Volume XIII, Issue 4, December 2022

Volume XIII, Issue 4, December 2022

Nonrational Belief Paradoxes as Byzantine Failures(pages 343-358)

Ryan MILLER ABSTRACT: David Christensen and others argue that Dutch Strategies are more like peer disagreements than Dutch Books, and should not count against agents’ conformity to ideal rationality. I review these arguments, then show that Dutch Books, Dutch Strategies, and peer disagreements are only possible in the case of what computer scientists call Byzantine Failures—uncorrected Byzantine Faults which update …

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IMPROVING CONCEPTUAL ENGINEERING BY DIFFERENTIATING THE FUNCTIONS OF CONCEPTS(pages 359-379)

Rogelio MIRANDA VILCHIS ABSTRACT: The leading assumption of this paper is that we can improve the methodology of conceptual engineering if we differentiate between the different functions of our concepts. There is a growing body of research that emphasizes the revisionist virtues of conceptual engineering against the descriptive task of conceptual analysis. Yet, it also has faced severe critiques. Among …

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RATIONAL DECISION-MAKING IN A COMPLEX WORLD: TOWARDS AN INSTRUMENTAL, YET EMBODIED, ACCOUNT(pages 381-404)

Ragnar VAN DER MERWE ABSTRACT: Prima facie, we make successful decisions as we act on and intervene in the world day-to-day. Epistemologists are often concerned with whether rationality is involved in such decision-making practices, and, if so, to what degree. Some, particularly in the post-structuralist tradition, argue that successful decision-making occurs via an existential leap into the unknown rather than …

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Objecting to the ‘Doesn’t Justify the Denial of a Defeater’ Theory of Knowledge: A Reply to Feit and Cullison(pages 407-415)

Timothy KIRSCHENHEITER ABSTRACT: In this paper, I explain Neil Feit and Andrew Cullison’s two proposed theories of knowledge, their initial No Essential Falsehood-Justifying Grounds account and their ultimate ‘Doesn’t Justify the Denial of a Defeater’ account. I then offer original counterexamples against both of these theories. In the process of doing so, I both explain Feit and Cullison’s motivation for …

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ON THE PERSISTENCE OF ABSOLUTE METAPHYSICS(pages 417-419)

Gustavo PICAZO ABSTRACT: Greenwood (2019) casts doubts upon whether a certain view about social groups (the view that social groups persist throughout changes in their membership, by virtue of the maintenance of their structure or function) is a fundamental metaphysical truth about social groups, rather than a theoretical truth about some or many social groups. In this note, I introduce …

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Defending Joint Acceptance Accounts of Group Belief against the Challenge from Group Lies(pages 421-428)

Lukas SCHWENGERER ABSTRACT: Joint acceptance accounts of group belief hold that groups can form a belief in virtue of the group members jointly accepting a proposition. Recently, Jennifer Lackey (2020, 2021) proposed a challenge to these accounts. If group beliefs can be based on joint acceptance, then it seems difficult to account for all instances of a group telling a lie. …

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