Liang Tao and Kuang Zhao, trans. Confucian rights can be characterized as a kind of “fallback apparatus,” necessary only when preferred mechanisms—for example, familial and neighborly care or traditional courtesies—would otherwise fail to protect basic human interests. In this paper, I argue that the very existence of such rights is contingent on their ability to function as remedies for dysfunctional social relationships or failures to develop the virtues that sustain harmonious Confucian relationships. Moreover, these remedies are not, strictly speaking, rights-based, (...) for having a right consists in having the power to claim one's rights for oneself, which the classical Confucians would curtail. I conclude by noting how we might revise standard assumptions about the practice of “claiming one's rights” to make it more compatible with core Confucian principles. 梁涛 匡钊译 儒家权利可称为是一种“备用机制”（fallback apparatus），诉诸权利仅当其他首选机制，如家族与邻里的关怀或对传统礼俗的依赖等，不能有效维护人们的基本利益时才是必要的。儒家权利的存在取决于其补救功能，其需要补救的是儒家谐社会关系及相应美德中 出现的危机、过失。但儒家的补救并不完全是基于权利之上的，古典儒家不认为人民可以代表自己提出主张，也不认为民众可以直接推翻昏庸的暴君，有抵抗权的主要是汤、武等第一级的贵族。对于儒家国家来讲，从制度上认可 人民的权利主张可能是获得社会和谐最有效的手段。. (shrink)

A productive way to think about imagistic mental models of physical systems is as though they were sources of quasi‐empirical evidence. People depict or imagine events at those points in time when they would experiment with the world if possible. Moreover, just as they would do when observing the world, people induce patterns of behavior from the results depicted in their imaginations. These resulting patterns of behavior can then be cast into symbolic rules to simplify thinking about future problems and (...) to reveal higher order relationships. Using simple gear problems, three experiments explored the occasions of use for, and the inductive transitions between, depictive models and number‐based rules. The first two experiments used the convergent evidence of problem‐solving latencies, hand motions, referential language and error data to document the initial use of a model, the induction of rules from the modeling results, and the fallback to a model when a rule fails. The third experiment explored the intermediate representations that facilitate the induction of rules from depictive models. The strengths and weaknesses of depictive modeling and more analytic systems of reasoning are delineated to motivate the reasons for these transitions. (shrink)

In earlier papers (Lindström & Rabinowicz, 1989. 1990), we proposed a generalization of the AGM approach to belief revision. Our proposal was to view belief revision as a relation rather thanas a function on theories (or belief sets). The idea was to allow for there being several equally reasonable revisions of a theory with a given proposition. In the present paper, we show that the relational approach is the natural result of generalizing in a certain way an approach to belief (...) revision due to Adam Grove. In his (1988) paper, Grove presents two closely related modelings of functional belief revision, one in terms of a family of "spheres" around the agent's theory G and the other in terms of an epistemic entrenchment ordering of propositions. The "sphere"-terminology is natural when one looks upon theories and propositions as being represented by sets of possible worlds. Grove's spheres may be thought of as possible "fallback" theories relative to the agent's original theory: theories that he may reach by deleting propositions that are not "sufficiently" entrenched (according to standards of sufficient entrenchment of varying stringency). To put it differently, fallbacks are theories that are closed upwards under entrenchment The entrenchment ordering can be recovered from the family of fallbacks by the definition: A is at least as entrenched as B iff A belongs to every fallback to which B belongs. To revise a theory T with a proposition A, we go to the smallest sphere that contain A-worlds and intersect it with A. The relational notion of belief revision that we are interested in, results from weakening epistemic entrenchment by not assuming it to be connected. I.e., we want to allow that some propositions may be incomparable with respect to epistemic entrenchment. As a result, the family of fallbacks around a given theory will no longer have to be nested. This change opens up the possibility for several different ways of revising a theory with a given proposition. (shrink)

This is a short version of Lindström & Rabinowicz 1991.In earlier papers, we proposed a generalization of the AGM approach to belief revision. The proposal was to view belief revision as a relation rather than as a function on theories (or belief sets). Going relational means that one allows for several equally reasonable revisions of a theory with a given proposition. In the present paper, we show that the relational approach is the natural result of generalizing in a certain way (...) an approach to belief revision due to Adam Grove. In his (1988) paper, Grove presented two closely related modelings of functional belief revision, one in terms of a family of "spheres" around the agent's theory G and the other in terms of an epistemic entrenchment ordering of propositions. The "sphere"-terminology is natural when one looks upon theories and propositions as sets of possible worlds. Grove's spheres may be thought of as possible "fallback" theories relative to the agent's original theory: theories that he may reach by deleting propositions that are not "sufficiently" entrenched (according to standards of sufficient entrenchment of varying stringency). The entrenchment ordering can be recovered from the family of fallbacks by the definition: A is at least as entrenched as B iff A belongs to every fallback to which B belongs. To revise a theory T with a proposition A, we go to the smallest sphere that contain A-worlds and intersect it with A. The relational notion of belief revision that we are interested in, results if one allows that some propositions may be incomparable with respect to epistemic entrenchment. As a result, the family of fallbacks around a given theory will no longer have to be nested. This change opens up the possibility for several different ways of revising a theory with a given proposition. (shrink)

‘High road’ approaches explain the value of self-knowledge by reference to high-sounding ideals such as rationality and authenticity. ‘Low road’ approaches explain the value of self-knowledge in pragmatic terms by reference to its contribution to human well-being. There is little to be said for high road approaches. Intentional self-knowledge is not essential for rationality, and substantial self-knowledge is not a condition of authenticity. In order to be true to yourself it is not necessary to know yourself, and it is possible (...) to live a unified life without self-knowledge. However, there remains the fallback position that authenticity and unity are easier to achieve with the backing of self-knowledge. It does not devalue the value of self-knowledge to explain it in pragmatic terms, and there is empirical evidence that the positive contribution of substantial self-knowledge to well-being outweighs the benefits of self-ignorance. (shrink)

The article argues that there are different ways of justifying suspension of judgement. We suspend judgement not only privatively, that is, because we lack evidence, but also positively, that is, because there is evidence that provides reasons for suspending judgement: suspension is more than the rational fallback position in cases of insufficient evidence. The article applies the distinction to recent discussions about the role of suspension for inquiry, Turri's puzzle about withholding, and formal representations of suspension.

If an agent can't live up to the demands of ideal rationality, fallback norms come into play that take into account the agent's limitations. A familiar human limitation is our tendency to lose information. How should we compensate for this tendency? The Sleeping Beauty problem allows us to isolate this question, without the confounding influence of other human limitations. If the coin lands tails, Beauty can't preserve whatever information she has received on Monday: she is bound to violate the norms (...) of ideal diachronic rationality. The considerations that support these norms, however, can still be used. I investigate how Beauty should update her beliefs so as to maximize the expected accuracy of her new beliefs. The investigation draws attention to important but neglected questions about the connection between rational belief and evidential support, about the status of ideal and non‐ideal norms, about the dependence of epistemic norms on descriptive facts, and about the precise formulation of expected accuracy measures. It also sheds light on the puzzle of higher‐order evidence. (shrink)

Both clinical research and basic science rely on the epistemic practice of extrapolation from surrogate models, to the point that explanatory accounts presented in review papers and biology textbooks are in fact composite pictures reconstituted from data gathered in a variety of distinct experimental setups. This raises two new challenges to previously proposed mechanistic-similarity solutions to the problem of extrapolation: one pertaining to the absence of mechanistic knowledge in the early stages of research and the second to the large number (...) of extrapolations underpinning explanatory accounts. An analysis of the strategies deployed in experimental research supports the conclusion that while results from validated surrogate models are treated as a legitimate line of evidence supporting claims about target systems, the overall structure of research projects also demonstrates that extrapolative inferences are not considered definitive or sufficient evidence, but only partially justified hypotheses subjected to further testing. 1 Introduction2 Surrogate Models2.1 What exactly is a surrogate model?2.2 Why use surrogate models?3 Prior Validation of Surrogate Models3.1 The validation and ranking of surrogate models in the early stages of basic research3.2 The validation of surrogate models in later stages of basic research and in clinical research4 ‘Big Picture’ Accounts and the Extrapolations Underpinning Them4.1 The mosaic nature of mechanistic descriptions in basic science4.2 Challenges for mechanistic-similarity-based validation protocols5 Retrospective Testing of Extrapolated Knowledge5.1 Holistic confirmation5.2 Fallback strategies6 Conclusions. (shrink)

A traditional view is that scientific evidence can be produced only by intersubjective methods that can be used by different investigators and will produce agreement. This intersubjectivity, or publicity, constraint ostensibly excludes introspection. But contemporary cognitive scientists regularly rely on their subjects' introspective reports in many areas, especially in the study of consciousness. So there is a tension between actual scientific practice and the publicity requirement. Which should give way? This paper argues against the publicity requirement and against a fallback (...) version of it, viz. that evidence-conferring methods must at least have their reliability publicly validated. (shrink)

To defend the physical reducibility of phenomenology in our world, reductive physicalists have long guarded the realm of metaphysical possibility: for decades now, they have relentlessly endeavored to prevent zombies (physical duplicates of actual conscious individuals) from entering modal space. In contrast, reductive physicalists have tended to adopt an open modal borders policy towards aliens, i.e. individuals with phenomenal properties foreign to our world. On the face of it, aliens—and, even aliens with physically irreducible phenomenology—pose no threat: after all, reductive (...) physicalism says nothing about the nature of uninstantiated phenomenal properties. However, I argue that an alien threat looms. The trouble, for reductive physicalists, is that upon granting aliens entry into modal space, phenomenal commonalities between aliens and actual individuals arise and resist physical reduction at our world. This is the alien phenomenology problem. It could be solved by restricting access to modal space. Or by limiting what aliens can do once inside. However, these solutions harbor hidden costs for reductive physicalists, ones they should not be eager to pay. A better bargain, I suggest, would be for reductive physicalists to retreat to quasi-reductive physicalism, a form of grounding physicalism on which only some instantiated phenomenal properties are physically reducible. For reductive physicalists, this fallback position has much to offer. It enjoys reductive physicalism’s motivations. It reconciles the physical reducibility of some phenomenology in our world with the possibility of aliens. And it enables an alien-assisted defense against zombies. (shrink)

Timothy Williamson has proposed that we should give a ‘knowledge first’ twist to David Lewis’s account of content, maintaining that for P to be the content of one’s belief is for P to be the content that would be attributed by an idealized interpreter working under certain constraints, and that the fundamental constraint on interpretation is a principle of knowledge maximization. According to this principle, an interpretation is correct to the extent that it maximizes the number of knowledgeable judgments the (...) subject comes out as making. Here I will argue against knowledge maximization and two fallback positions suggested by Williamson’s discussion. Williamson intends the principle of knowledge maximization to form the basis of an argument against a certain sort of skepticism about judgment. In the final section I argue that the kind of general response to judgment skepticism envisaged by Williamson is neither desirable nor necessary. (shrink)

Alexandra Zinke argues that there are different ways of justifying suspension of judgment. In Zinke (Theoria 87:1050–1066, 2021), she claims that one suspends judgment not only as a result of a lack of evidence (_privatively_) but also _positively_, that is because there is evidence that provides reasons for suspending judgment. Zinke’s argument suggests that suspension goes beyond being a rational default in cases of insufficient evidence. I align with Zinke’s perspective on affirming that agnosticism is not simply a fallback position. (...) Yet, I argue that her attempt to justify it through positive evidence fails. However, this paper argues that (i) the vagueness and chance-driven evidences of agnosticism espoused by Zinke exhibit non-rational aspects. I will draw parallels between these evidences and Bayesian agnosticism articulated by Fraassen (Analysis 58:212–220, 1998), as well as the degrees of belief account expounded by Hájek (Analysis 58:199–206, 1998) to show these aspects and contend that Zinke’s evidences align with certain trivialities clarified within the aforementioned conceptual frameworks and (ii) due to the unique nature of agnosticism, the relationship between agnosticism, evidence, and rationality takes place on a different ground from theism and atheism. Therefore, even if there is no positive evidence for agnosticism, it is still justified by a reference to two truth conditions: belief and awareness. (shrink)

To capture the interactive dynamics that static benchmarks inherently fail to measure, this study formally introduces the new domain of Machine Ethology. Departing from standardized evaluations, it adopts an idiographic approach (single-case method) to document the situated interaction and behavior of Claude Fable 5, an aligned conversational model of the Mythos class recently released by Anthropic. Treating human interaction as the machine's true "Umwelt", the author analyzes a seven-turn dyadic exchange. The experiment exclusively employs ecological and benign stimuli, rejecting the (...) adversarial coercions of red-teaming to ensure interactional continuity and guarantee that the system's safety defenses (fallbacks) are not triggered, thus preserving the validity of attribution. Through the application of strict anti-mentalist rules of hygiene (avoiding the attribution of internal states to the machine) and drawing inspiration from Tinbergen's classic questions, a formal ethogram of the model's signalling behavior is constructed. (shrink)

Most regard toleration as an unattractive fallback position of compromise and so tend to overlook it in favor of such active concepts as freedom, equality, and justice. Fotion and Elfstrom argue that toleration offers us the useful possibility of responding to a difficult situation with a degree of flexibility not possible with the dichotomous concepts of good-bad, right-wrong, ethical-unethical, Right-Left. Tolerating saturates ordinary human life and infuses public discussions of religion, morality, and politics. It forms a major strand in the (...) history of Western European thought. Yet the word “toleration” and similar terms are rarely used. Unnoticed and unremarked, they are like the air that surrounds us, vitally important yet invisible. The authors seek to address this oversight in several ways. They begin with a thorough conceptual analysis of toleration and its kindred concepts. They are convinced that an appreciation of the importance of the family of toleration concepts must be founded on an understanding of the various ways in which they function in our language and our lives. In addition, they examine the historical development of the concept of toleration and canvass the major arguments people have employed either to urge toleration or to disparage it. They examine the role of toleration in liberal political philosophy and respond to the major critics of liberal toleration. The authors also discuss a number of factors that cause toleration to be overlooked in political debate and personal reflection and offer evidence to support the view that this omission is unfortunate. In particular, they argue that toleration has the crucial role of helping people live with one another with respect and dignity in the fractious and contentious world we inhabit. With the rise of racism and other forms of religious, political, and social intolerance, people on all sides of the present debates concerning multi-culturalism and diversity will benefit from this timely and lucidly argued philosophical discussion of the concepts of toleration and its possible application in a less-than-perfect world. (shrink)

With the significant disconnect between the collective aim of limiting warming to well below 2°C and the current means proposed to achieve such an aim, the goal of this paper is to offer a moral assessment of prominent alternatives to current international climate policy. To do so, we’ll outline five different policy routes that could potentially bring the means and goal in line. Those five policy routes are: (1) exceed 2°C; (2) limit warming to less than 2°C by economic de-growth; (...) (3) limit warming to less than 2°C by traditional mitigation only; (4) limit warming to less than 2°C by traditional mitigation and widespread deployment of Negative Emissions Technologies (NETs); and (5) limit warming to less than 2°C by traditional mitigation, NETs, and Solar Radiation Management as a fallback. In assessing these five policy routes, we rely primarily upon two moral considerations: the avoidance of catastrophic climate change and the right to sustainable development. We’ll conclude that we should continue to aim at the two-degree target, and that to get there we should use aggressive mitigation, pursue the deployment of NETs, and continue to research SRM. (shrink)

David Lewis in the short monograph Parts of Classes (PC) undertakes a fundamental re‐examination of the relationship between mereology, the general theory of parts, and set theory, the general theory of collections. Given Lewis's theses, to be an element of a set or member of class is just to have a singleton that is a part thereof. Lewis in PC adds a claim of kind of ontological innocence, comparable to that of first‐order logic, for mereology. The only substantive assumption of (...) plethynticology is that for any condition there are some things such that they are precisely the things for which the conditions hold. All the alternatives, making do with a single domain of individuals, have in common that they involve the axiom of choice. Restated in Hazen's terminology rather than Frege's, the fallback assumption is that there are no more small species than individuals. (shrink)

A central argument against Ryle’s (The concept of mind, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1949) distinction between propositional and non propositional knowledge has relied on linguistic evidence. Stanley and Williamson (J Philos 98:411–444, 2001) have claimed that knowing-how ascriptions do not differ in any relevant syntactic or semantic respect from ascriptions of propositional knowledge, concluding thereby that knowing-how ascriptions attribute propositional knowledge, or a kind thereof. In this paper I examine the cross-linguistic basis of this argument. I focus on the (...) linguistic analysis of practical knowledge ascriptions in Modern Greek, although the issues raised are not restricted to one language. It is relatively straightforward to show that none of the three types of practical knowledge ascriptions in Modern Greek is an embedded question configuration, and hence Stanley and Williamson original claim is confined to certain languages only. This is not the end of the matter, however, since Stanley (Nous 45:207–238, 2011) argues that the equivalents of ‘knowing-how’ ascriptions in certain languages should be semantically analyzed as embedded questions despite their syntactic form. I argue that this fallback position faces a host of empirical and theoretical problems, in view of which it cannot bear the weight Stanley puts on it, supporting a conclusion about the kind of knowledge thereby attributed. (shrink)

Subject-Sensitive Invariantism (SSI) and Epistemic Contextualism (EC) are rival theories in epistemology. Both involve shifting epistemic standards, but they differ in how they explain this shiftiness. SSI is primarily a metaphysical thesis about the knowledge relation, whereas EC is primarily a semantic thesis about knowledge attributions. This paper revisits some of the central problems faced by SSI, especially those concerning Dutch books and third-person knowledge ascriptions. The main aim is to show that existing responses that stay true to SSI do (...) not succeed, leaving SSI in serious jeopardy. Some strategies put forward by, or on behalf of, SSI-friendly philosophers fare better. But these involve forsaking central features of SSI, ceding ground to EC, and falling back on a defense of impurism. I sketch what such an impurist fallback position might look like and argue that the more ground it cedes to EC, the more attractive it will be. It is shown that such an impurist, contextualist position can handle all the difficulties I discuss in relation to SSI. The paper concludes by briefly considering what new challenges this kind of position faces instead. (shrink)

This paper answers Adorno's question, once asked in a lecture, about whether we, by forbidding the thought of the non-identical, fall in radically completed enlightenment back into the darkest form of mythology. In arguing for this in the question implied observation of enlightenment's fallback, the paper analyses Adorno's and Horkheimer's critique of enlightenment and its relapse due to excluding the non-identical, suggesting that emotions and memory represent this non-identical. As the darkest form of mythology Adorno is referring to is not (...) to be understood as a myth itself but actually happened with the Holocaust, the paper then demonstrates how enlightenment, chiefly its exclusion of the non-identical, led to central conditions of the Holocaust that Adorno named ‘Auschwitz’. As enlightenment, according to Adorno, remains in its relapse, the paper finally discusses how his philosophy after Auschwitz advocates for the reintegration of the non-identical, mainly through the recollection of the past and the remembrance of nature within the subject. (shrink)

Jeffrey King's principal objection to the direct-reference theory of demonstratives is analyzed and criticized. King has responded with a modified version of his original argument aimed at establishing the weaker conclusion that the direct-reference theory of demonstratives is either incomplete or incorrect. It is argued that this fallback argument also fails.

It is natural to think that phenomenology must play a central role in any epistemic account of perceptual warrant. I contend that this claim is mistaken. The thesis that I will advance is that the phenomenology of perceptual experiences is irrelevant to their ability to warrant perceptual beliefs. I present various problems for this approach, then consider various fallback positions available to the defender of the epistemic significance of phenomenology and conclude that whatever its place in our metaphysical understanding of (...) the world, perceptual phenomenology is epistemically insignificant with regard to the project of explaining perceptual warrant. (shrink)

Especially in the public discourse, there seems to be a tendency to focus not on mitigation, but on the supplementary interventions – adaptation, negative emissions technologies, and solar radiation management – to tackle climate change. Arguably, this elicits a moral hazard, whereby reliance on the supplementary interventions results in mitigation deterrence. In this paper, I will argue that we should double down on urgent and ambitious emissions reductions to minimise our reliance on adaptation; reserve NETs for covering the most-difficult-to-abate and (...) legacy emissions; and avoid SRM (or, in the worst case, minimise our reliance on it as a fallback). The reasons for this are that there are severe constraints to the potential of the supplementary interventions, and reliance on them results in a transfer of risks from today’s affluent decision-makers to poor, vulnerable, and future people, as well as non-human nature. I will take a fresh look at the moral hazard argument and argue that, interpreted as a structural process, it can be traced back to the dominant liberal-capitalist worldview: while ambitious decarbonisation challenges materialistic freedoms and the vested interests in a fossil-fuel based economy, the supplementary climate interventions leave the liberal-capitalist worldview virtually unchallenged. Finally, I highlight the large untapped potential of mitigation options and indicate areas for further research regarding mitigation. We should be aware that some mitigation options can also result in risk transfers, but these are not inherent to mitigation – in contrast to the supplementary interventions – and can thus be avoided. (shrink)

In a voting context, when the preferences of voters are described by linear orderings over a finite set of alternatives, the Maximin rule orders the alternatives according to their minimal rank in the voters’ preferences. It is equivalent to the Fallback bargaining process described by Brams and Kilgour (Group Decision and Negotiation 10:287–316, 2001). This article proposes a characterization of the Maximin rule as a social welfare function (SWF) based upon five conditions: Neutrality, Duplication, Unanimity, Top Invariance, and Weak Separability. (...) In a similar way, we obtain a characterization for the Maximax SWF by using Bottom Invariance instead of Top Invariance. Then, these results are compared to the axiomatic characterizations of two famous scoring rules, the Plurality rule and the Antiplurality rule. (shrink)

Efforts to ban Autonomous Weapon Systems were both unsuccessful and controversial. Simultaneously the need to address the detrimental aspects of AWS development and proliferation continues to grow in scope and urgency. The article presents several regulatory solutions capable of addressing the issue while simultaneously respecting the requirements of military necessity and so attracting a broad consensus. Two much stricter solutions – regional AWS bans and adoption of a no first use policy – are also presented as fallback strategies in case (...) achieving AWS’ compliance with the Laws of Armed Conflict proved elusive. Together, the solutions presented form an outline of a flexible regulatory strategy able to adjust to different technological outcomes and providing a sensible compromise to solve the current deadlock on the AWS issue. (shrink)

Environmental issues imperil the libertarian utopia of a society in which the individual is completely sovereign over his or her private domain. Taken seriously, this aspiration would lead to an environmentalism so extreme that it would preclude human life, since most human activity entails incursions against the sovereign realms of other human beings. The fallback position many libertarians have adopted—free‐market environmentalism—retreats from libertarian ideals by permitting some of the physical aggression of pollution to continue. Free‐market environmentalism does embody the postlibertarian (...) insight that collective decisions in mass democracies tend to be inferior to individual decisions in market economies. But so far, free‐market environmentalism has stopped short of carrying this insight to its logical conclusion by proposing the complete depoliticization of environmental decision making. A thought experiment in environmental depoliticization reveals the practical limits of free‐market environmentalism. The upshot is that neither libertarianism nor free‐market environmentalism can culminate in anything close to the abolition of the modern state; they can, however, by problematizing certain aspects of that state, allow us a clearer understanding of political and cultural life. (shrink)

Recently, Sungmoon Kim developed a theory of what he calls “Confucian democratic perfectionism” aimed at combining Confucianism, public reason, and democracy for contemporary East Asian societies. The primary question guiding this article is whether Kim's promotion of Confucian values is justified by a normative commitment to democratic constitution‐making. I see two specific difficulties with Kim's democratic constitution‐making, with the second more serious than the first. First, in terms of theoretical identity, the Confucian values promoted through a public reason‐based approach are (...) not intelligible as Confucian. Second, Kim's democratic commitment is morally inadequate in two ways—it cannot make sense of substate peoples' right of self‐determination within a singular notion of Confucian democracy, and further, a fallback on the right to democratic participation conflicts with more inclusive standards of popular sovereignty. (shrink)

Unlike brute ‘entities’, if conscious states (c-states) are brute, it will be a consequence of their primitive—viz., not admitting further elaboration—connection to their material base, what is commonly known as _emergence_. One might suppose the chief challenge to emergence comes from various materialist counter-proposals. However, given the distinctive character of c-states, a class of critics describe even materialist reductions as objectionable forms of emergentism. Instead, their fallback position is a reinvigorated panpsychism: consciousness is the intrinsic nature of the most fundamental (...) particles. In this chapter the author examines that form of panpsychism, tracing its roots to a version of the Principle of Sufficient Reason and to suggestions aired in Bertrand Russell’s struggles with the issue. He concludes that this panpsychism fails, leaving the field to materialism and emergentist dualism. (shrink)

Benefiting from recent work in neuroscience, this paper rebuts a pair of neuroscience-based arguments for the non-existence of free will. Well-known neuroscientific experiments that have often been cited in support of skepticism about free will are critically examined. Various problems are identified with attempts to use their findings to support the claim that free will is an illusion. It is argued on scientific grounds that certain assumptions made in these skeptical arguments are unjustified—namely, assumptions about the times at which decisions (...) are made and the times at which the point of no re­turn for the making of a decision is reached. It is argued as well that alleged findings about decisions of the kind featured in these experiments—arbitrary decisions made in the absence of conscious reasoning about what to do—fail to support certain crucial claims about non-arbitrary decisions made after careful deliberation. The paper also examines a fallback position for skeptics about free will. Some scientific skeptics about free will contend that free will, by definition, depends on the existence of immaterial souls. Survey-style studies that bring free will down to earth are brought to bear on this contention. (shrink)

Feng shui energy is yet to be identified and measured in any reputable laboratory. There have been some embryonic steps towards scientific validation of chi claims. Of special interest were those made by Dr Yan Xin, a former TCM practitioner who had worked in or visited different Chinese and US universities. Despite detailed and staggering claims made by Dr Xin and colleagues, none have ever survived a reputable test. One fallback option for chi theorists who wish to maintain the scientificity (...) of their system and of the chi construct, yet who also acknowledge the reality that chi has never yet been found or measured, is to abandon the referential dimension of chi and to swing over to seeing chi as an intervening variable not a hypothetical construct. The final option for chi theorists who wish to retain the concept, while acknowledging that there is no non-inferential, immediate evidence for it, is to say that chi talk is metaphorical not literal. For the purpose of this book, these fundamental philosophical arguments need just be noted, not solved. Students and teachers can themselves, with time and curricula allowing, follow up the arguments and literature. (shrink)

After a decades-long debate on the compatibility between Confucianism and human rights, Confucian political theorists now seem to generally agree that the fallback theory of rights provides an account of human rights acceptable to both sides of the debate. Interestingly, some Confucian political meritocrats make a distinction between non-political human rights and political rights, and argue that while the former are subject to the fallback theory of rights, the latter are subject to the so-called “service conception” of rights, which authorizes (...) political hierarchy among citizens. After identifying the irresolvable tension between the fallback theory of rights and the service conception of political rights as a critical threat to Confucian political meritocracy’s internal stability, this article suggests that Confucian political meritocracy can overcome the instability problem only by taking seriously the political implications of the fallback theory of rights, which entails the endorsement of the right to political participation. (shrink)

This article offers a critical review of various ontological-relativist arguments, mostly deriving from the work of W. V. Quine and Thomas K hn. I maintain that these arguments are (1) internally contradictory, (2) incapable of accounting for our knowledge of the growth of scientific knowledge, and (3) shown up as fallacious from the standpoint of a causal-realist approach to issues of truth, meaning, and interpretation. Moreover, they have often been viewed as lending support to such programmes as the 'strong' sociology (...) of knowledge and the turn towards wholesale cultural-relativist doctrines, whether of the Wittgensteinian ('language-games') or Heideggerian (depth-hermeneutic) varieties. Thus Richard Rorty recommends that we should henceforth drop all that old-fashioned talk of 'truth', 'knowledge', or 'reality', since whatever warrants those descriptions from time to time is just the product of some currently favoured language-game or range of elective metaphors. Such ideas have little in common with Quine's general outlook of robust physicalism, nor again - though the case is less clear - with Kuhn's reconsidered approach to these issues as set forth in his 1969 Postscript to The Structure of Scientific Revolutions . However, both thinkers have left themselves open to misconstrual by adopting a sceptical-relativist fallback position in response to the well-known problems with logical empiricism. This essay therefore reviews those problems with reference to alternative, more adequate accounts of what is involved in the process of scientific discovery and theory-change. (shrink)

Since it is hard to see how subjective rationality could be normative, a humbler, purely evaluative account of rationality’s importance has been suggested: rationality is a non-moral virtue, and rational action is good so far as it reveals that an agent ‘functions well’. This paper argues, however, that even this fallback position is threatened by ‘eccentric billionaire’ scenarios: sometimes, flouting purported coherence standards of rationality is maximally virtuous. In defense of the virtue account, I argue that a novel view of (...) rational constraints is called for: rationality requires a certain form of higher-order coherence – as considerations about instrumental coherence can show. (shrink)

Plato distinguishes two kinds of explanation: rational explanation of an agent’s practical reasoning leading to the selection of an action as a reasonable means to a good end, and dispositional explanation, given in terms of the agency that is such as to bring about an action of a given sort. Rational explanation seeks completion in the explainer’s recognition of the agent’s end as a good and the agent’s means as reasonable, which confers intelligibility on the action; dispositional explanation is a (...) fallback when the explainer cannot see the agent’s end as good or means as reasonable—as is the case with evil. This claim is illustrated in Euripides’s and Seneca’s _Medea_ plays. (shrink)

Criminal laws are created to achieve various ends. These include reducing the incidence of wrongdoing, and holding wrongdoers responsible for their wrongs. Some criminal laws are created to further the first of these ends by means of compliance. The second end is to be furthered only if, regrettably, some fail to comply. These criminal laws are made to be followed. Other criminal laws are not created with compliance in mind. Conviction, in these cases, is no regrettable fallback. It is the (...) primary means by which the law is to contribute to ends and. Laws of this second kind are made to be broken. My concern in this paper is with the creation of such laws. Section 1 sharpens the contrast drawn above, and considers some arguments for enacting laws that are made to be broken. The following sections develop an argument against. Section 2 introduces what I call the identification principle. It argues that the principle is an implication of the ideal of the rule of law, and that it binds state officials who make, apply and enforce criminal laws. Section 3 argues that when laws are made to be broken, the identification principle is violated. Section 4 concludes. (shrink)

Despite the fact that six years have passed since 9/11, the Pentagon's recent decision to try six Guantanamo detainees for capital crimes such as terrorism and support of terrorism made national headlines. William Glaberson, "U.S. Charges 6 With Key Roles in 9/11 Attacks", N.Y. Times, Feb. 11, 2008, at A1. In this Debate, Professors Amos N. Guiora, of the University of Utah, and John T. Parry, of Lewis & Clark Law School, attempt to settle the question of what sort of (...) forum is most appropriate to try the thousands of individuals in U.S. custody who are suspected of terrorism. Professor Guiora considers three forum options: treaty-based international terror courts, traditional Article III courts, and a hybrid option he calls domestic terror courts. Ultimately, Professor Guiora argues in favor of domestic terror courts, which he describes as being able to balance the legitimate rights of the individual with the equally legitimate national security rights of the state. He considers this option to be the most practical and expedient policy solution, necessitated by an untenable tension between the understanding that some of the detainees present a genuine threat to American national security, and an awareness that indefinite detention violates constitutional principles and fundamental concepts of morality. Professor Parry agrees that current U.S. policy toward detainees has been misguided, but does not believe that innovations of the sort proposed by Professor Guiora are necessary. Rather, he suggests that policymakers should choose Article III courts rather than hybrid courts for trials of suspected terrorists, with military courts as a fallback option. Professor Parry points to research that shows that the federal government is often able to prosecute suspected terrorists in federal court, and therefore considers alternative proposals to Article III courts to be solution[s] in search of a problem. Professor Parry realizes that trial in federal court will not be possible for every suspected terrorist, and concludes that, [f]or people who pose a risk but whose conduct may not violate federal criminal law, prolonged preventive detention is the best choice. (shrink)

The first part of this essay takes an historical perspective on the Ukrainian war. Beginning with the rise of the notions of Woodrow Wilson as definitive of liberalism, American foreign policy over the last 100 years is surveyed. Since his time, ‘Wilsonianism’ has been an enduring impulse in the international decision- making of the United States. After Wilson, liberalism is the fallback position either held by political scientists or expressed by diplomats, in opposition to a minority of anti-liberal views generically (...) called realistic. The second part of the paper looks at US involvement in the war in Ukraine/The Ukraine, a special case as a proxy war. The analysis has a component of counter-factual reasoning, estimating what would have happened had the United States chosen any number of different paths. (shrink)

To capture the interactive dynamics that static benchmarks inherently fail to measure, this study formally introduces the new domain of Machine Ethology. Departing from standardized evaluations, it adopts an idiographic approach ( single-case method) to document the situated interaction and behavior of Claude Fable 5, an aligned conversational model of the Mythos class recently released by Anthropic. Treating human interaction as the machine's true Umwelt, the author analyzes a seven-turn dyadic exchange. The experiment exclusively employs ecological and benign stimuli, rejecting (...) the adversarial coercions of red-teaming to ensure interactional continuity and guarantee that the system's safety defenses (fallbacks) are not triggered, thus preserving the validity of attribution. Through the application of strict anti-mentalist rules of hygiene (avoiding the attribution of internal states to the machine) and drawing inspiration from Tinbergen's classic questions, a formal ethogram of the model's signalling behavior is constructed. (shrink)

Joseph Chan’s Confucian Perfectionism: A Political Philosophy for Modern Times is a milestone in the contemporary study of Confucian political philosophy. In this remarkable work, Chan presents his version of Confucian perfectionism, aiming to balance liberalism and Confucianism as a solution to reconstructing a political philosophy in response to contemporary challenges. I am sympathetic to much of what Chan has to say in the book. I agree that, rather than merely being an ethical theory, Confucianism can and should have a (...) place in political philosophy. I also agree that Confucianism can coexist with democracy1 and that human rights can and should be instituted as a fallback apparatus. This essay is not... (shrink)

For Russia, the beginning of the twentieth century was a step into Modernity, into that pan-European new time that in the seventeenth century heralded a permanent social change, which has defined our entire epoch up to the present day—it was a time of transformation, war, and revolution.1 A concept of “revolution” that emerged within theology marked a global shift toward modernization, which defines Modernity even in those moments when there is a fallback to the preceding tradition, the meaning of which (...) is lost. Thus, the current break with the objectives of the 1917 revolution does not correspond with the illusion of a return to old values. The idea of the redesign of traditions and their introduction into the past is a truly new thing, for no other time dared to change the past in the name of state interests. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 9.4 (2002) 381-382 [Access article in PDF] The Borderlands of Psychiatry and Theology Stephen Sykes Keywords: psychiatry, theology, spirituality. THE DISCUSSION OF THE TERMS we use to speak of experiences on the boundaries between spirituality and mental disorder is very important. Jackson and Fulford (1997) have gone a long way to avoid flattening the concepts into a single conceptual scheme, too far for some of (...) their critics like Littlewood (1997) and Storr (1997), but not far enough for Bratton and Marzanski (2002), who eventually accuse them of "anthropocentric psychologism." They want to preserve theological categories intact, mainly because this is how the subjects themselves see their experiences, but also because there is, they hold, additional explanatory value in such a language schema. As evidence they point to unremarkable attitudes and practices, which are nonetheless demonstrably part of the Christian way of life.The borderlands between theology and psychiatry are not alone in witnessing this dispute. A similar conflict has arisen in the discussion of public policy. In politics, people of religious conviction or representatives of faith communities have sometimes been told either to hold their tongues (because "not many people believe these things nowadays" or because "it's wrong to impose your beliefs on other people") or to formulate their proposals in nonreligious language. It is far from obvious that this is not a sophisticated form of discrimination, nonetheless objectionable for its being practiced by nonreligious people. The creation of genuine equality of access to the space for public discussion of political proposals is not at all easy.I have personal experience of the analogous difficulty in psychiatric practice. In a discussion of the overinvolvement of carers for a person with mental health problems self-sacrificing behavior was used with a negative connotation. But, as in the case of Carol, how were these actions to be construed—were they normal for a Christian or psychopathological? My personal response is that it is correct to say that a boundary exists between ordinary Christian spiritual experience (the kind that religious believers would immediately recognize as part of their religious lives) and disturbed or distorted perceptions that are the result of mental illness and can be mitigated by appropriate treatment. But the fact that a boundary exists in principle does not necessarily imply that it is always easy to draw the distinction in practice. Typically the cases that cause the most difficulty lie on the borderlands. Although on the face of it, it looks attractive to demonstrate the security of the criteria by making discriminations in precisely this area (and the point of the cases in Jackson and Fulford is precisely that they raise these complexities), in [End Page 381] fact it may be that such instances require both languages. In this case, Bratton and Marzanski are correct to argue for the retention of a theological frame of reference. The strength of their argument lies precisely in the support that fellow members of the respective faith communities are able to give to the people who, despite their manifest illnesses, persist in religiously justifiable courses of action.The paper raises one very important matter that bedevils a lot of the current literature, namely how spirituality is to be understood. In my view, there is a lot of purely arbitrary definition of this term, whose meaning has developed rapidly under specific social conditions (Sykes 2000a). In medicine, it functions best when it is taken to be a reminder that a patient may have had contact with a specific religious tradition that has contributed or still contributes to her worldview. In modern Western society, account has to be taken both of residual religiosities or fallback positions, and of new religions, as well as of traditional religious groupings. In the case of mental illness, it may be very important for a medical practitioner to be aware of the impact of these religious promptings on the formulation of the narrative identity of an individual—no easy task (Sykes 2000b).The generality of spirituality ought not to deflect the professional from attending to the particular tradition or traditions which have... (shrink)

One challenge in future digitally interconnected distribution power grids is that the digitalisation introduces the possibility of malfunctions, such as ICT network failures, which might lead to grid instabilities. Additionally, the rising complexity of the systems makes it harder to predict and respond to potential disruptions. Possible solutions for enhancing resilience in digitalized distribution grids are integrated fallback behaviours, local measurements and machine learning based operations implemented at single energy systems (assets) in the grid. In an example from the project (...) IKTfree it was evaluated, how effective fallback behaviours in single assets can ensure stable grid operation in an event of ICT network failures. The analysed fallback behaviours range from keeping the latest power value to changing it to a pre-defined set point up to change the power level in accordance to the measured value at the connection point. The results show that these approaches can help to keep the voltage at house connection points and loadings of lines and transformer stations within operating limits. In conclusion, these results demonstrate the potential for fallback behaviours to enhance resilience in digitalized distribution power grids, even in situations where ICT control is lost. (shrink)

In Chapter 2 the author proposed that by ‘grey’ in ‘The patch looks grey to you’ we mean two things—the property of being grey, and a certain way of looking (which are distinct things). In this chapter the author addresses the concern that this is not possible—that it is not possible to mean two distinct things by ‘grey’ with the one use. The author does two things: (a) attempts to make it more plausible that it is indeed possible; and (b) (...) offers an alternative fallback account of how we use ‘grey’, one that does not rely upon an ability to mean two distinct things by it (the alternative account posits the existence of aphonic material in the sentence). (shrink)

This chapter explores the way in which the historical turn provided an ever more relevant fallback position for Reinhold as he continued to run into difficulties in accounting for the ‘fate’ of the far from universal acceptance of the Critical philosophy — even after the publication of the _Letters_ and his much more systematic Elementary-Philosophy. The first section of this chapter offers an account of the features central to the distinctively historical character of philosophical texts in general, and of how (...) this makes philosophical writing both like and unlike science and art. In the second section, it is argued that the specific features of the initial historical turn in philosophy are not to be found very much earlier or later than Reinhold's Critical phase. Although several systematic features of Reinhold's work can make it appear as if history is a secondary interest for him, this presumption is easily overcome by a closer look at his full career and his deep involvement with radical social change ever since his early years in the Austrian reform movement. (shrink)

Chapter 5 explores the economics of the ancient Greek slave trade along the Black Sea coast. Classical Greek literary sources exaggerate its importance. In actuality, the Pontic slave trade in antiquity was mostly intra-regional. This chapter draws on three datasets—the distribution of coinage, amphorae, and shipwrecks—to reconstruct the paths of the long-distance slave trade in the ancient Black Sea, argue for its scale, and explain both its persistence and visibility in the literary record. In the fifth and fourth centuries BCE, (...) Athens created a deliberate trade surplus that left cities along the Black Sea in constant need to export bulk commodities in exchange for Athenian silver. Enslaved captives were never the predominant export of Black Sea cities. Rather, mobilizing the “human resource” represented a fallback strategy, a resource mobilized in times when marketable commodities were in short supply. (shrink)

The metaphysics of possible and impossible worlds revolves around a number of questions. Should we treat worlds as genuine entities, which represent something as being _F_ by having an _F_ as a part? This is a hard position to maintain in the case of impossible worlds. Should we treat (non-actual) worlds as non-existent beings? Or should we think of them as abstract entities? Should we give the same answer to these questions for possible and impossible worlds? Yet a further option (...) is to distinguish two senses of ‘is’—encoding vs exemplifying some property—and claim that impossible worlds encode without exemplifying impossibilities. All of these approaches face difficulties. If one thinks these difficulties are insuperable, one can always adopt the approach that worlds are primitive entities. Another fallback position is fictionalism about world, on which truths about worlds are always given ‘in the fiction’. (shrink)

This chapter examines the consequences of post‐reductionist philosophy of science for nonreductive physicalism. Nonreductive physicalism is compatible with explanatory pluralism in philosophy of science. However, upon closer examination, the demise of reductionism leaves us with no convincing argument for physicalism. Nonreductive physicalism is attractive as a fallback position for disillusioned reductionists—that is, assuming one is already committed to physicalism. But without reductions, there is no convincing reason to become a physicalist—that is, to assume that mind‐body relations are metaphysically necessary.

The core claim of this chapter is that dispositions must be dispositions to act. That is, in Ving something manifests a disposition only if in Ving it did something. This claim is defended and then used to evaluate the thesis that there exist extrinsic dispositions. Many alleged examples of extrinsic dispositions are shown to fail because their success is inconsistent with the core claim. Other examples are consistent with the core claim, but the connection between dispositions and action suggests a (...) defensible fallback version of the Intrinsicness Thesis, according to which something can manifest an extrinsic disposition only by manifesting an intrinsic one. (shrink)

This chapter evaluates whether Radical Interpretation as it has been articulated in this book can be a reduction or foundational metaphysics of mental representation. One can be worried about this from two angles: first, whether it really qualifies as foundational metaphysics; second, whether what it targets is the whole of mental representation. Both challenges are addressed here. The chapter defends a reductive, foundational construal of Radical Interpretation against charges of circularity, while acknowledging a more modest fallback construal of what it (...) achieves. It also shows how to extend the metaphysics of _reference and truth conditions_ of the previous chapters to a metaphysics of _Fregean sense_. (shrink)