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Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons™
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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences
When Knowing Prevents Doing: An Exposition On Commitment Hazards, Alexander Porter
When Knowing Prevents Doing: An Exposition On Commitment Hazards, Alexander Porter
Theses/Capstones/Creative Projects
Information hazards are risks posed by potentially harmful true information. Information hazards include the risks posed by instructions on how to make a bomb, facts about world events which could cause harmful political unrest, or even the password to an email account being revealed. I will examine and explain one specific type of information hazard which can be seen as the subject of discussion in three well-known but disparate philosophical texts: information which draws attention away from individual control. I will argue that this idea shows up in Plato as what is being avoided through noble falsehoods in The Republic …
Factlessness & Faultlessness: Individual Differences & Dimensions Of Philosophical Dispute, Geoffrey Scott Holtzman
Factlessness & Faultlessness: Individual Differences & Dimensions Of Philosophical Dispute, Geoffrey Scott Holtzman
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
This project addresses the question of why philosophical disputes persist, and tackles the problem of how we might better approach them. I demonstrate empirically several ways in which personality, gender, and other factors are associated with specific philosophical beliefs. Typically, one might assume that these individual difference factors are irrelevant to philosophy, and can only serve to bias philosophical disputants. Against this view, I present four case studies, which collectively highlight the different ways in which individual differences in lived experience may be inseparable from philosophical concepts themselves.
The Truths Of Chenglish: Logical Imperfection, Natural Language, And Philosophical Disagreement, Gregory Brazeal
The Truths Of Chenglish: Logical Imperfection, Natural Language, And Philosophical Disagreement, Gregory Brazeal
Gregory Brazeal
Why is it that philosophy seems unable to obtain the kinds of agreement regularly achieved by mathematics and the natural sciences? The experimental philosophy movement emphasizes conflicting intuitions as a potential source of philosophical disagreement. This essay draws attention to another, complementary source: the logical imperfection of natural languages. Unlike logic as it is formalized in symbolic notation, the rules governing the correct use of terms in a natural language can be indeterminate, underdetermined, and inconsistent. Though most philosophers recognize the logical imperfection of natural languages in the abstract, everyday philosophical discussion is often conducted as though the argumentative moves …