Monthly Archives: November 2009

Adam Elga

Suppose that for twenty-eight years in a row, Consumer Reports rates itself as the #1 consumer ratings magazine. A picky reader might complain to the editors:

You are evenhanded and rigorous when rating toasters and cars. But you obviously have an ad hoc exception to your standards for consumer magazines. You always rate yourself #1! Please apply your rigorous standards across the board in the future.

This complaint has no force. The editors should reply:

To put forward our recommendations about toasters and cars is to put them forward as good recommendations. And we can’t consistently do that while also claiming that contrary recommendations are superior. So our always rating ourselves #1 does not result from an arbitrary or ad hoc exception to our standards. We are forced to rate ourselves #1 in order to be consistent with our other ratings.

Adam Elga, ‘How to Disagree about How to Disagree’, in Richard Feldman and Ted A. Warfield (eds.), Disagreement, Oxford, 2010

Hans Eysenck

The continued hostility of Freudians to all forms of criticism, however well-informed, and to the formulation and existence of alternative theories, however well-supported, does not speak well for the scientific spirit of Freud and his followers. For any judgement of psychoanalysis as a scientific discipline, these points must constitute strong evidence against its acceptance.

Hans Eysenck, Decline and Fall of the Freudian Empire, New York, 1985, pp. 13-14

Jaegwon Kim

[I]f you want to make a perfect duplicate of something, all you need to do is to put identical parts in identical structure. The principle is the metaphysical underpinning of industrial mass production; to make another ’01 Ford Explorer, all you need to do is to assemble identical parts in identical structural configurations.

Jaegwon Kim, ‘Supervenience, Emergence, Realization, Reduction’, in Michael J. Loux and Dean W. Zimmerman (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Metaphysics, Oxford, 2003, p. 567

Ronald Milo

[C]ritics have complained that contractarians fail to provide any good reason for thinking that acts prohibited by the norms agreed on by the hypothetical contractors must be wrong. It would be absurd, they argue, to suggest that this is because hypothetical contracts (that is, contracts that one has not in fact made but would have made under certain circumstances) are somehow morally binding. Contractarian constructivism is clearly not committed to such an absurd view. Although it makes the wrongness of lying a consequence of the fact that lying would be prohibited by the norms agreed on by the contractors, this is not because an obligation to refrain from lying is created by such an agreement in the way that promises create obligations. Rather, the wrongness of lying (like the wrongness of breaking a promise) is a consequence of this agreement simply in the sense that being prohibited by such an agreement is what its moral wrongness consists in.

Ronald Milo, ‘Contractarian Constructivism’, The Journal of Philosophy, vol. 92, no. 4 (April, 1995), p. 196

Richard Wiseman

The differences between the lives of the lucky and unlucky people are as consistent as they are remarkable. Lucky people always seem to be in the right place at the right time, fall on their feet, and appear to have an uncanny ability to live a charmed life. Unlucky people are the exact opposite. Their lives tend to be a catalogue of failure and despair, and they are convinced that their misfortune is not of their own making. One of the unluckiest people in the study is Susan, a 34-year-old care assistant from Blackpool. Susan is exceptionally unlucky in love. She once arranged to meet a man on a blind date, but her potential beau had a motorcycle accident on the way to their meeting, and broke both of his legs. Her next date walked into a glass door and broke his nose. A few years later, when she had found someone to marry, the church in which she intended to hold the wedding was burnt down by arsonists just before her big day. Susan has also experienced an amazing catalogue of accidents. In one especially bad run of luck, she reported having eight car accidents in a single fifty-mile journey.

Richard Wiseman, Quirkology: the Curious Science of Everyday Lives, London, 2007, pp. 26-27

John Campbell

Why do we need the notion of the phenomenal character of experience? We have to loot at the role that the notion plays in our reflective thinking, we have to ask what the point is of the notion. For example, if we are presented with an analysis of the phenomenal character of pain, we have to remember that pain is awful: we have to remember that pain is a source of concern and that we think it right to try to nullify pain where we can. If we are told, for instance, that being in pain is a matter of being in a particular kind of representational state, we have to ask why being in such a representational state should be awful; we have to ask what it is about this kind of representational state that means we should try to nullify it.

John Campbell, Reference and Consciousness, Oxford, 2002, p. 138