Preface. Introduction 1. Externalism, Anti-Realism and the KK Thesis 2. Choice Principles in Intu... more Preface. Introduction 1. Externalism, Anti-Realism and the KK Thesis 2. Choice Principles in Intuitionistic Set Theory 3. Assertion, Proof and the Axiom of Choice 4. Montague's Modal Completeness Theorem of 1955 5. On the Rational Reconstruction of our Theoretical Knowledge 6. Do We Have the Right Limitative Theorems 7. Empirical Negation in Intuitionistic Logic 8 Negation's Holiday: Aspectival Dialethism 9. Monism: The One True Logic Bibliography Index
... 2 David DeVidi and Tim Kenyon 1 Epistemology and Epistemic Logic There is no surprise in the ... more ... 2 David DeVidi and Tim Kenyon 1 Epistemology and Epistemic Logic There is no surprise in the observation that ... It is then relatively uncontroversial that the principle (T) should be valid inepistemic logic, for it amounts to no more than the requirement that knowledge is factive ...
Presented at Canadian Philosophical Congress 2019. Session S50: Faculty Prize Winners and Canadia... more Presented at Canadian Philosophical Congress 2019. Session S50: Faculty Prize Winners and Canadian Journal of Philosophy Distinguished Lecture
False polarization (FP) is an interpersonal bias on judgement, the effect of which is to lead peo... more False polarization (FP) is an interpersonal bias on judgement, the effect of which is to lead people in contexts of disagreement to overestimate the differences between their respective views. I propose to treat FP as a problem of applied social epistemology—a barrier to reliable belief-formation in certain social domains—and to ask how best one may debias for FP. This inquiry leads more generally into questions about effective debiasing strategies; on this front, considerable empirical evidence suggests that intuitively attractive strategies for debiasing are not very effective, while more effective strategies are neither intuitive nor likely to be easily implemented. The supports for more effective debiasing seem either to be inherently social and cooperative, or at least to presuppose social efforts to create physical or decision-making infrastructure for mitigating bias. The upshot, I argue, is that becoming a less biased epistemic agent is a thoroughly socialized project.
The context or manner of an utterance can alter or nullify the speech-act that would normally be ... more The context or manner of an utterance can alter or nullify the speech-act that would normally be performed by utterances of that sort. Coercive contexts have this effect on some kinds of seeming assertions: they end up being non-assertoric, and are merely capitulations. An earlier version of this view is clarified, defended, and extended partly in response to a useful critique by Roy Sorensen. I examine some complications that arise regarding resistance to speaking under coercion when ideological or religious commitments are implicated.
An influential view in the epistemology of testimony is that typical or paradigmatic beliefs form... more An influential view in the epistemology of testimony is that typical or paradigmatic beliefs formed through testimonial uptake are noninferential. Some epistemologists in particular defend a causal version of this view: that beliefs formed from testimony (BFT) are generated by noninferential processes. This view is implausible, however. It tends to be elaborated in terms that do not really bear it out – e.g. that BFT is fixed directly, immediately, unconsciously or automatically. Nor is causal noninferentialism regarding BFT plausibly expressed in terms of belief-independent belief formation; the complex cognitive details of BFT fixation do not accord well with such a view. But perhaps the most significant issue is that the relevant causal notion of inference itself is not particularly well-defined, at least with respect to BFT. Causal noninferentialism in this domain is obscure as a result, but this does not in turn clearly vindicate any interesting version of inferentialism.
John Searle's The Rediscovery of the Mind comprises two related projects. The first is to sho... more John Searle's The Rediscovery of the Mind comprises two related projects. The first is to show that philosophy of mind since Descartes has been not merely false, but obviously false. The materialist tradition—as Searle encapsulates behaviourism, type and token identity theories, functionalism, Artificial Intelligence, and eliminativism—consists of more or less crazy positions, with a crucial shared trait: they “leave out” the mind, the very thing they were to explain. Searle's second concern is to sketch his own theory of mind, a “common-sense” view that is, he claims, obviously true, and thus is a sharp departure from the madness of the various received views of this century.
Critical thinking is often taught with some emphasis on categories and operations of cognitive bi... more Critical thinking is often taught with some emphasis on categories and operations of cognitive biases. The underlying thought is that knowledge of biases equips students to reduce them. The empirical evidence, however, doesn’t provide much support for this thought. We have previously argued that the emphasis on debiasing in critical thinking education is worth preserving, but in light of a more explicit and broader conception of debiasing. We now argue that this broader conception of debiasing strategies obliges critical thinking instructors and curriculum designers to reflect on the teaching approaches that might facilitate the use of those strategies. We propose some teaching techniques to expand the scope of debiasing in the classroom—some untested, some only rarely and recently characterized as critical thinking strategies, rather than as pragmatic considerations in, e.g., design, engineering, marketing. These methods and others like them, we suggest, broaden the prospects for teaching a range of effective critical thinking techniques for debiasing.
There are empirical grounds to doubt the effectiveness of a common and intuitive approach to teac... more There are empirical grounds to doubt the effectiveness of a common and intuitive approach to teaching debiasing strategies in critical thinking courses. We summarize some of the grounds before suggesting a broader taxonomy of debiasing strategies. This four-level taxonomy enables a useful diagnosis of biasing factors and situations, and illuminates more strategies for more effective bias mitigation located in the shaping of situational factors and reasoning infrastructure—sometimes called “nudges” in the literature. The question, we contend, then becomes how best to teach the construction and use of such infrastructures.
Preface. Introduction 1. Externalism, Anti-Realism and the KK Thesis 2. Choice Principles in Intu... more Preface. Introduction 1. Externalism, Anti-Realism and the KK Thesis 2. Choice Principles in Intuitionistic Set Theory 3. Assertion, Proof and the Axiom of Choice 4. Montague's Modal Completeness Theorem of 1955 5. On the Rational Reconstruction of our Theoretical Knowledge 6. Do We Have the Right Limitative Theorems 7. Empirical Negation in Intuitionistic Logic 8 Negation's Holiday: Aspectival Dialethism 9. Monism: The One True Logic Bibliography Index
... 2 David DeVidi and Tim Kenyon 1 Epistemology and Epistemic Logic There is no surprise in the ... more ... 2 David DeVidi and Tim Kenyon 1 Epistemology and Epistemic Logic There is no surprise in the observation that ... It is then relatively uncontroversial that the principle (T) should be valid inepistemic logic, for it amounts to no more than the requirement that knowledge is factive ...
Presented at Canadian Philosophical Congress 2019. Session S50: Faculty Prize Winners and Canadia... more Presented at Canadian Philosophical Congress 2019. Session S50: Faculty Prize Winners and Canadian Journal of Philosophy Distinguished Lecture
False polarization (FP) is an interpersonal bias on judgement, the effect of which is to lead peo... more False polarization (FP) is an interpersonal bias on judgement, the effect of which is to lead people in contexts of disagreement to overestimate the differences between their respective views. I propose to treat FP as a problem of applied social epistemology—a barrier to reliable belief-formation in certain social domains—and to ask how best one may debias for FP. This inquiry leads more generally into questions about effective debiasing strategies; on this front, considerable empirical evidence suggests that intuitively attractive strategies for debiasing are not very effective, while more effective strategies are neither intuitive nor likely to be easily implemented. The supports for more effective debiasing seem either to be inherently social and cooperative, or at least to presuppose social efforts to create physical or decision-making infrastructure for mitigating bias. The upshot, I argue, is that becoming a less biased epistemic agent is a thoroughly socialized project.
The context or manner of an utterance can alter or nullify the speech-act that would normally be ... more The context or manner of an utterance can alter or nullify the speech-act that would normally be performed by utterances of that sort. Coercive contexts have this effect on some kinds of seeming assertions: they end up being non-assertoric, and are merely capitulations. An earlier version of this view is clarified, defended, and extended partly in response to a useful critique by Roy Sorensen. I examine some complications that arise regarding resistance to speaking under coercion when ideological or religious commitments are implicated.
An influential view in the epistemology of testimony is that typical or paradigmatic beliefs form... more An influential view in the epistemology of testimony is that typical or paradigmatic beliefs formed through testimonial uptake are noninferential. Some epistemologists in particular defend a causal version of this view: that beliefs formed from testimony (BFT) are generated by noninferential processes. This view is implausible, however. It tends to be elaborated in terms that do not really bear it out – e.g. that BFT is fixed directly, immediately, unconsciously or automatically. Nor is causal noninferentialism regarding BFT plausibly expressed in terms of belief-independent belief formation; the complex cognitive details of BFT fixation do not accord well with such a view. But perhaps the most significant issue is that the relevant causal notion of inference itself is not particularly well-defined, at least with respect to BFT. Causal noninferentialism in this domain is obscure as a result, but this does not in turn clearly vindicate any interesting version of inferentialism.
John Searle's The Rediscovery of the Mind comprises two related projects. The first is to sho... more John Searle's The Rediscovery of the Mind comprises two related projects. The first is to show that philosophy of mind since Descartes has been not merely false, but obviously false. The materialist tradition—as Searle encapsulates behaviourism, type and token identity theories, functionalism, Artificial Intelligence, and eliminativism—consists of more or less crazy positions, with a crucial shared trait: they “leave out” the mind, the very thing they were to explain. Searle's second concern is to sketch his own theory of mind, a “common-sense” view that is, he claims, obviously true, and thus is a sharp departure from the madness of the various received views of this century.
Critical thinking is often taught with some emphasis on categories and operations of cognitive bi... more Critical thinking is often taught with some emphasis on categories and operations of cognitive biases. The underlying thought is that knowledge of biases equips students to reduce them. The empirical evidence, however, doesn’t provide much support for this thought. We have previously argued that the emphasis on debiasing in critical thinking education is worth preserving, but in light of a more explicit and broader conception of debiasing. We now argue that this broader conception of debiasing strategies obliges critical thinking instructors and curriculum designers to reflect on the teaching approaches that might facilitate the use of those strategies. We propose some teaching techniques to expand the scope of debiasing in the classroom—some untested, some only rarely and recently characterized as critical thinking strategies, rather than as pragmatic considerations in, e.g., design, engineering, marketing. These methods and others like them, we suggest, broaden the prospects for teaching a range of effective critical thinking techniques for debiasing.
There are empirical grounds to doubt the effectiveness of a common and intuitive approach to teac... more There are empirical grounds to doubt the effectiveness of a common and intuitive approach to teaching debiasing strategies in critical thinking courses. We summarize some of the grounds before suggesting a broader taxonomy of debiasing strategies. This four-level taxonomy enables a useful diagnosis of biasing factors and situations, and illuminates more strategies for more effective bias mitigation located in the shaping of situational factors and reasoning infrastructure—sometimes called “nudges” in the literature. The question, we contend, then becomes how best to teach the construction and use of such infrastructures.
... 2 David DeVidi and Tim Kenyon 1 Epistemology and Epistemic Logic There is no surprise in the ... more ... 2 David DeVidi and Tim Kenyon 1 Epistemology and Epistemic Logic There is no surprise in the observation that ... It is then relatively uncontroversial that the principle (T) should be valid inepistemic logic, for it amounts to no more than the requirement that knowledge is factive ...
How should we understand the kinds of speech that people produce under torture? And how does this... more How should we understand the kinds of speech that people produce under torture? And how does this question interact with the kinds of rationales for using torture that have been publicly aired in recent years? This talk offers some suggestions on how these things are related.
This White Paper provides a high-level review of issues relevant to understanding bibliometrics, ... more This White Paper provides a high-level review of issues relevant to understanding bibliometrics, and practical recommendations for how to appropriately use these measures. This is not a policy paper; instead, it defines and summarizes evidence that addresses appropriate use of bibliometric analysis at the University of Waterloo. Issues identified and recommendations will generally apply to other academic institutions. Understanding the types of bibliometric measures and their limitations makes it possible to identify both appropriate uses and crucial limitations of bibliometric analysis. Recommendations offered at the end of this paper provide a range of opportunities for how researchers and administrators at Waterloo and beyond can integrate bibliometric analysis into their practice.
The suggested citation for this white paper is:
University of Waterloo Working Group on Bibliometrics, Winter 2016. White Paper: Measuring Research Outputs through Bibliometrics, Waterloo, Ontario: University of Waterloo.
This was a response to "Levels of Depth in Deep Disagreement," a paper by Claudio Duran delivered... more This was a response to "Levels of Depth in Deep Disagreement," a paper by Claudio Duran delivered at OSSA 11. But the content of the reply is more directed at Robert Fogelin's original proposal of the idea of a "deep disagreement": one in which such fundamental principles are disputed that argumentation cannot resolve or make progress in the disagreement. The examples Fogelin offers are ill-formed, though, and there is no other reason to think there's any such thing, as Fogelin defines it. Weakening the idea, however, robs it of all interest.
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The suggested citation for this white paper is:
University of Waterloo Working Group on Bibliometrics, Winter 2016. White Paper: Measuring Research Outputs through Bibliometrics, Waterloo, Ontario: University of Waterloo.