Tadej Todorović

What should the public understand about climate change to form true beliefs and responsibly participate in democratic deliberation? We argue for a partly negative and partly positive answer. Negatively, the public does not need to understand the climate or first-order evidence in climate science: endeavors that pursue such first-order competence, such as mainstream critical thinking (CT) and logic-based inoculation strategies task non-experts with a demand they cannot reliably perform. We demonstrate this by applying such inoculation procedures to a sophisticated and credentialed argument against climate change, and show that encouraging non-experts to evaluate the first-order premises and scientific claims leads to epistemic trespassing. Positively, we argue that what the public actually needs for responsible participation in the climate debate is a more modest and attainable understanding of the social epistemology of science – understanding how the scientific consensus is formed and why the process is more reliable than the alternatives. This kind of understanding transforms blind reliance into rationally warranted trust. In doing so, we distinguish the process of higher-order critical assessment, the understanding it gives, and the calibrated deference it licenses, and we locate higher-order evidence on the side of warranted trust rather than first-order understanding. The result is an epistemically responsible framework for public engagement with climate science that redirects, rather than abandons, critical thinking.

The article offers an internal critique of Fodor’s original argument against the unity of science, claiming that multiple realization in special sciences blocks reduction to physical science and secures their autonomy. Fodor’s argument has been a cornerstone of the argument against reductionism in the philosophy of mind. In this article, we aim to show that it fails even when Fodor’s own presuppositions and his own understandings of key terms are considered. In this sense, the article probes the original argument for its internal consistency. Firstly, we provide an overview of multiple realization, along with the main motivation for it, i.e., the rejection of psychophysical reductionism, and a detailed discussion of Fodor’s claims and key terminology. This is followed by examining Fodor’s argument against psychophysical reductionism using his key example of multiple realization, Gresham’s law in economics. We argue that the law is either not multiply realized or basic sciences are also multiply realized, both options being problematic for Fodor. Turning to the apparent impossibility of reducing ceteris paribus special science laws via exceptionless bridge laws to exceptionless physical laws, we argue that the problem lies in the notion of “proper law”: if understood as an exceptionless law, the argument rests on a contradiction, and if understood as a “not gerrymandered” (not arbitrary) law, the key assumption of the argument, i.e., that special science kinds are natural, is simply false. The original argument, therefore, fails to establish the autonomy of special sciences even if Fodor’s own understanding of key terms is adopted, which leaves him, contrary to his opinion, empty-handed in the battle against psychophysical reductionism.

The article explores the problem of the cognitive value of thought experiments (TEs) and fictions. Specifically, it deals with the claim that fictions have cognitive value in virtue of being (elaborate) thought experiments. First, a short overview of the cognitive value of TEs is presented, followed by the recent findings from experimental philosophy, which cast doubt on the value of TEs. This is followed by an examination and rejection of the claim that fictions are TEs (as presented by Elgin) for two reasons. First, the analogy between scientific and thought experiments and fictions ultimately fails, as fictions contain the very variables that must be absent for performing successful scientific and thought experiments; second, because of this and based on the research in experimental philosophy, fictions should bias the reader to a greater degree than TE— this is shown to be collaborated by text comprehension research. This claim is further substantiated by analysing two examples of fictions, Le Guin’s The Matter of Seggri and her satirical piece A Modest Proposal: Vegempathy. Finally, a more modest claim is considered, namely that fictions contain TEs, which must be properly extrapolated and analysed, yet this leads to issues that are similar to the value of TEs debate. The article thus concludes that using TEs is not advisable for securing the cognitive value of fiction.