More publications available at philpapers
Books
The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Disagreement (2024)
Disagreement is one of the deepest and most pervasive topics in philosophy; arguably its very bedrock, and is an ever-increasing feature of politics, ethics, public policy, science and many other areas. Despite the omnipresence of disagreement, the topic itself has received relatively little sustained examination.
This outstanding handbook examines the philosophy of disagreement and how it extends to debates in public policy and science.
Testimonial Injustice and Trust (2024)
This book presents novel approaches and perspectives to scholarship on epistemic injustice and particularly, testimonial injustice and their connections with public trust.
Questioning Experts and Expertise (2023)
The role of experts and their expertise, in our personal and social lives, has taken centre stage in the debates about our post-COVID-19 world. Scientific disinformation is rife, and expertise is badly needed to tackle highly complex social problems.
The Value of Empathy (2021)
The central role of empathy in understanding others, and the need for it in our social and inter-personal encounters, is widely acknowledged by philosophers, social scientists and psychologists alike. Yet neither a clear understanding, nor a uniform definition of this relatively new term is available. Read more
Relativism (2020)
Relativism, an ancient philosophical doctrine, is once again a topic of heated debate. In this book, Maria Baghramian and Annalisa Coliva present the recent arguments for and against various forms of relativism.
From Trust to Trustworthiness (2019)
Trust is an essential component of social life and yet political polarization and social tensions can easily lead to its erosion. The articles collected in this volume throw a new light on the fundamentals of trust and trustworthiness and thus help us understand better the conditions and the limits of trust.
Pragmatism & the European Traditions (2018)
The turn of the 20th century witnessed the birth of two distinct philosophical schools in Europe: analytic philosophy and phenomenology. What is often left out of this history is the relationship between these European schools and the development of pragmatism, the indigenous philosophical movement of the United States. Read more
The Many Faces of Relativism (2014)
Relativism asks how we are to find a way out of intractable differences of perspectives and disagreements in various domains. Standards of truth, rationality, and ethical right and wrong vary greatly and there are no universal criteria for adjudicating between them.
Donald Davidson: Life & Words (2013)
Donald Davidson (1917-2003) was one of the most prominent philosophers of the second half of the twentieth century. His thinking about language, mind, and epistemology has shaped the views of several generations of philosophers.
Reading Putnam (2012)
Putnam is one of the world’s leading philosophers. His highly original and often provocative ideas have set the agenda for a variety of debates in philosophy of science, mind and language. His now famous thought experiments, such as the ‘Twin earth’ and ‘the brains in the vat’ are part of the canon in philosophy and cognitive science. Read more
Relativism (2004)
‘It’s all relative’. In a world of increasing cultural diversity, it can seem that everything is indeed relative. But should we concede that there is no such thing as right and wrong, and no objective truth? Can we reconcile relativism and pluralism?
Pluralism (2000) Tackles philosophical pluralism and link pluralist themes in philosophy to politics. A range of essays investigates the philosophical sources of pluralism, the value of pluralism and liberalism, and difference in pluralism, including writings on women and the public-private distinction. Read more
Modern Philosophy of Language (1999)
A collection of seminal writings on the philosophy of language. In our century, philosophers have become increasingly concerned with the relationship between language, the mind, and the world. Language has come to be viewed both as a source of puzzlement and as a repository for untapped knowledge.
Papers
This paper investigates the topic of epistemic authority from the perspective of the ordinary people facing expert testimony. In particular, two central questions are discussed: how one should respond to expert testimony; and what should one do before expert disagreement. Read more…
This paper investigates the topic of expertise in cognitive domains from a socio-epistemological perspective. In particular, two central questions in the epistemology of expertise are discussed: what an expert is according to extant theories on the market; and how ordinary people can identify an expert in domains in which they have no competence of their own. Read more…
Philosophy in the 20th century witnessed a schism between so called ‘analytic’ and ‘continental’ schools of philosophy. One of the aims of the IJPS from its inception was to provide a space for articles attempting to overcome, or at least foreshorten, that divide. This paper critically examines the various understandings of the divide and takes a quick glance at some of the attempts to bridge it Read more…
This review examines the alleged crisis of trust in environmental science and its impact on public opinion, policy decisions in the context of democratic governance, and the interaction between science and society. In an interdisciplinary manner, the review focuses on the following themes: the trustworthiness of environmental science, empirical studies on levels of trust and trust formation; social media, environmental science, and disinformation; trust in environmental governance and democracy; and co-production of knowledge and the production of trust in knowledge. The review explores both the normative issue of trustworthiness and empirical studies on how to build trust. The review does not provide any simple answers to whether trust in science is generally in decline or whether we are returning to a less Read more…
This introduction provides brief outlines of the articles collected in this special issue of the International Journal of Philosophical Studies on the topic of Ethics and Emotions. It also announces the winners of the 2021 Robert Papazian and PERITIA prizes. Read more…
Faced with current urgent calls for more trust in experts, especially in high impact and politically sensitive domains, such as climate science and COVID-19, the complex and problematic nature of public trust in experts and the need for a more critical approach to the topic are easy to overlook. Scepticism – at least in its Humean mitigated form that encourages independent, questioning attitudes – can prove valuable to democratic governance, but stands in opposition to the cognitive dependency entailed by epistemic trust. In this paper, we investigate the tension between the value of mitigated scepticism – understood as the exercise of reason-based doubt in a particular domain – and the need for trust in experts. We offer four arguments in favour of mitigated scepticism: the argument from loss of intellectual autonomy; the argument from democratic deficit; the argument from the normative failures of science; and the argument from past and current injustices. These arguments highlight the tension between the requirements for trust and justified scepticism about the role of experts. One solution, which we reject, is the idea that reliance, rather than trust, is sufficient for the purposes of accommodating experts in policy matters. The solution we endorse is to create a ‘climate of trust’, where questioning experts and expertise is welcomed, but the epistemic trust necessary for action upon information which the public cannot obtain first-hand is enabled and encouraged through structural, institutional, and justice-based measures. Read more…
Testimony has a specific epistemological vulnerability problem: What we come to know and understand is highly dependent on the cognitive labour and epistemic contributions of others. However, to form our beliefs merely on the grounds of a speaker’s words would be epistemically irresponsible, particularly since a speaker is capable of lying, deception, or error; hence, we require further justification for testimonial belief. Moreover, the capa-city to make epistemic contributions, that is, to convey knowledge or other kinds of epistemic inputs (e.g. evidence, doubts, and critical ideas) con-ducive to knowledge (and one could add understanding) is often dependent on communicative reciprocation of or appropriate uptake by an audience. This raises questions about how we ought to assess testimony or testifiers or allow ourselves a critical stance, without violating the norm of due epis-temic respect owed to speakers. An upshot of these considerations is that the moral attitudes that we bring to testimonial practices, e.g. trust and respect, can also be immediately relevant to our epistemic engagements. Specifically, we can wrong testifiers by unjustifiably discrediting their testimony or disbelieving them. Read more…
Relativism: Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (First published Fri Sep 11, 2015; substantive revision Tue Sep 15, 2020)
Relativism, roughly put, is the view that truth and falsity, right and wrong, standards of reasoning, and procedures of justification are products of differing conventions and frameworks of assessment and that their authority is confined to the context giving rise to them. More precisely, “relativism” covers views which maintain that—at a high level of abstraction—at least some class of things have the properties they have (e.g., beautiful, morally good, epistemically justified) not simpliciter, but only relative to a given framework of assessment (e.g., local cultural norms, individual standards), and correspondingly, that the truth of claims attributing these properties holds only once the relevant framework of assessment is specified or supplied. Relativists characteristically insist, furthermore, that if something is only relatively so, then there can be no framework-independent vantage point from which the matter of whether the thing in question is so can be established. Read more…
This special issue arose from the 2018 competition for the Robert Papazian Essay Prize in Ethics and Political Philosophy where the theme was empa- thy, with a special focus on its moral, political, epistemic and social roles and significance. The theme proved extremely popular, particularly with early career philosophers and advanced PhDs. As a consequence, excep- tionally, it was decided that, in addition to the annual Robert Papazian Essay Prize, to award a second prize, of the monetary value of 1500 euro, to an entry by an early career, post-PhD philosopher, and to publish all the shortlisted entries in a special issue of the IJPS. Read more…
We report the results of an exploratory study that examines the reactions of climate scientists, climate policy experts, astrophysicists, and non-experts (N = 3,367) to instances of disagreement within climate science and astrophysics. The study explores respondents’ judgments about the factors that contribute to the creation and persistence of those disagreements and how one should respond to disagreements among experts. We found that, as compared to educated non-experts, climate experts believe (i) that there is less disagreement within climate science about climate change, (ii) that more of the disagreement that does exist concerns public policy questions rather than the science itself, (iii) that methodological factors play less of a role in generating existing disagreement among experts about climate science, (iv) that fewer personal and institutional biases influence the nature and direction of climate science research, (v) that there is more agreement among scientists about which methods or theoretical perspectives should be used to examine and explain the relevant phenomena, (vi) that disagreements about climate change should not lead people to conclude that the scientific methods being employed today are unreliable or incapable of revealing the truth, and (vii) that climate science is more settled than ideological pundits would have us believe and settled enough to base public policy on it. In addition, we observed that the uniquely American political context predicted participants’ judgments about many of these factors. We also found that, commensurate with the greater inherent uncertainty and data lacunae in their field, astrophysicists working on cosmic rays were generally more willing to acknowledge expert disagreement, more open to the idea that a set of data can have multiple valid interpretations, and generally less quick to dismiss someone articulating a non-standard view as non-expert, than climate scientists. Read more…
Naturalism is the defining feature of the philosophy of Willard van Orman Quine. But there is little clarity in our understanding of naturalism and the role it plays in Quine’s work. The current paper explores one strand of Quine’s naturalist project, the strand that primarily deals with a naturalised account of language. I examine the role that Quine assigns to empathy as the starting point of the process of learning and translating a language and argue that empathy, when going beyond the automatic form of mirroring, has an irreducible normative character which does not sit well with Quinean naturalism. Read more…
Richard Rorty (2015)
Richard Rorty (B. October 4, 1931 – D. June 8, 2007) is a highly influential American philosopher who is as divisive as he is popular. Rorty’s many writings touch on major themes within both analytic and continental philosophy. Issues in epistemology, philosophy of mind, philosophy of science and naturalism featured centrally in his early work. His later writings placed increasing stress on questions of democracy and culture. However Rorty’s “great theme” is philosophy itself and his relentless interrogation of philosophy’s place and purpose both inside and outside the academy is unmatched in contemporary philosophy. The present article provides an overview of central features of his thought under the headings of “Anti-Representationalism”, “Pragmatism” and “The Scope and Role of Philosophy”. The examination is loosely chronological; however, since Rorty’s thought demonstrates deep continuities, each heading presents an aspect of his thought rather than, exclusively, a period of his development. Read more…
According to Quine’s thesis of the indeterminacy of translationthere are no facts of matter which could determine the choice between two ormore incompatible translation schemes which are in accordance with allbehavioral evidence. Donald Davidson agrees with Quine that an important degree of indeterminacy will remain after all the behavioral evidence is in, buthe believes that this indeterminacy of meaning (IM) should not be seen aseither mysterious or threatening. In this paper I argue that IM is not asinnocuous as Davidson believes it to be and has consequences which do not siteasily with some core elements of the Davidsonian project. I argue that IMleads to the nontrivial thesis of the indeterminacy of language ascription whichis not captured by the mundane examples of indeterminacy of measurementthat Davidson frequently cites. Davidson makes a liberal use of the principle of charity in order to lessen the effect of IM. In recent years he has broadened thescope of the principle of charity by arguing that a radical interpreter, at least insome basic cases, should identify the object of a belief with the cause of thatbelief. Davidson agrees with Quine and Putnam that the concept of causality isapplied to the world according to human interests. For Quine and Putnam,however, the interest-relativity of causal relations has relativisticconsequences. Given Davidson’s long-standing opposition to all types of relativism this conclusion should not be welcome to him. Relativism may beavoided by imposing a great deal of social and biological homogeneity on alllanguage-users which is an equally unwelcome view. Read more…
Many thinkers, including Descartes, Francis Hutcheson, and Henri Bergson have commented on humor’s correctivefunction, especially where ‘small vices’ or ‘mechanical inelasticity’ are concerned. Contemporary academics like, Rachelle Berg et. al.,describe the therapeutic value of humor in ‘forming a therapeutic bond, addressing resistance, reframing maladaptive beliefs, and replacingrigid, self-absorbed perspectives’ (2009). Frank Lachmann has discussed the valuable place of humor in working with adults suffering fromnarcissism or self-pathology (2007). These insights can be magnified when we examine the connection between humor and friendship,specifically the way that part of friendship is edifying confrontation. Where there is confrontation, humor can have a unique power topersuade one toward a healthier way of living. An incident in C.S. Lewis’s work The Great Divorce demonstrates this power, while alsoshowing its limitations. Humor cannot guarantee or force a particular outcome; it is a tool of humble persuasion. Finally, part of the value of humor’s humble persuasion is how it honors wonder. For those trapped in self-absorbed perspectives, narcissism, or any form of persistentwillful blindness, humor’s delightful invitation to wonder may free those who are trapped thereby. Read more…
In his John Dewey lectures,published in 1999 as The Threefold Cord, Hilary Putnam summarizes his philosophical life as a long journey from realism back to realism,but not back to the metaphysical version ofrealism with which he started. It has become common place to divide this journey into three more or less distinctphases—a division reminiscent ofthe three phases ofthe philosophical thinking of one ofPutnam’s philosophical heroes,Ludwig Wittgenstein.Early Putnam was athoroughgoing realist advocating scientific,mathematical,and metaphysical real-ism. The first and most crucial break in his thinking occurred in 1976 when herepudiated metaphysical realism and embraced in its place what he called “internalrealism.”The emergence ofthe third and most recent Putnam can be dated to the1990 Gifford lectures in St.Andrews.But compared to the revolutionary breakheralding his first philosophical turn,and like the emergence ofthe Wittgenstein of On Certainty, this latest transition is more subtle and gradual. Read more…
Why Conceptual Schemes? (1998)
According to Donald Davidson, the very idea of a conceptual scheme is the third dogma of empiricism. In this paper I examine the ways in which this claim may be interpreted. I conclude by arguing that there remains an innocent version of the scheme-content distinction, which is not motivated by empiricism and does not commit us to the pernicious type of dualism that Davidson rejects. Read more…
Maria Baghramian 