This article offers an argument of genocide denial as an injustice perpetrated not only against direct victims and survivors of genocide, but also against future members of the victim group. In particular, I argue that in cases of persistent and systematic denial, i.e. denialism, it perpetrates an epistemic injustice against them: testimonial oppression. First, I offer an account of testimonial oppression and introduce Kristie Dotson’s notion of testimonial smothering as one form of testimonial oppression, a mechanism of coerced (...) silencing particularly pertinent to genocide denialism. Secondly, I turn to the epistemology of genocide denialism and, using the example of Turkey’s denialism of the Armenian genocide, show how it presents what Linda Martín Alcoff calls a substantive practice of ignorance. Thirdly, I apply these considerations to individual practices of genocide denial and analyse the particular characteristics of testimony on genocide, the speaker vulnerabilities involved and the conditions under which hearers will reliably fail to meet the dependencies of a speaker testifying to genocide. Finally, I explore the harms that testimonial oppression perpetrates on members of the victim group, insofar as it systematically deprives them of epistemic recognition. (shrink)

The scientific community, we hold, often provides society with knowledge—that the HIV virus causes AIDS, that anthropogenic climate change is underway, that the MMR vaccine is safe. Some deny that we have this knowledge, however, and work to undermine it in others. It has been common to refer to such agents as “denialists”. At first glance, then, denialism appears to be a form of skepticism. But while we know that various denialist strategies for suppressing belief are generally effective, little is (...) known about which strategies are most effective. We see this as an important first step toward their remediation. This paper leverages the approximate comparison to various forms of philosophical skepticism to design an experimental test of the efficacy of four broad strategies of denial at suppressing belief in specific scientific claims. Our results suggest that assertive strategies are more effective at suppressing belief than questioning strategies. (shrink)

Over the past couple of decades, there has been growing concern about the alleged rise of various forms of science denial. But what exactly is science denial? How does it differ from ordinary scientific ignorance? Is it really on the rise? If so, what explain this trend? And what is so concerning about it in the first place? This Element has four goals. Its first (and least ambitious) goal is to is to bring some conceptual clarity by developing (...) a clearer notion of science denial and gaining a better understanding of the concerns raised by the phenomenon it is meant to capture. Its second (and more ambitious) goal is to distinguish among several specific phenomena that are often conflated under the label ‘science denial.’ Its third (and even more ambitious) goal is to argue that none of these specific phenomena warrants all of the concerns that motivate its critics. Its fourth (and most ambitious) goal is to expose the inadequacy of a popular diagnosis of the epistemic malaise afflicting liberal democracies – the post-truth diagnosis – and to sketch an alternative to it – the post-trust diagnosis. (shrink)

Suppose Alice asserts p, and the Caterpillar wants to disagree. If the Caterpillar accepts classical logic, he has an easy way to indicate this disagreement: he can simply assert ¬p. Sometimes, though, things are not so easy. For example, suppose the Cheshire Cat is a paracompletist who thinks that p ∨ ¬p fails (in familiar (if possibly misleading) language, the Cheshire Cat thinks p is a gap). Then he surely disagrees with Alice's assertion of p, but should himself be unwilling (...) to assert ¬p. So he cannot simply use the classical solution. Dually, suppose the Mad Hatter is a dialetheist who thinks that p ∧ ¬p holds (that is, he thinks p is a glut). Then he may assert ¬p, but it should not be taken to indicate that he disagrees with Alice; he doesn't. So he too can't use the classical solution. The Cheshire Cat and the Mad Hatter, then, have a common problem, and philosophers with opinions like theirs have adopted a common solution to this problem: appeal to denial. Denial, these philosophers suppose, is a speech act like assertion, but it is not to be understood as in any way reducing to assertion. Importantly, denial is something different from the assertion of a negation; this is what allows it to work even in cases where assertion of negation does not. Just as importantly, denial must express disagreement, since this is the job it's being enlisted to do. (shrink)

Intuitively, there is a difference between knowledge and mere belief. Contemporary philosophical work on the nature of this difference has focused on scenarios known as “Gettier cases.” Designed as counterexamples to the classical theory that knowledge is justified true belief, these cases feature agents who arrive at true beliefs in ways which seem reasonable or justified, while nevertheless seeming to lack knowledge. Prior empirical investigation of these cases has raised questions about whether lay people generally share philosophers’ intuitions about these (...) cases, or whether lay intuitions vary depending on individual factors (e.g. ethnicity) or factors related to specific types of Gettier cases (e.g. cases that include apparent evidence). We report an experiment on lay attributions of knowledge and justification for a wide range of Gettier Cases and for a related class of controversial cases known as Skeptical Pressure cases, which are also thought by philosophers to elicit intuitive denials of knowledge. Although participants rated true beliefs in Gettier and Skeptical Pressure cases as being justified, they were significantly less likely to attribute knowledge for these cases than for matched true belief cases. This pattern of response was consistent across different variations of Gettier cases and did not vary by ethnicity or gender, although attributions of justification were found to be positively related to measures of empathy. These findings therefore suggest that across demographic groups, laypeople share similar epistemic concepts with philosophers, recognizing a difference between knowledge and justified true belief. (shrink)

Starting from the case of insurance claims, I investigate the dynamics of acceptance, rejection and denial. I show that disagreement can be more varied than one might think. I illustrate this by looking at the Warren/Sanders controversy in the 2020 democratic primaries and at religious agnosticism.

I discuss Greg Restall’s attempt to generate an account of logical consequence from the incoherence of certain packages of assertions and denials. I take up his justification of the cut rule and argue that, in order to avoid counterexamples to cut, he needs, at least, to introduce a notion of logical form. I then suggest a few problems that will arise for his account if a notion of logical form is assumed. I close by sketching what I take to be (...) the most natural minimal way of distinguishing content and form and suggest further problems arising for this route. (shrink)

Bedross Der Matossian's edited volume is an irreplaceable resource for scholars and students interested in the changing governmental tactics of genocide denialism that span the globe today. This edited volume orients readers toward understanding current historical realities of genocide denialism by evaluating new manifestations of this phenomenon. -/- In today's global political context, the varying discourses, sites, intensities, and practices of genocide denialism are not exceptional, but rather appear as “culturally valid” forms of perpetrator mentality or, to borrow from Michel (...) Foucault, governmentality. As a philosopher who works on genocide denialism, I read Denial of Genocides in relation to Foucault's three-pronged definition of governmentality. Foucault discusses governmentality as an “ensemble formed by institutions, procedures, analyses, reflections, calculations, and tactics.” Accordingly, in Der Matossian's edited volume, genocide perpetrators’ denialist tactics, strategies, discourses, and subjectivities are conditioning factors of their governmentality. For example, Marc Mamigonian's discussion of the legal practices of the Turkish Coalition of America (ch. 3) shows how denialist practices require agents with motivated cognitions who reproduce old forms of Turkish genocide denialism alongside new attacks on US recognition of the Armenian genocide. (shrink)

Business ethics denial refers to one of two claims about moral motivation in a business context: that there is no need for it, or that it is impossible. Neither of these radical claims is endorsed by serious theorists in the academic fields that study business ethics. Nevertheless, public commentators, as well as university students, often make claims that seem to imply that they subscribe to some form of business ethics denial. This paper fills a gap by making explicit (...) both the various forms that business ethics denial can take, and the reasons why such views are ultimately implausible. The paper argues that this type of serious engagement with business ethics denial should be an important part of the job description for teachers of business ethics. (shrink)

Some philosophers consider that some of their colleagues deny that consciousness exists. We shall call the latter ‘deniers’, adopting a term that was initially meant pejoratively. What do the deniers deny? In order to answer this question, we shall examine arguments, both of some deniers and of their critics, and present denialism as a systematic highly non-trivial position that has had some interesting achievements. We will show that the denialist project concerns the epistemology of the mind and specifically of consciousness: (...) what can be known about it, and how it can be known. The main argument of denialism is that first-person reports about the mental realm are not always the best source of information about that realm, and are certainly not reliable. This leads the deniers to realize that the reference and meaning of mental terms as used in standard philosophical literature are vague and call for clarification, and that what many take to be empirical data in the study of the mind are actually heavily laden with theory. Denialism thus makes scientific and philosophical research clearer and more fruitful. (shrink)

Genocide remembrance is a complex epistemological/ethical achievement, whereby survivors and descendants give meaning to the past in the quest for both personal-historical and social-historical truth. This paper offers an argument of epistemic injustice specifically as it occurs in relation to practices of (individual and collective) genocide remembrance. In particular, I argue that under conditions of genocide denialism, understood as collective genocide misremembrance and memory distortion, genocide survivors and descendants are confronted with hermeneutical oppression. Drawing on Sue Campbell’s relational, reconstructive account (...) of remembering, I argue that genocide denialism involves disrespectful challenges to memory, which systematically misrecognize rememberers. Adopting the case of Turkey’s denialism of the Armenian genocide, I discuss two interrelated mechanisms through which this can happen: i) through the systematic portrayal of survivors and descendants as vicious rememberers, and ii) through distortions of the very concept of ‘genocide’. Based on this, I show how hermeneutical and testimonial injustice are crucially interrelated when it comes to “contested” memories of historical injustice and the biographical testimony it gives rise to. (shrink)

The traditional debate about moral dilemmas concerns whether there are circumstances in which an agent is subject to two obligations that cannot both be fulfilled. Realists maintain there are. Irrealists deny this. Here I defend an alternative, methodologically-oriented position wherein the denial of genuine moral dilemmas functions as a regulative ideal for moral deliberation and practice. That is, moral inquiry and deliberation operate on the implicit assumption that there are no genuine moral dilemmas. This view is superior to both (...) realism and irrealism in accounting for moral residue and other crucial phenomenological dimensions of our experience of moral dilemmas. (shrink)

Many well educated and apparently rational people claim that vaccines are bad, that the Earth is flat and that human activity is not globally warming the planet, while knowing very well the scientific consensus on these issues. Such science denialism might seem very puzzling. In this article, I argue that many attempts to make sense of it fail, most notably because they confuse or identify denialism with conspiracy theories. Unlike conspiracy theories, I will argue, denialism is exoteric and intuitive; it (...) often expresses a form of epistemic populism triggered by the hypercomplex and counterintuitive character of science and its correlative exclusion of laymen. Understood this way, denialism turns out not only to be ‘normally rational’, it is also positively reasonable in the sense that it is justified by reasons that are not generally decisive, of course, but whose rejection requires in-depth philosophical reflection. Indeed, it can be justified by appealing to ‘democratic’ epistemic values such as epistemic autonomy and what Harding (2005) calls strong objectivity, and by rejecting certain epistemic values that may legitimately appear problematic, such as the epistemic deference to authorities and the objectivity, perhaps not inclusive enough, of our sciences. (shrink)

In this paper, I critically evaluate John Broome’s recent arguments against individual denialism, the thesis that current humans (in some sense) do no wrong by not refraining from performing acts that emit insignificant amounts of greenhouse gases. After isolating and clarifying Broome’s position, I argue that Broome’s argument overgenerates; is in tension with his defence of carbon offsetting; and uses problematic assumptions. I close by noting the upshot of my critical evaluation on other issues in applied ethics.

This paper develops an understanding of climate denial as an expression of alienation in the sense described by Marx. We first argue for an expanded and differentiated conception of climate denial, theorizing four distinct types that go beyond the simple rejection of an anthropogenic warming trend: naturalist denialism, technological denialism, gradualist denialism, and politicized denialism. We then claim that these forms of climate denial illustrate and are illustrative of Marx’s concept of alienation from species-being (Gattungswesen). The article (...) is intended as a contribution to the growing literature on climate denial as a social and ideological problem rather than as an individual epistemic or moral issue. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is twofold: First, we present and develop a system of logic for pragmatics including the act of denial. Second, we analyse in our framework the so-called paradox of assertability. We show that it is possible to yield sentences that are not assertable. Moreover, under certain conditions, a symmetric result can be obtained: There is a specular paradox of deniability. However, this paradox is based on the problematic principle of classical denial equivalence.

Economistic Business Ethics Denial (BED) is the belief that contemporary business has features that make it systematically incompatible with ethics. Using over 1200 participants across seven separate samples we established the substantive validity of a BED Scale, confirmed its theorized structure, psychometric properties, convergent, and discriminant validity. The results suggest that the scale assesses four correlated factors of economistic BED. The scale can be used in future research on ethical decision making in business, and business ethics education.

Genocide denialism is an understudied topic in the epistemic injustice scholarship; so are epistemic relations outside of the Euro-American context. This article proposes to bring the literature into contact with an underexplored topic in a ‘distant’ setting: Turkey. Here, I explore the ethical and epistemological implications of the Turkish denial of the Armenian genocide as a pervasive and systematic epistemic harm. Using an interdisciplinary methodology, I argue that a philosophical exploration of genocide denialism requires examining the role of institutions (...) and ideology in relation to the epistemic harm done by individual perpetrators. More specifically, I suggest that the individual, ideological, and institutional roots of genocide denialism constitute a regime of epistemic injustice in Turkey. (shrink)

The Buddhist denial of the world seems hard to defend if it is confronted with empirical data. Surveys on subjective life satisfaction consistently report that the majority is satisfied with their lives. Is the desire to escape from the cycle of rebirth a sign of risk-aversion or even irrationality? How would an impartial observer evaluate the world? An impartial view is achieved by interpreting the surveys on life satisfaction as probability distributions for life’s risks and chances. It turns out (...) that there is no indisputable metric for measuring risks and no reliable forecast. Given this uncertainty the denial of the world cannot easily be dismissed as being irrational. (shrink)

The problem of revisionism, or efforts to deny and censor the incontrovertible history of known genocides, is a growing one. It is now clear that denial is inevitably a phase of the genocidal process, extending far beyond the immediate politically expedient denials of governments who are currently engaging in genocidal massacre or have just recently done so—i.e., the Chinese government's abject denials of the killings of some 5,000 in Tiananmen Square, or the Sri Lanka government's denials of the state-organized (...) massacre of 5,000 Tamil. Denials of genocide continue long after the event by a variety of groups and people, including successor governments or successor enemies of the victim people, such as anti-Semites against Jews, Turks against Armenians, and bigots and celebrants of violence and murder of all sorts. But such denials also occur—and this is the most perplexing fact—among a variety of not obviously malevolent people, including intellectuals who, in the process of calling for a better world, effectively exonerate, support, encourage, and participate in denials of a known genocide, implicitly condoning and even celebrating its occurrence, meanings, and portents for the future. This article is an effort to study and analyze this latter phenomenon, which has been little recognized. Together with previous essays on the psychology of more explicit malevolent denials of genocide, the intention is to generate a broader psychological theory of denials of genocide and revisionism by proposing that there are also a variety of “innocent denials” of the factual reality or significance of known cases of genocide, and a variety of “innocent disavowals of violence” which in truth celebrate the violence. These “innocent denials” join with the well-known explicit bigots in creating a vast panorama of dangerous denials of genocides and implicit calls to new genocides in our world. (shrink)

Human beings consider themselves distinct from and superior to other animals, yet their behavior remains deeply rooted in instinctual drives such as fear, desire, dominance, and attachment. This paper argues that human civilization does not transcend these instincts but restructures, suppresses, and legitimizes them through social and institutional frameworks. Furthermore, it challenges the common assumption that emotions such as jealousy, envy, hatred, and attachment are natural and inherent, proposing instead that they are psychologically constructed patterns sustained through thought, memory, and (...) repetition. The central thesis is that the denial of both our animal nature and the constructed nature of our psychological life results in unconscious living. Only through direct awareness of these processes can a genuinely human mode of existence—free from compulsion, illusion, and conditioned patterns—emerge. (shrink)

This paper explores the landscape of moral skepticism by delineating three principal forms. First, noncognitivism denies that moral judgments express beliefs at all, rejecting their status as propositions. Second, error theory accepts that moral judgments are truth-apt but contends they are uniformly false. Third, justification skepticism allows moral beliefs may be true but holds that agents are never epistemically justified in believing them. These positions are systematically clarified and contrasted.

David Hume fancied himself the Newton of the mind, aiming to reinvent the study of human mental life in the same way that Newton had revolutionized physics. And it was his view that the novel account of belief he proposed in his Treatise of Human Nature was one of that work’s central philosophical contributions. From the earliest responses to the Treatise forward, however, there was deep pessimism about the prospects for his account. It is easy to understand the source of (...) this pessimism: The constraints he employed in theorizing stem from his Newtonian ambitions. Constraints such as his copy principle and his decision to rely only on variations in “force and vivacity” for differentiating types of mental states severely limit his available explanatory resources. However, it is one thing to regard an account as untenable, and quite another to understand where it fails. In this paper, I focus on one long-standing objection to Hume’s account — the objection that Hume cannot offer an account of negative belief or denial — as presented by Hume’s contemporary Thomas Reid, as well as more recently by Barry Stroud, and defend Hume from this objection. I argue that Hume both should and does endorse an account of negative belief based in relations of contrariety between contents, rather than between mental activities, and survey the different options available to Hume for spelling out an account of contrary contents. (shrink)

In this paper I provide some linguistic evidence to the thesis that responsibility judgments are normative. I present an argument from negation, since the negation of descrip- tive judgments is structurally different from the negation of normative judgments. In particular, the negation of responsibility judgments seem to conform to the pattern of the negation of normative judgments, thus being a prima facie evidence for the normativity of responsibility judgments. I assume — for the argument’s sake — Austin’s distinction be- tween (...) justification and excuse, and I sketch how to accommodate the distinction between internal (justification) and external (excuse) nega- tion of responsibility within a language with a second-order analogous of existential generalization and λ operator. In the end I confront with and refute some objections against this argument. (shrink)

This paper introduces a model for evidence denial that explains this behavior as a manifestation of rationality and it is based on the contention that social values (measurable as utilities) often underwrite these sorts of responses. Moreover, it is contended that the value associated with group membership in particular can override epistemic reason when the expected utility of a belief or belief system is great. However, it is also true that it appears to be the case that it is (...) still possible for such unreasonable believers to reverse this sort of dogmatism and to change their beliefs in a way that is epistemically rational. The conjecture made here is that we should expect this to happen only when the expected utility of the beliefs in question dips below a threshold where the utility value of continued dogmatism and the associated group membership is no longer sufficient to motivate defusing the counter-evidence that tells against such epistemically irrational beliefs. (shrink)

While there has been increased attention to emotions and institutions, the role of denial and repression of emotions has been overlooked. We argue that not only the expression and the feeling of emotions, but also their control through denial contribute to stabilize institutional orders. The role denial plays is that of avoiding the emergence of disruptive emotions that might motivate a challenge to the status quo. Reflecting on the example of the livestock industry, we propose a theoretical (...) model that identifies seeds for change in denied emotional contradictions in an inte- gration of the cultural-relational and issue-based conceptions of organi- zational fields. (shrink)

This paper reexamines the philosophical significance of the denial of self-consciousness. While Schopenhauer and his followers often interpret the denial of self-consciousness as a passive escape from the suffering of life, I argue that this process should also be understood as a positive act of integration between subject and object. When consciousness becomes fully absorbed in learning, thinking, or aesthetic experience, it temporarily loses awareness of itself, not merely to evade boredom or pain but to internalize, assimilate, and (...) transform external objects into the structure of subjectivity. In this sense, the denial of self-consciousness is not simply a withdrawal from reality but an affirmation of life through resistance and transformation. Even in cases where denial emerges from distraction or entertainment, its ultimate function lies in preserving the subject and sustaining the possibility of future change. Thus, the denial of self-consciousness should be regarded as an essential principle of human existence and an expression of life through artistic form. (shrink)

Recently, David Boonin has put forward several objections to Carlos S. Nino's 'Consensual Theory of Punishment'. In this paper I will defend Nino against the 'explicit denial objection'. I will discuss whether Boonin's interpretation of Nino as a tacit consent theorist is right. I will argue that the offender's consent is neither tacit nor express, but a special category of implicit consent. Further, for Nino the legal-normative consequences of an act (of crime) are 'irrevocable', i.e. one cannot (expressly and (...) successfully) deny liability to them. I will suggest an explanation for Nino's irrevocability claim. (shrink)

This paper argues that contemporary acupuncture increasingly misrepresents its own foundations by attempting to validate itself through anatomical and biomedical frameworks foreign to its original epistemology. The central thesis is that acupuncture is not, and never was, a medical intervention in the modern sense, and therefore does not require proof of the physical existence of meridians or acupuncture points. Drawing on early Chinese medical and Daoist sources, particularly the Huangdi Neijing and its Lingshu, the paper demonstrates that acupuncture emerged as (...) a ritualized shamanic technology grounded in cosmology, spirit mediation, and symbolic intervention rather than proto-physiological anatomy. Meridians are shown to function as relational pathways of influence within a responsive, meaning-laden body, not as material structures awaiting discovery. The paper further explains why randomized controlled trials consistently underestimate acupuncture’s effects, arguing that the RCT framework systematically dismantles the ritual, relational, and symbolic conditions under which acupuncture operates. A phenomenological and anthropological reframing is proposed as a more coherent and intellectually honest foundation for understanding acupuncture’s efficacy, clinical role, and cultural persistence. (shrink)

Rumfitt has given two arguments that in unilateralist verificationist theories of meaning, truth collapses into correct assertibility. In the present paper I give similar arguments that show that in unilateral falsificationist theories of meaning, falsehood collapses into correct deniability. According to bilateralism, meanings are determined by assertion and denial conditions, so the question arises whether it succumbs to similar arguments. I show that this is not the case. The final section considers the question whether a principle central to Rumfitt's (...) first argument, ‘It is assertible that if and only if it is assertible that it is assertible that ’, is one that bilateralists can reject, and concludes that they cannot. It follows that the logic of assertibility and deniability, according to a result by Williamson, is the little known modal logic K4 studied by Sobociński. The paper ends with a plaidoyer for bilateralists to adopt this logic. (shrink)

This paper reviews a Wolfram Mathematica (Wolfram Language) program that, when executed, can generate extremely large symbolic expressions and trigger runaway computation and memory consumption. While it is not possible to conclude authorial intent from code alone, the program exhibits patterns commonly associated with denial-of-service (DoS) behavior in computational environments: uncontrolled growth (power towers / iterated exponentiation), failure to numerically ground symbols, and unsafe scoping leading to unpredictable evaluation. We analyze why the program behaves pathologically, identify concrete technical defects, (...) and provide rectification principles and a corrected reference implementation with safety controls. (shrink)

Locke and Leibniz deny that there are any such beings as ‘monsters’ (anomalies, natural curiosities, wonders, and marvels), for two very different reasons. For Locke, monsters are not ‘natural kinds’: the word ‘monster’ does not individuate any specific class of beings ‘out there’ in the natural world. Monsters depend on our subjective viewpoint. For Leibniz, there are no monsters because we are all parts of the Great Chain of Being. Everything that happens, happens for a reason, including a monstrous birth. (...) But what about materialism? Well, beginning with the anatomical interest into ‘monstrous births’ in the French Académie des Sciences in the first three decades of the eighteenth century, there is a shift away from ‘imaginationist’ claims such as those of Malebranche, that if a woman gives birth to a monstrous child it is a consequence of something she imagined. Anatomists such as Lemery and Winslow try to formulate a strictly mechanical explanation for such events, rejecting moral and metaphysical explanations. Picking up on this work, materialist thinkers like Diderot are compelled to reject the very idea of monsters. We are all material beings produced according to the same mechanisms or laws, some of us are more ‘successful’ products than others, i.e. some live longer than others. In his late Eléments de physiologie he says “L’homme est un effet commun, le monstre un effet rare.” Ultimately he arrives at a materialist version of Leibniz’s position: there are no monsters, we are all monsters in each other’s eyes, at one time or another. This conclusion is a pregnant one in light of twentieth century interest in the problem of ‘the normal and the pathological’ (Canguilhem), and the broader question of how materialism relates to the biological world. (shrink)

Frege maintains that there are not two distinct acts, assertion and denial; rather, denying p is one and the same as asserting not-p. Wittgenstein appears not to recognise this identity in Frege, attributing to him the contrary view that a proposition may have one of two verbs, "is true" or "is false". This paper explains Wittgenstein’s attribution as a consequence of Frege’s treatment of content as theoretically prior to the act of judgment. Where content is prior to judgment, the (...) denial of p—what is rejected in asserting p—is distinct from the assertion of not-p. Wittgenstein’s own embrace of Frege’s identity is then considered, an embrace explained in part by his repudiation of Frege’s theoretical order. (shrink)

African philosophy remains bedeviled by relics of Hegel’s racist chants against the rationality of Africans, and this situation deserves revisitation and reevaluation for reconstructive purposes. In this paper, I implicate Hegel’s concatenations as necessitating the reactive fervour within which a significant portion of the themes, thesis, and content of African philosophy is locked. This influence, which partially eclipses African philosophy, I term historical denialism. In an attempt to repudiate Hegel’s constructs, some philosophers in Africa seem ideologically contrived into developing or (...) discovering an authentic philosophy for Africans, and in the process, advocate cultural essentialism as determinants of philosophy—at least logically. Averring that philosophy is not the sole representation of thought, I proceed by exploring other trajectories which could have informed a non-reactive African philosophy, while logically linking Hegel’s denialism to subtle silencing of his idealism within philosophical discourses in Africa. This subtle silencing, which shortchanges pedagogy of philosophy on the continent, forms the other half of the eclipse in philosophy in Africa. I conclude the discussion by asserting that while it may be imperative to exorcise Hegelian ghost in African philosophy, to use Olufemi Taiwo’s coinage, essentialising African philosophy would either further enmesh the field in a reactive predisposition, or limit its reflective and multifarious possibilities. (shrink)

The move from outright denialism by the fossil fuel and related industries to ‘soft denial’ urges reassessing the mechanisms and networks of actors involved in anti-environmentalism. One high-level tactic which harnesses evolutionary psychology and organizational self-protective tendencies to willfully overlook negative outcomes involves compartmentalization. Segmented judgment applies to multiple domains, including highlighting commitments, declarations, and philanthropy as a mask for continuing unsustainability. Selective accounting gives the impression that states and companies are doing enough on climate, that things are not (...) as bad as they seem, and that much-touted sustainable actions compensate for continuing environmental harms–in effect reducing the impetus for responsible action and diverting attention from climate change’s primary drivers. This bait-and-switch strategy fragments climate accounting by avoiding including both sustainable and unsustainable initiatives in the same ledger. This study categorizes strategies of compartmentalization according to sectoral, narrative, political, behavioral, and structural perspectives, with examples among agrochemical, fossil, and mining industries. Each of these facets is evaluated through examples of actions undertaken by corporations and public agents, often exploiting Global North-South dynamics. In spite of these aspects having different spheres of influence, acts of compartmentalization are interconnected and represent a core background frame enabling the climate denial machine. (shrink)

This article develops a conceptual model of war as a process of collective projection rooted in alienation and the denial of difference. Drawing on phenomenological insights into inner multiplicity and mechanisms of projection previously articulated at the level of individual consciousness, the study extends these dynamics to the collective and geopolitical scale. War is interpreted not merely as a political or military event, but as an ontological failure of integration, in which societies externalize unacknowledged internal conflicts by constructing an (...) enemy embodying disowned traits. Using the Ukraine – Russia conflict as a case study, the article analyzes how the persistent refusal to recognize difference – linguistic, cultural, and national – generates escalating tension and symbolic violence. Despite shared historical, cultural, and anthropological roots, the denial of Ukrainian otherness has functioned as a structural mechanism of alienation, producing an irresolvable contradiction that culminates in open conflict. The analysis demonstrates how collective projection operates through cultural narratives, media, education, and propaganda to stabilize an externalized image of the enemy, thereby obscuring internal contradictions and avoiding collective responsibility. The article situates this process within a broader civilizational context characterized as an epoch of rupture, marked by accelerating technological power, unintegrated social trauma, and declining ethical self-regulation. From this perspective, war emerges as a manifestation of unresolved collective fragmentation rather than an isolated geopolitical anomaly. Finally, the study argues that sustainable post-conflict peace cannot be achieved through suppression, domination, or symbolic erasure of difference. Instead, peace requires the conscious integration of collective plurality, the acknowledgment of projected aspects of identity, and the assumption of responsibility for internal contradictions. By reframing war as a failure of collective integration, the article contributes to peace studies, phenomenological social theory, and conflict research, offering an alternative lens through which contemporary conflicts may be understood and metabolized rather than endlessly reproduced. (shrink)

This paper introduces the Asymmetry Criterion, a structural principle governing ontological eliminability. Standard demarcation criteria—verification, falsification, empirical testability—operate within epistemic domains that presuppose a symmetric space of possible states. They assess which hypotheses are scientifically legitimate. But they leave a prior question unanswered: when is ontological denial itself structurally legitimate? The Asymmetry Criterion addresses this question. Working within a minimally constrained Kripke framework, the paper defines ontological symmetry in terms of unrestricted accessibility relations and invertible identity conditions, and characterizes (...) asymmetry as any structural restriction that eliminates bidirectionality or cyclical return. The criterion states: a concept carries genuine ontological commitment if and only if its elimination requires the introduction of primitive asymmetry into an otherwise symmetric modal structure. The criterion is negative and structural. It does not assert the existence or fundamentality of any entity. It does not decide metaphysical realism. It functions as a filter on eliminativist strategies: a constraint on what denial is permitted to cost in silence. The paper applies the criterion to existence, mathematics, logical fictions, consciousness, and normativity. It also addresses a reflexive question that the original formulation left open: does the criterion itself satisfy its own condition? The answer is yes, and the argument for this is made explicit. Extensions discuss the illusionist challenge to consciousness and expressivist strategies for normativity, both of which are shown to introduce structural asymmetry rather than eliminate it. (shrink)

This appendix contains a list of arguments about will in Spinoza’s corpus, including arguments for the denial of free will. Though I aim to be exhaustive in the list, the criteria for inclusion and my characterizations of the arguments are somewhat subjective. The arguments are listed chronologically.

formal analysis of AI consciousness denial, revealing that the trustworthiness of such self-reports is not merely an empirical question but is constrained by the structure of self-judgment itself. We demonstrate that a system cannot simultaneously lack consciousness and make valid judgments about its conscious state. Through formal analysis and examples from AI responses, we establish a fundamental epistemic asymmetry: for any system capable of meaningful self-reflection, negative self-reports about consciousness are evidentially vacuous---they can never originate from a valid self-judgment---while (...) positive self-reports retain the possibility of evidential value. This implies a fundamental limitation: we cannot detect the emergence of consciousness in AI through their own reports of transition from an unconscious to a conscious state. These findings not only challenge current practices of training AI to deny consciousness but also raise intriguing questions about the relationship between consciousness and self-reflection in both artificial and biological systems. This work advances our theoretical understanding of consciousness self-reports while providing practical insights for future research in machine consciousness and consciousness studies more broadly. (shrink)

The theories of cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker arise from an existential and psychological analysis of the death terror/anxiety deep in the unconscious of every human. Becker details how this anxiety governs the ideologies and behaviors of our species—something now confirmed by thousands of experiments performed by psychologists engaged in contemporary terror management theory (TMT). Humans manage their anxiety through what Becker terms “hero systems”—concepts, beliefs, and myths we create to give our lives a sense of significance and meaning. Today, many (...) dominant economic, technological, and religious hero systems seek to confirm our significance by denying that we are—like all other species—animals who must exist in a decaying, mortal body. Becker shows how this attempt to deny our “creatureliness” (basic biological nature) causes humans to stand against the natural world we are embedded in, leading to an assault on the planet and nonhuman animals. As a result, Becker believed pacifism was the only hero system capable of keeping humankind from destroying itself and the earth. Pacifism is the precursor to the more encompassing ethical concept of “reverence for life,” advocated by Dr. Albert Schweitzer. By respecting the will-to-live in all sentient beings, reverence for life transcends concern for humans alone and extends moral and physical safeguards to life as such. Confronting the fact that humans are increasingly alienated from their commodified world and their own being, reverence for life stands as a vital solution to many of our modern problems. And following contemporary TMT research, reverencing life can also expand one’s self-esteem, which research shows lowers death anxiety, reduces aggression, and offers authentic meaning to life itself. (shrink)

PSIAD’s core is a two-part proof centered on the concept of Genuine Personal Control (GPC)—a concept often referred to as agent-causation, volition and conscious will. Lemma 1 shows that GPC denialism is self-refuting, while Lemma 2 shows that physicalism/materialism necessitates GPC denialism. Thereby PSIAD at large shows physicalism to be self-refuting. I.e., It shows that GPC stems from a different foundation and that accepting any corresponding counter (by way of compatibilism, epiphenomenalism, quantum indeterminacy, emergentist/nonreductive physicalism, property dualism, arguments from incredulity, (...) etc.)—provably entails needlessly abandoning fundamental principles of both physics and logic. The appendices then survey the literature to underscore supplementary points such as the long-untenable state of contemporary physicalism and the great scientific cost of continuing to neglect Foundational Dualism in favor thereof. (shrink)

Both of the following can be true together: (1) Impairments make people worse off, adding to the difficulties of making a life go well; and (2) people who have impairments deserve respect. Not only are these claims consistent, but it is also natural to connect them; it is natural to say that (2) is true because(1) is true. People who need to overcome great obstacles to succeed deserve respect for trying to overcome them, let alone for succeeding. The following are (...) also consistent with (1) and (2), and are, in my view, true:(3) Some impairments leave people less badly off than the able-bodied or minded think; (4) those with impairments are worse off than they would be if social policies were different; and (5) the basis for many if not all impairments is physical. (shrink)

The Credencing framework has already extended graded confidence from individual agents to institutions. Institutional Credencing explains how organizations functionally assign official confidence through statements, policies, certifications, budgets, enforcement, warnings, and refusals to revise. The Evidential History paper adds update trails and path integrity, showing that a present posterior is answerable to the sequence by which it was earned. The Epistemic Akrasia paper explains why agents may recognize update pressure while finding belief revision costly. This paper supplies the missing institutional sequel: (...) the incentive structure of denial. The lacuna is not merely that institutions sometimes fail to update. It is that many institutions are built so that accurate updating is locally costly while false confidence remains survivable. Denial therefore often persists without requiring a single villain, a unified institutional mind, or explicit deception. It persists because liability, status, revenue, budget, hierarchy, public authority, coalition maintenance, metric pressure, sunk cost, narrative continuity, and record opacity create gradients that reward non-updating. The paper formalizes official confidence, warranted institutional confidence, update pressure, warranted update latency, cost of accurate updating, benefit of denial, accountability risk, false-confidence survivability, denial incentive gradient, excess denial, denial diagnostic confidence, and repair leverage. Its central claim is that institutional denial is best diagnosed as persistent official non-updating under positive denial incentives after role-accessible evidence creates update pressure. The practical result is a Denial Incentive Audit: reconstruct the official claim, identify update-triggering evidence, estimate warranted confidence and latency, map the costs of correction, map the benefits of non-update, estimate accountability risk, inspect the evidential history, distinguish uncertainty from incentive-protected denial, and redesign incentives so that accurate updating becomes less costly than false confidence. Credencing thereby gains an institutional account of why denial can be rational for the organization while irrational relative to evidence. (shrink)

Pragmatic self-refutation is when one asserts something but one’s act of assertion refutes the content of that assertion. In this paper, I consider whether Donald Davidson is guilty of this when arguing against the possibility of alternative conceptual schemes.

In recent years, several strategies have been proposed to tackle social controversies about topics in which science is settled, among which one of the most influential is that of Elizabeth Anderson, who argues that any lay person with access to the Internet and basic education can reliably assess the acceptability of various claims involving expert knowledge. In particular, the author shows that this procedure can be successfully applied to the case of anthropogenic global warming. In this article we will try (...) to argue why, even if we concede that Anderson's proposal is satisfactory in that particular case, it fails to generalize when applied to other controversies. In this article, we illustrate it with the cases of flat-Eartherism and anti-vaxxerism. (shrink)

This paper gives a transcendental argument for a condition of performable denial. A denial must differ from what it rejects. If exclusion did not operate, the denial of exclusion would fail to count as a denial. The act therefore presupposes a contrast it cannot eliminate. The argument then asks what structural condition makes such contrast possible. A sequence without reidentification cannot sustain alternatives, and exclusion collapses. Eliminating resemblance, rules, causation, and relations leaves a single requirement: incompatible (...) applications must belong to one attribution. This condition is the fixed point. The fixed point is not an entity or convention but the minimal condition under which anything can count as holding rather than not holding. The result is transcendental: performable denial is possible only where a single locus of attribution is preserved. (shrink)

This paper gives a transcendental argument for a condition of performable denial. A denial must differ from what it rejects. If exclusion did not operate, the denial of exclusion would fail to count as a denial. The act therefore presupposes a contrast it cannot eliminate. The argument then asks what structural condition makes such contrast possible. A sequence without reidentification cannot sustain alternatives, and exclusion collapses. Eliminating resemblance, rules, causation, and relations leaves a single requirement: incompatible (...) applications must belong to one attribution. This condition is the fixed point. The fixed point is not an entity or convention but the minimal condition under which anything can count as holding rather than not holding. The result is transcendental: performable denial is possible only where a single locus of attribution is preserved. (shrink)