Katherine Hawley

(1971 - 2021)

Science as Salvation: a Modern Myth and its Meaning, Mary Midgley, 1994. London, Routledge x +256pp., Hb 04 15062713, £35; Pb 04 15107733, £8.99 Philosophical Naturalism, David Papineau, 1993 Oxford, Basil Blackwell xii +219pp., Hb 0631189025, £40; Pb 0631189033, £14.99 F. H. Bradley, Writings on Logic and Metaphysics, James W. Allard & Guy Stock (Eds), 1994. Oxford, Clarendon Press xv+357pp, Hb 0–198–24445–2, £40.00; Pb 0–198–24438‐X, £14.95 Invariance and Heuristics: Essays in Honour of Heinz Post, Steven French & Harmke Kamminga (Eds), 1993 Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, Vol. 148 Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht Beyond Reason: Essays on the Philosophy of Paul Feyerabend, GONZALO MUNÉVAR (Ed.), 1991. Dordrecht, Kluwer Academic Publishers xxi + 535pp., hb, ISBN 0–7923–1272–4, £104.20 World Changes: Thomas Kuhn and the Nature of Science, Paul Horwich (Ed.), 1993. Cambridge, MA, Bradford Books/mit Press vi + 356pp., pb, ISBN 0262581388, £14.95 Realism Rescued: How Scientific Progress is Possible, Jerold L. Aronson, Rom Harré & Eileen Cornell Way, 1994 London, Duckworth vii +213pp., Hb 0715624768, £30.00 Scientific Nihilism: On the Loss and Recovery of Physical Explanation, Daniel Athearn, 1994. State University of New York Press, Albany ix + 387pp., Hb ISBN 0–7914–1807–3, £52 Theism, Atheism, and Big Bang Cosmology, William Lane Craig & Quentin Smith, 1993. Oxford, Clarendon Press x +342pp., Hb 0198263481, £35; Pb 019826383X, £13.95.

When one is struggling to get motivated, one sometimes turns to social accountability strategies: telling others about one’s plans, or even promising to stick to them, in the hope that publicity will help achieve one’s goals. In this chapter, the author distinguishes four different strategies for social accountability, which vary in the content and strength of the commitments they involve. The chapter then explores different ways these strategies put one’s own interests, and those of others, on the line. When other people’s interests are at stake, this raises ethical questions about whether it is permissible to risk harm to others in order to achieve one’s own goals. The chapter shows how this can fruitfully be thought of as a problem within the morality of risk imposition. But, finally, it also argues that thinking in terms of risk imposition does not capture everything one cares about in the ethics of social accountability.

Can we be coerced into lying? Or does the very fact of coercion undercut the possibility of making an assertion? Through discussion of capitulations and other forms of coerced speech, this chapter explores the ways in which apparent assertions may be drained of standard normative significance, and thus excluded from the category of lies. Coerced pseudo-assertions are in this way similar to coerced pseudo-promises, and to coerced pseudo-gifts, neither of which have the standard normative significance associated with genuine promises and gifts. Nevertheless, our speech and actions under coercion are liable to moral evaluation, and coercion does not always make it permissible to speak falsely or attempt to mislead an audience.

In _Parts of Classes_, David Lewis argues that mereology is ontologically innocent, and connects this to the thesis that composition is identity. This chapter investigates whether mereology can be regarded as ontologically innocent even if composition is not identity. One idea is that we are all implicitly committed to the existence of arbitrary sums even before we accept mereology, so that accepting mereology does not give us any new commitments. A different idea is that, although accepting mereology gives us new ontological commitments, the additional entities do not add explanatory complexity, so do not offend against considerations of parsimony.

The world is remarkably stable -- amidst the flux, physical objects continue to persist. But how do things persist? Are they spread out through time as they are spread out through space? Or is persistence very different from spatial extension? These ancient metaphysical questions are at the forefront of contemporary debate once more. Katherine Hawley provides a wide-ranging yet accessible study of this key issue. She also makes a major contribution to current debates about change, vagueness, and language.

People are described as suffering from impostor syndrome when they feel that their external markers of success are unwarranted, and fear being revealed as a fraud. Impostor syndrome is commonly framed as a troubling individual pathology, to be overcome through self-help strategies or therapy. But in many situations an individual’s impostor attitudes can be epistemically justified, even if they are factually mistaken: hostile social environments can create epistemic obstacles to self-knowledge. The concept of impostor syndrome prevalent in popular culture needs greater critical scrutiny, as does its source, the concept of impostor phenomenon which features in psychological research.

The Ant Trap is a terrific book, which opens up new opportunities to use philosophical methods in the social realm, by drawing on the tools and techniques of contemporary metaphysics. Epstein uses concepts of dependence, constitution, and grounding, of parts and whole, of membership and kindhood, both to clarify existing accounts of social reality and to develop an account of his own. Whilst I admire the general strategy, I take issue with some aspects of Epstein’s implementation, notably his distinction between grounding and anchoring. I recommend that he give up this distinction, which is not crucial to his project.

Conspiracy theorists believe that powerful agents are conspiring to achieve their nefarious aims and also to orchestrate a cover-up. People who suffer from impostor syndrome believe that they are not talented enough for the professional positions they find themselves in, and that they risk being revealed as inadequate. These are quite different outlooks on reality, and there is no reason to think that they are mutually reinforcing. Nevertheless, there are intriguing parallels between the patterns of trust and distrust which underpin both conspiracy theorising and impostor thinking. In both cases subjects distrust standard sources of information, instead regarding themselves as especially insightful into the underlying facts of the matter. In both cases, seemingly-anomalous data takes on special significance. And in both cases, the content of belief dictates the epistemic behaviour of the believer. This paper explores these parallels, to suggest new avenues of research into both conspiracy theorising and impostor syndrome, including questions about whether impostor syndrome inevitably involves a personal failure of rationality, and issues about how, if at all, it is possible to convince others to abandon either conspiracy theories or impostor attitudes.

In his 1991 book, Parts of Classes, David Lewis discusses the idea that composition is identity, alongside the idea that mereological overlap is a form of partial identity. But this notion of partial identity does nothing to help Lewis achieve his goals in that book. So why does he mention it? I explore and resolve this puzzle, by comparing Parts of Classes with Lewis's invocation of partial identity in his 1993 paper ‘Many But Almost One’, where he uses it to address Unger's problem of the many. I raise some concerns about this way of thinking of partial identity, but conclude that, for Lewis, it is an important defence against accusations of ontological profligacy.

What kind of entity is a committee, a book group or a band? I argue that committees and other such social groups are concrete, composite particulars, having ordinary human beings amongst their parts. So the committee members are literally parts of the committee. This mereological view of social groups was popular several decades ago, but fell out of favour following influential objections from David-Hillel Ruben. But recent years have seen a tidal wave of work in metaphysics, including the metaphysics of parts and wholes. We now have the resources to rehabilitate the mereological view of social groups. I show how this can be done, and why we should bother.

You can trust your friends. You should trust your friends. Not all of your friends all of the time: you can reasonably trust different friends to different degrees, and in different domains. Still, we often trust our friends, and it is often reasonable to do so. Why is this? In this paper I explore how and whether friendship gives us reasons to trust our friends, reasons which may outstrip or conflict with our epistemic reasons. In the final section, I will sketch some related questions concerning trust based on the trustee’s race, gender, or other social identity.