Diversity Reading List

Publisher's Note: We say we can no longer trust our public services, institutions or the people who run them. The professionals we have to rely on - politicians, doctors, scientists, businessmen and many others - are treated with suspicion. Their word is doubted, their motives questioned. Whether real or perceived, this crisis of trust has a debilitating impact on society and democracy. Can trust be restored by making people and institutions more accountable? Or do complex systems of accountability and control themselves damage trust? Onora O'Neill challenges current approaches, investigates sources of deception in our society and re-examines questions of press freedom. 2002's Reith Lectures present a philosopher's view of trust and deception, and ask whether and how trust can be restored in a modern democracy.

Publisher's Note: This volume brings together Nussbaum's published papers on the relationship between literature and philosophy, especially moral philosophy. The papers, many of them previously inaccessible to non-specialist readers, explore such fundamental issues as the relationship between style and content in the exploration of ethical issues; the nature of ethical attention and ethical knowledge and their relationship to written forms and styles; and the role of the emotions in deliberation and self-knowledge. Nussbaum investigates and defends a conception of ethical understanding which involves emotional as well as intellectual activity, and which gives a certain type of priority to the perception of particular people and situations rather than to abstract rules. She argues that this ethical conception cannot be completely and appropriately stated without turning to forms of writing usually considered literary rather than philosophical. It is consequently necessary to broaden our conception of moral philosophy in order to include these forms. Featuring two new essays and revised versions of several previously published essays, this collection attempts to articulate the relationship, within such a broader ethical inquiry, between literary and more abstractly theoretical elements.

Abstract: Vague predicates, those that exhibit borderline cases, pose a persistent problem for philosophers and logicians. Although they are ubiquitous in natural language, when used in a logical context, vague predicates lead to contradiction. This paper will address a question that is intimately related to this problem. Given their inherent imprecision, why do vague predicates arise in the first place? I discuss a variation of the signaling game where the state space is treated as contiguous, i.e., endowed with a metric that captures a similarity relation over states. This added structure is manifested in payoffs that reward approximate coordination between sender and receiver as well as perfect coordination. I evolve these games using a variation of Herrnstein reinforcement learning that better reflects the generalizing learning strategies real-world actors use in situations where states of the world are similar. In these simulations, signaling can develop very quickly, and the signals are vague in much the way ordinary language predicates are vague - they each exclusively apply to certain items, but for some transition period both signals apply to varying degrees. Moreover, I show that under certain parameter values, in particular when state spaces are large and time is limited, learning generalization of this sort yields strategies with higher payoffs than standard Herrnstein reinforcement learning. These models may then help explain why the phenomenon of vagueness arises in natural language: the learning strategies that allow actors to quickly and effectively develop signaling conventions in contiguous state spaces make it unavoidable

Abstract: When I look at a colored object I have an experience of a specific phenomenal kind. Let us suppose I have an experience of pure blue. The blueness I see appears to be instantiated on the surface of the object. When I focus upon the specific phenomenal kind of visual experience I am having (on my having an experience of pure blue) I continue to carefully attend to the property the object appears to have and I do not direct my attention into some inner space. I do not get aware - by attending to my own experience - of the instantiation of any property I was not already aware of before I focused attention upon my own experience. These insights have been associated with the idea that perceptual experience is 'transparent' or 'diaphanous' and they have been taken to support a number of substantial philosophical claims about the nature of phenomenal states and about our capacity to attend to these states. It has been argued that these phenomenological insights support the claim that the phenomenal character of experiences consists in their representing objects as having specific properties (where representation is understood in a naturalistic manner). It also has appeared obvious to some philosophers that the so?called transparency of experience supports the following claim: either our experiences do not have an intrinsic phenomenal character or we are unable to attend to these intrinsic features. I will argue in this paper that the phenomenological insights associated with the term 'transparency of experience' do not support the philosophical consequences just mentioned. I will try to show that the contrary impression is a cognitive illusion that can be explained by reference to what one may call the perceptual model of phenomenal awareness and phenomenological reflection. This model is just a bad and misleading metaphor as everybody will agree when consciously considering the issue. Nonetheless, or so I claim, the metaphor is at work in the background of people's mind. If we assume that a philosopher is either him? or herself in the grip of that metaphor or implicitly interprets the view he wishes to attack along the lines of that metaphor, then we can see how it may appear obvious to him that the phenomenological insights associated with 'transparency' lead quite naturally to the strong philosophical claims they have been taken to support.1

Abstract: According to the experience property framework qualia are properties of experiences the subject undergoing the experience is aware of. A phenomenological argument against this framework is developed and a few mistakes invited by the framework are described. An alternative to the framework, the framework of experiential properties is presented and defended as preferable. It is argued that the choice between these two frameworks makes a substantial difference for theoretical purposes.

Abstract: Is a subject who undergoes an experience necessarily aware of undergoing the experience? According to the view here developed, a positive answer to this question should be accepted if 'awareness' is understood in a specific way, - in the sense of what will be called 'primitive awareness'. Primitive awareness of being experientially presented with something involves, furthermore, being pre-reflectively aware of oneself as an experiencing subject. An argument is developed for the claims that pre-reflective self-awareness is the basis of our understanding of what it is to be an experiencing subject and that that understanding reveals what being an experiencing subject consists in and what it is for experiences to belong to one single experiencer. Claim is used in an argument in favor of the so-called simple view with respect to synchronic and diachronic unity of consciousness.

Abstract: Is it possible that a person who behaves just like you and me in normal life situations and applies colour words to objects just as we do and makes the same colour discriminations and colour similarity judgements that we make, see green where we see red and red where we see green? Many philosophers assert that the description of such a case is somehow incoherent. Often the motivation for this assertion is "that they suspect that admitting that claim [the possibility of such a case] will put one on a slippery slope which will eventually land one in skepticism about other minds".1 Among philosophers, however, it does not seem to be common knowledge that there is scientific evidence for the existence of such cases. Theories about the physiological basis of colour vision deficiencies together with theories about the genetics of colour vision deficiencies lead to the prediction that some people are 'pseudo- normal' (according to an estimation of Piantanida (1974) this occurs in around 14 of 10 000 males). 2 Pseudonormal people "would be expected to have normal colour vision except that the sensations of red and green would be reversed - something that would be difficult, if not impossible, to prove. ''3 Any philosophical theory of mind or more specifically about colour, colour appearances or colour concepts should meet the following plausible prima facie constraint: No hypotheses accepted or seriously considered in colour vision science should be regarded according to a philosophical theory to be either incoherent or unstatable or false. Therefore - regardless of whether the hypothesis of the existence of pseudonormal people is correct- the mere fact that the hypothesis is seriously considered in colour vision science, is philosophically relevant. Central claims of colour vision science when combined with specific empirical assumptions lead to the prediction that there are red-green-inverted people. Therefore any philosophical theory which excludes such a case does not meet the above formulated constraint. The failure to meet this prima facie constraint does not in itself justify the rejection of a philosophical proposal, but it does represent a serious objection. This kind of criticism will be advanced against some widely held philosophical proposals in the present paper. But let me begin with a short sketch of the relevant parts of colour vision science.

Abstract: Free action and microphysical determination are incompatible but this is so only in virtue of a genuine conflict between microphysical determination with any active behavior. I introduce active behavior as the veridicality condition of agentive experiences and of perceptual experiences and argue that these veridicality conditions are fulfilled in many everyday cases of human and non-human behavior and that they imply the incompatibility of active behavior with microphysical determination. The main purpose of the paper is to show that the view proposed about active behavior leads to a natural compromise between libertarianism and compatibilism, which avoids the flaws of both positions while preserving their central insights.

Introduction: Everyone familiar with the current mind-body debate has probably heard about Frank Jackson's neurophysiologist Mary. So I tell her story very briefly. Mary knows everything there is to know about the neurophysiological basis of human colour vision but she never saw colours herself (she always lived in a black-and-white environment). When Mary is finally released into the beauty of the coloured world, she acquires new knowledge about the world and - more specifically - about the character of the visual experiences of others. This appears clear at first sight. In the ongoing philosophical debate, however, there is no agreement about whether Mary really gains new knowledge and about whether this would, if it were so, represent a problem for physicalism. Those who defend the so-called argument from knowledge (or 'knowledge argument') think that it does.

Abstract: I will present an argument for property dualism. The argument employs a distinction between having a concept of a property and grasping a property via a concept. If you grasp a property P via a concept C, then C is a concept of P. But the reverse does not hold: you may have a concept of a property without grasping that property via any concept. If you grasp a property, then your cognitive relation to that property is more intimate then if you just have some concept or other of that property. To grasp a property is to understand what having that property essentially consists in.