Southwest Philosophy Review

There is currently a tremendous surge in interest in the virtue of humility among contemporary philosophers and psychologists. Yet despite its recent popularity, identifying necessary and sufficient conditions for humility has proven quite difficult. Here, drawing on insights from several ‘inattentive’ accounts of humility, I offer a new account that locates the virtue in a transcendent orientation to the self and others such that one sees the self and others in proper perspective. I call this account the transcendent account of humility.

Aristotle argued that you need some wealth to live well. The Stoics argued that you could live well with or without wealth. But the Cynics argued that wealth is a hinderance. For the Cynics, a good life consists in self-sufficiency (autarkeia), or being able to rule and help yourself. You accomplish this by living simply and naturally, and by subjecting yourself to rigorous philosophical exercises. Cynics confronted people to get them to abandon extraneous possessions and positions of power to live better. And while the Cynics were experts in living in this way, their ascetic lifestyles made their message curious to some audiences. This paper reflects on Cynic ascetic practices and the ways others perceived them.

Lucretius follows his symmetry argument that one should not fear death with a dialectical strategy, the squandering argument. The dialectical presumption behind the squandering argument is that its audience is not an Epicurean, so squanders their life. The question is whether the squandering argument (and the other Epicurean arguments that one should not fear death) works on lives that by Epicurean standards are not squandered.

Fallibilism is typically taken to face a problem from the apparent infelicity of concessive knowledge attributions (hereafter, CKAs). CKAs are of the form: “S knows that p, but it’s possible that q,” where q obviously entails not-p. CKAs sound to the ears of many philosophers as contradictory or infelicitous. But CKAs look to be overt statements of fallibilism, since if S fallibly knows that p, then she can’t properly rule out some possibility in which not-p. Do fallibilists, then, have some way of explaining the seeming infelicity of CKAs that doesn’t impugn the truth of fallibilism? Fallibilists think so. In this connection, there are two well-known responses to the problem: Patrick Rysiew’s pragmatic strategy and Jason Stanley’s semantic strategy. While both strategies have real virtues, there are aspects of each strategy that face certain complications. In this paper, I’ll outline those complications and I’ll develop some remedies to them. The aim of this paper will be to show that the challenge posed by CKAs isn’t a grave problem at all. In particular, I’ll argue that if the semantic strategy fails because CKAs really are overt statements of fallibilism, then there’s good reason to think that the pragmatic strategy succeeds, but if the pragmatic strategy fails because CKAs are obviously false or aren’t overt statements of fallibilism, then the semantic strategy succeeds. Thus, I’ll conclude that the problem for fallibilism posed by CKAs isn’t a grave problem at all.

Cognitive heuristics, as proffered by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, are reasoning shortcuts that are useful but flawed. For example, the availability heuristic “infers” an event’s probability, not by performing laborious, ideally rational calculations, but by simply assessing the ease with which similar events can be recalled. Cognitive psychologists presume that cognitive heuristics should be identified with a distinct cognitive mechanism. I argue that this is a mistake ultimately stemming from descriptive rational choice theory’s entangling of descriptive and normative theorizing. Such mechanism-identification is a desideratum for kinds used in answering, “How—in a causal-mechanical sense—do we reason?” However, cognitive heuristics befit a different question, namely, “How—in a contrastive sense—do we reason vis-à-vis ideal rationality?” Clarifying cognitive heuristics’ nature and appropriate explanatory expectations can enhance understanding, provide lessons applicable elsewhere, and illuminate an important episode in the history of cognitive psychological science.

In this paper I defend the possibility of robustness analysis as confirmatory. Given that models are highly idealized, multiple models with different sets of idealizations are constructed to show that some result is not dependent on those idealizations (it is robust). This method of robustness analysis has been criticized since, no matter how many false models agree, all of them are false and lack confirmatory power. I argue that this line of criticism makes an assumption that a model is confirmatory only if it ontically represents its target. I draw on work about explanations to motivate a challenge to this assumption, and argue that this assumption needs bolstering.