture an important aspect of the normativity o…Read more
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1973Sophism and PragmatismLogique Et Analyse 53 (210): 131-149. 2010.A traditional pastime of philosophers is the analysis of rhetoric and the repudiation of sophistry. Nevertheless, some of what philosophers call sophistry might rather be a subtle repudiation of the traditional principles of rationality. In this paper I start by granting the Sophist his repudiation and outline some of the obstacles to settling the dispute between Sophists and Rationalists. I then suggest that we should distinguish pragmatic Sophism from nihilistic Sophism. In the hope of driving…Read more
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979Pseudoscience and Idiosyncratic Theories of Rational BeliefIn M. Pigliucci & M. Boudry (eds.), Philosophy of Pseudoscience: Reconsidering the Demarcation Problem, University of Chicago Press. pp. 417-438. 2013.I take pseudoscience to be a pretence at science. Pretences are innumerable, limited only by our imagination and credulity. As Stove points out, ‘numerology is actually quite as different from astrology as astrology is from astronomy’ (Stove 1991, 187). We are sure that ‘something has gone appallingly wrong’ (Stove 1991, 180) and yet ‘thoughts…can go wrong in a multiplicity of ways, none of which anyone yet understands’ (Stove 1991, 190). Often all we can do is give a careful description of a …Read more
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790Although religious belief is often claimed to help with physical ailments including pain, it is unclear what psychological and neural mechanisms underlie the influence of religious belief on pain. By analogy to other top-down processes of pain modulation we hypothesized that religious belief helps believers reinterpret the emotional significance of pain, leading to emotional detachment from it. Recent findings on emotion regulation support a role for the right ventrolateral prefrontal cortex, a …Read more
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169The fragility of freedom of speechJournal of Medical Ethics 39 (5): 316-316. 2013.Freedom of speech is a fundamental liberty that imposes a stringent duty of tolerance. Tolerance is limited by direct incitements to violence. False notions and bad laws on speech have obscured our view of this freedom. Hence, perhaps, the self-righteous intolerance, incitements and threats in response to Giubilini and Minerva. Those who disagree have the right to argue back but their attempts to shut us up are morally wrong
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