Southwest Philosophy Review

The long history of research and debate surrounding expertise has emphasized the importance of both automaticity and intelligent deliberation in the control of skilled, expert action – and often, their mutual exclusion of one another. To the contrary, recent developments in the cognitive science of skill implicate the likelihood of a third, hybrid line of interpretation and a new path forward. This paper surveys these recent developments, arguing that hybrid models of expertise and skill are the most fruitful way forward in interpreting and conducting research on experts. I categorize a new set of interpretations of skill as ‘sophisticated hybrid models’ owing to the fact that they deny the mutual exclusion of automaticity from intelligent action control. I then argue that this interpretive strategy is the most fruitful way forward to making clear much of the complexity of skilled action and expertise.

I conceive of Spinoza’s substance monism as a response to Aristotle’s prohibition against actual infinity for one key reason: nature, being all things, is necessarily infi nite. Spinoza encapsulates his substance monism with the phrase, “Deus sive Natura,” implying that there is only one infinite substance, which also possesses an infi nity of attributes, of which we are but modes. These logical delineations of substance never actually break up God’s reality. Aristotle’s well-known argument against the reality of an actual infinity in his Physics prohibits the existence of an actually infinite bodily substance because it would necessarily “destroy” (Physics 204b26-27) all other elements or bodies. On Aristotle’s view, there is a fundamental and concrete distinction between things: each substance is primarily a this (Categories 3b10). I maintain that Spinoza’s rationalism and radicalization of the principle of sufficient reason lends him greater explanatory potential than Aristotle to justify the (non) existence of actual infinity.

Although fantastical thought-experiments about personal identity abound, these seemingly cannot bring home the conviction one way or the other, when it comes to the nature of diachronic (or synchronic) personhood. Per Kathleen Wilkes, these thought-experiments suffer from being divorced from the necessary background conditions. In this paper, I aim to rectify this by developing an empirically-informed thought experiment (that fill in these blanks) focusing on feral children, or children who have grown up in near-complete isolation from all human interaction. After detailing the significance of these cases and discussing a present-day case, I move to construct the background for thought-experiments on these cases. As an upshot, I apply the experiment to a contemporary theory of personhood (namely, constitutionalism), analyze its shortcomings, and make recommendations for future improvements.

This paper will explain three reasons why pro-choice advocates should move away from arguments in favor of abortion choice that is dependent upon the fetus’ non-personhood, and more towards generating arguments in favor of abortion choice that embraces a more respectful view of fetal life. First, the future of the legal right to an abortion in the United States may depend on generating an argument that does not rely on denying fetal personhood. Second, pro-choice advocates should be more respectful of fetal life because the hesitancy of doing so has not gone over well in the general public. Even individuals who are sympathetic to a pro-choice perspective are sometimes hesitant to align themselves with the pro-choice community because of the perception that it is antithetical to the value of fetal life. The third reason is that some women who choose abortion regard it as a morally significant act precisely because they regard the fetus as a morally significant being.

Many debates in philosophy of language are driven by examples in which two expressions have the same meaning, in some sense, yet fail of intersubstitutability in some of their occurrences. The usual move in response is to postulate a kind of meaning different from that which is shared by those two expressions. I argue that that the resulting semantic theories nevertheless typically cannot explain such failures: the explaining is not done entirely by the postulation and individuation of the new meanings. It is done partly by accompanying metaphysical and epistemological claims about them. Making this clear requires distinguishing between intersubstitutability salva veritate and intersubstitutability on grounds of logical form, and getting straight on what kinds of facts secure the obtaining of each.

Infallibilism leads to skepticism and fallibilism is plagued by the threshold problem. In this narrative setting, the pragmatic turn in epistemology has been marketed as a way for fallibilists to address one of their central problems. While pragmatic versions of infallibilism have been left unexplored, I propose that going pragmatic also offers the infallibilist a way to address its main problem, the skeptical problem. Pragmatic infallibilism, however, is committed to a radical pragmatic view of epistemic certainty, where the strength of a subject’s epistemic state can vary depending upon the practical context. To make room for the plausibility of such a view, I discuss the role that the framing of decision problems can play in the evaluation of choices and evidence. And based on this discussion, I offer some suggestions about how we might develop a pragmatic version of infallibilism.

Kant famously claims that there is only a single supreme principle of morality: the Categorical Imperative. This claim is often treated with skepticism. After all, Kant proceeds to provide no fewer than six formulations of this purportedly single supreme principle—formulations which appear to differ significantly. But appearances can be deceptive. In this paper, I argue that Kant was right. There is only a single Categorical Imperative, and each of its formulations expresses the very same moral principle.

I contend that scientific realism and realism about natural kinds should be given separate treatment because a person could be a scientific realist in general without having key realist commitments about natural kinds. I utilize Chakravartty’s three dimensions of commitment for scientific realism to create three key conditions for realism regarding natural kinds in particular. I find that Dupré’s promiscuous realism fails at least one these conditions, and therefore, for the sake of terminological consistency and clarity, we should classify promiscuous realism as an antirealist view of natural kinds.