Trust is fundamental to epistemology. It features as theoretical bedrock in a broad cross-section of areas including social epistemology, the epistemology of self-trust, feminist epistemology, and the philosophy of science. Yet epistemology has seen little systematic conversation with the rich literature on trust itself. This volume aims to promote and shape this conversation. It encourages epistemologists of all stripes to dig deeper into the fundamental epistemic roles played by trust, and it encourages philosophers of trust to explore the epistemological upshots and applications of their theories. The contributors explore such issues as the risks and necessity of trusting others for information, the value of doing so as opposed to relying on oneself, the mechanisms underlying trust's strange ability to deliver knowledge, whether depending on others for information is compatible with epistemic responsibility, whether self-trust is an intellectual virtue, and the intimate relationship between epistemic trust and social power. This volume, in Routledge's new series on trust research, will be a vital resource to academics and students not just of epistemology and trust, but also of moral psychology, political philosophy, the philosophy of science, and feminist philosophy - and to anyone else wanting to understand our vital yet vulnerable-making capacity to trust others and ourselves for information in a complex world.

Bioethics is a field of inquiry and as such is fundamentally an epistemic discipline. Knowing how we make moral judgments can bring into relief why certain arguments on various bioethical issues appear plausible to one side and obviously false to the other. Uncertain Bioethics makes a significant and distinctive contribution to the bioethics literature by culling the insights from contemporary moral psychology to highlight the epistemic pitfalls and distorting influences on our apprehension of value. Stephen Napier also incorporates research from epistemology addressing pragmatic encroachment and the significance of peer disagreement to justify what he refers to as epistemic diffidence when one is considering harming or killing human beings. Napier extends these developments to the traditional bioethical notion of dignity and argues that beliefs subject to epistemic diffidence should not be acted upon. He proceeds to apply this framework to traditional and developing issues in bioethics including abortion, stem cell research, euthanasia, decision-making for patients in a minimally conscious state, and risky research on competent human subjects.

This book tackles questions which revolve around the representational purport (or lack thereof) of evaluative and normative claims. Claims about what we ought to do, what is best, what is justified, or simply what counts as a good reason for action-in other words, evaluative or normative claims-are familiar. But when we pause to ask what these claims mean and what we are doing when we use them, puzzles arise. Are there facts of the matter about what ought to be done, much like there are facts of the matter about mathematics or the natural world? If so, "ought claims" are probably trying to represent the "ought facts". Alternatively, perhaps there are no evaluative facts, in which case evaluative claims are either trying to represent facts which do not exist, or evaluative claims are not in the representation business to begin with. The latter option is intriguing, and it is the subject of much recent work in expressivism, pragmatism, and semantic relativism. But if ought claims are not representing anything as factual, why do we think such claims are true or false, and what are we doing when we disagree with one another about them? This book sheds light on this important area of philosophy. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Canadian Journal of Philosophy.

This book defends an account of the positive psychological, ethical, and political value of simulated human experience. Philosophers from Plato and Augustine to Heidegger, Nozick, and Baudrillard have warned us of the dangers of living on too heavy a diet of illusion and make-believe. But contemporary cultural life provides broader, more attractive opportunities to do so than have existed at any other point in history. The gentle forms of self-deceit that such experiences require of us, and that so many have regarded as ethically unwholesome or psychologically self-destructive, can in fact serve as vital means to political reconciliation, cultural enrichment, and even (a kind of) utopia. The first half of the book provides a highly schematic definition of simulated experience and compares it with some claims about the nature of simulation made by other philosophers about what it is for one thing to be a simulation of another. The author then provides a critical survey of the views of some major authors about the value of certain specific types of simulated experience, mainly in order to point out the many puzzling inconsistencies and ambiguities that their thoughts upon the topic often exhibit. In the second half of the book, the author defends an account of the positive social value of simulated experience and compares his own position to the ideas of a number of utopian political thinkers, as well as to Plato's famous doctrine of the "noble lie." He then makes some tentative practical suggestions about how a proper appreciation of the value of simulated experience might influence public policy decisions about such matters as the justification of taxation, paternalistic "choice management," and governmental transparency. A Defense of Simulated Experience will appeal to a broad range of philosophers working in normative ethics, aesthetics, the philosophy of technology, political philosophy, and the philosophy of culture who are interested in questions about simulated experience. The book also makes a contribution to the emerging field of Game Studies.

Kierkegaard's Concepts is a comprehensive, multi-volume survey of the key concepts and categories that inform Kierkegaard's writings. Each article is a substantial, original piece of scholarship, which discusses the etymology and lexical meaning of the relevant Danish term, traces the development of the concept over the course of the authorship, and explains how it functions in the wider context of Kierkegaard's thought. Concepts have been selected on the basis of their importance for Kierkegaard's contributions to philosophy, theology, the social sciences, literature and aesthetics, thereby making this volume an ideal reference work for students and scholars in a wide range of disciplines.

Kierkegaard's Concepts is a comprehensive, multi-volume survey of the key concepts and categories that inform Kierkegaard's writings. Each article is a substantial, original piece of scholarship, which discusses the etymology and lexical meaning of the relevant Danish term, traces the development of the concept over the course of the authorship, and explains how it functions in the wider context of Kierkegaard's thought. Concepts have been selected on the basis of their importance for Kierkegaard's contributions to philosophy, theology, the social sciences, literature and aesthetics, thereby making this volume an ideal reference work for students and scholars in a wide range of disciplines.

Kierkegaard's Concepts is a comprehensive, multi-volume survey of the key concepts and categories that inform Kierkegaard's writings. Each article is a substantial, original piece of scholarship, which discusses the etymology and lexical meaning of the relevant Danish term, traces the development of the concept over the course of the authorship, and explains how it functions in the wider context of Kierkegaard's thought. Concepts have been selected on the basis of their importance for Kierkegaard's contributions to philosophy, theology, the social sciences, literature and aesthetics, thereby making this volume an ideal reference work for students and scholars in a wide range of disciplines.

Kierkegaard's Concepts is a comprehensive, multi-volume survey of the key concepts and categories that inform Kierkegaard's writings. Each article is a substantial, original piece of scholarship, which discusses the etymology and lexical meaning of the relevant Danish term, traces the development of the concept over the course of the authorship, and explains how it functions in the wider context of Kierkegaard's thought. Concepts have been selected on the basis of their importance for Kierkegaard's contributions to philosophy, theology, the social sciences, literature and aesthetics, thereby making this volume an ideal reference work for students and scholars in a wide range of disciplines.

Does science argue against the existence of the human soul? Many scientists and scholars believe the whole is more than the sum of the parts. This book uses information and systems theory to describe the "more" that does not reduce to the parts. One sees this in the synapses"or apparently empty gaps between the neurons in one's brain"where informative relationships give rise to human mind, culture, and spirituality. Drawing upon the disciplines of cognitive science, computer science, neuroscience, general systems theory, pragmatic philosophy, and Christian theology, Mark Graves reinterprets the traditional doctrine of the soul as form of the body to frame contemporary scientific study of the human soul.

This collection of original essays explores the topic of skeptical invariantism in theory of knowledge. It eschews historical perspectives and focuses on this traditionally underexplored, semantic characterization of skepticism. The book provides a carefully structured, state-of-the-art overview of skeptical invariantism and offers up new questions and avenues for future research. It treats this semantic form of skepticism as a serious position rather than assuming that skepticism is false and attempting to diagnose where arguments for skepticism go wrong. The essays take up a wide range of different philosophical perspectives on three key questions in the debate about skeptical invariantism: (1) whether the standards for knowledge vary, (2) how demanding the standards for knowledge are, and (3) whether the kind of evidence, reasons, methods, processes, etc. that we can bring to bear are sufficient to meet those standards. Skeptical Invariantism Reconsidered will be of interest to scholars and advanced students in epistemology and the philosophy of language.

The philosophy of perception investigates the nature of our sensory experiences and their relation to reality. In the second edition of this popular book, William Fish introduces the subject thematically, setting out the major theories of perception together with their motivations and attendant problems. While providing historical background to debates in the field, this comprehensive overview focuses on recent presentations and defenses of the different theories, and looks beyond visual perception to take into account the role of other senses. The second edition organizes the contents into two main parts: the first deals with philosophical theories of perception, and the second covers key topics and issues in perception as they are discussed in philosophy, cognitive science, and psychology. Two completely new chapters have been added - one on color and color vision; and a second on the interaction between sense modalities - and other chapters have been significantly updated to include discussion of topics such as pre-twentieth-century philosophy of perception, phenomenal intentionality, color adverbialism, predictive processing approaches to perception, ecological approaches to perception, and in-depth discussions of the non-visual senses. Additional updates include fuller and easier-to-understand explanations of some important views that were glossed over in the first edition and greater coverage of research from the last 25 years. All chapter summaries, references, and Suggested Reading lists at the end of each chapter have been brought up to date and the volume now includes a more extensive index at the back of the book. Key Features and Benefits: The only single-authored textbook on philosophy of perception currently available Devoted to contemporary theories and topics, but with appropriate historical coverage for fuller understanding of contemporary work Each chapter includes a chapter overview, questions for further consideration, and an annotated list of Suggested Readings Includes coverage of topics like: - the phenomenal principle - perception and hallucination - perception and content - naive realism and disjunctivism - intentionalism and representationalism - the nature of content - qualia theories and phenomenal intentionality - perception and empirical science - color and color science - theories of non-visual perception - Molyneux's problem - cross-modal illusions - multimodality Key Changes to the Second Edition The division of the book into two major parts: Part I on philosophical theories of perception, Part II on key interdisciplinary topics in perception The addition of two new chapters on color and color vision, and interaction between different sense modalities More topics from the last 25 years of philosophy of perception Combined chapters on belief acquisition theories and intentional theories into one larger chapter More material on the growing intersection of the philosophy and psychology of perception Includes coverage of Molyneux's problem and of cross-modal illusions Updated chapter summaries, references, and Suggested Reading lists at the end of each chapter A summary table and a more extensive index

The aim of this volume is to critically assess the philosophical importance of phenomenology as a method for studying the normativity of meaning and its transcendental conditions. Using the pioneering work of Steven Crowell as a springboard, phenomenologists from all over the world examine the promise of phenomenology for illuminating long-standing problems in epistemology, the philosophy of mind, action theory, the philosophy of religion, and moral psychology. The essays are unique in that they engage with the phenomenological tradition not as a collection of authorities to whom we must defer, or a set of historical artifacts we must preserve, but rather as a community of interlocutors with views that bear on important issues in contemporary philosophy. The book is divided into three thematic sections, each examining different clusters of issues aimed at moving the phenomenological project forward. The first section explores the connection between normativity and meaning, and asks us to rethink the relation between the factual realm and the categories of validity in terms of which things can show up as what they are. The second section examines the nature of the self that is capable of experiencing meaning. It includes essays on intentionality, agency, consciousness, naturalism, and moral normativity. The third section addresses questions of philosophical methodology, examining if and why phenomenology should have priority in the analysis of meaning. Finally, the book concludes with an afterword written by Steven Crowell. Normativity, Meaning, and the Promise of Phenomenology will be a key resource for students and scholars interested in the phenomenological tradition, the transcendental tradition from Kant to Davidson, and existentialism. Additionally, its forward-looking focus yields crucial insights into pressing philosophical problems that will appeal to scholars working across all areas of the discipline.

This is the first volume dedicated solely to the topic of epistemological disjunctivism. The original essays in this volume, written by leading and up-and-coming scholars on the topic, are divided into three thematic sections. The first set of chapters addresses the historical background of epistemological disjunctivism. It features essays on ancient epistemology, Immanuel Kant, J.L. Austin, Edmund Husserl, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. The second section tackles a number contemporary issues related to epistemological disjunctivism, including its relationship with perceptual disjunctivism, radical skepticism, and reasons for belief. Finally, the third group of essays extends the framework of epistemological disjunctivism to other forms of knowledge, such as testimonial knowledge, knowledge of other minds, and self-knowledge. Epistemological Disjunctivism is a timely collection that engages with an increasingly important topic in philosophy. It will appeal to researches and graduate students working in epistemology, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of perception.

Roughly, instrumentalism is the view that science is primarily, and should primarily be, an instrument for furthering our practical ends. It has fallen out of favour because historically influential variants of the view, such as logical positivism, suffered from serious defects. In this book, however, Darrell P. Rowbottom develops a new form of instrumentalism, which is more sophisticated and resilient than its predecessors. This position-'cognitive instrumentalism'-involves three core theses. First, science makes theoretical progress primarily when it furnishes us with more predictive power or understanding concerning observable things. Second, scientific discourse concerning unobservable things should only be taken literally in so far as it involves observable properties or analogies with observable things. Third, scientific claims about unobservable things are probably neither approximately true nor liable to change in such a way as to increase in truthlikeness. There are examples from science throughout the book, and Rowbottom demonstrates at length how cognitive instrumentalism fits with the development of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century chemistry and physics, and especially atomic theory. Drawing upon this history, Rowbottom also argues that there is a kind of understanding, empirical understanding, which we can achieve without having true, or even approximately true, representations of unobservable things. In closing the book, he sets forth his view on how the distinction between the observable and unobservable may be drawn, and compares cognitive instrumentalism with key contemporary alternatives such as structural realism, constructive empiricism, and semirealism. Overall, this book offers a strong defence of instrumentalism that will be of interest to scholars and students working on the debate about realism in philosophy of science.

The turn of the millennium has been marked by new developments in the study of early modern philosophy. In particular, the philosophy of Rene Descartes has been reinterpreted in a number of important and exciting ways, specifically concerning his work on the mind-body union, the connection between objective and formal reality, and his status as a moral philosopher. These fresh interpretations have coincided with a renewed interest in overlooked parts of the Cartesian corpus and a sustained focus on the similarities between Descartes' thought and the philosophy of Baruch Spinoza. Mind, Body, and Morality consists of fifteen chapters written by scholars who have contributed significantly to the new turn in Descartes and Spinoza scholarship. The volume is divided into three parts. The first group of chapters examines different metaphysical and epistemological problems raised by the Cartesian mind-body union. Part II investigates Descartes' and Spinoza's understanding of the relations between ideas, knowledge, and reality. Special emphasis is put on Spinoza's conception of the relation between activity and passivity. Finally, the last part explores different aspects of Descartes' moral philosophy, connecting his views to important predecessors, Augustine and Abelard, and comparing them to Spinoza.

The aim of this book is to address the relevance of Wilfrid Sellars' philosophy to understanding topics in Buddhist philosophy. While contemporary scholars of Buddhism often take Sellars as a touchstone for philosophical analysis, and while many take Sellars' corpus as their entree into current philosophical discourse, fewer contemporary philosophers have crossed the bridge in the other direction, using Sellarsian ideas as a way of entering into Buddhist philosophy. The essays in this volume, written by both philosophers and Buddhist Studies scholars, are divided into two sections organized around two of Sellars' essays that have been particularly influential in Buddhist Studies: "Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man" and "Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind." The chapters in Part I generally address questions concerning the two truths, while those in Part II concern issues in epistemology and philosophy of mind. The volume will be of interest to Sellars scholars, to scholars interested in the contemporary interaction of Buddhist philosophy and Western philosophy and to scholars of Buddhist Studies.

This book combines virtue reliabilism with knowledge first epistemology to develop novel accounts of knowledge and justified belief. It is virtue reliabilist in that knowledge and justified belief are accounted for in terms of epistemic ability. It is knowledge first epistemological in that, unlike traditional virtue reliabilism, it does not unpack the notion of epistemic ability as an ability to form true beliefs but as an ability to know, thus offering a definition of justified belief in terms of knowledge. In addition, the book aims to show that this version of knowledge first virtue reliabilism serves to provide novel solutions to a number of core epistemological problems and, as a result, compares favourably with alternative versions of virtue reliabilism both in the traditionalist and in the knowledge first camp. This is the first ever book-length development of knowledge first virtue reliabilism, and it will contribute to recent debates in these two growing areas of epistemology.

The claim according to which there is a categorial gap between meaning and saying - between what sentences mean and what we say by using them on particular occasions - has come to be widely regarded as being exclusively a claim in the philosophy of language. The present essay collection takes a different approach to these issues. It seeks to explore the ways in which that claim - as defended first by ordinary language philosophy and, more recently, by various contextualist projects - is grounded in considerations that transcend the philosophy of language. More specifically, the volume seeks to explore how that claim is inextricably linked to considerations about the nature of truth and representation. It is thus part of the objective of this volume to rethink the current way of framing the debates on these issues. By framing the debate in terms of an opposition between "ideal language theorists" and their semanticist heirs on the one hand and "communication theorists" and their contextualist heirs on the other, one brackets important controversies and risks obscuring the undoubtedly very real oppositions that exist between different currents of thought.

To claim to believe in God without accepting that God exists independently of human minds would mean reducing God to merely a human construct, thus not real enough for being the object of religious worship. This book sets out to challenge this common view on existence and religious belief. Arguing from concrete examples of language use in children's make-believe play and other ordinary situations, Erica Appelros suggests that what makes us consider something to be real involves our capacities to relate to our surroundings - not only on grounds of their physical characteristics but also on grounds of human construction. This book makes a substantial contribution to the contemporary debate within philosophy of religion on religious realism and non-realism, and suggests innovative and constructive solutions to the perennial philosophical and religious issue of what is meant by talking about God and God's existence.

This book advances the growing area of language policy and planning (LPP) by examining the epistemological and theoretical foundations that engendered and sustain the field, drawing on insights and approaches from anthropology, linguistics, economics, political science, and education to create an accessible and inter-disciplinary overview of LPP as a coherent discipline. Throughout the book, the authors address LPP from different perspectives, exploring the interface between planning in theory and its practical problems in implementation. This volume will be of interest to students and scholars with an interest in LPP in particular, and educational, social, and public policy more broadly.

Structural realism has rapidly gained in popularity in recent years, but it has splintered into many distinct denominations, often underpinned by diverse motivations. There is, no monolithic position known as 'structural realism, ' but there is a general convergence on the idea that a central role is to be played by relational aspects over object-based aspects of ontology. What becomes of causality in a world without fundamental objects? In this book, the foremost authorities on structural realism attempt to answer this and related questions: 'what is structure?' and 'what is an object?' Also featured are the most recent advances in structural realism, including the intersection of mathematical structuralism and structural realism, and the latest treatments of laws and modality in the context of structural realism. The book will be of interest to philosophers of science, philosophers of physics, metaphysicians, and those interested in foundational aspects of science.

Thomas Pink offers a new approach to the problem of free will. Do we have control of how we act, so that we are free to act in more than one way, and does it matter to morality whether we do? Pink argues that what matters to morality is not in fact the freedom to do otherwise, but something more primitive - a basic capacity or power to determine for ourselves what we do. This capacity might or might not take the form of a freedom to act in more than one way, and it might or might not be compatible with causal determinism. What really matters to morality is that it is we who determine what we do. What we do must not simply be a function of powers or capacities for which we are not responsible, or a matter of mere chance. At the heart of moral responsibility is a distinctive form of power that is quite unlike ordinary causation - a power by which we determine outcomes in a way quite differently from the way ordinary causes determine outcomes. Pink examines how this power is involved in action, and how the nature of action permits the operation of such a power to determine it.

This book contains more than 15 essays that explore issues in truth, existence, and explanation. It features cutting-edge research in the philosophy of mathematics and logic. Renowned philosophers, mathematicians, and younger scholars provide an insightful contribution to the lively debate in this interdisciplinary field of inquiry. The essays look at realism vs. anti-realism as well as inflationary vs. deflationary theories of truth. The contributors also consider mathematical fictionalism, structuralism, the nature and role of axioms, constructive existence, and generality. In addition, coverage also looks at the explanatory role of mathematics and the philosophical relevance of mathematical explanation. The book will appeal to a broad mathematical and philosophical audience. It contains work from FilMat, the Italian Network for the Philosophy of Mathematics. These papers collected here were also presented at their second international conference, held at the University of Chieti-Pescara, May 2016.

The central problem of philosophy is the problem of certainty. What does it mean to be sure? Are there ideas beyond the possibility of error or refutation? What does it mean for a notion to be incorrigible? In this book, Frank D. Schubert squarely addresses the question of whether there is a single standard of certainty that can be applied to such disparate areas as logic, mathematics, politics, religion, familial/tribal commitments, and science. Schubert proposes a common standard for assessing certainty - the certainty of knowing one's own personal proper name - as a standard that can establish common ground within each widely disparate area. The result is a new "philosophy in a grand manner" and a powerful ethical proposal for our time.