Nonideal Theory and Content Externalism

Nonideal Theory and Content Externalism

Author: Jeff Engelhardt

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2024-01-24

Total Pages: 217

ISBN-13: 0197754198

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Just about every philosophical theory of mind or language developed over the past 50 years in the West is systematically inaccurate. Systemic oppression has influenced the processes that theories of mind or language purport to identify; it has also made it so that most middle-to-upper class White men are ignorant of systemic oppression. Consequently, most theories of mind or language are systematically inaccurate because they fail to account for the influences of systemic oppression. Engelhardt solidifies this argument, exemplifies it with two versions of an influential theory, shows how to remedy the inaccurate theories, and considers some consequences of the remedy.


Global Sweatshops

Global Sweatshops

Author: Mirjam Müller

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2024

Total Pages: 161

ISBN-13: 0197767206

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Sweatshop labour is characterized by low wages, long hours, and systematic health and safety hazards. Most of the workers in the sweatshops of the garment industry are women, many of them migrant women. This book develops an intersectional feminist critique of the working conditions in sweatshops by analysing the role of gender, race, and migration status in bringing about and justifying the exploitation of workers on factory floors. Based on this analysis, the book argues that sweatshop workers are structurally vulnerable to exploitation in virtue of their position as gendered, racialized, and migrant workers within global supply chains. While this exploitation benefits powerful actors along global supply chains, it also creates spaces of resistance and structural transformation.


Nonideal Theory and Content Externalism

Nonideal Theory and Content Externalism

Author: Jeff Engelhardt

Publisher:

Published: 2024

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9780197754221

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"This book examines the intersection of systemic oppression and philosophical methodology. Focusing on philosophical theories of mind and language, it makes the case that they tend to be systematically inaccurate because they abstract away from systemic oppression when they model society, but the phenomena they aim to describe, explain, and predict are in fact systematically influenced by oppression. In short: philosophers of mind/language have tended to think that oppression is either non-existent or non-systemic, and this has rendered their theories systematically inaccurate. Moreover, it's plausible that philosophers have tended to be ignorant of systemic oppression as a consequence of how oppression has influenced educational systems, legal systems, dominant ideology, and our language. In order to develop empirically adequate theories of mind and language, then, philosophers need to learn about and take into account systemic oppression and its effects. In addition to arguing for this general methodological point, the book illustrates it and shows the way forward. The author illustrates the point by showing that two influential versions of Content Externalism are systematically inaccurate because they fail to recognize how oppression influences their explananda and explanantia. Engelhardt then introduces modifications that correct the systematic inaccuracies, thus demonstrating how to remedy our inaccurate theories and the methodology that led to them. In conclusion, the author considers how the book's arguments, conclusions, and modified theories bear on philosophical discussions of epistemic injustice and conceptual engineering"--


Normative Externalism

Normative Externalism

Author: Brian Weatherson

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2019-03-20

Total Pages: 260

ISBN-13: 0192576887

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Normative Externalism argues that it is not important that people live up to their own principles. What matters, in both ethics and epistemology, is that they live up to the correct principles: that they do the right thing, and that they believe rationally. This stance, that what matters are the correct principles, not one's own principles, has implications across ethics and epistemology. In ethics, it undermines the ideas that moral uncertainty should be treated just like factual uncertainty, that moral ignorance frequently excuses moral wrongdoing, and that hypocrisy is a vice. In epistemology, it suggests we need new treatments of higher-order evidence, and of peer disagreement, and of circular reasoning, and the book suggests new approaches to each of these problems. Although the debates in ethics and in epistemology are often conducted separately, putting them in one place helps bring out their common themes. One common theme is that the view that one should live up to one's own principles looks less attractive when people have terrible principles, or when following their own principles would lead to riskier or more aggressive action than the correct principles. Another common theme is that asking people to live up to their principles leads to regresses. It can be hard to know what action or belief complies with one's principles. And now we can ask, in such a case should a person do what they think their principles require, or what their principles actually require? Both answers lead to problems, and the best way to avoid these problems is to simply say people should follow the correct principles.


The Routledge Handbook of Non-Ideal Theory

The Routledge Handbook of Non-Ideal Theory

Author: Hilkje C. Hänel

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2024-10-15

Total Pages: 723

ISBN-13: 1040120814

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Made popular by John Rawls, ideal theory in political philosophy is concerned with putting preferences and interests to one side to achieve an impartial consensus and to arrive at a just society for all. In recent years, ideal theory has drawn increasing criticism for its idealised picture of political philosophy and its inability to account for the challenges posed by inequalities of, for example, race, gender, and class and by structural injustices stemming from colonialism and imperialism. The Routledge Handbook of Non-Ideal Theory is the first handbook or reference source on this important and fast-growing debate. Comprised of 34 chapters by an international team of contributors, the Handbook is divided into three clear parts: Methodological Challenges Intersections Applied Issues and Contemporary Challenges Within these sections key topics are addressed including: the question of whether non-ideal theory is methodologically linked to ideal theory; its intersection with feminist philosophy, critical race theory, decolonial theory, and critical theory; its characteristic features; the role of the non-ideal theorist; its relation to activism; and its application in the context of disability and health studies, climate justice, global injustices, colonialism, and many more. As well as a comprehensive introduction which provides important background to the debate between ideal and non-ideal theory, the Handbook also features a contribution by the late philosopher Charles Mills on non-ideal theory as ideology. The Routledge Handbook of Non-Ideal Theory is essential reading for students and scholars of political philosophy, ethics, and political theory, and will also be of interest to those studying and researching related subjects such as gender, race, and social justice.


Right Belief and True Belief

Right Belief and True Belief

Author: Daniel J. Singer

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2023-07-28

Total Pages: 257

ISBN-13: 019766038X

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The most important questions in life are questions about what we should do and what we should believe. The first kind of question has received considerable attention by normative ethicists, who search for a complete systematic account of right action. This book is about the second kind of question. Right Belief and True Belief starts by defining a new field of inquiry named 'normative epistemology' that mirrors normative ethics in searching for a systematic account of right belief. The book then lays out and defends a deeply truth-centric account of right belief called `truth-loving epistemic consequentialism.' Truth-loving epistemic consequentialists say that what we should believe (and what credences we should have) can be understood in terms of what conduces to us having the most accurate beliefs (credences). The view straight-forwardly vindicates the popular intuition that epistemic norms are about getting true beliefs and avoiding false beliefs, and it coheres well with how scientists, engineers, and statisticians think about what we should believe. Many epistemologists have rejected similar views in response to several persuasive objections, most famously including trade-off and counting-blades-of-grass objections. Right Belief and True Belief shows how a simple truth-based consequentialist account of epistemic norms can avoid these objections and argues that truth-loving epistemic consequentialism can undergird a general truth-centric approach to many questions in epistemology.


A Defense of Simulated Experience

A Defense of Simulated Experience

Author: Mark Silcox

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2018-12-07

Total Pages: 227

ISBN-13: 0429663498

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This book defends an account of the positive psychological, ethical, and political value of simulated human experience. Philosophers from Plato and Augustine to Heidegger, Nozick, and Baudrillard have warned us of the dangers of living on too heavy a diet of illusion and make-believe. But contemporary cultural life provides broader, more attractive opportunities to do so than have existed at any other point in history. The gentle forms of self-deceit that such experiences require of us, and that so many have regarded as ethically unwholesome or psychologically self-destructive, can in fact serve as vital means to political reconciliation, cultural enrichment, and even (a kind of) utopia. The first half of the book provides a highly schematic definition of simulated experience and compares it with some claims about the nature of simulation made by other philosophers about what it is for one thing to be a simulation of another. The author then provides a critical survey of the views of some major authors about the value of certain specific types of simulated experience, mainly in order to point out the many puzzling inconsistencies and ambiguities that their thoughts upon the topic often exhibit. In the second half of the book, the author defends an account of the positive social value of simulated experience and compares his own position to the ideas of a number of utopian political thinkers, as well as to Plato's famous doctrine of the "noble lie." He then makes some tentative practical suggestions about how a proper appreciation of the value of simulated experience might influence public policy decisions about such matters as the justification of taxation, paternalistic "choice management," and governmental transparency. A Defense of Simulated Experience will appeal to a broad range of philosophers working in normative ethics, aesthetics, the philosophy of technology, political philosophy, and the philosophy of culture who are interested in questions about simulated experience. The book also makes a contribution to the emerging field of Game Studies.


The Externalist Challenge

The Externalist Challenge

Author: Richard Schantz

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter

Published: 2011-08-18

Total Pages: 533

ISBN-13: 3110915278

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The debate between internalism and externalism has become a focal point of attention both in epistemology and in the philosophy of mind and language. Externalism challenges basic traditional internalist conceptions of the nature of knowledge, justification, thought and language. What is at stake, is the very form that theories in epistemology and the philosophy of mind ought to take. This volume is a collection of original contributions of leading international authors reflecting on the present state of the art concerning the exciting controversies between internalism and externalism.


Feminist Philosophy of Mind

Feminist Philosophy of Mind

Author: Keya Maitra

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2022

Total Pages: 409

ISBN-13: 0190867612

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"This collection is the first book to focus on the emerging field of study called feminist philosophy of mind. Each of the twenty chapters of Feminist Philosophy of Mind employs theories and methodologies from feminist philosophy to offer fresh insights and perspectives into issues raised in the contemporary literature in philosophy of mind and/or uses those from the philosophy of mind to advance feminist theory. The book delineates the content and aims of the field and demonstrates the fecundity of its approach, which is centered on the collective consideration of three questions: What is the mind? Whose mind is the model for the theory? To whom is mind attributed? Topics considered with this lens include mental content, artificial intelligence, the first-person perspective, personal identity, other minds, mental attribution, mental illness, perception, memory, attention, desire, trauma, agency, empathy, grief, love, gender, race, sexual orientation, materialism, panpsychism, and enactivism. In addition to engaging analytic and feminist philosophical traditions, essays draw from resources in phenomenology, philosophy of race, decolonial studies, disability studies, embodied cognition theory, comparative philosophy, neuroscience, and psychology"--