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Full-Text Articles in Philosophy

The Basic Dualism In The World, Martin Zwick Nov 2023

The Basic Dualism In The World, Martin Zwick

Systems Science Faculty Publications and Presentations

Graham Harman writes that the “basic dualism in the world lies…between things in their intimate reality and things as confronted by other things.” This paper supports Harman’s assertion from a systems theoretic perspective and illustrates it with some examples, including conceptions about truth, ethics, value, and intelligence. But dualism implies irreconcilable difference; what Harman points to is better expressed as a dyad, where the two components not only imply one another but are related, and where this spatial dyad is usefully augmented with a temporal dimension, expressed in a third component or an additional orthogonal dyad.


How To Save Pascal (And Ourselves) From The Mugger, Avram Hiller, Ali Hasan Nov 2023

How To Save Pascal (And Ourselves) From The Mugger, Avram Hiller, Ali Hasan

Philosophy Faculty Publications and Presentations

In this article, we re-examine Pascal's Mugging, and argue that it is a deeper problem than the St. Petersburg paradox. We offer a way out that is consistent with classical decision theory. Specifically, we propose a “many muggers” response analogous to the “many gods” objection to Pascal's Wager. When a very tiny probability of a great reward becomes a salient outcome of a choice, such as in the offer of the mugger, it can be discounted on the condition that there are many other symmetric, non-salient rewards that one may receive if one chooses otherwise.


Comment On Gignac And Zajenkowski, “The Dunning-Kruger Effect Is (Mostly) A Statistical Artefact: Valid Approaches To Testing The Hypothesis With Individual Differences Data”, Avram Hiller Jan 2023

Comment On Gignac And Zajenkowski, “The Dunning-Kruger Effect Is (Mostly) A Statistical Artefact: Valid Approaches To Testing The Hypothesis With Individual Differences Data”, Avram Hiller

Philosophy Faculty Publications and Presentations

Gignac and Zajenkowski (2020) find that “the degree to which people mispredicted their objectively measured intelligence was equal across the whole spectrum of objectively measured intelligence”. This Comment shows that Gignac and Zajenkowski’s (2020) finding of homoscedasticity is likely the result of a recoding choice by the experimenters and does not in fact indicate that the Dunning-Kruger Effect is a mere statistical artifact. Specifically, Gignac and Zajenkowski (2020) recoded test subjects’ responses to a question regarding self-assessed comparative IQ onto a linear IQ scale when a normal IQ scale would likely have been more appropriate. More generally, researchers studying self-assessed …