August 2012
10 posts
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In 1908, Zermelo defended the axiom of choice partly on the grounds that it was “necessary for science.” (van Heijenoort 1967, 187-189) I had thought that indispensability arguments were a more recent invention.
“I have no intuition, for example, that that tells against a sharp line between the definitely definitely definitely definitely red and the not definitely definitely definitely definitely red. As a result, accord with intuition cannot guide us in settling the issue; other virtues of the available theories must point the way. And one virtue of a precisificationalist theory which accepts a...
Amidst widespread public ignorance about economics, values, and what makes for a just distribution of resources in society, the primary public-facing advocacy among academic philosophers concerns our self-policing of conferences.
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“What are the potential repercussions of China’s economic situation on the U.S....”
– http://chovanec.wordpress.com/2012/08/04/cfr-interview/
Here’s a good feeling: you form some beliefs about a topic, rejecting arguments you see as flawed and so on, and then you come across an article in a top journal that directly engages the topic and the same literature. And the author rejects the same arguments that you reject, regards your preferred solution as the best of the lot, and makes an objection to the solution you favor.
And your...
“[C]onsider Hud Hudson’s defense of another revisionary ontological view, universalism, against the objection that it has counterintuitive implications. Hudson’s strat- egy for handling the objection is to contend that our intuitions about which composite objects exist have an unreliable source:
‘we simply mistake a strategy for identifying objects that are likely to concern us...
