Are there ever good epistemic reasons to neglect base rates? Assuming an empiricist modal epistemology, I argue that we face an interesting tension between some very plausible epistemic norms: a norm requiring us to proportion our beliefs to the evidence may facilitate knowledge of the actual world, whilst inhibiting our acquisition of modal knowledge—knowledge of how things could be, but are not. The potential for this tension in our epistemic norms is a significant result in its own right. It can also rationalize certain forms of demographic base-rate neglect.
Moral Testimony and Collective Moral Governance
I suggest that a moderate version of pessimism about moral testimony succeeds. However, I claim also that all major pessimist accounts—Understanding, Affect, Virtue, and Autonomy—fail. Having argued for these claims, I propose a new pessimist alternative.
The State of the Field Report IX: Contemporary Chinese Studies of Zhuangzian Wang (Forgetting)
The use of the character wang 忘 (forgetting) in the Zhuangzi 莊子 has been widely recognized in traditional and contemporary Chinese scholarship, but its meaning remains unclear. This article reviews some notable studies in Sinophone academia concerning the notion of wang in the Zhuangzi. The studies, though not necessarily focused on wang, shed light on different aspects of the concept, including its relation to self-cultivation, aesthetics, ethics, and ontology. While some scholars see wang as a form of elimination, others stress its relation to other concepts such as shi 適 (fitting). The relation of these two concepts, however, is not yet clear. There are also debates over what makes wang possible, with some linking it to dao 道 and some directing our attention to our daily experience. Despite the limited attention paid to wang to date, the studies reviewed show that it is a crucial aspect of Zhuangzian philosophy and deserves further study.
The Debate over Xing in the Outer Chapters of the Zhuangzi
Contemporary discussions of xing are often inspired by the Confucian tradition, but recent studies have brought the Zhuangzi 莊子 to the table as a viable alternative. In this essay, I present three different accounts of xing 性 in the Outer Chapters: (1) the primitivists who emphasize body vitality and simple life, (2) the Huang-Lao 黃老 school that emphasizes the balance among different things and the overall cosmological order, and (3) skill stories that look at individual skill masters rather than people in general or the role of the human species in the cosmos, entertain only the descriptive dimension of xing, and cast doubt on the normative status of xing. These three accounts can be read as responding to each other, and each shares certain themes with the Inner Chapters in different ways. Together, they demonstrate the complexity of the Zhuangzi’s view on xing and complicate attempts of cross-textual comparison.
Zhuangzi and the Issue of Human Nature
The issue of human nature or xing 性 was a major philosophical topic of the mid- and late-Warring States period of ancient China. It was famously discussed, for example, in the Mencius. Zhuangzi 莊子 lived around the same time as Mencius and one might expect that he, too, would have discussed it. Surprisingly, the term xing is absent from the Inner Chapters of the Zhuangzi. There have been different responses to this, namely, that Zhuangzi: used different terms equivalent to xing; believed that human nature is bad (despite not mentioning xing); was deliberately silent on xing as an oblique way of criticizing others such as Mencius. I review these claims and pro- vide an analysis of how xing was mainly conceptualized during the Warring States period in essentialist terms. I shall read Zhuangzi’s philosophy as transcending this conceptual framework. Instead of a theory of human nature, Zhuangzi provides sto- ries and descriptions of the different facets of human behavior and their psychologi- cal and other complexities. These often have an epistemic focus that stand indepen- dently of any theory of human nature.
Is the Feminist Critique of Reason Rational?
Recent criticism of feminist philosophy poses a dilemma. Feminism is taken to be a substantive set of empirical claims and political commitments, whereas philosophy is taken to be a discipline of thought organized by the pursuit of truth, but uncommitted to any particular truth. This paper responds to this dilemma, and defends the project of feminist philosophy.The first task toward understanding the feminist critique of reason, Alcoff argues, is to historically situate it within the rather long tradition of critiquing reason that has existed within the mainstream of philosophy itself.
Is the Subject of Science Sexed?
The premise of this paper is that the language of science, like language in general, is neither asexual nor neutral. The essay demonstrates the various ways in which the non-neutrality of the subject of science is expressed and proposes that there is a need to analyze the laws that determine the acceptability of language and discourse in order to interpret their connection to a sexed logic.
The Language of Man
This paper enumerates Irigaray’s main arguments and thoughts regarding the gendered nature of language and “the logos”.
The Liberation Argument for Inconsistent Mathematics
Val Plumwood charged classical logic not only with the invalidity of some of its laws, but also with the support of systemic oppression through naturalization of the logical structure of dualisms. In this paper I show that the latter charge – unlike the former – can be carried over to classical mathematics, and I propose a new conception of inconsistent mathematics – queer incomaths – as a liberatory activity meant to undermine said naturalization.
De-centering and Genderqueering Val Plumwood’s Feminist Logic
The strongest and, until recently, least-explored approach to feminist logic holds that some formal logics have structural features that perpetuate sexism and oppression, whereas other logics are helpful for resisting and opposing these social phenomena. Our choice of logics may not be purely formal on this view: for example, some logics are preferrable to others on the grounds of feminist commitments. This strong account of feminist logic was first articulated by Val Plumwood. We will critically engage salient features of her view, especially her critique of classical logic and the centering and dominating functions she believes classical negation has. We will see that her understanding of classical negation captures neither the development of Intersectional Feminism, nor the position the concept of centering holds in transformative justice. However, Plumwood’s critique of classical negation does lead us to a deeper insight regarding which logics to apply in social justice contexts. Robin Dembroff’s analysis of genderqueer as a critical gender kind helps us delineate a non-classical context in which a four-valued logic, such as FDE, can structurally account for the critical feature of this gender kind in a way classical logic cannot. We will also observe how four-valued logics precisely capture the destabilization of, and resistance to, the exclusive and exhaustive gender binary categories Dembroff describes.